Sweden for example have church tax for church members, this tax is taken out directly on your salary payed to the tax office.

The EU is not just the institutions, it is an idea as well. Governments do indeed blame the Union for things they have been along negotiating in the council, this being quite unfair in many cases.

You complain that the commission is not elected, well firstly, strictly speaking, neither is any government of any member state in the Union. The main problem has been that the commission has not actually represented the parliamentary election results. Will you be happy to know that from the next elections (in 2014), the commission will be appointed based on the EP election results? This is actually a result of the Lisbon treaty.

Further, the commission are not breaking any local laws they prime mandate is to guarantee that the treaties are upheld by the member states. The member states have ratified the treaties, and this means that the treaties are law in the member states. Typically the treaties take president over every law in the member state except for their constitutions, which in turn means that any law that is incompatible with the treaties is an illegal law. Remember, membership in the Union means that your country has ratified the treaty and that the treaty (and accompanying directives) is the law. The commission is therefore strictly say, when they point out errors in member states laws, telling the member states that they do not follow their own laws.

The EU does indeed employ around 40k civil servants, but you should compare this to a medium sized city in Europe. These cities will by themselves often have more bureaucrats on their payroll than the entire Union.

You claim that MEPs are not present most of the time, such claim requires proof, and to be frank a comparison with attendance records for the member states. If you wish to look at different MEPs, research has shown that eurosceptic MEPs produce far fewer amendments, documents and have lower attendance records than main stream or euro centric MEPs. The point of this is that the "lazy MEPs" are in fact, predominately those with eurosceptic tendencies.

The EU does also indeed want more money. But, on the other hand, since the Lisbon treaty, the EU has not received any more money, despite having (based on the treaties negotiated by the member state governments) to set up the european foreign service (including embassies all over the world); and despite having to expand certain areas such as the ECB being given more work to do with the latest treaty. There is only so much you can do in order to optimising the current funds with respect to the job the Union has been given by the member states.

The governments are represented in the Council, they are the assholes that pushed this through in the first place, the leading culprits where the British and the Swedish (previous) government under lead of the Swedish minister of justice Thomas Bodström. The Parliament did approve of it, but only after the Council said that if you don't approve, we will treat it as a matter of "criminal and justice cooperation", an area where the Parliament had no co-legeslative rights with the Council before the Lisbon treaty went into effect. Some MEPs where not happy though, Alexander Alvaro had his name stricken from the EP report on the issue.

The Parliament approving it, did in the end ensure that they could at least water it down a little bit with amendments, even though I am uncertain as to this was a good thing in the end. The EP keeping their hands clean of the crap could have resulted in a real debate of the Council's behaviour and as to how the governments of the member states could be controlled in the EU setting.

In any case, it is not the Austrian government that is fighting the directive (they are after all part of the body that approved it in the first place), it is the Austrian constitutional court and the EU court, and it is about time the EU court seriously evaluate the legality and treaty compatibility of the directive!

Well, if this is found to break the fundamental charter, which is part of the treaties, it is not that easy to lobby for it to change. That would require a massive effort which would not be very practical.

This sort of thing is done in many many EU member states, that it does not violate EU-law is not that strange. However, it is strange that the German constitution does not ban it with respect to the background.

Then don't buy CFLs, buy LED bulbs instead. Problem solved...

Honestly, cleaning out after you break a disconnected CFL is not that hard, the mercury is in liquid form. If you break it while it is on, I would be more worried about the fire hazard coming from the exposed conductors, which is even worse in a incandescent bulb.

IPCC being a body with representation from different states (with a lot of political interest in the reports), that more or less work with consensus, their reports are often watered down when released. This means that the published science is often more pessimistic than the IPCC report.

MEPs cannot initiate law. The commission is the only body that can propose new directives, but they will do so under advice from the parliament and the council.

To be frank, after having travelled with railways in many places. I must say that the Dutch railways are probably the best working ones on the entire continent (except for when it is snowing).

