So I'm working with my mom to manage her ETrade IRA account and she, being old, wanted to start drawing on it. "No problem" I thought, "I'll just help her open an Etrade Bank account and she can start transferring funds into it." Boy was I wrong. She got listed on some DTEC report as a part of the Patriot Act. According to the law, she is a suspected terrorist. Her crime? She was married and had a different last name. From Nancy Pollock to Nancy Saville back to Nancy Pollock. Because of that, she is a suspected terrorist. So Etrade says, just call Equifax and have them clear it. Except Equifax doesn't have a rectification procedure for clearing Dtec. And my mom can't open any other bank account anywhere because she has a Dtec. Thank you, John Ashcroft, for being an idiot. I'm writing a letter to all these bozo's: US DOJ Equifax Etrade KFI (sortof a bozo) KABC (hey, it's a good story!) LA Times

So I listen to KFI AM 640 late at night as I'm driving home, mainly because KNX 1070 is playing some oldie's radio show. Coast to Coast AM is usually on and, in their usual pattern, they'll talk about aliens and other weird anomolies.

I don't think that UFO's exist in the way that the media traditionally displays them. The reason is, our society has only advanced to the pre-nanotech era. In order to travel between stars, nanotechnology would be a necessary advancement for alien races. Given that they would probably be in the well-developed Nanotechnology age, or most likely, heavy into quantumtechnology, it would be reasonable to assume that they wouldn't need "traditional" UFO's in order to travel in interstellar space.

What is more likely is that some of these "UFO's" are either figments of people's imagination or military research (like Area 51), or disinformation put out by the CIA to prevent other countries from learning some of our military secrets.

Aliens with fully-developed Quantum Technology would not need the "traditional" spacecrafts because they could utilize other forms of transportation. In addition, they would be able to morph their bodies to appear identical to us, in every way. At this level of technology, space and time is only a method by which we think, not the reality in which we live.

So, UFO's as commonly described are not real, but another fear that the media preys upon in order to get you to watch advertising and buy more products to safeguard your home from aliens attacking us from distant worlds. Or something like that.

So, Slashdot rejected yet another story which I thought was cool. Whatever.
A bunch of researchers got together and built a $50,000 Linux-based Playstation 2 Beowolf Cluster, capable of half a trillion operations per second. They said they did this to research Quantum Chromodynamics. While a rather arcane field, it should prove useful for research into 4th Dimensional Theories. All I want to know is can I play Doom III on this Beowolf Cluster...