When it comes to the work I do, graphics to a certain extent and Audio Processing to a large extent, the contemporary Apple OS machines always out-performed the contemporary Windows OS machines at any time since I began... 1990, if you measure it in terms of work done on the file... how long does it take to get x amount of final output?
It's the combination of OS and hardware configuration. You can build a similar Windows box, but it still lags in output over, say, a week. Also note that when Jobs built Pixar, he didn't use Macs to render his movies, he used x86 boxes.
But, he also didn't use Windows; back in the day (before the Disney buyout) Pixar built proprietary Linux applications to process their film stock. So it really IS the OS.
I don't see any reason why we need abandon "Noon" (or "Midnight") in our vernacular. What we would abandon with the adoption of Coordinated Universal Time (CUT) would be the current specific relationship of the local time of day to those terms. We still can maintain the solar or day-to-day relationship. It might then be Noon at 6 AM where I live (UTC -6:00) but we can still say "Noon" as the point in the sky where the sun is most vertical in it's arc. The same for Midnight... the point where one day changes to the other, which would be in my local 6PM CUT.
It may never happen, but this is one of those things that the Computer Age might bring, once the current generation (my generation, as it turns out) that grew up without a digital life passes on. I would expect that would encompass those born after 1980, but maybe you could roll that back to the 70's (b1970 is age 20 in 1990).
Traditions die hard, however... that's why we call them "traditions".
The Hardest Part isn't the routing or means of connection, it's the OS and Browser itself you choose to use.
What you need to do, is find an OS and a Browser you can use *with the default settings unchanged*. Making Configuration or Preference adjustment paints you with an identifiable combination of unique settings visible to the web itself as you surf.
Under no circumstances do you ever lower your salary expectations. If the industry or position you are qualified for or seeking changes with regard to the typical salary paid, either be a Hero and be worth more, or change occupations.
I learned over 30 years ago, while struggling to pay my way through University, how to stop earning near-minimum wage jobs. Stop looking for them, and don't accept any.
And, as if by Magic, I started earning higher salaries. Work was no easier and no harder to find. When I retired I was amongst the highest paid in my profession in Canada.
That's the beauty of your (and my) Kenmore appliances. Stable technology and manufacturing processes which haven't changed in years. If you're happy about your appliances being flawless after 5 years, you have pretty low expectations.
Do you want your washer to post to your Twitter/FB/txt/whatever when your laundry is done? Or do you want your appliances to work?
I voted with my dollars and my dollars opted for the latter.
You should keep your appliance(s), but come time to replace them, be careful. This recall also includes Samsung-manufactured Kenmore branded models.
In Canada: You cannot fly a drone:... within 5 Nautical Miles (9 km) of any aerodrome (i.e. airport, heliport, helipad or seaplane base, etc.). Because every Hospital in my city (pop 260,000) has a helipad, it means flying a drone within the City Limits is illegal. Not to mention that flying a drone in a populated area is also specifically illegal.... in any restricted airspace (military bases, prisons, skydiving clubs, and forest fires).... in any populated area;... over sporting events, concerts, festivals, and firework shows;... near moving vehicles, highways, bridges, busy streets, or anywhere you could endanger or distract drivers;... closer than 150 metres (500 feet) from people, animals, buildings, structures, or vehicles;... anywhere you may interfere with first responders.
Violations are covered under a number of statutes, including the Criminal Code, and the range of penalties include throwing away the key.
********** "... The Criminal Code of Canada describes several offences involving the dangerous operation of aircraft and endangering the safety of other aircraft. Committing such offences is punishable by monetary penalties and/or jail time including imprisonment for life...." -Advisory Circular (AC) No. 600-002 Civil Aviation Resources General Safety Practices – Model Aircraft and Unmanned Air Vehicle Systems
**********
And yes, I have it on good authority (Federal Prison Staff) that your drone will meet firepower over a Prison, Penitentiary or Psychiatric Hospital.
I don't know the mechanism of the Brexit Vote, or the legalities surrounding it, but I must say that the Pro-Brexit side were poor planners if they didn't insure a Constitutional pathway existed for a refferendum to be binding and executable, before placing the question before the people.
