Yeah, all those tribes sure loved the Romans! I guess that's why they migrated into the Roman lands. And killed a lot of Romans.

But yeah; the comparison with the US is inaccurate.

We already tried to give you Iceland. But you did not want it. And I don't blame you for that.

Hey, 666 is too obvious, they are never gonna guess that!

Moreover, Ireland needs the EU, for financial reasons and whatnot. The EP does not need ACTA.

I recommend you to read up on party-list proportional representation voting systems. Because you can vote for individual candidates, but the party will also recieve a vote at the same time. Whenever a vote for a party list has elected on its candidate list, the votes from thereon pass onto the next one, and so on.

They are not indirectly elected, because their listing has to be made official prior to the election, and moreover, the list has to appear on every ballot, in order.

So even if it was indirect, it is very transparent.

Ah, indirectly. Most - if not all - EU countries use a parliamentary system, which means our governments are not directly elected, but elected by the parliaments which are directly elected. So you have voters > local parliament > local government > EC. So yeah, that's quite far from the voters. Compare to the EP: voters > EP. One step.

A lot of special interests are bound to be happening through those steps. However, the EC has far less power with the passing of Lisbon, so I wouldn't worry too much.

We rewrote parts of it to satisfy their demands, and it went into effect in 2009.

Woah. I always thought that Metro was a positive step away from the Aero of Vista/7 and whatever they called that cartoon thing in XP. Both of those looked ridiculous, so I always ended up switching to Windows Classic, which - despite its ugliness - doesn't at least pretend to be something it is not.

But boy, did they miss the train with Metro on the desktop. I was thinking (hoping) that they would sort of redesign it, rather than just making it be Aero Glass without gradients and transparency. I am quite amazed at how ugly it looks.

You're twice the the he ever was!

I agree that the tiles are more confusing than helping. But the Metro design is actual a huge improvement from the Apple-lookalike Auro crap from Vista and the cartoonish joke thing from XP. So much so, that I always pick Windows Classic when I theme a Windows box. I'd much rather look at a broken Metacity than those. At least Metro looks streamlined and without dumb attempts at round borders and gradients.

That being said, it is hardly used to its full potential by making its content so ridiculous.

It's danger, Will Robinson, danger.

How often is it 'people with a clue' that attackers are after?

A lot of people got elected that way.

Yes, I can't believe Blizzard is asking us to get off our lazy asses one day and purchase a retail copy. I'll gladly do it to save 20EUR. And I did it with StarCraft 2. Remember, kids, SC2 is short for Star Control 2.