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.
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.
I honestly, believe that this is one of the root causes to the objections. The actual valid reasons that are published, are then used as fodder for the anti-helmet camp, though they certainly was not in that camp because of the research being published.
The general problems with helmets among the public seem to be:
1. It will ruin my haircut (mostly among women). 2. Inconvenient to bring along. 3. People telling you that you look silly (I have actually had people telling me that I look like an idiot when I cycle with a helmet).
Scientists look into what happens when you introduce helmet laws, and they find all kinds of valid reasons of why the laws are bad. Among these that the laws are that people cycle less, which leads to more health issues in the general population. The root cause are the problems listed above, but the research results are then used as fodder by the people who are responsible for reasons 1, 2 and 3.
The good thing is that problem 1, 2 and 3 has been technically solved by a Swedish company that that makes airbags for bikes (the company is called Hövding and is best described as a scarf that will blow up and cover your head in an airbag), they are a bit expensive, but are anyway really cool.
This is not correct, the council IS the governments of the member states, which makes the anti EU thing, where he hates the EU but loves the national government really silly.
"Name n* countries where you can vote for top people in the executive?"
This only happens in presidential systems where the president has powers... I suppose, in the EU this is only France. Maybe the British eurosceptics want to fire the Queen and elect their monarch instead; this would be consistent with their insisting on the lack of EC president election being a major issue. Somehow I doubt it though:)
No, this is not uncommon if the local law conflicts with EU-wide legislation, or if the law simply omits implementing provisions in EU directives. This happens all the time, and have happened for the last 40 years or so.
In this case, the EU copyright directives does stipulate that there _may_ be compensation for private copying, and there are also regulation as to what constitutes private copying. So, the question at hand is: does Dutch law follow EU law or not. Note that national law that is in violation of EU law is invalid. This stem from the treaties, European case law and national law that does acknowledge this fact. I.e. by signing the EU treaty, EU law is Dutch law as well.
De-jure, the European Council must select a candidate taking the EP election results into account. This means appointing the candidate from the biggest party group. If they would appoint another one, that candidate will never pass the parliaments vote.
Effectively, this is the same as the rules in most memberstates. Any PM in the Council who objects to this appointment is violating the treaty. In addition, the selection is also to big an issue to ignore the parliament on this. They have been plenty pissed about lesser issues...
So you are saying that, if the EU change the system, so it effectively works in the same way as national elections (i.e. you know who will be commission president if your side wins), it is still not good enough...
Sigh... typical eurosceptic thinking... any fix of a problem is not good enough.
Complaint: Commission president is not known or elected during the election. Fix: European parties elect a commission president candidate before the election. Result: Commission president is known and de-facto elected during the EP election.
How is this a token change? Can you please say what they should do instead. If the most fundamental democratic reform at the EU-level since the introduction of the elected parliament is apparently only a token change, how is it to be done?
By the way, only very few voters in the UK can vote for Cameron; wonder what would happen if the prime-ministerial candidate would not win in his constituency? Would your pre-known prime ministerial candidate still be prime minister?
If in the next election, you don't like the ECR (Conservative) candidate, then you simply vote for one of the other parties, like PES (Labour) or ALDE (LibDem) or whatever. Of course, the ECR candidate will never be elected as Commission president as ECR does not have enough votes Europe-vide for that, but that is the nature of democracy after all.
The European tradition is parliamentary democracy, so that the executive is picked from parliament is essentially the normal rule in Europe (directly elected executives are really rare). Naturally, one can also think of a more US or French style system, where the commission president would be directly elected. Though, this has its own issues in that the president cannot be sacked as easily, which in my mind is a really important feature of the parliamentarian way. Though, it would arguably be better than the current mechanism, but really, it is not a big issue whether the Commission president is picked by parliament or by the public, as long as he/her is not appointed by the memberstates and you take care of the details (like the sackability of a directly elected president). This is why the improvements for the next EP election stemming from the Lisbon treaty, in this area are really huge and important.
I honestly believe that the change of appointment mechanism of the Commission president is the single most fundamental and important democratic reform in the EU since the public elections of the parliament was started.
