I agree with your main point, btw.

However, both on paper and from real-world experience, I dare to say that the judicative is the least troubled arm.

In most of Europe, the legislative and executive are pretty much identical and that bothers me to no end. Parliament passes laws and parliament elects the executive, and all the executives (ministers, etc.) are also members of parliament. These two arms are not seperated at all. The USA has the better system there, even though it is still imperfect in that the same parties exist in both.

If I were to re-write the political rules, I'd seperate the arms completely and make a law that political parties can be active in either the executive or the legistlative election processes, but not in both and any attempt to do so leads to immediate dissolution of the party in question with all assets seized and distributed to the poor.

Let me repeat that: It is absolutely technically possible to filter based on source IP address country.

Yes, you can also do various trickery to cloak your real source behind another source. That doesn't invalidate the point.

Highly unlikely. Putin is beloved by the majority of russians, because under his government economy and internal security have improved dramatically. Most russians remember the 1990s when people were shot in the streets regularily, the way you only see in some old movies about when the Mafia ruled in some US cities. Compared to that time, they live in paradise now, and many attribute this change to Putin. Don't expect him to be out of power anytime soon. As for the russian elite, a lot of them own their fortune to this change. Never mistake criticism for opposition. Especially among politicians and the rich, it is fairly common to complain loudly about someone and still support them when it matters, because all the complaining and seeming hostility is simply an attempt to move them on certain topics.

You should update your propaganda-driven beliefs. I've got a russian girlfriend and I've been to Russia myself. At least for where I was (St. Petersburg), it looks much like any european city, except more beautiful (but that's a St. Petersburg special, they made very sure to keep all the old palaces and buildings in shape).

Crime was horrible in the 1990s, my girlfriend says, but here's why most russians actually love Putin: Since he became the top dog, things have been continuously improving. Crime is low, economy is good, of course nothing is perfect, but compared to previous times, they're pretty great.

From what I've seen in daily life, I don't see anything that would make them jealous of a random EU member country. Supermarkets are full of basically the same products I can buy here, everyone has a car, public transport is better than in some european cities, the streets are in good condition and clean, I felt safe both at day and at night.

Of course Putin doesn't want Ukraine to join the EU. But that they will all be able to suddenly buy bananas and thus run away from communism is 1990s stuff and long since outdated.

My programming skills are debatable but I tested in the top 10th percentile for dick-punching. Here... let me show you...

You kidding? I'd love to go myself - you see, some of us actually want to know what's out there, and to see it first-hand.

I meant "heartless" in the vein that they have no heart for it.

But we don't do that. We never do that. As developers, we hide our head in the sand until we absolutely can no longer ignore then problem, and then we say "Whoops! My bad!" As consumers we assume that professionally published software should be reasonably free of bugs or exploitable code. And people start being held accountable by law for their shitty software, the status quo will never change.

I was demonstrating to a shitty software developer the other day how all his input sanitizing routines were in the javascript front end to his web application and anyone bypassing the javascript could essentially have their way with the back-end database, and he told me "Oh you're making a back-end API call, no one will ever do that!" No one except the guy who's hacking your fucking system, jackass. People like that make me want to sign on as Linus' personal dick-puncher. Whenever someone writes some shitty software that pisses Linus off, I will find that person and I will PUNCH THEM IN THE DICK. Because I swear to god, that's what it's going to take. Congress is going to have to WRITE A LAW allowing me to HUNT PEOPLE DOWN and PUNCH THEM IN THE DICK over the SHITTY SOFTWARE they write. And when that day comes, with God as my witness, I will PITCH A TENT outside MICROSOFT HEADQUARTERS, and that will be the LAST TENT EVER PITCHED at MICROSOFT HEADQUARTERS!

Give the physiologic changes that microgravity brings, I'd be surprised if sex was even possible without some engineering and pharmaceutical assistance...

Sadly, you're right. The same fuckers that make that decision are probably the same ones who think that artificial insemination is vastly superior to sex. Objectively they'd be right for the purpose of reproduction, but they're still a bunch of heartless assholes for basing public policy on it.

Agreed again - open the damn thing to commercial exploitation and see how fast NASA catches up.

You mean like the typically politically motivated appointment of the judges of the supreme court? Oh wait, that's in the USA...

Legislative. Get your facts straight before you argue.

Let me guess, you're american and you didn't pay attention in school, so you think "Europe" is some small country somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, yes?

The EU is larger than the USA in people, economic power and basically every other metric except prison population. Blackhole the EU if you want. We may or may not come over to save the sorry remains of your economy in a couple years.

The trade volume between the USA and the EU is about 60 billion US$ monthly . However, the USA imports a lot more, while the import/export balance of the EU is almost balanced (http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/eu-position-in-world-trade/). Make a guess who would suffer more.

You've heard of this thing they call "Separation of Powers"? Maybe the news hasn't reached you yet, after all it's only been around for some 350 years.

Searching and speaking are really not the same thing. Once again, you can say they are related and one requires the other and so on, but all of that only means that yes, there really is no "right to search", you can only construct it from other rights.

Is a right in itself and maybe you can derive a "right to search" from it, but in doing so you would only prove my point that a "right to search" by itself is nowhere in the law books.

Nice hyperbole, but entirely beside the point. I already explained in my original posting what the legal situation actually is, I don't see why I should repeat it.

Of course, you can refute me easily. Find the correct EU law that contains the phrase "right to search" and post a link. I will apologize if you do.