Indeed the situation in Europe can be quite horrific, some years ago I would often find myself working on Swiss (qwertz), UK (qwerty), Belgian (azerty) and Scandinavian (qwerty) keyboards during my average day. To make matters worse I were working on the machines remotely so glancing down on the keys to find that "misplaced" comma, period, forward slash, parenthesis and so forth were not an option. My favorite layout to hate is the Belgian/French azerty where digits and period require use of shift as the keyboard design work from the assumption that semi colon is more frequently used than period and section sign () more than the digit six and so on. Seriously! What insane person came up with this?

"A government-approved mobile operating system, especially in China of all places, reeks of its own backdoor exploits for governmental spying"
As opposed to the reek of the daily NSA exploits published by Bruce Schneier?
In difference from for example the RSA back door this is open source , so the code is there to review for potential back doors for anyone with the necessary knowledge. I can imagine quite a few will do so only to be able and point fingers and say "see, see! they do it too!" and would be little surprised if there is a government sponsored team doing just that as I write with the hope there will be findings to detract attention from scandals closer to home.

Seriously?! Are you trying to insinuate that they wouldn't if such leaks were available to them? If so, then maybe you should actually read the actual article alternatively work on your reading comprehension before commenting again as there is a paragraph clearly indicating that they would.

As far as I know it's neither. Langley, Virginia is where the CIA HQ are located while NSA have their HQ in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Isn't a lot of the US cultural institutions subsidized via donations and fund raisers so that rich folks to mingle and be seen with other of their ilk also pretending to be socially/culturally concerned by donating a tiny fraction of their wealth and then write off the donations on their taxes? The difference is that in socialist Europe we cut out the middle man by taxing directly and then distribute to directly to theaters, museums, art projects, movies and so forth.

Culture being subsidized is hardly anything new, be it via donations, taxes or a patron.

By your criteria Beethoven's compositions would fail to qualify as art as he were dependent on Archduke Rudolph's patronage to such a degree that he dedicated more than 10 of his compositions to Rudolph.

Maybe so, then again that might not be necessary as NSA are on very good terms with their Swedish equivalent FRA as revealed by a Snowden leak published in Sweden a couple of days ago which reported how FRA assisted NSA in the hacking of target machines in operation Winterlight. I can easily see how Sweden would bend over backwards to help USA gaining physical access to the cables just like with the extraordinary rendition of two asylum seekers in December 2001.
I long ago ceased being proud of the (imaginary) neutrality and foreign politics of my native Sweden, and sadly find it easier and easier to explain why over a decade ago I decided to leave Sweden and its great health care, education, welfare, beautiful nature and so forth.

The type of tracking in question have nothing to do with what OS you use as it is done via those little social media links that are present all over on nearly every damn website of a reasonably large size.

Use CyanogenMod. Stop being the product or a tool.

Covert Operation Collecting Knowledge, or COCK for short? Which clearly would not be the same as spying.

Do you mean "warnings" such as when the European Patent office revoked the Nespresso coffee pod patent?
http://www.eplawpatentblog.com/eplaw/nespresso/ http://www.domain-b.com/companies/companies_n/Nestle/20131012_coffee.html

which is my only serious gripe with Clemetine, sure there are some clunky ways to work around it it but they aren't pretty. That aside, I do find that Clemenitine do the job very well, and based on the few times I've encountered iTunes I'd that say anything is an improvement

Foobar2000. The only piece of software I really miss after moving to Linux. Simple but effective GUI, crazily customizable and low on resources, Clementine which I use now is a good replacement but still there are times when I miss Foobar.

The book were published in 2009, the agent that prevented her entry specifically referred to a hospitalization that took place in 2012. How did they know about events that should be shielded under patient privacy laws and took place years after publishing of mentioned book? Unless you can point to a source describing her 2012 hospitalization that were publicly available at the time of her entry denial, then I'd say that her story have a very interesting place in this matter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HnwhGgsgXc

Many of those users fall into the category that believe the CD tray is a cup holder, that Internet Explorer is the Internet and that Pass1234 is a secure password. Good luck educating them, I've tried and on more than one occasion left with the feeling of having dropped a few IQ points.

I summoned Walt Disney to ask him about his opinion on the matter but we got into a dispute on whom that would own the rights to the recording I were making of our session and before I could ask him he the question he flipped me off and vanished.