I'm curious. 

Assuming this isn't a lame attempt at scamming someone on this forum from Mexico, which to me seems like a silly thing to attempt here, what product could be bought by a Mexican national with a Mexican credit card that couldn't just as easily be ordered by an American using an American credit card?  Now, I understand that this is a bitcoin forum and most people want to help spur the economy, but if you are paying someone in Mexico to use a credit card then, logically speaking, you will be paying for a credit fee anyway; so why not skip the trouble and additional risks and just buy it yourself with your own credit card (or a prepaid Visa from Wal-mart, if your credit already sucks)?  What is this item?

I've been having a thought that's been nagging at me for a couple of days.  I'm bit of an obsessive compulsive learner, which was much harder before the rise of the Internet (and both Google & Wikipedia are my two best friends).  I'm also a bit of a 'prepper' in the sense that I am the kind of person who deliberately stocks up for a winter storm before the leaves on the trees turn to fall colors.  For some reason that I can't really recall, my brain got locked onto the subject of off-grid/power outage lighting.  As in candles, lanterns, etc.  When I get this, I keep revisiting the subject over several days, and this is what has been happening to me.

Over the past several days, thus, I have learned much about how modern lanterns work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_mantle) as well as historicly how we got there (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limelight) and the scientific process that such lighting depends upon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candoluminescence).  (Just to give you an idea how my mind wanders across these broad subjects)  I also learned that candles, although they are the most basic of lighting technologies, are terribly inefficient as a light emitter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candles#Light) (although pretty good little heaters at roughly 80 watts heat output per flame) despite still being in wide use on a regular basis across the "third world" along with lanterns, etc.  In such places, lanterns are favored for their superior white light compared to the yellowish light of a standard candle; not to mention the flicker of a candle.  Yet like many other simple & cheap technologies, candles persist even in first world countries because it's sledgehammer simple and will always work when we need it to.  Said another way, when the power fails and the batteries in the emergency flashlight haven't been changed in four years, a simple candle and a match will not fail you whether or not that candle was bought for just such an emergency or because it looks pretty on the mantle and smells nice.

And all this brings me to what has been bugging me.  There are many 'rare earth' minerals that have a high candoluminescence that we in our modern world are aware of, meaning that they glow whiter, brighter, with less emissions in the infrared spectrum (meaning less energy lost as heat) and at much lower temps than were ever known in the days that gas lamps dominated London, New York or Paris.  The best modern choice being thorium oxide, which is used in almost every modern lantern mantle mass produced in the world, including every Colman propane camping lantern ever produced.  So why don't modern candle wicks have a thorium-oxide coated thread of metal in them?  I understand why the candles intended for looks or nice smells or comforting background noise (such as Woodwicks) don't include such a simple improvement in luminous efficacy (and potentially light quality, since it would likely be a whiter light) but why not include them in candles made for the purpose of producing lighting, such as those deliberately marketed as emergency candles or those sold in regions of the world where candles are still regarded as a regular light source (as opposed to a medium for perfumes to be atomized and sent airborne in a controlled manner)?

If there are any hobbist candle makers around here, let it be known that I would certainly be willing to buy a custom made emergency candle that included the above simple feature, although I have no idea how one might go about getting thorium-oxide in any useful form.

It's not a problem for bitcoinspinner, which pretty much does the same thing for an android smartphone.  It would take some significant adoption rates before the server side was heavily loaded even for a low end server instance, and it's not like that can't be scaled up if the market is there.  I wouldn't expect that transfers from a bitcoincard are going to be free, they aren't for bitcoinspinner.


Not quite correct, as all signing is a reproducable process by necessity.  Also, any amount of entrophy can be aquired early, over a period of time, or by the wireless radio receiver by tuning to an off channel and digitizing the background noise.  There is no need for a radndome number generator because the digital receiver acrtually is one.


I'm sure that some future users will go that route, or simply buy smartphones with this kind of hardware included in the phone.


Mobile phones do, but smartphone not so much.  Not yet anyway.  Still, I want a dozen even though I have a smartphone.  I use my smartphones for a great many things, many of which are terriblely insecure.  Hardening my smartphone so that it could do any kind of mobile payments secure enough to keep any significant balance would be an inconvience in so many other ways.  If the devices are cheap enough, they have value as a secondary value storage device, even if they spend most of their time in my safe.  The mesh texting functions also make them independently valuable to myself to keep in touch with my kids when we are in public but separated from line of sight.  I could put some without any balance in the back pockets of my toddlers, so that I could vector track them with a smartphone app should they get loose in a crowd.  I could give one to each of my older kids so that I could keep tabs on them while they wander the Mall or the craft fair, and do so far cheaper than it would cost me to pay for a cell phone & service.  Cheaper even than a set of Family Radio Service handsets, and less publicly annoying.  I could give them away to my pre-teen daughter's click of friends as a texting toy, if they are cheap enough.

