if you bought it digitally, typically ncsoft bans credit cards that have had charge backs in the past so that works out as well..
Funny thing, about that - It works upstream just as well. Visa (et al) doesn't look kindly on merchants with "unusually" high chargeback rates. If 5% of their customers get pissed and reverse the charges, Arena can kiss its ability to accept CCs (and, effectively, its ability to do business in the modern world) goodbye forever.
Because the players payed for access in US fucking dollars? Hey, Arena screwed up. TFB, y'know?
Should they allow their game to be ruined by the actions of stupid players.
Yes. And the the actions of their own stupid devs? all the more so! Next time, don't outsource to Bangalore, and perhaps your team will understand what you tell them; lesson learned (probably not, but hey, we can hope).
Oh really? They're still there and they're calling the shots.
Tell that to all the people with terabytes of MP3s, ebooks, movies, video game ROMs...
It's Google that has to filter search results to comply to media monopolies' wishes, not the other way round
Only because Google wants to play with their ball, hoping to make a buck skirting the edges of what "they" will allow. TPB, for comparison, has relatively little money, and no commercial motive, and has managed to remain a thorn in Big Media's side for over a decade - Even to the point of winning multiple seats in the parliaments of several countries (including a respectable forty-five seats in Germany).
If we want them gone, action must be taken before Internet becomes InterMarketNet(TM).
Agreed - But for a different reason than currently under discussion. You can already get anything you want over the internet, if you know where to look; For most of it, you don't even need to resort to hitting the "dark" net.
That said, we do still need to remain vigilant, to keep the internet a network of our peers rather than just an extension of the old-school push-on-their-terms advertising-as-content delivery system.
Loserboy nerd, learn your French
...I can't decide whether to consider it sublimely funny, or just moronic, that someone with the handle "JockTroll" would go around calling people names.:)
Anyway, yep, good catch on the feminine. Now you might want to learn how sometimes, people use words in ways contrary to their literal meaning, either figurative or even ironically; case in point, the expression I quoted. Taken literally, as you perversely chose to do, it means "more of the same". Taken figuratively, it means a paradigm shift, a changing of the guard. And taken ironically, it means throwing away the old ways as the new norm.
Two of those make sense, in context. One does not. You chose... Poorly.
Huh, I don't think I've ever heard that used in a non-ironic sense (or if not quite "ironic", more in the context of replacing an authority figure with an alternate form of "king", eg rule by the people).
we may be free of them perhaps for a moment until new ones come along with Fresh new ideas about how to squeeze the vise to extract more money from people.
I have no doubt that someone, somewhere, will always try (with some degree of success) subjugate as many people as possible, whether by withholding basic necessities or with some form of memetic poison such as religion or simply at the wrong end of a gun. I do, however, firmly believe that ubiquitous "replicator" technology will count as a total and irreversible game-changer. All the old power structures based on physical scarcity will collapse in short order.
Going further, once we reach a certain critical threshold of the complexity possible via replicators, even energy will become something of a moot point - When you can "print" solar cells for a few bucks per square foot (which we can already do, albeit low efficiency and durability cells), issues like insolation, efficiency, and space become moot; pave your driveway with them, use them as shingles and siding.
That really just leaves ideology and violence as viable tools of oppression. The former requires you to buy in to the BS; the latter, I suppose we'll never completely eliminate (but I'll take a world where I can print my own guns over one where only "they" have them).
Let it pass. Let them all get their wildest wet dreams encoded in the laws of the world.
And then... Let them sue each other into oblivion, a la Apple v. Samsung.
And then... Let them realize that We The People really don't give a fuck about their rules. Digital media killed the old media monopolies (they just haven't fallen over yet); A few more generations of RapReps will kill what remains. The robber barons finally lost; Le Roi est morte, vive le Roi!
That's blatantly not true. If you're trying to make money in the arts and you're caught plagiarizing you can very easily see your entire career finished.
...Which explains why a good third of pop music sets lyrics and new instruments to "Canon in D"?
Sorry, but if you made a truly "original" artistic works, it would sound/look like complete crap and you would die in obscurity. People want slight variations on familiar themes.
In this case nobody would ever go into court and say that as the plaintiff would still be entitled to court costs for taking it to court. And perhaps they're not so nice and decide to ask for statutory damages.
Meh. IANAL, and responded to the premise of the GP, whether it holds true or not.
The fact that it's a CC work would only get you out of the damages of misusing it [...] The damage to your reputation from losing the suit and the money you'd have to pay defending yourself would be more than enough to keep most folks honest.
Damage to your reputation? What world do you live in? No one outside academia cares about anything but the monetary damages. In which case...
