Point of Sale terminals keep their 3DES encryption keys in firmware within a tamper-resistant module. Even with advanced technology like plasma ablation and electron microscopy, it is believed to be impractical to extract the key. The keys are loaded by a courier who swipes special cards while the device is in maintenance mode. This permits the POS stations to be used over an insecure line to the payment processor, and cleartext is never present anywhere outside the sealed module, from which the key cannot be recovered. So unless you tap the keypad, you cannot have access to the unencrypted PIN. Stealing data is insufficient to obtain the information necessary to use the card. That having been said, if there is any way you can do a trial of a large number of PINs, it is trivial to try all 10,000 possibilities, and see which one works, no matter how strong the encryption is.

At one time, the age of consent was 10. Failure to prosecute something doesn't mean it's "OK", either then, or today. Although Turing's conviction was based on his affair with a 19-year-old, I recall reading that he befriended quite a few working class youth aged 15-17, although it's not well-documented what, if anything, they did in private. Certainly, such behavior would make him the third rail of gay politics if it occurred today. Now I certainly don't think Alan Turing did anything wrong, but my point was that we gloss over things historically, which we would be very unforgiving about in the present time, and perhaps that's a bit hypocritical.

Alan Turing, like Oscar Wilde, had some sexual partners who were working class youth. Back in those days, homosexuality was homosexuality, all homosexuality was illegal, and age wasn't much of an issue. While the Gay Movement celebrates the unjust persecution of Alan Turing for "Homosexuality," they gloss over the fact that today, we would lock him up, throw away the key, and denounce him as a pedophile for consensual sex with teenagers. It's lovely that he's been pardoned, but it's a bit hypocritical how today's Gay Activists grandfather in for Historical Gay Icons, behavior they would be the first to loudly condemn in their contemporaries.

It's not at all clear from the story that JP Morgan's patent copies Bitcoin. The patent says nothing about the transactions being stored to a Distributed P2P Network. Paying bills anonymously with zero transaction fees and competing with Western Union are hardly the areas in which Bitcoin distinguishes itself from other EFT systems.

There's an old joke about outsiders versus locals in Seattle. "When you move to Seattle, bring your own friends, because you're not going to make any while you're there." While locals don't control Seattle as much as they used to years ago, Seattle employment is a very insular environment dominated by employment agencies.

NASA is currently conducting experiments to see if they can make microscopic warps in space-time sufficient to be detected by an interferometer. What technologies do you see expediting interstellar travel a few centuries from now, and what technologies do you see as being dead ends.

What is your educated guess on whether NP=P, or not.

Would you view the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a fundamental law or a statistical law. Might deterministic nano machines be able to violate it?