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Bickering Blocks US Mobile Phone Payments
theodp writes "Imagine a technology that lets you pay for products just by waving your cellphone over a reader. You wouldn't have to if you lived in Japan, where people have been using it for the last five years to pay for everything from train tickets to groceries to candy in vending machines. While nearly everyone who's tried it has liked this form of payment, consumers in the United States won't be able to wave-and-pay anytime soon: The companies that must work together to give the technology to the masses can't agree on how to split the resulting revenue."
...We have a similar system. You pay to wave...
I've used cold hard cash, and that's neatest.
It's light, portable, needs no batteries and isn't subject to arbitrary restrictions or revocations. No devices or readers are needed. You don't need a "credit rating" to use it. And I can pay for pretty much anything, except those services which require me to spend extra cash on an alternative transaction medium.
Cash. Is. King.
May the Maths Be with you!
If the performance of the composite were equal or better, you might have me as a customer, but for now, I'll pick and choose.
Then I might interest you with a toaster running BSD.
Think about it: you put some toasts in, go back to your computer, then when the toast is ready your computer says [record a female friend of yours saying this:] "your toast is ready".
It's also a cheap DMZ-able web server in its own right: no need to buy a different box to host your blog out of security concerns.
[be warned though: if someone roots the box, they might run "sysctl dev.heater.enable=1; sysctl dev.heater.temp = F451" and set your house on fire.]