By that logic, any company taking investor money is a ponzi scheme: the early adopters (i.e. initial investors) are heavily rewarded if and only if they can convince latecomers that the company actually has value
The difference is in the fact that legitimate companies have value - they have buildings, machines, materials, people and the market where the produced goods can be sold at profit.
A pyramid scheme company has no value outside of a tiny office with filing cabinets where nonexistent money is recorded.
In both cases the company seeks investment and in both cases the company advertises how good and stable it is. A pyramid scheme company is lying. A manufacturing company tells the truth.
Confiscation of a BitCoin stash requires that they be able to actually find the account.
Question #0: "Do you have cash or any other form of money on you or with you?"
How will you answer? If you lie and say "no" and the Bitcoins are found, it's ungood for your freedom. If you say "yes" then it's ungood for your wallet. I would presume that most people who go to such length to hide their money will say "no" - and that will be just as good for them as it was good for holders of offshore bank accounts who "forgot" to pay taxes on their income.
Try transporting $1,000,000 in actual cash, or gold. It is very hard.
What are you talking about? Every day more drugs cross the border than your puny $1M. Drugs are hard to hide - they are light and take lots of volume; they are chemicals, so every dog in the neighborhood smells them. That doesn't stop anyone. Who would stop you from shoving a gold bar or ten into the body of your car? There are plenty of inaccessible places in modern spot-welded designs, and nobody will be cutting your car apart on a vague suspicion.
BitCoin is becoming a viable answer. Have you ever tried using it?
Perhaps I'm fortunate that I don't have a problem for which Bitcoin is an answer. I don't carry a million dollars in small denominations in my car. I usually don't carry any cash. Using Bitcoin for anything else only fattens the exchange owners. If I earn USD and I need to spend USD why should I bother with an intermediary currency?
It may well be that the day comes when an honest US resident must memorize his Bitcoin stash to avoid being robbed by the government or by other miscreants. But it would be too late then to work within the system. You'd have to either escape the system or to fight it; otherwise the system will be looking for more ways to wring you dry. How about paying 10% of the assessed value of your home in yearly property taxes, for example? The homeland needs your cash, citizen, pay up.
Get an old phone without a SIM card or a contract. (This phone can only call 911.) Then keep it in the car and designate that phone as a driver's phone. How is the car to know?
Also, have someone to stand near the car. Start the car and designate the stranger's phone as the driver's phone. Drive away. The software will probably decide that the driver's phone lost power.
Have your phone off when you start the car. Start driving. Later turn the phone on. What will happen then? Is this phone in your car or in the car in the other lane? Would it be OK for your car to interact with that phone and disable something on it? Would a phone require some pairing or other interaction before car A can disable phone B? If yes then you keep pretending that the phone is in the other car (Bluetooth can reach out pretty far.) If no then your car, without a driver's phone, will be randomly disabling passengers' phones in other cars as you go by (a clear violation of all kinds of rules, from moral to FCC.) If it disables only the first phone that came along then you can then turn your own phone on and text all you want.
Sarcastically or not, but that's exactly what the founders of Bitcoin ("minters") got away with. They calculated a bunch of numbers and then found, through Slashdot and the like, enough gullible idiots who gave them real money in exchange for the numbers.
The banks are pretty generous with your information and I am not yet convinced who's the bigger bogeyman -- the people or the gub.
The set of all people contains the set of the government people. Therefore Bitcoin transfers are traceable by the government and by anyone who wants to know. Bank transfers are traceable only by the government. You have more privacy with banks - and you don't have the illusion of anonymity with banks.
it might be a good idea to have someone else other than gub peering in, if not just to have a witness
It will not work well. If the government wants to frame you they can either wire the money from your bank account to a terrorist, or they can send Bitcoins from your IP to a terrorist. It is actually much easier to compromise your PC at home than a mainframe at a major bank. In the latter case you need cooperation with the bank's IT - and this cannot be kept secret for long. In the former case only the agent who does the work needs to know.
The "new" thing about BitCoin is that it is decentralized, and cannot realistically be regulated or tracked. Do you have any real comprehension how valuable that is, in this day and age? A form of value transaction that cannot be confiscated, tracked, or reported?