That's just my own, very real, use case.  I can think of a dozen other use cases off the top of my head, not the least of which is as an actual payments device for people who are 1) to poor or 2) too cheap to buy a smartphone (such as the third world bitcoin user model mentioned by others) or 3) those who actually do own a smartphone but are either beyond their effective 3G service range or 4) desire to have a backup method should their smartphone be physically stolen or 5) pwned or 6) busted or 7) simply a dead battery.  And then there are those who like to go camping beyond the range of their cell service and the camp store accepts bitcoins but doesn't have wifi.

Again, it depends upon the cost of the device.  If they cost under $2 each to  procure, I'll buy a dozen & one  or two hardware gateway dongles jsut for the location & texting features.  The bitcoin fuctions are just a bonus.

I think that you misunderstood the intent of that particular webapp.  That isn't there to annouce who actually has a bitcoincard or gateway already, but who would be willing to do so and their estimate of how many potential bitcoincard users could pass that person's personal gateway each week.

I have one, and it's pretty cool; but you will be surprised at how many consumer devices will refuse to cooperate with it.  Both Amazon Kindles & Apple products need to be able to communicate with their parent companies servers in order to do much of anything, which kinda makes them useless with the piratebox.  Android phones don't seem to care, and can happily upload & download without complaint.

Mesh networking isn't implausible at all, hams do it constantly.  That is exactly what a packet TNC does.  The real question is can they do it in such a small device and with such small power requirements, but 100 meters is nothing for a modern digital mode even at low power levels, so I don't consider that unrealistic either.  In fact, I'm hoping that they are under stating the effective range, because 100 meters isn't practical except in some pretty dense urban areas.  I'd say the bear minimum effective ranges start at 300meters.  And nor is communications sans (commerical) infrastructure implausible, for that is the very nature of mesh networking anyway.

I think that the video was mostly a generic promo developed for the card before they settled on using as a bitcoin device.  I doubt, seriously, that it will ever be able to send actual images even though the mesh protocol might support sharing of arbitrary data objects.

Maybe, maybe not.  Build it and find out.

Maybe it won't matter anyway, but you certainly can't fault us for lack of effort.

This was never about Ron Paul per se, even though he has done a wonderful job of motivating the young.  Nor is it about Rand Paul.  Romney is someone who isn't strong in any convictions, so he is just as influence prone from a Republican base that has turned strongly lib as he has been influenced by liberal voices while governor.  If this proves not to be the case, there is always Gary Johnson.  If Romney ignores lib concerns, and loses because 6% of the Republicans voted for Johnson, the next nominee in 2016 will certainly not repeat that error.  The key is displaying that there are more libertarians (and voters who lean libertarian) than has been assumed by all sides.  The voter turnout from the Ron Paul primaries should be proof enough of this, but if not, a Gary Johnson spoiler will certain be enough. 

If someone would make an auto handgun that has three barrels in a equalateral triangle, with a triple wide, single stacked magazine, and eats 22lr; I'd love to have one.  The total impuse of three 22lr rounds at once is on par between a 380 and a 9mm, and with greater area trama that comes with the 'multiple tap' engagement stragedy.  And three standard 22lr rounds are often cheaper than one of either 380 or 9mm.

I'd like to see the same thing in a PDW, but that the barrels aren't quite parallel and the impact triangle pattern spreads out slightly.

Sometimes that's what you get. Rand isn't fake, though. The Tea Partyy started off about 50% lib, but didn't stay that way. Still that is an improvement upon some of the neocons I've met since joining the exbaord. I really didn't think that intelligent people actually beleived some of this crap before, but I now have real examples of party officials who will talk about fidelity to the constitution except (whatever).

