Here's a radical idea...

Rather than the consumer wearing the RFID chip, the consumer instead carries the RFID reader to find out what the merchant is offering.

The consumer doesn't radiate anything, and the merchant radiates the information the consumer might be interested in (or not...).

This puts the control back into the consumer's hands. As it should be.

It might be interesting to consider that Microsoft was able to claim a trademark on "Windows", "Word" and "Excel", et. al under US of A laws. Common words.

Perhaps this is simply an attempt by the EU to demonstrate that they also have laws which are to be followed under international treaties....

Title says it all.

Those who have profit incentive from burning oil and gas will put a lot of money into dis-crediting alternatives.

The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park (England) might be interested as well -- they have a section for personal computers.

Also, if you ever get a chance to visit, plan for at least half a day -- it's fascinating!

Please, please, PLEASE make this an option, not a full removal.

I will stop using GNOME if this ability is fully removed.

In mid-grade school I had a particularly exceptional and progressive teacher who ran experiments like this (Canada)...

Rather than the regular curriculum delivery, each student had a filing box where the entire year's assignments where defined on cards (with references to what pages in what textbooks should be read). The students were allowed to do them as quickly they wished. Once an assignment was completed the card (and the results) were placed back in the box for the teacher to review, grade, and comment on (if needed).

There were almost no "lectures" (read: the teacher standing in front of the classroom talking to the utter boredom of most of the students). In fact, the classroom was broken up into various different areas with partitions upon which the students could stick things -- drawings, notes, etc. There wasn't even line-of-sight from most of the classroom to the blackboard!

Instead, each morning there was a "class meeting" in a common area (with a blackboard) where everyone got to share where they were in their "program", and ask questions or make comments (if they were comfortable doing so). Once a week each student would have a one-on-one "meeting" with the teacher to review progress.

Any student could request additional meetings with the teacher at any time if they were having difficulty with a subject. Often the teacher would then ask a stronger student in a subject to help a weaker student. I was often asked to help in (simple) Maths and (simple) Science. I was often helped in just about all other subjects, like English, Social Studies, etc...

It is interesting how memory works... I had largely forgotten about this exceptional learning environment and experience until this article jogged my memory.

I must try to thank the teacher. He was clearly ahead of his time....

All the regulator has to do is introduce a very small charge for every share traded.

Let's say something like USD $0.0001 per share.

Feed the funds collected back to the exchanges to pay for the networking and the compute consumed by the very high-speed traders.

Problem solved.