The atmosphere is more or less transparent to most wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. This is evidenced by the fact that you can, you know, see through it. Radar astronomers, using microwaves, also have no difficulty seeing through it. Although the atmosphere absorbs most of the sun's microwaves, some manages to get through. And it's not just harmless stuff like light and microwaves that the atmosphere is transparent to: although the ozone layer provides partial protection against ultraviolet radiation, a significant portion still reaches Earth - this why you should wear sunscreen to avoid skin cancer. Why would you think the atmosphere stops "everything"?

Despite what you may have seen in the (completely retarded) movie The Core, the Earth's magnetic field only affects charged particles; it has absolutely no effect whatsoever on any kind of electromagnetic radiation.

More bullshit. Non-ionising radiation is not "a violent, destructive process" that "rips apart" molecules. Heat can cause chemical reactions and in some cases produce toxic or carcinogenic chemicals, but the source of the heat makes no difference.

What? The sun has been microwaving everything on Earth for billions of years. No harm seems to have come of it, especially compared to the ultraviolet radiation the sun is constantly spraying out, which is far more dangerous.

All forms of heating destroy nutrients in food, not just microwaves. In most cases, microwaves actually do less damage than other methods of cooking, due to the lower temperatures and shorter cooking times (the only exception is boiling certain vegetables, which some studies suggest causes slightly less damage than microwaving).

The paper in that link is complete bullshit. For starters, the formation of radiolytic compounds in a microwave oven is flat-out impossible, as microwave radiation is non-ionising. Microwave radiation is also not "AC" or "DC"; these are varieties of electric current, not radiation. Radiation can be neither of these things.

There is also no way for microwaves to increase the cholesterol content of foods. More likely, the types of food which are typically microwaved (ie, junk food) contain higher levels of cholesterol to start with. Eating that shit ain't healthy, microwaved or not.

As for increased white blood cell counts, it is less widely-known than it should be that because microwaves cook at lower temperatures, there is a much higher risk of bacterial contamination from undercooked food. Lack of awareness of this fact is a very common cause of food poisoning.

This is a common misconception. Microwaves are not even close to the resonant frequency of water molecules, instead the heat is caused by the fact that water (along with fats and sugars) is a polar molecule, meaning the electric charges are not evenly distributed (ie, each molecule has a positively charged end and a negatively charged end), and exposing it to a rapidly varying electric field causes the molecule to vibrate. The exact frequency does not matter, though higher frequencies penetrate less deeply and so are less useful for cooking.

Wrong. Water can indeed be heated beyond its boiling point without actually boiling, a process known as superheating, and this is much more likely to occur in a microwave than a stove due to the fact that a microwave heats water more evenly. It is a well-known hazard of microwave cooking.

As a general rule, if your "business" is of a type that requires quotation marks to refer to it, then yes, you need a lawyer.

Microwaved water has absolutely no effect on plants, provided you allow it to cool first (turns out hot water causes plants to die). Which reminds me, you should use (conventionally) boiled water as a control, otherwise any differences may simply be because the heat from the microwaves affected the water in some way (the consensus is that all bad effects of microwaves (destruction of nutrients, leaching of toxic substances from containers, third degree burns from disabling the door safety and sticking your hand inside, etc) are caused entirely by the heat and are no worse than ordinary cooking).

Wait, so you're saying if I put up cameras around my house to find out who's always smashing my windows when I'm away, and then I catch the guy on video, I don't have a case because there are no actual witnesses? I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. Wouldn't I be the witness, since they're my cameras? How is this any different?

It is a type of network connection that allows you to receive data, but not transmit data. It's used to prevent accidentally leaking sensitive data over the network (which also requires the use of a second, more secure channel to acknowledge receipt of data) or to intercept network data without being detected.

Are we even talking about that same thing? The gold standard is not currently used by any country on the planet, as every country that ever tried found it too inconvenient as it prevented them from printing their way out of trouble. Not quite what I would call "wildly successful".

Well, there's your answer. DSA and SHA-256 are not encryption algorithms, and are not used to hide information. They are used to authenticate data and communications, ie, make sure it hasn't been tampered with and was really created by the person who claims to have created it. The NSA receives data from other US government agencies and foreign governments as well as private companies. The NSA absolutely requires a way for these people providing them data to prove that they really are who they say are and that their data hasn't been tampered with. The only way they can do that is to provide secure public-key cryptosystems and hashing algorithms, and they daren't risk including a backdoor in case an enemy finds it and uses it to feed the NSA false data that appears to come from trusted sources. If these algorithms are flawed, the NSA's whole operation is in jeopardy.

Yes, you're missing the fact that this has been tried before (with gold instead of bitcoins) with absolutely no success.

The only such hack is Auto-MDIX (which swaps the transmit and receive pairs if you used a patch cable where a crossover cable was required or vice versa), which won't work if only the receive pairs are connected. If you're worried about "determined adversaries" (just who do you expect to be pissing off, exactly?), worry about such techniques as time-domain reflectometry, which will detect any devices connected to a network cable even if they are not actually transmitting anything.

