...it assumes that all the mechanisms for posting and collecting these bonds are perfectly reliable, perfectly secure, and unhackable.
Right.
If they aren't this just opens fresh avenues for abuse.
For example, you receive an email saying "Your PayPal account will be suspended if you don't reply." You find that in order to reply you will have to post a bond of $0.0001, which is the going rate for such things, so you do so without thinking about it. Later, you discover that due to some cunningly-engineered HTML, the part of your screen that you THOUGHT was telling you that the bond was $0.0001 was somehow faked, and that really you posted a bond of $1000 which the sender has collected.
...Brookstone, Herrington's, etc. will all carry it for about six months and then it will be go to join the Pet Rocks, in the great Johnson Smith & Co. catalog in the sky.
This is just a way of saying "I am so important and so concerned with matters of consequence that I actually need to know all this information on a minute-to-minute basis."
Remember the old Beagle Brothers software ads in Softalk? Their office had a row of clocks showing the time in, IIRC, Sausalito, Bakersfield, and San Jose... all showing the same time, of course.
Privacy invasion OK as long as it's for sales?
on
The Trouble with RFID
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The big question, which, it seems to me, gets deliberately fuzzed in all of these discussions, is this:
Is it acceptable to invade your privacy as long as it is for the purpose of selling you stuff?
Privacy advocates tend to emphasize the danger that systems put in place for the purpose of selling you stuff might later be used for purposes of political repression. This is a real concern, but a relatively remote one. It's a slippery-slope, speculative, "if this goes on" kind of argument. Yes, I know (mostly from reading Slashdot!) that there have already been instances of such usage creep.
Let's suppose--implausible, of course, but suppose--that you could somehow guarantee that RFID tags, and all the information that companies gather on you in all sorts of ways, could be freely exchanged by companies for the purposes of selling you stuff, but could be perfectly secured against any other kind of use whatsoever.
Step 2: Use Canon DV-equipped digital camera to take a picture of faked photo.
Presto! A "verified" copy of a faked photo.
You can also take verified photos of forged documents, verified photos of staged scenes, verified photos that include clocks set to the wrong time, etc.
It seems these days as if virtually every USB device comes with a warning saying you should not plug it into a hub. Everything wants to be plugged directly into the CPU. Too bad if you have more than two of these devices.
WTF???
It is not just a matter of needing a powered hub, either. The Tom's Hardware review notes that it was a powered hub with which the Dell digital jukebox failed to work.
I don't know enough about the USB spec to know who's wrong, but it seems to me that if USB devices don't work on a hub, either
a) the hub is defective, or b) the device is defective, or c) the USB spec itself is defective.
What's the deal? Are hubs supposed to work, or not?
Why do they want to intercept video signals, when they find nothing "interesting" by non-hacker standards?
Pure curiosity and the joy of discovering what information is being propagated through the aether.
It's not that different from the motivation behind, say, birders, or SWL's (shortwave listeners--people that do not have licenses and just listen rather than transmitting).
It's just interesting to see and understand what's there.
The funniest aspect of the article, to me, is that (at least when I visited the page) the New York Times helpfully added a set of three "advertiser links"--for companies that sell chandeliers.
Well, of course--anyone that reads that article is someone interested in chandeliers, right?
(Yes, it would have been even funnier if the links had been for companies selling chandaleers, but I guess I'll take my amusement where I can find it...)
Agreed. I've always been puzzled by the mutation of the IBM PC in PC folklore from "open-as-in-expandable" to "open-as-in-free." The IBM BIOS was always protected by copyright. EARLY articles about the IBM PC make it clear that "open" referred only to the ability to add interface cards. A lot of early personal computers were "open" in that sense. Indeed, the earliest personal computers were selling dreams in the sense that they didn't have much hardware or software and the purchaser was buying a belief that third-party hardware and software would materialize in the future.
IBM did not intend for there to be a clone market. Notice how they changed the bus structure every time their competitors got good at reverse-engineering the PC bus? First, the PC bus, then the AT bus, and then the patented-to-the-hilt Micro Channel.
SI units are legal in the United States and have been for a very long time. The inch was set at precisely 25.4 mm _by definition_ in July 1959.
The additional units, such as inches, miles, quarts, pounds, etc. which I believe are all legally defined by reference to SI units, are officially and properly referred to as "U. S. Customary" units. They have, of course, a strong historical connection to English units.
