you're assuming he *has* to convert to dollars. It should be obvious that he could simply keep the bitcoin. Takes 2 minutes or less to start up an online wallet, which would be perfectly acceptable for a 1 bitcoin balance.

I'm pretty sure it's the same guy just arguing with himself.

you're right... unless his landlord takes bitcoins.

hell, even cheapo Avaya telephone systems use this as a licensing scheme, and it works well enough (until it doesn't, anyway)

what you're describing (the port listening part) *is* a firewall - just locally installed and managed. The traditional idea of "a firewall" is exactly that, but in a centrally managed package that makes changes somewhat easier to manage and MUCH easier to scale. No difference functionally, really, except for the "listening for specific secured encrypted messages" part, which is an application-level thing anyway. Furthermore, if planned carefully, the "secured encrypted messages" part can be offloaded to a layer 6/7 switch as well, so even that's not always a restriction.

So really you just want application hardening (a good idea in most cases) and a firewall to filter the port, but you want to do that N number of times for however many hosts you have doing the same job (speaking about more complexity!) instead of centralizing it once or twice to redundant switches, etc.

...for a very specific (but entirely unpopular) definition of the word "everyone", I suppose you might be right

just don't try this in Italy.

Vacuum tubes! You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down to the mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt in front of a window so our brothers and sisters would have something to watch.

That's 12,857,426 double-density 3.5" floppies, or 73,336 years' worth of free AOL

They rely on outside organizations to purchase the results of their efforts. What you're citing as a counterexample is simply a loosely formed variation of a corporation.

so far, there have been no implementations of the Communist ideology *without* suppression of free people to the extreme of mass murdering the dissenters.

so then I can expect the same out of my Surface Pro 1 after I upgrade to 8.1? Cool, now I don't have to buy a Pro 2 and ebay this one.

As a native Arizonan now living in Texas for the past 8 years, I still am not accustomed to the time changes, and am quite annoyed at the completely unnecessary practice.

Actually, it was originally "seasonal time", but the British now call it "Summer Time" and the Americans (along with Australians, most Russians, Canadians, Israelis, etc.) call it something equivalent to "Daylight Saving Time". The French call it "Advanced Time".

http://rsnz.natlib.govt.nz/volume/rsnz_31/rsnz_31_00_008570.html
http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/

Team Amerophobia loses the point.

Except for that pesky fact that "no, that won't happen."

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139735.msg1494135#msg1494135