My claim was and still is that using cash eliminates many of the scams - your claim was that scamming was too infrequent to matter. I provided evidence that it was frequent enough that the marketplace warned you against handing over money via bank transfers (other than their own special bank transfer that still had no guarantees). Please read those links I posted - they actually specifically warn against bank transfers.

But the system still works. You haven't provided any evidence that it doesn't. You haven't even provided evidence that the incidence of fraud is higher with direct bank transfers.

I don't need to provide evidence that it doesn't work because I never made the claim that it does not work. I claimed that untrusted transactions are best with payment and possession taking place at the same time, hence cash works best for this. The sites you pointed me to warn specifically about doing bank transfers.

From the trademe site, they warn about this specifically: http://www.trademe.co.nz/trust... So, they themselves think that if you hand over money you could lose it. Let me emphasise that for you: Trademe themselves think that you should use any protection you can when paying money and you should not rely on trust!

So the trust issue is not an insignificant problem, but it is one that is painlessly solved by using cash.

I refer you to the trademe trust and safety blog (yes, it really is called that): http://www.trademe.co.nz/trust...

You're claiming "It works, because there are no scams", and I'm telling you, right now and right here, there are scams in all the classifieds. You're relying on the fact that people are honest; I'm comfortable being skeptical. You're asking me to trust "because it doesn't happen", and I'm saying that over here it's a daily occurrence. I actually don't know how to make it any clearer - if you're buying something off of craigslist, or whichever classifieds, the damn site itself warns you to be skeptical! Even the marketplace itself is telling you that there are scammers out there!

True, but if you're going to mug someone, why post on the classifieds first? You're just as likely to be mugged leaving a bank after all.

In 30cm pieces? Taking 12 hours for enough to do a single room?

Yes, you can save $0.5 USD just by waiting an hour.

No such thing - a variety of elbows, t-pieces and such are available to fit any sort of plumbing the average house has, which leaves us to the only legitimate use ...

And this is the option that requires the owner to be proficient enough to design his own stuff in the first place, which may take (from my experience) anything from 2 hours to twenty hours. If he is downloading a design off of the net, then it's not unique, is it?

I do lots of DIY. Really lots. I've refloored my house with three different types of flooring (wood, carpets and tiles), rebuilt walls, built a pond, welded up 30m of palisade fencing. I've built tiny once-off tools for specialised purposes (especially when repairing newer models of cars). I've reroofed my garage, installed ceilings, rewired entire buildings. I've done the plumbing and cabling for much of my house. I've built cupboards, and constructed various sheet metal projects. I'm okay with electronics as well, having had a career in the embedded world.

And with all that experience of rolling my own, I can tell you one thing for certain - there is no decent ROI in any of the current consumer 3d printers (I've got unlimited access to one at work). You cannot print anything other than cosmetic items due to the lack of strength or rigidity. The pipes you think you will print? Maybe it will work as a straight length - a single bend is going to cause unpredictable rigidity. It will also still have to be milled/finished to fit into the other fittings. Or perhaps you want to print out enclosures for your rasberry pi/arduino projects? Rather than get an ugly plastic case with lines all over it, you can construct one from aluminium sheets in about ten minutes with a jigsaw and a $20 home-made brake.

I doubt it - you can't even print a spanner that will work more than once. Or anything that is supposed to look good.

What are you talking about? What's not a reality?

Once again it comes down to trust - you trust that the marketplace has identified the scammer. What if you're the first person to respond to the ad? Regardless, you're still asking two parties who are unknown to each other to trust each other with no real evidence that the trust is warranted. My point still stands in this reality - transactions need to be completed when there is a lack of trust. Cash works for this. Waiting doesn't (hence the reason bitcoin is still less traded than actual toy money).

