"With over 70 offices in more than 40 countries, chances are we’ve got opportunities near you."

Offices in Germany == subject to German law.

Looking at the atrocities committed in the name of religion, I for one would rather take my chances with that other evil.

And why the hell is Richard Attenborough suddenly buying up Central American islands?

The issue is not that they can tell which phone number you use, obviously. As I see it there are three problems with this kind of tracking technology:

Firstly they could potentially track you across devices based on your behaviour. Think "disposable" phones. Sure, here in the Western world those are mostly used by criminals, so being able to track them may appear to be a good thing. But such technology usually ends up in the hands of repressive regimes.

Secondly, mass surveillance is not just about you as an individual. By looking at where you go when and how long you stay there and correlating this with who else goes there at the same time one can make deductions about social networks within society without ever looking at one person up close. We already have a rampant practice of police doing what is in German called "Funkzellenabfrage": they request the names of every person logged into one specific radio cell at a given time. Essentially hundreds or thousands of people are made into suspects based on one point of data and consequently investigated, often to the point of harassment.

And, even more importantly, algorithms can tell when you deviate from your regular pattern. This is the Next Big Thing in the security theatre. And I for one do enough "random" stuff to be worried that I may in the future find myself singled out by law enforcement based on what some computer says. Geo-caching alone should make my movements stand out quite a bit from the general population. Just look at the abundance of issues with existing "dumb" solutions like the US no-fly list or the European anti-terror watch lists.

You should really look up "feminism" in a dictionary. You will find that it does not mean what you think it does.

Leaving aside the, frankly, rather stupid stereotype you keep playing* there: This is precisely what went down. The woman reported them to staff, they were taken aside, they apologised. But oh, Missus Mighty Righteous could not leave it at that. No, she had to go nuclear on the two of them.

This has nothing to do with sexism, we agree on that. This is one person being an asshole.

* I do not know what the proper terminology for that is, but it is not all that different from sexism. Or racism, for that matter. "The geeks" are about as sexually inexperienced as "the women" are incapable of programming or "the blacks" are prone to stealing. I consider myself part of "the geek community", and so far I have seen a level of sexism on par with that in politics, business, academia and the Scouts but not exceeding it. It may well be more visible here, just as public name-calling probably is more rampant on FOSS mailing lists than in corporate boardrooms, due to the specific communicative culture and conventions. But that in and of itself does not mean it is worse than elsewhere.

And that sets Jediism apart from other religions because...?

You also get emotional when the OS deliberately breaks things. The Windows installer still overwrites existing boot sectors without asking for confirmation. The people who sign off on something like this should be publicly burned at the stake.

Whenever opposing parties try to do anything about it the churches and the conservatives both play the "They hate Christians! They want to destroy the church!" card. There currently is quite a controversy around certain religious figures publicly complaining about an anti-Christian campaign and even pogrom-like persecution when in fact it is the institution and not the faith that is attacked, and rightly so, for their role in the ongoing child molestation scandal.

Few people are aware of this system. They believe that the churches actually pay for those institutions. The ones in the position to educate the people about the truth are those who benefit from keeping the status quo: conservative politicians.