These guys have a great selection of sauces and excellent service.  Someone accidentally dropped one of my 1498 Heartbreaking Dawn scorpion pepper sauces on the floor and it broke.  The house had to be evacuated and people were acting like they'd been tear gassed.  I was pretty impressed.  That isn't even the hottest sauce I have.

The Heartbreaking Dawn series of sauces is one of my favorites.  They generally use the hottest of peppers, but blend them in a way that there's a lot more to the sauce than just heat.  I particularly like what they've done with the scorpion pepper and ghost pepper.  These sauces are by no means mild, but there are actually well-considered flavors in addition to the peppers, and in a recipe that lets you taste some of the subtleties, like the fruity undertones of the ghost pepper.  Usually, the ghost pepper has such a rapid attack that you only get a second or two of its actual taste before your head explodes.

I usually now prefer this kind of sauce to the extreme sauces like the Dave's Insanity blends, because those often rely solely on the bludgeon-like use of the pepper to the exclusion of any actual taste.  (But I did get one Dave's product, the Insanity Spice which is basically red savina peppers sprayed with capsaicin.  Like the pizza topping but mind-blastingly hot.  I recommend it.  Even used in barely visible amounts, it kicks any dish up a notch.)

Agreed on both of these.  I'll note I only have used Coinbase to convert to fiat, rather than the other way around.  I have heard of some having difficulties in the other direction.  I am about to try buying BTC from them, but will only do it if the price goes down in the near future.  At least in some significant amount.  Regardless of price, I am going to do a couple buy transactions just to verify a credit card and jack up my limits a bit.

As for Bitstamp, I do not use them personally as an exchange, but I consider their ticker a lot more reliable indicator of value than the often fantastic and unbelievable prices the Magic the Gathering exchange gives.  How the Magic the Gathering folks are considered the leading exchange is kind of a mystery, because their ticker is ludicrous.  It is hard to avoid the conclusion that these guys have no idea what they're doing.

Pretty simple.  If someone is stupid enough to send anything, he keeps it.  Double or nothing, but most certainly nothing.

If multiple people are dumb enough to send larger amounts, maybe he does double one or two of the lesser idiots to keep the scam going.

Sort of like an even more retarded Ponzi scam.  Because any doubles will come from other people.  Zero risk to the scammer, probably very little likelihood of profit unless people are even dumber than usual.

But probably nobody is stupid enough to send to this idiot.  He didn't even put any effort into this bullshit, unlike other scammers who have pulled the same schtick.

Well, this would certainly be a great time to get a discount on purchasing BFL products for Christmas. . .of 2018.

By then, they'll be antiques and you can make a profit by selling them to a museum.

In Milton Friedman's formulation of the concept, he calls it a "negative income tax."  Just apply the same principles as the progressive income tax and take it to its logical conclusion.  There are a number of reasons that can be argued for it being a good idea.

1)  Increased efficiency.  People are best suited to make their own decisions and given the resources to do so, will tend to do a better job than the government.  Further, you have one person making these decisions rather than literally dozens of bureaucrats per person, each of whom is (badly) making decisions for hundreds or thousands of benefit recipients.

2)  The removal of perverse incentives.  The current web of ad hoc benefits programs each designed to address some real or perceived social ill has often led to systems that reward bad behavior while punishing good behavior.  I.e. people trapped into receiving benefits because if they did get an entry-level job at a low wage, they'd immediately lose more in benefits than they make in wages.

3)  Decreasing expenses relating to fraud detection.  Currently, the system of dozens of different benefits programs means each one has to spend a great deal of administrative costs related to detecting fraud unique to its own regime.  There would still need to be fraud detection for a negative income tax system, but it would be much more limited, since the only kind of fraud would be income-related.

4)  Increased freedom.  While a frequent criticism of the welfare state is that it requires coercion against those taxpayers whose money is taken for it, less often is it heard that it actually inflicts coercion on the recipients of the programs, into whose lives the government intrudes in numerous forms.  If there is anyone who ends up most humiliated by the nanny state, it is the ones it treats as infants.

There are also lots of criticisms of the idea from all areas of the political spectrum.  These are a few of the "pro" column arguments, though.

Very good explanation of why BFL is a scam and not merely an accident of fate and why taking pre-order money is inherently shady.

Every forum I go where the subject of Bitcoin comes up and people ask about mining, I'll point to this as a good layperson's explanation of why to stay the hell away from the scam known as BFL.  People see BFL ads whenever they search for Bitcoin, and what they need to see is Josh Zerlan publicly acting like a psycho and a weasel at a public industry gathering, in front of customers.

Yep, that was cool, but I'd still rather have played it.  Maybe I was more harsh than deserved, but this thing just routinely does not go off on time or in this case at all, and it's frustrating.  Throw in a day of disconnects and I was pretty pissed.