No, I do not have such a comprehension. 99.(9)% of the population do not care if their meager salary is tracked or reported - it is already tracked and reported by payroll companies before they even get the check. Noone's money is confiscated except in two cases - by the court's order and by the police when they find a suitcase with "drug money" in your car. The latter is bad, but they would confiscate your Bitcoin stash just as easily, by transferring it into a holding account that they control.
you underestimate the power of this idea.
I think you overestimate the number of people who have money to hide. Combine that with the technological expertise that is required to use Bitcoin, and the picture of the resulting audience is predictably sad: it's techno-geeks who either have a serious drug habit or who are certified lunatics.
But we're talking about how to POWER OFF the computer.
What for? I measured, and in sleep mode this box takes about 1W. I can wake it up with a USB keyboard, and it takes only 5-7 seconds to be back in business.
I've stayed in five star hotels without a card before.
But you don't know how closely the security looked at you because they did that quietly. They found no reason to suspect you since you were not on a list of wanted persons.
I would get myself on a slow boat to Ecuador
It's dangerous to confine yourself to a boat from which there is no escape. You cannot be taken aboard before the captain checks your visa and records your name into the ship's books. Perhaps one can become a stowaway, but for that to work you have to know how ships operate. Most people have no clue where one can hide on a ship or even how to get onto one.
You may be better off crossing into Mexico on land, especially because the US government does not even pretend to guard the border. Crossing into Canada would be also easy enough. You can take the next step from there.
In your other comment you were predicting JA's demise as a natural consequence of the evil South American gangster/politician. I dispute your interpretation as overly dramatic.
It fits this thread on Slashdot, unless it is also overly dramatic:-)
But seriously, Assange threw himself into the fight of titans. Even the government of Equador is much more powerful than any single man - not even mentioning the CIA and other TLAs of Europe and the USA. Sure, they can do Assange's bidding, for a while - but Assange will also do the same for them. Equador is not a very democratic country; people there get in trouble for criticizing the government. Perhaps Equador wants to get a few brownie points among the leftists and anarchists of the world by protecting one of them in exchange for the awkward silence when someone sends evidence of Equador's own wrongdoing to Wikileaks.
Governments are not people, at least because any government, especially a good one, has to act for the benefit of the people of their country. It may not go as far as to invite Assange and then have him terminated out of convenience. But another accusation of rape wouldn't be too difficult to manufacture. Or Equador may overlook a certain airplane that briefly landed in the country (the USA used this method before.) I already mentioned looking the other way when a street brawl occurs. The black mark has been issued, and all Assange is currently doing is an attempt to never meet the issuers. His actions in this regard are amateurish, and IMO they will be insufficient. The USA is currently applying pressure by doing exactly nothing - the target is victimizing himself. It's quite smart. Give Assange a few more months under his self-inflicted house arrest and you can be sure he will do something else that will sully his image even more. For example, Assange can always leave the embassy by wearing a face mask and clothes and makeup to look like someone else. But escaping the country this way would solidly make him a fugitive from justice, and he will be sought by Interpol. He may be safe in Equador, for a while, but his friends at Wikileaks will get a very clear message - "if you mess with us we will have your lives destroyed forever."
A strange question on Slashdot. But I'll answer. The box was turned on many months ago by crawling under the table. Since then the button was never touched. When the computer is not in use I put it to sleep via software command. When I come back I press Any Key and it resumes. If I need to reboot it from time to time I do it also through the software.
Like that would work in court. With the same result you can say that you rob banks only in a red baseball cap, and if it isn't red then it couldn't be you who did the job. The prosecutor uses different evidence, one that is based not on your words but on external, verifiable facts.
Not only that. Imagine that someone is after you (well, we are discussing such a scenario here, don't we?) That "someone" is either the government or another powerful force. How hard would it be for them to pick the lock of your apartment when you are at work and do the usual things to steal your keyring and your passphrase? Once that is done your goose is thoroughly cooked. By claiming that you always sign your messages you dig a pretty deep hole for yourself - you abandon the simple and straightforward defense of "my account was hacked." You would have to erect a far more complex cardhouse - that an unknown villain stole your digital ID to impersonate you. That is not going to fly unless you have evidence - and you will not have any.
The power button on my box is so deep under the table I can't even reach it. Should I put my new shiny box into the prime space on my desk just so I can access the button? That's what I did in 1990's - is the old new again?