Naturally they must have had legal opinions that said, yeah, this ought to work, and we have the appeal process, which I have zero doubt will be pursued, but clearly they didn't have one that said... it's cut and dried, there, see that in the Constitution? Go for it.
I have to agree with you. Five dollars a month for every customer even one too don't want it is ridiculous for one non-premium channel.
You might be assuming the Dodgers organization actually wanted people to see the games at home. Maybe they want people to be forced to go to the stadium to see the games.
Now, there is the principle that everything has a price, and it's in the team's best interest to try and determine what that price is. Maybe $5 a viewer is the price the Dodgers feel is reasonable, given they don't feel TV viewership is an unqualified win for them, and maybe they feel they are liable to lose what they really want... bums in the seats.
Whether it's reasonable to the viewer is not the only metric in play here.
Although it sounds ominous, we can learn from the various lawsuits so far within the various FTAs signed up to now.
For example the Canada-US FTA has one, and it was carried over into NAFTA. There have been five such suits against Canada:
The Ethyl Corporation (US) sued Canada for banning MMT, a fuel additive (and one banned in the US). Cost? $13 million dollars paid by Canada. S.D. Myers Inc (US) sued Canada for banning the export of PCBs. Cost: $5 million paid by Canada. Sun Belt, Inc (US) sued Canada over it's moratorium on bulk water exports. Sun Belt dropped their case over advice from their legal team. V.G. Gallo (US private citizen) sued because the province banned the dumping of garbage into the provinces lakes. Dismissed, Canada awarded $450,000 USD in costs. Bilcoin Inc (US) sued over a failure to receive a Environmental Assessment approval for a quarry. Unsettled at this time.
There are about a dozen cases filed against the US, and some against Mexico. I made the effort to dig through about a third of the cases; they all were dismissed, with costs awarded to the US Government.
The information available on the relevant US Government website is ridiculously complex (dozens of legal submissions pdf format per case) and no brief summaries exist, while the Mexican cases are not only complex but also only in Spanish, unlike the information available from the Government of Canada.
We can learn some things, however, from what is available. For one, we have a roughly 30 year history to look at (the original Canada-US FTA dates back to the late 1980's). Despite losing some of these cases in Court, Canada merely paid the assessments and carried on. The amounts fall into the "trivial" area as far as lawsuits go, let alone spending by Government. The winners in these tribunal cases were not allowed to carry on the practices or go about a project.
Even when the Government in question loses, it's a matter of pay the money and that's the end of it. In no circumstance was any Government "forced" to "allow" anything.
A reasonable dispute settling mechanism is a feature of all treaties, let alone Free Trade Agreements. Virtually any World Trade Organization ruling (which just about everyone is a member of, and therefore subject to it's rulings) costs more and reaches further, often requiring changing the law in the loser Nation. I don't see what the fuss is about with the considerably more benign FTA dispute settlement mechanisms.
Well, I'm not sure I'd put it as you did ( " a fake approval "), but you are describing the Standard Operating Procedure for most International Treaties by most Nations (including the United States). A Treaty is signed, and then it is ratified. The Ratification process usually involves passage by a legislature of some kind (Congress, Parliament, House, etc) and the process is defined by the laws of each Nation.
So, yes, this Treaty has to be ratified in Europe and in Canada. I believe there is a two year window to get it done.
In practical terms, though, it's rarely an issue. Sometimes you have Treaties amongst sworn enemies that aren't ratified; it's very rare for a Treaty amongst allies or friendly Nations to not be signed into law by the elected body.
There is little chance this particular Treaty won't be ratified. It has to pass the European Parliament and the Canadian House of Commons. Both have enough support.
Canada in particular has never failed to ratify a Free Trade Agreement, and there are a lot of them (Israel, Chile, USA/Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, Columbia, Jordan, Panama, Honduras, South Korea) and will soon ratify this European FTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States of America, Vietnam) and another with Ukraine.
Canada is currently negotiating individual FTAs with the Caribbean Community (CARICOM members are Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago), and separately with Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, Dominican Republic, India, Japan, Morocco and Singapore.
