Yeah, remember those idiots who protested against street view and the newspaper made a picture of them in front of their home and published the article online?
http://www.rp-online.de/duesseldorf/duesseldorf-stadt/nachrichten/Buergerprotest-gegen-Google_aid_892897.html

Sorry, article is in german, but the picture is there.

Two weeks ago I spoke with a man who shot the last harry potter book as lego stop motion. Here is the english trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xedFmxo7hc0&feature=channel

He uses 25 pictures per second of film. It is a hobby of his and he spent two years making it. Every evening during the week and the complete day on weekends. In my opinion it nearly looks as good as rendered.

Germany has a law that prevents you from hacking any and all encryption and protection. So even programs circumventing CSS encryption on DVDs are technically not legal.

In Germany everyone of legal age can send a cease-and-desist-letter to anyone, even if the plaintiff is not even your client. You either pay the fee or you can fight it and if you go to court and you loose, you have to pay a lot more. So most people get scared, don't take a lawyer and just pay. We have a lot of well known lawyers who live on this kind of harassment.

This guy http://www.stum.de/2010/02/22/lawyer-von-gravenreuth-commits-suicide/ used to be very big in this line of work, but eventually he got caught and committed suicide.

The only difference is that this rule was still unofficially in place until recently when we got new anti-discrimination laws.

We had a similiar case around here a few months ago. A woman reported a priest to the police who had sexually abused her back when she was a teenager (in the 90s). The priest told her back then, that she would go to hell forever if she reported him to the police, so she only reported him to the policy recently when there was that big scandal.

As I mentioned above, I am a student on a tight budget that has 250 euros for each month to pay for everything, including books. 30 euros would be close to the sum I spend for eating lunch for two weeks in the university's canteen (weekdays only).

My parent's can't afford to give me more since they have three children who study, but they earn enough so that I can't get government student loan (BAFÖG). I am looking for a job, but haven't found one yet as the city I study in has 280k inhabitants and 50k students, though a part of them are not registered as living in the city, though they work there, because they take the bus or train home to their parents at the end of the day. So trying to find a decent student job there is pretty hard.

It is not only the curch. My mother told me that the company C&A (a big clothing store chain in germany with nearly 8 billion $ revenue per year) used to have a policy that forbid divorced men and women in upper management positions because the owners are strict catholics. (now living in the netherlands, but they originated from Mettingen, my birthplace: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mettingen )

I don't pay income tax as I am a student that is under the limit where you have to pay taxes. It's called allowable deduction and it is currently at 7680 (~10.7200$) per year.

I guess that's the price of living in a state that has the word god in the preamble of the constitution and where a catholic group just send 100.000 plastic foetuses to houshold in one state to demonstrate against aboirtion (sorry, no english source on that that I could find).

As a student I live on a very limited budget and there is no way my parents would pay for that. Living in the secondmost catholic region after bavaria in this country with a rich christian history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnster

The only thing that prevents me from leaving the catholic church in germany is the fee that I have to pay in order to get out. It's 30 (~42$) and a visit to the local court. I don't know if you have to pay a fee in finland.

Yeah, but with just one language you lose so much cultural difference. In danish, "sild" means herring, but can also be used to refer to a hot girl. "Skat" means tax, als well as treasure and can be used as "min skat" - my dear. In icelandic, the word for computer is composed of an ancient word for witch and the word for number, so a computer in icelandic literally means "number witch". Even english has so many words borrowed from other languages, like Zeitgeist, Angst, Kindergarten or Leitmoti(f/v). Studying foreign languages gives you so much insight into the cultural differences if you think about how certain words are used. I think that english already is the standard language that you use on the internet, but I don't like the idea of forcing everybody to use one specific mother tongue. There are too many languages already dying out today. Every language has word plays that you can't translate which would be lost. In german we have "Widerstand ist zwewcklos", which means "Resistance is futile" but also "Resistor is futile". I think you can come up with an idea for a T-Shirt with that sentence in german yourself.

Makes sense, it hides the real purpose.

Well, then the government should send them a bill. Than we would really see how expensive or inexpensive nuclear power is compared to wind, water and solar energy.

Where I live they drill 1,5km deep just to get black coal to fuel a coal plant. If they wouldn't cut the state funding in a few years I imagine they would drill even deeper when the current reserves are depleted. It is all just a matter of being dependent on other countries natural reserves vs. funding it with tax money.

Anyways, I wish my government would invest more in this kind of energy and not give the energy producing companies a 100 billion check over the next 12 years for keeping the nuclear plants running longer and waste taxpayers money by taking care of the waste. (my government being that of germany). You made that waste, you should have to pay for it being taken care of. But well, then you couldn't rake in billions of profits each year and claim that nuclear energy is oh so cheap and green energy oh so expensive.