I'm afraid I'm not cynical enough. Hard to believe in purely humanitarian motivation. Asylums these days are granted only if there is a benefit to the receiving country. Equador already had its fifteen minutes of infamy and it is working on more, now that the UK successfully put itself into a corner. Rafael Correa is a close friend of Hugo Chavez, and both are known for using the weapon of speech as a lethal weapon:-) Anyway, political leanings of those guys are best left to their voters - but as things are, they may be a factor in these tensions. In essence, Equador got a fresh hot potato and is juggling it fiercely - to the considerable benefit to the country's image. Assange would be wrong if he considers himself anything but a pawn on the global chess board. His pawn may be even taken before it makes the next move, since he can't leave the UK and he can't stay in the embassy for the rest of his life.
First, nobody ever expects you to lay low in a nice place.
For a good reason. A nice place will not ask for cash -- they use credit cards and they ask for one before you get the key. If you walk in and pay in cash it will be a huge red flag already. Expensive hotels protect their guests, so they don't want any weirdo to stay in the room next to a Wall Street banker. Those hotels have security personnel and they are often close with police, and the hallways are packed with cameras.
lay low for a week or so
Doesn't make any sense. You are transitioning from "legal, under observation" to "illegal, fugitive." Why in the world would you give them time to realize that you escaped? Laying low helps only if you expect that the manhunt will be called off after a few days. Do you have such an expectation - and if yes, why? It does not cost anything to have your photos uploaded into cameras and posted on all police bulletin boards. Your best bet would be to move fast, one step ahead of your admirers.
Just don't be surprised when social accounts are created under your name and identity and then are quickly used to threaten harm to various people (which is a crime.) Good luck proving that it was not you who posted a certain message. There was a news story a week ago about an ex-Marine taken and placed into a psychiatric hospital for something he (supposedly) wrote on Facebook.
If the government is after you (for whatever reason) the only sane and effective thing you can do is to leave the country as soon as you can. Within the country you will be hunted down, framed or simply disappeared - it's just a matter of time. It's much harder to do in China, for example - and if you are not an evil mastermind on par with OBL then the costs of locating you in India, China or Africa will be too high. Even CIA has a budget - and most importantly they have only a limited number of agents. Within the country the police will do their job for them.
your best bet would be actually the Assange way; seek asylum in an embassy that does not have an extradition treaty with any of the G8 countries.
You can get beaten up real good whether you are in G8 or in Equador. The cost of the service is very affordable if you are a nation state. The police will not even look for your assailants if all you can say is "there were five of them, all big and all inebriated." Assange can be easily placed into a wheelchair for life if a powerful country wants it so. Living under 24/7 police protection is, for most people, a punishment on its own - and Assange will not get police protection anyway. Equador is using him for a political statement; but once the statement is spelled out and recorded in the archives of the United Nations Assange becomes a liability. It would be then quite convenient for Assange to disappear.
Value is purely a matter of perception, as is reality.
You cannot eat that value or live in it. Even artists are creating more value (though that is also intangible) because they are producing works that people want to see or hear.
Bitcoins, just like most any currency, have no intrinsic value. You cannot eat dollar bills and you don't really care to own those sea shells. The only value of the currency comes from the fact that you can exchange it for products that you really need. Bitcoin has minting cost, however. Dollars have no minting cost (or it is so low that we don't care.)
This means that by wasting power and calculating numbers you created no value to the humanity. At best you moved someone else's wealth into your pocket by convincing the seller that your bits are better than someone else's pieces of green paper. Your gain has the same origin as the gain of issuing banks - they make money out of thin air, and so do you. Nobody got more food on the table because of that. You only created and sold another - and more expensive - token. In essence, that's the whole idea behind Bitcoin - to create an alternative currency and get rich off of it.
Personal Web sites with projects, ramblings, writings and stuff
Noncommercial Web sites existing as a free service in a paid membership (ARRL.org)
Commercial Web sites that directly sell products (mouser.com for example)
Commercial Web sites that advertise products made by the company in question (www.sony.com)
Commercial Web sites that are useful enough so that users subscribe to them (some newspapers; Toyota's service manuals)
Commercial Web sites that allow public access to information on a lesser level than the paid access (Reuters can publish week-old news for free, and charge newspapers an arm and a leg for instant news)
I'm sure there are other viable scenarios.
