And boy let me tell you, the items that are controversial in the USofA are not the same ones that are controversial over here in Europe. Of course we get a smattering of IS and Ebola related news this time of year, but in general political discourse tends to not involve discussions on what one should be doing with one's penis, vagina, uterus or the contents thereof, but much more about the re-distribution of wealth and the state of law.

I see that both in Israel and the US, to be honest: A focus on the irrelevant. Case in point being that the security craze and hype surrounding 9/11 has caused a spike in ground traffic that killed more people than the 9/11 incident itself. It seems to me that both the US and Israel have a greater tendency than normal to hype relatively small risk factors and completely and blatantly ignore evidence for large looming risk factors, even in the face of mounting evidence.

The more progressive a society gets, the more balanced people's view is on risk. Whether the one causes the other or vice versa, I do not know. The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland are decidedly more earthy in their political discourse, even if obviously we do have some fear mongering rotten apples. Case in point in the Netherlands being the fascist reactionaries that crawled from under all the rocks in the country in the wake of the discussion on whether blackface is a good idea, but I digress.

So while the findings are interesting, firstly 83 subjects is a piss in the pond and secondly the original poster is right: Is this finding universal for all the cultures we find on the globe?

Lastly, by US standards I would be a flaming liberal. There's nothing wrong with smoking a doozie, I am atheist, I think abortion isn't even worth a discussion since babies only really become sentient some 2 months after birth, obviously I am in favour of gay marriage and last but not least I think the proliferation of weapons amongst civilians (and even the army, but I digress again) is a really really silly idea.

However, I self identify as a Left Winger in terms of economic re-distribution politics, as a Constitutional Conservative when it comes to safeguarding the state of law in my country, a Conservationist in terms of the environment and indeed finally as a Liberal in terms of sexual practice and tolerance and the tolerance for people of other color. But when it comes to my atheism I am quite extremist. I think people who are god-believers are simply lesser beings and I do strive to stamp out god-belief and related silliness wherever I encounter it.

Now I wonder, given all my views and thoughts on things, whether I would be deemed a "Conservative" or "Liberal", and what selection criteria would be used for classifying me such. Because none of those were mentioned in the article.

Why post this anonymous? Now it won't be +5Funny.

I wanted to ask why Star Wars and Galactica, but no Culture novels, but then I realised that neither GCU Fate Amenable to Change or dROU Frank Exchange of Views had any sort of catch phrase.

You, as an individual, are not statistically relevant, even if what you describe is the actual truth. I say that last bit because infants, as soon as they are born, start sucking up language from their parents / caretakers, and I cannot really imagine you growing up in a total vacuum.

I do tend to agree most people learn best from people, because of the simple reason that there is so much evidence all around us that supports that claim. It is wired into us to mimic and learn from the people in our environment.

Konami Magical Tree, Yie Ar Kung Fu II and Namco's Bosconian, is all I have to say.

Maybe King's Valley II and Boulderdash too.

If you infer that this post has a get-off-my-lawn type of feel to it, you're right. Point is that the games I grew up with were all at least 10-15 years before 20 years ago. ;)

Since then, from my perspective, the largest two "Good Ideas" were packed in Leisure Suit Larry / Space Quest I and potentially Wolfenstein 3D.

I must admit I think Masters of Orion is one seriously underrated game. I'd love an update on that where the original gameplay is kept as is and ported to MacOS. ;)

Obviously you have never heard of Fjallraven G2000 cloth. Then the US Marine Core uses cloth in their uniforms that is designed by a company residing in Almelo, the Netherlands. So in terms of cloth that can withstand fire, wear and tear, wind and rain, we have some of the most techy gear on the planet in Europe.

Then when it comes to regular clothing, I find that the US and Canada have an absolute horrid industry. Clothes are baggy, ill fitting and generally just look like bags rather than shirts or trousers. For nice, form fitting jeans, suits, shirts and such I rely on G-Star (Dutch), Diesel (Italian), Boss (German), Van Gils (Dutch again), Eton Shirts (Swedish), Ledub (Dutch) or Sand (Danish).

When it comes to hand made shoes for business or evening wear, I would point to Van Bommel (Dutch), Van Liers (Dutch), while for casual wear and golf I enjoy Ecco sneaks and golf sneaks (Danish).

All of these clothes are not particularly cheap, but they fit the body, they look really damn good and the quality is generally excellent.

So whether it's hi-tech (polar, wetlands, desert) gear or actual clothing for regular use, I tend to favor (Northern) European brands any day of the week.

Information security and adhering to all manner of certification, both in terms of physical security and compliance to information management regulation, is usually a lot more stringent in a decent (professional) cloud environment than in people's own data center.

I'd be inclined to disagree with your assessment of hosted infrastructure, although quite honestly I am apprehensive about going to the cloud myself.

Maybe it's a psychological thing.

Sorry to burst your bubble there.

I'm afraid to say I've been bleeding blue (HP Blue, not Dell, IBM, eh... never mind) since the dawn of time.

Yes they are. I work in the Information Management software division as a pre-sales, and I'm pretty much paid to tell subsets of the above to customers.

- We are our own reference customer for Connected backup for end-points.
- We are our own reference customer for TRIM, now known as HP Records Manager 8.0
- We are our own reference customer for Database Archiving, now known as HP Application Information Optimiser

So all of that is publicly available in white-papers and case-studies.

