to start, a companies ToS means absolutely nothing.  They can write whatever they want in it, but if they violate the government laws, they may have as well written them in the sand on a beach, because they are worthless.  Now BA has decided to business in the U.S., the U.K., as well as a slew of other companies whose laws protect the consumer from unfair business practices such as this.  In the U.S. for example, you are allowed to request a refund even after the product is delivered for some period of time (someone can correct me on the exact length of days here as I am unsure off the top of my head) no questions asked.

Now, if a refund request was submitted prior to shipping, it is on the companies responsibility to oblige the request, and shipping the product blatantly ignores that.  Any judge will easily award the customer the lawsuit and make the seller refund for the product.  He should just make sure he has copies of all emails sent to and from BA, as well as copies of when his shipping notice was received and the tracking info.  Now being in China, that complicates things, and a rejected package will probably have a very hard time getting retribution even though the law is very clear.  This is because it can get messy when going international.  But the fact remains, that he has the right to request a refund at any point, regardless of what any ToS say on BA's.

Also, it can be proven that BA very clearly violated their own ToS many times.  The one I am referring to is when they said they needed to cash out the order money to pay for production.  There are many people who have tracked their bitcoins and they are still sitting in the same address that they were sent to, obviously not cashed out by BA.  Just another instance where the scum of the earth company has lied about what they are doing.

The conversation that was posted about 8 pages back between Dan at MS was my email chain.

I have since refused the shipment and it was sent back to them.

If anyone has requested a refund from Minersource and has not received it, please send me a message.

If your order ships, do not accept it, if you accept it you will make it quite a bit harder to get your refund.

Interesting return path. It shipped out from Commerce City, Co. The tracking return the package to Rolla, MO. Which JUST happens to be where Bob and Dan seem to live.

to re-answer and agree with the former answer on the asic miners and chips...........

I am sure that KNC miner is working on their next generation, however, I do see their reasoning in not having so many chips made the first time around.
It takes MONEY, and time. I am sure they didn't want to gamble more than a few million dollars (of our money) on making chips no one would buy, or someone would outdate, quickly.

With several companies jumping  into the fire with big asic miners, it is getting harder to sompete, and if you look at their mission statement, they stated out front, that they would release them slowly, as not to drive the market up too high, too fast, allowing the owners time to recover their outlay, before saturating the market with new machines.
I am also sure that the manufacturers held some back for them, and that means they want to keep the market low, for their own mining purposes, and I can't really blame them.
We saw  many group buys (I personally got left out of several, in this  particular forum, because of that stupid NEWBIE crap, which sucked wind like a vacuum cleaner...thanks a lot I might add), here, and a ton of us got left out, but that is they way it goes.

At least they HAVE a release date for more machines. cointerra doesn't, others don't either. And here comes blackarrow, not willing to answer questions, nor have they posted very much data, nor do they have any means of insuring yours and my money, and expect us to just GIVE them our money and hope they deliver.

That being said, by the time their (knc's) MARCH batch comes out, the difficulty will be WAY beyond what any 500Gh machine can do.
Cointerra had the right idea, but by the time theirs comes out, those 2TH machines will only deliver 1 BTC/day, leaving 500GH machines in the dust, and themselves fading fast. Right now, it takes over 1TH to make 1BTC/day, and novembers, and decembers machines haven't been released yet. It seems to just about double what it takes (in TH's, now that GH's are about dead...Mh or Kh is useless) every month.
By february and march release dates, it will take upwards of a  minimum of 5TH for 1BTC/day and 10TH to make a descent profit, maybe even more. No telling what those will cost, either.

I, being willing to invest some bucks, now that I have stacked some away, see it being a loosing battle, and bullcrap stuff like 45-50,000 for a jupiter machine, or Cointerra PREORDER (which again smacks of rip off), on fleabay, is making me sick.
ROI WAS at about 30-60 days, that 50,000 crap puts it 6 months to a year or  more before you get any ROI, and that is only if the price stays up.
I am NOT willing to throw my money at someone who won't give me any way to insure my money is well spent and not ripped off. And when they aren't aswering questions, or putting out any data, THAT raises more questions than answers.

Not to mention the fact that these "groups" are buying up anything and everything that comes out, since they were the only assholes allowed in on the group buys, because about a hundred of us "newbies", or a LOT more got left out ,because we couldn't post, or PM anyone about getting in on those "group" buys. Once again, thanks a lot for that shit, too............

rant rant rant..........

I'm doing this to gauge what type of mobile OS this hardcore bitcoin community uses. One assumption is Android. Open for geeks to tinker with. And just look at the market share... But I'd like to know what folks vote on here.

Sure I could have included Ubuntu FireFox OS and even some crazy shit like Windows Mobile or even more bizarre Navyn OS or whatever custom strip of gentoo you wish to compile. That's too nerdy for the topic.

I have the intention of developing a mobile app. Question is android or iOS first. I'm personally an iOS user.

The webapp will be the universal default of course. But native is nice and smooth....

Your an idiot. You'd be better off stashing those coins under your bed.  I can promise you that your ROI will be higher.  Whoever collects those coins from you wins.

I think this needs to be looked at as much from the expenditure side as the forecast fabrication side.

In essence, a years worth of investment is coming onto the network now and over the next few months.  A lot of new miners (like me) have spent their available cash on pre-orders.  I'm not sure that the market will be there to pay for the production of the ~ 6 PH/s that's been announced by the new ASIC foundries over the past couple of weeks.

Of course, I could be very wrong, and new corporate-scale mining companies with new external capital might appear, but the existing contract 'cloud' hashing services don't seem to me to be capturing that much interest.

So another way to look at the question would be to try and calculate retrospective month-by-month dollar spends, and projecting that curve and factoring in some approximate hashrate-per-dollar forecasts. 

What are the odds that he could solve a block with his USB miners? Thinking in terms of time, how long would it take to get a 25BTC block reward? (That's how that works, right? Newbie, here:-)

1 month, 1 year, 100 years, 1000, years?

As I understand it, it is a bit of luck too, right? A bit like gambling?