Or skip NASA and go with someone cheaper.

Sorry, no. Prices have come down a lot since I last checked.

-- http://www.interorbital.com/in...

Nooo..Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter on the school's PDP11 which they sold to Altair, which gave us the famous "computer club piracy" speech. Now one could argue whether or not the computer time was "stealing" but they got their BASIC commands from the same place everybody else did, Knuth and his books of the early 70s.

go home Sean Young, you're drunk

Tools -> Internet Options -> Programs Tab -> Make default

Tools <next page>
Internet Options <next page>
Programs Tab <next page>
Make default <next page>

Well how is a documented protocol for communication different from a backdoor?

On a house, how is the back door different than the front door, other than being on the back side of the house?

No. The hardware never met expectations and it never really got to the kids. Most were confiscated by the local dictators and sold off.

Not just that. I thought the buy-1-give-1 program was awesome and my daughter was four at the time, so I thought it would be perfect. Christmas came and went and I never got a box in the mail. The office was clearly a mess.

I month or two later, I gave up after getting nowhere with those people, bought her a pink eeePC and all was well with the world. Especially ASUS's profit, since they dared to earn it.

I've heard Sugar is the reason many of the kids learned to hack their first machine. That's a feature, not a bug.

Facebook is only able to buy them because they can raise insane amounts of money selling shares (or buy partly with shares), and guess who is buying those shares...

And on the flip side you can now go to jail for a drawing of Lisa Simpson in an S&M outfit and thanks to their not being any way to make money many who would need a liver and kidney who aren't rich (and can bribe their way to the top like Steve jobs did) will die.

the problem is laws and common sense almost never go together and laws WILL be abused, look at the kids doing time for taking pics of their own bodies and sexting them to their SO. Do I trust BTC? Not really but frankly I trust the governments of the world to make just laws even less.

ha ha very good!

I'm cool with that.

That was my immediate thought. Any decent system needs to ensure that it isn't running at a loss. To make that happen, they need an accounting system in place.

Rather than a loss, they managed a significant profit. The profit didn't go to the company.

I've seen lots of affiliate systems (sign up for a sight, the referring webmaster gets x%). In the adult industry, it's called shaving. The referring webmaster has a percentage of their sales (I've seen up to 25%), where it isn't recorded that they got the sale. Instead, it is credited to another account. The owner of the system doesn't always know. They see sales come in. They see payments go out. The shaved sales go to one of the developer's accounts (usually to a difficult to trace 3rd party).

If I were the developer, I'd have a friend in another country set up his affiliate account. The "lost" sales get paid out to him. He keeps a percentage, and pays me the rest. It can be very difficult to trace until there is a code audit. The audits don't usually come until the boss knows there's something funny going on. As long as the boss is getting a large profit, they have no reason to audit.

In the rest of the corporate world, it's skimming. Accountants can make it look like the missing funds are going to nondescript costs.

In both skimming and shaving, it becomes obvious when the person doing it gets too greedy. Like, it's difficult to justify that $1M/yr goes to miscellaneous custodian costs. And yes, I've seen exactly that, in a company that only made about $3M/yr profit. Sometimes it goes to consumable costs. It can be tricky to track if they're smart. When they get greedy, smart falls out of the equation.

You need to read up more on economics. Maybe swing by a local college and audit some economics courses.

No, most (all?) of the current in use today is backed by nothing. Well, nothing more than the idea that it's worth something.

I have a $20 bill in my pocket. It's not worth anything. There is a perceived value of it, so I can exchange that piece of paper for goods and services.

If it were backed by anything, there would be an obligation by the issuing party to exchange it for the commodity it was backed by. You can't go to the federal reserve and say "I want to exchange my $20 note for $20 worth of gold". Best case, you'd get a smile, pat on the head, and be sent on your way.

We effectively work with a bartering system. The perceived value of one service or object, for another. You can barter drugs, ammunition, or sex. That doesn't make any of them a currency, even though they'd each be good examples in your description. Actually, I think I like my examples better than the ugly paper in my pocket.

You may want to familiarize yourself with the concept of rubber hose cryptography.

Granted, the United States Federal Government won't literally beat you with a hose, but they will take away your freedom until you comply with the lawful orders of the courts. The Government will go over your finances with a fine toothed comb, accounting for any and all assets you currently or previously owned, including bitcoin. If you obtained any of those assets via fraud you're going to be on the hook for repayment, plus criminal and civil penalties on top of the fraudulent earnings.

Want to play the "I lost them" card? You can try, but you're still going to be on the hook for the full amount Uncle Sam thinks you owe your victims, plus the aforementioned penalties, and you're not wiping any of that away with a bankruptcy. It will follow you until the day you die.

Bitcoin doesn't spend at the prison commissary, nor am I aware of any reputable criminal defense attorneys that accept payment in bitcoin.