Is it getting closer? It didn't look THAT BIG yesterday!!
Sure that would be scary.

Here in Chile... I think only elderly people still uses cheques.

Here a PIN is mandatory, but a receipt can still be printed and signed, you know, for American tourists ;-)

In here Electronic Transfer between regular people is INSTANTANEOUS.

We have a system called PATPASS, and, again, is instantaneous, you can connect, for example, to your Internet Provider, and see your bill listed as "payed" right after you paid through your bank.

Same thing here, including the fact that you can get cash-change while you pay.

In Chile, as I said earlier, hard cash is mostly used by older people, or in very small shops, like kiosks... even in craft markets you can use plastic money.

Banks in Chile are very closely and strongly regulated by government agencies. That allows the banks to have a standardized interop system.
Maybe the problem with the US lies within its state-government organization... with every State having its own bank regulation, making it very difficult to interact... I'm only guessing here.

Well... communications between the machine and the credit issuer IS encrypted, so no worries about the use of WiFi network as a transport layer. (although now that I think of it, I might be wrong and it uses only GPRS and not WiFi, I remember once being ask to get closer to the windows in a bar with a train station theme - lots of iron)

You must enter a PIN every time the card is swiped, so, no hassle or worries checking every entry on the card statement looking for possible misuse. (at least from restaurants... there is always the Internet use issue).
Nowadays here you don't give your credit card (the plastic) to anyone, as every machine (portable or not) is designed to be swiped by the customer himself, so it is less probable to be cloned.
I must say I'm being unfair, because I recognize it is much easier to make the use of PIN codes mandatory, within a few months, in a country with less than a million card issued than in a country of... I dunno... 200 million cards(?)

Tip can be included on the card, as a separate item, at the time you enter the PIN.

Same thing here in Chile, waiter comes to the table with a little WiFi or GPRS credit card machine.
No chip on credit card though, all PIN based.

Why are you still using handwriting signatures for credit cards?

Have you ever heard about PIN Codes?.

Who is under-developed now? eh? ;-).

greetings form South America.

Excuse my ignorance. But, on what grounds, shooting is considered educational?

Sounds suspiciously similar to the Chilean Net neutrality law. :-)
Greetings from the south cone.

If the axis is perfectly oriented to the geographic north pole, then there is no problem.

Hundreds of coloring pages for my kid.
Cheap!... a cartridge of black ink lasts forever.

first to post, wins!

There... FTFY.

Erased by lightning... it's Alive!! ^H^H^H^H erased!!

Most DVD now can play downloaded content, like movies or series encoded in Xvid.

Also, there's a lot of competition from on-line content players like the Boxee Box, that can even play blu-ray content stored on hard disk. I can't see how stand-alone Blu-ray players would be able to beat that.

Death penalty? I guess only in Texas :-)