Well...
Sure! Insofar as I'd call you an idiot for bothering to defend yourself against a no-penalty infringement suit. "Yup, we did it, your honor. Deliberately. And at treble damages, that comes out to... Zero dollars! Can we just write you a check now for the next 365 days, since we plan to keep using this for the foreseeable future?"
People claiming that they can make "a sound every 2.5 seconds" don't get it. It's is not the same as a single continuous waveform oscillating at 0.189 Hz.
Not quite true. No, you can't just make a click every few seconds and call it "sound" at the corresponding frequency.
You can, however, simply breathe at that frequency, which follows a not-too-shabby sine wave.
For comparison, one of the "loudest" subwoofers made (though damned if I can find a link to it ATM) uses a fan with blades that pivot in phase with the sound... Effectively "breathing" in and out based on whether it has a positive or negative pitch to the blades at any given point in time.
So evidently many of you folks believe this is reason enough to pirate the content.
Um... Yes? Let us have it, for a decent price, and in a format we want... Or we'll just take it and the "content barons" can go pound sand. Simple as that.
If a patent isn't available for licensing by its owner, and thus not "available for purchase anywhere," is that also reason enough to pirate the patent?
Absolutely! I don't give the least damn about your "profit motive" when you want to let kids die because you won't license that great new antimalarial drug to companies willing to make it cheap enough for the 4th world to afford. I also don't care about rounded corners or XOR, but, different battles.
What about violating GPL, since it isn't "available for purchase anywhere," either?
Nice try, but now cross out the "purchase" part of that. Again - I don't care about whether or not some dead-from-the-hair-down exec can make a buck on it. I care about available, full-stop.
Not in sports, it doesn't. In any athletic endeavors, your raw physical ability continually decreases as you age (past a peak at 20-25). In some sports, your skill at it increases enough to compensate for that loss well into your 30s, but if you had had the same skill a decade earlier, you'd have set world records.
Especially if those geeks and survivalists are into buying black tar heroin!
I'll take that in the spirit of a joke, but if you don't realize it, you really can buy all sorts of things directly with BTC.
I've personally spend almost a grand (USD equivalent) in direct BTC transactions over the past year, and haven't bought a single illegal item. You can buy food, guns (despite all the media frenzy around guns, private otherwise-legal firearms sales don't break any federal laws, regardless of what currency you use - Though your state may have more offensive limits to your 2nd amendment rights), precious metals, register domains, web design services, contract coding, an assortment of hosted solutions, "fremium" in-game perks, "human"-powered search engines... And you can buy almost any physical-product used via a variety of CraigsList/eBay-like sites...
Check out the Trade section of the Bitcoin FAQ - And that list completely excludes illegal products.
My gut feeling on someone claiming to have done $100,000 in cash transactions is that they are lying.
You could more accurately say that they use barter combined with something like cash-backed net-90 terms - No, people don't actually fork over wads of $100s on a weekly basis. They keep a running tab with their major suppliers and customers (which often overlap to a large degree), and settle up every few months.
You can't anonymously use it. FTA, however, "Each card will bear a QR code on the front and a printed BitCoin address on the back, allowing instant transfers to and from the account."
Let's take a pie-in-the-sky view of BitCoin adoption. You can buy anything with it, perhaps even a major retailer like Amazon or Walmart starts taking it. Perhaps you run such a store yourself, and take BTC.
Come April, you suddenly have a problem - You have a tax burden based on your income (and yes, non-dollar-denominated transactions count), but very little in dollar-denominated assets with which to pay.
Presently, all the means by which you can convert BTC to USD only work for relatively small amounts, a few hundred here and there. Even a small-scale retail operation will realistically have a tax bill in the tens of thousands, at which scale direct currency conversions send red flags up throughout the system.
Well, guess what? The IRS takes plastic!
More generally speaking, Amazon and Walmart won't take BitCoin any time soon. The BTC economy has gotten reasonably large to the point that you can buy an awfully lot of things that appeal to geeks and survivalists directly, but at some point, if you interact with the rest of the world you need a way to use the local currency. And even though you can do it cheaper through the likes of Gox->Dwolla, you probably don't want to wait up to 10 days for it to clear through to your bank account (with no fewer than five manual steps required to complete the transaction).
You realize, of course, that the US "cash" economy dwarfs the "real" economy?
Do you remember why soooo many people had trouble putting in claims for damages after the BP spill? Because people pulling in six figures had no way to prove their income (ie, they bought and sold everything cash, then rolled 300d100 to decide what to report to the government in April). I have no sympathy for that situation, but use it only to provide some context.