I personally have a Web site where I sell a commercial product and where I offer free products (GPL designs.) There are no ads on my Web site, and no trackers (except Google Analytics... I guess I should remove that.)
I never look at ads even when for some reason I'm using IE on someone else's computer. At home I run every ad blocker known to man.
So why wouldn't it be morally honest to block the ads because I refuse to look at them? Why should the advertiser be wrongly charged for an ad that nobody consumed?
True, cost is an issue. But also time is an issue. Life is short. You cannot spend three days to walk to the other end of the city to buy flowers for your GF because when you are back the flowers will become straw and the GF will have a new BF. In middle ages most people lived sedentiary lives because going somewhere was a costly and risky affair, and they didn't really have a good reason to go.
Today if you look at who rides buses it's exactly who you said would be - students and poor people. Bus passes are expensive -- very expensive. I used to ride a bus when I worked, back in 1995, but the pass was $100/mo or something like that. Here is what the local bus company says:
VTA's Adult Express Pass, which is equivalent to Eco Pass, costs $1,540 a year per person.
Hey, you can buy a nice junk car for this money and go anywhere you like! Most people in the market for bus trips will need to take a loan to buy such a pass. I'd have to be insane to buy one. I'd rather buy a cheap scooter or an electric bicycle.
Today a single fare on a bus here costs $2 or $4. Since most trips are both ways, you are looking at spending $5 to $10 per day at minimum if you go somewhere on a daily basis. Over the year it will be $1800 to $3600, with nothing to show for it. These monies can buy you a very decent car, and you will keep it - so that the next year you only pay the maintenance (insurance and fuel) and not the capital cost.
For those with no assets even the cost of a car plus insurance may be too much, but a weekly or monthly travel-pass may be an option.
As the numbers above prove, that person should be taking those trips rarely - certainly not every day. Only then he can save money on taking the bus. He still loses time, but people without a job usually have time. People with a job can afford a car.
Just like pretty much every other piece of consumer electronics. How easy is it to upgrade your Blu-Ray player, or replace components in your clock radio?
Simple devices, like a clock radio or a hammer, are not upgradeable. But take a hand saw - it is already upgradeable, and there are many blades to choose from. Same applies to your hand drill, your AR-15, your car, your home... Only very cheap items, or very complete items, are not upgradeable. Consumer electronics rates high on "completeness" - it does what it is supposed to do, and there is nothing to add to make it do more.
By the way, about the "replace components in your clock radio" part - if you are talking about repairs, it's fairly easy if you are the one doing the work. If you want to upgrade the clock radio, it's cheaper to buy a new one. You need the new parts anyway (say, to add FM to an AM-only radio.) If the thing can be upgraded without new parts (DD-WRT) then many people do just that.
Back when I was flying I took my car to the airport and left it at the long term parking lot. $15 per day, paid by the employer, is hardly an expense worth mentioning - but the convenience is very valuable. You may return at random time of the day, and assured availability of a familiar vehicle is nice.
Other people have family members who can drive them to the airport. If that's not the case, take a taxi - it makes sense.
Airports are a special case anyway because this is a one-way trip, and it's a rare destination too (one out of a thousand drivers heads to the airport at any given time, I guess.) What does not make sense is to take a bus across town on a two-way trip. One of my friends wanted to visit a store about 30 miles away, on the other end of the city. He took public transit about 2 hours before the store was supposed to close. He didn't make it! Talk about waste of time. Taxi is OK if you are Bill Gates or the like; but they are enormously expensive for casual use. A car may cost me $2,500 per year in original purchase cost (amortized over 10 years of use and then written off.) But I would pay the same $2,500 to the taxi companies within a couple of weeks, if not sooner. Hell, any working stiff would have to pay $50 twice per day, 5 days a week - that would require only 5 weeks for the personal car to become a better proposition even if he does not go shopping or visiting friends.
It took me two hours to get from one side of Indianapolis to the other, but it would have taken 45 minutes in a taxi, and cost over 10x more ($45 vs. $3.50). There was nobody else on the bus when it got to the airport.
