Let's make a bet then. You pay me $1 if there is no credible commercially utilized cold fusion by 2024. I'll pay you $10,000 if there is. And please don't bother me until then.

The difference is for authentication for important stuff we have to show up in person with an ID and a real human checks the identity.

For some things you can also use a SuisseID which is just a regular PKI smartcard USB dongle thingy. I have one. After installing the software, you can log in to some Swiss websites by just clicking the login button in the web page. You might have to enter a password and the dongle then signs the SSL session. It's all standards based and the certificate in the hardware is based on your legally verified identity, i.e. you show a passport at the post office and get your personalised stick through the mail a few days later.

There's no such thing as EU VAT, it varies by state. Now you have to take into account the inter-country differences and remit taxes to each EU country independently, for certain classes of goods.

I believe you, seeing attitudes like this: " "There's a prisoner shortage," says Mike Arismendez, "

Er, if you ignore things like lack of a stable driver API then sure. Lots of users would have loved one of those.

But Linus encounters fewer problems like that because he has little in the way of vision for what desktop Linux should be. His job is to make a UNIX kernel along the same lines they were being designed 30 years ago. He is largely judged by how tightly he replicates a long-dusty commercial design. Desktop Linux on the other hand has no such luxuries because old commercial UNIX was never a force on the desktop. There, it has to both forge ahead its own path, and also look to competitors like MacOS X for good ideas.

And guess what? The genesis of SystemD bears a strong resemblance to launchd, the MacOS X init system. But because that's not something you would have found in Solaris or AIX, the UNIX "community" throws a fit.

Odd, because it seems to be going the other way... State by state Telsa is challenging the antiquated archaic franchising laws and winning. Michigan doesn't surprise me.... I can only imagine the lobbyist money that flowed from Detroit to make this happen...

Intelligence is a lot like money.

Those who've always had an abundance generally either think its no big deal, because they've never suffered the limitations of not having enough, or look down on those with less and consider them inferior.

Those in the middle have enough to see the benefits of having more, and want to improve themselves in order to get more.

At the bottom this analogy falters, but I think the point remains. It's easy to dismiss making the rest of the population smarter when you're already smart and not suffering the limitations imposed on those with less to work with. I find the notion that we shouldn't meddle and just leave those who draw the short genetic-straw to be cruel and self-serving. If the lowest common denominator is raised, chance are the whole society benefits, the world becomes a better, more thoughtful place, and the overall pie grows accordingly.

*sigh* You can lead a horse to an optimized process, but you can't make him apply it. Enjoy wasting your time diving for cover whenever any nuke goes off, while the rest of of snort, "Heh, he thought that was an H-bomb? What a dimwit!"

You say it dismissively, but the big thing lately is that Microsoft can play catch-up and is really trying to do it. Did you ever think you'd see the day? Starting around MSIE 9 they made huge strides toward becoming fairly normal, rather remaining forever obsolete, as a weird, special, anachronistic case. You never would have heard anyone say this in 2009 or 2004 but it now looks like a fresh Windows install might be able to surf the web, right out-of-the-box.

It used to be that if someone had problems and you found out their browser was .. well, they didn't know, but they said they just "clicked the internet" .. you'd tell 'em they need to get a browser, any reasonably modern browser. But I rebooted to do some testing just yesterday, and MSIE 11 does not suck. Seriously, I found more problems with Safari on Windows, than I did with MSIE.

Today's web browsers, in general, are pretty damn good. Even Microsoft can do this now.

My parents (who live in Auburn (a suburb of Worcester)) have Charter and even compared to Verizon they've had great service. They had an issue with one of their boxes and Charter came out same day, replaced it, a second box and then proceeded to replace the wiring in the house, all at no cost. As an ISP they're not world class, but their reliable and responsive when problems crop up.

Is Charter a panache? No. They're just a bit better than the average which oddly makes them pretty damn good.. which is really sad.

I'm not especially libertarian, but I do not believe libertarianism has anything to say against dispute mediation. Bitcoin itself has the ability to do dispute mediated transactions but it's not fully fleshed out. If it was, and had been used here, a third party could have signed off on the transaction and the money could have been released, only once the machine was delivered and working.

Of course, Robocoin may have chosen not to use such a mechanism because with pre-sales, they are often spending the purchase money to actually build the machine, but that will always be extremely risky.

Well, except, you know, running an bitcoin ATM in a shop is about a million times easier than getting a full blown banking license. Right now they often charge very high spreads because there's a lot of risk involved and the machines costs have to be paid down. But in theory there could be quite a bit of competition, given friendly governments and a long enough time horizon.

> But how about a person who's suffered years of emotional abuse "knowing" their spouse is cheating without being able to prove it?

What is the point of proving it? You don't get double-divorced if you can prove it. You don't get more money if you prove it. Decide to stay together or split up, then do it.

From a certain point of view, they are huge.

I once read (*) that the full gamma burst from a thermonuclear explosion takes several seconds. (Whereas from a fission bomb, it's mostly over in a fraction of a second; the bigger-yield fusion bombs create a lot of temporary unstable shit that gives off more gamma rays as it decays over several seconds.) This led to me developing a nuclear war survival trick, which I will now share with everyone on Slashdot, even though I haven't tested (**) it yet:

If there's a sudden blinding flash in the sky, quickly try to estimate: does it look like a big one? If so, then dive for cover, preferably behind something big and solid, like a boulder or something like that. HTH.

(*) Wish I could cite a reference, but I'm lazy.

(**) If my trick is no good or based on misunderstood physics, you can make fun of me after the next nuclear war.

This is not about the "sales tax" (VAT in EU) which is typically assessed and paid in a defined jurisdiction where the sale occurs.

..... until January. It appears our glorious leaders in the EU have decided that they weren't getting enough VAT because people sell things out of low tax jurisdictions (how dare they), so now VAT on various types of digital products and services e.g. online software sales or e-books get to pay tax based on the jurisdiction of the buyer, not the seller. So if you sell software in the EU now you have no choice, essentially, but to hire an expensive middleman who handles the nightmare of filing VAT returns in every EU state. Plus you need to be able to track exactly where your customers are for tax purposes. Effectively people would get a discount for buying through a proxy so god knows how this will be implemented. Total nightmare. All driven by the desire for ever more tax.