But that's the problem: we can't borrow any more money until the debt ceiling is raised. Hence the Atlantic article. You're right, it wouldn't normally be an issue, but now, suddenly, it is.

The Reserve is required to pledge collateral for every dollar it puts into circulation. It must keep those securities on its balance sheet and cannot sell them.

Those Treasury bonds held by the Federal Reserve actually represent government debt. By law, each Reserve bank is required to pledge collateral for every dollar it puts into circulation. Most of that collateral is in the form of government securities. They can be counted as assets by the Reserve because they represent…

Well, technically we borrow the money. This can be the same as printing it, but since Congress can't figure out how to raise the debt limit, Apple really does have more money than them.

Read more carefully. I said it's effectively the same as burning natural gas for energy which also uses methane and also produces CO2.

Not necessarily. The algorithm is very simple: replace each character with a different character. However, the text uses 63 different symbols. By choosing different letters to replace each symbol, there are potentially trillions of trillions of different possibilities.

Here's what I've personally downloaded in the past month, documentaries only:

They're going to burn the methane, not release it into the atmosphere, so it's effectively the same thing producing electricity from natural gas, which is also mostly methane. You're right, it produces more carbon than nuclear, but it's not disastrous.

There are two versions which need to be able to take off from a carrier by catapult. The F-35C is a carrier version which doesn't have the vertical flight system. That makes it cheaper and able to carry more fuel.

Oh, sorry. There is a serious comment like yours every time an American iPlayer comes up, so I probably didn't read as carefully as I should have.

I scrolled down knowing I would see this comment.

The BBC has so much more than just those two shows. Just this week, there have been three documentaries worth watching, for example. They're the kind of shows the Discovery Channel would make if they had a brain, or PBS would make if they had any money.

Can we add websites whose advertisements overlap content? My other reply is back there somewhere.

That poor machine. I don't suppose the tunnel could use a water heater, could it?

Battleship? It looks like they took more inspiration from Mad Libs.

I'd like to barter a truce: First, all you crazy people on the right: Stop going on and on about the President's birth certificate. He's President now and your crazy ideas aren't going to change that. Just drop it.

But what if they purposely bungled the Lewinsky affair to make you think they couldn't cover up the Moon landing? I bet you didn't think of that!

Seconded. I saw them a couple months ago when they aired. Definitely worth a watch.

Pandora's web player would regularly use 20% of my computer's CPU. The new HTML5 site is currently using 2%. Granted, it's hard to tell how much that was due to Flash vs. problems with Pandora's code, but that old site was a resource hog.

Maybe in this specific instance no one is being harmed. Who knows. But in general, not being able to trust the name printed on a product or on a store hurts the consumer. It's nice to see China acting like a grown-up country and enforcing trademarks, even if it takes a little prodding from a blog. Just imagine if…