Well, not for no reason... in a dictatorship, using the modern meaning of the word as in "not a democracy", most people are afraid of opening their mouths. If they say the wrong thing, they will be dragged away in vans, during the middle of the night and disappear; or in the less murderous dictatorships, simply be tossed into jail or prison for an indefinite time.
This is not about to happen in the EU anytime soon, so yes you need to be insane if you attribute these things to the EU.
The EU commission is not DIRECTLY elected, but neither is any other government in Europe. With the exceptions of a few presidents (most being powerless and appointed) no head of state/government is directly elected in Europe. De-facto, most governments are picked from parliament, though this is not a legal requirement in most states. The commission is in fact elected by parliament, although it is also at the same time appointed by the memberstates' governments. In most states in Europe, the prime minister is appointed (in some cases by the king/queen/president and in other cases by the speaker of parliament who is appointed in some other way), and then elected by parliament. This is actually not that much different. Although, it would clearly be better if the commission is taken from parliament from a democratic standpoint, some states does not seem to like the idea that much. But things are changing for the better.
Following the Lisbon treaty, the Commission president will be selected from the candidates fielded by the European parties starting with the next EP-elections in 2014. In addition to this, the future group (consisting of some of the EU foreign ministers) have also fielded the idea that the commission should be selected by the commission president and subject to the normal parliamentary scrutiny of a memberstate government (and presumably with a requirement to have one commissioner from each memberstate).
Firstly, let us start with another rant: the ESM treaty has nothing to do with the spending of the individual member states, this is handled by another treaty called TSCG (known as the fiscal compact), assuming you mean to protest against the fiscal compact and not actually the ESM treaty.
By the fiscal compact, no one need to ask permission for spending, unless the spend well above what they have previously agreed to, which actually means running a huge deficit, which in turn result in the deficit having to be payed back by your children. From that point of view, there is no democracy in overspending now, since the people who have to pay for do not yet have the right to vote and the government does not spend their money, they spend their future tax payers money. The treaty also does allow for substantial deficits, but only if the budget is balanced over a cycle. I.e. you can go minus now, as long as you go plus in a few years. In addition, the people who have negotiated the treaty are democratically elected.
I do not know how you interpret the EU as the successor of nazi-germany, this just plain ridiculous. I will ignore Godwin on this, as I honestly believe that you do the sufferers of the war a great injustice by saying this. The Union's primary purpose is after all to build a lasting peace in Europe. This said, the Union also have very high standards for human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Everything opposite of the third reich.
Should we go on... you may complain against some democratic deficiencies in the EU, but these issues are being solved. The main blockers of democratic reform so far has been the UK and some other member states. In either case, from the next EP elections (2014), the commission president will for example be selected from candidates laid out by the parliamentary groups before the election. In addition Barroso and others (e.g. the future group), have been pushing sweeping changes of the Union to guarantee power to the parliament. The lack of democracy at the EU level is solely the result of it being an intergovernmental organisation to some extent where the states have too much to say about things.
Yes the robots are terrible, we have seen this massive industrialisation before. The industrialisation of agriculture which resulted in a drop from 90 % to 5 % of the population being involved in agriculture resulted in 85 % unemployment as everyone is aware of, I can hardly leave the house without being chased by all those pitchfork carrying unemployed peasants... every day I fear for my life.
Define war... Sweden has not been invaded during the last 200 years, but the Swedish army has certainly seen action outside of Sweden.
For example:
1800s: Sweden pays for and sends troops to assist the Danish against Germany (the Danes surrender before the troops get into action though). WWII: Sweden pays for and sends troops to fight for the Finnish against the Soviets. Congo: Sweden sends troops under EU flag to take part of operation Artemis. They are involved in heavy fighting. Afghanistan: Sweden pays for and sends troops that have been involved with relatively heavy combat operations.
Swedish neutrality and non-belligerence is a myth.
Yes, the GP is out smoking bananas. The Union doesn't give shit in wether a memberstate charges tuition fees or not for non EU nationals. As you say, if education is free for you own citizens, then it must be free for all EU citizens.
