I always thought tapanar is an insult more becuase the tapan (whose name does derive from tap) is percieved as a really simple instrument to play.

Nope, Tapanaris it's definitely the name a Bulgarian would come up with if he wants to make up a Greek /sounding/ name for a stupid person (it's somewhat similar to the Biggus Dickus thing in History of the World).

I spent almost half a minute wondering who did a graphics overhaul to Star Control 2.

Indeed, that's why the European Cup, in which 16 teams qualify for the finals, is regarded as a stronger tournament than the World Cup.

That's if you go by population. If your aim is to include the best 32 teams in the world, you would have much _more_ teams for Europe. The way it is right now is a compromise between team strength and population.

Why would it be a problem for helicopters? I thought it's just jet engines? And the ash is at a much higher altitude?

To clarify: Opera proxies need to de-encrypt HTTPS data from servers sent to you because Opera Mini does not parse HTML. It parses OBML (Opera Binary Markup Language), which the Opera proxies transform HTML into, which is the whole point of it being _Mini_. If you want an HTML parser get Opera Mobile.
And for normal HTTP you get the benefit of encryption from their proxies to your phone, for which you would otherwise need to run your own encryting proxy on your own server.

Eh, what? "insecure"? On the contrary, traffic between Opera Mini and the Opera proxy servers is always encrypted. HTTP traffic is unencrypted. That makes Opera mini _more_ secure by definition for the huge majority of surfing. Only when you use HTTPS, Opera (the company) has access to the unencrypted data. There is no way around that, technologically, and as they plainly state in the FAQ, if you don't trust them, don't use their browser for secure connections like banking. But you implicitly trust Apple for that, on an iPhone, or your browser vendor in general, unless you check the whole code every time before an update and compile it yourself with a compiler you trust to be secure.

Going to Wikipedia, NY City council also has 51 councillors. Looking at an American city the same size as Plovdiv, Minneapolis has 39 councillors.

He was voted off the budget committee, which is presumably comprised of a small subset of council members. Also, they are often actually called local parliaments in Bulgaria.

The two expansions of the original GTA were set in London.

Dude, journalists have been harrassing him for years. It's weird that you hadn't heard of the media siege on him, but at least RTFA.

From TFA: "I'll note: this has nothing to do with dark matter. As it happens, 90% of the matter in the Universe is in a form that emits no light, but affects other matter through gravity. We know it exists, and you can find out why here. We know it exists locally, in nearby galaxies and clusters of galaxies, too. This new result doesn't affect that, since the now un-hidden galaxies are very far away, like many billions of light years away. They can't possibly affect nearby galaxies, so they don't account for dark matter."