No probably the http://europa.eu/about-eu/institutions-bodies/court-justice/index_en.htm which is supposed to upheld the "federal EU legislation" against the local governments and in generally gets involved in almost every principal case as a standard practice by the local supreme courts, the fact that few cases actually make it all the way is due to a process of advisory where the national court ask the EU court for advice, on cases where EU law may be relevant.

The interesting thing is that the main tactics in the war on "fair use" seams to be outsourcing the regulation to private parties who does not get a realistic choice to refuse a takedown request as it will always be both more expansive and more risky to defend their customers rights then not.

This allow some interesting legal doublethink in the context of the US supreme court where you can protect the "freedom" of the "oppressor"(telco) instead of the "oppressed"("uploader"), by granting corporation a privileged personhood status,something that is a bit harder with the general EU legislation because corporation and consumer tend to be more clearly defined.

The basic tactic is to avoid involving the courts, as it spread the risk of financial loss move evenly between the accuser and accused in favor of a "private" pseudo system where it's almost free to accuse and expansive to defend, when things go to court the content industry almost always get's less then they ask for, if anything at all.

At least the high frequency trading mess is leaving some usable wreckage behind that's a lot more then you can say about most of the financial institutions innovations.

Problem is, that windmills are noisy neighbors and cannot cover every square mile, take a place like Denmark with around 20% of energy coming from wind where the eco-activists is now chaining themselves to construction machinery to protest the construction of bigger and hence more noisy windmills in what they consider a Nature reserve.

Above a certain level you simply run out of space, where you can put em without "ruining" someone neighborhood for the windmills and the figures of cost rises significanly when you move the location out into the oceans, hydro reached that point decades ago.

Traditional solar panels are extremely expansive in both energy and material cost to make when you measure pr megawatt, and just not viable on a large scale 10% might be a realistic upper limit. Bio cant provide anything like double digit percentages either, This leaves us with something like 60-70% of our energy need we can only fill with, fosil, nuclear or tech we dont have yet.

If you want to move from gas/diesel cars to hydrogen/battery power you add to this problem by increasing the drain you need to put on the grid by 30-100%.

The problem is that none of the alternative energy forms will generate the same amount of energy we get from fossil without us actually making sacrifices, beyond spending a few billions.

In some parts of Europe we are beginning to see data protection agencies(yes normally an oxymoron) banning the use of clouds, where parts of the infrastructure is outside of their jurisdiction, for anyone licensed to store sensitive information. because they assume that the authorities of that place will always have access to back doors in the platform. Something that have caused the usual cloudvangalists to accuse them of being anti progress and all the lot.

This is causing some ruckus as school districts want to use google docs and hospitals want to move their IT into the cloud where the unicorns roam and IT is free and easy.

the BP oil spill.

One of the biggest issues in the whole nuclear accident meme thing is that well somehow nuclear accidents are only ever compared to other nuclear accidents. But on a wider scale how dangerous is this compared to similar events hitting conventional energy sources? like oil well or refinery fires.

Chrome like safari is based on the rather old khtml engine(of konqueror fame) that always was fast but tended to do pretty bad when rendering non standard html the way the author intended(and nobody especially google writes standard html) that issue slowly got fixed, and when apple got involved(and it got renamed to webkit), it took off for mainstream use.

Chromes javascript performance along with firefox latest 6x improvement is achived by going from parsed code to compile on load or JIT compilation.

Version numbers are often marketing tools firefox is at triple digit version numbers if you convert it to the scheme chrome uses, it makes little sense to use them as indication of progress.

600 SMS'es on the same cell to the same recipient could cause some interesting effects, especially if multiple carriers are involved. You might see random votes get delayed for longish period of time and you might not get the result within seconds. Email is also set up to allow for delays. It might not be a real problem but dont expect a SMS system to be 110% reliable.

Wireless Ethernet fails a lot more transparent i.e. the voters will get a feedback from the system if their transaction fail, SMS/Email will fail silently i.e. it will not be obvius to the voter if transaction went through.

Wasn't this the MS get the fact showcase as to how much better ms.net and sql server were compared to linux? Before the system came crashing down and latency became an issue?

<quote><p>as I understood it, China has control over the vast majority of media- would the population even need a reason more than whatever the govt told them? eg. they are taking our resources... why bother with copyright?</p></quote>

How exactly was it the current batch of chinese plutocrats took power? did they have a full free press back then?

If things gets to obvuis and the "bread and circus" bribes cant be upheld due to a cash shortages populations tend to support revolts. And history is littered with example of those revolts being more the a small anoyance even if they fail. And they dont always fail, often because the army is tied to close to the general public to be of much use in actual popular revolts.