People have no problem with anonymous currency. Banks and governments do, but currently, people hate banks, and don't feel much warm-and-fuzzier about governments.
You are doing all this cloak-and-dagger, then you expect to log into your credit card account online to check the balance?
No. The point of the credit card (and half the point of the bank in the first place) lets you know if "they" have frozen your assets. The government can (and does) do that; the Mafia, not so much.
That said, for a small amount of money, you have a good point about using your credit cards. I don't know about all cards, but mine have a much lower cash limit (total, not per transaction) than my overall credit line - Like 1k, IIRC.
Most of you failed to read the FP, and even if you did, seem to have skipped the obvious first step.
* You have someone following you. You haven't yet manage to elude your potential captors.
* You don't know that your pursuers have government ties, just suspect it.
* You don't know that "they" actually know your identity yet - Even the MiBs don't really know everything instantly.
* You have almost no money on you (or if 1% counts as "enough", you have enough money to get a damned good lawyer).
You can test two of these and potentially fix one with one simple move - Go into the nearest branch of your local bank and take out a modest, odd-sized sum of cash well under $10k... Perhaps $3450 (no need to go crazy with precision, virtually all legit debts in the four-digit range will round to the dollar, and often enough to the 50s - And keep in mind that 35 bills will cause a very sizable bulge in your pocket). If the bank gives it to you, then "they" either don't know your identity, or don't belong to the government (note that the latter doesn't make you any safer - Plenty of NGOs pose as much, if not more, of a threat to you than the government-proper). If the bank tries to make you stick around for more than two minutes, time to vanish into the woods, penniless or not (and if "they" can get to the bank and nab you in under two minutes, sorry dude, you had no shot from the moment you saw A Strange Event, so might as well get it over with).
So, assuming you have a decent wad of cash (if you have either died at this point or know you can look forward to a life of hermitage in a mud hut in the Great North Woods, not much more advice matters, so turn to page 99, "the end")... Task #0a: Leave a message with your lawyer describing your situation and asking him to look into it, and say that you'll contact him in a week for an update. Task #0b: Leave a goodbye message (you can do that directly with most cell phones, without actually ringing the line) for anyone you care about - This will both protect them and make you less likely to do something stupid like try to go home three months from now. Take this chance to wipe your phone (not that they can't recover it, but might as well make it a bit of a challenge)
Task #1, lose your tail. Easier said than done, but we've all seen plenty of trick in movies you could try. Personally, I'd favor large crowds with lots of cover, ie, a shopping mall (outdoor market, all the better, but we don't have a whole lot of those in the US). Wander around for a while, always heading for the largest crowd you can see, and try to leave by an unusual route. At some point early in this step, "accidentally" leave your phone in a conspicuous place, preferably with lots of teens around. Someone will kindly pocket it for you and provide a new non-you moving target.
So you've lost your tail. Task #2, get the hell out of Dodge. "They" will watch most forms of public transit, so a series of hailed cabs or hitchhiking will give you the best chances. If you can get to a bus depot in an outlying suburb, you have a chance. Go to a different state.
On your first stop, buy an activate a pair of Tracphones. Mail one to your lawyer, and one to your wife (or mother). Now Pretend you still have a tail and repeat steps 1 & 2. Do it again. Bonus points for finding alternate means of transportation than buses and taxis (commuter trains don't ID you, long-haul ones sometimes do, airports always do).
So... Now you consider yourself more-or-less safe to stop and think for a while. Get a good night's rest, get a complete makeover (hair/beard style and modest color change), get some new clothes. Get another Tracphone, activate it, but don't call anyone yet.
Have your next bus ticket ready, and take a taxi/T to the opposite side of the city. Call your lawyer's shiny new Tracphone and see if he has anything useful to tell you. Don't automatically believe
By the sound of it you're the kind of customer companies are glad not to have.
Quite the opposite, actually... I base my patronage on researching what the various available options have to offer me, I select what I want with no ad-inspired misconceptions about what I'll really get, I pay on time and in full, and unless the product/service breaks beyond my own ability to troubleshoot it (fairly rare), they'll never even hear from me for the duration of our business. If you have something good to sell, I will find you, and then vanish into the wallpaper as a zero-maintenance customer.
If, however, you have over-hyped crap to sell and think an animated mascot will make me ignore the fact that your product doesn't meet its own specs... Then yeah, you really don't want me as a customer.
By the way, all the ISPs and phone companies run advertisements, you better cancel all of your accounts.
As I already pointed out to another response to my original post, life often requires us to pick the "least bad" option from an entire field of suck; the fact that I strongly disliking advertising doesn't mean I sit inside a dark cabin in the woods writing manifestos and grumbling about all the things I could have if not for Madison Ave.
