Those wacky Europeans
»Ask Europeans to cross a buggy footbridge and they'll balk, quail, and consult the 80,000 regulatory pages of the EU's acquis communautaire. Tell them it's art, and they'll flock to it in droves, sit on it, and drink Beaujolais nouveau.«
Bruce Sterling [whose SciFi novels are usually excellent while his opinion pieces fall somewhere in the range between lame and dumb] in Wired 13.02