"Cruise through a neighborhood"? Really? Dude, NFC has an effective range measured in millimeters, so to "cruise through the neighborhood scanning cards, you'd have to be cruising through people's living rooms.

And the transaction still have to be uploaded and processed by the merchant service. There is no magic money machine in your phone. Really.

The bogus "transaction" is done offline. At that point, nothing has happened, no money has changed hands, and none will until it is uploaded.

When it is uploaded, it becomes an online transaction and goes through all the usual security checks, including card limits, and the money gets deposited in the bank account attached to the merchant account.

Contrary to what Hollywood might like you to believe, the cell phone used as an offline POS station cannot magically put money in to your bank account.

The way that most credit card thefts work is that someone working in the store gets the card number to be used somewhere else to buy stuff that's easily fenced.

The chip cards prevent that (easily, anyway).

The only thing that "someone in the store" can do with this is get an offline transaction that will be rejected when uploaded, and if it isn't, the store gets the money, not the minimum wage employee who did the dirty deed. And it doesn't take very many challenged transactions before the store loses their merchant account.

Sounds like if you can find a store that is currently offline (which is rare) you can rip off the store for goods purchased, and that's about it.

It's useless for the thief to directly charge a card unless the thief also has a merchant account, which are not exactly trivial to sign up for, what with credit checks and all.

And these people obviously have no clue how offline transactions actually work. They're held in the POS station until they get uploaded, where they get all the normal verifications before they are processed and the money deposited in the merchant's account.

Other than ripping off a merchant in some way (and that would require a coordinated effort on the part of someone with a portable card reader and someone else at the cash register), there is no risk here whatsoever. Nothing but FUD, deliberately fostering hysteria to sell advertising. In other words, in the world of "journalism", it's a day that ends in "y".

I'll trust Visa more not because they've been at it a while, but because the law gives me a good deal of protection against fraud. CurrentC does not use credit cards, it requires direct access to your checking account. That means none of the legal protections against fraud that apply to credit cards. It also means that if their servers get breached, and that bank account information is stolen, the thieves aren't stealing money from the bank, and the bank responsible for getting it back, but rather, they're stealing my money from my bank account, and it's up to me to get it back. And my bank isn't responsible, and the merchant probably isn't either, according to their terms of service, and the people behind CurrentC are likely a shell corporation with nothing to sue them for.

CurrentC looks, to me, like the biggest bucket of bad ideas in the history of electronic payment.

1. One of the terms of service is exclusivity - if you use CurrentC, you can't use any other kind of mobile wallet system.

2. It is more like a debit card than a credit card - the money comes directly out of your bank account.

3. As such, it has none of the legal protections that a credit card has. With a debit card, pretty much all banks offer the same protection on debit cards anyway, because it's good for their business. CurrentC won't be run by banks, it will be run by some of the largest retailers in the country - Walmart, etc. None of the political pressures that keep banks on the straight and narrow apply.

4. CurrentC requires - cannot possibly work without - that you give the retailer all the information needed to take as much money as they choose directly from your bank account. These are the same retailers who have had hundreds of millions of credit card numbers stolen from their servers in the last couple of years. They have proven, conclusively, that they cannot be trusted.

5. CurrentC is about more than just transaction fees. It is also about turning the customer into a product - they require a lot of personal information that is completely irrelevant to the transaction - like health information (which they are also incapable of protecting) - to set up the account.

6. CurrentC is based on QR Codes, which is just stupid.

I'll go back to carrying cash before I use a mess like that. Or barter. Or growing my own food on a mountain top somewhere.

Did Twitter kick you out again?

You are, in fact, saying libel and slander laws (which specifically sanction the person who speaks or writes them) are bullshit.

Which is to say, you're go stupid you have no idea what you're saying.

Or Sex Box. Because "Naked Dating" was such a smash hit.

Dude, you missed the best part, at the end, when they're driving a Ferrari under the jet liner that's flying eight feet off the runway, with the copilot sitting on the lowered landing gear dangling an Ethernet cable down to the car so they could grab a copy of the magic software off the plane's flight systems.

It was so ridiculous, I kept looking for Bruce Campbell with a chainsaw for a hand. What made it funny was how earnest they were about it all. How anyone could keep a straight face long enough to finish a single scene, I don't know. Funniest new show of the season. Far funnier than any of the comedies, like Two and a Half Years Past When It Should Have Been Canceled And The Entire Cast Put in a Home. Or Mysteries of Laura, which is based on the premise that using police powers to blackmail your children (who had been kicked out of preschool for peeing on each other) in to a new preschool, then drugging the children to keep them quiet while interviewing with the headmistress, well, that's the funniest shit on television.

In Hollywood, however, it's called "a day that ends in 'y'."

"Based on a true story" means "based on the title of a book that you might recognize." If you don't know that, you should be kept in a home for the mentally insufficient, for your own safety.

Why would they? It doesn't make any difference whatsoever if the producers (or network) believe him in any way. It doesn't matter how credible he is.. All that matters is if they think they can sell more advertising during the show than they think they could during a different show. They thought they could.

I expect they're wrong on that, But that's hardly unusual, either.

I think you have mistaken me for someone of your own species, living in your own world. I'd tell you to smoke less dope, but I suspect the real problem is not enough drugs, rather than too much.

In any event, dude, have fun.

There's no point in submitting them for publication in a format that nobody is going to bother to read. PDFs are nice for stuff that's going to be printed. They're marginal on a desktop sized screen. They're utterly useless on a bookreader sized screen.

And PDFs can't be converted to other formats worth a damn, DRM or not.

You've clearly never tried to read a PDF on a book reader with a small screen.

"Think" is not the word I would use to describe what they do. But yeah, that's how they believe.