If you need the  $300 balance to be on a single card Visa gift card, I can accommodate.

If that's what he is looking for, I can certainly do that. Thank you for pointing this out!

Well, for example, if you had a Visa GC, you could use these codes to transfer the balances onto your card. But I guess this isn't what you're looking for.

No, sorry. I intend to do electronic exchange only by providing the visa.gowallet codes so the buyer may do with the funds whatever he wishes (load onto another card, spend online, whatever). You don't need the physical cards for that.

LOL. I mean the kind that have that dollar amount loaded on them. I have one card with $100 loaded, and another card with $200 loaded. These are the typical Visa gift cards issued by Metabank sold at grocery stores everywhere.

I have $300 worth of Prepaid Visa Gift Cards (w/ receipts) that I want to sell for 8.6 BTC OBO.

EDIT: completed this tx via another service

I'm currently waiting on a $300 transaction. Hope all is well on your end...

Yes I did.

It would give them credibility if they could provide solutions to intractable problems or give the factors of RSA-2048, but they've done nothing of the sort and in fact avoid saying it will do anything specific. They make only vague statements about using it for "business solutions" but not a word about what sort of processes it can handle "out of the box" (so to speak) - or even that it will run any processes at all.

Yes, if they weren't so secretive about exactly is inside the shielded black-box and its capabilities - not to mention the claims that it utilizes a much-hyped "future tech" that has fundamental physical limitations in scalability beyond rudimentary proof of concept experiments.  As it stands, it's got all the earmarks of a type of scam that's as old as the hills.

There have always been people who are willing to use coercion in order to force their will upon others. But that's hardly a justification for bestowing an air of legitimacy on one particular set of them and accepting their moral authority. All this does is create a society with an entrenched Stockholm syndrome of continued fealty in exchange for ever-increasing levels of parasitism and domination.

Their website described the *ahem* ... "product"... as follows:
https://lh3.ggpht.com/-Rp-_nYzp51A/TeIvrhL36XI/AAAAAAAAPpc/9p4HVdLFJmc/s1600/d_wave_one_system_geordie_rose.jpg

Gee, a shielded black box that you can't look inside of - but oh, fer sure it's got a real live quantum computer that can be used in place of a regular computer... but no peeking!

It reminds me of the story of the Automaton Chess Player that gained fame in the late 1700's? Read about it - you might find it enlightening. Yes, truly, there's a sucker born every minute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/27/Kempelen_chess1.jpg/250px-Kempelen_chess1.jpg

While I am completely against the idea of anyone (governments or otherwise) having nukes/WMD's, the big difference between the two is the people/organizations they work for and how their power is obtained. The realities of how they are funded can't be ignored - government can undertake insane courses of action and it is the taxpayers who bear the cost. Those in the private sector would have to divert immense amounts of their own accumulated capital - and without the benefit of being permitted to threaten violence with impunity as a way to obtain continued funds from their investors.

All the more reason to have armor-piercing bullets. Besides, you don't think a nut who wants to go on a homicidal rampage doesn't mind being shot in the arms, legs, or head?

"What are the minimum prerequisites for Capitalism to be possible?"

Not interfering with voluntary exchange.

Haha I thought it might be a tall order!

Thanks for the link - I'll check out the white paper.

Bottom line: we're screwed. Nobody wants to be holding the bag when the shit hits the fan, so there will be continual "temporary measures" to postpone it further and further down the road (all the while making the eventual correction that must happen be more and more severe), until finally nothing more will work. It's a like a heroin addict chasing the rush by taking higher and higher doses until he finally OD's.

America: it was fun while it lasted.

I have some questions that have to do with how new blocks are created and how the total number of bitcoins is ultimately limited to 21 million. I vaguely understand that new blocks are created through "solving a cryptographic problem" and that this takes an immense amount of computing power. But what I don't understand is what the cryptographic problem they solve is or how it was made part of the blockchain.

How exactly do the blocks fit together?

What is the information that is analyzed in order to create new blocks and how are they validated to become part of the blockchain? What are blocks checked against to know they are valid?

Could the entire 21 million BTC blockchain technically be solved only from information that was in the very first block or whatever algorithm is used for BTC? Would it be possible (in theory) for all of the information to be known by the creator/Satoshi by having a private key or something that forms the basis for the blockchain?

I draw the line at weapons of mass destruction - nukes, bunker-busters, etc, (you know, all those things that governments create and stockpile by the megaton). Basically any item whose use entails indiscriminately kill large swaths of people within a geographic area ("killing the righteous along with the wicked", as it were) is something that represents an aggressive threat against everyone. It is illegitimate to claim such a device is "defensive" when by it's very nature it ensures immense "collateral damage" for miles and miles.

But the government is nothing more than a big misinformation-based mafia. Take for example the terror attacks that are part and parcel to State Warfare - Dresden, Hiroshima, essentially any bombing campaign that was ever perpetrated. The lies and propaganda run so deep that the people don't even understand the madness inherent in the system.

This is the main reason I so hate the movie "Fail Safe", which has the President offering to nuke New York in order to make up for accidentally nuking Russia. What the movie should have had was the President offering himself and all of his warlord cabinet members up for execution, not murdering more millions (who happen to be unfortunate enough to live in a certain geographic area) in order to prove it was a mistake and he was "sorry". Would the filmmakers have even dared put forth such a statement? Of course not. /rant

The vast majority of "the public" lacks the intelligence to understand the intricacies of the Scientific Method, let alone be able to detect when it is improperly used. To them, "Scientist" is a title that commands respect, deference... and obedience - the New Priesthood.

Evolution is a theory that accounts for facts that anyone can observe - that is, the abundance of life on earth. Humans are here, along with monkeys, birds, snails, insects, trees, mold, bacteria, etc. The religious assertion had always been that "God" just *poofed* all our ancestors into being in some cosmic fart, and that is how we all got here. Evolution, however, provides a simple physical processes for generating the biodiversity we observe - eliminating the impetus to accept a supernatural explanation.

"Anthropogenic global warming", on the other hand, is a different beast altogether. It began as speculation in search of facts, or put another way, a bias in search of confirmation. It doesn't seek to explain a past, but to predict a future. It also has the unfortunate feature of being a warped political justification for increased wealth confiscation - something all States fundamentally seek to gain. And wouldn't you know it; the State is the single biggest provider of grants and funding research (confirmatory only) into the potential goldmine. "The end is nigh... unless you pay up!"

People forget that even Galileo recanted when he saw what the political apparatus had in store for him. Nowadays that lesson is lost while the threats are much more subtle - public ridicule, loss of funding... being "blackballed" for anything less than fully-endorsing a politically-backed consensus. One minute you're in the game; a 'respected scientist' and the next minute you're a joke who will be mocked by the media and shunned from academia. Written off as a kook on par with flat-earthers and republicans.

In other words, the observation and scientific discovery surrounding evolution is orders of magnitude above the statistical shenanigans that support AGW. They are no more alike than dermatology and phrenology.

That's my observation. 

Well, on the one hand I'm glad I use Ubuntu 12.04 (since this "spyware" is introduced on 12.10). But on the other hand I'm not overly bothered that the spying is limited to the "Home Lens" unified search feature (which I don't have let alone use) including recommendations from Amazon.

"As bad as Windows"? Oh HELL NO.