Oh, I should have mentioned... I've been making payments via NFC on my Android phones for nearly three years. Actually, these days I'd say about 80% of my in-person retail purchases are made with my phone.

Bluetooth, USB, GSM/CDMA? Apple follows standards just fine when they need to.

Yep, once we hit 6 Mb per screen we should be all set... that's the speed compressed HD video moves at at most. Anything that moves faster than a 1080p screen can't be represented by humans that fast, until we get to 4Kx1080.

That's something that hit me quite recently: with an 80/20 Mbps VDSL2 line, I can honestly say it's "fast enough" for everything I do. My satellite STB has a semi-streaming mode, where it downloads a whole show and will start playing once it has enough to play through without pausing for buffering - and it always starts in seconds. Big downloads, I'm almost always limited by the far end anyway; they tend to take longer to install than to download anyway - so if I had the option of a faster link, would I actually get any benefit at all? Previously, I jumped on every increase: from dialup (pricey, even a 30 Mb download was an ordeal) to half-megabit cable modem (yay, I could grab hundred meg files overnight), to ADSL, ADSL2+ (nothing big enough to leave downloading overnight any more), 50 Mbps cable modem, getting a big improvement each time. (I even have the option of upgrading to 330/30 if I want, for a price ... and it really isn't tempting, in the way I would have jumped at any chance of better speeds before.)

The funny thing is, I recall a Labour MP here in the UK saying something comparably dim back in 1998! At that point, all we had was expensive metered dialup; I was in a group campaigning to change that, and happened to meet him at some event. His reply was that he "didn't think the Internet was a good idea". One of those moments I really, really wish I could have recorded!

Then dont use it. Pretty simple. There is no law that says you have to use any cloud service, so if you dont trust/like them, dont use them. And dont bitch about it when you choose to do so.

There's no law that says you have to drive a Ford. If you don't trust them, don't drive one. But don't bitch about it when it bursts into flames and kills you, when you choose to drive it.

So who "won" in the PC industry?

Dell -- revenues and profits declined so badly they went private?
HP - PC division is doing so bad they almost got rid of it.
IBM -- completely left the business
Compaq - Dead
Gateway - Dead

All those companies won. They made great profits from an important product. So what if many are no longer in business. Many steam engine companies are out of business. That doesn't mean that steam engines were bad and we should have invested more in horses or blimps. Life moves on.

'Losers' would be the likes of Commodore, Olivetti, Tandy, Atari, Amstrad

The Apple iPhone may yet end up as the Commodore Amiga of it's era.

There are standards. Japan is its own world, but the Google Wallet and ISIS (a consortium of mobile network operators and banks who created the ISIS wallet -- yes they're looking for a new name) relies on standard EMV payment protocols -- slightly modified by the US Visa, MC, AMEX and Discover organizations, but not incompatibly so. Apple will follow the EMV standards as well, or they'll get nowhere, because retailers are a slow-moving, cost-conscious group.

Visa and MasterCard announced two years ago that they'll implement the "liability shift" the end of 2015, which means that from 2016 onward 100% of fraud will be charged to whichever entity in the chain (merchant, merchant acquirer, clearing house, issuer) does not have the EMV smart chip technology implemented. Since merchants get stuck with 98% of fraud, and other links in the chain are moving slowly, this will provide a huge incentive for merchants to install EMV-capable point of sale terminals. That doesn't require them to deploy NFC-capable terminals, but they will, and many of them are.

Not even Apple is capable of creating an entirely new payment ecosystem. They'll play ball with the banks and card associations, or they'll go nowhere.

Ah, you have no sense of humor. That explains a great deal.

Traction, yes. Broad attention, no.

Bah.

It's got nothing to do with intelligence, or even knowledge in a general sense. It's that his comics so often rely on specialized knowledge. For example, a couple of my favorite strips are the "sudo" strip and the "Bobby Tables" strip. The former is only understandable to someone who has at least a passing acquaintance with *nix system administration, and the latter requires some knowledge of SQL and SQL injection attacks. Neither of those things is hard to understand. They don't require great intelligence. But they're not generally known. And to people who require an explanation, they're not funny (I have t-shirts of both, and I have never gotten so much as a chuckle from anyone to whom I have to explain the basis for the jokes).

You'll note, of course, that I'm not actually addressing your real point, which is a snarky argument that only people who like to feel themselves smarter or more knowledgeable than most would enjoy the strip. That's because it's not worth addressing.

Anand first review was about an Amd....

Really, because Anand site first article was about his Amd processor...

I should have qualified this to point out I'm talking about his comics, more than What If. HIs What If series is very accessible, by design.

Sure, as long as your stick figures are saying and doing incredibly witty things.

Actually, Munroe's success is really surprising to me in spite of the brilliance of his work, because so much of what he draws is accessible to a relatively narrow audience. Not all of it, not even the majority. But there's enough that is only understandable to people who know more than most about computers, mathematics, physics, etc., that none of the non-geeks I know really like it.

Exactly what I came here to say. Well put.