I'm getting a little tired of the continued rant about how antiquated magnetic stripes are versus chips.

The magnetic stripe technology first showed up in a meaningful way in 1970. That's forty-two (42) years, not 50.

The first chip-based cards showed up in France in 1982. That's 12 years after magnetic stripe, or 30 years ago.

Both systems have significant security vulnerabilities: magnetic stripes can be cloned fairly easily, and this is an easy source of fraud. Chip cards have been cracked as far back as 1988, and EMV has been broken quite definitively for several years now (cite: http://dev.inversepath.com/download/emv/emv_2011.pdf)

The question isn't security, or which is new and great, but the simple question of utility: which cards pay for what things where. As long as I can pay for my train ticket, latte, or dinner, I really don't care if the card encodes data on magnetic stripe, "smart" chip, stone tablet, or buffalo chip. And, I tend to think that's a reasonable attitude to take -- I'm just plain done feeling like the US is lame because we haven't spent billions to move from one insecure standard to another insecure standard.

I'll save that frustration for the state of our high speed rail