Once you've earned the 2000 reputation to edit without peer-review, you can edit as little as you like. But until then, your edits are reviewed by other users before they're applied, and there has to be a certain threshold so these (volunteer!) reviewers don't just waste time by reviewing tons of mini-edits.
> Just working alone and from time to time a face2face meeting won't establish a relationship
I disagree with that. We had the first real in-person meetup about half a year after I joined the company. Up to that point, I knew everyone else pretty much only through text chat (Google Hangouts didn't exist yet).
But when I met everyone in person, it felt like we already knew each other quite well. It may not always be the case that your online and real-life personalities are aligned enough to get to know a person via chat, but in this case it definitely was.
I'm a regular employee (of the UK presence; it's all EU, so I assume that makes things a bit easier). There's a German tax office that does the wage accounting to make sure that it follows all the rules.
The only difference to a standard German employee is this: While in Germany legally the employee owes the wage taxes, they're usually collected by the employer and passed on to the authorities. But the German tax authorities don't like to do that with foreign companies (basically because they can't hunt after them when they don't pay). So from a legal perspective, I pay the wage taxes myself (but the tax office takes care of that as well).
I work for Stack Exchange in Germany (where they have no presence except for me), and I'm a regular employee with all German taxes, social security etc. that entails. These things can be made to work.
I assume that WW would have used a much stronger phrasing, had the "Google spokesperson" actually said that. And a Google spokesperson is obviously careful when talking to the press.
Yes, it's not unlikely that they did -- but Softpedia is blatantly misquoting here. They base their writing solely on the WW article, and that one doesn't include anything to back up the claim.
> According to German-language magazine WirtschaftsWoche, a Google spokesperson confirmed that the company has complied with requests from US intelligence agencies for data stored in its European data centers.
This isn't true; the WirtschaftsWoche article doesn't claim this. It says this could happen, but the claim that this article says it already did happen is a lie.
Not that this means it hasn't happened or is unlikely.