So, more correctly, it was signed by 8 out of 29 participating countries.

They will sign it as soon as practicable? I thought that the European parliament and the Mexican one had explicitly instructed the commission and the Mexican government, respectively, not to sign ACTA in its current form

I suppose that's just a minor detail.

Is "the EU debating it", or is it just this one loon who has suggested it to the media? Has this suggestion made it to any committee, showed up in any directive proposal from the commission, been discussed in any meeting of the council of ministers?

If one single parliamentarian doing a mouth-fart is the same as the entire institution he's in "debating it" then the EU is also debating reinstating the death penalty, banning the building of mosques, abandoning the inner market, patenting business methods, etc etc etc.

I don't actually know French, but I think I get the gist of that info comment.

As the other poster said, it depends on the nationalist party. The Welsh and Scottish nationalists are fairly pro-Europe because neither country is really viable as a totally independent entity, but both are larger than some other EU member states and could work as members of the EU, rather than members of the UK.

Also, the Welsh and Scottish national parties aren't really the same type of "nationalists" as most others across the EU, who are mostly just trying to pass racism and anti-immigration off as "nationalism". You can't compare SNP to Front National, BNP, Sverigedemokraterna or Dansk Folkeparti.

But Norway is a ESA member state.

Why would you have to buy a new satnav? The GPS satellites aren't going anywhere.

How can you know how a given patent will be interpreted by a court?

You don't. You hire very expensive lawyers and ask them. They don't know either, but when someone sues you even though your lawyers said they wouldn't, you can fire the lawyers.

Did they make it round with square corners?

You get back what it says on your balance with Bitcoin as well. It's a currency, not a banking system.

Yes, for-profit USES.

Why couldn't they just have required that for GPS rather than spending billions on new satellites?

...but if the ESA wanted to, they could have just told the US to get back to them when they had an actual situation where Galileo might be used for military purposes against the US, and they would have a look at it and, maybe, degrade the signal themselves. Unless they disagreed with the assessment. The way they did it now means that the US can make those decisions entirely on their own.

Did the immigrants come over and steal all your jobs, women and punctuation marks?

From the start Galileo was designed to be even more "GPS independent", for example it was going to use the same frequency band as GPS so that the US couldn't use ground-based interference signals to block it without also blocking their own GPS in the same region. But someone scared them out of that.