If it's patented, you're compelled to publish your method. Are you confusing patents with trade secrets?

I can send money from my GMail account.

Well I don't know whether the Amazon one worked outside the US, but the Google one definitely doesn't. But given a choice between Google and Amazon, I'd take Amazon. I find them slightly less intrusive and pervasive.

Yeah, but very basic functionality like actually being able to type your name if you happen to be Japanese requires you to install the OS, then get a combination of strangely-named packages like ibus, im-chooser, anthy, some font packages, etc. and then screw around getting it configured. None of this is documented clearly. Windows or OSX lets you choose a language from a list at install time. Which do you think is easier?

Device drivers are another issue. Linux is simpler if there's a driver in the kernel tree and it works adequately. If there isn't, then it's far more trouble than Windows to find a driver and get it to work. Also, drivers often lack functionality on Linux. For example the Wacom tablet drivers aren't adequately configurable. There are some options in obscure text files that you need root to edit, but there's no simple way to switch mapping on-the-fly or reconfigure your buttons per application. This is all dead easy on OSX or Windows.

Linux may be easier for you, but there are far more use cases than "person with no exotic hardware speaking a language using Latin script".

It definitely doesn't just work if you need Japanese language support. You need to find the necessary packages, install them, configure ibus... Seriously it's a nightmare. On Windows or OSX you just choose it from the dropdown during installation. Every time I do a distro upgrade I have to go through this stupid pain-in-the-arse procedure again, trying to work out exactly which packages I need with no help from any documentation.

Ubuntu server is an oxymoron ;)

You know, I liked the Amiga. But it was a machine of such contradictions. It had preemptive multitasking, but no isolated application heaps. So if an app didn't clean up properly, memory leaked not just until you closed the app, but until the machine restarted. And if an app crashed, all its allocated memory leaked until you restarted. Even the Mac had isolated application heaps from day one. As cool as the graphics system was, it just about impossible to deliver a much-needed new generation without breaking compatibility with everything. They really painted themselves into a corner there. Even things like the filesystem that made DMA read/write impractical. It had so much baggage to work around right from the start.

Nah, seriously, rampant piracy on the Amiga drove developers away and killed the platform. The IBM PC had businesses paying for site licesnses, which more than made up for widespread piracy by home users. Apple had their cult following who were paying for the big-name Adobe, Aldus and Macromedia packages, andfor some reason actually paying money for shareware as well. But there was just no money in developing for Amiga because no-one ever paid for software.

lol people like you are what killed the Amiga. no-one wanted to make Amiga software because everyone pirated it. without software a platform dies.

No they can't. They invoke a SUID binary that always runs as root to do the password change. That means an exploit in the SUID password change tool could potentially do anything the root user has permission to do.

There's an offline mode that's available in Europe where the card verifies the PIN entered on the terminal. This mode has been shown to be vulnerable to compromised hardware as response for a valid PIN is predictable. The cards in Australia are incapable of verifying the PIN at all - you can set or change your PIN for many cards using an online service without the card present.

US is really that backwards? And I thought the "offline mode" in Europe where the card verifies the PIN was bad enough.

We have NFC credit cards in Australia now. They don't seem to have caused a big uptick in fraud. Also, the worst you could do from a distance (assuming you could communicate with the card for long enough) would be to process a payment of up to $100 - you can't actually copy the card.

Coin is going to be dead in the water as soon as US requires chip cards. The whole point of chip cards is that the key never leaves the chip and it can't be copied. They talk about supporting it in the future but can't elaborate on a plan, as they don't have one. They also have blatant misinformation about "chip and sign" on their site. "Chip and sign" uses the ICC chip to verify card presence, but you sign the receipt rather than entering a PIN. The Coin people claim you still use the magnetic strip, but that just plain isn't true.

Samsung's latest phones do NFC payment in Australia. There's no reason it couldn't work, besides vendor apathy.

The early prototype fast neutron reactors in the UK had issues with handling of the coolants, and are proving very expensive to decommission. Irradiated light metals coating the insides of pipes are difficult to deal with apparently. It's probably nothing that couldn't be solved with additional R&D, but how long before it actually pays off? The UK gave up on it before getting to a viable level.