ukrules

I had a pretty expensive leather bound hard back writing book arrive today from the UK - with nothing to pay. It cost around 6000 Baht including shipping and they sent it via DHL.

I believe DHL will take care of any duties and bill the original sender in this case.

If they deicde to charge it there are two options :

1 - Don't pay and lose the package

2 - Pay up and hope for better luck next time

So far I've dumped one package and never had to pay anything.

the internet cannot be compared to bitcoin as there is essentially no substitute for the internet and it is a tool that has completely transformed the world (and many aspects of our lives) -

Were you saying that in ~1990? You were probably saying "Who needs this 'internet' when we already have teletext...internet is just a substitution for that".

where as there are many subsitutes for bitcoin (i.e. other ways to do online transactions) and it is only relevant to one aspect of our lives (just as many of the dot com start-ups were based on interesting and plausible ideas about new ways to do specific things)

Really many substitutes? What object or technology can be used as an indestructible store of value that can be transferred anywhere in the world instantly?

I believe that it's only a matter of time before banks start issuing digital currencies to complement the printing of notes and the minting of coins.

I've done some research into this scenario and it could be easily done using the same ECDSA signing technology used in Bitcoin. People would be able to pay each other directly cutting out the middle man, the likes of Mastercard and VISA. Of course transactions would need to be co-signed / authorised by a central authority (the issuing bank) but that's no issue as it can be done in fractions of a second and you would be online when sending the money anyway.

So existing money could quite easily be moved in this way. It doesn't even take a central bank to do this, any bank, credit union or financial institution with some measure of trust can do it and he software isn't that hard to write - thanks to Bitcoin.

The same system could also work for storing other kinds of financial instrument like share certificates for example. Shares could be withdrawn from brokers and traded on an open market just like currency.

Money will evolve and Bitcoin doesn't necessarily need to be part of it. There's also some other much faster alternates to Bitcoin - they are all based on the original Bitcoin code to some degree.

To name just a couple there's Digital Coin, Litecoin, SecureCoin. There's probably hundreds of them.

You can trade them all at www.cryptsy.com

Yeah, bitcoin is up only 13% since 3 days ago. A regular disaster.

You wouldn't be feeling too smart right now if you purchased a few hundred thousand dollars of Bitcoin when it was priced at between $800-$900 a few days ago.

So this will indeed be a disaster to some people who fell for the latest manipulation in the price of Bitcoin.

Does anyone know where I can buy a high end laptop with a fast i7 CPU, 16 GB RAM and reasonably large SSD (500/1000GB) drive in it ?

All I see in the regular stores are mediocre laptops which aren't very good. They're low performance, low RAM and have slow small hard drives, this simply isn't good enough.

I made a decision recently to swap to Virtual Machines for most of my computer work so I can move them around and avoid ever having to reinstall operating systems in the future. I'll just copy the VM's between hardware.

The best part of this is - I can take my main workstation with me when I travel by simply copying the entire VM onto a thumbdrive and then onto the laptop - however the laptops are so under powered they just aren't good enough when running the VM's. So the easy solution is to buy a laptop which is nearly as good as my desktop.

The only laptop I've seen on sale so far which will definitely be powerful enough is a higher end MacBook Pro which costs about 100,000 Baht - this would do the job but I think I'd prefer a windows system.

I will be in Bangkok in a few weeks time so I could pick one up while I'm there.

Does anyone have any recommendations for this kind of laptop ?

I set it to 18 at night and 25 during the day.

I've never heard of this and have had liquids sent to me from within Thailand and from the US and the UK.

Are you talking about sending liquid out of Thailand ?

What type of liquid ?

What country to /from ?

Also how much of it are you talking about ? For example I had several small bottles sent in each package - 50ml per bottle maximum, some of them much less.

She agreed to stay in my house and look after the animals as well.

You're back now - tell her to move out. Her son is no concern of yours. He can work as a labourer and get his own place again.

She was out on the day I came back, the little rat is not.

