Backed in what way? They certainly don't guarantee any specific value of that dollar. In fact, they debase the value intentionally on a regular basis. The only guarantee you get from the government re: the dollar is that you can pay your taxes with it. What a deal!

No, it 'took off' when the media discovered it, and the fact that Silk Road commerce was conducted with Bitcoin gave them the sauce for the story - but the media would have eventually discovered Bitcoin with or without Silk Road.

From https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Point_of_sale_with_bitcoins_isn.27t_possible_because_of_the_10_minute_wait_for_confirmation : " Point of sale with bitcoins isn't possible because of the 10 minute wait for confirmation It is true that transactions can sometimes take tens of minutes to become confirmed. Despite this, retailers can accept unconfirmed transactions with very little risk by simply 'listening' on the network for a double-spend transaction, or partnering with a company that provides this service. After a head start of merely several seconds, the original transaction would reach so much of the Bitcoin network that a fraudulent double-spend transaction would almost certainly be fruitless. An attacker would have to commit easily-detectable fraud, in person, several hundred or several thousand times, before one of these low-value double-spend attempts would likely succeed. An attacker could work around the necessity of sending out a second fraudulent transaction to the Bitcoin network by attempting to solo-mine an attack block containing the attack transaction himself - temporarily withholding the block with the rest of the network - and then execute the fraudulent purchase within seconds, or minutes at most, of mining the attack block, before broadcasting the attack block. However, the cost of such an activity would dramatically outweigh the value of anything typically offered without a confirmation wait for several reasons. First, mining a block (attack or otherwise) entitles the miner to a valuable block reward, and because the attack involves temporarily withholding the block from the network, the attacker would put himself in the likely position of his block becoming stale, which would result in forfeiture of the entire reward. Most solo miners solve less than one block per month, so this would represent the loss of proceeds of potentially several weeks of mining. Second, it is not possible for a solo miner to know exactly when his mining activity will yield a block, and because the attack must be carried out within seconds or minutes of successfully mining a block, the attacker will not be able to know or plan in advance the brief window when the attack would be likely to succeed. While it may be easy for a determined attacker to get low-value items that are sold and delivered online instantly without waiting for confirmations (such as downloads), this unpredictability and the briefness of the opportunity would make it extremely difficult to commit any kind of fraud where real-life interaction is required, such as visiting a merchant or taking possession of goods. Petty shoplifting would be far simpler. Even if an attacker went forward with this attack, the retailer would be notified of the fraud the moment the attack block is released seconds later. In short, the 10-minute wait for confirmation is only practically necessary when delivering goods of value that significantly exceed the block reward an attacker would have to risk to perform an attack and where recourse after delivery is practically nonexistent, such as money transfers. "

Maybe the US cyber-warfare division CREATED flame, stuxnet, etc. That would probably make it undesirable to be the one to first 'identify' it.

And then there are those that don't understand that the sine qua non of a healthy society is individual liberty.

It's my understanding that this boson was not discovered before LHC because it was too massive to produce in a lesser accelerator; however, the top quark was produced at Fermilab some years ago, and it has a larger mass (Higgs @ 125GeV, top quark @ ~171GeV). Does anyone understand why this is? I know I am missing something here...

Is it possible that "green" solutions that are not economically sustainable, and/or that are produced by poorly managed companies may not be "good for society"? Someday a well-managed company will produce economically viable "green" solutions, and the market will definitely support them. The problem with the government spending big money betting on companies like this is that, even if the government is right about which direction we need to go in (which they frequently are not), they still don't know how to pick the right companies to lead in that direction. The market does, and will - if the government lets it.