European servers owned and managed by a US company. While there may be local employees in the EU, they are ultimately answerable to more senior US based employees within their own company and therefore to US law.

That assumes that the US division of Deutsche Bank actually has access to the banking records of German citizens. If the chain of command is set up correctly within the company, then the US division should be unable to get access to German records without the agreement of someone sufficiently senior in Germany.

Employees located in a different country would not be subject to the laws, but they are still subject to the hierarchy of their own business - that is if their boss is located in the US and compelled by US law to do something, the less senior employee would also be so compelled not directly by US law, but by the internal rules of the company.

The data belongs to a US company, and is on servers which US based employees have access to. Those employees are beholden to US laws, and should retrieve the data if directed to do so by a US court.
Also the Irish company is a subsidiary of the US company. The Irish employees don't have to obey US law, but they do have to obey their bosses who in turn do have to obey US law.
So long as the data is stored on servers operated by an organisation which has a chain of command extending upwards in the US, they are beholden to the demands of the US government. The opposite probably wouldn't apply, as the Irish employees wouldn't have seniority over the US and thus couldn't compel them to do anything.

If they don't like it, the Irish part could be spun off as an entirely separate entity free of US control.

Linux support for MIPS is actually pretty good, and has been around at least as long as ARM support if not longer... The rest of the toolchain, like gcc etc also has good MIPS support. There is already 64bit MIPS support in the Linux kernel and has been for a long time too, MIPS is actually one of the oldest 64bit architectures out there.
MIPS would actually be better off focusing on this, as they have a good head start on ARM when it comes to 64bit and multiprocessing. I used to have a 24 cpu (discrete cpus, not cores) 64bit MIPS years ago in the form of an SGI Onyx.

They should be required to actually pick up the leaves and dispose of them, rather than just blowing them around...
There seems to be a constant battle here whereby someone will hire a gardener who will blow the leaves off their front lawn, mostly onto the adjacent properties or onto the road. A few days later, those adjacent properties hire gardeners who blow them all back.

Most washers have a delay start option...
So if you work 9-17, and your wash cycle takes 2.5 hours you schedule it to start at 14:30 and it will be just finished by the time you get home. If you have 4 loads to do a week, then you just run it all but one weekday. Plus if you spread your 4 wash loads out over the week rather than waiting until a specific laundry day you won't get such a large buildup of dirty clothes.

In the EU, 240V outlets are the standard not anything special. Generally appliances (at least in the UK) have up to a 13A fuse in them, and you may have a higher capacity hard wired circuit for the stove (the dryer is almost always just plugged into a standard wall outlet).

Or they could just turn off the tower? That gives them the added benefit of deniability, they could claim the tower suffered a power outage or other technical fault.

Why would the NSA or the police want to brick someone's phone? All that would achieve is a minor annoyance for the target, who would promptly go out and buy another cheap burner phone. The needs of NSA/police are much better served by keeping the phone online and monitoring it.

Vendors on the other hand, have a vested interest in shutting down old phones to make you buy a new one.

So ARM is in the same boat x86 was in compared to high end RISC all those years ago...
You could have your cheap, slow and unscalable x86 - or you could have a fast Alpha at 10x the price. Look what happened there?

The Apple touchpads are actually quite good, but everyone else's attempts to rip them off have been terrible and unusable...
I always used to use the nipple on thinkpads, and with other laptops i would always connect up an external mouse. When i got a macbook i actually started using the touchpad.

Apple's employee profile should match the population of people qualified to carry out the roles Apple has available... If there is a lack of diversity among qualified individuals then the issue is with the education system, not Apple. Apple can only hire from the pool of available talent thats qualified to do the job.

Quotas won't "fix" anything...
It's the culture among kids that needs to change. If kids are in an environment where their peers shun specific subjects, then they will go along with it due to peer pressure irrespective of what they might individually be interested in.

Some of them ship with dd-wrt preinstalled, if you go for those models then you can be sure of compatibility.

A small cheap UPS could keep something as low power as this running for a long time, brief power outages shouldn't pose a problem. And if you build it correctly, you shouldn't really need to reset it.