Maybe the European government will do something similar to what they did for cellphone's charging ports (require all manufacturers to use micro USB). And as for the cellphone change, it would hopefully be applied mostly across the board by manufacturers (in USA too).
both in Canada and USA, there is plenty of house parties but you can get in trouble for drinking in the streets... but there is private beaches and such, at hotels for example.
Also, the pictures that you posted appear to be a private area...
I'm not sure how long it would last but how about something like a bubblegram [1] (laser crystal)... You could use a flatter plastic block and create a 2D image inside. Also, maybe other materials can be used.
it is probably actually much less then that since Facebook doesn't appear to store full resolutions... for example, they serve a very low quality version of the original picture...
I think that it means that thing #1 and thing $2 might appear to be just as difficult to untrained eyes while one would require very little work because of what's already available (libraries, data or whatever) and the other would be a very large task because most of the work hasn't been done yet (but of course a different engineer might be able to find more efficient ways to do things)
lookup dutch bucket system ... it is soil-less and use the same water/nutrients solution over and over (recirculating), you just need to fill the thank