Yes, clearly we must protect obsolete industries at any cost.

I wish I could mod this up! Thanks!

>somebody got away with something so nobody should get prosecuted for something different

GJGE

This is a felony. It's fraud and theft. Good engineers don't get fired for stealing 10% or less of what good engineers in the prime of their careers are making.

He didn't download a movie. He didn't copy that floppy. He appropriated a taxpayer resource to line his pockets.

...because you buy time on modern supercomputers all the time, and can give us the real scoop, right?

Being reclusive doesn't make you a recluse. A recluse withdraws from society; Watterson is just largely withdrawn from participating in the popular media. For someone as famous as he is, who is actively sought by writers and interviewers, that's reclusive behavior.

Google "Earth Class Mail."

These services existed before Outbox and continue to exist now that it's gone. They just don't assume that the USPS wants to facilitate their businesses for free (or at a loss), so you don't see their CEOs being interviewed for hand-wringing articles about how bad the government is.

I have no doubt that the USPS is run by incompetents, but that doesn't mean they're the only incompetents in this story.

Liability insurance would be cheaper than sending you to a community college class about statistics and probability.

Another amazing act of mental acrobatics and insane projection. Where dark corner of your pathetic psyche are you dredging up these things from? What am I distancing myself from? Or am I not distancing myself, I can't keep it straight.

In everything I've written in this thread, I've not made a single value judgment about illegal drugs, you raving lunatic. And by the way, you know a helluva lot less than you think you do. It is an undisputed fact of economics that contraband (guns, drugs, porn, forbidden politics, outlaw jedi) will command a premium proportional to the risk required to deliver it.

Maybe you should smoke a little less crack so that it's not so obvious to everyone what an insufferable idiot you are.

If you deposit on a per-transaction basis, you can only lose as much money as you can lose if all of your transactions fail.

If you leave your money on deposit, or "store" your bitcoins there because you don't know how to drop a wallet into dropbox, you are basically dangling a carrot for somebody to steal (MtGox). I mean, think about PayPal for goodness sakes. After the whole minecraft incident, what sane person would just "let it ride" in a paypal account? PayPal is great for facilitating transactions, but there's no reason to trust them with massive deposits.

TL;DR: you didn't read what I wrote, and responded to something you made up.

With a broker or an exchange, you only have risk associated with the transaction. You put money in, bitcoins come out. You put bitcoins in, money comes out. Or, alternatively, you put bitcoins in, special brownies come out. The risk is all associated with that transaction.

With a deposit, you're basically putting money in and crossing your fingers.

In the above-ground market, there are lots of rules to try and mitigate the risk, which is why the vast majority of us will go our whole lives without losing a deposit in a normal financial institution. When you put your money on deposit with DogeBank, you have none of that mitigation.

This is the dumbest thing I've ever read. You have managed an astronomical level of projection.

I said that grey/black market transactions are risky, but the that the risk is limited to the transaction, while the risk making a deposit to a grey/black market bank is basically 100%. Buying contraband is risky; that's not a value judgement, it's a fact. That's why people make shitloads of money dealing in it.

My NexusS has a plastic bezel and it shattered from a 2-ft drop onto a faux-wood (read: not that hard) surface.

Because our anti-anecdotes would annihilate each other in a flash of light, you're going to have to come up with a better line of reasoning.

These losses illustrate perfectly the stupidity of giving some pseudoanonymous sociopath on the internet your money to "hold" for you. WHY? WHY? WHY?

Nobody would ever think, "Hey! I've got $500 in my pocket, better give it to the first creep that I find in an alley!"

Using a shady, tor-based business to broker a transaction is risky, but it only risks the single transaction (or the consequences for making transactions in contraband). Putting your funds on deposit with a shady, tor-based business (or a Japanese trading card exchange) is dumb in ways that must boggle even the Princes of Nigeria.

Good point! Also, a standard axe might be good for other uses, but less effective at splitting wood.