Truth is there are likely many things you buy that you have seen ads to.
Of course I do - Since just about everything commercially available in the modern world uses some form of advertising, I'd just sound obstinate to insist that I never buy anything that I may once or twice have seen in an Ad. The real key difference here, "may once or twice" - Not intrusive enough that they got my attention.
Simple example, people really do drink Coke. If a movie has people drinking Coke, hey, no problem. Compare that to the almost-a-running-joke classic CSI "SUV model of the season", where at least 30 seconds per episode, if you had just flipped channels, you wouldn't recognize as part of the show rather than an ad.
Speaking of car ads, though - Obviously, in some situations, I have no choice but to choose the lesser evil, since they all manage to annoy me. I view it as a pretty sad state of the entire marketing industry, though, when for all their clever ideas to get my attention, they actually compete for "least annoying". And yeah, lookin' at you, Mit and Barry - You guys keep swapping places for "most lost my vote" on a daily basis.
then ads have a large affect on the emotional parts of your brain. As such, your perception of them is likely to be very subjective.
First of all, I meant that largely as hyperbole. Yes, some ads really do infuriate me (drug ads and "reputation.com" as the top recent examples, and perhaps you can see the connection there), but 99% of them, yeah, they just mildly annoy me as a waste of time and/or screen space.
You do have it wrong, though, on me giving a "pass" to ads for things I use (on that basis alone). I have, and no doubt will in the future, intentionally stopped using products because of an exceptionally annoying new marketing campaign.
how would you feel if your ad blocking software reported to sites that it was in place (via user-agent or whatever) and then sites had the ability to selectively allow or disallow you access?
Many large commercially-owned sites already use anti-adblocking tech, letting them decide whether or not to boot me as a visitor; Most choose to simply nag visitors with a "please don't block us, bro" at the top of every page, demonstrating that while they like revenue, they recognize that they need an audience (or in the case of sites like Slashdot, posters) more.
Speaking of Slashdot, it actually makes for a pretty bad example in my original post here - It counts as something of a rarity, in that it allows regular, high-karma contributors to the site to disable ads - For which I applaud them (even if the content has gotten a bit fluffier over the years). Slashdot "gets" it, that we provide the content, they just need to (make enough to) keep the lights on.
Every site needs to walk the line between paying the bills and having a reason to pay the bills. I simply prefer the (non-ad-based) "sponsorship" model to using psychological warfare against your audience. And yes, before anyone asks, I do support several noncommercial sites through contributions (or buying of overpriced swag). I don't support anyone's "shareholders", however.
Worse than that - Advertising motivates me to make a point of never buying it. Ads absolutely infuriate me, the less obtrusive ones, less so.
If you find a magic formula to get my attention with an ad, congratulations, you have just lost me as a customer forever.
I block ads because they waste my, and the sites, bandwidth. I have zero chance of ever clicking an ad, or buying a product based on "impressions".
Don't like it? Go bankrupt. Because realistically, those describe your two choices - Accept that some fraction of people will block your ads no matter what, or stop producing content and let someone else fill your niche.
And in case you wonder - Nope, I don't feel "bad" about this. If Slashdot vanished tomorrow, another "news for nerds" site would take its place overnight.
wtf do you think you'd use it for? paying at mcdonalds? no, the primary purpose is for you to be able to sell bitcoins and draw the cash as cash out of the wall.
Why the hell would anyone want to do that, when you can already convert BTC to cash through a number of online mechanisms (as one of the simplest, gox->dwolla costs $0.25 per transfer)?
I love the idea, and fully support (yes, even use, when possible) BitCoins, but sorry, this sounds DOA - And not for reasons having anything to do with the "BitCoin" aspect of it.
You call a system 'fully functional' if you can only use it for a month or so at a stretch without doing a complete reinstall?
You, my friend, need to learn a new command: "slmgr/rearm" trivially extends that to 4 months.
You can also use slmgr to extend that infinitely, though it takes a few more steps - I won't detail it here (search Google for "rearm C7483456" and you'll find about a hundred step-by-step guides), but suffice it to say you basically just move three files out from under windows, and reactivate it with the default license key. Cake.
Or, for those scared of the command-line, you can find a number of scripts (such as IR5) online that automate the process, no actual "cracks" required.
Slashdot Mirror
PS how do you know the players PAID not PAYED fuckwit
How do I know? Well, because I have a grasp of the English language that you apparently lack?
You might want to invest in a dictionary... Or just, y'know, Google it, perhaps?
"Paid" functions as an adjective, "payed" as a verb.
Fuckwit.
if you bought it digitally, typically ncsoft bans credit cards that have had charge backs in the past so that works out as well..