And that's why people buy their own cars in the USA. They can make this trip in 45 minutes, like in a taxi, for a couple of dollars, like in a bus.
Slashdot Mirror
By that logic, any company taking investor money is a ponzi scheme: the early adopters (i.e. initial investors) are heavily rewarded if and only if they can convince latecomers that the company actually has value
The difference is in the fact that legitimate companies have value - they have buildings, machines, materials, people and the market where the produced goods can be sold at profit.
A pyramid scheme company has no value outside of a tiny office with filing cabinets where nonexistent money is recorded.
In both cases the company seeks investment and in both cases the company advertises how good and stable it is. A pyramid scheme company is lying. A manufacturing company tells the truth.
Confiscation of a BitCoin stash requires that they be able to actually find the account.
Question #0: "Do you have cash or any other form of money on you or with you?"
How will you answer? If you lie and say "no" and the Bitcoins are found, it's ungood for your freedom. If you say "yes" then it's ungood for your wallet. I would presume that most people who go to such length to hide their money will say "no" - and that will be just as good for them as it was good for holders of offshore bank accounts who "forgot" to pay taxes on their income.
Try transporting $1,000,000 in actual cash, or gold. It is very hard.
What are you talking about? Every day more drugs cross the border than your puny $1M. Drugs are hard to hide - they are light and take lots of volume; they are chemicals, so every dog in the neighborhood smells them. That doesn't stop anyone. Who would stop you from shoving a gold bar or ten into the body of your car? There are plenty of inaccessible places in modern spot-welded designs, and nobody will be cutting your car apart on a vague suspicion.
BitCoin is becoming a viable answer. Have you ever tried using it?
Perhaps I'm fortunate that I don't have a problem for which Bitcoin is an answer. I don't carry a million dollars in small denominations in my car. I usually don't carry any cash. Using Bitcoin for anything else only fattens the exchange owners. If I earn USD and I need to spend USD why should I bother with an intermediary currency?
It may well be that the day comes when an honest US resident must memorize his Bitcoin stash to avoid being robbed by the government or by other miscreants. But it would be too late then to work within the system. You'd have to either escape the system or to fight it; otherwise the system will be looking for more ways to wring you dry. How about paying 10% of the assessed value of your home in yearly property taxes, for example? The homeland needs your cash, citizen, pay up.
Get an old phone without a SIM card or a contract. (This phone can only call 911.) Then keep it in the car and designate that phone as a driver's phone. How is the car to know?
Also, have someone to stand near the car. Start the car and designate the stranger's phone as the driver's phone. Drive away. The software will probably decide that the driver's phone lost power.
Have your phone off when you start the car. Start driving. Later turn the phone on. What will happen then? Is this phone in your car or in the car in the other lane? Would it be OK for your car to interact with that phone and disable something on it? Would a phone require some pairing or other interaction before car A can disable phone B? If yes then you keep pretending that the phone is in the other car (Bluetooth can reach out pretty far.) If no then your car, without a driver's phone, will be randomly disabling passengers' phones in other cars as you go by (a clear violation of all kinds of rules, from moral to FCC.) If it disables only the first phone that came along then you can then turn your own phone on and text all you want.
Sarcastically or not, but that's exactly what the founders of Bitcoin ("minters") got away with. They calculated a bunch of numbers and then found, through Slashdot and the like, enough gullible idiots who gave them real money in exchange for the numbers.
The banks are pretty generous with your information and I am not yet convinced who's the bigger bogeyman -- the people or the gub.
The set of all people contains the set of the government people. Therefore Bitcoin transfers are traceable by the government and by anyone who wants to know. Bank transfers are traceable only by the government. You have more privacy with banks - and you don't have the illusion of anonymity with banks.
it might be a good idea to have someone else other than gub peering in, if not just to have a witness
It will not work well. If the government wants to frame you they can either wire the money from your bank account to a terrorist, or they can send Bitcoins from your IP to a terrorist. It is actually much easier to compromise your PC at home than a mainframe at a major bank. In the latter case you need cooperation with the bank's IT - and this cannot be kept secret for long. In the former case only the agent who does the work needs to know.
The "new" thing about BitCoin is that it is decentralized, and cannot realistically be regulated or tracked. Do you have any real comprehension how valuable that is, in this day and age? A form of value transaction that cannot be confiscated, tracked, or reported?
