Funny, now that you mention, I've got reasonably priced "metered" SIM cards in my phone and tab, plus a personal Mifi hotspot with a true flat fee sim card. The SIMs are from different operators, so I can get connectivity on 2 of the 3 local physical mobile networks.

So situations where I'd use any "public" wlan are rather sporadic, and limited to situations where mobile coverage is shit.

Most home routers won't work in a public setting, nowadays:

Please consider, that by default such devices are setup to provide DHCP from a small range of addresses.

Typically, SOHO router will provide less than 128 IP addresses. The problem is that they hand it out in a way that is tuned to a more stable environment, in ISP routers herearound I've seen 24h as a typical lease period. So if you have enough repeat customers, are located in an area that has spotty mobile coverage, people tend to get no IP address more often than you would prefer. Notice that in such situation, using a (semi-) random IP address from the network works quite well (but while you can do it easily enough on a laptop via tcpdump, figuring out network address, gateway and so on is not feasible on mobiles/tabs).

Furthernore, having a router that cannot handle that many TCP connections is kind of broken. I'm using a Linux PC as the LAN server/router, and you can blast around what you want, have 10K NATed TCP connections and everything works fine. The cable company's provided "router", OTOH, does not even handle long running ssh connections (especially when they go idle for periods) without any torrent traffic properly. Worse, it does not even send a RST packet, so your local ssh client thinks everything is fine till it tries to send something, ...

Pick any random Linux box, and it will have bash/openssl installed.

Xen on the other hand, rather specialized software, hence you have a couple of mega-users. It's easy to coordinate with a couple of professional organisations that are critically interested.

Without such usage clusters, it's much more difficult.

It's not about customers.

Every website under German jurisdiction has to follow certain rules. They slightly differ if the website is run for private purposes or commercial ones, but one of the things that you need to include is an electronic form of contact, that is responded to.

It's not about doing business, it's about providing an internet service, which comes with a number of rules in most countries.

Basically, anyone providing a website does need to provide an imprint with a possibility for a quick contact.

don't use their own products.

As an example for a common service where 4/1 mbit is problematic you can take Google Hangout.
Experience shows that 4/1 mbit is kind a certain minimum /(assuming that the connectivity is perfect), and I don't think that you'll manage two video chats on 4/1.

The experience comes from our team where some people have 8mbit DSLs, and they usually just turn off video to get reliable and useful audio. Hangouts being bandwidth hogs also pans out with the reported transferred data counters, e.g. a video call can can take a couple of 100MB very quickly (according to this, http://mashable.com/2012/11/14... Hangouts use ~900MB/h)

Now, consider that 1mbit upstream can transfer roughly 350MB/hour (that assumes an networking overhead and calculates with 10bit per byte).

As it has been pointed out, does not work this way.

Many people do need to follow corporate rules, which includes going for the cheapest fare.

Furthermore almost all people are under the pressure to travel as fast as possible.

So in many cases when travelling A to B you end up with a very short (kind of len=1) list of possible flights/fares.

Add to this that companies are starting to other different options to customers. (E.g. reserved contingent of places for people with frequent traveller status)

Basically, "seat design" is an important consideration, but only one of many considerations. E.g. not loosing your job, getting to visit you family at all (e.g. taking the "nicer" connection would mean that you loose to much time), or not going bankrupt (e.g. you could get the nicer seat, but it would negate hugely the initial idea why you are commuting to the better paid contract in the first place), ....

Then you've got the last-minute substitution of planes, ... or planes that are officially

So you think the "Market" will work, when it's hard to get the information (that's a very known failure point of free markets, these presume full information so every participant so he can decide what's best for him), and the customers are not completely free to decide (company rules, time constraints).

Well, "writing" is not really an issue. What you might have meant was Gutenberg with the printing press. But even that's wrong, because printing something does not make the document accessible over long time spans. Even if it's published and widely circulated, after a surprising short time, only a tiny subset of the public (these that care about the subject) matter, might remember the original event and publication.

That's what libraries have provided as a service for a long time:

* books (and other publications)
* and an INDEX.

The index was usually by author, by title, by topic, and if you were lucky, by keywords. If something was not indexed, finding the stuff was basically a random happening.

So you could look up (with some work) what Mr X Y has published, or you could lookup "treaties about atomic proliferation", and discover by happenstance, that X Y has played a role in that topic. But that fact was known (as in can be "recalled") by a tiny set of scholars at best.

Now, you can lookup X Y directly, and you'll see not only stuff that X Y has labelled explicitly to be associated with his name (that would be what being an author means), but all kinds of facts, non-facts, lies, and so on about X Y.

So no, writing, nor the printing press are not the technology meant, it's more like "big data" and "automatic indexing".

First, moving to a big city has been an option in most of Europe at least since the 19th century.

