Something that you need a "xzillion" of to buy a decent meal. (The proceeds from my time-travel compound interest plan didn't go as far as I'd hoped. )

Of course they will. I guarantee that if you go to the police and tell them you've had a large amount of money stolen from you, they will, in fact, do something. They have identity theft and fraud departments specifically trained to handle these sorts of cases. They won't necessarily be able to get your money back, but they'll sure as Hell try. Why people here seem to think the cops won't do anything is anyone's guess.

The key word here is boat. If a missile is launched from mainland North Korea, it'd be pretty obvious that the missile belongs to North Korea. But a boat in the Gulf of Mexico could belong to anyone. It could be North Korea. Or maybe China, or Russia, or literally any other country that owns both boats and missiles. That's why submarines are such a critical part of nuclear strategy: they can go almost anywhere in the world without being detected and then fire their missiles without anyone knowing which country was responsible.

They don't. Passwords are case sensitive when determining whether your login password is correct, but not case sensitive when determining whether a new password is the same as one of your old passwords. I'm pretty sure they're not storing two different hashes of each password solely to produce inconsistent case sensitivity, because there's just no real reason to do that and it runs the risk of people like me noticing the inconsistency and complaining about it unnecessarily. No, it's far more likely that they're storing passwords in plain text, and the inconsistent behaviour is the result of the two password comparison functions being written by two different people, neither of whom thought it was strange that they were comparing actual passwords instead of hashes, or if they did, their boss angrily reminded them that "they don't get paid to think".

There's no "perhaps" about it. Here in Australia, I remember recently a police car was stolen out of a parking lot and found abandoned a few days later - minus the guns. Guns mysteriously "disappearing" from military bases is also far more common than it should be. Naturally, the gun control lobby firmly believes we can solve these problem with tighter regulation.

I already knew that Australian government agencies don't hash passwords. I discovered that a few years ago when I changed my password to one of my old passwords but with part of it capitalised differently, and got an error message that the new password was the same as one that I was used previously, even though passwords are case senstive. There's only possible way the system could know that, and that's if they stored every password I've ever used in plain text. I tried complaining, but nobody knew what I was talking about and wouldn't even listen when I tried to explain it. I see nothing's changed.

A newbie walks into a bank and says, "I want to open to an account."

And the teller says, "Sure, no problem."

So they set up his account, and when it's all done, the newbie asks, "What's my balance?"

"Well, zero, of course. You have to deposit some money before you can have a balance."

"What!? You mean I have to put in my own money? You don't just give me free money for signing up?"

"Uh, no. We used to give away free toasters, but we stopped doing that a while ago."

"This is an outrage! I'm a newbie! I deserve free money for no reason! What do you have against newbies?"

"Nothing, we just..."

"I don't want to hear it! You'll be hearing from my lawyers!"

And the newbie storms out, never to be seen again. There's a lesson in here somewhere.

How about a place that doesn't include your stolen coins in the payout? That might be a better place for money laundering, don't you think?

Sorry, but this is a dumb question. You wouldn't be asking it if you know what any of these terms meant.

VoIP, short for Voice over Internet Protocol, is a system for making telephone calls over the Internet instead of over standard phone lines. It has absolutely nothing to do with Bitcoin beyond both being things that are done on the Internet.
The blockchain is database containing the history of all Bitcoin transactions. New transactions are appended to it every 10 minutes on average. It is not even remotely useful for VoIP applications.
An ASIC miner is an Application Specific Integrated Circuit that executes the SHA-256 hashing algorithm used in Bitcoin mining. It cannot be used for anything else, for the same reason that the ASIC in your digital alarm clock can't be used for anything other than telling the time.

As an experienced electronic technician and network admin, you really ought to know these things.

Create a new address to give to each person you want to do business with. Then, when you receive money at one of those addresses, you know who it came from, since you didn't give that address to anyone else. Though it's still possible that they got a friend to pay you on their behalf, or something like that. You don't know. You don't need to know. If you think you need to know, you're probably doing something horribly wrong.

Gweedo may be a complete jerkass, but he's an intelligent jerkass, and he does have a point. Leaving a large amount of money unprotected where other people can access it is kinda stupid, you have to admit. But that doesn't mean it's entirely (or even mostly) your fault. You could sue the prankster, but that won't do you much good if they really can't pay you back (though the court could garnish their wages if they have a job). I'd advise you to go to the police and/or a lawyer and discuss your options. I understand if you don't want to put a family member through that, but there's really not much else you can do if you want your money back.

It makes absolutely no difference on my computer using IE 8.0. Removing the spans leaves exactly the same gap. The only thing that makes any difference at all is increasing the padding/margins, which increases the size of the gap (as expected), but nothing I've tried will reduce the gap or remove it completely. I wouldn't have thought floating it would make a difference, but I never thought to try that because it'll just screw up the pop-up even if it works. I don't think there's any way to float it and still have the pop-up work the way you want.

Thanks.

It's not really a hole in time, they're just slowing down and then speeding up photons so that to an outside observer it appears* that the photons have briefly ceased to exist and they'll be all like, "Whoa, where'd they go?" No doubt this has really cool applications for secure communications and whatnot, but it does not "tear a hole in time".

*Actually, they don't just appear to not exist, they have ceased to exist temporarily (sort of), and cannot be observed or interacted with in any way. Relativity is funny like that.

Um, no, they couldn't. The reporter is confusing people with subatomic particles again. It's a surprisingly common mistake (they did it with quantum teleportation, too), although I really don't understand how anyone could make it in the first place. A person is nothing like a subatomic particle! Why would anyone even think that?

No, your car keys are not where.

When Schrödinger's cat was sealed in a box with a radioactive substance, a vial of poison, and no air holes, does it exist as a superposition of multiple causes of death before the box is opened?

Yes (no).

Is it acceptable to ask two separate questions at once in this thread?

Wait, does that rag have blood on it?

It doesn't matter what shape they are. As I pointed out earlier, even regular M&M's may contain peanuts. They're all made in the same factory, and Mars has admitted that cross-contamination happens, despite their best efforts to prevent it. That's why they put warnings on the labels. A person allergic to peanuts eating M&M's of any kind is playing a delicious version of Russian roulette. This kid should never have been allowed to eat them in the first place.

It's a banknote being de-rezzed.

By "not a quantum computing pro", I presume you mean "don't know anything about the subject at all and learnt about quantum mechanics from watching Star Trek", right?

It is. It is ECDSA that is vulnerable to quantum computers, and which will have to be replaced with a quantum resistant public key algorithm if the need arises (there are already several suitable algorithms, and the only reason we're not using one of them right now is that they haven't been extensively tested and may have unknown flaws).

No, of course not. It was installed for your convenience by the magical software fairy. Of course it's malicious! To assume otherwise is extremely unwise, to say the least.

Yes, it never had any viruses... before. Now it has. How are you so sure your laptop has never had any viruses? A good virus is designed to avoid being noticed. I bet you've never seen a good toupée, either.

Please run a virus scan on your PC before you do anything else. The results may surprise you.