If you approach a gas station in New Jersey and the guy standing next to the pump is 300 lbs overweight, be careful- it could be an ex-governor. Make sure to pull in slowly, give him some clearance, and fill up with 93. He may give you a strange piece of metal as a "gift". If it doesn't enter your skull at high velocity, take it (WTC steel, baby!). Then hand him a nice tip. Otherwise you might have to put the gas cap back on yourself a few blocks up the road- i.e. "self-service".

You can't be serious, making an insinuation like that on a good man.

Governor Christie is just concerned about the changes in traffic patterns that would be triggered by allowing electric cars to enter the state's vehicle markets unimpeded. Christie has a vision for the future of New Jersey and it is deeply important to him that municipal leaders across the state share his enthusiasm and goals. Enforcement along these lines would be impeded. Specifically, if the governor were to block off lanes to a bridge within a mayor's district, and everyone was driving electric cars, the smog wouldn't be as good for intimidating or disciplining the mayor. Clearly the traffic issues need more study.

Just have a factory stamp out your backups then.

A more accurate headline would have been "Will this nanomaterial be the future of hard drives?". Then I would have been able to apply Betteridge's law and avoid wasting time reading the article.

I would volunteer for that one-way mission to Mars!

Of course the trip better not take too long, because of the Alzheimer's progression. If I get there too late, I might make a fool out of myself on the mission:

"Hi, Mars, Bob Flemstein, big fan! I know you're crazy busy with us suicidal visitors and everything, but...could you sign? I don't wanna be that guy, but..."

If they install a physical mailbox where people can post letters which some employee then delivers to the post office, are they allowed to read the mail that people put into it?

Don't give them any ideas. O, well, who am I kidding, of course they will have thought of that already. I bet they'll pull a Monsanto on any grandchildren.

Well, they do push up the price of bitcoins so that miners can reap bigger rewards (same amount of bitcoins worth more money). This attracts more miners and makes the network more robust. Right? Who would buy a mining machine if it cost more than what it would yield?

Bitcoins are actually much easier to trace than cash. Every transaction is recorded in the block chain which is public for anyone to see. I bet intelligence agencies absolutely love bitcoin and are actively using it to trace connections between criminals all over the world.

There are ways to anonymise transactions using third party services who receive bitcoins from many different sources and return the money in randomised, seemingly unrelated transactions, but that requires trusting those services. Basically, they do money laundering just like similar laundering services for other currencies. And if you received money from them, you might have some explaining to do when law enforcement one day asks you where you got all those bitcoins. Just like you might have to explain where you got the bundle of banknotes you used to pay for your new house.

So yes, it is possible to launder bitcoins and render them very hard to trace, just like it's possible to launder other currencies, but I wouldn't call bitcoin untraceable by design. If anything, it's more traceable.

The whole point of BitCoin is that you don't have to trust some private company. Sure, the exchanges are companies, and when you wire money to an exchange to buy bitcoins, you need to trust that exchange and may lose money if that exchange happened to be Mt. Gox, but once you take the bitcoins out of the exchange, you are not dependent on any company. The system is run by miners all over the world, and no single miner can control the network. You need at least half the mining power of the entire network to even have a shot at fooling the system.

Of course you can't, at this time, compare the solidity of bicoin to that of the euro or dollar, but I would certainly prefer it over the currency of certain countries in South America or Africa. There too, the value of the currency is determined by how much people are willing to accept it for. If trust in the country is lost, the currency goes down the drain and people have to pay for bread with wheelbarrows full of banknotes. There's really no fundamental difference.

Personally I only invested an amount I can afford to lose, and consider it a very risky investment with a potentially huge reward. Obviously at this stage it would be utterly stupid to put your life's savings into it. If BitCoin fails, it will indeed have been a pyramid scheme duping people into losing money. If it succeeds, it will be obvious that this was no pyramid scheme and people who missed out will kick themselves for not seeing the obvious potential. Hindsight will tell which it will be.

The alleged goal, yes. Their actual goal? Who knows what that is or if they even have one.

Sadly though, most european airports are exactly the same. I'm a pilot, and I've actually seen them take a bottle of after shave from a captain, not even apologising for their idiocy, as if it was the most normal and logical thing in the world. Never mind the giant crash axe behind the first officer's seat, we must not allow them to bring nail clippers on board! Back when I was flying private jets, they wanted to pass my passengers' cat through the X-ray machine. They might try to hijack their own private plane with a weapon hidden in the plastic cat container! We had to take the cat out, fortunately it didn't run away or they would no doubt have closed the airport. Idiots.

Actually they keep it a secret because that way they can catch more terrorists. If the terrorists would know how many of their colleagues have failed, they would stop trying and therefore wouldn't get caught by the TSA!

I wish everyone would just go back to the original name "alumium" and end this tomayto/tomahto rubbish once and for all.

I've always wondered why they conficate nail files at the security checkpoint. Thanks for clearing that up!