The EU is currently working on regulating payment systems, and there is still an option that they will force easy (well easier) access to new players to the market.

What good relationship? The reason Obama has been popular for some time is related more to the fact that the Bush administration had any number of very unpopular policies here around, and Obama claimed that he'll change them when elected. The sad part is, that he did not change them, he continued them or even enlarged them. The only big promise that he kept at least partially, was stopping all these "illegal stuff". Alas, he stopped it be legalizing the practices in most cases, so lawyerish he's correct, he stopped all these "illegal practices", although many people (voters or not) probably took him to mean that he'll stop the practices and not just legalize them ;)

Actually, the funny part is, that spying on Mrs. Merkel phone is the NSAs job. And she's got a number of people whose job it is to prevent such spying. Technically, btw, as far as it's known, only Merkel's private (or technically party) mobile has been intercepted. In effect most relevant stuff was certainly interceptable => because her communication partners have to rely on "normal" communication systems designed to be easily intercepted.

Spying on the whole German population is the big issue. Mass-surveillance is a problem, it violates basically the 4th ammendment (and their local counterparts, e.g. in Germany, as you've mentioned the example, it's the "Fernmeldegeheimnis", communication privacy that is a constituional basic right). One of the things that was disliked about the Britons back than that they used to do basically warrentless searches, for whatever reason.

Now consider that the NSA wants all electronic communication world wide, and that naturally includes communication by US citizens at home. So think, if the population (because the political caste in D.C. is way less interested) manages to forbid domestic mass surveillance, And they manage to make it stick (against a bureacracy shredded into multiple layers of secrecy for the "common good", invoking "national security" every second sentence). Now what do you think will keep the NSA from asking their British friends to do some spying, under supervision for them? A good pretence would be e.g. "Safety of NATO personal deployed in the US", that's what the German BND (which is mostly forbidden to work inside the borders) did, just ask the allied agency that have the right to spy (via the NATO treaty and related "formerly secret" treaties) in Germany. Not probable, but the British inteligence community is very intimate with the US, even more than the other members of the "Five Eyes" club.

So basically, what we've got are highly unregulated secret organizations (where even the official oversight, usually from the legeslative branch has not enough insight, and still has to rely on the perps themselves not to lie), which have shown in the past a tendency to work around any legal issues very creatively, by doing the illegal thing (and cover it under the "national security" tag, to avoid scrutiny), by interpreting law in fascinating ways (e.g. creative interpretations of the Patriot Act, rubber stamp it at the FISA Court, and again we wouldn't want independent analysis if the legal creative interpretation is okay, so it's a question of "national security"), ...

And if everything else breaks, split the bad stuff up internationally, there are enough allied spooks that are not explicitly forbidden to do the bad deed in question, ...
"And no, Senator, we cannot tell you that, because that information "belongs" to an allied foreign agency, and sharing it would endanger international cooperation, and you know, that cannot be allowed, because the bad bad terrorists would win."

You do realize that having stayed in the Windows camp, they would have one migration more, because they're (12 years ago) migration target Windows XP is unsupported.

Munich is in the southeast of Germany.

Small reactors have still the unsolved "spent fuel" == "highly toxic waste that stays so for an eternity" issue

No problem. 40K debt. No problem, but notice that these cannot be discharged in a bankruptcy. So as long as these guys pay up, there is no issue.

The problem is, that climate change is something that up to a certain point is natural (research it, climate change has happened over the centuries, with sometime grave side effects for humans), the nuclear waste is highly toxic (the radiation is not noticable without technical kit, you'll just notice that all kinds of life forms start to die, seen it in person, but any numbers of elements present in the waste output is also chemically toxic to humans), and it will need safe storage for a multiple of the time span that modern humans have existed (the convinient time unit for measuring half-life is MILLIONS of years, and that's only the half-life => after millions of years (for some elements it's only 0.1 millions years) half the stuff has decayed, so half of the original bad stuff is still there, PLUS some of the decay products might be still radiating/toxic)

Now, consider how much we know about the Egyptian pyramids (e.g. we are still figuring almost everything about them out), and these are less than 5K years old).

So exactly how these far planning corporation that cannot budget correctly for the demantling of the plants (which funnily is a very common thing) plan to safe keep the stuff for 1 million years? It's not as if they have budgeted for lifting the stuff from Earth to drop it into the Sun.

So basically it's yet again an example of "private profit" + "community risks/costs". And while Communism sucks, this half-version of Communism (good private, bad shared by all) sucks even more.

Exactly, they produce stuff that is dangerous to life for time spans that are expressed in millions of years.

Put bluntly, this stuff will need safe keeping for way longer than the modern human has existed.

This is not comparable to CO2, which might have side effects on climate, but CO2 is a biologically safe gas, actually humans produce it themselves all the time breathing.

Well, they produce the mobiles, so I guess that they should have included some items in the contract for the software they've licensed that MS will comply with local laws.

Well, actually, if they stop a bombing, that would lead to prosecution, which is public.

Actually it's part of human development, if I got that one right, normal child development involves learning the concept of privacy around age 4.

Hint: apt-get install XXX-desktop converts your Ubuntu into a XXX desktop variant.

Ubuntu does create different distributions to make it easier for the user. and so that they don't need to install software initially that they won't be using.

Congrats, but you do realize that surfing to http://www.somerandomdomain.com/ will result in your data being collected (in many cases) by Google/Facebook and a number of other players in the field? You don't have to be a customer of Facebook so that Facebook starts collecting data about you. Not being a customer just means that some tiny bits of information are not supplied by you. So if some partner site where you ordered enriches your anonymous identity with Google/Facebook with your real name, you are still not a voluntary customer of Google & co.

That's utterly naive.

What a company does is not scrutinized at all.

Reporting some bad data about you can end with you being branded a child molester (have fun clearing your name on that). Reporting bad data about you can get you fired. Bad data can basically destroy your existence, by influencing how others deal with you.

Now the big issue here is that all the big data whore houses draw conclusions mostly by statistical correlation. Now that works quite well for 99% of the cases. For the rest, the conclusions drawn from the data can range from funny over bad to catastrophic.