The Swedish government did realise that they where paying a lot of money to educate especially Chinese students who were there for free, and the Swedish tax payers did not recover the costs. This is why tuition fees where introduced for non EU students at Universities in Sweden, the EU had nothing to do with it.
--- "Another source of the strong Swedophilia around the world, is that until a few years ago, the Swedish educational system was open to, and free of cost, to anyone applying from around the world, and accepted students purely based on academic merits. Unfortunately, this practise was not allowed within EU and discontinued some years after Sweden joined EU. Interesting in this case is that many higher government officials and bureaucrats in influential African countries have received their education in Sweden." ---
The EU doesn't give shit about whether or not education is free for non-EU students. They do however mandate that all EU students are treated identically to the national students. The government introduced tuition fees for non EU citizens as the educational system was being strained by especially Chinese students who did not pay for their studies, essentially costing the local taxpayer's money. This tuition fees for non EU students was not mandated by the EU. However, the EU does make the rule that if you provide free education for your own citizens, then it must also be free for all EU-citizens.
Sweden is not neutral. Sweden has had a policy of being non-aligned in order to keep the ability of being neutral in the case of war. Sweden was never de-jure recognised as neutral. Although to some, Sweden, may be seen as de-facto neutral, the actual fact is that Sweden has been involved in numerous armed conflicts during the last century. In WWII Sweden who stayed outside of the main conflict, sided with Finland and even sent troops, both air force and army (including officers) that took part in combat operations, all-though technically they where sorted under Finnish flag, the fact is that they where endorsed by Sweden, how also sent over lots of arms.
In addition to this, Sweden has been a member of the EU since the 1990s, and even though the EU did not have mutual defence guarantees until the Lisbon treaty, the fact is that no EU state would remain neutral in the case of another one being attacked.
Sweden has also removed "neutrality" from their foreign policy documents. So, it has not been neutral nether de-facto or de-jure since before WWII. And especially, given the membership of the Union, the old motto of "non alignment in order to be able to be neutral in the case of war" has not been true for 20 years.
Let's see here, in addition to the productivity issues of working more than 8h per day (shown in multiple studies); working 12 h (say, from 09:00-21:00) will in many cases leave you without the ability to go and buy food in the grocery store (depending on where you live of-course...), it will prevent you from getting a workout, and it will prevent you from meeting friends, wife, kids, et.c. Push that up to 16, and you will have about 8h left per day, assuming you only need 6h sleep (very unlikely with days that long), this leaves you with two hours for eating breakfast, getting to and from work, showering, doing your groceries, washing your clothes, getting dressed/undressed, reading the newspaper et.c.
This had maybe some point of truth to it in the 1970s when the EP was not directly elected. Most of the MEPs these days are pretty serious about what they do and becoming a MEP these days is not something that you get to become because you have been a politician for all your life.
Many MEPs are also fairly young career MEPs such as for example Fjellner, Alvaro and in 't Veld. They choose to become MEPs (or rather to try to be elected as MEPs) because they where seriously interested in the EP politics.
The commission did not refuse, they kept asking the other parties to open up. However the US and Japan refused to open up the negotiations. The US claimed that national security was at stake.
Not that the commission handled things that good, and Karel's actions following the MEPs rejection is clearly a reason to sack him.
I would like to ask MEPs: Please subject Karel to a very intense smacking in the EP and if he does not amend his ways, fire him. Yes, I know that de jure you have to fire the entire EC, but you could just tell Barrosso, that he and the others will loose their jobs unless Karel is sacked.
The Tories are against all measures that would make the commission either directly elected or appointed by the European parliament. So they are not really the best people to refer to in this question.
The reason that the tories hate Europe is that they want their own empire back; complaints about that the commission is not elected are just easy points to sell their ideas to the public, however the Tories fail to see that complaining about this and doing something about it will work against their own policies; so they rather keep the status quo in order to be able to continue bitching about it. And indeed, the European federalists have complained about this for a long time as well, but they actually want to solve the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
I honestly, believe that this is one of the root causes to the objections. The actual valid reasons that are published, are then used as fodder for the anti-helmet camp, though they certainly was not in that camp because of the research being published.