Second, Privacy legislation like in Germany does work, e.g. it has happened to me at least once that an Agency that I parted in a bad way (basically the customer was very embarrassing for the Agency, and I milked them by basically offering to discuss the dirty laundry of said customer in Court) has offered me a new contract only two years later on. Reason: Storing more than what is necessary is not legal, so most Agencies in Germany do not have databases storing long details about contractors, OTOH, they did have my CV in their DB (I supplied it to them, so they had the right to store it), and their IT could tell them that I had worked in the past (keeping invoices for accounting purposes is a legal requirement). The employees that had dealt with me, had moved on, so the only people who might have commented on my unfriendly (even if legal, I just insisted on my legal rights, which is something many contractors don't know about, and the others usually don't insist on them) behaviour where basically the CEO and the legal counsel. Both not guys you would ask about random potential contractors.

So yes, arguably, the European system of privacy protection DOES (or CAN if enforced) work. Think HIPAA, but applied to all areas, with certain shades of grey (different data about a person requires different levels of protection, e.g. you really really have better an explicit legal requirement to store say the religion or medical data about a person, these are are considered highly sensitive)

The problem is that it's completely incompatible with the way the US system works. (It's not only the Patriot Act, it's also the civil court system with subpoenas and so on, which treat personal data in the US completely incompatible with the EU requirements) And for the moment, the European pols have decided to look away. As always that works for some time, but now the Courts are slowly (really slowly) starting to point out issues.

What the real issue here is, IMHO, is that this "looking away" is giving an unfair competitive edge to US companies, which regularly are doing stuff with European data that would be strictly illegal for European companies. (I happened to have worked as a freelancer for US and for European companies)

So basically, the EU has basically the following options (ordered by personal preference):
1.) enforce the Privacy guideline also against US companies.
2.) drop the Privacy guideline and go with the US model where personal data is owned by corporate entities.
3.) do nothing, meddle through like it's currently doing.

The sad thing is, that if you order it by likelihood of implementation, you get 3-1-2. (3 because that's what the US lobby is working for, because 2 is unlikely, considering that Privacy is a basic (constitutional, even if we don't call it that way in the EU, it's always "Treaty of X" or "Treaty of Y", the pols got burned quite a bit when they tried to create a document called "EU Constitution") Human Right.

Well, it's simple.

The American way of life (or understanding Privacy) is that information about Mr. X, that is collected by some company is the property of said company.

The European concept in Privacy is that any data about Mr. X is basically always the property of Mr. X, and any company wanting to store/process/... that data needs a legal authorization to do so. (That can be explicit by law, there are some general cases where other laws imply the right to process data, e.g. accounting/taxing rules, or by personal consent.) Even if a a company processes data about Mr. X legally, Mr. X has a number of rights (e.g. withdrawal of permission => deletion, correction of data, and naturally as a first, a right to query any data linked with him by the company). The stuff is complicated by the fact that privacy protection is currently regulated by the member countries, based on a common guideline.

If you think about this for a moment, you'll realize that these two concepts are very incompatible. The Politicians decided to paper over this with the "US-EU Safe Harbour Agreement", and currently some of the high level courts in the EU are finding that the Agreement is not exactly working as advertised.

Considering the right to be "forgotten", if you think about this, it's obviously covered by existing law:

* Google is not some kind of Publisher (that would be an argument that they have a legal authorization from laws covering Journalism), so it's a data processor of data that can be linked to an individual.

* Hence the right to delete stuff (withdraw the permission to process data about Mr. X.) obviously applies.

Well, at least a Communist Agent Provocateur, I mean what's better to hobble an enemy than a witch hunt?

It's a simple case of living in system where you need to cheat (be creative, "organize", ...) to fulfill basic requirements.

That means that people who have lived through this deprivation, act funny to people in more normal econimies:

1.) So you need to sacks of cement. Typical response of a Western guy, "okay, let's go buy 2 sacks of cement, and what exact kind do we need?". Somebody tha has lived in the Eastern block might start plotting a "plan" to get his hands at two sacks of cement. That might involve all kinds of criminal or semi-criminal behaviour, be it stealing, defrauding, ... => one of the reason why many building efforts of the communist were not as well built as planned, quite a bit of material disappeared.

2.) Values and perceptions are also shifted. Happened to our family. Our car was stolen in a former eastern country. Very irritating experience, one has to organize how to get home, fill out a ton of irritating insurance forms, and one might wait a couple of weeks for a new car. Our local acquaintances took it as if the theft was "the end of the world" => cars at that time were viewed quite different there.

In my experience, it took at least a decade of "freedom" before the worst of there effects were gone (e.g. I need X => let's see what shops sell X), and multiple decades before it all faded kind of in the background.

Germany is a special case too, because it was a split country (so many things that are not commonly visible are more visible), plus Eastern Germany was one of the economic powerhouses of the Eastern block, so normal people could avoid the deprivation economy quite a bit longer/had to endure it way shorter.

But still, the point stays, if the only way to feed your kids is stealing, most people will start stealing. And if the situation where this is necessary keeps on going for decades, certain habits and values form that cannot be undone quickly.

Only as a side note, the German speaking countries have also a system where books are not allowed to be sold below the price set by the publisher. Nothing new here.

Well, auto connect for encryption less wifis is a clear way to get MITM attacked.

But even with encryption the way Wifi work your device will broadcast all networks it tries to autoconnect. An most mobile devices that's equal to "known networks".