The immigration policies in Berlin/Germany might be better than they are in the US, but they are _far_ from perfect.
As someone from Berlin who went through the whole process multiple times from an employer perspective, these are my experiences:
When you hire someone from the EU: No problems at all.
When someone is from another “western” country (USA, Australia, etc.): Things take some more time and are a bit of a hassle, but are basically OK.
Everything else: Big problems. Unless you are formally really well qualified, a work permit is pretty hard to attain. If it is even possible at all, it definitely takes a lot of time and energy from everyone involved.
During normal use, the performance degradation is barely noticeable, it _feels_ like 10%–15%. Things become a bit more critical when working with larger files or during heavy I/O.
One thing to consider, however, are SSDs. To my knowledge, encrypted data is only written to blocks that already contain random data. You therefore might want to look for disks whose performance does not degrade that much when free blocks are no longer available.
Since most of my life exists in one way or another on my hard disk, I consider it to be an absolute must to encrypt the drives.
I’m using PGP Whole Disk Encryption http://www.pgp.com/products/wholediskencryption/index.html, which works perfectly. I prefer it over OS X’s FileVault feature since it just protects everything and is completely transparent to the system and the user.
And, btw, I’m still hoping for a mobile OS besides BlackBerry’s that provides a reasonable secure encryption option.
What really amazes me is the fact that even on this site, the discussion barely touches the app store issue.
It might be true that the tablet will have a significant impact on tomorrow's computing platforms. But what really scares me is the prospect that it might become more and more accepted that the user will loose the freedom to decide what software he can install and thus what to do with the machine.
This is something that goes against anything we learned from the open web and, of course, from "hacking" (jailbreaking does not count here). It goes against the central things I value at computing.
By comparison, _I_ could not care less whether this thing comes with Flash or not.
As someone from Berlin who went through the whole process multiple times from an employer perspective, these are my experiences:
When you hire someone from the EU: No problems at all.
When someone is from another “western” country (USA, Australia, etc.): Things take some more time and are a bit of a hassle, but are basically OK.
Everything else: Big problems. Unless you are formally really well qualified, a work permit is pretty hard to attain. If it is even possible at all, it definitely takes a lot of time and energy from everyone involved.