However, this high resolution would come at the expense of broad coverage, and would be achievable over an area of only a few tens of kilometers square.
You might not believe it, but the earth has a surface of more tens of square kilometres. The site doesn't have any real data on the actual speed of this thing, but it looks like that thing is something completely different (a military spy satellite) and might take dozens of years to cover the whole planets or even longer. If it is even capable of producing a coherent map, this doesn't seem to be in the design specifications.
You're mixing "national ID card" and "passport" again. This are very different things.
National IDs are
- required for everyone in most EU countries
- sufficient for travelling inside the Schengen zone
- not regulated by the EU
- required to contain contain fingerprints in some countries but not in others
Passports are:
- not required if you don't want to visit foreign countries (or leave the Schengen zone)
- regulated by a whole bunch of international treaties
- for EU countries, regulated by the EU
- required to contain fingerprints
For the fingerprints in ID cards, blame the national governments, this has nothing to do with the EU. For fingerprints in passports, blame the whoever you like. Blaming the EU is ok too, they did not start the idea, but they weren't too opposed to it either. Or blame the USA, who won't recognize passports without fingerprints any more. Or blame yourself or me for not protesting it when the international treaties were written years ago.
- Log url history.
- log phone contact history
- log mail contact history
Yes, but a number (at least 3, might be more) of EU countries have already thrown that out as unconstitutional and are taking the fight back to the EU to get it thrown out on a EU level.
- Obliged to introduce CP filter. Filter can be expanded for other 'illegal' websites.
- Obliged fingerprint scans for id cards.
Uhm, no. The EU does not prevent members from implementing this but it is not required in any way. A lot of EU states don't have this and don't have plans to implement it. If you live in a country where this exists, well that sucks, but don't blame the EU.
- Log banking history.
Well, duh, would be a bad bad world where your bank doesn't have your history on record. They could just change your balance without anyone noticing. At least the treaty to live-stream it to the USA was killed by the EU parliament.
The content-delivery services seem to be very cautious about what you can buy from German soil
Don't confuse selling with releasing. Companies refuse to release that stuff in the first place. An easy way around this problem is to just buy UK imports. If you live in a big city there probably is a shop near you that sells this stuff. Otherwise just order it on the internet, either from UK sites like amazon.co.uk/play.com (you'll need a credit card for this) or from German shops that specialize in this stuff, like Okaysoft (you'll need to send them a copy of you ID first, as proof of age). So if you want to buy uncensored games in Germany there are a lot of options and all of them are 100% legal. But the people who release the games on the German market are big companies that try to maximize profits, naturally. Restriction on the age of potential customers is bad for that, therefore they'll cut as much as possible to get the rating as low as possible.
This is the country that has banned Wikileaks
Except they didn't. wikileaks.de was disabled because the guy who own this domain (and nothing else related to wikileaks) didn't pay his bills. He was also involved in some fraud so his ISP didn't want to do business with him any more. They informed him 3 or 4 month before killing his account, he just forgot about it.
sought a ban on violent games
Good thing the word sought is there. The conservative hardliners have been talking about it for 20 years now and so far not much has happened. Preemptive censorship by the publishers is far worse.
and voted to censor child porn (only to have the president kill the ban as unconstituitonal).
Except he didn't, he signed this law. It's just that everybody (including half the people who voted for it) hoped he wouldn't because a few month after this law was voted on the pirate party gained 2% in the federal election (5% is the minimum to get seats, which they did get in some regions). The last thing any of the established parties want is yet another party to worry about so internet topics suddenly because important. The ministry of justice has instructed the police to treat this law as the most unimportant one of all (i.e. not enforce it) and the parliament is actively working on replacing it with a law that does not allow filtering. All in all, awesome summary.
Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.