Funny thing, about that - It works upstream just as well. Visa (et al) doesn't look kindly on merchants with "unusually" high chargeback rates. If 5% of their customers get pissed and reverse the charges, Arena can kiss its ability to accept CCs (and, effectively, its ability to do business in the modern world) goodbye forever.
Why not? It's their server.
Because the players payed for access in US fucking dollars? Hey, Arena screwed up. TFB, y'know?
Should they allow their game to be ruined by the actions of stupid players.
Yes. And the the actions of their own stupid devs? all the more so! Next time, don't outsource to Bangalore, and perhaps your team will understand what you tell them; lesson learned (probably not, but hey, we can hope).
the latter currently has a real-money value of $10/800.
No, it most certainly does not. It has an in-game value of 800/$10. Night and day, and if you don't see why, I have some LindenBucks to sell you.
Oh really? They're still there and they're calling the shots.
...I can't decide whether to consider it sublimely funny, or just moronic, that someone with the handle "JockTroll" would go around calling people names. :)
Tell that to all the people with terabytes of MP3s, ebooks, movies, video game ROMs...
It's Google that has to filter search results to comply to media monopolies' wishes, not the other way round
Only because Google wants to play with their ball, hoping to make a buck skirting the edges of what "they" will allow. TPB, for comparison, has relatively little money, and no commercial motive, and has managed to remain a thorn in Big Media's side for over a decade - Even to the point of winning multiple seats in the parliaments of several countries (including a respectable forty-five seats in Germany).
If we want them gone, action must be taken before Internet becomes InterMarketNet(TM).
Agreed - But for a different reason than currently under discussion. You can already get anything you want over the internet, if you know where to look; For most of it, you don't even need to resort to hitting the "dark" net.
That said, we do still need to remain vigilant, to keep the internet a network of our peers rather than just an extension of the old-school push-on-their-terms advertising-as-content delivery system.
Loserboy nerd, learn your French
Anyway, yep, good catch on the feminine. Now you might want to learn how sometimes, people use words in ways contrary to their literal meaning, either figurative or even ironically; case in point, the expression I quoted. Taken literally, as you perversely chose to do, it means "more of the same". Taken figuratively, it means a paradigm shift, a changing of the guard. And taken ironically, it means throwing away the old ways as the new norm.
Two of those make sense, in context. One does not. You chose... Poorly.
Perhaps you were being ironic.
Huh, I don't think I've ever heard that used in a non-ironic sense (or if not quite "ironic", more in the context of replacing an authority figure with an alternate form of "king", eg rule by the people).
we may be free of them perhaps for a moment until new ones come along with Fresh new ideas about how to squeeze the vise to extract more money from people.
I have no doubt that someone, somewhere, will always try (with some degree of success) subjugate as many people as possible, whether by withholding basic necessities or with some form of memetic poison such as religion or simply at the wrong end of a gun. I do, however, firmly believe that ubiquitous "replicator" technology will count as a total and irreversible game-changer. All the old power structures based on physical scarcity will collapse in short order.
Going further, once we reach a certain critical threshold of the complexity possible via replicators, even energy will become something of a moot point - When you can "print" solar cells for a few bucks per square foot (which we can already do, albeit low efficiency and durability cells), issues like insolation, efficiency, and space become moot; pave your driveway with them, use them as shingles and siding.
That really just leaves ideology and violence as viable tools of oppression. The former requires you to buy in to the BS; the latter, I suppose we'll never completely eliminate (but I'll take a world where I can print my own guns over one where only "they" have them).
Let it pass. Let them all get their wildest wet dreams encoded in the laws of the world.
And then... Let them sue each other into oblivion, a la Apple v. Samsung.
And then... Let them realize that We The People really don't give a fuck about their rules. Digital media killed the old media monopolies (they just haven't fallen over yet); A few more generations of RapReps will kill what remains. The robber barons finally lost; Le Roi est morte, vive le Roi!
That's blatantly not true. If you're trying to make money in the arts and you're caught plagiarizing you can very easily see your entire career finished.
...Which explains why a good third of pop music sets lyrics and new instruments to "Canon in D"?
Sorry, but if you made a truly "original" artistic works, it would sound/look like complete crap and you would die in obscurity. People want slight variations on familiar themes.
In this case nobody would ever go into court and say that as the plaintiff would still be entitled to court costs for taking it to court. And perhaps they're not so nice and decide to ask for statutory damages.
Meh. IANAL, and responded to the premise of the GP, whether it holds true or not.
The fact that it's a CC work would only get you out of the damages of misusing it [...] The damage to your reputation from losing the suit and the money you'd have to pay defending yourself would be more than enough to keep most folks honest.
