xternal7

As an European, it seems strange to me that voter ID thing is so vehemently opposed to in the USA. (But then again, having a photo ID is mandatory in most of the EU)

^{Edit: oh god, dont think I'd want to live in the US. Also factual fixes: most of EU, not entire EU}

it's pretty difficult, particularly for non-Indo-European speakers.

It's still not nearly as difficult as other languages from the same bin.

Sure, there's this bit where English sounds rather unlike how it's written, and there's about a dozen tenses. But that's really it. Compared to other European languages, English has no grammatical genders (which are often a very nice bit of syntactic sugar for native speakers, but seemingly arbitrary for everyone else) and it has no declinations. It's really one of the easiest languages to learn — at least to the point where you know it well enough to get your point across.

That's before you consider that English being lingua franca and the abundance of content in English language also helps a lot with learning the language.

Source: ESL, also tried learning German as a third language but that didn't go as well.

Minor correction, though:

Now imagine that you have to pay for your ID.

You have to pay for ID in most of Europe as well. There's a few countries where ID card is free, but most countries will charge anything between €5 to €50 even for renewal (once every 10 years for adults).

Other than that, that's some outright bullshit.

We're currently making great strides in halving the "actually needed" labor pool through the magic of automation, so ...

I've seen the verification pic on your twitter.

1. Do I see KDE there?

2. Which distro?

3. (if the answer to the first question is 'yes') Thoughts on Plasma 5?