The general problems with helmets among the public seem to be:
1. It will ruin my haircut (mostly among women).
2. Inconvenient to bring along.
3. People telling you that you look silly (I have actually had people telling me that I look like an idiot when I cycle with a helmet).
Scientists look into what happens when you introduce helmet laws, and they find all kinds of valid reasons of why the laws are bad. Among these that the laws are that people cycle less, which leads to more health issues in the general population. The root cause are the problems listed above, but the research results are then used as fodder by the people who are responsible for reasons 1, 2 and 3.
The good thing is that problem 1, 2 and 3 has been technically solved by a Swedish company that that makes airbags for bikes (the company is called Hövding and is best described as a scarf that will blow up and cover your head in an airbag), they are a bit expensive, but are anyway really cool.
"council is appointed by the governments"
This is not correct, the council IS the governments of the member states, which makes the anti EU thing, where he hates the EU but loves the national government really silly.
"Name n* countries where you can vote for top people in the executive?"
This only happens in presidential systems where the president has powers... I suppose, in the EU this is only France. Maybe the British eurosceptics want to fire the Queen and elect their monarch instead; this would be consistent with their insisting on the lack of EC president election being a major issue. Somehow I doubt it though :)
No, this is not uncommon if the local law conflicts with EU-wide legislation, or if the law simply omits implementing provisions in EU directives. This happens all the time, and have happened for the last 40 years or so.
In this case, the EU copyright directives does stipulate that there _may_ be compensation for private copying, and there are also regulation as to what constitutes private copying. So, the question at hand is: does Dutch law follow EU law or not. Note that national law that is in violation of EU law is invalid. This stem from the treaties, European case law and national law that does acknowledge this fact. I.e. by signing the EU treaty, EU law is Dutch law as well.
De-jure, the European Council must select a candidate taking the EP election results into account. This means appointing the candidate from the biggest party group. If they would appoint another one, that candidate will never pass the parliaments vote.
Effectively, this is the same as the rules in most memberstates. Any PM in the Council who objects to this appointment is violating the treaty. In addition, the selection is also to big an issue to ignore the parliament on this. They have been plenty pissed about lesser issues...
So you are saying that, if the EU change the system, so it effectively works in the same way as national elections (i.e. you know who will be commission president if your side wins), it is still not good enough...
Sigh... typical eurosceptic thinking... any fix of a problem is not good enough.
Complaint: Commission president is not known or elected during the election.
Fix: European parties elect a commission president candidate before the election.
Result: Commission president is known and de-facto elected during the EP election.
How is this a token change? Can you please say what they should do instead. If the most fundamental democratic reform at the EU-level since the introduction of the elected parliament is apparently only a token change, how is it to be done?
By the way, only very few voters in the UK can vote for Cameron; wonder what would happen if the prime-ministerial candidate would not win in his constituency? Would your pre-known prime ministerial candidate still be prime minister?
If in the next election, you don't like the ECR (Conservative) candidate, then you simply vote for one of the other parties, like PES (Labour) or ALDE (LibDem) or whatever. Of course, the ECR candidate will never be elected as Commission president as ECR does not have enough votes Europe-vide for that, but that is the nature of democracy after all.
The European tradition is parliamentary democracy, so that the executive is picked from parliament is essentially the normal rule in Europe (directly elected executives are really rare). Naturally, one can also think of a more US or French style system, where the commission president would be directly elected. Though, this has its own issues in that the president cannot be sacked as easily, which in my mind is a really important feature of the parliamentarian way. Though, it would arguably be better than the current mechanism, but really, it is not a big issue whether the Commission president is picked by parliament or by the public, as long as he/her is not appointed by the memberstates and you take care of the details (like the sackability of a directly elected president). This is why the improvements for the next EP election stemming from the Lisbon treaty, in this area are really huge and important.
I honestly believe that the change of appointment mechanism of the Commission president is the single most fundamental and important democratic reform in the EU since the public elections of the parliament was started.