Electricity doesn't work the way you think it does. The direction of current flow has absolutely nothing to do with whether you're transmitting or receiving a signal. You seem to think that signals are transmitted by "pushing" electrons down a wire, where they are somehow "collected" by the receiver. This is not how electricity works. Electricity works with voltages. Electricity flows when there is a difference in voltage between two points, and flows from the point of higher voltage to the point of lower voltage (it actually flows in the reverse direction, but nobody will know).

In a twisted pair cable, transmitting a signal is done over a pair of wires, where one wire of the pair (specifically, the white-striped one) has a positive voltage and the other (the solid-coloured one) has a negative voltage. This causes an electrical current to flow through whatever the two wires are connected to. These voltages can be turned on or off, causing the current flowing through the device the wires are connected to to start or stop, and this is how a varying signal is transmitted. Note that with this setup, a single pair of wires can only transmit in one direction, so in order to send signals and receive them, two pairs are needed, hence why you have a "transmit" pair and a "receive" pair. Cat-5 actually has four pairs, but the other two pairs are not used in regular Ethernet, and hence can be used for other purposes, eg, power over Ethernet, but that's another story.

Note that it is trivial for the transmitter to reverse the voltages, but this would not actually make any difference (actually, it makes the difference that your network card simply won't detect the signal at all because it's only designed to detect current flowing in one direction, not the other; but it would be possible to modify the card (with a full-wave rectifier) so that it could detect it, and then it really would make absolutely no difference).

This has to be one of the dumbest posts I've ever seen on this forum, and that's saying a lot. If the "problem" is that it is impossible for Bitcoin to produce infinite wealth by infinite splitting, then a) nobody who suggests splitting bitcoins has that as a goal; and b) if you think that is their goal, or should be, or is even remotely possible in any way whatsoever, or that anyone even believes it is possible, then you're an idiot.

Close. However, instead of addresses, it is previously received transactions that have to be spent in their entirety. eg, if you received BTC3 in one transaction and BTC4 in another transaction to the same address, each of those amounts would be treated separately (eg, you could send BTC2 and receive BTC1 change) even though they are at the same address.

This is something that varies between wallets. While some work as you describe, others (including Bitcoin-Qt) do not actually require confirmations before change can be spent. There is no technical reason to wait for confirmations before sending coins, however unconfirmed transactions usually can't be trusted to not be double-spent. But since change is sent from yourself, to yourself, it is always trustworthy (unless you're trying to rip yourself off).

No. Think about what would happen if you did have a bunch of tiny amounts built up, and tried to spend them. Say you have BTC10 in ten lots of BTC1, and you want to send BTC4.5. You would take 5 of those BTC1 (and the recipient receives a single BTC4.5, so the individual BTC1 units don't exist anymore) and you would get a single BTC0.5 in change. About half of your "dust" is suddenly gone. The more "dust" you have, the more likely it is that a future transaction you send will consume a large chunk of it in this way.

Correct. You cannot delete receiving addresses. Doing so has no benefits, and would cause you to lose all coins you ever received with that address, as well as any coins you might receive at that address in the future, hence the software does not allow you to even try to do this.

With 10/100BASE-T over Cat-5 (but not 1000BASE-T, which uses all four pairs), just disconnect the transmit pair (pins 1 and 2, either green and green/white (T568A) or orange and orange/white (T568B)), and you will no longer be capable of transmitting. Then put your card in promiscuous mode (since you obviously won't be able to establish a connection), fire up your favourite packet sniffer and you're done. Note that you may experience unavoidable data loss, as you will be unable to request that dropped packets be retransmitted.

Transactions sending coins which were only very recently received are considered "low-priority", to prevent spammers from bloating the blockchain by sending coins back and forth to themselves repeatedly. Low-priority transactions always require a fee (this is explained on the wiki). The basic requirement for a typical (not too complex) transaction to be considered "high-priority" is "1 bitcoin-day", ie, if you're sending 1 bitcoin, you have to have to received that bitcoin more than 1 day ago. Since you're only sending 0.01 bitcoins, you will need to wait at least 100 days before you can send it without fees. If you can't wait that long, you'll just have to buy some more.

Note that transaction fees are a normal part of Bitcoin, and eventually Bitcoin will be entirely supported by fees, at which point free transactions will probably no longer be allowed at all. If you have been told that transaction fees are not normally required or expected with Bitcoin, you have been lied to.

His Ph.D. is in political science, and the SSE is not a scientific institute in anything but name. The SSE is known for "studying" such things as ESP, UFOs, and alternative medicine. (All of these, by the way, are oxymoronic when treated scientifically: any kind extra-sensory perception, if it actually exists, would just be a regular sense; unidentified flying objects cease to be unidentified once you know what they are; and alternative medicine becomes regular medicine if it actually works.)

As for the "quantum" stuff, I think that started when some pseudoscientist misconstrued the uncertainty principle to mean "anything's possible". Or maybe they just thought the "q" makes it sound cool. Either way, none of this has anything to do with actual quantum mechanics or any kind of real science whatsoever.

Yes, it goes to the address in my signature. I used qrencode and GIMP. QR codes use error correction, so you can just draw anything you want on top of it and it'll still work as long as you don't cover too many symbols.