This is slashdot, where most posters don't believe nuclear waste can be harmful to anyone you commie pinko liberal terrorist.

Next time there's a Slashdot story where the consensus among the wise, assembled community (who always have mysterious insight above and beyond the people behind the technology in question) is It'll-Never-Work, just remember this article.

We're talking about a technology that is 20 years old, deployed globally and (based on the complete absence of negative comments from current users) a universally accepted improvement upon the system it replaced.

And the running theme from the (let's face it : primarily American) contingent in the comments is It-Can-Never-Work, It's-Hopelessly-Flawed and What-Idiot-Invented-This.

Slashdot is a special place.

For this to be a new system you need to travel back to 1992 when France adopted it.

Anyway, it can't ever be purely proximity based (like the contactless payments systems that you are presumably worried about) because it requires your PIN to authorise the transaction. Since its challenge/response there is presumably little benefit to eavesdropping on one transaction - you're not going to capture anything that will allow you to perform additional transactions in future.

The first proper credit card in the US was 1958, the first outside the US was 1966 (according to Wikipedia). I'm not sure that an 8 year head start investment of infrastructure from 50 years ago is a plausible explanation.

It's easy to make excuses to save national face, but given the massive fraud reduction that chip and pin brings the likely result is that you have spent the last 10 years or so paying for the increased credit fraud in the US through charges or through increased interest rates on credit card debt.

Someone has dragged the process out for their own gain and they'll do it again next time round if you accept it.

Chip and pin is not proximity based. You put your card in a handset and enter your pin to authorise the transaction like at a cashpoint. The handset never gets access to the PIN in the card, only the one you enter on the pad. It's genuinely surprising that there is still somewhere where this is not the standard. I can't remember the last time I had to sign for a card transaction.

Strong patent protection is a characteristic of the steepest technology jump in human history. The 20th century saw technological innovation increase exponentially, frequently driven by well-funded R&D departments at large corporations. They would not have developed these things without patent protection because it would put them out of business. I have never heard a plausible explanation of how a company that spends a billion dollars developing a technology can compete if their competitors can undersell them simply because they don't have to recoup the R&D budget.

And while the Constitution does not mandate copyright and patent laws, it does legitimize it, removing the argument that implementing them is violative of free speech.

There's no proof that they aren't. And legally they are enshrined in the Constitution.

That would be horrific to the parties involved; someone trying to recover under a contract in New York should have to go to Hawaii? Litigation is expensive enough without multiplying the cost like that.

"The point of the patent system (as I understand it at least) is to ensure that information doesn't get lost."

Nah, the purpose of the patent system is to encourage invention.

"Since we can't test for obviousness, both the patent office and the courts have decided to ignore obviousness, thus destroying any possible usefulness of a patent system."

That doesn't really compute there. You're assuming both that patents never work without things going to litigation, that when they are litigated that it's only about "obviousness," and that in every patent case (the vast majority of which I am sure you are unfamiliar with) the courts "ignore" obviousness.

Interesting! I had the opposite situation; read Neuromancer a couple of times but tried Cryptonomicon twice and just couldn't get through it. Just found it tedious.

I used to swing back and forth between Windows and Linux, but honestly the past few years it's been all Windows. Windows 7 and Windows 8 are actually decent OSes, plus they run the software I need and the games and media that I want.

I also blame sysadmins who frequently don't understand that security is contextual; you do not need the same level of password complexity for a gardening forum or slashdot that you need for your bank account. But you still see ridiculous requirements for low-security sites.

This should convince anyone that open source linux software can compete with windows, given 22 years.

Actually voiding a contract is a term of art in the law and refers to a court finding that a valid contract never existed. Just because the terms were never fulfilled doesn't mean the contract didn't exist; the contract isn't the completed transaction, it's essentially a binding promise on both parties to perform. Just because performance wasn't made doesn't mean the promise never existed.

Arguing that the contract is void is basically trying to say that the promise never existed, and is a defense by the breaching party to invalidate the contract (and thus not be responsible for fulfilling its terms), not the plaintiff in a breach of contract action.