Well, not for no reason... in a dictatorship, using the modern meaning of the word as in "not a democracy", most people are afraid of opening their mouths. If they say the wrong thing, they will be dragged away in vans, during the middle of the night and disappear; or in the less murderous dictatorships, simply be tossed into jail or prison for an indefinite time.
This is not about to happen in the EU anytime soon, so yes you need to be insane if you attribute these things to the EU.
The EU commission is not DIRECTLY elected, but neither is any other government in Europe. With the exceptions of a few presidents (most being powerless and appointed) no head of state/government is directly elected in Europe. De-facto, most governments are picked from parliament, though this is not a legal requirement in most states. The commission is in fact elected by parliament, although it is also at the same time appointed by the memberstates' governments. In most states in Europe, the prime minister is appointed (in some cases by the king/queen/president and in other cases by the speaker of parliament who is appointed in some other way), and then elected by parliament. This is actually not that much different. Although, it would clearly be better if the commission is taken from parliament from a democratic standpoint, some states does not seem to like the idea that much. But things are changing for the better.
Following the Lisbon treaty, the Commission president will be selected from the candidates fielded by the European parties starting with the next EP-elections in 2014. In addition to this, the future group (consisting of some of the EU foreign ministers) have also fielded the idea that the commission should be selected by the commission president and subject to the normal parliamentary scrutiny of a memberstate government (and presumably with a requirement to have one commissioner from each memberstate).
Firstly, let us start with another rant: the ESM treaty has nothing to do with the spending of the individual member states, this is handled by another treaty called TSCG (known as the fiscal compact), assuming you mean to protest against the fiscal compact and not actually the ESM treaty.
By the fiscal compact, no one need to ask permission for spending, unless the spend well above what they have previously agreed to, which actually means running a huge deficit, which in turn result in the deficit having to be payed back by your children. From that point of view, there is no democracy in overspending now, since the people who have to pay for do not yet have the right to vote and the government does not spend their money, they spend their future tax payers money. The treaty also does allow for substantial deficits, but only if the budget is balanced over a cycle. I.e. you can go minus now, as long as you go plus in a few years. In addition, the people who have negotiated the treaty are democratically elected.
I do not know how you interpret the EU as the successor of nazi-germany, this just plain ridiculous. I will ignore Godwin on this, as I honestly believe that you do the sufferers of the war a great injustice by saying this. The Union's primary purpose is after all to build a lasting peace in Europe. This said, the Union also have very high standards for human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Everything opposite of the third reich.
Should we go on... you may complain against some democratic deficiencies in the EU, but these issues are being solved. The main blockers of democratic reform so far has been the UK and some other member states. In either case, from the next EP elections (2014), the commission president will for example be selected from candidates laid out by the parliamentary groups before the election. In addition Barroso and others (e.g. the future group), have been pushing sweeping changes of the Union to guarantee power to the parliament. The lack of democracy at the EU level is solely the result of it being an intergovernmental organisation to some extent where the states have too much to say about things.
Yes the robots are terrible, we have seen this massive industrialisation before. The industrialisation of agriculture which resulted in a drop from 90 % to 5 % of the population being involved in agriculture resulted in 85 % unemployment as everyone is aware of, I can hardly leave the house without being chased by all those pitchfork carrying unemployed peasants... every day I fear for my life.
Define war... Sweden has not been invaded during the last 200 years, but the Swedish army has certainly seen action outside of Sweden.
For example:
1800s: Sweden pays for and sends troops to assist the Danish against Germany (the Danes surrender before the troops get into action though).
WWII: Sweden pays for and sends troops to fight for the Finnish against the Soviets.
Congo: Sweden sends troops under EU flag to take part of operation Artemis. They are involved in heavy fighting.
Afghanistan: Sweden pays for and sends troops that have been involved with relatively heavy combat operations.
Swedish neutrality and non-belligerence is a myth.
Yes, the GP is out smoking bananas. The Union doesn't give shit in wether a memberstate charges tuition fees or not for non EU nationals. As you say, if education is free for you own citizens, then it must be free for all EU citizens.
