sitting in Frankfurt right now. sources from the city tell us most companies in skyscrapers either evacuated or let most of their people go home earlier without formal evacuation (it's now 7pm here.). Most large banks are reported to be run with skeleton staff.
If those web designers would stop coding artsy-fartsy crap and stayed with simple formats there would be no problem even with archaic stuff like Mosaic
I am so tired of so called designers who go out of their way to press a flexible text presentatation system into their stupid little icon tricks. Pixel scale positioning - pfffft! Text as Images - pffft! Font sizes mandated by NaziStyleSheets - pffft pffft!
Forcing people to post in PDF format was a good thing
It is utter hogwash. Think of an Artist, or a housewife, or somebody who has not even a remote technical clue. How is such a person supposed to generate PDFs ? The only way is shelling out bick bucks to Adobe.
The is a thing called "American Standard Code for Information Interchange". It's got that name for a reason.
he real trouble (in Germany) is [...]People don't want to get their hands dirty [ Yadda... Yadda... Yadda... ]
Yeah. You essentially describe social security. That's close to what those ultrra right wingers always tend to say (and, no, I'm not claiming you are one). The just love to point out the example of a turk with eight children getting as much from social security as from (cheap) labor. So What ? Go to our jails. Count inmates. Thanks, case closed.
For what? Being registered as unemployed in Germany
(it actually is much higher for some time after you loose your old job).
Now it gets funny. Good morning, people paid for that. It's called unemployment insurance, it's mandatory, and you paid it, too. Go have a look at your salary statement. Now they are unemployed they collect their insurance. There's reason behind that - landlords don't give discounts once you are unemployed...
I'm by no means an expert on this but if you need additional workers for a short term then wouldn't the logical thing to do, be to offer them a short-term contract? Working with an interim and renewing the contracts on a weekly basis would seem like the way to go.
Hey, these laws may lok a little socialist, but the people who made them weren't utterly brainless. Renewing term conbtracts a cetrtain number of times is legally considered permanent employment - employees can sue for permanent contracts. Moreover it can be illegal in some situations (essentially if the authorities have the impression you are doing it just to circumvent laws you can get hefty fines). And if that's not enough, the employee's council is to some degree invloved in temp hiring as well.
The key word, of course, is cooperation. Companies that are constantly in fights with their employees create themselves a living hell short time, and tend to fail in the long run.
every single termination... has to be agreed by the employee's council.
Ugh. Don't europeans understand that this is a huge disincentive to hiring aditional workers?
To some degree it is. OTOH, in a stock based corporation (AG), the employees get to elect 50%-1 board members anyway. And the employee's council has far more rights than just discussing terminations. Working conditions, hiring, promoting, you name it - to most things they have at least right to be heard; often they must agree.
So, running a medium or large company gets you to cultivate a cooperative culture with the employees anyway. That contributes muich to the often quoted "social peace" which is actually an advantage of many Geman companies.
What blows me away about Germany is the Kirchen Steuer (church tax). When I was over there, I couldn't believe the gov't collected taxes for the Lutheran and Catholic churches.
It's a historical issue. During secularization the state(s) confiscated huge amounts of church property. Among other things the post-napoleonic peace order of the Vienna Congress was essentially financed by confiscated or not restituted church property (mostly monastery properties) that were distributed among the nobles and states that felt not 'getting enough' in this landgrab.
So they had somehow to compensate the churches. They did that by making treaties guaranteeing certain rights and privileges. One of these is the collection of church taxes.
This of course goes both ways. No catholic bishop, for instance, can be instituted without the blessing of the governor/governing mayor of the respective state.
So, just get used to it. It's not bad, it's just... different.
First, have a look at their web site. They announce to reduce headcounts in a socially acceptable way and in close cooperation with the empolyee's council (which for all practical means can here be compared to a union).
Announcing this now means that - if they are really fast in the HR department - they get contract terminations out this month. More likely it will be next month, since every single termination (or the whole package with all details) has to be agreed by the employee's council.
Since people here have usually 3 months notice on termination in their contracts (and, especially in the tech sector, 6 is not uncommon) thus the affected people will regularily have to leave earliest end of october of november.
But that's not all - an employee's council worth its name will ususally get a substantial severance package for anybody terminated. I'd be surprised if they didn't get at least an additional 2 or 3 month's pay as compensation.
Now, what does that all mean ?
First, expect noone to fall harshly into poverty anytime soon.
Second, Suse will probably not save a single dime this year by doing this. All they do is proactively reducing next year's cost (and, maybe, impress some analysts). So this is not, IMO a sudden panic measure but an act of careful planning for times getting harsher.
Wasn't there a time when crimes needed to be committed within the sovereign territory of the country involved before someone got arrested
Forget it. Judical mindset. A Munich (in Bavaria) local court judge said it best: "The issue took place on the internet. The internet can be accessed from Munich. Therefore this court has jurisdiction".
Good morning Americans. Its is your hand that put the guy in prison. It is your arm that voted for DMCA. It is you who votes for corrupt politicians. Stop whining! Stop blaming everybody else ! Stop blaming evil corporations.
