Yes, right, In my native language, it's called differntly, thus the translation back into English failed.

Actually, there is no EU law to forbid data retention. To the contrary, there was a EU law (a directive) that every member state has to have a data retention law. And this directive was pulled because in the current form, it was considered unconstitutional. Thus no member state is required to have data retention anymore, and if they have, it has to conform to the verdict of the European High Court.

It gets really complicated here.

First, the EU directive on which this law was built upon, itself was already pulled because of being too unbalanced. Thus the Netherlands are no longer required to have a data retention law at all. So, from an EU point of view, no one in Brussels actually cares anymore if the Netherlands have a data retention law. They can do so if they want, but that's an entirely different matter (and even a new one has to take into account the verdict of the European High Court which pulled the old directive).

Second: If a new directive was in place which conforms to the verdict of the European High Court, the member states have to work out new data retention laws which also conform to the verdict and to their respective constitutions. If they don't manage to do so, they will be sued for EU contract violation, and then they have to argue why their new data retention law is not in place yet. This could even work out to the theoretical new directive being pulled too, if not enough member states are able to create constitutionally acceptable data retention laws.

But all those laws define requirements for telcos and internet providers, they totally leave out the ability or the legality of secret service agencies to gain access to the data and create their own data retention. My guess is that the whole data retention bruhaha came up because the spy agencies already did all those things without a legal base, and now the governments wanted them to be legalized in a way that the results could be used in the open. Maybe some envy between police forces and spy agencies also played a role, and the police wanted to have the same abilities.

It does in the second link: District court of The Hague.

The problem was that with ever changing hardware due to hotplugging during the runtime of a system, the concept of different runlevels was rendered obsolete. You can't have a runlevel for every hardware configuration that is possible. And if you have mobile devices, you have to take care of different power states, of connectivity, power saving modes and lots of other things that change during runtime. You simply can't solve that with a concept that was developed under the premise that the system gets powered up once and then runs forever without any further changes, until it has to be powered down for hardware maintenance.

So there was a system required that while running can adapt to different hardware configurations on the fly and automaticly solves the interdependencies for different demons, drivers and configurations.

While that is in principle possible with a set of scripts, it easily becomes un-maintenable, as every new hardware or state to support might need a hands-on on every script that might directly or indirectly affected by it, and you'll soon get runtime errors because a required service is not started, or a service, that is no longer required, is eating resources that long should have been freed. There was a system necessary for each demon and service and driver to report their requirements, and to calculate the new set of required resources and running processes, and to automaticly stop, reconfigure and start the approbriate things.

It is not claimed to be a new species, but the earlies known remains from a wellknown genus: Homo. It probably is from a very early Homo habilis.

No, there are experiments on evolution that are not experiments in intelligent design.

For instance we look which common properties two species have, and we calculate when the last common ancestor of those species must have lived, and then we go out and check mineral deposits of the approbriate age to look if we find fossils that are close to what we expect as the common ancestor.

I doubt it. Both France and UK are quite positive to nuclear (France gets 67% of her electricity from nuclear). And still Areva, a french company, is in turmoil. And UK is planning to build a new nuclear site and is securing 19 billion Euros in subsidies for it - why would they actually need all those subsidies, if nuclear is cheap? And even if the electricity produced is cheap -- the biggest part of the subsidies is the warranted price for the electricity produced of 11 euro-cents per kWh, about double the current market price. Then why's that?

Face it: nuclear is expensive.

The standard argument is that climate scientist have to claim the existence of AGW, otherwise they would lose their tenure, their grants or whatever their finance support is.

Now this just uses the same argument: Climate sceptics have to doubt AGW, because otherwise they would lose their financial founding. And to support that, the lawmakers want to actually know who founds the climate sceptics.

The correct sentence should have been: "At one time, most people thought the people of former times thought the earth was flat. That didn't make it factual."

There never was a time when people, who were really interested in the actual shape of the earth thought it was flat. There have been models of a flat earth, but they existed solely because no one actually cared about the real shape. It was just assumed in the models to be flat because it wouldn't have made a difference anyway. Old Germans believed the world was a tree -- but just in the sense that the World Tree Yggdrasil made for some nice stories. They never tried to map their trips assuming they would be walking along the bark of an actual oak.

