While it is true that people with higher IQs tend to have higher incomes, it does not mean that they have a greater net worth, found a new study by Jay Zagorsky of Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research. Based on data gathered from 7,403 American participants in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, who are now in their mid-40s and have been interviewed repeatedly since 1979, the study found that a person’s income increases $202-616 with each IQ point, something we’ve known for a while. But, Zagorsky went a step further to analyze the likelihood of participants falling into financial difficulties. Strangely, he got mixed results. Take the percentage of people who maxed out their credit cards: it starts rising from 7.7% of people with IQ less than 75 until it peaks at 12.1% for IQ 90, then it starts falling irregularly to 5.4% for IQ 115, only to start rising again. Similar irregularities can be found regarding participants claiming bankruptcy or missing bill payments. Even with people of IQ 125 and above, 6% have maxed out their credit cards and 11% miss payments from time to time. So, there is no direct relationship between intelligence and total wealth, college campuses can testify to that. "Professors tend to be very smart people. But if you look at university parking lots, you don’t see a lot of Rolls Royces, Porsches or other very expensive cars. Instead you see a lot of old, low-value vehicles" said Zagorsky, who is currently finishing a new study to account for how people with higher incomes can have the same total wealth as those with low-medium. To hazard a guess, it probably has to do with them spending more on today instead of worrying about tomorrow, while also supporting other people in their lives.

You don’t have to be smart to be rich, OSU.edu
IQ Table

In a follow-up to the earlier story about the bittorrent site PirateBay trying to buy the micronation of Sealand, it seems that self-declared Prince Michael Bates, owner of the gunnery platform located in international waters, has refused the pirates, opting instead to offer asylum to Gary McKinnon, a British hacker facing extradition to the US. Concerning PirateBay, Bates’ said that "its theft of proprietary rights, it doesn’t suit us at all… I’ve written a book and Hollywood is making a movie out of it, so it would go right against the grain to go into the filesharing thing," so his reasons for choosing hackers over pirates are not all that altruistic.

McKinnon, a.k.a. Solo, is allegedly responsible for hacking 97 US Army, Navy, Air Force, DoD and NASA computers in 2001-02, which has been dubbed "the biggest military computer hack of all time." The way he got into the military networks was with a simple Perl script that searched for blank passwords, finding stations where the defaults were never changed. "When I scanned thousands of machines on one particular military network, there were always a few hundred with blank passwords, and once you’re on one, you use ‘trust’ to speak to another." Thus, the biggest hack involved little actual hacking, mostly just looking for the open doors.

McKinnon claims that his reason for hacking was his belief in UFOs. He even said that he discovered names and ranks of extra-terrestrial officers, "all very human-like," but does not remember the details as his computer was seized by the authorities. If sent to the US, he could face up to 60 years in prison on ten charges, the most serious being ‘bringing down the entire military network of Washington’. "Hearing that the New Jersey Authorities want to see me ‘fry’ was like having a 17-tonne hammer waiting to hit me on the head."  Currently, McKinnon’s last hope is a hearing at the House of Lords, if denied, he will be extradited within four weeks, and New Jersey will eat his soul. So, perhaps it’s best that Solo get his asylum, after all, PirateBay can find other islands, even actual islands instead of rusty metal and concrete contraptions, but the lone hacker’s options for a haven within fleeing distance from the UK are much fewer. May everyone get what they want.

This much I know: Gary McKinnon, hacker, 41, Observer.Guardian.co.uk
Sealand prefers hacker to The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreak.com
Free Gary McKinnon - or at least try him in the UK, FreeGary.org.uk