Make sure you choose a good picture, because it's going to be online long after you're gone :)

Okay, so you could survive :)

Or you can extract it with whatever archive application that comes with gnome by default...

And here I thought pirates just took the boats :)

I'm pretty sure things have changed in Europe since your ancestors emigrated 200 years ago :)

</flamebait> if by "any European country" you mean the only poor former east block countries, then maybe you're right... Assuming you don't care about human rights.

Every digital recording of the wax cylinder is probably copyrighted from date of the digital recording :)

I don't think it's the large areas, but lack of proper energy taxes to encourage smaller cars and better fuel efficiency. In Europe you typically pay twice as much for gas as in the US, due to responsible energy taxes.

They're not maintaining a closed code repository, Qt LGPL version is hosted on gitorious. In fact they're moving towards some sort of open governance. So if they do have any significant commercial only features, they have to maintain that in a private git repository some where else.

TV ads don't pose as reviews or recommendation by other follow consumers.
Also ads elsewhere are not posted without consent, the spam comment that show up on my blog are not ads placed with my consent (Note I have spam filter and personally reviews everything it doesn't kill).
It's equivalent to a people just putting ad-posters on your wall without your consent.

Furthermore it is the biggest threat to the free internet today, to some extent outright destroying the internet as we know it.
Evil is a strong word, but it's capitalization with total disregard for other peoples property and misleading to the degree that it's outright criminal.

I know that Google and MS are worlds apart in terms of ethics. But no matter how good Google promises to be, having a single point of search/failure/innovation/you-name-it for the internet is not great. I doubt Firefox changes to Bing, but I understand why they are testing the waters, and why someone at Mozilla could think that maybe Google shouldn't be their default engine.

The best solution would obviously be an entirely free software search engine, but I'm not familiar with one, so looking at commercial alternatives to Google makes sense.