If you want "too strong a term", how about the submitter calling LoopPay a "major" competitor. That one is truly hilarious.

Your card is not a chip and PIN but a chip and signature card. If it's a low-value transaction, then simply dipping may be enough (just like tap-to-pay cards), but if the value is high enough you will be required to sign for it rather than enter a PIN.

The merchant is liable if the transaction is fraudulent. He or she chose to punch the numbers in manually instead of rejecting the faulty card.

Pretty sure ClearType came from them. There's also C#, though I suppose some would argue about its technological value. They also did a pretty heavy duty astronomy visualization program that I forget the name of.

Even if the transaction is 999,999.00 euros, the point remains: in all likelihood that transaction would be over the limit of 99.999% of all credit cards out there.

Also:

"Since the transaction is done offline without going through a retailer’s point-of-sale system, no other security checks are done."

How do they get at the money, however much it is, without passing it through the payment network at one point or another? It's not like there's only one check done when the card is tapped.

Politicians aside, any complex issue is ripe for manipulation by media entities, as the average individual usually cannot be expected to fully comprehend a complex piece of legislation or treaty.

"Simple" enough when you're talking about what is clearly unrelated legislation, but the problem then becomes where to draw the line between "related" (example: how to fund whatever program you're trying to pass) and "unrelated", and who has the power to draw that line.

BART is not under the governance of San Francisco.

BART is a metropolitan transit system. The city government of San Francisco has practically nothing to do with day-to-day operations.

> 30 years later they extended to one of them but you still have to transfer to a bus for the last mile on another.

Pity you didn't have a spare $100 million a couple decades ago. I'm SURE you'd have been willing to pay for it, right? The extension to SFO wasn't built until recent times because back in the '60s San Mateo County quit the BART project, and the money wasn't around until the tech bubble started growing; ground was broken in 1997. The Oakland extension wasn't started until recently (opens in 2014) because again, there wasn't any money for it. The only reason it's getting built now is because Feds are footing a good chunk of the bill. OAK wasn't even all that popular an airport until last decade, after their renovation.

It was broke (and remains so) decades ago. The automated system never really worked properly.

You've almost certainly never ridden BART, much less seen the driver's cab. Why do I say this? Because there's a section of the BART system (the Oakland Wye, bane of commuters who want to get anywhere during rush hour) where drivers are instructed to go to manual control, limited to 25 MPH. It's the result of your vaunted "automated" system designed in the '60s never having worked properly in the past 50 years, and one of the contributing factors to a crash in 2009 (thankfully no one was seriously injured). There are many well-documented incidents of entire train sets disappearing from the computer system, as well as "ghost" trains randomly appearing.

Here is what an actual BART cab looks like:
http://i.imgur.com/IbYtYTa.jpg

Forget about taxing. Imagine how much mining the federal government could do.

>At least in my opinion.

And does your opinion about the benefits of failpositive (as opposed to failsafe) nukes take into account the plane falling apart/being destroyed just after launch from friendly territory, like a military base or a carrier air group?

>Can we NOW put the "do no evil" bullshit

It's "Don't be evil", not "Do no evil". It would be ludicrously impossible for any publicly-owned and traded corporation to achieve the latter, while within the realm of possibility for the former.