No, I do not have such a comprehension. 99.(9)% of the population do not care if their meager salary is tracked or reported - it is already tracked and reported by payroll companies before they even get the check. Noone's money is confiscated except in two cases - by the court's order and by the police when they find a suitcase with "drug money" in your car. The latter is bad, but they would confiscate your Bitcoin stash just as easily, by transferring it into a holding account that they control.
you underestimate the power of this idea.
I think you overestimate the number of people who have money to hide. Combine that with the technological expertise that is required to use Bitcoin, and the picture of the resulting audience is predictably sad: it's techno-geeks who either have a serious drug habit or who are certified lunatics.
But we're talking about how to POWER OFF the computer.
What for? I measured, and in sleep mode this box takes about 1W. I can wake it up with a USB keyboard, and it takes only 5-7 seconds to be back in business.
I've stayed in five star hotels without a card before.
But you don't know how closely the security looked at you because they did that quietly. They found no reason to suspect you since you were not on a list of wanted persons.
I would get myself on a slow boat to Ecuador
It's dangerous to confine yourself to a boat from which there is no escape. You cannot be taken aboard before the captain checks your visa and records your name into the ship's books. Perhaps one can become a stowaway, but for that to work you have to know how ships operate. Most people have no clue where one can hide on a ship or even how to get onto one. You may be better off crossing into Mexico on land, especially because the US government does not even pretend to guard the border. Crossing into Canada would be also easy enough. You can take the next step from there.
In your other comment you were predicting JA's demise as a natural consequence of the evil South American gangster/politician. I dispute your interpretation as overly dramatic.
It fits this thread on Slashdot, unless it is also overly dramatic :-)
But seriously, Assange threw himself into the fight of titans. Even the government of Equador is much more powerful than any single man - not even mentioning the CIA and other TLAs of Europe and the USA. Sure, they can do Assange's bidding, for a while - but Assange will also do the same for them. Equador is not a very democratic country; people there get in trouble for criticizing the government. Perhaps Equador wants to get a few brownie points among the leftists and anarchists of the world by protecting one of them in exchange for the awkward silence when someone sends evidence of Equador's own wrongdoing to Wikileaks.
Governments are not people, at least because any government, especially a good one, has to act for the benefit of the people of their country. It may not go as far as to invite Assange and then have him terminated out of convenience. But another accusation of rape wouldn't be too difficult to manufacture. Or Equador may overlook a certain airplane that briefly landed in the country (the USA used this method before.) I already mentioned looking the other way when a street brawl occurs. The black mark has been issued, and all Assange is currently doing is an attempt to never meet the issuers. His actions in this regard are amateurish, and IMO they will be insufficient. The USA is currently applying pressure by doing exactly nothing - the target is victimizing himself. It's quite smart. Give Assange a few more months under his self-inflicted house arrest and you can be sure he will do something else that will sully his image even more. For example, Assange can always leave the embassy by wearing a face mask and clothes and makeup to look like someone else. But escaping the country this way would solidly make him a fugitive from justice, and he will be sought by Interpol. He may be safe in Equador, for a while, but his friends at Wikileaks will get a very clear message - "if you mess with us we will have your lives destroyed forever."
How do you turn it on?
A strange question on Slashdot. But I'll answer. The box was turned on many months ago by crawling under the table. Since then the button was never touched. When the computer is not in use I put it to sleep via software command. When I come back I press Any Key and it resumes. If I need to reboot it from time to time I do it also through the software.
Like that would work in court. With the same result you can say that you rob banks only in a red baseball cap, and if it isn't red then it couldn't be you who did the job. The prosecutor uses different evidence, one that is based not on your words but on external, verifiable facts.
Not only that. Imagine that someone is after you (well, we are discussing such a scenario here, don't we?) That "someone" is either the government or another powerful force. How hard would it be for them to pick the lock of your apartment when you are at work and do the usual things to steal your keyring and your passphrase? Once that is done your goose is thoroughly cooked. By claiming that you always sign your messages you dig a pretty deep hole for yourself - you abandon the simple and straightforward defense of "my account was hacked." You would have to erect a far more complex cardhouse - that an unknown villain stole your digital ID to impersonate you. That is not going to fly unless you have evidence - and you will not have any.
