Apologies Stan, I didn't mean to imply that I thought AGS was not being used as expected.  My intent was to address the more general discontent some hold regarding planned release dates and other specific adaptations to initial plans.

As you just quoted: "...Anything is fair game that we believe will grow the value of PTS and all DACs that honor the contributions of PTS and AGS holders.  That said, these are pure donations for which your only expectation must be that we will use our best judgement to apply them toward these purposes."  Thus anyone who "feels they were sold a false bill of goods" I think failed to understand the arrangement, for one reason or other.

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The problem with Bitshares is they started selling a product before they had one, and have had no problem taking money all along the way promoting whatever is currently being worked on.  As such, there are many people who feel they were sold a false bill of goods.  Those people can upturn the apple cart pretty badly if they sue Invictus, which will make the project very difficult to complete.

The problem of course with Invictus is there is no escape valve for the funds invested in the venture, so they don't care about investors. They already have the funds.  They just want to be left alone to work, which would be fine except they're still taking time to promote and network and pivot the vision based on what they think is right, but it's very seat-of-the-pants and makes me nervous. 

Mostly though, I think a lot of us feel like we are trapped.  Whether in PTS or AGS, selling now is to your detriment and Invictus can keep this up for as long as they want, individual supporters have no option but to wait.

I think this is somewhat legitimate criticism, but I think it largely comes from either a failure of III to communicate the initial arrangement or a failure of investors to understand it.  Bytemaster is an idealist I think, and part of his dream is a post-contract society.  The "investment" model here is based on that vision, so it's structured as donations based on personal trust between individuals.  The open discussion of plans on this forum I think are not intended as promises to investors, but as collaboration and relationship/consensus building between individuals.  Those who saw it this way to begin with and thought they were investing in the people involved and in their visions I think are generally happy.  Many of those coming from a more traditional investment perspective I think are not happy.

Personally, I think the people involved in this are generally trustworthy, talented, and have a valuable vision they're trying to bring to reality.  I certainly don't see Bytemaster as the sort of programmer/economist god that some of the cult-like attitudes I see around here would suggest, but I think he and the rest of the team are making good progress pursuing good goals, and I trust them enough to invest time and resources in their success.

Can I get a refund on the double transaction I sent to the AGS address a month or two ago?  Sent 2kPTS when I only intended to send 1k, blockchain reflects the mistake (it was two TX, one sent the day before the other sent the day after but I closed the client apparently before it broadcast because they were both picked up in the same block when I fired the second one) but I figured the rules were the rules and it was my mistake.

If we're fixing mistakes, I'd be happy to get my 1k PTS back.

The rules are that usage of AGS donations is entirely at III discretion, as they're donations.  In this case I guess they think the best use of some that donation is to show grace to somewhat diminish the consequences of this error.  They would have every right to do the same in your case, or to do nothing.

It is not technically possible to return AGS.  III has no obligation to do anything about this, but since use of donations is entirely at III discretion, they could take the top 1120 PTS or so of the donation and distribute it to today's donors (including ebit) to decrease their losses.

I'm not saying they should do anything, but if they decide they should, this is the approach I would recommend.

Can there be known numbers where S1,S2 have the same HASH(S)? If yes, delegates can use this to cheat. Say the number is SH. Say I always publish SH and choose S1 or S2 to reveal if I'm the last one in the round. How can I reduce this risk?

This is technically possible, but is cost/time prohibitive.  The entire BTC proof of work system is basically based on how impossible it would be to do this sort of thing.

We're all still learning all this stuff, since much of it has never been done before, so don't take my words as authoritative. 

What I'd like to see similar to this is a Keyhotee based VPN, and Keyhotee key secured remote access.  Combined with decentralized storage, I think this could offer more functionality, as well as finer granularity of control than Active Directory.

There's an old project to manage OpenSSH key lookups through the PGP Web of Trust, but I think Keyhotee would be much more elegant for this sort of thing: http://web.monkeysphere.info/

Keyhotee based logins to the local machine would be great, but to be secure I think it would require using a phone or other trusted device to pass the credentials.

It sounds like your BitShares-PTS client may have stalled connections.  Try restarting it to fix this, and you can also confirm if this is the problem by checking the number of blocks processed by your client and comparing to a block explorer.  You can also look at the transaction details for the unconfirmed transaction in your client and see how many nodes it's been broadcast to.