Exploratory discussions are underway with Turkey, the Philippines, and Thailand.
<quote><p>It's not a separate country. It's a region of Belgium and Belgium has a very complicated federal system. In many cases, Belgium can only sign contracts, if all regions agree to said contract.</p></quote>
<p>Same deal for Canada. All provinces and Territories have to agree.</p></quote>
Bull. Provinces have nothing to do whatsoever with Treaties with other Nations.
Yeah, a super-majority is needed to change the Constitution, and no, all Provinces and Territories don't even have to agree for that.
Whatever number of Provinces that represent two thirds of the population have to agree. When Canada became truly independent of Britain in 1980 (when the Queen of England gave up her very last Rights over Canada) the Province of Quebec... second in population... famously did not sign on. The other 9 (0f 10) did, however, and the resulting Constitution was passed into Law.
Bonus points for being wrong on two counts, though. The Federal Government has, and always had, the power to deal with any international business of any kind alone without the approval of even a single Province.
"... It says Tennessee product liability law holds a seller responsible if the manufacturer cannot be found...."
Assuming that's true and complete, Amazon, who handles the cash for the transaction, is on the hook.
Regardless, when you sue someone, you sue everybody who even looked like they were near the situation in question, to get at the deep pockets when the losers are found to be jointly and severally liable. It's up to each of them to convince the courts they should be dropped from the suit. So, regardless of what happens next, Amazon is going to be chased in this case.
The legal drinking age isn't 18 in most North American jurisdictions because when it is (and it has been tried, based on legislators buying the "go to war" argument) then High School seniors can buy booze and attend school drunk, with little recourse for the school to address the disruptive behaviour.
We had it here... I was actually grandfathered in, when they changed it back (to 19) after one year, but wasn't effective until after my birthday. Pure Fucking Chaos in the High Schools, at after-hours sports events, you name it.
Which kind of shows that, *supervised* you can send a kid to war but on their own, they act like big-bodied children.
We now live in a world where people who are still far too young and immature to fully understand the consequences of their actions can take actions that cause tremendous harm.
Our legal system is not well-equipped to handle this. So we are going to see a lot of weird on all sides.
Of course, the real reason such people can cause so much harm is because of:
1) the overwhelming majority of people (adults included) being stupid enough to click random links (seriously, this is a stupidity epidemic). 2) the economic leaders who are driving technical decisions that power our digital infrastructure continue to opt for cost-cutting measures over safety features.</p><p>So, the kid isn't at fault for these two problems, but he did exploit them to cause a lot of harm, so now he is about to learn a very hard lesson about consequences.</p></quote>
If you read the article, 12,000 people were sent the link, and about 10% clicked on it. Far from "the overwhelming majority".
A telemarketer is doing a job. Some people may actually benefit from being exposed to a new product. Dont lump them with scammers
I'm sorry, but NO, there is no such thing as a legitimate Telemarketer, and not one single person in the history of the planet has ever "benefit[ed] from being exposed to a new product" over the phone
I lump them in with scammers because they are scammers, regardless of whether they are technically legal or not. If they are so wonderful, why won't they tell a recipient their physical location? Because they know someone might just go there and perform some corrective justice. And normal, law-abiding people don't do that unless provoked.
It's akin to a mobster claiming a puppet corporation setup by laundered money is "running a legitimate business here". Really? I think not.
Just this morning I read a news report from South Korea (English media) that said 85% of buyers of the Note7 in South Korea have so far refused to turn in their phones. It seems likely that a similar sentiment, regardless of exactly what percentage, exists in other markets.
Apple learned a long time ago... in the System7/7.5/8/OS9 days... that if you want third parties to develop on your platform, you need to stand back and let that happen. They have introduced software (much of which is cited in the summary) to fill holes in the ecosystem, but they are pointers to lead third party developers to create something better and sell it.
They learned that lesson because they sometimes did step in and kill interest in developing for the Mac (more so with OS9, but the lesson stuck).
iTunes is a little different, in that it's a gateway to Apple income, so updates concentrate on that area, but it's wrong to expect it to be a state-of-the-art audio application. iTunes actually has no audio abilities; it uses QuickTime and Core Audio (built into the OS itself), and both are usable by any third party developer to make their own audio related apps.
