Satoshi Nakamoto, the originator of Bitcoin, made the following appeal on 5 December:

The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.

You are right that it might not cover your electricity bill to generate a few bitcoins (unless you are generating on a high-end graphics card), but that's how it should be. If it was easy to generate bitcoins, they would be worth nothing.

It gets interesting after the coins are generated, and they start being traded for goods and services.

Bear in mind that the difficulty of generating new bitcoins rises in proportion to the total CPU power in the network, so most people will need to get their bitcoins by trading rather than by generating.

If you just want to play with Bitcoin, you can install the software then get 0.05 free bitcoins (5 bit "cents") from the Bitcoin Faucet. There's no catch.

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency that is fairly cash-like. It was discussed on Slashdot in July.

The exchanges are currently trading one bitcoin for US$0.27, way up on $0.06 around the time of the slashdot article (charts are here).

Well of course, the intention is to divert taxpayers' money into the "legal music download" industry.

It has also been done the other way around. Live rats can be remotely controlled by humans, using signals sent to an implant in the rat's brain.

When the scientist wants the rat to turn one way or the other, he/she sends a signal that makes the rat feel like one of its whiskers has been twitched, and the rat turns on command.

If you have an old 78rpm record, you can make a record player in about three minutes, to show kids how sound recording works.

Push a needle through an empty matchbox, put the record on something that you can spin (like the turntable in a microwave). Spin the record and touch the needle to the grooves, and the sound will come out of the matchbox. Kids love it! Then point out the wiggly grooves to them.

A compact disc isn't directly understandable like that. You can teach people how it works, but they can't see it so they just have to take your word for it.

Here's a corresponding piece by a male: "Sex Tips For Geeks: How To Be Sexy" written by none other than "Mr Cathedral and Bazaar" Eric Raymond.

I remember a few decades ago when it was proposed to remove the navigator from the flight deck of passenger jets. The same arguments were being made against removing the navigator as are now being made against removing the co-pilot.

As it turned out, the post of navigator was eliminated, and no-one ever regretted it. And that was before GPS existed.

Having said that, I wouldn't want to be on a plane without a co-pilot. But by all means let the co-pilot replace one of the cabin crew when not needed to land the plane in an emergency.

I think it's funny that at 0:46 in the video they get the message "Please upgrade to a modern browser".

That would be money laundering.

This reminds me of the old Swiss watchmaker. Every day at noon, regular as clockwork, on office worker walked past the watchmaker's window on his way to lunch. This was the watchmaker's reminder to carry out his daily clock setting, so every time the office worker went past, the watchmaker checked that all of his clocks indicated noon.

One day the watchmaker happened to be out in the street at noon, and he mentioned this to the office worker. "That's funny", said the worker, "I always set my watch when I walk past your shop".

And so the network of software-based clocks will work fine, provided the computers from which the time is being aggregated are not themselves setting their time by this software-based clock.

You insensitive clods, some people live in Exeter NH and have to wait another 12 days for the 4th July.

And I have a reference book on my bookshelf whose spine carries the bold text "The Latex Companion". Takes a bit of explaining.