Your mom, who never played them? I strongly suspect this is just a case of content creators expecting the "content consumers" to have an attention span of under 30s, similarly to what happens with "Lost" or "Star Trek" fans bashing the product for not being consistent with itself.

Just shut up and buy, damn it!

The thing is fraud is just not making a dent in their finances to bother. Even with mag stripe the PIN is checked in real time with your bank for any non-trivial transaction, you could have any type of one-time-pass device for ATM transactions (or for purchases over let's say $100 or similar): paper, SMS, token, smartphone offline app, etc. You could have two cards, one without mag stripe. But no, that's just not possible. Even getting one card but without the mag stripe is not possible. I've been thinking to just go ahead and wipe with a magnet the stripe on one of my cards just to be on the safe side. Any experience/tips? I assume just using a strong magnet a couple of times on the stripe would do.

We all know there is no security without physical security.
But let's forget about that for a second.
Even if you make it ueber-secure (not like today when in many Samsung devices the IMEI is actually in some obfuscated file in the efs partition!) and you really manage to bound each device to an IMEI you still have the challange of managing the blacklist/"nuke from the orbit" authorization list.

It costs 5-10-15EUR to send a box full with phones across Europe, and no customs at all if it's within EU.
You need to have (at least) EU-wide database. How do you manage that? What recourse you have if you bought your phone in Germany, you leave in Belgium and it gets blacklisted by an operator in Bulgaria based on some typo from a dodgy police station in village? How can you argue that (hint: they don't even use the latin alphabet in Bulgaria)?

We had enough of this country-coded DVDs and network locked phone and all the crap. Any more of this and will give (another) unfair advantage to your operator: the only safe phones will be the ones bought directly, they know for sure it's legit. Anything else is a risk.

The real way out here is just to have police go after the thieves. Even the older phones could be tracked well enough and with some social engineering (if you had access to the list of calls) you could find out who has the phone without any GPS or camera and whatnot. However, they just don't bother even if you give them the position of the phone within meters, inside a single-house and a picture of the user.

You are correct, except for the fact that carrier locks are country based. They are not (I think they are bound to MCC+MNC of the IMSI), in fact this is how most people learn their phone is locked, they go abroad and try a local prepaid SIM.

Maybe they injure themselves worse on the weekend?

Sure, first reader is 119.99$ and the second one 250 EUR, yay for people with more money than sense!

Of course if you pay enough somebody will make you some adapter to shove data into the iPhone despite iPhone's lack of connectivity (not only over wifi but there are some adapters that use the microphone analog input to send data to the iphone!). All that because of SPP Apple refuses to implement, even if it's present basically everywhere else since more than 10 years ago (yes, that includes mobile OSes like Windows Mobile 2003, symbian, etc).

I think the program GP has in mind is Torque (that can read OBD 2 data and do many other things).
iphone lacks the serial port profile for bluetooth so it's quite a sure bet it can't do that.

x-ray the burrito seems to be the correct answer (no joke).

As a side-note I've seen at some point a sign saying "no food" before the screening area. I was a bit amused; however later on a half eaten sandwich comes in one of the boxes where you are supposed to put your watch or belt to be X-Rayed ....

Not EU, UK maybe.

Oops!

There was a problem starting Bananabread. Please see the Troubleshooting section below for more information.

Technical Details: WebGL is missing.
=======
That much about web based apps that just work.
Wiki says:
"Mozilla Firefox - WebGL has been enabled on all platforms that have a capable graphics card with updated drivers since version 4.0"

Last firefox, ati 5770, what the heck?

...that they didn't shot him 7 times in the head:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menezes

In the US reselling licenses is not been held up as legal.

Really? Says who, Microsoft? Of course, not long ago they would claim you can't even donate the PC and trash the OS; look for " It is a legal requirement that pre-installed operating systems remain with a machine for the life of the machine. If a company or individual donates a machine to your school, it must be donated with the operating system that was installed on the PC. "

Not only it was buying OEM version (if you found a vendor) 100% legit all the time (even if presumably frown upon) but reselling+splitting the OEM license from the original hardware was uphold in courts already (look for OEM windows on German ebay for example).
It's not that bad (for M$) because they still have a Microsoft tax on most retail laptops and now they probably won't repeat the "long-lived XP mistake" but I'm sure they were for quite a few years scared shitless by the spectre of a sane 2nd hand market for "used OEM Windows" flooded with all the licenses coming from broken PCs 3-4-5 years old.

No, not unless the device sells better than the iphone; they concentrate on round generic connectors.
This "usb-like" power connector will be most likely patented to hell and back and even if you might find some adapter on ebay for sure you won't find it in any brick and mortar store.

And it doesn't?!
Even netbooks from 2008 have LED backlit screen, possibly by now it isn't even worth mentioning.