Spies.

Ah, Americans talking about Canadian healthcare. It's like hearing from an old, crazy friend.

(For the record, Canadian healthcare is awesome. Consider any metrics from Americans who haven't lived there to be very likely cherry-picked to support their ideology.)

Please? How much more complicated do we have to make it before we do what the rest of the civilized world is doing?

I know Americans like to be different but it's gone too far.

Until you need to leave during peak time and find your battery depleted.

...but let's just ignore that and come up with conspiracy theories.

Games, both downloaded and on optical media, are likely to be encrypted eight ways to Sunday on modern systems. Before you can even begin to emulate games from a modern console, you need the unencrypted binaries, or you need to resign yourself to running community-developed homebrew. This means extracting the console key from a console, which is not likely to be a trivial matter.

I'd be OK with it as long as I could annoy Jean-Luc.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're already doing this. An Android fork does take time, though.

Wouldn't retailers be required to treat these transactions as "Card Not Present" transactions, meaning that far fewer would accept them?

I believe the liability is increased to the merchant if they just accept a CC number + expiration + CVV, to which accepting this would be functionally equivalent.

Not having to deal with (nearly as much) BS is why I work for a startup.

Look but don't touch.

God, you mention a possible solution to corruption and people start complaining "but there are so many variables!" Yes, yes there are. Politics is complicated.

If we're going to block every idea because it's not simple enough, we're simply going to be paralyzed, and I'm not a fan of that course of action.

False dichotomy. The government should provide public campaign financing with reasonable rules as to who can access the funds.