Wasn't there even a story about archiving know-how in companies a couple of weeks back that mentioned a company that ran and maintained an old plant but had no idea how it actually worked?

Fixed that for you

People in Germany for example don't have to shop at Walmart, because Walmart doesn't exist anymore in this country. Fittingly because they failed to adapt to the new environment.

Nice 10nant quote.

Sometimes I wonder if we are just like the people in Plato's Allegory of the Cave - staring at the wall, watching the shadows move and then try to come up with scientific explanations of the shadows' behaviour - without knowing what's really going on because there's so much that we can't see/measure yet.

The first German hybrid plant started operating in Berlin last month. Surplus wind power is used to produce hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen will be used to produce heat and energy, but will also be sold at local gas stations for use in fuel cells. So Vattenfall, Deutsche Bahn and Total seem to think that it's indeed worth it.

And there are projects starting next year that will built plants to convert the hydrogen into methane.

They'd take you to court. And they don't have to prove anything. The law in this case says that GEMA can safely assume that every artist is a GEMA member and it's on you to prove them wrong. The German laws in this regard are unfortunately really fucked up and far from common sense...

Because German record labels, publishers and other greedy companies want to continue making money from works created by long-dead authors and have lots of lobbyists and politicians on their payroll?

That should teach you a lesson about the importance of off-site backups.

You don't need to get into the plants to cause serious damage to them. Just hi-jack a large plane and crash it into the plant. IIRC there were some studies a while back in Germany that showed that several of the country's nuclear plants were not built to withstand such forces. And it's not just the initial impact that causes damage, you have take into account the thousands of liters of burning fuel. And central Europe isn't that big, so there are many airports less than a few minutes of flight away from nuclear plants.

Facebook Continues Assault On StudiVZ, Opens Office In Hamburg

Not really. Shooting raw materials 350 Km up into orbit is a bit easier than travelling a few hundred million km into the void, cruising around in the asteroid belt looking for those materials (remember, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately three thousand, seven hundred and twenty to one!) and then returning into earth orbit.