This is the endgame of a decade long endeavor among small-L libertarians to take over the Republican party.  Keep in mind, that the Libertarian Party was born about 1971 because of a liberty purge that followed Barry Goldwater's unsuccessful presidential campaign.  But a generation of activism as a third party has netted zero gain.  During that entire time, libertarians never exceeded 6% of the electorate; which in our system (as opposed to a parlimentary system such as is common in Europe) that amounts to zero representation.  It had become obvious to the Gen-X libertarians (and some of the old guard) that this third party thing was never going to amount to anything.  So around 2002, or perhaps even earlier, a new plan was hatched.  One that didn't require the total commitment of a population that is known for doing thier own thing.  A campaign of educating (or indoctrinating, according to a certian perspective) of the young Millinial generation using their own, and at the time very new, methods of communications on the Internet.  Ever noticed how the Internet, in general, appears to be very libertarian with pockets of liberalism?  This lifted up a new generation of educated young voters, and now they are ready.  I'm not saying this is what what was supposed to happen, this is what did happen.  And I have to admit that I am more than a little suprised to see it working, but it is.  I am now a voting member of my local Republican Excutive Committee, in addtion to being a district chair.  Nor am I alone on the committee.  Our intent, and successes, are to inject ourselves into the party structure, demonstrate our political will as a block, and take over the party from the grassroots up.  Ron Paul has been aware of, and agreed to be the figurehead of, this movement.  So has his son Rand.  I know this to be fact personally, as I have met both of them.  Honestly, Ron Paul never expected to win the nomination, and probably didn't really want it anyway.  But not only will we be a force to contend with at the national convention, local and state candidates that wish to stand a chance at winning officeare going to start talking to us and talking the talk.  This doesn't mean that they will actually be liberty minded candidates, but it does improve those odds.  The (R) nest to your name, as a liberty minded candidate, is a huge political advantage compared to trying to run an independent or (L) campaigin.  In another 4 years, the demographics & votin trends says that enough Boomers will have died off that the center of the electorate in the US will shift directly to the Millinials, skipping my generation completely.  This was never some off-the-cuff plan by a bunch of disorganised kids.  This is a well executed long range plan, and the Republican Party will be the liberty party again for another generation.  We have already affected change.

I would like to point out that it's been more than a week.

Heh.

Dash7 would still be a better wireless protocol, even on a bus or a bird.

Considering that they use only a solar cell for power, just put one into a ziplock bag and tape it down to the top of objects that pedestrians cannot see above.  Like the roof of a bus shelter, or the top of a vending machine.  If they are cheap enough, it doesn't much matter if someone eventually finds them.  By the time your's go bad or are stolen, either the mesh network would be self-sustaining or it likely will never be.

Not unless it's a small school, and the kids are evenly spaced and don't move.  Something closer to 30 would be required to maintain a mesh network for any school that I've attended, with a radio radius of 100 meters.  Wifi can get 100 meters in open air space, but 2.45 Ghz is a crappy frequency choice for a mesh.  Without changing the protocol or peak-power, just switching to 433 Mhz would double the effective range due to the lower background noise level & reduced sensitivity to attenuation by hydrogen containing mass.  Wifi doesn't use 433mhz mostly because the band is too narrow for such wideband tech.

I wish, at least, I knew what frequency this device used.  That would tell me much about how well I could extend ranges.  A single dongle may only have a radius of 100 meters, but three of them using 120 degree wide panel antennas on a pole can cover 2-3 times that radius under ideal conditions.  2.45 Ghz would not be an ideal condition, however. 

Those can be your priorities.  Let others focus on their priorities.  I have a lot of personal reasons to want a secure offline bitcoin device, and I have a lot of personal reasons to want a meshable & service free practial means of near-space texting.  Again, 100 meters isn't enough, but imagine if I had a dozen of these devices & gave each of them to people that I was traveling to a concert with.  Or a ball game.  Just the ability to send a text to my kids headed to the conessions stand "cancel the chips, I want a hot dog" or "cancel the entire order, halftime is over, get back" or using the location features, after one child telss me that his sister's purse was snatched, I could potentially track it up to a point.

Well, he learned a lot; while I learned a little.  Mostly I'm just out of practice at rifle shooting.  Hard to go shooting with my Mosin-Nagant.  The local ranges won't permit anything rifle-like but 22lr.

No apologies necessary, I wasn't offended.  I was just pointing out that there are people who are using scopes for the sub 100 yard ranges for practial reasons.  When my son was an infant, he did not yet wear the prescription sunglasses, because no one makes them for an infant.  It took some looking, but I did find a manufactuer of baby sunglasses that really did filter out the ultraviolet ranges (the most dangerous frequencies for him) so he would wear the glasses outside, but as soon as we went indoors anywhere he would snatch them off his face.  So one day I was in Wal-Mart (or some other retail store like that) and he was just starting to walk.  He was toddling along slowly, and he attracted the attention of a couple of middle aged women.  I remember noting that they both that very long & straight hair, and were wearing full length skirts.  Now, because my son has no irises, he can get a 'red eye' flash effect under normal lighting, since that is just a reflection off the back of the eye.  Well, these two women were approaching him from behind....

"He's so cute!  What's his name?"

"Isaiah"

"Oh, a prophet's name"

And just about the time that they were getting close enough to reach out an pick him up, he turns around.  Both immediately snap upright and start to back up, just as he reaches out to be held.  They didn't say anyting intelliglbe after that, and just kinda walked away.  I knew right away what had happened, because they both had that look that normal people have while whatching The Excorcist for the first time.  So I picked him up and held him, and just laughed at the ignorant people.

He's vicious on Team Fortess II though.