Except that in Germany too, "think of the children" will get you a lot of people agreeing with your position - whereas mentioning Hitler, the Nazis and the 3rd Reich in a way that could be interpreted as positive or comparing contemporary political figures to Hitler and the Nazis will heavily damage or even end your political career (see Herta Daeubler-Gmelin and others).

Except maybe with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

Yep. German courts (just like courts in many other countries) assume that if Germans can access it, it's in their jurisdiction.

That's the status quo. Of course that doesn't mean that foreign courts can always enforce their decisions against corporations, but they can certainly convict the company and ask the country where the company resides to help them via mutual legal assistance treaties (which exist between many western countries).
In theory, an Iranian court could sentence you to death for uploading certain videos to Youtube. And if you plan on visiting far away countries after that, you better make sure those countries that don't have extradition treaties with Iran...

When a fictional universes has been around for a long time, the opinion of the creator becomes less and less important and the stories themselves and the fictional facts therein become more important.

It's the same with the Star Wars Expanded Universe, where many fans desperately wish that Lucas would stop meddling with their SW universe and leave it to the authors and writers who can capture the feel of the universe much better and have a lot more knowledge about what's happening in that world.

I stopped reading at "Swarm of Laser Wielding..." when an image popped into my mind:
A big bad asteroid hurtling towards our little blue planet. Then the camera pans around and we see a huge number of little dots. Flying closer, we see a huge swarm of frickin' space sharks swooping down towards the asteroid, shooting their lasers at it while Bruce Willis, riding the lead shark, yells "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker." I'd pay money to see that.

Uhm...

Especially at -40C with strong winds and pretty thick gloves on.

I'd compare her to Byrd. Wilkins was the first to use aircraft on the continent, but Byrd was the first to fly over the south pole.

Wasn't there even a story about archiving know-how in companies a couple of weeks back that mentioned a company that ran and maintained an old plant but had no idea how it actually worked?

Fixed that for you

People in Germany for example don't have to shop at Walmart, because Walmart doesn't exist anymore in this country. Fittingly because they failed to adapt to the new environment.

Nice 10nant quote.

Sometimes I wonder if we are just like the people in Plato's Allegory of the Cave - staring at the wall, watching the shadows move and then try to come up with scientific explanations of the shadows' behaviour - without knowing what's really going on because there's so much that we can't see/measure yet.

The first German hybrid plant started operating in Berlin last month. Surplus wind power is used to produce hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen will be used to produce heat and energy, but will also be sold at local gas stations for use in fuel cells. So Vattenfall, Deutsche Bahn and Total seem to think that it's indeed worth it.

And there are projects starting next year that will built plants to convert the hydrogen into methane.

They'd take you to court. And they don't have to prove anything. The law in this case says that GEMA can safely assume that every artist is a GEMA member and it's on you to prove them wrong. The German laws in this regard are unfortunately really fucked up and far from common sense...