Speaking of which, Malaysia simply needs to request #NSA for the black box backup.

Actually you can if you have more than one satellite receiving the signal. Radio data arrival time triangulates the signal's origin position.

Whoever modded that Offtopic didn't read it very carefully, or at least should have modded me Offtopic too.

That's just bullshit. Those individuals can make their own expenditures in support of their First Amendment rights which are no less than the First Amendment rights that anyone not associated with a corporation has. If the corporation has rights then they are in addition to the rights their associates have on their own. I haven't always supported the positions of the corporation I'm associated with and it offends me that they can imply that I do through their expenditures.

You seem to think that money is equivalent to free speech but in reality it is merely an amplifier of free speech. Most corporations (especially the large ones) have resources far in excess of of most individuals. That stacks the deck in favor of corporations and wealthy individuals enough and I'm tired of my voice being drowned out by them.

You got bigger problems then. Even actual tanks are disabled/destroyed by those. Heck, an armor penetrating bullet or bullets will do.

I don't think that means what you think it means.

First problem, the gambler's fallacy refers to a mistaken belief that a random process that has locally shifted away from its mean somehow "owes" the universe a return to its mean. After a long losing streak, the gambler erroneously believes he has a better chance of a win.

Second, for the gambler's fallacy to apply, you need an independent random process. Specifically, if the randomness in question has a history to it, the gambler's fallacy doesn't apply as a fallacy - The deck of cards with all the non-face cards played out really does "owe" you a 20 or a blackjack (Hmm, do aces count as face cards? Whatever - You get the point).

In this case, you want something more like confirmation bias or a sunk cost fallacy - Though neither of those quite properly applies to what I described, because I haven't ignored evidence contrary to my opinion (quite the opposite, I've weighed it heavily), and I haven't needed to keep pumping more money into my BTC position to keep it afloat (again, contrary to that, I've steadily syphoned money out and what remains just keeps going up in value).


It's a zero sum game, their gain will be matched by the losses of ordinary punters like you.

You have the first clause right, though you use it as though you don't realize that makes it 2.5% per year better than USD, which systematically loses value over time.

As for the second half of that - If BTC entirely collapsed tomorrow, I've already done better than break even on my original investment. Except, haters like you don't seem to get that my "investment" consists of having fun (and $50 in electricity, but hell, I've paid more for a single concert ticket). I got to play a part in the success of the first viable non-commodity non-government currency. I got to learn OpenCL as a result of tweaking miners to squeeze every possible hash out of my GPU. I got to watch my "just for laughs" investment turn into the price of a new car (if I hadn't slowly spent most of what I had over time) - And no, I don't regret spending it at $4/BTC, at $30/BTC, at $200/BTC, because I got involved for the idea, not because I someday hoped to get rich fleecing morons out of their dollars in exchange for worthless ($0.10 each, when I started) bits in a shared transaction record.

Yeah, hemp doesn't make very good armor.

Created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve.

This. Over the course of a year, Amazon's free (normal) shipping easily saves me a few hundred bucks. Last year, I bought one especially large item that would have cost that in shipping by itself (and perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Amazon's price beat every local brick-and-mortar for that item by very nearly the cost of shipping). Then for some bulkier items, hey, I'd rather have something like a sofa delivered to my doorstep than try to figure out how to squeeze it into a subcompact car. ;)

That said, I don't pay for prime, because seriously, people can't wait a whoooole week to get their stuff (anything I need now, I simply buy locally)?

Now my "disable advertising" checkbox doesn't work. :-(

The only reason people were into this was to either trade in illegal goods and services or be cutting edge with something that only really served to facilitate illegal activity.

Fuck you very much, sir.

I, and the vast majority of Bitcoin users, engage in entirely legitimate commerce with BTC as the medium of exchange. Heck, I even declared my BTC gains on my taxes last year, fer chrissakes.

Now, when I want to score a quarter of weed - You ever actually try to buy anything with BTC, or just mindlessly parroting the FUD about Silk Road? My dealer takes USD only, thanks.

If you hold your own Bitcoins in a local wallet, then yes, a handful of confirmations adequately proves you really do have those coins.

As soon as you entrust them to someone else to store in a pooled account, bam, confirmability lost.

A key philosophy behind the BTC protocol assumes direct person-to-person transactions. If you adhere to that, you don't get screwed by a failed exchange; for that matter, you don't even care about the existence of an exchange... Except insofar as they help define the "worth" of a Bitcoin as a medium of trade. Though, with the likes of Overstock accepting BTC now, the marketplace itself might soon serve that function without needing an external point of reference.