They're not trying to compel Microsoft Ireland to do anything though: they're trying to compel Microsoft U.S. to retrieve the data and turn it over to the court. Since Microsoft U.S. has access to the data, they are able to do that. If Microsoft Ireland were firewalled off so U.S. employees could not access Ireland data, it wouldn't be an issue.

What if the person from the German branch doesn't have to travel to America?

That's true, but seems pretty similar to the case where you have e.g. multiple physical copies of a document. What happens if a document is photocopied, and both Microsoft's Seattle office, and Microsoft's Dublin office, have a copy of the document? My understanding of traditional subpoena law is that either country could subpoena the document in this case, even if it were considered privileged or private data under the law of the other country.

Imo the version you present is clearly inferior. For one it's ugly, breaking the left-to-right dataflow nature of shell pipelines. For two it requires more tedious line-editing if you change out the source, e.g. if phonelist is encrypted, with the previous version you just replace "cat" with "zcat", whereas with your version you have to rearrange the commands. "cat" in this case just functions as a noop data source, like a 'dac' node in a Max/MSP graph. Overloading the first command in the pipeline with special syntax to read from a file is bad, non-modular design: "grep" should just read from stdin, not have some special syntax and code to read from files.

And no, your version isn't faster, either.

Their analogy also fits how I personally think the case should be resolved. The court seems to be unsure about the personal access of Microsoft's American staff though. In your example, a U.S.-based employee has to be ordered to comply with the German subpoena. But it sounds like in this case, Microsoft's U.S. employees can comply with the subpoena fully themselves, without having to order Microsoft Ireland employees to assist. So the court seems to be leaning towards thinking that in that case, as corporate officers subject to U.S. jurisdiction, they can be served subpoenas to retrieve that data, even if the data is elsewhere—because data isn't a legal person.

You could imagine a kind of really walled-off setup where Microsoft US employees literally can't access Microsoft Ireland data without a Microsoft Ireland employee authorizing it. And then the Microsoft Ireland employee would be directed to only authorize it in accordance with Irish law. The trouble is that that's a really cumbersome way to run an international business. So Microsoft US employees, or at least some of them, seem to have direct access to worldwide Microsoft data.

Oddly enough this actually became common with Linux before Windows. Many big companies that use Linux pay for an annual RHEL subscription, even though you could use a gratis version of Linux. The current prices: without support, it's $50/yr for desktops, $180/yr for workstations, $350/yr for servers. With support, $300/yr for workstations, $800/yr for servers.

Open mockery of France didn't really start until the first Gulf War

Rather earlier than that. Open mockery of the French has been an American thing since at least my parents' generation, probably longer. I remember it being common as a kid myself, before the Gulf War. You can see the baguette and cheese tropes in old silent films, even. It's true that the sentiment wasn't quite as negative as it was for Germans, though: French were at least considered civilized, unlike the Hun.

The North Korean statement itself is here:

The SONY Pictures, a film producer in the U.S., has reportedly been attacked by hackers.

The hacking is so fatal that all the systems of the company have been paralyzed, causing the overall suspension of the work and supposedly a huge ensuing loss.

Much upset by this, the U.S. mobilized many investigation bodies including FBI, CIA and the Department of Homeland Security for urgent investigation and recovery of the system.

We do not know where in America the SONY Pictures is situated and for what wrongdoings it became the target of the attack nor we feel the need to know about it.

But what we clearly know is that the SONY Pictures is the very one which was going to produce a film abetting a terrorist act while hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK by taking advantage of the hostile policy of the U.S. administration towards the DPRK.

We already called upon the world to turn out in the just struggle to put an end to U.S. imperialism, the chieftain of aggression and the worst human rights abuser that tramples down the universal rights of people to peaceful and stable life and violates the sovereignty of other countries, as well as its followers.

The hacking into the SONY Pictures might be a righteous deed of the supporters and sympathizers with the DPRK in response to its appeal.

What matters here is that the U.S. set the DPRK as the target of the investigation, far from reflecting on its wrongdoings and being shameful of being taken unawares. And the south Korean group, keen on serving its master, groundlessly linked the hacking attack with the DPRK and floated the "story about the north's involvement", an indication of its inveterate bitterness towards its country fellowmen.

The U.S. and south Korean puppet group are all accustomed to pulling up others for no specific reason when something undesirable happens in their own land.

The south Korean puppet group went the lengths of floating the false rumor that the north was involved in the hacking that happened in the U.S., a country far across the ocean.

It should be well aware that it can not evade the severe punishment by the anti-U.S. sacred war to be staged all over the world if it blindly curries favor with the U.S. as now.

The U.S. should also know that there are a great number of supporters and sympathizers with the DPRK all over the world as well as the "champions of peace" who attacked the SONY Pictures.

The righteous reaction will get stronger to smash the evil doings.

there are ZX Spectrum emulators for Windows that are free and ready to use

There are quite a few of them, on a number of platforms. There's even one that runs in a browser.

Having fewer people with a higher degree of autonomy manning these kinds of communication channels does tend to produce more of an identifiable "voice", along with the ability to respond to things faster and insert your message into current events/discussions. The downside is that it's also somewhat more prone to gaffes or off-message comments, basically for the same reason, that the messages are written on the spur of the moment by one or a few people and don't go through a more "heavyweight" approval process that ensures they're in line with the brand's desired image. Of course you can then deal with that on the meta-side by blaming "a staffer" who "didn't follow policy" if anything particularly controversial happens.

I think campaigns will probably move towards the more lightweight-review model, just because inserting yourself into topical discussions is so important for the news-cycle-driven style of campaigning.

Next maybe they'll fine the military over activities at White Sands Missile Range?

Have you read much about Roman culture? You can pull out bits that are similar (like the timeless complaint about decay of family values you mention), but by and large the societies seem quite foreign to me.

Until Hughes bought it, for the previous few decades it had been controlled by Marty Peretz, and was to some extent reflective of his views, which are an odd idiosyncratic mix of left-wing and right-wing ideas. He's socially liberal but a defense hawk, among other positions. Which explains why TNR was liberal on things like gay marriage, but neoconservative on things like the Iraq War.

The SDS splintered years before Nixon ended the draft, so your chronology seems a bit off. The bulk of them went into anti-prison and anti-racism activism, as far as I can tell, not environmentalism.

Especially because it's highly likely that there is a lot of self-interested money on both sides here. If your heuristic is that the side funded by someone unsavory must be wrong, might want to look into where Romanian politicians are getting their money from.