The Swedish government did realise that they where paying a lot of money to educate especially Chinese students who were there for free, and the Swedish tax payers did not recover the costs. This is why tuition fees where introduced for non EU students at Universities in Sweden, the EU had nothing to do with it.
---
"Another source of the strong Swedophilia around the world, is that until a few years ago, the Swedish educational system was open to, and free of cost, to anyone applying from around the world, and accepted students purely based on academic merits. Unfortunately, this practise was not allowed within EU and discontinued some years after Sweden joined EU. Interesting in this case is that many higher government officials and bureaucrats in influential African countries have received their education in Sweden."
---
The EU doesn't give shit about whether or not education is free for non-EU students. They do however mandate that all EU students are treated identically to the national students. The government introduced tuition fees for non EU citizens as the educational system was being strained by especially Chinese students who did not pay for their studies, essentially costing the local taxpayer's money. This tuition fees for non EU students was not mandated by the EU. However, the EU does make the rule that if you provide free education for your own citizens, then it must also be free for all EU-citizens.
Sweden is not neutral. Sweden has had a policy of being non-aligned in order to keep the ability of being neutral in the case of war. Sweden was never de-jure recognised as neutral. Although to some, Sweden, may be seen as de-facto neutral, the actual fact is that Sweden has been involved in numerous armed conflicts during the last century. In WWII Sweden who stayed outside of the main conflict, sided with Finland and even sent troops, both air force and army (including officers) that took part in combat operations, all-though technically they where sorted under Finnish flag, the fact is that they where endorsed by Sweden, how also sent over lots of arms.
In addition to this, Sweden has been a member of the EU since the 1990s, and even though the EU did not have mutual defence guarantees until the Lisbon treaty, the fact is that no EU state would remain neutral in the case of another one being attacked.
Sweden has also removed "neutrality" from their foreign policy documents. So, it has not been neutral nether de-facto or de-jure since before WWII. And especially, given the membership of the Union, the old motto of "non alignment in order to be able to be neutral in the case of war" has not been true for 20 years.
Let's see here, in addition to the productivity issues of working more than 8h per day (shown in multiple studies); working 12 h (say, from 09:00-21:00) will in many cases leave you without the ability to go and buy food in the grocery store (depending on where you live of-course...), it will prevent you from getting a workout, and it will prevent you from meeting friends, wife, kids, et.c. Push that up to 16, and you will have about 8h left per day, assuming you only need 6h sleep (very unlikely with days that long), this leaves you with two hours for eating breakfast, getting to and from work, showering, doing your groceries, washing your clothes, getting dressed/undressed, reading the newspaper et.c.
This had maybe some point of truth to it in the 1970s when the EP was not directly elected. Most of the MEPs these days are pretty serious about what they do and becoming a MEP these days is not something that you get to become because you have been a politician for all your life.
Many MEPs are also fairly young career MEPs such as for example Fjellner, Alvaro and in 't Veld. They choose to become MEPs (or rather to try to be elected as MEPs) because they where seriously interested in the EP politics.
It is not 1970 anymore.
The commission did not refuse, they kept asking the other parties to open up. However the US and Japan refused to open up the negotiations. The US claimed that national security was at stake.
Not that the commission handled things that good, and Karel's actions following the MEPs rejection is clearly a reason to sack him.
I would like to ask MEPs: Please subject Karel to a very intense smacking in the EP and if he does not amend his ways, fire him. Yes, I know that de jure you have to fire the entire EC, but you could just tell Barrosso, that he and the others will loose their jobs unless Karel is sacked.
The Tories are against all measures that would make the commission either directly elected or appointed by the European parliament. So they are not really the best people to refer to in this question.
The reason that the tories hate Europe is that they want their own empire back; complaints about that the commission is not elected are just easy points to sell their ideas to the public, however the Tories fail to see that complaining about this and doing something about it will work against their own policies; so they rather keep the status quo in order to be able to continue bitching about it. And indeed, the European federalists have complained about this for a long time as well, but they actually want to solve the problem.