I'm on the fence over whether shopping locally weakens the economy or not.

In general, spending more money for the same value is wealth destroying: money trickles up by nature, through a process I'd rather not outline--it involves specialization of services such that a certain portion of money moving through a business always goes to a very small subset of businesses, the most notable examples being energy (oil) and steel. More spending extracts more money from the consumer base in general, and concentrates it in a smaller consumer base.

Based on these assertions, it's reasonable to assume that shopping locally and buying the same kabocha for $15 would make a community more poor than shipping in kabocha from elsewhere for $5. This is a good example: Kabocha needs to be harvested ripe and stored for 3 months to develop flavor; it's no good right off the vine. That means there's no compromises such as harvesting green bananas and ripening them on truck, versus a local supplier harvesting ripe bananas. So what you get is a bunch of people who spend $15 and get 1 kabocha instead of 3 kabocha, as well as a local farmer or retailer who is either a rich feudal lord or beholden to his lords (oil...).

If it's easier for the local farmer to grow apples, but difficult due to soil and climate to grow kabocha, then the most wealth-generating solution here is for the local farmer to grow apples and export them, and the local community buy some of those apples because they're cheaper than growing apples elsewhere and shipping them in. Elsewhere, where a Kabocha can be grown for $2, a farmer will grow a Kabocha and sell it for $2.50 to a distributor who spends hundreds on bulk shipping that comes down to $1.00 per kabocha, and then puts a mark-up of $1.00 on it and sells it to you for $5. Since it would cost your local farmer $14.50 to grow the same kabocha and you'd pay him $15 for it, you should buy imported Kabocha and get your farmer to grow apples.

Books, electronics, and a lot of other stuff have become more of an import item, ordered online and shipped in. Consequentially, Best Buy, CompUSA, and Circuit City have failed. Your community would be served best by then changing tactic: close down those defunct electronic stores, open up something else. MicroCenter is attacking the problem by coming close to, meeting, or beating most online retailers in electronics prices; if you come close enough, the ability to engage in tactile shopping with no shipping delays is a value-add worth several dollars. Many people will go to Barnes & Noble and find a $35 book they like, then order it for $11 on Amazon; but if the book is $35 and the Amazon book is $33.76 with free 5 day super saver shipping, they'll probably pay the extra $1.24 and buy the book immediately.

I've taken to ordering personal care items from Amazon. Liquid starch, $500 ironing boards (with built-in vacuum--the polymer bonds in organic fibers de-link when you get them hot and wet, and then rotate freely until you get them cool and dry, so vacuum lets you rapidly set sharp creases like at the dry cleaner), laundry detergent, shave soap, and so on. Even a $500 serger, although I get the thread locally, and then I order decent clothing online and tailor it to get that final fit. Some of these things are hard to find locally, or cost $300 more.

They can proclaim whatever the hell they want to; they themselves state, on their website in multiple places, that bitcoin transactions are routed through coinbase or similar.

I know, right? Such frauds... Kinda like how Mom n' Popco claim to take Visa, but in reality the transactions are routed through Network Merchants or Fiscorp or authorize.net. A bunch of lying liars! What does it matter that I can give them a credit card and they send me product, if they didn't personally wave the magic wand of money creation to turn that into USD?

Seriously, lose the hate-on (sorry, this irrational fear of BTC doesn't quite rank all the way up to the level of monkeys flinging poo... more like sheep running away from the rising sun every morning) for Bitcoin. Step back and think about what you believe about Bitcoin, and before posting more garbage, ask yourself: Could you say the same thing about the US financial system?

Ponzi schemes... Like Madoff? More SEC oversight... Like Enron? Useful for money laundering... Like a briefcase of USD$100s? Early adopters have an edge... Like the Rockefellers or Carnegies or Vanderbilts?

I know, you don't really care what I have to say about this, because you lost a few bucks trying to game a sytem you didn't understand, and no one can ever explain that away for you. But really, a great many of us use Bitcoin, for legal purposes, and find it extremely convenient. And like it or not, you can't do a damned thing about that.

Proving once again that "best" does not exist.

This is all a mental masturbatory smoke screen. Disregard the bad analogy they're marketing: You're copying bits and erasing them. There is no borrowing going on regardless of the level of mental gymnastics you've performed.

Fuck Beta!

No one would suspect Kentucky to be home of the NSA pre-exploitation complex... But when you think about the nature of the actions Snowden revealed, the location starts to make a lot more sense.

You're a fucking idiot. I was playing an OpenGL game over X from across the network. It was rendering beautifully and responsive... except the audio was coming from the other room where all the game code was running.

Friends who are not my friends apparently want me to stop finding meaningful results.

DuckDuckDon't.

Fool. We have never had the NSA we deserve. Secret agencies are now and have always been anti-activist. There is nothing we can do about them legally, we are their enemy. They will not bow to the demands of the enemy. I speak of activism because voting is meaningless. If you think otherwise then you're under the flawed assumption that our government's voting system isn't compromised, that or you wrongly believe it hasn't been blatantly rigged all along.

How dare you accuse the powerless of deserving their despotism. It's thinking like yours that allows it to perpetuate.

I'm not smart enough for some of the XKCD strips...

Hell, I'm not smart enough for Garfield.

TL;DR: Even intellectual fools let themselves be divided and conquered. Learn it: Compartmentalization = Evil.

I hope you encrypt everything on those drives, just in case your bag is lost or stolen.

I didn't say I carry the bag around. I keep it locked in a massive safe buried underground.

It's not as convenient, but it sure is secure. Except from flooding, but that's a different story. I can't actually get to the data, but it's there. Secure. But not from floods. I'm going to have to think about sealing it in impenetrable waterproof material, but I can't afford that because the password to my online banking is on one of those SD cards, in the bag, in the safe, 20 feet underground.

You see how complicated my life is.

Why is this lie perpetually getting repeated? Hell, some moron even modded it up. Overstock (and Tigerdirect, etc) do not accept bitcoins as payment.

You might want to tell that to Overstock and Tiger Direct, then, who both proudly proclaim that they do accept BTC as payment.

But no doubt, you know better than they do, so carry on with the Bitcoin hate.

From the user's point of view, the cost is a bit different. It's x cents per month for storage, plus whatever you pay for internet access.

And, of course, the fact that there's no question Uncle Sam will be pawing through your Rule 34 collection.

There a topic that isn't about America? Well can't have that! Spin it to be about America! Redirect all topics to be on America, particularly whining about America!

Seriously, this American-centric bitching is really annoying. People need to knock it off. This is about Russia. That things are happening in America doesn't mean things aren't happening elsewhere. It also doesn't mean those things aren't of interest to the wider world. What is happening in Russia right now is of quite a bit of interest not just to Russians, but to Ukrainians, and to the whole of Europe. Also some people from the US might like to know too because hey, it is nice to be informed about the wider world.

So quit. Quit trying to make every thread about the US. There are lots and lots of those on Slashdot. When something comes up on a foreign country, let it be on that topic. The topic at hand is Russian media/internet censorship not NSA spying. That one is a little further down the front page.