I was very tempted and almost bought it during the amazon prime sale when it was $120.

My parents just bought a cheap unlocked phone, the one here

Yea its lower end for sure than the huawei honor 5x but for $59.99 its a very good value seems like a really nice phone for the price. Screen is very nice I wasn't sure if 720p on a 5" screen would look good but it looks just fine.

Also another phone with similar specs to the Huwei honor 5x would be the Moto G (4th gen) for $150

Don't worry about the "with offers & ads" as you can just remove the deal of the day widget and use a lockscreen app to load a custom lock screen to get rid of the ads.

The reason for valve collecting your tax information is because a law congress passed around 2013 or 2014, which requires payment processors such as credit card processing companies (including paypal and amazon payments) to collect your tax information if or when you hit 200 transactions or $20,000+ in sales, whichever comes first and issue you the IRS tax form 1099-K. It is my understanding that it is not relayed to the IRS unless you actually exceed the 20k/yr.

The reason for it is because there were Taxi drivers and other businesses accepting credit cards and yet never reporting their earnings as income. The funny thing though is with a closed on the steam market you are just essentially trading lets say a 3 cent crate for steam money which you will then later put towards a game or in-game item etc. No $ is ever directly exchanged between the buyer and seller on the community market. It's actually kind of funny because it seems that valve could have side-stepped this whole thing by calling it steam bucks or steam points instead of USD.

It's rather silly because lets say you sell a crate to someone for 3 cents on the market, or you could sell it to them for 1 rec. Both the 3 cents and the 1 rec hold the same purchasing power, but one is monitored by the government and one isn't.

Please tell that to the IRS. Valve is still required by law to collect your social security number (for tax reasons in the US) if you sell more than 200 items or $20,000+ in a year on the steam community market. Yes, even selling 200x 3 cent crates for a total of $6 will get your steam market blocked for the rest of the year unless you hand over your SSN. Yet there is no direct way to cash out, so why would that information need to be provided to the IRS for tax reasons when the steam wallet $ can not be withdrawn to your bank account? And all you can do is use that virtual money to buy more virtual items.

Really now. So lets say if I started a new lotto (and rolled it out at all convenience stores across the country) where lets say each lotto ticket is $1. But you are guaranteed to get 1 cent back at minimum, or instead of the 1 cent maybe like 1 small piece of candy or gum, then its not gambling by definition? If its not gambling then even 10 year olds can irresponsible spend all of their allowance (or steal their parents money) and play lotto at the 7-11, and thats totally fine? I think there are lots of grey areas, and the whole case opening thing would probably have to be challenged in court to see if a judge or jury considers it gambling (which is regulated by US law.)

LOL valve doesn't care. Money is money. Unboxing is gambling, and by putting it into a game that kids play they are encouraging kids to gamble by unboxing.

Exactly. The only reason valve is starting to act like they give a shit about these 3rd party sites is because of the recent class action law suits filed against them and CS GO lotto and a few other sites. CS GO lotto though was on another level, not only was it illegal rigged gambling, but also they were shilling for their own site without any FTC disclosure statements saying they own the site and have a financial interest in the site.

I'm not sure if valve will be able to completely kill off gambling though, as some sites may still be able to operate through countries that don't really respect US gambling laws. I suppose they can just ban API calls from specific sites and stuff, but I'm sure there are ways around that.

Skins > bitcoins might work.

Thanks got them cause the plether ones on my ATH-M50X's are wearing down and are a bit hot maybe these will be better. According to CamelCamelCamel 99% of the time these sell for $19.5 or more with one price drop to $12 on one sale in the past. So $13 is pretty darn good + I have 10% off Amazon through my discover card.

Disable push to talk and use voice activation so people can hear your every comm, swearing, keyboard and mouse noises etc.

When I use to play a lot of Day of Defeat Source back in the day, I'd randomly change my name all the time. Then one time I picked slayer with $ sign for the hell of it because I enjoyed the Halo game mode slayer. Then I left it that way for a few days / a few weeks and people in the community recognized me by it so it stuck.

Then I recently started using dollarlayer 'cause that's how the mumble announcer lady says it, and myself and other tf2 friends thought it was funny and would sometimes call me dollar layer.

Select decline to the TOS when it appears and it will take you back to Win 7.

they have no love for pay per minute customers :(

Saw this on slickdeals. Best buy has the Logitech G303 Daedalus Apex Optical Gaming Mouse for $25 + Free In Store pickup. Link to Best Buy.. That is quite an outstanding price for this mouse which normally goes for $40-50. Thought I'd pass on the deal for anyone looking to try out a new mouse or in need of a replacement mouse.

I've used this mouse for about 6 months and I like it, and even bought a backup to use if/when this fails.

But a few things to note about it:

1) It has a very low LOD (Lift off distance). So if you pick up your mouse slightly or drag it slightly on an angle with the sensor lifted up partially this mouse won't track any movement more than about 1mm off the mosuepad. I used previously a Logitech G400 which would still register movement about 1/4" or 5-6mm or so above the mousepad. It definitely takes some getting used to if you lift up your mouse a lot, or are used to a high LOD mouse.

2) The shape isn't the best. Shape might be a little awkward at first, but IMO its fine after you're used to it.

3) Great sensor, buttons, response time, fully adjustable RGB backlighting. Very sold mouse if you take my 1&2 points into consideration.

lol I was actually calculating it for 10% originally but wrote 20%. mb. Edited.

But just because GO has 18 skill ranks and TF2 has 16 player ranks, doesn't mean that there actually will be or even need to be 16 actual MMR ranks for TF2. For example 6 players in a group queue together, they are ranked at various ranks but their average rank is 13/16. It can pool them together into a game on a skill scale of 1 to 5. 1 being noobie and 5 being very good and place them into a level 4 skilled game. Their win or loss, or overall performance relative to the ranks of the other players will then determine how much XP they gain or lose.

Let's do some basic math here since Muselk seems unable to provide much math to support his claim.

TF2 has an average player base of 50,000 players per day on at any given time. Now lets use Muselks assumption that up to 20% are interested in comp, but for arguments sake lets say 10%. So we have 5,000 players playing at any given time. Now lets assume there are 3 main global regions (NA, EU, Asia).

NA would represent the largest player base, and based upon the total steam bandwidth usage, NA accounts for almost exactly 50% of total global steam related bandwidth. So that would put the NA player base at ~2500 players playing comp at any given time. Now lets assume there might be 5 different main skill levels for the games matchmaking and balancing. So that would account for an average of 500 players in each skill level group on average That's enough for over 40 6v6 games on average per skill level in NA at any given time, many more than that during peak hours, and far fewer during off peak hours.

This math is using several assumptions for player base, and the percentage of players that will regularly play comp. Actual figures will vary, but its a decent ball park estimate. This also does not take into consideration any increased hype, marketing efforts, further tf2 updates that expand the overall player base.

In my opinion TF2 official comp can succeed if valve wants it to. If they actually put effort into it and throw some money into it, perhaps sponsor a few tournaments etc. If they continue to have just a few devs dragging their heels developing little to nothing, then it will be a fail.

I agree that if you removed rng from the smg and pistol, you would have to decrease the damage it does at least at longer distances. 2-3 damage per tick at long range vs the current 8. Otherwise a perfectly accurate pistol at long range for 8 damage a tick would be dumb. I'm all for making the game more aim based and less random based (the very reason bullet spread, random spread and random crits are off in comp), but you can't just turn rng off without balancing the damage fall-off.

Here in the US, DHS = Department of Homeland Security lol

tf.tv = twitter now. Interesting.