In the US private parking facilities belonging to the house appear to be quite common in middle class suburban homes. This seems to me to be the most important condition for effective use of (trickle charged) electric cars.

Here in the Netherlands private parking is uncommon, even in suburbs and villages. I have seven parking spaces along the length of my garden, which is a lot by Dutch standards, but 1) I have no privilege to them, and they are indeed sometimes all occupied, and 2) a power cable from my house would cross a public pavement.

Privatization of parking spaces is not really an option, since on the whole there are too few in the neighbourhood to leave some during the day for visitors and customers of nearby shops. Also for new developments usually a 1:1 ratio for parking to households is used, as far as I know. The only viable solution is the government installing power outlets everywhere, but that is only a reasonable investment if the government also coerces or bribes people into buying an electric car.

Other than this parking and charging issue, the Netherlands is perfect for electric vehicles. An electric motorcycle makes more sense. I'll buy one if it is cheap and categorized as a car (to avoid an expensive new driver's license).

I'd say the system of government is pretty much irrelevant to the dedication people show fighting for their country. Odds are most important to morale. People want to survive, and they want to win. I think the Iraqis would have fought well if they would have faced a limited invasion, and would have believed that the US would retreat if things didn't go smoothly. Instead it was obvious that they were going to be massacred by an army with better technology, training, maintenance, and logistics, which is a very good reason for running away as soon as the opportunity presents itself. Morale made the Iraq invasion a cakewalk for the US, and better technology, training, maintenance, and logistics directly affected morale. Without the morale effect, US would also have dominated, but it would hardly have been a cakewalk.

Weaker democratic countries may also fight much stronger tyrannies badly (as the first years of WWII for instance show) if they think they are on their own against overwhelming odds, while they may fight heroically if they think a stronger ally will join them if they hold out for long enough. This is exactly why the appeasement by Chamberlain in the 1938 Czechoslovakia crisis was so damaging; It severely harmed morale on the European continent. On the other side, many veteran German units also fought badly in the end of WWII in many places because they had lost the belief they were winning and simply wanted the war to be over.

US military requirements for chips do not exceed 20% of worldwide production capacity. The US military could use only locally produced chips if it wanted to, but at the expense of more taxpayer money, and stimulation of the economy is a bad reason to waste money. Preparing yourself for the eventuality that the whole world will turn against you is not a sound Keynesian investment; It's just plain paranoid. Even the ability to take on the rest 0f the world together with you allies is an unprecedented and unique luxury.

ASML (Netherlands), Nikon, and Canon (both Japanese) together have a market share of over 95% in semiconductor lithography machines. Strategically this seems to me more important than semiconductor manufacturing using the machines of one of these three suppliers. Both countries are allies of the US, and will most likely remain allies in the foreseeable future if the US behaves not too unreasonably. Intel and AMD are US companies, and design state-of-the-art chips in the US. There is hardly an immediate risk of the US losing access to knowledge about semiconductor manufacturing, and the country most able to embed kill switches into other country's military hardware is still the US.

An analogy: Imagine a large train station, with lockers, and drugs dealers. Now suppose I set up a business which works as follows. People who want to sell drugs store specified amounts of drugs in lockers. They bring me the keys. I, instead of selling drugs, sell access rights to the lockers in the form of a key. The dealers get their money from me, minus a fee for the service I provide. I sell no drugs, they take less risks, everybody happy. Is a judge who thinks I sell drugs a moron?

We only have to look at the number of officially recorded wiretaps per capita to see that Dutch (and for instance Italian, Swiss) authorities are indeed two factors of ten more likely to wiretap than US authorities. Monitoring in real time would be too labour intensive for Dutch police purposes.

The wiretaps are in reality hardly relevant for evidence purposes. The police uses them mostly tactically for surveillance of, and investigation into the structure of, criminal organizations. It's a more efficient use of time than following people around.

The conversation between lawyer and client may be confidential, but the extent of the protective perimeter you set up around it is a practical matter.

You may declare prison and law office phones sacred altogether in order to make sure you don't record such conversations, missing a lot of useful conversations, but if you don't, you will have to listen to the conversations to establish, firstly, that it is a confidential conversation, and secondly, that the recording doesn't contain parts you presumably may use (for instance the lawyer dictating something to a secretary in the background).

Dutch practice is that you may not use or store it in principle but you may listen to the recording and store it until you did. After that, you have to destroy it, and the suspicion is now that the system only deletes it.

Having said that, this whole thing became an issue after it was discovered confidential phone conversations were actually copied to DVD by the police in one high profile case, which is indeed outrageous.

The issue is the difference between destroying (in practical terms: erasing), as they are legally obliged to do, and deleting it. This pdf documentlinked from the article explains in laymen's language how the "pointer (or route) in the system to the data concerned" is removed, making 1) the data inaccessible to investigators, and 2) freeing up the space of a hard disk array for new data, and then goes on explaining that the data may theoretically still be retrieved from the disks if not yet overwritten. They don't know whether the commercial black box system they use erases the data, and suspect it doesn't.

There is a proverb that seems appropriate here: "the legion does not need heroes; heroes is what the legion kills."

The bill obviously is a diff on the existing body of law. I don't know how it is produced in the US, but one way of producing it - showcased in some research projects in the EU - is by simply editing the existing body of law stored on a version management system and then have the editor generate the act from a generic template for bills, a set of sentence models, and the diff. Nobody has to read it, since the result of applying the act is already known. The legislator's approach to this is very much like version management in software development, except that 1) the codebase is centuries old, 2) thousands of people work on it, generally without deep knowledge of what other committees are doing, causing occasional confluence between amendments, 3) hundreds of millions are affected by it, and 4) most of the people involved don't have the mindset of a programmer.

To laymen who don't know what the existing body of law looks like, neither the bill (lacks context) nor the set of amended documents (too much) are very useful. You need to understand the situation being changed to form an educated opinion on the change. A tkdiff is worse than a bill. At least the legal system tries to pretend it is natural language.

It is certainly arrogant to believe that nobody understands them (I do, since I have read dozens of them, and worked on software to generate them) but it is equally arrogant to believe that SVN is better. It is not. SVN fails to make fundamental distinctions that legal amendment procedures do make. Programmers could benefit from copying best practices from amendment manuals and understanding for instance the bibliographic distinction between item, manifestation, expression, and work level changes to a text (look up MetaLex XML).

That criterium obviously still doesn't make the Turks native to Turkey. Kurds and jews, to name some random minorities, were surely there before the Turks invaded.