It's how the Internet works. To quote directly from the experts: A target's phone call, e-mail or chat will take the cheapest path, not the physically most direct path.

Physical distance is not as important as congestion on the routes. So it might very well be that your data takes a much longer path that what you'd think, simply because it uses the fastest way, not the shortest.

Angela Merkel's approach is pretty idiotic, and it cannot fix the problems. First of all, most emails are routed through the US either because the sender or the recipient has an American email provider (Germans love Gmail, too). Secondly, even if that is not the case, can you be sure that the NSA doesn't spy on traffic in Frankfurt? It wouldn't surprise me.

Only true end-to-end encryption can be a solution. The government in Germany is currently pushing for DE-Mail, which relies on transport encryption only. So that means that your email provider can still snoop and so can the German government, which is probably the reason why they designed it like that in the first place. End-to-end encryption would have been possible, especially since the German government is spending much money rolling out their own PKI, with keys for every citizen right on their new national ID card.

There's a presentation about DE-Mail from last December's Chaos Communication Congress, it's worth watching (video also has an audio track with English translations).

The ICE runs at a speed of 198 mph in some locations and back in 1988 it even set a new world record with 253 mph. Only problem: It's a train.

I submitted a photo where I wear a pasta strainer for my official electronic health insurance card in Germany -- and it got accepted, no questions asked! Always good to get some laughs when I have to go to a doctor.

Head coverings were not allowed, but religious ones were exempt. Oddly enough however, a friend of mine got a photo accepted where he poses with a beer mug (Maßkrug, you know, the typtical bavarian 1l mugs). Maybe because that's a religious symbol as well?

Your calculations are wrong, it's 0.87 hectares of land per person or roughly the size of a football field. Still a shockingly small area. If every person in the world had a western meat-rich diet, you'd need a whole lot of earths to feed them.

I think lab-grown meat is the future. For quite a lot of people, meat is just too tasty to be given up completely. At the same time, it is an environmental disaster, with the United Nations estimating that animal farming has a greater effect on climate change than ALL of the worlds transportation (that is, cars, trucks, trains, ships and airplanes) combined. Some even say it's responsible for 51% of greenhouse gases emissions. Additionally, factory farming causes billions of animals to suffer, which is highly unethical. Lab-grown meat avoids both problems.

Until we can buy lab-grown meat, we should still go Veg, but once lab-grown meat is available, the abolishment of the mass factory farming is much more realistic.

Freedom of speech is not dead in Germany. The constitution just put a different (higher) weight on personality rights.

In this case, googleing the name "Bettina Wulff" of the first lady would autocomplete to things like "escort" and "prostitute", because some people wrongfully tried to make a past life as a prostitute stick to her public image (which has been shown is just nonsense).

Now, I would agree that it is perfectly reasonable to put a higher weight on the right of free speech. But personality rights, and the right to be protected from libel are also important. Those are two legally protected values that have to be carefully balanced.

According to this report, the movie depicts an area of 45 x 25 nanometers. I use the body of the stickman to approximate pixels, which gives me about 30 pixels in height. Which translates to 3 * 10^7 DPI. Which will be in your iPhone 71's über-retina display (assuming dpi grows exponentially). Although it's really debatable if your eye is capable of making use of such a high resolution.

Let me quote from a blog post that paints an even darker picture than the original story I submitted on /.

Can you imagine the pressure they put this volunteer through? Threatening him with five years of prison if he does not immediately comply and delete the article in the intelligence agency's offices? You think that doesn't matter?

In this case the problem was not that Wikipedia was centralized. The Wikimedia Foundation in the US did not comply with the agency's demands.

The problem was that the administrator's real name was publicly known (he's a public figure and it's his username) so that they were able to find someone under French jurisdiction. Most admins and non-admins use pseudonyms and are thus immune to real-life pressure.

All in all, I'd say the system worked. The admin had to give in to the immense pressure, but he was sensible enough to publicly announce what he did, thus enabling foreign users to reinstate the article. Now, the really threatening cases are those with gag orders, such as given by US intelligence agencies.

I'm using Mullvad. It's 5 Euro per Month (about $6.5) and is quite fast – I couldn't notice a loss in bandwidth, although naturally the ping is slightly higher. Oh, and they have their servers in Europe (Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands) which obviously is not perfect for Americans. If you're extremely paranoid, Mullvad offers the ability to pay by cash sent through snail mail or bitcoins.

Other than that, IPredator seems to be a well-known VPN provider based in Sweden. It's about the same price.