Well, the problem is that European privacy guidelines are a completely foreign concept to US data collection practices.

Ok, let's detour slightly: A typical US american has a couple of "fundamental rights", and the moment someone threatens them, get up in arms. E.g. most jurisdictions have at least a little weaker Freedom of Speech rights. Now Germany considers Privacy (and a number of related concepts releveant to IT) a fundamental Human right. As in, your data is yours. And by default companies (and even the public administration) are required to do their business by recording the minimal amount of data possible. And as long a company has no business relationship with you, they ought to record NOTHING that can be traced back to you.

Now how's that relevant? I mean Germany is just but one country. Well, the EU legal framework around Privacy usually trails the German concepts by one iteration. (The EU usually uses laws that need to be enacted into local law by local member countries, and they usually define only the framework).

The next interesting tidbit is that German courts have been usually in the fore when it comes to protecting privacy, so Apple should not hope to appeal this away, the higher Courts are usually even more stringent on privacy and citizen rights.

Last but not least, Germany has a curious legal setup, including a number of constitutional provisions that are eternal, as in they cannot be ammended away, you have to go the route of replacing the whole constitution, which is practically means that the traditional "Rent-a-Politician" route works only up to a certain level, the Constitutional Court has been kicking in governmental teeth all the time.

Two aspects: price and usefulness.

The Segway has been to expensive, plus had usefulness issues, e.g. many jurisdictions banning them from public usage.

A decade ago, reading an ebook on a tiny electronic display was clearly very nerdy, and a couple of people wondered how I managed to walk with the head in the tiny thing, without crashing into the surroundings all the time.

Today, it's common place. Because being able to read an ebook everywhere without carrying around dead wood. Checking on your electronic communication on the way to the office is useful.

Now for Google Glass the first question is price. The developer preview seem to be a little bit pricey, but if Google wants they could push it probably down far enough. Now the question is how useful it will be.

One issue would be input for me. If Google glasses require e.g. voice input, they are setup for semi-failure. (Hint: Siri&Co might be basically useable for English-speaking people, but voice input does fail badly the moment you want to support international customers. Plus voice input has the drawback that the fallback is way worse than hacking in a word unknown to your display keyboard char by char)

I mean, sorry, yeah, it's a felony, but we've authorized our people to do this. No we won't extradite our police officers to you, ...

What makes me really wonder about this in the context of the EU warrant, I mean, compromising computer security is a felony everywhere, so by the rules of the EU warrant the NL would be required to extradite their own police officers?

Well, that depends on the jurisdiction technically.

E.g. prosecutors in Austria need to fulfill the requirements that judges need, both career path do not involve being a lawyer. Germany OTOH, has basically one generic exam for the classical legal career paths.

I guess someone should tell this guy that conditions of Internetaccess vary strongly, as a small sample:

- I've got 100mb/s cable service
- the guy sitting next to me got only 3G service that get really expensive beyond 5GB monthly usage.
- and my inlaws living in the countryside manage around 2mbit/s DSL

Latency vary by connection and by daytime, and can go eerywhere between 20ms to >300ms for a ping roundtrip to nearest google server

So I guess if MS is willing to provide quality broadband service in all the places that normal ISPs consider to uninteresting commercially.

Yep, it's simple, for these closed-source commercial offerings, the option of being able to close the source is valued more than features, especially hardware compatibility is not overly relevant, considering the fact that it has to run on a highly limited set of hardware.

Put bluntly, considering that the alternative is either Windows, which has bad license requirements for manufacturers, and is not exactly a high performance OS (just to illustrate, the Win7 here manages to slow down even a nice new SSD by over a magnitude in the filesystem code just copying small files on NTFS), and on the other hand you've got Linux that has license conditions that are not acceptable (or perceived so by the legal dept), and say some performance enhancements and quite a bit of hardware support that you don't need anyway, ...

Hard choice, isn't it?

For a generic OS, I'll stick with Linux, because that's where all the advanced stuff is relevant.

First, the question is of the interaction. The apps almost certainly consist of a launcher/helper written in Java/Android and a compiled binary. The normal analysis is that by calling a GPLed program your program does not yet become GPLed. The next detail is that the DOSBox source is probably modified, e.g. to interact with the hardware (e.g. Android is not X11), and to compile on ARM, ... => these modifications do need to be released.

How does the PlayStore have anything with that? They could easily embed the source in the apk and distribute it with the binary.

Hint: yes. Apple only allows the browser competition to use the Safari browser (in a slower mode than by default, to add insult I guess), hence all these other browsers are slower than Safari (different mode), but offer in the end rather exactly the same rendering experience.

It does not use the oil up.

Exactly, and the perverted criminal competition has changed the landscape all around to make Apple Maps look bad.

So if Hyundai lies about it's cars fuel efficiency, you go and discuss this at your gas station, right?

Well, they lost that one in the UK and the US (funny detail, but then the jury has gone so fast through the verdict that they had less than 5 minutes on average for each question, and that does include the time that they should have spent reading the explanations, guess a "quality verdict"), even the US jury found that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 does not infringe on the iPad design.

Well, lying as such is not covered by the 1st Amendment. Especially if done in the course of commercial activities.

You sure? My Apple-logic(tm) that would make super productive, as the iPad is clearly superior to a mere PC for any use, ....