The power button on my box is so deep under the table I can't even reach it. Should I put my new shiny box into the prime space on my desk just so I can access the button? That's what I did in 1990's - is the old new again?
I'm afraid I'm not cynical enough. Hard to believe in purely humanitarian motivation. Asylums these days are granted only if there is a benefit to the receiving country. Equador already had its fifteen minutes of infamy and it is working on more, now that the UK successfully put itself into a corner. Rafael Correa is a close friend of Hugo Chavez, and both are known for using the weapon of speech as a lethal weapon :-) Anyway, political leanings of those guys are best left to their voters - but as things are, they may be a factor in these tensions. In essence, Equador got a fresh hot potato and is juggling it fiercely - to the considerable benefit to the country's image. Assange would be wrong if he considers himself anything but a pawn on the global chess board. His pawn may be even taken before it makes the next move, since he can't leave the UK and he can't stay in the embassy for the rest of his life.
First, nobody ever expects you to lay low in a nice place.
For a good reason. A nice place will not ask for cash -- they use credit cards and they ask for one before you get the key. If you walk in and pay in cash it will be a huge red flag already. Expensive hotels protect their guests, so they don't want any weirdo to stay in the room next to a Wall Street banker. Those hotels have security personnel and they are often close with police, and the hallways are packed with cameras.
lay low for a week or so
Doesn't make any sense. You are transitioning from "legal, under observation" to "illegal, fugitive." Why in the world would you give them time to realize that you escaped? Laying low helps only if you expect that the manhunt will be called off after a few days. Do you have such an expectation - and if yes, why? It does not cost anything to have your photos uploaded into cameras and posted on all police bulletin boards. Your best bet would be to move fast, one step ahead of your admirers.
Just don't be surprised when social accounts are created under your name and identity and then are quickly used to threaten harm to various people (which is a crime.) Good luck proving that it was not you who posted a certain message. There was a news story a week ago about an ex-Marine taken and placed into a psychiatric hospital for something he (supposedly) wrote on Facebook.
If the government is after you (for whatever reason) the only sane and effective thing you can do is to leave the country as soon as you can. Within the country you will be hunted down, framed or simply disappeared - it's just a matter of time. It's much harder to do in China, for example - and if you are not an evil mastermind on par with OBL then the costs of locating you in India, China or Africa will be too high. Even CIA has a budget - and most importantly they have only a limited number of agents. Within the country the police will do their job for them.
your best bet would be actually the Assange way; seek asylum in an embassy that does not have an extradition treaty with any of the G8 countries.
You can get beaten up real good whether you are in G8 or in Equador. The cost of the service is very affordable if you are a nation state. The police will not even look for your assailants if all you can say is "there were five of them, all big and all inebriated." Assange can be easily placed into a wheelchair for life if a powerful country wants it so. Living under 24/7 police protection is, for most people, a punishment on its own - and Assange will not get police protection anyway. Equador is using him for a political statement; but once the statement is spelled out and recorded in the archives of the United Nations Assange becomes a liability. It would be then quite convenient for Assange to disappear.
Value is purely a matter of perception, as is reality.
You cannot eat that value or live in it. Even artists are creating more value (though that is also intangible) because they are producing works that people want to see or hear.
Bitcoins, just like most any currency, have no intrinsic value. You cannot eat dollar bills and you don't really care to own those sea shells. The only value of the currency comes from the fact that you can exchange it for products that you really need. Bitcoin has minting cost, however. Dollars have no minting cost (or it is so low that we don't care.)
This means that by wasting power and calculating numbers you created no value to the humanity. At best you moved someone else's wealth into your pocket by convincing the seller that your bits are better than someone else's pieces of green paper. Your gain has the same origin as the gain of issuing banks - they make money out of thin air, and so do you. Nobody got more food on the table because of that. You only created and sold another - and more expensive - token. In essence, that's the whole idea behind Bitcoin - to create an alternative currency and get rich off of it.
Heh, I applied for an AmEx card last week, sounds like I shouldn't have bothered ;)
The pizza place near my home only takes Visa and cash. The owned explained that anything else is too expensive and isn't worth it.
Have you tried blocking ads on the Hulu website? You'll get to wait for about twice as long as if you watched the ad.
