I didn't say they were looking at signatures (and really, how many cashiers are trained in handwriting analysis to tell the difference between my variable scribbling and a forgery). Visa (and MC and Amex) disallow either a customers willingness to produce an ID or anything about the ID itself as a legitimate factor in refusing to accept someones card.

Absolutely correct. In fact, merchants should not (cannot, in practice) ask for your drivers license to compare to your credit card. Visa's rules don't allow them to base a decision off of that. Once they touch a drivers license, they have now colored any future decision to reject the card as a payment type.

See the top of page 34: http://usa.visa.com/download/m...

It doesn't even have to move! Menacing trees are cause for murder and mayhem! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

If they really want to make sure he stays in forever, they'll try him on this too. Only finding him guilty of the DPR charges means that they're the only thing keeping him in - an appeal might fix that. If he is found guilty of the murder-for-hire charge as well, his chances of successfully appealing them both and getting out are likely poor.

It's not just sick or die. There is a whole range of horrible lifelong consequences - blindness, deafness, impaired motor function, damaged kidneys, brain damage, heart damage, etc.

https://ellislab.com/ - There is plenty of flexibility here, which also means a requirement to do a fair bit of work by hand.

http://pagekit.com/ - The company behind this (Yootheme) has a good track record.

I haven't looked in-depth, but I'm guessing that the companies that are accepting bitcoin payments are behaving more like a foreign currency exchange transaction. The thing being purchased is priced only in the local currency, and they will happily take something else in payment for a small fee for what it will cost them to convert that payment into local currency. All of the chocolate that I bought in Germany at the airport with dollars, for example.

You beat me to the punch. Agreed.

I don't think this is the most likely answer. Most likely is that the big companies have an instant exchange set up where a purchase made in bitcoins is immediately converted to dollars, and they charge their customers a small transaction fee in the form of an exchange rate difference.

There's not a single thing in what you've written that requires you to vote from home, instead of at a polling place with election observers.

I will also tell you that from 3 decades of watching this stuff I believe that you've put yourself at the mercy of the propaganda people. They are the ones who retain, manipulate, and present the information that you are election-night-cramming on. Off the top of my head I can think of a dozen examples of candidate-selection-altering events that, when I go back later to see what history has had to say, are entirely missed, glossed over, or are otherwise mischaracterized.

In summation (not to the parent at this point) - get yourself to a town hall meeting or two sometime, and get off your lazy butt and walk to the post office or a polling place.

Where's the money to be made in that? Furthermore, how can I pump some hype up about bitcoins with pedestrian paper?

But this isn't about "no votes". Low turnout needs to be addressed while repeating the mantra "correlation is not causation". Until the true root cause(s) is/are understood, just doing something isn't a good approach (and will likely be a "something" that slimeball politicians will use to abuse voters futher).

This is interesting to me. Have you ever looked at the Swiss system of voting?

You're going to do your vote research AT THE TIME OF VOTING? Are you nuts? Politicians lie pretty much ... constantly. Are you really going to trust the single site presented to you by whoever runs the voting system as an unbiased source of information?

Your argument that "it simply takes too much time to do the research" reads to me as an admission of being uninformed. Your statements preceding that set off every alarm in my system for propaganda abuse.

Do your own research. If you care about an issue watch your local, state, and national politicians over time and keep track of what they DO, not just what they SAY.

The counter-argument goes that if the voter can pull out their generated ID tag to verify their vote after the fact, a standard-issue "thug" (representing any malicious party) can also use that ID to verify that the votes went to their preferred candidates. So it's not really anonymous at all.