When there was a glaring hole in the software ecosystem (Keynote, etc) Apple built a simple but functional app to be included with the OS It was never as functional as Microsoft PowerPoint; it was never intended to be. It was a kick in Microsoft's pants to keep developing PowerPoint for the Mac.
The point is the lack of feature enhancement is not by accident; it's deliberate. Apple wants developers to develop for the Mac, and they've learned that one way to do that is to leave room for 3rd Party Developers to fill in the void themselves.
<quote><p>Productivity and "working more" are not the same thing.</p></quote>
<p>This poster was replying to a post that tried to imply that europeans were just more efficient. Also, one common thread you hear is that productivity starts to fall as hours increase. This poster was saying that for the USA, even working more than other people we still seem to have the most productivity per hour worked. I think it still wouldn't hurt to try to reduce the number of hours worked but to be working the most hours per week and still have the most productivity per hour is actually kindof impressive.</p></quote>
I would suggest that we don't actually know what "productivity" actually is. Not that we don't have figures to represent productivity, or that we haven't established categories of economic data that we use to generate productivity estimates... we have and do all these things.
But it's a measure of something that changes depending on what you are measuring, and what you choose to measure often comes down to what you do in the first place. A nation that has a large agricultural economy will choose to use different parameters than a nation that has a large automated manufacturing sector, and one that has a large fundamental industrial capacity (steel making or shipbuilding, for example) a different set again.
The problem, of course, comes when you throw these various economies together and compare them... the set of parameters you measure become prejudicial, benefitting one economy over another, leading to a "better" number for one compared to the other.
So, productivity numbers are generally useful but specifically useless. You can use them to establish baselines and glean trends that are useful to a certain extent, but to compare two different economies the value becomes diluted and of dubious merit.
Maybe Germany might find productivity values useful in making economic goals for the future, to assess where it should be putting it's assets for competitive advantages versus the rest of the world, and the US might find similar value in similar fact gathering, but comparing Germany to the US, it becomes much more difficult to come up with a set of measurable criteria that doesn't favour one over the other, because they are significantly different economies structurally.
I remember in the 1990's if you were to compare productivity figures for various nations worldwide, they all came down to a single metric... the adoption of computers in business and industry.
I have no doubt that adopting computers were important factors in how efficiently work got done, but it's absurd that a single metric represented the entire picture. The result was Productivity figures that said one economy (the US) apparently became many times more productive than any other economy on Earth, overnight.
Plus, and I say this as an Economics major in college, anything that involves an economist is tantamount to guessing.
And you are better off for it. Sure I'd love to slash the military budget to 1/10th its current size and bring all our armed forces home for pure defense purposes, but Europe has done a piss poor job of showing that it is willing to fund the military presence needed to ensure stability. So we do that. You're welcome, and STFU.
America cannot "slash it's military budget to 1/10th" and "bring all our armed forces home" and expect to maintain it's profits from trade. No nation has ever earned money from foreign trade without a strong military presence; one goes hand in hand with the other, and a failure to maintain the military side of the equation inevitably leads to the trade income disappearing, having been taken over by a foreign rival who understood the necessity for military might abroad.
Some might assume that the US, with a falling manufacturing base, no longer has a robust international trade to protect. They would be wrong.
Although things like machinery or textiles or electronics may no longer be large parts of the export pie, the US has robust trading products such as agriculture, software, fast food franchises, entertainment, and even sports to offer in international trade, and in essence, all these products are equivalent to manufactured goods which, although certainly valuable commodities, are old economy products. Despite all the advantages a manufacturing export economy offers, it is important to realize there is more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak.
Another might suggest that maybe others should step up and provide "their share" of the military resources the US has deployed internationally. Regardless of what that should involve... allied nations do deploy troops and assets in shared geopolitical conflicts now, but the US media can't sell news of non-American troops in, say, Syria so it's little wonder the average US citizen has no idea to what extent allied nations do share objectives and absorb the consequences of being in action... the point is it's not these short term deployments that matter when it comes to trade; it's the military bases worldwide, and the naval assets that support those bases.