Damage to your reputation? What world do you live in? No one outside academia cares about anything but the monetary damages. In which case...
Well...
Sure! Insofar as I'd call you an idiot for bothering to defend yourself against a no-penalty infringement suit. "Yup, we did it, your honor. Deliberately. And at treble damages, that comes out to... Zero dollars! Can we just write you a check now for the next 365 days, since we plan to keep using this for the foreseeable future?"
"Read a book!"
People claiming that they can make "a sound every 2.5 seconds" don't get it. It's is not the same as a single continuous waveform oscillating at 0.189 Hz.
Not quite true. No, you can't just make a click every few seconds and call it "sound" at the corresponding frequency.
You can, however, simply breathe at that frequency, which follows a not-too-shabby sine wave.
For comparison, one of the "loudest" subwoofers made (though damned if I can find a link to it ATM) uses a fan with blades that pivot in phase with the sound... Effectively "breathing" in and out based on whether it has a positive or negative pitch to the blades at any given point in time.
So evidently many of you folks believe this is reason enough to pirate the content.
Um... Yes? Let us have it, for a decent price, and in a format we want... Or we'll just take it and the "content barons" can go pound sand. Simple as that.
If a patent isn't available for licensing by its owner, and thus not "available for purchase anywhere," is that also reason enough to pirate the patent?
Absolutely! I don't give the least damn about your "profit motive" when you want to let kids die because you won't license that great new antimalarial drug to companies willing to make it cheap enough for the 4th world to afford. I also don't care about rounded corners or XOR, but, different battles.
What about violating GPL, since it isn't "available for purchase anywhere," either?
Nice try, but now cross out the "purchase" part of that. Again - I don't care about whether or not some dead-from-the-hair-down exec can make a buck on it. I care about available, full-stop.
Younger means fuck-all.
Not in sports, it doesn't. In any athletic endeavors, your raw physical ability continually decreases as you age (past a peak at 20-25). In some sports, your skill at it increases enough to compensate for that loss well into your 30s, but if you had had the same skill a decade earlier, you'd have set world records.
Especially if those geeks and survivalists are into buying black tar heroin!
I'll take that in the spirit of a joke, but if you don't realize it, you really can buy all sorts of things directly with BTC.
I've personally spend almost a grand (USD equivalent) in direct BTC transactions over the past year, and haven't bought a single illegal item. You can buy food, guns (despite all the media frenzy around guns, private otherwise-legal firearms sales don't break any federal laws, regardless of what currency you use - Though your state may have more offensive limits to your 2nd amendment rights), precious metals, register domains, web design services, contract coding, an assortment of hosted solutions, "fremium" in-game perks, "human"-powered search engines... And you can buy almost any physical-product used via a variety of CraigsList/eBay-like sites...
Check out the Trade section of the Bitcoin FAQ - And that list completely excludes illegal products.
My gut feeling on someone claiming to have done $100,000 in cash transactions is that they are lying.
You could more accurately say that they use barter combined with something like cash-backed net-90 terms - No, people don't actually fork over wads of $100s on a weekly basis. They keep a running tab with their major suppliers and customers (which often overlap to a large degree), and settle up every few months.
And the advantage using it is what then?
You can't anonymously use it. FTA, however, "Each card will bear a QR code on the front and a printed BitCoin address on the back, allowing instant transfers to and from the account."
Let's take a pie-in-the-sky view of BitCoin adoption. You can buy anything with it, perhaps even a major retailer like Amazon or Walmart starts taking it. Perhaps you run such a store yourself, and take BTC.
Come April, you suddenly have a problem - You have a tax burden based on your income (and yes, non-dollar-denominated transactions count), but very little in dollar-denominated assets with which to pay.
Presently, all the means by which you can convert BTC to USD only work for relatively small amounts, a few hundred here and there. Even a small-scale retail operation will realistically have a tax bill in the tens of thousands, at which scale direct currency conversions send red flags up throughout the system.
Well, guess what? The IRS takes plastic!
More generally speaking, Amazon and Walmart won't take BitCoin any time soon. The BTC economy has gotten reasonably large to the point that you can buy an awfully lot of things that appeal to geeks and survivalists directly, but at some point, if you interact with the rest of the world you need a way to use the local currency. And even though you can do it cheaper through the likes of Gox->Dwolla, you probably don't want to wait up to 10 days for it to clear through to your bank account (with no fewer than five manual steps required to complete the transaction).
bitcoin will never be accepted if it's anonymous.
You realize, of course, that the US "cash" economy dwarfs the "real" economy?