You realise you're pointing out examples of doing transactions there are all trust based - even if you had no reason to trust that the seller would not disappear with the money, you still trusted that he would send the goods. If you trust that the seller would send the goods or that the payment would clear, then that is outside the scope of this discussion, which is "how to do EFT transactions with people you don't trust". The answer is not "trust them first, then do the transaction".

I don't trust what the seller says about a car's mileage, I check it out myself (last car I purchased went for and passed a full AA test before I parted with my money). The majority of the worlds population does untrusted transactions in person every day due to the ability of instant payment with cash and instant completion of sale. You're asking all these people that they should just trust other parties more?

So? This is a total non sequitor to what I said above: when you need to do a transaction where both parties have no reason to trust each other the only option is payment and possession at time of sale.

And then you have scams arising where you pay your money and the "seller" vanishes. The only safe way to deal with a potential scam when trading through the classifieds is to hand over payment and take possession of the item at the same time. Not possible if one party has to wait to verify payment.

Because the human is nondeterministic and the computer isn't. A computer, given a certain input, will always respond with a certain output. Humans, dogs, cats and most other animals don't do this. I'm finding it hard to understand why you have trouble with determinism vs non-determinism.

For the input "fruit flies like a banana", the computer must always EITHER ask for clarification OR assume what the sentence means. It cannot do ask for clarification some of the time and not others as a human will do.

No, it can't. In order to ask for clarity it first has to recognise that there is a 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001% chance of ambiguity. This would result in it always asking for clarity. A human is allowed to make mistakes in comprehension because the producer of the sentence might recognise that there was incorrect understanding. Then again, they might not. The computer doesn't have the luxury of taking the chance that there is no ambiguity.

Put differently - the human assumes that the other human will understand him or ask for clarification. Sometimes they are wrong in this assumption but no harm is done. With a computer: if the human takes the chance that the computer understands him OR will ask for clarification and the computer assumes a different meaning then there will be hell to pay. In essence, what you are saying is "given the sentence 'I once saw a deer riding my bicycle' I want the machine to sometimes ask for clarification and sometimes not, but the machine won't be told in advance which time to ask for clarification and which time to assume non-ambiguity." This is clearly impossible.

TLDR: You're asking a deterministic machine to perform non-deterministic actions; mathematically this is impossible, hence it will never be a reality.

I'll repeat myself too: You haven't figured it out, you're only convinced that you have. How can you know that I'm not saying "All fruit have the same trajectory as a banana?".

Your problem is probably lack of interaction with the real world. Go to court some day and watch proceedings of a trial - there is no such thing that a sentence is "obvious". In even the most trivial of defences the defence attorney is going to argue, sometimes successfully, that a much structured and mostly unambiguous piece of legislation is too vague to apply to his client.

No, you haven't.

Well, you thought that I meant "I was out on my bicycle when I saw a deer", but what I actually meant was "I was in my yard when a deer rode past on my bicycle". How the hell can you be sure that I meant the former and not the latter?

Nope, wrong again - worst case scenario is that the language interpreter does not figure it out, and doesn't realise that it hasn't figured it out!. Best case scenario in case of errors is the interpreter managing to figure out that it got the incorrect meaning.

Well, perhaps my emacs is broken then, because it lets me type anywhere and accepts the line as a command upon pressing enter. I can also scroll up and position the cursor on any line in the emacs window and press enter and it will accept that line as a command to execute, even if that line was not a command previously but the output of a command.

I'm afraid you are correct - I simply cannot see anything in that video which I cannot also do using a shell from emacs, and I'm way too lazy to make and post a video of myself doing emacs-as-a-shell. There's a slime video on youtube somewhere that shows the user using emacs exactly as the FA video shows, but with more functionality (and with software from over a decade ago).

It's hard to take a 'reviewer' seriously when they make goofs of such epic proportions, such as these. This blogger is obviously unaware that the IoT devices (along with a lot of the 'smart' devices) aren't going to be able to run ruby crap.

I've used emacs for that (editing 'uneditable' things in the buffer and then re-executing). See my post above - handy link here