These represent long term, relatively fixed costs that cannot be reduced to any significant level without jeopardizing their very existence.
And when one nation closes a base, or moves out of an anchored position somewhere on the planet, another nation is always eager and ready to move into the vacuum created. And that is how the world's larger trading nations grow their domestic economies.
<quote><p>Of course. I forgot that Europeans were able to prevent Russia from moving in all by themselves. Oh wait. No they didn't. Russia moved in and installed puppets in all those Eastern bloc countries and the other European countries did nothing. The US was tired and left Europe to do something and Europe failed</p></quote>
<p>If by "Europeans" you mean Nazi Germany, then no, they had a treaty with the Soviet Union.
If you mean other major European powers, well, they were more concerned about Nazi Germany at the time.
In the period of 1918 to 1940, there was no real U.S. military presence in Europe.
I think we all agree that it was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the USA into WW2 - otherwise they would have been quite content to sit it out, like they did most of WWI.</p></quote>
And the US was so reluctant to get involved in WWII that even after Pearl Harbour, wherupon the USA declared war on Japan, the vote to declare war on Germany was defeated. It was Germany whom, after waiting about a week for the US to act and realizing it wasn't going to happen, declared war on the US.
When you retire, you're not out buying new Tesla's or a new phone every year, you don't really need to....having things paid off and money in the bank, and with age, your "fun" needs decrease really, no kids to take care of, etc. That's pretty easy in most parts of the US.
Or buying a new Tesla ever. </quote>
Bingo!
Now, I can't remember who did it or even when I read the summary, but in a survey of US millionaires, there were some consistent traits that stood out against the common practice of those who had net worth less than $1 million.
One of those traits was the Millionaires bought (gently) used cars, the poorer Americans bought new cars.
Can we pretty-please, with sugar on top, not refer to: Explode? As an old electronics guy who has seen more than his share of fried electronics, the word "Explode" does not compute with low-voltage electronics. Smoked? Burned? Yes! Explode? No!!!
So all the failed electrolytic capacitors you've ever encountered just sat there, sharing cigarettes?
Slashdot Mirror
When it comes to the work I do, graphics to a certain extent and Audio Processing to a large extent, the contemporary Apple OS machines always out-performed the contemporary Windows OS machines at any time since I began ... 1990, if you measure it in terms of work done on the file ... how long does it take to get x amount of final output?
It's the combination of OS and hardware configuration. You can build a similar Windows box, but it still lags in output over, say, a week. Also note that when Jobs built Pixar, he didn't use Macs to render his movies, he used x86 boxes.
But, he also didn't use Windows; back in the day (before the Disney buyout) Pixar built proprietary Linux applications to process their film stock. So it really IS the OS.
I don't see any reason why we need abandon "Noon" (or "Midnight") in our vernacular. What we would abandon with the adoption of Coordinated Universal Time (CUT) would be the current specific relationship of the local time of day to those terms. We still can maintain the solar or day-to-day relationship. It might then be Noon at 6 AM where I live (UTC -6:00) but we can still say "Noon" as the point in the sky where the sun is most vertical in it's arc. The same for Midnight ... the point where one day changes to the other, which would be in my local 6PM CUT.
... that's why we call them "traditions".
It may never happen, but this is one of those things that the Computer Age might bring, once the current generation (my generation, as it turns out) that grew up without a digital life passes on. I would expect that would encompass those born after 1980, but maybe you could roll that back to the 70's (b1970 is age 20 in 1990).
Traditions die hard, however
The Hardest Part isn't the routing or means of connection, it's the OS and Browser itself you choose to use.
What you need to do, is find an OS and a Browser you can use *with the default settings unchanged*. Making Configuration or Preference adjustment paints you with an identifiable combination of unique settings visible to the web itself as you surf.
Under no circumstances do you ever lower your salary expectations. If the industry or position you are qualified for or seeking changes with regard to the typical salary paid, either be a Hero and be worth more, or change occupations.
I learned over 30 years ago, while struggling to pay my way through University, how to stop earning near-minimum wage jobs. Stop looking for them, and don't accept any.