I also know it was the little rat who used up all the toothpaste , shower gels, razors, etc.

I am also sure it was him who broke the DVD , and took the cloths

Just throw him out and change the locks. I was under the impression they were both still there.

Consider yourself lucky the damage is only 20,000 Baht, a negligible amount in the long term.

But in five years you can only buy one egg for that $3500.

BTW buying 500 bitcoins would cost 200.000US$! A little diffrent then trying something for 20.000 GPB.

At the moment you have 99% change it goes down and 1% it goes up.

Wait until it goes down at least 80% then buy some.

Maybe only have to wait a few days, you never know when one of the server on mount Gox goes offline for a while.

Never ever buy at the top!

I think you are confused, you think Bitcoin is like a stock. Bitcoin is being adopted as digital currency by more individuals, merchants, stock exchanges, companies, and countries every day. The adoption and increase user base guarantee's the increase in price IMO. If you think it's going to drop, IMO, you are waiting for something that won't happen.

All we need is one large merchant, e.g. Ebay, Amazon or any other Fortune 500 company to start using it on their website, and the price will go to $1000. I believe we are very close to this happening.

Bitcoin is at it's highest price ever in a market with wild volatile swings in price.

Do you really expect me to believe that the current price (the highest ever) is the lowest it will ever be again and that the volatility has now vanished because some large company might use it ?

This reminds me of what people were saying in the first days of April right before Bitcoins 'value' plunged from the then all time high of $266 to $50 in the space of a few days.

Bullish on Bitcoin! I'm mining at a current rate of 2.3 TH/s with 5.2 TH/s hardware on the way.

I don't really know much about this 'Bitcoin Mining', I've only purchased my Bitcoins so far but Isn't that quite a lot of hardware ?

I'm not going to start mining these coins but where do you get this hardware from and is it expensive ?

The miners are specialized and called ASICS and frankly it's turned into an arms race now. From everything I read, individuals have a very difficult time now to recoup their investments in mining gear.

That doesn't sound like it's too sustainable to me.

The whole Bitcoin thing is becoming a massive 'greedfest' - I don't see it ending well.

I will generally read the first couple of pages of a topic but if it's about 5 or more pages then I won't bother reading them all unless it's something I'm quite interested in.

Of course it all depends on the topic. If someone requests an opinion then I'll post my opinion without reading all the other replies - like now for instance.

If you're asking for information then I'll read the other replies and if I have anything new to add I'll add my post.

I suspect they would issue a new passport unless it's an offence for which you can be extradited for, a serious offence.

It would be interesting to know this as it will be an extension of 'big brother creep' betweeen government departments and I'm sure the rules and regulations will vary between the different countries.

I know in the US they will prevent you from renewing a passport for things such as being behind on child support payments but I have a feeling the EU will be slightly different.

Bullish on Bitcoin! I'm mining at a current rate of 2.3 TH/s with 5.2 TH/s hardware on the way.

I don't really know much about this 'Bitcoin Mining', I've only purchased my Bitcoins so far but Isn't that quite a lot of hardware ?

I'm not going to start mining these coins but where do you get this hardware from and is it expensive ?

That was sickening enough, but all the cars on the scene then manoeuvred around the lifeless body laying in the road and continued on their journey, other cars slowed down to pass the guy but didn't stop.

I'm pretty sure I saw a dead woman lying in the road once. The paramedics just left here there while they worked on the injured.

We didn't stop but the taxi did have to slow down a bit to drive around her.

I'm not 100% sure she was dead but she looked it and was being ignored by the rescue workers at the time we passed.

I guess you would class me as being in the 'other cars slowed down to pass' category as I didn't see the accident but was driving the same way.

What would you do ? Stop the car and then what ?

I wonder if there's any upcoming changes to the ASEAN countries as well as this recent G7 thing.

I wouldn't be surprised if the ASEAN changes are more generous than the G7 changes and I seem to remember reading something about it earlier in the year.

I heard the embassy staff buy them all up every time a new shipment arrives into Thailand.

