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Sometimes we forget how medieval the US banking system is. Then something like this comes around.

Every major bank in South Africa has offered cardless ATM services for so long I can't even say for sure when the last one came online. But the first seems to have been by 2008 at the latest.

I use it at least once a month to pay a casual worker who has no bank account. It has also saved my bacon when I forgot my wallet (but not cellphone with banking app) at home. And I've employed it twice when I suspected card skimmers had been attached to the ATM I wanted to use.

Never had any hassle with it. Never heard of any either.

This may have worked to, however when Mandela was replaced, it all went to shit pretty quick.

Go read this http://www.moneyweb.co.za/arch... to give you a pretty good idea of how things are. The current president is a moron. Thabo Mbeki, slightly less a moron, but still a moron.

Mandela had lofty goals, and I truly (as a white person no less, who grew up in South Africa) believe he had the best intentions, but his successors have done nothing but consolidate power and money, cronyism is rife in SA, they are the cause of many of the problems. Eskom used to be at the forefront of power generation and research, and now, they can barely keep the lights on. As of today, they are currently practicing load shedding (think planned.. or in many cases un rolling blackouts).

Until the current parties figure out how to replace the stupid people with those who have the best interests of the country at heart, instead of their own power and finances, nothing will change. In that respect, SA is very similar to the US, voting along party lines rather than voting for the best candidate.

South Africa is currently saddled with ridiculously high broadband prices (and a typical bandwidth limit of 3GB/month). It sucks being an emerging economy at the ass end of the dark continent. At least Egypt is right next to the EU.

Interestingly, Microsoft knows that, and they seem really interested in providing the right framework to "take advantage of the multicore architectures while solving the most common problems with concurrency.

Their Research Labs are doing a lot of good work with experimental language features, and many of them are getting their way into the .Net platform.

This makes sense coming from this company, since one of their strong points always has been creating good development environments for the not-highly-specialized programmers of the world. These features take a good effort to make them very integrated into the old way of programming, and easy to use even without a "functional mindset".

Interestingly, Microsoft seems really interested in providing the right framework to "take advantage of the multicore architectures while solving the most common problems with concurrency. Their Research Labs are doing a lot of good work with experimental language features, and many of them are getting their way into the .Net platform.

This makes sense coming from this company, since one of their strong points always has been creating good development environments for the not-highly-specialized programmers of the world. This collection of features could put them again on the right track to dominate the software building environments.

The WSJ got a 'no comment' from the NY AG ( http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page94?oid=161203&sn=Detail ). The AG's case was definitely related to child porn; not piracy.

His CEO could call punching women, "Pugilistic Female Empowerment - it empowers them to make the right decisions with regard to doing what I want." all he liked too.

Shame no one accepted that argument either.