As soon as the necessity arised to know about the real shape, it was pretty clear from the beginning that the earth was round.

They just play the denier's game. Attacking AGW folks because of funding was one of the first games the deniers played, as they couldn't come up with enough solid science on their side.

It's not the lack of imagination. Far from it.

When the buggy whip makers went out of business, the car industry was already in full swing. They were already outputting enough cars to replace the buggies. The buggy whip makers could actually see the workers working to make them obsolete. At this time, it was wellknown how many jobs the automobile industry was creating. And it was wellknown that the new automobile not only replaced the horse carriage, it actually made it better, allowing for more trips, for more load hauled, for higher speed. The car helped to make the whole transportation business to grow more productive, and not just a few percent, it was a multitude of improvement. The demand for transportation at the same time was also growing because transportation got so much cheaper that goods or persons which would never have been transported so far and so often before, now could. Replacing the buggy with the car as the means of transport actually increased the transporting market.

Buggy whip makers didn't need to imagine the new jobs. They knew what the new jobs were, as they could see their neigbours already having them.

But if you just replace a worker by a machine, there is not necessarily a new job opening waiting. The manufacturer of the machine already has the people to make the machine, as he was able to built it. And it's not as if his business has to be growing, as the market for his worker-replacement-machines is limited to the number of workers his machines can replace. It happens that not only the worker who is replaced by the machine is out of the job, also the people installing the machine are also out of a job, because their job is now finished. And maintaining the machine surely will require either less man-power or less qualified man-power than the man-power it is replacing. Otherwise there would be no point in actually replacing them.

Automatisation of jobs in general does not create new jobs. It just frees up human labor. If that allows for huge gains in productivity (and we are talking huge gains. The mechanical loom improved the productivity tenfold, and so did the spinning machine), there might be new markets and thus there might be new demand, creating new jobs. But just replacing the human by a machine does not. Having cheaper sport news does not increase the market for sport news. The replacement of the financial advisor by a computer does not increase the demand for financial advise, because the requestor does not get a tenfold improvement on his ROI. As a maximum, he saves the few percents the human financial advisor got as his premium. The same is valid for legal expertise. People will not want to have more need for legal advise just because it is cheaper. Most people prefer not to be involved in legal quagmires at all. Compare that with the demand for cars! People love to buy cars. Or at least, they used to love it. But the demand for new cars is already shrinking at least in some parts of the world. Young people in Europe list the desire to own a car quite low in their priorities already. A similar trend can be seen in the U.S.. And which new job is replacing the car manufacturer's job? Simply none. Completely different than it was when the welder's job at a car factory replaced the buggy whip maker.

The short story "Invasion from Aldebaran" by Stanislaw Lem pictures a very advanced race with lots of means to hide their presence or to seamlessly adapt to the environment they are landing in.

The invasion starts in a forest near a small polish village, and the aliens transform into local people they just saw passing by, thus totally hiding their alien presence. But then they meet a drunkard, who bears a grudge against one of the people they have turned into anyway. Their biogenic attack weapons (a swarm of insect-like stitching and poisoning robots) turn back because they can't get through the ethylalcohol cloud surrounding the prospective victim, and the drunkard gets agitated because they aliens don't really react when he yells at them. Their weapon detecting device doesn't warn about the knag lying wayside, and the drunkard takes it and hits them on the head, while they still try to get their translation device to decipher the messages he was mumbling at them - thus killing the aliens and fighting off the alien invasion.

Actually, it would make sense to charge smokers less than the non-smokers for health insurance.

Sure, smokers die early. But the typical reasons for a smoker to die are quite cheap for health insurance. Yes, lung cancer is nasty, but you are dead after half a year. A healthy non-smoker with just a tad high blood pressure gets fifteen years of treatment until he dies.

Not the nicotine itself, but the amide of nicotinic acid, namely nicotinamide a.k.a. Vitamin B3.

But that's the general problem with many toxins: They are often toxic because they are so similar to a very important compound that's quite necessary for us, and they poison us, because they are nearly, but not completely right.