Well, maybe not in the "legally required to" sense (though I think that in some areas those are mandated as well) but but more in the "if you want your business to succeed" sense.

There are lots of reasons for having headquarters of some sort near your customers. The most important is probably having easy understanding the culture of your customers and/or actually getting or retaining customers. The best example I can come up with on short notice is McDonalds, which for a good reason has headquarters in nearly every European nation in order to set the logistics and handle the cultural integration (see; selling beer in France or selling hamburgers with black rye bread in Finland).

Few years back (2005) I was trying to buy an iPod directly from Apple Europe (located from Ireland), and even that was horrible as the Irish customer service didn't understand my problem (the reference number wasn't correctly formated to be used with Finnish bank transfers* and students don't usually get credit cards even if we have savings and steady income from student benefits). The Finnish FAQ-web page didn't load correctly (links didn't work and some of the images were missing). Apple supposedly had Finnish contact phone numbers but they didn't work either; when I send email afterwards with feedback, they claimed that they "work perfectly from line phones", which few households had even back then. If they had had even one Finnish worker, none of these problems would be an issue. Not to mention better translation for the operating system; you still remove CD's and iPods by clicking button titled "Give Me".

And so on.

*these days it's not issue any more.

But the companies are in Ireland because it's part of EU: they HAVE to have headquarters on the EU-area to do business there. There already is Apple Singapore, Apple India and Apple China (and probably rather same percentage of the rest of the companies listed), and they very well can't move their European operations there. If the taxes rise, the only thing Ireland has going for it is a large population of native English-speakers (and already having all the infra built on Ireland).

The rest of the states have tax of average of 26% and none under 20%; Ireland has 12% and if I understand correctly, USA has anywhere between 15% - 35%. The companies currently have extremely good deal, and even if the taxes would rise, the deal would still be very good.

Few years back, when cutting pirates from the 'net became legal in Finland, one of the first cuts were against the autonomical government of Åland. The newspapers questioned widely if the next target would be hospitals. And that was the last I've heard of THAT business in Finland.

We can hope something similar happens at Eire.

Didn't Windows 3.x have Alt+Tab? I distinctly remember using it. Worked like charm, and even today the best way to move between two programs, no matter what OS you prefer to use.

Thankyou for clarifying :)

However, there are relatively few programs that spam the news-feeds, and I find that "x became a fan of y"-posts are usually quite useful in later communication with the mentioned person. For this reason I don't see why (1.) the script has been written nor (2.) why Facebook would be interested about script with such a narrow potential user-base, particularly as this doesn't seem to cut into their ad-money.

Facebook has inbuilt "ignore this"-feature. Every post has an X on the top-right corner, click it, and you can choose do you want to ignore application or the user who spams your newsfeed (in case you don't want to lose him/her from your friendlist). I did this months ago, and since then I've forgotten that Mafia Wars even exist.

I understand it's an update for Windows 7, served with other software updates for computers in EU.

You mean kilometres per second.

763 mph=1 228 km/h
1000 mph=1609 km/h

It's nothing to do with the size of the country, but with population density. I live in Finland, most of the towns are few hundred people in the middle of nowhere, the population density is less than in most of your States, and they still have ATM (usually several). You may recall the earlier "Internet/mobile access in Finland vs. USA" discussions we had some months ago.

There's "Everyman's Right" in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Austria. They allow hiking and camping on areas that aren't obviously someone's backyard. Scotland allows walking in the wilderness freely, but with some heavier restrictions (though what I have seen of the country, they couldn't really enforce if somebody would decide to set up a camp for few days). England and Wales allows hiking, but apparently camping is frowned upon.

From experience, I also note that while camping in forests may not be exactly allowed by law, it isn't really frowned upon in Germany and Denmark, at least if you try to stay out of the way. At least, nobody bugged me when I was too cheap to make a camp at the backyard of a boarding house (I like to travel carrying a tent on a bike).

In a nutshell; the denser the population, the more likely you are to be bothered (if you camp somewhere without asking permission).

What I read from wikipedia, the technology seems far better than for electric car. Range of 100 km with a tank, charging the tank costs about EUR 2, and in emergency situation you can probably use manual pump to get enough pressure to get to the next station.

The only problem is that a car with a full tank would be rather dangerous in an accident, but I guess they could work around that. Link. The article (and the related articles) are rather badly written though, going from EUR to USD inside one sentence as comparisons, but I guess we can manage.

Well, the statement didn't pass with a really narrow margin - the chairperson decided. One MEP less on the right, and the statement would have went through.
While Parliament couldn't have forced Berlusconi to step down nor sell his newspapers OR ask him to stop using them as political weapon, it would have been a statement on what the other countries think of Italy's politics - which also affect the other states. Berlusconi has, among other things, tried to block all EU communication from minister councils and commission without the approval of all member states - effectively making it even harder for citizens to know and affect upon up an coming legislation and directives.
If the statement had passed, Berlusconi would have had much harder time trying proceeding on this venue, but.. you know..

"As long as it wasn't Berlusconi.."
If you didn't vote at all, you effectively gave your right to decide to others - who voted Berlusconi (supposing you're Italian). If you aren't Italian, there are quite many bad people you could vote. Remember, the previous EU Parliament was against 138, while the new one much less so. Did you vote? Who did you vote? EU is behind many things.. both good and bad. Most of the "bad things" spring from the Council of Ministers, who are fervently pushing for the good of their own states. Strong parliament is generally a good thing (while examples to the contrary could perhaps be found), and balances things out.