The right to be forgotten is about one thing: If I delete my Facebook account, they should also delete all the data associated with that account (including face tags in other people's photos).

It does not force Facebook to delete comments written by others mentioning your name, just the material you posted.

This is not that unreasonable. It does in no way effect free speech (although, the preliminary text in the directive may not be clear enough, but it has to go through the parliament and the council that will amend the directive), except that you have the right to delete all the posts you made, but if you are the one who expressed yourself initially, you are still free to repost the information elsewhere.

Several have tried, but many of the attempts where localized to one or two states, no-one tried to make their system global. Which is why they failed. Now that Facebook have achieved world domination, it is very tricky to fix the mistakes of the past for the smaller companies.

In NL, a system called Hyves was very popular, they are still there but virtually no one is using it anymore; I would not be surprised if they declared bankruptcy in the next two years. In SE, there was a company called Lunarstorm, they failed by only supporting social stuff in Sweden and Finland (for the Swedish speaking finns), plus their user interface was horrible and essentially only tested with Internet Explorer; this company folded a couple of years ago. I am sure that there have been similar systems in the other states of Europe.

The big problem is that these companies never realized that Internet is a global thing, people have friends that are spread out in all of the world and would probably want to be in touch with them over the social networks. So, when you apparently need at least one "global" Facebook account in addition to your local "national social internet service here" account, why stay in the local service?

The main point is that the EU is planning on introducing the "right to be forgotten", that is if you terminate your Facebook account, they have to delete the data you uploaded.

The parliament is directly elected, they in turn together with the local governments elect the Commission. The Commission does intact have the same legitimacy as most parliamentary governments.

You thought wrong about what you believe the EU to be about, since the founding the purpose has been to lay a foundation for peace in Europe by slowly federating the member states.

IIRC, the register estimated that BT owned copper cables worth more than the company itself (current day's copper prices). Obviously, would all that copper come out on the market, copper prices would fall down to essentially nothing.

If telcos start digging up their copper cables, replacing it with the steel cables with less copper contents. The telcos need to sell their excess copper; and so the copper price will plummet, eliminating the need for digging out the cables...

If it would have had been only a security feature, there would be an SD-card in the device storing encryption keys for approved OS software manufactures. The SD-card could in this case be made read only and if the user wants to disable any tampering, he could glue it in the slot. A user could add additional approved keys (even his own keys) by placing the card with write enabled in another machine.

In this case, it would have only been about security. As it stands now the MS rules is to lock out competitors from the market.

What is there that prevents a rouge developer at the voting box company from adding some obfuscated code that skews the results on a national level (say, miscounting every 100 votes for party X as being for party Y)? In a paper based system, miscounts will happen, but they will be local and attacking the whole system requires a large scale conspiracy that is very difficult to hide.

Not anymore...

I would suggest the following requirements before anyone designs an electronic voting system:

1. Must allow for anonymous fair voting et.c. (standard stuff from your country's constitution)
2. Should be robust against attacks from individuals.
3. Any attack should preferably leave a trace somewhere.
4. Should a local attack occur, the results should not affect the general results.
5. Voting mechanisms (not necessarily the mathematics, but the actual counting process) must be verifiable by non domain expert. It should be possible to train up an observer in 30 minutes.
6. Voting results should be stored and be possible to be verified and recounted for some time.

It turns out that number 2 and 5 is practically impossible to do with an electronic voting machine, number 6 is also very difficult but could possibly be solved with cryptography, but not without breaking number 1 (anonymous votes). And seriously, what is the point of building an electronic system that can most likely be manipulated without anyone noticing? What is so bad in having to wait a few hours extra for the results, is democracy not worth one hour of waiting?

I suppose that the only argument would be that you can carry out public votes more often, but do people really want to move away from democracy in the direction of ochlocracy?

What may be interesting if you want to speed up the counting process is to make the ballots machine readable, still on paper though.

Hopefully, but it depends as all things about law. It is however up to the Irish high court and (ultimatelly) the ECJ to decide on whether or not the Irish laws fulfill the requirements in the relevant directives.

No they can't, the EU regulates a minimum term copyright (which for physical persons is life plus 50 or 70 IIRC). Ireland is not sued without basis, they are sued about not implementing EU law. IP legislation is primarily made by the Union; most people who are trying to do something about this understands this, especially thanks to the EUCD directive which was a fundamental wakeup call for individuals who did not previously pay attention to EU-debate.

The big mass is unfortunately still unaware and whining when their state implement directives. To branch of a bit of topic, this is partially main stream media's fault. Media has an obligation to monitor the lawmakers, but apparently they ignore their duties when it comes to the EU. You need to start reading more specialized news like EU-observer, European Voice and the like to keep up with what is actually going on. Another issue (the BBC does this right however), is that many news papers and news outlets have two sections of news; domestic and foreign. EU issues are somehow clumped into the foreign news section so people don't understand that it is actually affecting them.