Yes, it's sadly common. Ask anyone who owns a strip club or an adult bookstore or a pawn shop, or even a bar in some places. The government doesn't usually make them illegal outright*; instead, they make them regulated. Then they draft regulations stating that those businesses can only operate in a certain zone of town. Oh, and you need a license, but it's going to run you half a million dollars, and they'll only grant one license every 10 years, or one license per 250,000 citizens (in a town of 30,000), or some other hurdle that's insurmountable enough so as to make your business effectively illegal.

Your second point reminds me of the marijuana tax stamps that are still law in 20 or so states. You incriminate yourself just by asking to buy the stamp in the first place.

*Because then the mayor couldn't accept an enormous campaign contribution in exchange for issuing a special license now and then.

They'd better start blocking gov.co.uk (PDF warning). That PDF file contains a hyperlink to proxybay.info.

This isn't about money, this isn't about closing down one specific named program. It's about raising awareness, for one, and about fighting for our rights in general. I'm behind that.

What I wish they'd do is make the situation more sorely obvious. They have the eyeballs and the screen real estate, and they used it once, back when the 2nd (I think) SOPA attempt was coming around. For all the times I've seen those slide-in banners talking about "Buy one programmer a cup of coffee," I wonder about the impact if those banners instead said "Your government is watching you read this article right now!"

I'm a middle-aged guy and I wind up on Wikipedia at least once a day, I know the younger generation is probably hitting it more frequently doing research for papers and assignments. Put it right in their face. That big yellow donation banner, but with substituted text for visitors from the US,

"Your government watches everything you do on the internet. Even your religious and church communications! Even your private Snapchats! This is unconstitutional. Complain loudly to your representatives today."

::shrug:: That's what I'd do.

GOTO is well-known as a beneficial logical statement. I suppose in this day and age, we're going to need something like this:

10 PRINT "GIRLS KAN CODE 2"
20 GOTO 10

I'll look into that.

I have a hard time taking seriously any website that loads a 2MB image into a 108x118 author avatar. The topic becomes irrelevant when I see the journalist's picture slowly coming in like a GIF from the 2400bps days.

I can parse that complaint, and I agree with it. I bought my car for $foo and we worked it out to a monthly payment. I always made that payment via check until I received the title. I'm one of the holdout types who still likes to write checks and put them in an envelope with a stamp, there's some personal empowerment there where I remain the final arbiter over the distribution of my money.

But once a contract was in place, and I was driving the car, I could have shown up with cash, or mailed them such which is an enormous risk. GMAC/Ally would have been obligated to accept that payment. In cash bills. Nothing says that GMAC/Ally is required to accept Bitcoins or Dogecoins or any other made-up "money." But my hundreds, twenties, tens, fives, and even down to $1 bills, my government may do a lot of things wrong but they will guarantee that those pieces of paper will be accepted for any debt.

Is it the government's business what I'm doing with 100 $100 bills? Fuck no. I should make it very clear that I don't approve of reporting requirements. And the idea of civil forfeiture is entirely ridiculous.

I'm not arguing against BTC. I don't own any, don't want any, the whole concept seems messed up. If you have BTC and can cash them out for money, do that! Just don't come around after your BTC "investment" disappears and say you've been screwed.

McLaren Special Operations? ;) Kidding of course, but any business is well within their rights not to sell you something for cash. Note the word "debt" printed on US currency. If you walk into a dealership and offer to buy a car with stacks of $100 bills, you have no debt to them, so they're under no legal obligation to accept your offer. I'm not so thrilled that large cash transactions must be reported to the government, but that strays off topic.

Have you tried to purchase a car using BTC? If there are dealers somewhere accepting it, that's pretty cool. There are also dealers somewhere who will take cash. So I don't see the difference except for the fact that the BTC price will probably go up and down during the course of a given day, where the cash price will probably remain stable for a week or more at a time.

The coins I have don't say anything about being good for all debts, public, private, or otherwise. Do you have US coins that do carry such a guarantee?

If you find the topic interesting, there was a very thorough and interesting feature in Popular Science last year, Radio Tecnico: How the Zetas Cartel Took Over Mexico with Walkie-Talkies.

What's holding you back? GMail stopped requiring an invite years ago!

I assume the government has already served any ISP worth mentioning with a secret FISA warrant that says "give us everything."

Except you should goof the math and actually pay them $0.008.

Taboola is an advertising and user-tracking company whose CEO says the company looks for "unorthodox solutions to monetize and engage consumers."

"Prior to founding Taboola, [CEO] Adam [Singolda] developed his analytical skills while serving as an officer in an elite mathematical unit of the Israeli National Security Agency. Adam is an honored alum of the [IDF's] elite Mamram computer science training program, graduated first in his class at the Officers Academy of the IDF." Right from the source.

In other words, block that shit at the edge of your network.

I think it's more likely they were afraid that Bing would continue to have the upper hand. Or the lower hand. Or maybe the hand stroking both up and down...