I'd block the whole Hulu.com.
So what's the business model you'd prefer then?
I personally have a Web site where I sell a commercial product and where I offer free products (GPL designs.) There are no ads on my Web site, and no trackers (except Google Analytics ... I guess I should remove that.)
I never look at ads even when for some reason I'm using IE on someone else's computer. At home I run every ad blocker known to man.
So why wouldn't it be morally honest to block the ads because I refuse to look at them? Why should the advertiser be wrongly charged for an ad that nobody consumed?
True, cost is an issue. But also time is an issue. Life is short. You cannot spend three days to walk to the other end of the city to buy flowers for your GF because when you are back the flowers will become straw and the GF will have a new BF. In middle ages most people lived sedentiary lives because going somewhere was a costly and risky affair, and they didn't really have a good reason to go.
Today if you look at who rides buses it's exactly who you said would be - students and poor people. Bus passes are expensive -- very expensive. I used to ride a bus when I worked, back in 1995, but the pass was $100/mo or something like that. Here is what the local bus company says:
VTA's Adult Express Pass, which is equivalent to Eco Pass, costs $1,540 a year per person.
Hey, you can buy a nice junk car for this money and go anywhere you like! Most people in the market for bus trips will need to take a loan to buy such a pass. I'd have to be insane to buy one. I'd rather buy a cheap scooter or an electric bicycle.
Today a single fare on a bus here costs $2 or $4. Since most trips are both ways, you are looking at spending $5 to $10 per day at minimum if you go somewhere on a daily basis. Over the year it will be $1800 to $3600, with nothing to show for it. These monies can buy you a very decent car, and you will keep it - so that the next year you only pay the maintenance (insurance and fuel) and not the capital cost.
For those with no assets even the cost of a car plus insurance may be too much, but a weekly or monthly travel-pass may be an option.
As the numbers above prove, that person should be taking those trips rarely - certainly not every day. Only then he can save money on taking the bus. He still loses time, but people without a job usually have time. People with a job can afford a car.
Just like pretty much every other piece of consumer electronics. How easy is it to upgrade your Blu-Ray player, or replace components in your clock radio?
Simple devices, like a clock radio or a hammer, are not upgradeable. But take a hand saw - it is already upgradeable, and there are many blades to choose from. Same applies to your hand drill, your AR-15, your car, your home... Only very cheap items, or very complete items, are not upgradeable. Consumer electronics rates high on "completeness" - it does what it is supposed to do, and there is nothing to add to make it do more.
By the way, about the "replace components in your clock radio" part - if you are talking about repairs, it's fairly easy if you are the one doing the work. If you want to upgrade the clock radio, it's cheaper to buy a new one. You need the new parts anyway (say, to add FM to an AM-only radio.) If the thing can be upgraded without new parts (DD-WRT) then many people do just that.
Back when I was flying I took my car to the airport and left it at the long term parking lot. $15 per day, paid by the employer, is hardly an expense worth mentioning - but the convenience is very valuable. You may return at random time of the day, and assured availability of a familiar vehicle is nice.
Other people have family members who can drive them to the airport. If that's not the case, take a taxi - it makes sense.
Airports are a special case anyway because this is a one-way trip, and it's a rare destination too (one out of a thousand drivers heads to the airport at any given time, I guess.) What does not make sense is to take a bus across town on a two-way trip. One of my friends wanted to visit a store about 30 miles away, on the other end of the city. He took public transit about 2 hours before the store was supposed to close. He didn't make it! Talk about waste of time. Taxi is OK if you are Bill Gates or the like; but they are enormously expensive for casual use. A car may cost me $2,500 per year in original purchase cost (amortized over 10 years of use and then written off.) But I would pay the same $2,500 to the taxi companies within a couple of weeks, if not sooner. Hell, any working stiff would have to pay $50 twice per day, 5 days a week - that would require only 5 weeks for the personal car to become a better proposition even if he does not go shopping or visiting friends.
It took me two hours to get from one side of Indianapolis to the other, but it would have taken 45 minutes in a taxi, and cost over 10x more ($45 vs. $3.50). There was nobody else on the bus when it got to the airport.
And that's why people buy their own cars in the USA. They can make this trip in 45 minutes, like in a taxi, for a couple of dollars, like in a bus.