Do you remember why soooo many people had trouble putting in claims for damages after the BP spill? Because people pulling in six figures had no way to prove their income (ie, they bought and sold everything cash, then rolled 300d100 to decide what to report to the government in April). I have no sympathy for that situation, but use it only to provide some context.
People have no problem with anonymous currency. Banks and governments do, but currently, people hate banks, and don't feel much warm-and-fuzzier about governments.
You are doing all this cloak-and-dagger, then you expect to log into your credit card account online to check the balance?
No. The point of the credit card (and half the point of the bank in the first place) lets you know if "they" have frozen your assets. The government can (and does) do that; the Mafia, not so much.
That said, for a small amount of money, you have a good point about using your credit cards. I don't know about all cards, but mine have a much lower cash limit (total, not per transaction) than my overall credit line - Like 1k, IIRC.
Most of you failed to read the FP, and even if you did, seem to have skipped the obvious first step.
* You have someone following you. You haven't yet manage to elude your potential captors.
* You don't know that your pursuers have government ties, just suspect it.
* You don't know that "they" actually know your identity yet - Even the MiBs don't really know everything instantly.
* You have almost no money on you (or if 1% counts as "enough", you have enough money to get a damned good lawyer).
You can test two of these and potentially fix one with one simple move - Go into the nearest branch of your local bank and take out a modest, odd-sized sum of cash well under $10k... Perhaps $3450 (no need to go crazy with precision, virtually all legit debts in the four-digit range will round to the dollar, and often enough to the 50s - And keep in mind that 35 bills will cause a very sizable bulge in your pocket). If the bank gives it to you, then "they" either don't know your identity, or don't belong to the government (note that the latter doesn't make you any safer - Plenty of NGOs pose as much, if not more, of a threat to you than the government-proper). If the bank tries to make you stick around for more than two minutes, time to vanish into the woods, penniless or not (and if "they" can get to the bank and nab you in under two minutes, sorry dude, you had no shot from the moment you saw A Strange Event, so might as well get it over with).
So, assuming you have a decent wad of cash (if you have either died at this point or know you can look forward to a life of hermitage in a mud hut in the Great North Woods, not much more advice matters, so turn to page 99, "the end")... Task #0a: Leave a message with your lawyer describing your situation and asking him to look into it, and say that you'll contact him in a week for an update. Task #0b: Leave a goodbye message (you can do that directly with most cell phones, without actually ringing the line) for anyone you care about - This will both protect them and make you less likely to do something stupid like try to go home three months from now. Take this chance to wipe your phone (not that they can't recover it, but might as well make it a bit of a challenge)
Task #1, lose your tail. Easier said than done, but we've all seen plenty of trick in movies you could try. Personally, I'd favor large crowds with lots of cover, ie, a shopping mall (outdoor market, all the better, but we don't have a whole lot of those in the US). Wander around for a while, always heading for the largest crowd you can see, and try to leave by an unusual route. At some point early in this step, "accidentally" leave your phone in a conspicuous place, preferably with lots of teens around. Someone will kindly pocket it for you and provide a new non-you moving target.
So you've lost your tail. Task #2, get the hell out of Dodge. "They" will watch most forms of public transit, so a series of hailed cabs or hitchhiking will give you the best chances. If you can get to a bus depot in an outlying suburb, you have a chance. Go to a different state.
On your first stop, buy an activate a pair of Tracphones. Mail one to your lawyer, and one to your wife (or mother). Now Pretend you still have a tail and repeat steps 1 & 2. Do it again. Bonus points for finding alternate means of transportation than buses and taxis (commuter trains don't ID you, long-haul ones sometimes do, airports always do).
So... Now you consider yourself more-or-less safe to stop and think for a while. Get a good night's rest, get a complete makeover (hair/beard style and modest color change), get some new clothes. Get another Tracphone, activate it, but don't call anyone yet.
Have your next bus ticket ready, and take a taxi/T to the opposite side of the city. Call your lawyer's shiny new Tracphone and see if he has anything useful to tell you. Don't automatically believe
By the sound of it you're the kind of customer companies are glad not to have.
Quite the opposite, actually... I base my patronage on researching what the various available options have to offer me, I select what I want with no ad-inspired misconceptions about what I'll really get, I pay on time and in full, and unless the product/service breaks beyond my own ability to troubleshoot it (fairly rare), they'll never even hear from me for the duration of our business. If you have something good to sell, I will find you, and then vanish into the wallpaper as a zero-maintenance customer.
If, however, you have over-hyped crap to sell and think an animated mascot will make me ignore the fact that your product doesn't meet its own specs... Then yeah, you really don't want me as a customer.