Unofficially, "Metric" and "English" are the U. S. customary designations for "SI" and "U. S. Customary."
...all it says about adhesive labels is that they shouldn't be applied for disks that are to be kept for more than five years because it might "delaminate" (start to peel off) and interfere with disk drive operation, and because any attempt to remove such a label will likely result in an imbalanced disk.
The recent reports concern CD-R's that are less than five years old, have nothing visibly wrong with them, but cannot be read.
Figuratively, you could even regard it as, I don't know, maybe the death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, and chief nourisher in life's feast.
That's a word I haven't actually heard in used since... um... since... um... Oscar Hammerstein II used it in the lyrics to a song in "South Pacific." ("I'm as trite and as gay as a daisy in May/A cliche comin' true!/I'm bromidic and bright/As a moon-happy night/Pourin' light on the dew!")
True... and quiet computer is not the same as a silent computer! Yes, I really miss the original fanless Mac... and the Apple ][, silent except for the faint swoosh when the diskette drive was spinning, which wasn't very often.
Silent machines seemed to be less demanding; it added to the feeling of "fluidity."
Of course, you had to leave the cover of the Apple ][ open so it wouldn't overheat... and if you'd been able to open the cover of the original Macs, they might have been less prone to overheating, too.
My favorite quotation from the article: "Because the machine now has one drive and 128K of RAM, several sources said users might have to 'swap' diskettes..." Oh, brother. Did we ever.
It's strange that Steve Jobs, generally a fan of new technology, had such a blind spot about internal hard drives. I tend to think it was that, more than anything else, that got the Mac off to a dangerously slow start.
I remember paying, I believe it was $400, for a second, external floppy drive, without which the machine wasn't very usable. Even then, it was (after the novelty wore off) quite annoying listening to those drives play that "MacDirge" (they had a very audible, musically pitched whine that jumped between several pitches as the disk format went to different numbers of sectors per track. I never thought to take it down in musical notation, but the drive played three or four notes of a minor chord).
"The mouse factory," as his studio was known in the forties, like the rest of Hollywood, was in the business of making money out of dreams. It is possible to acknowledge real affection for the enterprise and its products. But at the same time, we should recall details such as the ugly labor disputes that took place at Disney studios during the forties.
Hand-drawn animation was all but shut down once before, as I recall. In the fifties, Walt Disney shifted the emphasis to live-action movies (and mixtures, as in "Mary Poppins.") Animation wasn't abandoned altogether, but the stuff between 1955 ("Lady and the Tramp") and 1981 ("The Fox and the Hound") was cheaply done and not top-drawer. You didn't have those luscious Chris-van-Allsburg-quality backgrounds, the animation was jumpy and more like Saturday morning cartoons than the classic Disney animation oeuvre.
I believe the survival of animation at Disney depended in part on the new technology of xerography--pencil drawings were photocopied onto cels instead of having to be laboriously inked.
Walt Disney himself didn't have any special affection for animation. It happened to be the business gimmick that worked for him and got him on the road to success. When he was asked late in life what he was proudest of, he answered that it was what he had built--the buildings, the companies, the infrastructure, the businesses.
And, when it came to animation and movie production, he was always a bit of a gadget freak. Or technology enthusiast. He would be just as pleased with Pixar's technology now as he was with the multiplane camera that pushed the envelope in the, let me think, late thirties? For Pinocchio? Used in that amazing over-the-rooftops opening sequence.
What gripes me and frightens me about technical means of enforcing legal requirements is that they are ALWAYS wrong. They always overreach in the direction of whatever large interest asked to have them put in. As the article makes clear, "Adobe is actually exceeding the requirements of U.S. law, which allows color reproductions of U.S. bank notes so long as the reproductions are smaller than 75 percent or larger than 150 percent of actual size."
There are probably other rights, as well. If, for satirical purposes, I want to produce an altered image of $20 bill with a portrait of George Bush or Bart Simpson or my grandmother on it, I believe that is legal. As long as the final product isn't a counterfeit, the fact that there may be intermediate images in RAM that would be counterfeits if printed shouldn't matter.
Similarly, DRM systems don't check to see whether what you want to do is fair use, whether the supposedly copyrighted material is actually in the public domain, etc.
