Online voting and vote by mail present essentially identical issues for vote selling. And if you have to sign your name on or inside the envelope containing the vote by mail then it presents exactly the same secret ballot issues as online voting as well. That leaves security. I'd guess your vote by mail system uses photocopies on easily procured papers, yes?

Everything of interest to me happens in some other forum. I only see the ACM name attached to something about once a year and I generally abandon the effort to view it at the paywall.

Sticks and stones. I'd rather face honest anger than than a disingenuous veneer of reasonableness. And this isn't the first (or second or third) time in the last couple years GCC has been found to have optimized something into wrong code.

Taxes pay to print cash. They could pay to run the transaction system.

Cards could carry a monthly fee that covers up to some number of transactions.

Transactions consisting solely of splitting or combining cards could be made free while transactions consisting of the purchase of goods or services continue to carry a fee.

There are any number of ways to set up the system where one activity or another carries no fee. When I write a check I pay no fee. The bank makes its money off me other ways.

Maybe. Certainly with today's approach.

So a guy walking around with an artificial leg, a plastic heart valve, dentures and google glass ISN'T a cyborg? What is?

Seriously?

By the parent using the parent's bank card. By the kid splitting a larger card so he can give some amount to his buddy or combining several cards he got from his buddies.

I'm against a cashless society but not because there's any practical obstruction to it working. There isn't.

Shame you don't understand logical fallacies.

"Appeal to consequences" means an argument that something must be false because the consequences would be bad. I made no such argument. I said, "we'd better be damn sure we're right" before undertaking an effort with such negative consequences.

Unproven is not the same as false, nor is disputing unfounded conclusions the same as calling the conclusions untrue. This is one of the central fallacies that the alarmists have been perpetrating: that anyone who says, "hold on, it looks like you should investigate this a little more thoroughly" is a "denier" claiming that the hypotheses are false.

Climate alarmists may yet find sufficient scientific evidence to justify drastic action. I claim only that the ringing of the alarm bells is premature and I even suggest a form of acceptable evidence which, if found, would sustain the yet unproven claims.

Unfortunately science only works when scientists are at liberty to try as hard as they can to demonstrate counter-examples to your theory. The whole "denier" politics discourages folks from asking the questions scientists must ask in order to sustain or refute the hypotheses on the table. Your politics have gotten in the way of actually proving whether you're right.

Not exactly. When someone with good credit pays off his "cash back" card at the end of the month, the bank passes on a portion of the merchant fees. That's the "cash back."

Of course, if you use your card as an unsecured loan for longer than the billing cycle then you pay interest. And if you're late paying you pay late fees. You're a fool to do that in anything but a dire emergency, and your parents, friends and colleagues have warned you about it all your life, but you're free to live your life any way you want to.

What would we like about the dollar coin? Except by sight it's nearly indistinguishable from a quarter worth, well, a quarter of what a dollar is worth. And when we see it... it's ugly. I want to see George Washington on my dollars, not obscure companions of explorers however worthy they may be.

I do think it'd be reasonable to replace the penny and nickle with a better designed $1 coin and a $5 coin. Then the new system of cash transactions in tenths of a dollar instead of hundredths of a dollar would make sense and the universe wouldn't end because of it.

Pre-paid debit card.

No approach to "programming" for normal people ever has allowed normal people to go beyond the canned capabilities. Excel macros are as far out of reach.

But why would this be surprising or unreasonable? Most people can't change the oil in their car either, or replace the stereo. And most of those who can can't make engine repairs. It'd be absurd to suggest this reflects faulty thinking on the part of car manufacturers.

We are talking about something "regular" people can do.

Regular people can build web apps. It's called "Microsoft Sharepoint."