Is there really someone so stupid that they cannot tell the difference between a cartoon drawing and a real child?

There appears to be an entire united kingdom whose legal system is populated with such people.

Just FYI, the rule against illegal cartoons exists in the USA too. The Supreme Court struck down attempts to use CP laws in this way as being obvious nonsense, so Congress just went ahead and amended the law to make it explicitly illegal as opposed to implicitly illegal.

Unfortunately a lot of crap like this ends up being brought into otherwise sane legal systems thanks to pressure from the USA to "upgrade" national laws to meet the "latest standards". Japan has been pressured for years to tighten its CP laws, being publicly named and shamed etc - the primary justification for not doing so was fear of false positives. Like this one. And like the notorious cases where two teenagers can legally have sex but not photograph themselves doing it.

Fact is, politicians love being able to say they made the law tougher on paedophiles. It's a sure popularity winner. So it's inevitable you end up with idiocy like this.

South Korea is hardly the third world. If Danish shipyards can't beat them on price, why not?

The JVM is very language specific. For example it has op codes for allocating java objects. A truly cross language virtual machine doesn't have anything anywhere near that high level or specific to a particular language.

Whuuu? The JVM does not have opcodes for allocating "java" objects unless you use a very strange definition of the term - if it worked that way then how could other languages target it? The JVM has opcodes for allocating objects and calling methods on them, including opcodes like invokedynamic that exist purely to support non-Java languages like Javascript, Python, Ruby, etc.

The JVM has a really large variety of languages that target it. It's impressive. There are static languages like Java, Scala, Kotlin, Ceylon etc, there are dynamic scripting languages like JS (using the new Nashorn engine it's only about 2-3x slower than V8), there are Lisp like languages, there are implementations of Erlang and so on. And thanks to the fairly well specified "least common denominator" type system Java provides, code written in these languages can all interop pretty nicely.

If you think the JVM is language specific then I'd suggest looking at Ruby and Kotlin, two very different languages that are not much like Java, yet nonetheless both can run on top of the JVM.

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.

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.

Does the Touch ID imply that it also has an NFC chip for ApplePay? (Apparently it does, and the iPad Mini 2 doesn't.) That's an odd thing to leave off the comparison chart.

This was mentioned in the keynote. Although they both have Touch ID, neither of them come with NFC.

As a result, they'll only support half of Apple Pay. That is, they'll support purchasing things online from retailers, but not contactless transactions at physical merchants with a contactless terminal.

THAT mistake I can understand. They've seen SO many cases of Ebola after all. But permitting scores of people to be in the room with the guy *after* they decided to test for Ebola was a preventable error. And failing to tell the folks involved in his treatment to stay away from public transportation for a safety period following their contact with a confirmed Ebola patient was total amateur hour. Seriously, WTF do we have a no-fly list for anyway?

I don't know about Libre Office, but Firebox would behefit from a few more people telling certain devs how truly awful they've done this past year. It's bad. So bad.

Have you had much luck with that approach in a major open source software project?

Sure there is. Average car purchase or rental: X% tax. Below average: X-factor%. Above average: X+factor%. Jewelry? Always a high %. Watercraft? Never a low percent and grows in portion with the cost of the craft. Milk and staple vegetables? Always a low percent. Junk food? Always a high percent tax.

Designing a progressive consumption tax isn't even particularly hard.

Why would you presume that? Just because that's how we've done it for an income tax?