No, these systems are always quick, dirty, and one-sided. And it's always "prior restraint." The software stops you from exercising what may well be your legal rights without due process, without imposing any burden of proof on the entity on whose behalf it is acting, without any appeal (other than returning the software for a refund)...
There is no way to accurately map the complexity of the legal system, which is designed for processing by human brains, into a software specification, for a program to be executed by a computer. All attempts to do so are injurious to the rights of one party or the other. Oddly enough, the injured party always seems to be the consumer.
I see a pattern that looks like a human figure dancing, perhaps juggling a beach ball on his or her left arm, in the lower portion of the image of the Sloan Great Wall?
How long before people start gaming the system?
on
IBM vs. Content Chaos
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
As Google has discovered, it's only possible for simple heuristics and algorithms to "understand" the human content on the Web for as long as it doesn't matter.
As soon as people become aware that Google or WebFountain or whatever is trying to evaluate web content, immediately they will begin trying to reverse-engineer and subvert the algorithms and heuristics that are used.
And the stakes are much higher for gaming WebFountain than for gaming Google.
For example, I'd imagine there would be big money for anyone who could convince companies that they know how to make it appear that a particular movie/song/toy/computer was "hot," so that the WebFountain-using Walmarts and Best Buys of the world would stock more of it.
WebFountain will work well only until it is actually introduced.
NorthernLight was (it still exists, but apparently is not available to the nonpaying public at all) a search engine that displayed its results automatically sorted into as many as fifteen or twenty categories, automatically generated on the basis of the search. (For some reason, they called these categories "custom search folders.")
Since it's no longer available to the public I can't give a concrete example. I can't test it to see whether a search on "Pink" creates a couple of folders labelled "Singer" and "Color," for example. But that's exactly the sort of thing it does/did.
I actually would have used NorthernLight as one of my routine search engines--it worked quite well--had it not been for another major annoyance: in the publicly available version, it always searched both publicly available Web pages and a number of fee-based private databases, so whatever you searched for, the majority of the results were in the fee-based databases and I would have had to pay money to see what they were. In other words, it was heavy-handed promotion of their paid services and had only limited utility to those who did not wish to by them).
After reading the Shirky article, and Scott McCloud's rebuttal, in which he rakes Shirky over the coals for criticizing Bitpass based on its state that the time when Shirky looked at it, I took another look at Bitpass, and also at Peppercoin.
My fellow Slashdotters, this is rubbish. There's not a single thing there that I want to buy, not for a quarter, not for a penny, not for a mill, not for a peppercorn.
Nobody forced Bitpass and Peppercoin to put up "Grand Opening" signs and hire brass bands to promote a giant warehouse store with nothing in it to buy but two magazines and three candybars at the checkout line. It makes them look really stupid. If they didn't want people to see them before they were ready, they could have waited to crank up the publicity machine until they were ready.
There's nothing to argue about here (unless you're personally invested in the systems). Bitpass and Peppercoin can prove me wrong any time they want. McCloud implies that Bitpass is the next eBay (by saying that eBay wouldn't have looked any more impressive when it was the same age Bitpass is). Fine, maybe I'll have accounts with both of them in a year. In which case I'll be glad to say I was mistaken.
But as of today, it sure smells like dot-bomb smoke to me.
PayPal made sense practically from day one. I joined PayPal because there was a guy that had a self-published book I wanted to buy--a very good book about the history of Apple--and his website offered me the choice of mailing him a check or signing up for PayPal and using a credit card. Nobody had to talk me into it. I didn't have to engage in theoretical arguments about whether PayPal was a viable system. There was something I wanted to buy. I wanted the convenience of buying by credit card from someone who didn't have a merchant account. I glanced a leery eye at PayPal's terms and conditions, shrugged, and signed up. PayPal has been continuously useful to me every since.
Peppercoin and Bitpass are a joke. Spare me articles about them until there is something worthwhile I can buy with them.
Slashdot Mirror
...it assumes that all the mechanisms for posting and collecting these bonds are perfectly reliable, perfectly secure, and unhackable.
Right.
If they aren't this just opens fresh avenues for abuse.
For example, you receive an email saying "Your PayPal account will be suspended if you don't reply." You find that in order to reply you will have to post a bond of $0.0001, which is the going rate for such things, so you do so without thinking about it. Later, you discover that due to some cunningly-engineered HTML, the part of your screen that you THOUGHT was telling you that the bond was $0.0001 was somehow faked, and that really you posted a bond of $1000 which the sender has collected.
