Uh, Why?  The newbie section is the only place that you can post for the next four hours, it's not the only place you can read.

Yet, the common American didn't have any direct experience with those banks that failed.  The Federal Reserve exists to protect the banks' investors and their funds, not the livelyhood of the public.

... is only outmatched by the myth that a fiat currency cannot return to a gold standard without economic upheaval.

http://lewrockwell.com/case/case45.1.html

I disagree, the mesh texting feature makes such a device useful for me independently of whether or not it can transact in bitcoin.  Like I said, I want 6 right now for my wife & kids.  Way cheaper to give my kids each one of these to let them go play than give each of them a cell phone with service.  With android phones (and my ham radio privileges) I can give each of my kids a cell phone that uses APRS to tell me where they are, and I can call any one of them home at will.  My daughter can take my cell phone with her to her friends house, and I can track her progress with extreme accuracy.  But that means that 1) I can't use my cell phone in the meantime and 2) I have to pay for that data plan.  With a wallet card sized device, I could do some very similar things without the need of the costly data plan (granted, I'd be paying for one such plan anyway, but not six) or the expensive hardware (i.e. the android smartphone required to run the APRS app).  If my wallet card couldn't see her card because there wasn't yet enough such cards in my neighborhood to support a mesh, I'd still be able to get into my car and drive a couple of blocks to locate her signal without needing to actually see her.  I could get a seventh and pin it to my dog's collar, and find him the same way whenever he got out of the yard.

I've got a Samsung Intercept I've had for a number of years, and I've long been annoyed with the poor battery life of the device, which is made worse by the bloatware that Virgin Mobile insists that I keep one the phone, that I never use.  Worse still by the fact that no oversized lithium-ion batteries are available for this device, because it's a slider and aftermarket batteries often need  to attack to the back of the device in such a way to make sliding impossible.  Well, it's long since off warranty, if it ever had one, and so this weeked I resolved for finally root this device and install a different rom without all that bloatware.  I did some research and found a rom call 'IcyPop' for the Intercept that runs Android 4.x.  I must say that I'm impressed at this guy's talent, and the addition of a cpu control that backs the cpu speed down to 66mhz while locked is quite the battery saver.  I think that my standby battery life more than tripled, even though my battery dies pretty fast if I'm using it. 

Which brings me to my question.  My device is capable at running at 66mhz, 266mhz, 400mhz and 800mhz.  Nothing else in between.  Does anyone know what the minimum speed that I could set the 'waking' cpu speed to that can support a proper phone call?

And if there is anyone else out there with a Samsung Intercept or Moment, consider doing this.  IcyPop isn't just fast and easy on the battery, it's beautiful.

While this is all true, the problem is this kind of analysis is (at best) concurrent or (more likely) delayed.  Said another way, these metrics look at recent history (and perhaps the trends) in order to make a future prediction.  That is, after all, the point of all this; to make an educated guess as to what comes next.  The problem with that is there are other metrics that should more indicitive of the future than (in particular) the consumer price index over the past several years.  The metrics of the monetary base, for example (M1, M2 & M-prime) have more than doubled over that same time frame.  Has the demand for liquidity and/or the practical size of the US economy doubled during that time?  No and No.  So the simple logic of the law of supply and demand (as applied to monetary demand) says that, eventually, we are going to see some rather severe inflation, assuming that the federal reserve does not (or cannot) withdraw that liquidity from the banking system at the next inflection point.  There is no historical evidence that the academics who work at the federal reserve even have a reliable theory that could inform them of such an inflection point.  And that should worry you more than the small, and dropping, risks of a deflationary event.

Of course I see variation, but I see a pattern as well.  Don't you?

yes, while it was in the blocking wallet; but most of those are for passive rfid formats like in passports.  These devices are active units with their own processors, and don't depend upon the security of the readers or trust that all readers are themselves trustworthy.

use the search function for the dedicated wallet printer

For that price, I'm seriously considering bidding on this.

No.  IW is 20 miles, plus the property was built by the US government and a condition of the sale is that the new owner must consent to that as an ongoing fact.

SDR's still cost too much.

While this is somewhat true, it's a natural law that in the absence of any established cultural rules on property, societies tend toward a known set of such property rules.  If you stake a claim on unused/undeveloped land, and start to work it as such, some other people will respect that claim; but property isn't about what you can defend, it's about agreement.  For example, if there were no laws on the matter, and you moved onto the abandoned farmland a few miles from me.  I wasn't working that land and didn't claim it, because I couldn't do anything with it anyway.  So you start working it, and I respect your claim on that land and the products of your work.  Not because I must, but because by respecting your claim I can expect the same from you, you will respect my claim on the portion that I have been working.  This is how society really works, but on a much larger scale.  A land deed is simply a document that states that a government, acting on behalf of society at large, is honoring a claim of ownership.

You can watch this very natural set of property rules in their most basic form by watch toddlers in a playroom.  Whoever has a particular toy and is presently playing with it 'owns' it for the moment, and any attempt by others to take it away will result in not just resistance, but cries for help.  Yet, if the first child gets up and walks away from the toy, another could come in and take that toy and stake his new claim, and often expect it to be respected by the other kids and the adults alike.  After all, it does come naturally.

EDIT: And you can tell that the claim of ownership is known by the kid who takes toys from others, even if he doesn't respect it, because he never calls for help to take away the toy and doesn't expect the adults to help him do so; and when the child who feels that he has been wronged squeals for intervention he does expect to receive aid, while the attacker will often lie about the facts or simply look quilty.  Because in truth, he knows he was wrong.

It's a solution to the problem.  Rather than run a bitcoind on the hotspot hardware or use an api to do it with an overlay network, simply forward bitcoin ports from the hotspot hardware directly to a full bitcoind that you control.

Probably you can, when that is available.

Or just a port foraeding over a ssh tunnel.

All USB sticks are slow, mostly because USB is slow.  Expecially if your pc only has a USB 1.1 host chip.  I could see such a thing taking a full four days to bootstrap a full gig, because there is more to verifying a single block than a single copy action.  There is a huge amount of disk action that goes on with the bitcoin index/database files.  That's most likely where your problem lies.  On my nearly brand new Imac, a new install took me 7 hours to bootstrap using the internal harddrive, and the case/monitor was actually hot.  Even a couple hours of TF2 won't make that thing more than warm.  If you intend to keep your complete client & data on a USB drive, I recommend a USB 3.0 card.

You have a firewall blocking incoming connections.  Could be the computer, or it could be upstream from it.  The first step is to figure out where your firewall is.

Honestly, you don't need more than 8, unless you're going to be mining locally & solo.  Technically, you don't need more than three even while bootstrapping.  Most computers choke on the verification of the blocks, not on the peer bandwidth anyway.

It's not really a timer, it's a page view counter that doesn't credit you if you are clicking too fast.

Sounds normal.  Your old bitcoin addresses should still be present, and still usable.  The client just doesn't display all of them.