I use precisely such a device with my online banking. The point about the fob would be convenience, really. Only one thing to carry around with you... having to carry the card reader around with you to access online banking sucks.

What's to stop someone building a portable high power RFID reader, strapping it round their waist and walking around some crowded places like train stations and taking a small amount from anyone who got within range?

Because you'd have to accompany it with your PIN.

A number of people are taking banks to court over bank charges, claiming they're unfair. If they ultimately get their way (a recent court defeat isn't the end of the matter), the banks aren't going to accept the loss of their biggest cash cow overnight. They'll come up with something else.

Yeah, this is what I find rather depressing about this situation. The people doing this are stupid. They're gonna wind up ending free banking in the UK (for people smart enough not to go into unauthorized overdrawal), which sucks even more than the current situation.

What I'd like to see would involve a fundamental overhaul of things.

Banks shouldn't issue you with a card - they should issue you with a fob. This fob would contain an RFID chip and you could top it up to make small transactions, which would be made by putting the fob near a reader and entering your accompanying PIN. In addition, the fob could display a new number every 30 seconds or so, allowing good security for online banking. This would replace cheques for all businesses, even small ones, who could shell out for a machine allowing you to use your fob to pay them (if they're too cheap to do that, they shouldn't be in business). As for paying individuals (and in addition, another way to pay small businesses) - electronic funds transfer, and you could hand them a printout of the confirmation of the transfer. Cash also remains an option.

I'm sure we could replace the cheque with more secure, modern methods, if we actually tried hard enough.

Anyone have a link to the actual redacted original? The TSA appear to have taken it down now and you need it to see what was redacted.

international politics is no different from national politics, the less light that is shown on the process the more mold that grows

The more light you shine on something the more mold will grow. :-D

People even in their 20's and 30's grew up playing "games" of execution (Mortal Kombat) and mass murder simulators (Doom), alienating us from society.

How and why were you alienated from society?

It's posts like yours that make me wish Slashdot didn't ban modding in the same story as you post in. You're an idiot that always copy/pastes this trash and gets modded up by your zealot supporters, and the Daily Mail is a decent publication that at least occasionally publishes a decent story. This is one of them.

The event cited (C&D over a gift doll) was actually done in error and was not sent by Epic themselves but rather their trigger-happy crack legal team. Mark Rein (PR dude) later explained the incident [epicgames.com] as an accident and publicly apologized for it.

Yup. I didn't rape her, your Honour, but rather my trigger-happy penis. I later explained the incident as an accident and publicly apologized for it.

If only the BSDs didn't have a licence that makes you feel like every line of code you contribute to it requires your bending over to Microsoft et al., and saying "here ya go, feel free to take it, compile it, and take all the credit (and money!)", I'd use them instead.

.co is Colombia, .om is Oman, but .con doesn't exist.

That's a shame, coz then we could have all the malware and phishing websites under one roof like porn is with .xxx. :-(

The BBC's content is very much paid for. They just don't need a Murdoch-esque figure running around because they enjoy the inexplicable support of many of the British public for their biased reporting.

5 minutes of US DoD operational costs?

If this is a funny joke, I don't get it. 'Organic food' is a term widely used, at least in the UK, to describe food that's been grown in a way that avoids using things like herbicides and genetic modification, as some people believe them to cause the food grown to be detrimentally polluted.