Looking forward to the server upgrade if that ever happens but seriously, the site should be more reliable so it can be trusted with substantial amounts.  If the disconnects are just going to be a constant thing, there should at least be disconnect protection (and some way of turning it off for people who abuse it).

Gotta love the Suspiciously Specific Percentages cited by this whoever-it-is.

Is it really a surprise or even wrong, though, that the police are as capable of reading shit you post in public as your next door neighbor is?

Seriously.  How shocking!  How dare the police look at posts of you boasting about your crimes!

Why?  Are you actually addicted to losing your chips to me?   

Yep.  I mad.  But since I have all my money off the site (they are still legit enough to process cashouts) I don't care any more.

Enjoy the bullshit.  I'll just freeroll on this shit from now on.  They apparently don't care at all.  

You fucking retards have ONE freeroll a goddamn week.

It has NEVER gone off without you MORONS fucking it up somehow.

How stupid are you idiots not to be able to carry off one fucking freeroll a week without absolutely fucking it up? 

"Seal Team Six" appears to be a Comic Book Guy clone with a fucking neckbeard in a basement drooling on himself while fapping to everyone TRYING to register for a fucking freeroll.

How about you idiots step your game up and get this fucking site to a level where people would actually deposit on it?  Because as for me, I'm cashing out my minuscule roll that amounts to $300 at most because I can't trust fucking retards like you with my fucking money.

Fuck you idiots!

If 1 SAT is ever worth a dollar, there will have to be a lot of off-chain transactions, or the protocol will need to be changed.

I hope so.  Because if he's dead he's rolling in his goddamn grave that anyone would ask how someone with a known PGP address would prove their identity.

Yes, it would be legal, or at least, there are entirely legal ways for the U.S. government to do it under U.S. law.  The technical issue would be the difference between "entrapment," which is not permissible, and "enticement," which is.

Not to get too technical, the general principle is whether law enforcement basically goes out and gets people to commit crimes they otherwise would not have committed, or whether it simply provides an opportunity for them to do what they would otherwise do.

An example of the first would be John DeLorean of the DeLorean Motor Company, which made the car that ended up as the time machine in Back to the Future, which you probably remember if nothing else.  His company got into serious financial difficulty and basically, an FBI informant came up with a scheme to involve DeLorean in a cocaine trafficking scheme.  DeLorean had never done anything like this previously and almost certainly would not have without the feds basically exploiting the financial mess he was in to get him to participate in a crime.  Essentially, the defense was that there would have been no crime except for the actions of the feds themselves, and it would be unfair to convict DeLorean.  He won that argument defending himself.

Depending on how it shakes down, the guy accused of being DPR might have a defense on the "hit man" things based on entrapment.  We don't really know any more detail of how that happened other than what the feds put in the charging papers.

"Enticement" is different.  A simple example is the undercover vice cop dressing like a prostitute in an area of prostitution, who is approached by a man for sex, negotiates it and then arrests the john.  Or a controlled buy situation where an undercover informant purchases drugs from a suspect then arrests him.  While there are a lot of technicalities about this kind of thing, at bottom, the issue is really whether the defendant would have been likely to do this or something similar anyway, and that the enticement merely got them to get caught.

I think they could legally run a honeypot operation.  If the original SR vendors and customers came back and managed to get caught and get evidence on them based on such an operation, I'm pretty sure it would be admissible and that both the evidence could be used in court and they could actually be convicted of whatever new offenses they commit on the new site.

Now, my personal guess would be if the feds wanted to operate SR as a honeypot, they might have preferred not to shut it down in the first place, but if there was really an issue of DPR potentially going around having people killed, they might have chosen to cut the operation short, since it was obviously finished the moment they arrested and unsealed indictments.  The question really becomes whether they'd essentially run what is likely once again to become a large drug operation in order to do a sting.  This isn't some controlled buys.  It's reopening something they made a lot of news releases about shutting down.  If they do it and something goes really bad, careers would end.

So my guesses are:

A)  It'd be legal for them to run such a sting and its evidence would be admissible; but
B)  It'd be a really bad idea.  And could easily go out of control.

None of this is intended as legal advice and nobody should rely on it for that purpose.  It is largely guesswork based on incomplete information.

There's one under the SNG tab, 99 players.  Apparently, it is triggered only when the site activity is relatively low, but when it opens, it pops off as soon as it get 99 people.  There's also stuff like the Boozehound.  And of course the DonkDown.

I have had repeated disconnects the last 24 hours, sometimes lasting as long as 15 minutes, where I couldn't reconnect.

It's hard to justify a $400 buyin tournament if the site is consistently this unreliable.

What the fuck am I reading?

That's the proper position to take.  If it's connectivity, be back up in seconds or suck my dick.

If it's security, take as long as it takes.

I've been giving this guy the benefit of the doubt since this story came out, but I think that is pretty much out the window.

What an asshole.

A currency is anything used as a currency.  It's as simple as that.  Just because you say otherwise based on your own made-up definition doesn't make it so.