By the way, all the ISPs and phone companies run advertisements, you better cancel all of your accounts.
As I already pointed out to another response to my original post, life often requires us to pick the "least bad" option from an entire field of suck; the fact that I strongly disliking advertising doesn't mean I sit inside a dark cabin in the woods writing manifestos and grumbling about all the things I could have if not for Madison Ave.
Truth is there are likely many things you buy that you have seen ads to.
Of course I do - Since just about everything commercially available in the modern world uses some form of advertising, I'd just sound obstinate to insist that I never buy anything that I may once or twice have seen in an Ad. The real key difference here, "may once or twice" - Not intrusive enough that they got my attention.
Simple example, people really do drink Coke. If a movie has people drinking Coke, hey, no problem. Compare that to the almost-a-running-joke classic CSI "SUV model of the season", where at least 30 seconds per episode, if you had just flipped channels, you wouldn't recognize as part of the show rather than an ad.
Speaking of car ads, though - Obviously, in some situations, I have no choice but to choose the lesser evil, since they all manage to annoy me. I view it as a pretty sad state of the entire marketing industry, though, when for all their clever ideas to get my attention, they actually compete for "least annoying". And yeah, lookin' at you, Mit and Barry - You guys keep swapping places for "most lost my vote" on a daily basis.
then ads have a large affect on the emotional parts of your brain. As such, your perception of them is likely to be very subjective.
First of all, I meant that largely as hyperbole. Yes, some ads really do infuriate me (drug ads and "reputation.com" as the top recent examples, and perhaps you can see the connection there), but 99% of them, yeah, they just mildly annoy me as a waste of time and/or screen space.
You do have it wrong, though, on me giving a "pass" to ads for things I use (on that basis alone). I have, and no doubt will in the future, intentionally stopped using products because of an exceptionally annoying new marketing campaign.
how would you feel if your ad blocking software reported to sites that it was in place (via user-agent or whatever) and then sites had the ability to selectively allow or disallow you access?
Many large commercially-owned sites already use anti-adblocking tech, letting them decide whether or not to boot me as a visitor; Most choose to simply nag visitors with a "please don't block us, bro" at the top of every page, demonstrating that while they like revenue, they recognize that they need an audience (or in the case of sites like Slashdot, posters) more.
Speaking of Slashdot, it actually makes for a pretty bad example in my original post here - It counts as something of a rarity, in that it allows regular, high-karma contributors to the site to disable ads - For which I applaud them (even if the content has gotten a bit fluffier over the years). Slashdot "gets" it, that we provide the content, they just need to (make enough to) keep the lights on.
Every site needs to walk the line between paying the bills and having a reason to pay the bills. I simply prefer the (non-ad-based) "sponsorship" model to using psychological warfare against your audience. And yes, before anyone asks, I do support several noncommercial sites through contributions (or buying of overpriced swag). I don't support anyone's "shareholders", however.
Advertising != forcing you to buy it.
Worse than that - Advertising motivates me to make a point of never buying it. Ads absolutely infuriate me, the less obtrusive ones, less so.
If you find a magic formula to get my attention with an ad, congratulations, you have just lost me as a customer forever.
I block ads because they waste my, and the sites, bandwidth. I have zero chance of ever clicking an ad, or buying a product based on "impressions".
Don't like it? Go bankrupt. Because realistically, those describe your two choices - Accept that some fraction of people will block your ads no matter what, or stop producing content and let someone else fill your niche.
And in case you wonder - Nope, I don't feel "bad" about this. If Slashdot vanished tomorrow, another "news for nerds" site would take its place overnight.
wtf do you think you'd use it for? paying at mcdonalds? no, the primary purpose is for you to be able to sell bitcoins and draw the cash as cash out of the wall.
Why the hell would anyone want to do that, when you can already convert BTC to cash through a number of online mechanisms (as one of the simplest, gox->dwolla costs $0.25 per transfer)?
I love the idea, and fully support (yes, even use, when possible) BitCoins, but sorry, this sounds DOA - And not for reasons having anything to do with the "BitCoin" aspect of it.
You call a system 'fully functional' if you can only use it for a month or so at a stretch without doing a complete reinstall?
/rearm" trivially extends that to 4 months.
You, my friend, need to learn a new command: "slmgr
You can also use slmgr to extend that infinitely, though it takes a few more steps - I won't detail it here (search Google for "rearm C7483456" and you'll find about a hundred step-by-step guides), but suffice it to say you basically just move three files out from under windows, and reactivate it with the default license key. Cake.
Or, for those scared of the command-line, you can find a number of scripts (such as IR5) online that automate the process, no actual "cracks" required.