I purchase Malwarebytes for my parents for Christmas every year and it's saved me so much time troubleshooting or recovering files from my parents' PCs.
US Navy veteran turned peace activist with experience in DoD, law enforcement, and K-12 environments. Cloud enthusiast escaping the stale tech of the education system. I'm all-in when it comes to cloud technology, and I'm capable of learning anything that gets thrown my way.
I don't really want this type of drive-by snark from a newspaper, but I think there is some truth to what was written.
It's seems like any time a merchant announces they'll accept BitCoins, it will get pushed to the front page of /r/bitcoin and probably drum up some business because of it. I know of some local businesses who got online and print coverage for announcing that they're accepting BitCoin have hardly had any actual BitCoin activity.
I'd be interested to see if any of the big companies, e.g. NewEgg, Overstock, etc., have seen sustained business increases from accepting BitCoins.
The overwhelming majority of those companies also don't actually accept bitcoin. They've brokered a deal with an exchange. Bitcoin payments are made to the exchange and the exchange pays the vendor in U.S. currency.
So, the company isn't actually transacting in bitcoins.
By that token most companies do not take anything but their own currency. Currency hedging is something corporations do to align costs and revenues - companies generally are not trying to make money wagering on currency positions.
Why would you go through the hassle and possibly loss of money to convert fiat to bitcoins then purchase things with bitcoins instead of just buying with fiat? You wouldn't, except that bitcoin is anonymous so you can use it to buy things privately. Most people really don't care enough about the privacy of an average amazon purchase to go through all this hassle.
When you're buying illegal goods, however, privacy is #1. And what is the most popular item on the most popular illegal goods marketplaces? Drugs.
Almost everyone I know that uses bitcoin is either speculating to make a quick buck, or using it to buy something on a darknet market. I'm sure there are people using it for everyday goods but it really doesn't make much sense to do that now unless you value your privacy very highly.
> What's wrong with people using BTC to buy drugs?
The flaw that is raised isn't that BTC is used to buy drugs, but that it (in the view of those raising the complaint) doesn't have a strong use aside from buying drugs (and, while "drugs" are usually mentioned, the substance of the complaint appears to be more about drugs-as-popular-form-of-contraband rather than drugs-qua-drugs.)
And given the way governments tend to respond to things that (1) are primarily used to facilitate unlawful trade, and (2) become increasingly popular, its a real, if political, risk for the Bitcoin ecosystem.
No, the buying drugs part is what's 'wrong,' if you consider breaking the law to be a bad thing.
But you're right to point out that, in sheer usage, Bitcoin really has nothing on the USD when it comes to buying drugs. Still, when you're asking why anyone would consider buying drugs with bitcoin to be wrong, you have to understand that not everyone considers that to be a positive or even entirely neutral act. Most people consider a currency whose primary use case involves breaking the law to be a net negative for society.
I don't work for Office 365 or have affiliation there nor would I suggest Office deploys in a way that is AGILE.
My question for you as a founder is, how else would you prefer that a product introduce new features? I want to make sure that our users don't feel like you do, but I also need to roll out new functions as we grow so there has to be a balance there,
I was originally hired at my current company to migrate our on-premise servers to Office 365, so I was not involved in the decision to actually select a service.
Microsoft had already considered OneDrive for Business (SkyDrive Pro at the time) a finished product. Two years of hell has proven otherwise. Personally I still view OneDrive as an MVP, though I will concede it has gotten a little better over time.
Microsoft has also failed to provide notification of a new feature rolling out several times, causing confusion with end-users. At best, I'll get a brief message in the Office 365 admin portal that says "Within the next 4 months, we'll be rolling out x, y, and z features." I'm glad that I know months in advance of a new feature, but not knowing any type of specific time frame really puts us at a disadvantage.
New features are awesome and I am more than willing to try them out if I know they're still not totally ready. Ultimately what really irritates me is when companies tout a product as "enterprise-ready" that is still riddled with bugs.
I have been putting together a list of software to look at for a tech-based activism/volunteerism site I'm working on. This looks like it could be very useful and I'm looking forward to checking it out this weekend. Thanks for this!
I served on the Reagan from 2003-2007 and am lucky enough to have finished my enlistment before the Fukushima incident.
I still have a large network of friends in the military and work in the defense industry in San Diego so I was surprised when I first learned of this incident only a few weeks ago. I thought the post I was reading at the time was a sick hoax at first but have since learned otherwise.
This doesn't surprise me much at all unfortunately, and I wish my fellow sailors the best of luck in not getting screwed by Uncle Sam, which is what I fully expect will happen.
I know their service is awesome, that's why I wanted to use them. I just thought their verification questions were way over the top.
I sent them a pretty snarky reply, and they handled it very professionally. They even activated my account, which made me questions once again why they ask so many questions if they will just activate your account anyway.
Bottom line, very impressed with their service and would recommend, just don't like how they go about verifying users.