No, the vote signals the stance of the EP, this is important as the council is more aware of the current mood in the parliament and they need to take this into account when negotiating new rules in the council and the commission since the rules must go through the EP in a final vote anyhow. It is not just related to the specific question on hand.

"On the contrary: exactly the opposite is true. It may not be obvious, but the crime rate in the U.S. has been dropping significantly and steadily for 30 years now. During that entire time, per-capita gun ownership has gone steadily UP. And so have concealed carry permits."

Crime rate has been dropping in (almost) the entire world during the last 30 years. In some of these states, they have removed guns from circulation, abolished the death penalty, and in others the guns have increased in number. The US rifle lobby does have a point, saying that "guns do not kill people", but claiming that more guns result in less crime is clearly false (the inverse is not really true either). By this notion, in the good old times, when everyone carried a sword, there would be no violence at all, right... and yet, murder rates have steadily been declining since the middle age, even though the numbers of side arms (swords/guns et.c) have declined in most places.

Let's take some statistically and culturally irrelevant examples (homicide rates here are killings people with guns, judged not to be accidents or suicides):

US: 88 guns per 100 persons, 4.14 homicides / 100000 people.
SE: 32 guns per 100 persons, 0.18 homicides / 100000 people.
NL: 4 guns per 100 persons, 0.46 homicides / 100000 people.

Conclusion from this data... well, nothing... in the US the gun rate is quite high, and so is the homicide rate, but in Sweden, where the gun rate is also high, the number of homicides is very low, compared to the netherlands where the homicide rate is a bit higher, but there are essentially no guns available at all.

Presumably, one of the newtonian physics games you played was Terminus. While some do not like this, others do. Personally I found Terminus so nice, that whenever I play a non newtonian space "sim", I end up stopping being interested very fast.

The only problem is that if you want to run a newtonian space combat sim, you more or less need two joysticks, one for yaw and pitch and one for vertical and horizontal strafing, and most good joysticks only come in right handed variants.

So, you want to find a private investor that forks out over 15 bn EUR in order to do an experiment... yeah right. For a commercial reactor when the technology is proven, this would be viable but ITER will not generate any profit, and as the technology will literally save the planet it is done through international collaboration.

Newer missions collect too much data to transmit everything back to earth. They typically need to do local processing of for example images and other data. There is also AI aspects, for the ExoMars rover (made by Europe), the onboard computer will have a virtual scientist embedded. This virtual scientist look at the camera pictures and decide if something is worth an extra look, and may order the rover to carry out opportunistic science. I am not sure as to whether this is the case with Curiosity, by I could easily imagine this is the case. In fact, newer missions have substantial need for computational power. But, there is no software reason to do these computational tasks on the main computer, the task may as well be sent to a soft realtime helper computer, that may as well run Linux or something else. A lost image is typically not the end of the world.

In many cases the spacecraft and rovers are also not hard realtime, but they are also not soft realtime either (i.e. we compute thruster response for t=0, only to have the thrusters fired at t+0.1 or something in that range, whether they fire within this time does not really matter except during docking, landing and separation), I was trying to push through the notion of firm realtime when I was working in the space sector, but the main problem with this notion is that we do not yet know what effects it has in terms of sw design. Any way...

The primary reasons for running 10 year old CPUs is that, 1) specs are chosen early in the project, this is important as the CPU specs are guiding the development of the SW requirements and the actual implementation of the SW and 2) as you say, the older CPU will be battle tested before they are sent into deep space.

That would be an explanation, not an excuse. The reason may be silly considering the gamble, but it has been shown in experiments that people ignore long term consequences.

The fact is that humans are not smart in many cases, if you offer a guy 1 euro today vs 2 tomorrow, they will most likely take 1 euro now, however, if you offer them 1 euro tomorrow or 2 in a week, they will usually take the 2 euros.

The thing is, if you get small reward now (e.g. having a nice haircut today), you take it over a larger future reward (e.g. getting a smashed scull and bloody head sometime in the future). This is perfectly rational, after all, the future reward may not show up at all, so the safest bet is to take what you can get now for sure. The problem is that this hard coded reasoning ignores facts and risks in many cases as you only optimise after short term gains.