Or whatever.
...Brookstone, Herrington's, etc. will all carry it for about six months and then it will be go to join the Pet Rocks, in the great Johnson Smith & Co. catalog in the sky.
This is just a way of saying "I am so important and so concerned with matters of consequence that I actually need to know all this information on a minute-to-minute basis."
Remember the old Beagle Brothers software ads in Softalk? Their office had a row of clocks showing the time in, IIRC, Sausalito, Bakersfield, and San Jose... all showing the same time, of course.
The big question, which, it seems to me, gets deliberately fuzzed in all of these discussions, is this:
Is it acceptable to invade your privacy as long as it is for the purpose of selling you stuff?
Privacy advocates tend to emphasize the danger that systems put in place for the purpose of selling you stuff might later be used for purposes of political repression. This is a real concern, but a relatively remote one. It's a slippery-slope, speculative, "if this goes on" kind of argument. Yes, I know (mostly from reading Slashdot!) that there have already been instances of such usage creep.
Let's suppose--implausible, of course, but suppose--that you could somehow guarantee that RFID tags, and all the information that companies gather on you in all sorts of ways, could be freely exchanged by companies for the purposes of selling you stuff, but could be perfectly secured against any other kind of use whatsoever.
Would that be all right, or not?
--Carl Sandburg, "Washington
Monument by Night," from Slabs of the Sunburnt West
Scholarly publications do not view any encyclopedia as a valid source of accurate information.
Traditional print encyclopedias do not cite their sources adequately, and are not peer-reviewed.
(That would make a good slogan...)
Step 2: Use Canon DV-equipped digital camera to take a picture of faked photo.
Presto! A "verified" copy of a faked photo.
You can also take verified photos of forged documents, verified photos of staged scenes, verified photos that include clocks set to the wrong time, etc.
It seems these days as if virtually every USB device comes with a warning saying you should not plug it into a hub. Everything wants to be plugged directly into the CPU. Too bad if you have more than two of these devices.
WTF???
It is not just a matter of needing a powered hub, either. The Tom's Hardware review notes that it was a powered hub with which the Dell digital jukebox failed to work.
I don't know enough about the USB spec to know who's wrong, but it seems to me that if USB devices don't work on a hub, either
a) the hub is defective, or
b) the device is defective, or
c) the USB spec itself is defective.
What's the deal? Are hubs supposed to work, or not?
Why do they want to intercept video signals, when they find nothing "interesting" by non-hacker standards?
Pure curiosity and the joy of discovering what information is being propagated through the aether.
It's not that different from the motivation behind, say, birders, or SWL's (shortwave listeners--people that do not have licenses and just listen rather than transmitting).
It's just interesting to see and understand what's there.
The funniest aspect of the article, to me, is that (at least when I visited the page) the New York Times helpfully added a set of three "advertiser links"--for companies that sell chandeliers.
Well, of course--anyone that reads that article is someone interested in chandeliers, right?
(Yes, it would have been even funnier if the links had been for companies selling chandaleers, but I guess I'll take my amusement where I can find it...)
Agreed. I've always been puzzled by the mutation of the IBM PC in PC folklore from "open-as-in-expandable" to "open-as-in-free." The IBM BIOS was always protected by copyright. EARLY articles about the IBM PC make it clear that "open" referred only to the ability to add interface cards. A lot of early personal computers were "open" in that sense. Indeed, the earliest personal computers were selling dreams in the sense that they didn't have much hardware or software and the purchaser was buying a belief that third-party hardware and software would materialize in the future.
IBM did not intend for there to be a clone market. Notice how they changed the bus structure every time their competitors got good at reverse-engineering the PC bus? First, the PC bus, then the AT bus, and then the patented-to-the-hilt Micro Channel.
(And the right term for "metric" is "SI").
SI units are legal in the United States and have been for a very long time. The inch was set at precisely 25.4 mm _by definition_ in July 1959.
The additional units, such as inches, miles, quarts, pounds, etc. which I believe are all legally defined by reference to SI units, are officially and properly referred to as "U. S. Customary" units. They have, of course, a strong historical connection to English units.
Unofficially, "Metric" and "English" are the U. S. customary designations for "SI" and "U. S. Customary."
...all it says about adhesive labels is that they shouldn't be applied for disks that are to be kept for more than five years because it might "delaminate" (start to peel off) and interfere with disk drive operation, and because any attempt to remove such a label will likely result in an imbalanced disk.