Has anyone heard any update about this border crossing recently ?

Taxi from where ? Maybe people who stay at hotels in this part of town want to be in this part of town.

I've always managed to clear blockages by pouring various types of chemicals down there,and using a plunger an never really had a problem.

I posted something about this as recent as a few weeks ago in another thread somewhere on this forum.

This must have been some kind of bad omen because within days of making that post I got a serious blockage that would not be cleared using any of the previous methods.

I know the pipework where I live is adequate for wads of toilet paper as I've been here with only minor issues for just over a year now. At one point I had a cold and must have blew my nose dozens of times and I flushed it all and it all went down no problem.

I rapidly came to a conclusion about the recent blockage : I blame the girlfriend.

You can put any amount of toilet paper down the toilet without causing a serious blockage but one sanitary pad can potantially cause a block so bad physical action will need to be taken.

First we called someone out to empty the septic tank at the request of the guy who was going to do the unblocking.

There are two toilets in the house and they appear to have separate pipes which then join into a single pipe which goes into the tank - the blockage was in the single pipe after the individual pipes join as one so it was quite deep. I could tell this as when I plunged one of the toilets air bubbles came up into the other so the blockage was stronger than the pressure created by the plunger so the displaced water I plunged sent the air in the pipe by the route of least resistance which was back up the other toilet.

The guy with the electric snake came out, wasted his time trying to clear it with the small manual snake which is only good for blockages within about 60cm of the toilet.

This didn't work as the blockage was deeper.

So then he got his heavy duty electric snake thing out - this is an impressive piece of kit with reels of reasonably wide coiled metal. The coils were 5 Meters long and they were extendable by attaching another coil to the end of it. This is not something that's going to make it aound the u-bend in the toilet so you need direct access to the pipe in the floor.

He removed the toilet whch took a couple of minues then fed this thing down there, extended it and it cleared the pipe all the way into the tank.

Had he just removed the coil there would have been crap all over the bathroom but obviously this guy knows what he's doing as before he turned the machine into reverse to withdraw the pipe he stuck a hosepipe pumping water down the toilet pipe and used it to wash the coil as it came out.

Result : clean bathroom, unblocked pipe and both toilets working again. A professional job well done.

He put the toilet back in place with some sealant around the base and said don't use it for about 5 hours while the seal dries.

Sanitary pads were responsible for the cause of this serious blockage. It was working fine until she stuffed a few of those things down there.

I have avoided WD for the last 5 years - had a 50% failure rate within the first 6 months (10 drives failed out of 20).

I have 20 (estimate) WD drives and every month or every 2 month I go to the shop for a warranty claim.

This is interesting, it's the complete opposite to wht I've found. I've been using mainly Western Digital RE 4 Enterprise drives and I very rarely have any problem with them. Between myself and the guy who handles the hardware side of things in Europe we've been using WD for probably around 10 years now.

For backup servers I recently added 2 x 9 drive RAID6 arrays using the WD Red drives and it's been ok now for a few months. I have a 'hot spare' inside the machine for when one of them inevitably goes down. With these a light starts flashing when one drops out of the array and you just insert a fresh one as it rebuilds using the hot spare.

i'm American, so sorry for feeling the need to comment on all this. But why, if you live in Thailand would you even worry about UK health insurance? Covering yourself here under the best BUPA policy here is dirt cheap, certainly as cheap, if not cheaper than an airfare back to LHR. Private Thai hospitals rank up there with the best I've experienced back in the States. Out patient care is equally cheap as are prescription drugs. So maybe you guys have some emotional attachment to be treated in a British hospital, but I'm in a cultural befuddlement!

Well that all depends on how old you are when you first take out the policy doesn't it.

SWIFT commission, are you sure ?

There is a small fee at the sending and receiving banks but I've never paid a commission, in my experience SWIFT transfers are exchanged at the proper market rate.

The fee is normally pretty small (20 - 30 pounds or the equivalent depending on the bank).