The parliament can only retire the commission as a whole, it cannot retire individual commissioners. I explained that in a previous post.

I do not know why you think that: I work with the EU administration on a daily basis and I have taken several courses on the EU institutions.

No, a directive IS a law, the member states have an obligation to implement it as a national law. However until the member states have implemented it as a national law, the national courts will not enforce it.

Agreed, I am not implying that the EU is not democratic.

I also disagree that this is nitpicking: members of national parliaments have the right to propose legislation, to which the national government has to adhere if that proposal is adopted by the parliament. The European Parliament cannot do that: they can only ask the Commission to please propose something. The Commission has no obligation to be forthcoming. This is really a severe limit on the power of the European Parliament.

It goes further than that: in general national parliaments can censure the government (I am not well versed in the German situation, but this is the case in Belgium and many other countries), just as the European Parliament can censure the European Commission. The European Parliament however has no means at all to censure the European Council or the Council of the European Union, since those consist of ministers of the member states.

My point is that the European Union is not a republic, which was stated by the Great-great-great-grandparent post, since the member states have a lot of power in the EU and hardly anything on EU level happens without consent from the national governments.

I know that about 80% of national legislation in the EU nowadays comes "from Europe" in the form of directives, but those were most times negotiated between the governments of the member states beforehand.

As I wrote, the rotating "European Presidency" is held by a country, not by an individual president. Also that is only the presidency of the Council of the European Union, which is the meeting of the departmental ministers (e.g. ministers of economy, the ministers of environment, or ministers of science policy of the member states - of note is that the heads of the governments of the member states do not belong to this since they are in the European Council unless they also were the hat of a specific departmental ministry), separate from the president of the European Council, the president of the European Commission and the president of the European Parliament - all of which are sometimes incorrectly referred to as "European president".

We can discuss on the exact amount of power of the European Parliament, but they have no right to take the initiative on European legislation: the Parliament can only vote on proposals of the Commission. The European Parliament has the right to request the Commission to initiate a legislative procedure and put forward a proposal, and they only have power of the Commission by adopting a motion of censure - which has never happened. The Parliament has no power over the European Council and over the Council of the European Union which both represent the member states.

Forgot to mention in my previous post:

The commissioners of the European Commission (which is the executive branch of the EU, the closest thing to a "European government") are proposed by the member states and then the entire Commission is confirmed by the European Parliament. The parliament cannot dismiss individual Commissioners, but it can dissolve the Commission as a whole: this was close to happening in 1999 when president of the Commission Jacques Santer and all 20 commissioners resigned before the formal vote could take place. Also the parliament can reject the entire Commission at its installation, this has never happened but member states had to swap out proposed individual commissioners to prevent that from happening at several occasions.

There is also a "European Presidency", actually the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, which is rotating every half year through the member states (currently Ireland). It are the ministers of that member state who preside the meetings of the Council of the European Council depending on the issue at hand (e.g. currently the Irish minister of environment would preside over meetings regarding environment)- so in that sense the "European President" is a country rather than a person.

The European Union is not a republic. The EU started as a confederation, it is now somewhere halfway between that and a federation.

The main power is still with the nation states, represented in the European Council (consisting of the heads of states and heads of governments, lead by the president (currently António Costa) of the European Council who has no real power if he does not get the heads of states convinced) and the Council of the European Union (consisting of the national ministers and state secretaries for specific issues).

Both should not be confused with the Council of Europe, which is a human rights organisation not related to the European Union, but it gave permission to the EU to use its flag.

Next are the European Commission (currently presided by Ursula von der Leyen) with commissioners appointed by the national governments and/or national parliaments.

Least power is with the European Parliament (currently presided by Roberta Metsola) which can only accept European legislation following a proposal by the European Commission.

There is no European President, though the presidents of the European Commission, the European Council and the European Parliament sometimes are referred to by that title.

Perhaps this will become as popular as Google's Buzz.

My first computer was a 1979 Sharp MZ-80K, I spent my school vacations writing Z80 mnemonics code in the day time and hand assembling it to hex code at night. I still have, program and use two MZ-80K machines here in the room with me.

The Z80 today:

- Z80 assembler, linker, C compiler and libraries: Z88DK was originally developed for the Cambridge Z88 notebook computer but now supports over 100 Z80/8080 machines.
- RC2014 is an open source modular Z80 computer kit, it runs CP/M and Microsoft MBASIC.
- Two recent open source designs by The Byte Attic (Bernardo Kastrup):
- * The Cerberus 2100 has a Z80, 65C02 and a AVR processor for I/O. You can build it yourself or buy it from Olimex
- * The Agon Origins and Agon Light have an eZ80 CPU, it runs BBC BASIC. You can build it yourself or buy it from Olimex
- T80 FPGA core for the MiST and MiSTer FPGA.
- The MiSTer implements many Z80 systems, including the Sharp MZ series, Sinclair ZX series, Tandy TRS-80 series, MSX, Amstrad/Schneider CPC and PCW series, Commodore 128 (which also has a Z80 CPU next to the MOS 8502 CPU), Jupiter ACE, SAM Coupé, Tatung Einstein TC-01, etc., as well as several consoles and arcade machines.
- The ZX Spectrum Next and the N-GO implement the Z80 in FPGA, it can also run on the MiSTer.
- The MSXVR is based on the Raspberry Pi.

The Lenovo laptop I type this on is 15 years old, it runs Linux and I use it every day.

I have 3 perfectly working computers (two Sharp MZ-80K's and a HP-85, none of those run anything by Microsoft) in the room here that are over 46 years -almost half a century- old. My HP-1660C logic analyzer is about 30 years old. My Wyse WY-60 terminal is 40 years old (connected to a Udoo Bolt V8 computer from 2019 which I also use every day, and which is also running Linux -- Windows 11 is not supported on it even if that computer is only 7 years old).

None of those machines is obsolete, the HP-85 has an SD-card interface. Whenever I need to make a quick calculation I turn on the HP-85, I can even print out the results with the built-in printer. The MZ-80K's are running software that I wrote and assembled/compiled on my Linux machines. There is also an SD card interface for the MZ-80K.

Because Microsoft introduced artificial limitations that prevent perfectly working computers to run Windows 11.

Just use Latin:

Counterclockwise = prograde.
Clockwise = retrograde.

Well, on Earth it is, it may be different in your solar system.

That myth has been debunked.

The native operating system of ARM is RISC OS.

Yet Another Dupe

dBASE II was a sequel to nothing.

(Well, it was a re-release of Cecil Wayne Ratliff's Vulcan database for CP/M when Aston-Tate bought a license to that, but there never was a "dBASE I".)