The recent reports concern CD-R's that are less than five years old, have nothing visibly wrong with them, but cannot be read.
Figuratively, you could even regard it as, I don't know, maybe the death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, and chief nourisher in life's feast.
... they said... 69... heh-heh-heh-heh.
Is it a problem that people used movable type to read Richardson's "Pamela" rather than the Bible?
Is it a problem that people went to the movies to watch Rudolph Valentino kiss Theda Bara instead of "Greed?"
Is it a problem that people used radio to listen to Amos 'n Andy rather than to the speeches of great statesmen?
Is it a problem that people used advances in color printing technology to subscribe to "Playboy" rather than "American Heritage?"
Is it a problem that people used vinyl LP's to listen to Elvis Presley albums instead of "Die Meistersinger von Nurnburg?"
Is it a problem that people used cable TV to watch MTV instead of C-SPAN?
Because, if these are problems... boy, have we got problems.
Wow! It pays to increase your word power!
That's a word I haven't actually heard in used since... um... since... um... Oscar Hammerstein II used it in the lyrics to a song in "South Pacific." ("I'm as trite and as gay as a daisy in May/A cliche comin' true!/I'm bromidic and bright/As a moon-happy night/Pourin' light on the dew!")
Which makes about as much sense as the article.
Bromo-Seltzer, anyone?
True... and quiet computer is not the same as a silent computer! Yes, I really miss the original fanless Mac... and the Apple ][, silent except for the faint swoosh when the diskette drive was spinning, which wasn't very often.
Silent machines seemed to be less demanding; it added to the feeling of "fluidity."
Of course, you had to leave the cover of the Apple ][ open so it wouldn't overheat... and if you'd been able to open the cover of the original Macs, they might have been less prone to overheating, too.
My favorite quotation from the article: "Because the machine now has one drive and 128K of RAM, several sources said users might have to 'swap' diskettes..." Oh, brother. Did we ever.
It's strange that Steve Jobs, generally a fan of new technology, had such a blind spot about internal hard drives. I tend to think it was that, more than anything else, that got the Mac off to a dangerously slow start.
I remember paying, I believe it was $400, for a second, external floppy drive, without which the machine wasn't very usable. Even then, it was (after the novelty wore off) quite annoying listening to those drives play that "MacDirge" (they had a very audible, musically pitched whine that jumped between several pitches as the disk format went to different numbers of sectors per track. I never thought to take it down in musical notation, but the drive played three or four notes of a minor chord).
"The mouse factory," as his studio was known in the forties, like the rest of Hollywood, was in the business of making money out of dreams. It is possible to acknowledge real affection for the enterprise and its products. But at the same time, we should recall details such as the ugly labor disputes that took place at Disney studios during the forties.
Hand-drawn animation was all but shut down once before, as I recall. In the fifties, Walt Disney shifted the emphasis to live-action movies (and mixtures, as in "Mary Poppins.") Animation wasn't abandoned altogether, but the stuff between 1955 ("Lady and the Tramp") and 1981 ("The Fox and the Hound") was cheaply done and not top-drawer. You didn't have those luscious Chris-van-Allsburg-quality backgrounds, the animation was jumpy and more like Saturday morning cartoons than the classic Disney animation oeuvre.
I believe the survival of animation at Disney depended in part on the new technology of xerography--pencil drawings were photocopied onto cels instead of having to be laboriously inked.
Walt Disney himself didn't have any special affection for animation. It happened to be the business gimmick that worked for him and got him on the road to success. When he was asked late in life what he was proudest of, he answered that it was what he had built--the buildings, the companies, the infrastructure, the businesses.
And, when it came to animation and movie production, he was always a bit of a gadget freak. Or technology enthusiast. He would be just as pleased with Pixar's technology now as he was with the multiplane camera that pushed the envelope in the, let me think, late thirties? For Pinocchio? Used in that amazing over-the-rooftops opening sequence.
What gripes me and frightens me about technical means of enforcing legal requirements is that they are ALWAYS wrong. They always overreach in the direction of whatever large interest asked to have them put in. As the article makes clear, "Adobe is actually exceeding the requirements of U.S. law, which allows color reproductions of U.S. bank notes so long as the reproductions are smaller than 75 percent or larger than 150 percent of actual size."