Go habve a look at that mirror on that wall there ! You see the ruler of this country ! He has your face ! Oppression, indifference, inhumanity, recklessness, it all comes with your face on it. Now, stop talking.
The current American government was elected by a small majority of voters.
Not to spoil anyone's fun, but that is a claim a large part of these people would hesitate supporting.
The only majority Mr Bush had some claim to is the majority of electors in the electoral college. And even there is more and more evidence coming up that he obtained these votes... hmm... not really the way they were meant to be obtained.
He certainly never had or even claimed having whatever majority of voters on his side.
I can deny the holocaust all I want if I feel like it and that wouldn't even be hate speech in the sense that I was asking that a group of people be injured, killed or otherwise treated unpleasantly.
Just in case you are really German, you suffer from substantial - and dangerous - delusions. Its is by no means possible to deny holocaust in this our country. Not even partially. Regardless how polite or educatedly you formulate it. Maybe there are qualificatiuons in the law that should -- in theory -- allow independant scientific research while banning only nazis from saying it. In practice, though, courts have consistently interpreted any attempt to publish substantial doubts on parts or the whole holocaust as political and punished people for it severely.
Get your facts straight.
No, I won't engage in debate on wheter the idea of legislating truth -- or distinguishing 'pure' from 'political' research in a court -- makes any sense. It is quite obviously utter bull.
We do not ignore complaints, although, sometimes it does take a few days to reply.
According to the page that started this thread - and thus according to your own boss - you ignore complaints about people grossly violating newsgroup chartas.
So, the Taliban are certainly misguided, IMHO, but we must forgive them and recognize our own shortcomings in what we perceive as theirs. They are trying to force with law and government what they really wish would happen as a result of a transformation in the hearts and minds of people.
No !
This is the "misguided idealist" defense, which we keep hearing for all kinds of murderous bastards over and over again. Every tyrannic cretin out there will tell you he is doing it for this or that greater good.
It doesn't matter. It just proves that the end doesn' justify the means.
Also, your claims are factually wrong here as well. Some of Taliban's objectives are a bad as their methods; for example see the role and position they want to force upon women in their society.
You are just another silver tongued apologist for just another bunch of criminal thugs.
If your Aunt Edna can't send e-mail because a spammer sent spam from her ISP's domain two months ago, MAPS doesn't care.
Aunt Edna subscribes with an ISP that is spam friendly. Just having spammer in your dialups doesn't suffice. They have to refuse or fail to take proper action.
And so Aunt Edna subsidizes spammers. And so she got cut off rightly.
Part of the real problem is spamers computers are told to go away nicly and not delt with properly
No
Part of the real problem is spammers are told to go away nicely and not dealt with properly.
"Dealt with properly" should include substantial financial penalties. I mean "real" substantial, like US$1 per Mail sent, like "your house is gone now".
They have to pay for servers and bandwidth, so it's understandable that they want to charge.
That is simly nonsense.
Of all things the bandwidth thing could be solved pretty fast. Changr your distribution model to compressed signed files in a special usenet group, and that's it. Stuff like that has worked for ages - see for example the recently closed UUCP mapping project.
The real issue is maintainance and support. People that answer calls. People that work on cases. etc.
It's open to debate if that should be paid for by users. IMO they should make spammers pay them.
and join an historically black fraternal organization.
Um... what's that ? There are actually fraternities calling themselves 'black' here, but that's just meaning they don't wear those coloured ribbons and caps most other German fraternities have.
Oh, and then there are the 'Black Corps', too... but trust me you won't want to join them, unless you really like fencing with sharp blades while wearing somewhat... ahem... limited protective gear. Don't know if there's one in Stuttgart, though.
Sounds good, but why is the "du" capitalized? I thought Sie was unique among personal pronouns for capitalization
When talking directly to someone, the pronoun is capitalized. There's nothing special about 'Sie' in this regard. Same to "Du" or even "Ihr" (both in an ancient singular usage, something like "thou" - or in a plural). It's probably as logical as the English habit to capitalize "I".
An intersting use of this on Usenet, btw, is the habit to transfer that usage into English in front of a German reading audience - like soc.culture.german - to emulate the German "Sie".
Some people use that as a style mechanism (what's Stilmittel in English ?) to acchieve that devastating coldness in a flame that the German Language permits you by keeping formally polite . Some folks there have developed mastery in that:-)
Slashdot Mirror
sitting in Frankfurt right now. sources from the city tell us most companies in skyscrapers either evacuated or let most of their people go home earlier without formal evacuation (it's now 7pm here.). Most large banks are reported to be run with skeleton staff.
Palestinians right now are celebrating the attack on the streets, in fact. Maybe you can shed light on that.
You refernce to [stallmann.org] is a troll - you certainly did not discuss your project with a German kitchen supplier...
f.
This is nonsense.
If those web designers would stop coding artsy-fartsy crap and stayed with simple formats there would be no problem even with archaic stuff like Mosaic
I am so tired of so called designers who go out of their way to press a flexible text presentatation system into their stupid little icon tricks. Pixel scale positioning - pfffft! Text as Images - pffft! Font sizes mandated by NaziStyleSheets - pffft pffft!
f.
It is utter hogwash. Think of an Artist, or a housewife, or somebody who has not even a remote technical clue. How is such a person supposed to generate PDFs ? The only way is shelling out bick bucks to Adobe.
The is a thing called "American Standard Code for Information Interchange". It's got that name for a reason.
f.
What is an Arsenal Ship ?
f.
f.
Now it gets funny. Good morning, people paid for that. It's called unemployment insurance, it's mandatory, and you paid it, too. Go have a look at your salary statement. Now they are unemployed they collect their insurance. There's reason behind that - landlords don't give discounts once you are unemployed...
f.
The key word, of course, is cooperation. Companies that are constantly in fights with their employees create themselves a living hell short time, and tend to fail in the long run.
f.
So, running a medium or large company gets you to cultivate a cooperative culture with the employees anyway. That contributes muich to the often quoted "social peace" which is actually an advantage of many Geman companies.
f.
So they had somehow to compensate the churches. They did that by making treaties guaranteeing certain rights and privileges. One of these is the collection of church taxes.
This of course goes both ways. No catholic bishop, for instance, can be instituted without the blessing of the governor/governing mayor of the respective state.
So, just get used to it. It's not bad, it's just
f.
I'd like to add a few remarks on this.
First, have a look at their web site. They announce to reduce headcounts in a socially acceptable way and in close cooperation with the empolyee's council (which for all practical means can here be compared to a union).
Announcing this now means that - if they are really fast in the HR department - they get contract terminations out this month. More likely it will be next month, since every single termination (or the whole package with all details) has to be agreed by the employee's council.
Since people here have usually 3 months notice on termination in their contracts (and, especially in the tech sector, 6 is not uncommon) thus the affected people will regularily have to leave earliest end of october of november.
But that's not all - an employee's council worth its name will ususally get a substantial severance package for anybody terminated. I'd be surprised if they didn't get at least an additional 2 or 3 month's pay as compensation.
Now, what does that all mean ?
First, expect noone to fall harshly into poverty anytime soon.
Second, Suse will probably not save a single dime this year by doing this. All they do is proactively reducing next year's cost (and, maybe, impress some analysts). So this is not, IMO a sudden panic measure but an act of careful planning for times getting harsher.
f.
f.
They think all the same, all over the planet.
Shakespeare once mentioned a solution....
f.
Good morning Americans. Its is your hand that put the guy in prison. It is your arm that voted for DMCA. It is you who votes for corrupt politicians. Stop whining! Stop blaming everybody else ! Stop blaming evil corporations.
Go habve a look at that mirror on that wall there ! You see the ruler of this country ! He has your face ! Oppression, indifference, inhumanity, recklessness, it all comes with your face on it. Now, stop talking.
f.
The only majority Mr Bush had some claim to is the majority of electors in the electoral college. And even there is more and more evidence coming up that he obtained these votes
He certainly never had or even claimed having whatever majority of voters on his side.
f.
Get your facts straight.
No, I won't engage in debate on wheter the idea of legislating truth -- or distinguishing 'pure' from 'political' research in a court -- makes any sense. It is quite obviously utter bull.
But that's the reality. We just live with it.
f.
So you do ignore complaints.
f.
This is the "misguided idealist" defense, which we keep hearing for all kinds of murderous bastards over and over again. Every tyrannic cretin out there will tell you he is doing it for this or that greater good.
It doesn't matter. It just proves that the end doesn' justify the means.
Also, your claims are factually wrong here as well. Some of Taliban's objectives are a bad as their methods; for example see the role and position they want to force upon women in their society.
You are just another silver tongued apologist for just another bunch of criminal thugs.
f.
You forgot the "red ink flows like rivers of blood" part. And the funny caclculation of Theo's CD sales...
f.
And so Aunt Edna subsidizes spammers. And so she got cut off rightly.
He who doesn't learn will die clueless.
f.
Part of the real problem is spammers are told to go away nicely and not dealt with properly.
"Dealt with properly" should include substantial financial penalties. I mean "real" substantial, like US$1 per Mail sent, like "your house is gone now".
And If they can't pay, substitute jailtime.
Don't they say deterrence works ?
f.
Of all things the bandwidth thing could be solved pretty fast. Changr your distribution model to compressed signed files in a special usenet group, and that's it. Stuff like that has worked for ages - see for example the recently closed UUCP mapping project.
The real issue is maintainance and support. People that answer calls. People that work on cases. etc.
It's open to debate if that should be paid for by users. IMO they should make spammers pay them.
f.
Oh, and then there are the 'Black Corps', too... but trust me you won't want to join them, unless you really like fencing with sharp blades while wearing somewhat
f.
An intersting use of this on Usenet, btw, is the habit to transfer that usage into English in front of a German reading audience - like soc.culture.german - to emulate the German "Sie". Some people use that as a style mechanism (what's Stilmittel in English ?) to acchieve that devastating coldness in a flame that the German Language permits you by keeping formally polite . Some folks there have developed mastery in that
f.