The fact that we're building a public cloud infrastructure per country in Europe is also very much not a secret. If we want to get or retain EU based cloud customers, we need to be able to guarantee that their data remains their data and that it won't fall prey to third parties, chiefly amongst which the US government.

In terms of data center consolidation and cost savings associated with that, the strategy internal IT is following is largely in line with the Data Center concept we sell as Converged Infrastructure, Cloud System Matrix and Cloud System One.

Moreover our external web presence is run on the newly launched project Moonshot, in which you can currently cram some 45 servers in 5U rack space, which will soon get uplifted to 180 servers in 5U rack space.

All of this is a clean cut case of eating your own cooking, and then using that fact to market the underlying technologies.

So yes, I am very much convinced HP is comfortable with me sharing this publicly.

We've consolidate all office application servers to 5 data centers, one per continent. Then we've rolled out end-point backup for some 80.000 laptops in the field and some 150.000 more PC's around offices across the world which includes legal hold capabilities. Each country in which we're active has a number of mobile device options for telephony, most of them being Android and Win8 based nowadays since WebOS got killed.

Then we're in the process of building a European infrastructure where we have data centers for managed customer environments in every major market in Europe. I am currently not aware of what's going on in APJ or South America. This is important in Europe however, because managed European customers don't want to see their data end up in the States, and the same goes for those that use our cloud offerings.

physical local IT staff presence in all countries has been minimized to a skeleton crew, not only because of data center consolidation but also because of the formation of a global IT helpdesk in low cost countries, and the rise of self-service portals.

The plethora of databases we had internally has been Archived using Application Information Optimizer for structured data archiving. We are our own biggest reference customer in this regard. On top of that we've beefed up our VPN access portals across the world so as to accommodate road warriors logging in from diverse locations.

Lastly, we use our own Records Management software suite to generate 8.000.000. unique records per day. These are archived for a particular retention period (7 years I believe) for auditing purposes.

Why not Luxemburg? Liechtenstein? Andorra? Monaco? Tonga?

Personally I wouldn't mind being spied on intensively by Ancilla Tilia, but that just makes me sound sexist and / or desperate. Plus she's not into that kind of thing.

Well, I hate to say this, but while corporations are just greedy entities that seem only care about expansion and profit, not in that order, governments actually should be somewhat ideological in nature.

As such I'd rather have particular governments spy on me. At the moment, I could deal with the Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Swiss, Dutch, possibly maybe the German, Belgian, French and Finnish governments spying on me. As for the rest, I am not so sure.

Conceptually speaking I do endorse governments before corporations.

I am assuming that whole post should have been modded up +5 Funny, but for those that don't get the sarcasm it represents I would like to add my two cents to the mix.

Let alone the fact that the good old US of A violates the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Convention and a whole slew of international and sensible treaties on Human rights and rights in general faster than you'd be able to say porridge, I must also point out the sheer arrogance of many US citizens when they indeed trumpet their nation as the birthplace of anything that's democratic (a Greek word) and free (an old Saxon/Frisian/Germanic/Scandinavian word).

Firstly, the United States are not the only country on the planet that has a Constitution. it might behoove people to remember that (amongst others) the Dutch Unie van Utrecht out of 1579 and the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish served as inspiration for Jefferson et al when they were looking to write their constitution and declaration of independence. So no, the US did not invent humanism, the enlightenment, the notion of an inalienable freedom to believe what you wish and other core things. Those have been around far longer than the US across many cultures on this globe.

Hell, I use a shaving soap from a factory that was started in 1565. My shaving soap is actually older than the US itself.

Secondly, given the levels of poverty, incarceration, the amount of annual executions, the lack of healthcare or even access to education many of your citizens suffer do point in the direction that the USA is actually becoming an impoverished, brutish, oppressive and uncivilized nation. As we all know paranoia, poverty and an unlimited supply of guns for the largest army on the planet are hardly a mix I would call "a jolly good idea".

Having said all that, for those that still don't get the sarcasm of the poster I'm replying to: I do indeed suggest you let the Canadians spy on you. They do seem more civilized than the other options in the poll.

Why thank you. I really try, so it's a nice compliment.

The poster you just replied to took the words right out of my mouth.

While I agree with you, and not a lot of people seem to disagree here, that vaccinations against dangerous diseases are a good thing, I think over-medication is the bane of our health care systems.

In the Netherlands, doctors have a reputation for not easily medicating people. We're cautious about antibiotics, we're cautious about many types of drugs. The usual response of a Dutch doctor to fever is that as long as it's not over 40 degrees C and doesn't last for longer than three days, it's nothing to worry about. Of course this can be nuanced based on symptoms seen, but you get the gist of it.

This means that the amount of people that develop an immunity to antibiotics and whatnot is much lower than in countries such as Israel and Bulgaria, where people tend to be over-medicated in my view.

To get back to vaccination, I do think it's our collective responsibility to weed out things like polio, diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus as much as we can, not getting flu shots is hardly morally offensive for the reasons already stipulated by the poster above.

In the Netherlands there's a huge debate over religious freedom vis a vis the vaccination of children from families that are religious to the point where they don't vaccinate. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's a collective responsibility to make sure these children don't fall victim to their parents' backwards views.

What you believe should be your prerogative, but as soon as you let it endanger unsuspecting minors your belief should be a secondary concern relative to the safety of those unsuspecting minors.

Either which way, a degree of nuance is called for in any such debate, so I don't think you should make messaging as simple as a blanket statement of "please get vaccinated" any more than you should advise people not to get vaccinated at all.