posting to undo accidental mod...

I'm pretty sure truecrypt will let you have as many hidden partitions as you want, so your megahidden partition idea is perfectly doable.

It can also have them inside files that are visible in the main partition (although I don't think you could make it so that the file is also seems like a valid Excel file, although that would be a nice touch if the devs are reading this...)

If you want to play games, couldn't you just have a decoy hidden partition for which you hand over the keys immediately when asked, and an additional one you say nothing about?

Anyway that's just hypothetical - in real life I agree with you that when you put yourself in a situation such that someone else can do whatever they want to you, your best bet is trying as hard as you can not to annoy those people regardless of who is right. My solution (which has been working so far but I don't know if it's feasible to keep it up forever) is simply not to travel to such countries. Certainly if I were travelling there for pleasure I wouldn't bring any kind of laptop (and would consider buying a not-so-smart phone for the trip - one that does nothing but calls and texts which means less content to worry about).

The problem is, let's say I'm sent there for work, which sometimes requires me to travel overseas. And carry a laptop. And for that laptop to be encrypted with TrueCrypt (no hidden partitions, just plain old visible encrypted partitions). And by handing over the keys to anyone without a court order or warrant I would be breaching my employer's data security policy (grounds for instant dismissal, with potential for follow up legal action ... I would also be exposing them to legal action from their clients so I've doubt they would have much sympathy). What advice would you have for me (in hypothetical land) then?

It looks like it's just water from the air conditioner...

http://www.motorpoint.com.au/car-air-conditioning-system.asp

5. Dont worry about a pool of water forming under your car after using the A/C

If you see a puddle of water on the ground, usually under the passenger area dont be alarmed. This is a normal feature of the system as it is only water dripping from the air conditioning evaporator. The evaporator has a drain tube fitted to allow the condensation from the evaporator to drain away from the vehicle.

Because this is China.

Executable offensives include: political dissent, terrorism, drug dealing, child pornography, being of the wrong religous groups, the usual laundry list.

Where it gets exciting is when they send doctors to determine your blood type to decide if you've committed an executable offense.

The way to deal with this is with certification. Give manufacturers the option to certify their products, and then let people decide if they want to pay the premium. And do it at a state level, not federal, so people can at least leave if they don't like it.

No, it is certain physical properties that makes something useful as money (scarcity, durability, divisibility, fungibility, ease of identification, suitable for making denominated units (coins), not a gas that will escape when you open the jar, not toxic or radioactive). This is why gold and silver are money, but diamonds aren't, even though both are pretty and both have value. Diamonds are neither fungible nor divisible. This makes them are illiquid, and therefore bad money. Sure gold is pretty but most people don't look at their gold, it sits stored away in a vault.

Gold is *naturally* money. It's not something that humans had a say in. The best way to understand this is by the anthropic principle - what else could be money? There is no other substance with all the right properties. Silver, platinum, and palladium are the runners up - but they lack better identifiability, since the grey metals all look pretty similar.

The cultural significance and beauty were probably assigned after humans came to recognize it as a store of value. For example, aluminum was once highly valued due to its near non-exsitence in nature in its elemental form - more valued than gold even, until we figured out how to refine it. Bitcoin doesn't have aesthetics going for it, but it doesn't have to. Plenty of people think stocks and bonds are valuable for example, and there's nothing pretty to look at there.

So bitcoin has all the necessary monetary properties of gold, with the added advantage that it can be moved around electronically. So I would say it's actually far better money than gold (at least as far as market participants would be concerned - governments hate it). Yes there is a chicken and egg hurdle before it can gain widespread adoption as currency, but actually there is a plausible path to get it there. Already as I mentioned it is perfectly useful for foreign exchange including international wire transfers. This doesn't require it to have a particularly stable value as long as there are currency exchanges available to both parties. Money and currency are not the same thing... bitcoin is already money, even if it's not yet currency.

Bitcoin would be a lot more valuable if your currency held the promise of something. NO, this is exactly why government money fails. Whichever authority is responsible for that "promise" will simple renege after the currency has gained acceptance. They debase the money, becoming extremely powerful in the process, until eventually it becomes worthless. Then after everyone else is broke and they have all the real money, they do it again. When you mine bitcoins you aren't exactly "selling computer time", you are using your computer to produce a product. The person who buys your coins wants the coin as proof of work, not the cpu time itself. This is exactly the same model as gold mining, the point is that nobody can get more gold without incurring the cost to mine it. Gold doesn't have to "promise" anything except its inherent promise of being scarce (and its other monetary properties such as durability, divisibility, etc). Yes bitcoin is volatile but only because it is new. As it gains acceptable, the real promise that you will care about is the market in which people will let you trade it for stuff (even just forex is a great start). That does NOT require any authority to back the money. The whole point of bitcoin is that it is a scarce commodity, as opposed to a token or note.

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard.