Only if they actually quit. In some jurisdictions, severance pay is required in absence of sufficient notice, unless you have evidence of serious ethical misconduct (for example, embezzlement or something pretty serious which would usually warrant legal action).
Where I live, for example, the notice required by law is as follows: 1 week after 3 full months, 2 weeks after 1 full year, 3 weeks after three full years, and 1 additional week per each full year worked after that, to a maximum of 8 weeks, So if a person has been working at a place over 7 years (but less than 8) and is given only 2 weeks notice to find another job, they must also receive 5 weeks worth of severance pay.
Actually, Canada did not actively remove the $1 bill from circulation right after the $1 coin was introduced. They reduced the printing of $1 bills considerably when they introduced the $1 coin, but what the mint found in the aftermath was that people would tend to use the bills far more frequently than the coins. and this would create above average wear and tear on them. With fewer bills in circulation already, the rate at which bills were needing to be replaced rose significantly, increasing costs, which largely defeated the purpose of introducing the coin in the first place, and they retired the bill about two years after introducing the $1 coin. A couple of years later, they decided to avoid the whole mess they had with the $1 currency entirely by pulling the $2 note at the same time that they started minting $2 coins.
The Bank of Canada is wholly Canadian owned. Legally, it is a crown corporation, belonging to the federal government. Ultimately, the Bank of Canada is owned by the people of Canada.
R.R. Donnelly runs the Canadian Bank Note Company, which prints bank notes for Canada, but this has always been a private company (before 1920, it was a subdivision of the American Bank Note Company in New York). The Canadian Bank Note Company is not to be confused with the Royal Canadian Mint, which is another crown corporation, and is also wholly owned by the Government of Canada. CBN also prints passports, driver's licences, and assorted other documents that are government-issued.
I've heard of a handful of isolated cases of people counterfeiting the new polymer Canadian bills, but no stories about any that actually entered circulation.
In other words, the hopeful counterfeiters who've attempted this so far are only fooling people who can't be bothered to actually check for even the most basic security characteristics. The forgeries discovered were actually quite crude,and it's nothing less than laziness on the part of the recipients that led to it being passed off as genuine in the first place. One wonders if they could have been equally successful passing off monopoly money as genuine, simply if it were at least sized correctly (jokes about how Canada currency looks like monopoly money to some people aside).
The techniques used in the new Canadian bills have been in use in Australia for about 25 years now, and to date, by my understanding, the measures have defeated *every* attempt to pass off a fake bill as genuine under remotely close scrutiny.
Implied ad-hominems aside,
although yes, the USA is a very distant third in terms of overall population... it is still overwhelmingly in the lead in terms of english speakers. More than double, in fact, the number of total english speakers as are found in any other single country, and this is including non-native english speakers (the country with the 2nd most number of english speakers is India, having about 120 million or so). If you only count native english speakers, the USA has 6 times english speakers as many as the runner-up, the UK.
Slashdot, I might point out, is generally an English-speaking website... and cultural references that are predominantly US-centered are not remotely unheard of.
For what it's worth, I'm not even American... and before you think I've been trying to defend them. I'm just calling someone on being needlessly pedantic over a reference that while admittedly might not be known to people who haven't watched the show, has really very little to do with which side of the ocean a person is on. It very nearly borders needlessly on racism, and has no place in a forum that, at least theoretically, is aimed at audiences who, often by virtue of being somewhat outcast themselves, may tend to be more tolerant of people who don't necessarily think or act exactly like they do.
It's entirely fine to not know about the show... what's not fine is presuming that somebody is trying to somehow be unnecessarily exclusive just because they refer to something that they don't know about, or happens to not be quite as popular in another country. Again, the show that's being referred to is only moderately less popular in the UK than it is in the USA if you go by the population in each country, and it's really not a remotely far stretch for most people who visit this website to have not heard of the program and its characters.
Little compared to what? The whole world? Sure... compared to other countries? Not so much.
The USA is the third largest country in the world by population, and the 4th by geographical area. In the English speaking world, it is the largest by population by an overwhelming amount, and only slightly smaller geographically than Canada. Since most people on Slashdot speak English here, it's really not that out of line to make cultural references here that are extremely likely to be understood by Americans.
But hey... if it makes you feel any better, you can feel free to make cultural references that people who are from your own country are more likely to understand than North Americans too. And I'm certain we can promise not to get all pissy about it after asking for a simple clarification... particularly if it's contextually relevant to the subject being discussed, which the opening comment to this thread actually was.
I never suggested upgrading existing reactors... I realize that's impossible...
It's just damn annoying reading stories like this because passive cooling reactor technologies have existed for decades, and yet hardly anybody ever used them. We have an opportunity to change how we do things in the future, but given the past resistance to adopting such methods, I remain pessimistic that they'll actually start using far safer systems, in favor of what will give them the most money right away.
Not to anyone who watches the show... and I'd imagine that your reference is equally unobscure to people who watch whatever show you may have been referring to.
But how popular is that show within the nerd demographic? Compare that to the popularity of BBT, and its popularity among the kinds of people who would frequent a site like Slashdot.
Of course...but for reference, BBT also has nearly 2 million viewers in the UK and well over 3 million viewers in Canada, so per capita, it's only slightly less popular in the UK, and wildly more popular in Canada.
Even though proponents would argue that biometrics take orders of magnitude more effort to crack or defeat (a dubious claim, but giving them the benefit of the doubt), it's impossible to escape the fact that if or when a biometric security system *IS* cracked, then it's game over for the person who was hacked, since changing his biometrics is not an option, whereas if your PIN is hacked, you can at least change to a new one to keep the damage from recurring in the future.
Had my remark that you interpret as insulting people who disagree with me stood alone, I'd suggest that such an interpretation might be reasonably valid. However, I followed the remark with an endeavor to uphold how the ramifications to copyright infringement, which can be bigger than what might be immediately obvious when one is just making a single copy, can be a potentially negative thing. Assuming that the remainder of my position has some merit, people who would engage in piracy in spite of this either do not care about such repercussions or are simply ignorant of them.
No insult was specifically intended towards people who have a different opinion... people are welcome to disagree, but I was only endeavoring to present why I believe what I do.
How does it make you feel that I don't give a damn what you think?
The above was my opinion... I hold firmly to it, and I respect copyright. I sincerely wish others would do likewise, but I'm aware enough of the realities of this world to realize that it's not likely to happen... sort of like wishing for world peace, in that respect, I guess.
It can be argued, however, that copying copyrighted content without permission *is* harmful.... just in a very subtle way that people who may not see past their immediate desires and notion of immediate gain are liable to notice.
Disrespecting copyright is harmful probably not necessarily to anyone explicitly, but is probably most directly harmful to copyright itself. Specifically, it depreciates the trust that content makers would place in copyright to protect their interests on works that they publish. Society, supposedly, is enriched by a steady stream of new published content. While copyright is supposed to give content makers some incentive to actually publish it in the first place. Harming copyright, therefore, may arguably pose some long-term harm to society as a whole, where if or when content makers no longer rely on copyright to protect their interests, they could resort to other means that ultimately only end up limiting their audience... although this is, in a sense, harming themselves... by virtue of how newly published content can culturally enrich a society, it can pose a much larger threat to society as a whole.
Of course, one might argue... if copyright were completely dissolved, there'd still be people who want to self-publish or would make works that could culturally enrich the society they live in without the protections of copyright. This is certainly true, but the logistical reality is that such people are not llikely to be the status quo for works of appreciable quality. If they were, in an age where people can pretty much self-publish already anyways, we would certainly see a very large amount of works being released where the author has actually explicitly surrendered all copyright claims, and the work is public domain. The fact that even in the realm of entirely freely available content, the fact that content makers still choose to want to protect their interests by keeping copyright on them suggests that, at least in the normal case, most content makers would not be as amenable to publishing without copyright as they are with it.
Because, in the end... people are greedy.
Now I'll agree that greed isn't exactly a virtue, but it's not something that's going to go away... even if you try to change society's structure so that it seems like it is no longer particularly beneficial to continue to be greedy. In fact, such a structural change is liable to only worsen the condition with many people.
So while you might argue that copyright only services that sense of greed... this argument isn't entirely valid... because it does, as pointed out above, benefit society in the end by providing some incentive for content makers to publish. Without it, we're just left with a bunch of greedy people who will resort to other means to get what they want, and a culture-starved society who must swim through an endless sea of self-published content rich with advertisements, spam, and cat-videos to find the works of quality that are out there.
In the end... people are gonna do whatever it is they want to do, and I doubt what I've said above is really going to change many people's minds who think piracy is okay, but if it makes even one person think or pause or go "hmmm.... maybe", then hey.... I'd be happy with that.
Except that they shouldn't be trying to put out a gasoline fire with water either.... since gasoline will just float on top of the water, and continue burning merrily.
I'm just surprised they would have used water at all... it would have been just as problematic with gasoline, since water can't put out a gas fire either.
Of course water intensified the effect... it's an electrical fire!
Anyways... I didn't see anything in the article about it. Did the battery actually explode? If not, then there's an argument for increased safety over gasoline, isn't it?
It's also off by 100% if the person did even a couple of meters of running... say, because they didn't want to miss a bus and they were already at the bus stop but not quite at the door...?
Unless you are going to suggest that the typical slashdot reader is ordinarily paralyzed from the waste down... as I've never met any other slashdot readers in person, I really couldn't say for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if they actually quit. In some jurisdictions, severance pay is required in absence of sufficient notice, unless you have evidence of serious ethical misconduct (for example, embezzlement or something pretty serious which would usually warrant legal action).
Where I live, for example, the notice required by law is as follows: 1 week after 3 full months, 2 weeks after 1 full year, 3 weeks after three full years, and 1 additional week per each full year worked after that, to a maximum of 8 weeks, So if a person has been working at a place over 7 years (but less than 8) and is given only 2 weeks notice to find another job, they must also receive 5 weeks worth of severance pay.
No... it was not. Canada did not pull the $1 bill from circulation until about 2 years after the coin was introduced.
They did, however, pull the $2 note from circulation at the same time that they introduced the $2 coin.
Actually, Canada did not actively remove the $1 bill from circulation right after the $1 coin was introduced. They reduced the printing of $1 bills considerably when they introduced the $1 coin, but what the mint found in the aftermath was that people would tend to use the bills far more frequently than the coins. and this would create above average wear and tear on them. With fewer bills in circulation already, the rate at which bills were needing to be replaced rose significantly, increasing costs, which largely defeated the purpose of introducing the coin in the first place, and they retired the bill about two years after introducing the $1 coin. A couple of years later, they decided to avoid the whole mess they had with the $1 currency entirely by pulling the $2 note at the same time that they started minting $2 coins.
The Bank of Canada is wholly Canadian owned. Legally, it is a crown corporation, belonging to the federal government. Ultimately, the Bank of Canada is owned by the people of Canada.
R.R. Donnelly runs the Canadian Bank Note Company, which prints bank notes for Canada, but this has always been a private company (before 1920, it was a subdivision of the American Bank Note Company in New York). The Canadian Bank Note Company is not to be confused with the Royal Canadian Mint, which is another crown corporation, and is also wholly owned by the Government of Canada. CBN also prints passports, driver's licences, and assorted other documents that are government-issued.
I've heard of a handful of isolated cases of people counterfeiting the new polymer Canadian bills, but no stories about any that actually entered circulation.
In other words, the hopeful counterfeiters who've attempted this so far are only fooling people who can't be bothered to actually check for even the most basic security characteristics. The forgeries discovered were actually quite crude,and it's nothing less than laziness on the part of the recipients that led to it being passed off as genuine in the first place. One wonders if they could have been equally successful passing off monopoly money as genuine, simply if it were at least sized correctly (jokes about how Canada currency looks like monopoly money to some people aside).
The techniques used in the new Canadian bills have been in use in Australia for about 25 years now, and to date, by my understanding, the measures have defeated *every* attempt to pass off a fake bill as genuine under remotely close scrutiny.
Implied ad-hominems aside, although yes, the USA is a very distant third in terms of overall population... it is still overwhelmingly in the lead in terms of english speakers. More than double, in fact, the number of total english speakers as are found in any other single country, and this is including non-native english speakers (the country with the 2nd most number of english speakers is India, having about 120 million or so). If you only count native english speakers, the USA has 6 times english speakers as many as the runner-up, the UK.
Slashdot, I might point out, is generally an English-speaking website... and cultural references that are predominantly US-centered are not remotely unheard of.
For what it's worth, I'm not even American... and before you think I've been trying to defend them. I'm just calling someone on being needlessly pedantic over a reference that while admittedly might not be known to people who haven't watched the show, has really very little to do with which side of the ocean a person is on. It very nearly borders needlessly on racism, and has no place in a forum that, at least theoretically, is aimed at audiences who, often by virtue of being somewhat outcast themselves, may tend to be more tolerant of people who don't necessarily think or act exactly like they do.
It's entirely fine to not know about the show... what's not fine is presuming that somebody is trying to somehow be unnecessarily exclusive just because they refer to something that they don't know about, or happens to not be quite as popular in another country. Again, the show that's being referred to is only moderately less popular in the UK than it is in the USA if you go by the population in each country, and it's really not a remotely far stretch for most people who visit this website to have not heard of the program and its characters.
Little compared to what? The whole world? Sure... compared to other countries? Not so much.
The USA is the third largest country in the world by population, and the 4th by geographical area. In the English speaking world, it is the largest by population by an overwhelming amount, and only slightly smaller geographically than Canada. Since most people on Slashdot speak English here, it's really not that out of line to make cultural references here that are extremely likely to be understood by Americans.
But hey... if it makes you feel any better, you can feel free to make cultural references that people who are from your own country are more likely to understand than North Americans too. And I'm certain we can promise not to get all pissy about it after asking for a simple clarification... particularly if it's contextually relevant to the subject being discussed, which the opening comment to this thread actually was.
I never suggested upgrading existing reactors... I realize that's impossible...
It's just damn annoying reading stories like this because passive cooling reactor technologies have existed for decades, and yet hardly anybody ever used them. We have an opportunity to change how we do things in the future, but given the past resistance to adopting such methods, I remain pessimistic that they'll actually start using far safer systems, in favor of what will give them the most money right away.
Because then bonehead manoeuvres like this just won't be an issue.
Oh right... passive cooling reactors don't produce weapons-grade material as a waste by-product.
We wouldn't want to switch to energy systems that might actually have wholly peaceful implications, would we?
Not to anyone who watches the show... and I'd imagine that your reference is equally unobscure to people who watch whatever show you may have been referring to.
But how popular is that show within the nerd demographic? Compare that to the popularity of BBT, and its popularity among the kinds of people who would frequent a site like Slashdot.
Of course...but for reference, BBT also has nearly 2 million viewers in the UK and well over 3 million viewers in Canada, so per capita, it's only slightly less popular in the UK, and wildly more popular in Canada.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raj_Koothrappali
Since when does something being unconstitutional actually stop them?
Even though proponents would argue that biometrics take orders of magnitude more effort to crack or defeat (a dubious claim, but giving them the benefit of the doubt), it's impossible to escape the fact that if or when a biometric security system *IS* cracked, then it's game over for the person who was hacked, since changing his biometrics is not an option, whereas if your PIN is hacked, you can at least change to a new one to keep the damage from recurring in the future.
Had my remark that you interpret as insulting people who disagree with me stood alone, I'd suggest that such an interpretation might be reasonably valid. However, I followed the remark with an endeavor to uphold how the ramifications to copyright infringement, which can be bigger than what might be immediately obvious when one is just making a single copy, can be a potentially negative thing. Assuming that the remainder of my position has some merit, people who would engage in piracy in spite of this either do not care about such repercussions or are simply ignorant of them.
No insult was specifically intended towards people who have a different opinion... people are welcome to disagree, but I was only endeavoring to present why I believe what I do.
How does it make you feel that I don't give a damn what you think?
The above was my opinion... I hold firmly to it, and I respect copyright. I sincerely wish others would do likewise, but I'm aware enough of the realities of this world to realize that it's not likely to happen... sort of like wishing for world peace, in that respect, I guess.
Dustbusters don't have a powerful enough suction... you need something with a lot more oomph.
It can be argued, however, that copying copyrighted content without permission *is* harmful.... just in a very subtle way that people who may not see past their immediate desires and notion of immediate gain are liable to notice.
Disrespecting copyright is harmful probably not necessarily to anyone explicitly, but is probably most directly harmful to copyright itself. Specifically, it depreciates the trust that content makers would place in copyright to protect their interests on works that they publish. Society, supposedly, is enriched by a steady stream of new published content. While copyright is supposed to give content makers some incentive to actually publish it in the first place. Harming copyright, therefore, may arguably pose some long-term harm to society as a whole, where if or when content makers no longer rely on copyright to protect their interests, they could resort to other means that ultimately only end up limiting their audience... although this is, in a sense, harming themselves... by virtue of how newly published content can culturally enrich a society, it can pose a much larger threat to society as a whole.
Of course, one might argue... if copyright were completely dissolved, there'd still be people who want to self-publish or would make works that could culturally enrich the society they live in without the protections of copyright. This is certainly true, but the logistical reality is that such people are not llikely to be the status quo for works of appreciable quality. If they were, in an age where people can pretty much self-publish already anyways, we would certainly see a very large amount of works being released where the author has actually explicitly surrendered all copyright claims, and the work is public domain. The fact that even in the realm of entirely freely available content, the fact that content makers still choose to want to protect their interests by keeping copyright on them suggests that, at least in the normal case, most content makers would not be as amenable to publishing without copyright as they are with it.
Because, in the end... people are greedy.
Now I'll agree that greed isn't exactly a virtue, but it's not something that's going to go away... even if you try to change society's structure so that it seems like it is no longer particularly beneficial to continue to be greedy. In fact, such a structural change is liable to only worsen the condition with many people.
So while you might argue that copyright only services that sense of greed... this argument isn't entirely valid... because it does, as pointed out above, benefit society in the end by providing some incentive for content makers to publish. Without it, we're just left with a bunch of greedy people who will resort to other means to get what they want, and a culture-starved society who must swim through an endless sea of self-published content rich with advertisements, spam, and cat-videos to find the works of quality that are out there.
In the end... people are gonna do whatever it is they want to do, and I doubt what I've said above is really going to change many people's minds who think piracy is okay, but if it makes even one person think or pause or go "hmmm.... maybe", then hey.... I'd be happy with that.
Except that they shouldn't be trying to put out a gasoline fire with water either.... since gasoline will just float on top of the water, and continue burning merrily.
I'm just surprised they would have used water at all... it would have been just as problematic with gasoline, since water can't put out a gas fire either.
Actually, I heard that she quite likes the Dyson... so her attitude is starting to shift.
Of course water intensified the effect... it's an electrical fire!
Anyways... I didn't see anything in the article about it. Did the battery actually explode? If not, then there's an argument for increased safety over gasoline, isn't it?
HTML is hyper*TEXT* markup language.
If they encrypt it or make it an unreadable binary format, then it's no longer actually TEXT, is it?
It's also off by 100% if the person did even a couple of meters of running... say, because they didn't want to miss a bus and they were already at the bus stop but not quite at the door...?
Unless you are going to suggest that the typical slashdot reader is ordinarily paralyzed from the waste down... as I've never met any other slashdot readers in person, I really couldn't say for sure.
Or... you know... we could just kill them as we encounter them. May the better species win.