There are probably other rights, as well. If, for satirical purposes, I want to produce an altered image of $20 bill with a portrait of George Bush or Bart Simpson or my grandmother on it, I believe that is legal. As long as the final product isn't a counterfeit, the fact that there may be intermediate images in RAM that would be counterfeits if printed shouldn't matter.
Similarly, DRM systems don't check to see whether what you want to do is fair use, whether the supposedly copyrighted material is actually in the public domain, etc.
No, these systems are always quick, dirty, and one-sided. And it's always "prior restraint." The software stops you from exercising what may well be your legal rights without due process, without imposing any burden of proof on the entity on whose behalf it is acting, without any appeal (other than returning the software for a refund)...
There is no way to accurately map the complexity of the legal system, which is designed for processing by human brains, into a software specification, for a program to be executed by a computer. All attempts to do so are injurious to the rights of one party or the other. Oddly enough, the injured party always seems to be the consumer.
I see a pattern that looks like a human figure dancing, perhaps juggling a beach ball on his or her left arm, in the lower portion of the image of the Sloan Great Wall?
As Google has discovered, it's only possible for simple heuristics and algorithms to "understand" the human content on the Web for as long as it doesn't matter.
As soon as people become aware that Google or WebFountain or whatever is trying to evaluate web content, immediately they will begin trying to reverse-engineer and subvert the algorithms and heuristics that are used.
And the stakes are much higher for gaming WebFountain than for gaming Google.
For example, I'd imagine there would be big money for anyone who could convince companies that they know how to make it appear that a particular movie/song/toy/computer was "hot," so that the WebFountain-using Walmarts and Best Buys of the world would stock more of it.
WebFountain will work well only until it is actually introduced.
This sounds very similar to NorthernLight.
NorthernLight was (it still exists, but apparently is not available to the nonpaying public at all) a search engine that displayed its results automatically sorted into as many as fifteen or twenty categories, automatically generated on the basis of the search. (For some reason, they called these categories "custom search folders.")
Since it's no longer available to the public I can't give a concrete example. I can't test it to see whether a search on "Pink" creates a couple of folders labelled "Singer" and "Color," for example. But that's exactly the sort of thing it does/did.
I actually would have used NorthernLight as one of my routine search engines--it worked quite well--had it not been for another major annoyance: in the publicly available version, it always searched both publicly available Web pages and a number of fee-based private databases, so whatever you searched for, the majority of the results were in the fee-based databases and I would have had to pay money to see what they were. In other words, it was heavy-handed promotion of their paid services and had only limited utility to those who did not wish to by them).
After reading the Shirky article, and Scott McCloud's rebuttal, in which he rakes Shirky over the coals for criticizing Bitpass based on its state that the time when Shirky looked at it, I took another look at Bitpass, and also at Peppercoin.
My fellow Slashdotters, this is rubbish. There's not a single thing there that I want to buy, not for a quarter, not for a penny, not for a mill, not for a peppercorn.
Nobody forced Bitpass and Peppercoin to put up "Grand Opening" signs and hire brass bands to promote a giant warehouse store with nothing in it to buy but two magazines and three candybars at the checkout line. It makes them look really stupid. If they didn't want people to see them before they were ready, they could have waited to crank up the publicity machine until they were ready.
There's nothing to argue about here (unless you're personally invested in the systems). Bitpass and Peppercoin can prove me wrong any time they want. McCloud implies that Bitpass is the next eBay (by saying that eBay wouldn't have looked any more impressive when it was the same age Bitpass is). Fine, maybe I'll have accounts with both of them in a year. In which case I'll be glad to say I was mistaken.
But as of today, it sure smells like dot-bomb smoke to me.
PayPal made sense practically from day one. I joined PayPal because there was a guy that had a self-published book I wanted to buy--a very good book about the history of Apple--and his website offered me the choice of mailing him a check or signing up for PayPal and using a credit card. Nobody had to talk me into it. I didn't have to engage in theoretical arguments about whether PayPal was a viable system. There was something I wanted to buy. I wanted the convenience of buying by credit card from someone who didn't have a merchant account. I glanced a leery eye at PayPal's terms and conditions, shrugged, and signed up. PayPal has been continuously useful to me every since.
Peppercoin and Bitpass are a joke. Spare me articles about them until there is something worthwhile I can buy with them.
Move along, folks, there's nothing to buy here.