Also, enjoy Mark Twain's The Awful German Language. A brilliant take on my native language.

The EU is also responsible for the Data Retention Directive.

Indeed. Which is - I admit - a shame. But we're also capable of learning from our errors, it seems:

The European Union's data retention directive is incompatible with the bloc's charter of fundamental rights, Advocate General Pedro Cruz VillalÃn said in an opinion Thursday. [...] The opinion isn't binding on the European Court of Justice, Europe's highest court, but in the majority of cases, advocate general opinions are followed.

Source

I wish the same could be said about Obama's administration and its stance towards the NSA spying.

That wasn't it (although that still applies). It had something to do with the nations/institutions doing arctic research helping out each other.

I just think it is cool there is such cooperation between Russia, China, and Australia

I've learned these days that they're acting not so much out of 'coolness', but due to international agreements. Unfortunately I don't remember the agreements name (other than it being a typical bureaucratic monster term) and my Google Fu is rather weak today, it seems.

Why has it failed to protect to Mr. Appelbaum ? Just because the word "Appelbaum " sounds Jewish ?

You're asking too much here - I mean, we're not even able to protect our own Bundeskanzlerin, let alone a mere mortal foreign citizen ...

[...] plus inhouse VB stuff that keeps some stuff on old MS Windows systems here

All of our VB(6) stuff runs without problems on Win7 without me having done anything special to make it run there.

I'd go so far to say it's even better now, because Win7 (and Vista before) have the VB runtime included, so installation has basically become a copy & paste of the EXE.

[...] a coincidence that this happened just before XP is retired.

Yes and No.

I disagree. I'm not a native English speaker, but most music I listen to has English lyrics. Now - I've even got a hard time to understand the lyrics in my native language. For English songs, I really need to concentrate hard to understand the lyrics. Therefore they could very well sing "LaLaLa" (OK, with some variations ...) and it wouldn't change much the way I feel for/perceive a song. It's more about the phrasing, rhythm and melody. The voice is just another instrument - and a very versatile one. Oh, and did I mention that I absolutely love monumental choirs? :)

"I have seen the horse vomit."

That's not right. Our expression is "(Aber) Man hat schon Pferde vor der Apotheke kotzen gesehen." A translation might be "(But) Horses have been seen vomitting in front of a pharmacy". It's a phrase that's added after describing a very unlikely situation, which may nonetheless happen, e.g. "Given X and Y, I doubt that Z will happen ... but horses have been seen ..."

Sure. Here you go. Source of that URL, an article of the German IT publisher/news site Heise.

That article is about kino.to, a streaming "service" for pirated movies, to which you had to subscribe for a flat monthly fee. It is assumed (and that's what the Süddeutsche article linked there states), that anybody subscribing to that service had to know - by using common sense - that it can only be an illegal streaming portal and that streaming of illegal content is, well - illegal. And you had to be a suscriber in order to use that service.

That's a bit different from the current case.

... or pick a religion which hasn't a contract with the German state for collecting taxes (hint: any non-christian religion).

In thousand years? Just ask your replicator (aka "3D printer" these days) to create one ...

The question is whether that worry is rational or not

I don't think that is the point. It's rather how many feel the same (rational or not) and censor themselves. If a big enough part of a constitutional democratic country's inhabitants feel that way, it's troubling for a democracy. It typically is one of the attributes of a totalitarian regime that its citizens don't dare to speak up freely.

There are plenty of markets that are free enough that the advantages (and disadvantages) of free markets are clear.

No there aren't, because people like you keep forgetting (or ignoring?) one of the main prerequisites that Adam Smith described for a "free market" to work: equal knowledge of buyer and seller.

For a free market to work (according to Smith), a seller must be aware of all "ingredients" (cost of work for production, production methods, cost of raw materials etc.) of a product in order to decide a) the product's worth and b) being able to compare it to similar products. The cheap, low quality knife might be good enough for me, whereas the professional cook goes for the high quality and expensive one.

So, be honest: for how many of the products you buy each day, do you know the exact raw material combination? Are you able to judge the toxic level of all chemicals used in those products? Do you know the medications given to the animal whose meat you're buying, all the herbicides and fertilizers used for those vegetables, how many kid's slave labor is involved in the production of that t-shirt and how many m of fresh water have been contaminated during the mining of these rare earth used in your new gadget?

No, the parent was correct: free market (as defined by Smith) does not exist. Not even close these days.