"Not publicly traded" does not equate to "do not have stockholders". They wouldn't be required to speak publicly to their shareholders or to file with the SEC, but there are all sorts of businesses which have privately held shares.

If the things are to actually be thought of as currency, then they should be considered fungible. If they are fungible then any price paid for a large quantity of them should impact the value of the market in them and at the same time be informed by the market in them.

There's a matter of due process, sure. Go ahead and step forward as the owner of these coins. They won't sell them out from under you until they are done prosecuting you for claiming to have run Silk Road. Right now it's unclaimed property.

It's an auction. The great thing about an auction is it sets a data point for market value in the fact that people are paying for something in a competitive manner.

The size of the deposit does set a minimum expectation of the value of a block, although I've made deposits (much smaller ones) on auction items that went for less than the deposit. That's not common, but in the case that it happens the balance of the deposit is just returned to the buyer.

Perhaps you're looking for "judgment-proof".

The problem arises not just from wasting the auctioneer's time, although that is certainly a problem. Allowing people not serious about paying also wastes the seller's time, the other bidders' time, the time of the banks and accountant of the other bidders if the price is high enough, and potentially the time of the courts. Another big problem is that it tends to waste the money of the winning bidder in favor of the seller as the only real reason to bid without the means to buy is to shill and run up the price.

Texas is a large state. It has more land than any state but Alaska and more people than any state but California. It also has one of the highest growth rates by percentage.

"Williams" is the third most common surname in the United States, behind just Smith and Johnson.

"Jody" is pretty regularly in the top 1000 most common given names and during the 1960s and 1970s was among the top two or three hundred for newborns of both sexes.

I happen to have an uncommon last name (fewer than 2 people per 100,000 in the US) and have run across a number of people with the same given name and surname in the US. At one time I lived in a city of about 120,000 people and there was another with the same first and last name across town who was, as far as I know, no near relation. I had moved from well outside that area.

Intelligent life with thumbs is probably rarer. If you're a happy dolphin in a worldwide ocean that the damn land dwellers haven't irrevocably poisoned yet you probably aren't busy building a starship with your bottle nose.

There are more hydrocarbons on some of the _moons_ of other planets in this system than on our planet. Food is a tricky thing. Would our food matter to someone who has solved interstellar travel, or would they have that problem solved?

Maybe the dark matter is mostly stars occluded by Dyson spheres or ring worlds.

There are other pretty darn intelligent species on this planet. How is a dolphin going to build a spaceship, though? Intelligence and opposable digits would seem to both be required for our level of technical prowess.

They absolutely do not. Trademarks do.

Various web hosting providers including GoDaddy have been known to buy hosting accounts at competitors. This is often done with a company credit card under the name of a company executive or division manager. They do it to see things like how much traffic a common application like WordPress or ZenCart can take on various price points for hosting at the competition. They may also check out customizations to the control panel software and choose which features they may want to implement for their customers, too. This is often not even frowned upon by the target company. It's an endorsement that you're of interest to the competition for one thing.

Figuring out how your performance compares to the competition is quite different from being able to improve your own performance without killing your margin. That said, with something as easily monitored as a server account any attempts to poke around under the hood too much are easier to stop than in hardware like Juniper/Cisco.

It will never happen, but it'd be cool for them to come to market with something really revolutionary and launch with the end of "Guerrilla Radio". HP strikes me as quite too stodgy for this.

It has to start somewhere It has to start sometime
What better place than here, what better time than now?

All hell can't stop us now
All hell can't stop us now
All hell can't stop us now
All hell can't stop us now
All hell can't stop us now
All hell can't stop us now

As far as band names go, there are also Machine Gun Kelly, Florence and the Machine, Machinehead, Ghost in the Machine, The Suicide Machines, and Miami Sound Machine not including lots of drum and bass acts. I think a lyric or song title about machines would be more likely. It's all probably moot, because they won't market it under the lab's code name.

Oddly enough I've never seen a taco pizza at a Taco Hut/Pizza Bell. It's usually a Pizza Hut Express that serves only cheese, pepperoni, sausage, and supreme along with breadsticks. Generally the pizzas are only "personal" size, too. The Taco Bell OTOH tends to have a full menu. I've also seen other Yum! Brands combinations, including a KFC/Pizza Hut ("Kentucky Fried Pizza") and a Pizza Hut/A&W.

If you're not getting the speed you pay for, try another modem. I get more bandwidth than I pay for most of the time. Comcast is aware of this and says they don't care because they have plenty of backhaul built in my area. I switched out the cheap Ubee for $8/month for a Zoom Telephonics modem rated at 343 Mbps. I pay for 50 Mbps and often download from services like Steam or Origin at around 8 MBps average for 200 or 300 MB at a time.