Exactly; homeopathy is quackery, but there are plenty of supplements in their aisles that have been shown to be effective.

Try reporting the theft of one of your MMORPG characters' best sword and see how much attention the police pay you.

"While nothing is 100% certain, I know I would feel a hell of a lot more secure with $100,000 in cash in a fireproof safe, or even at a bank, than I would with the same amount in BitCoins sitting in an exchange or even in "cold storage" that's based on untested (and obviously flawed) protocols and trust in a completely unregulated private company in another country (or even our own)."

The vast majority of bitcoin conspiracy theorists feel the same, they just won't admit it.

I have never heard of any residential mortgage agreement having an acceleration clause tied to a change in debt/equity ratio. Do you have any citations for this? By the way, even if such a clause existed, it was something you contracted for, so it's not like it was completely out of the blue.

"Trying to get more people educated in a field by saying "we need more people with STEM degrees!" is like saying I need more people who know how to run. I don't want someone who knows how to run, I want someone who loves running." And I want a billion dollars, a private island, and a private masseuse. I'm not going to complain when I don't get it, though. What you should reasonably expect when you hire is someone who will do the job you pay them reasonably well and be a net asset to your company; most people don't "want" to work, they work to live. Expecting them to find spiritual fulfillment in helping your company do whatever it is it does is unreasonable.

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.