And, as if by Magic, I started earning higher salaries. Work was no easier and no harder to find. When I retired I was amongst the highest paid in my profession in Canada.
That's the beauty of your (and my) Kenmore appliances. Stable technology and manufacturing processes which haven't changed in years. If you're happy about your appliances being flawless after 5 years, you have pretty low expectations.
Do you want your washer to post to your Twitter/FB/txt/whatever when your laundry is done? Or do you want your appliances to work?
I voted with my dollars and my dollars opted for the latter.
You should keep your appliance(s), but come time to replace them, be careful. This recall also includes Samsung-manufactured Kenmore branded models.
In Canada: ... within 5 Nautical Miles (9 km) of any aerodrome (i.e. airport, heliport, helipad or seaplane base, etc.). Because every Hospital in my city (pop 260,000) has a helipad, it means flying a drone within the City Limits is illegal. Not to mention that flying a drone in a populated area is also specifically illegal. ... in any restricted airspace (military bases, prisons, skydiving clubs, and forest fires). ... in any populated area; ... over sporting events, concerts, festivals, and firework shows; ... near moving vehicles, highways, bridges, busy streets, or anywhere you could endanger or distract drivers; ... closer than 150 metres (500 feet) from people, animals, buildings, structures, or vehicles; ... anywhere you may interfere with first responders.
... ..."
You cannot fly a drone:
Violations are covered under a number of statutes, including the Criminal Code, and the range of penalties include throwing away the key.
**********
"
The Criminal Code of Canada describes several offences involving the dangerous operation of aircraft and endangering the safety of other aircraft. Committing such offences is punishable by monetary penalties and/or jail time including imprisonment for life.
-Advisory Circular (AC) No. 600-002
Civil Aviation Resources
General Safety Practices – Model Aircraft and Unmanned Air Vehicle Systems
**********
And yes, I have it on good authority (Federal Prison Staff) that your drone will meet firepower over a Prison, Penitentiary or Psychiatric Hospital.
I don't know the mechanism of the Brexit Vote, or the legalities surrounding it, but I must say that the Pro-Brexit side were poor planners if they didn't insure a Constitutional pathway existed for a refferendum to be binding and executable, before placing the question before the people.
... it's cut and dried, there, see that in the Constitution? Go for it.
Naturally they must have had legal opinions that said, yeah, this ought to work, and we have the appeal process, which I have zero doubt will be pursued, but clearly they didn't have one that said
Fail.
I have to agree with you. Five dollars a month for every customer even one too don't want it is ridiculous for one non-premium channel.
You might be assuming the Dodgers organization actually wanted people to see the games at home. Maybe they want people to be forced to go to the stadium to see the games.
Now, there is the principle that everything has a price, and it's in the team's best interest to try and determine what that price is. Maybe $5 a viewer is the price the Dodgers feel is reasonable, given they don't feel TV viewership is an unqualified win for them, and maybe they feel they are liable to lose what they really want
Whether it's reasonable to the viewer is not the only metric in play here.
Although it sounds ominous, we can learn from the various lawsuits so far within the various FTAs signed up to now.
For example the Canada-US FTA has one, and it was carried over into NAFTA. There have been five such suits against Canada:
The Ethyl Corporation (US) sued Canada for banning MMT, a fuel additive (and one banned in the US). Cost? $13 million dollars paid by Canada.
S.D. Myers Inc (US) sued Canada for banning the export of PCBs. Cost: $5 million paid by Canada.
Sun Belt, Inc (US) sued Canada over it's moratorium on bulk water exports. Sun Belt dropped their case over advice from their legal team.
V.G. Gallo (US private citizen) sued because the province banned the dumping of garbage into the provinces lakes. Dismissed, Canada awarded $450,000 USD in costs.
Bilcoin Inc (US) sued over a failure to receive a Environmental Assessment approval for a quarry. Unsettled at this time.
There are about a dozen cases filed against the US, and some against Mexico. I made the effort to dig through about a third of the cases; they all were dismissed, with costs awarded to the US Government.
The information available on the relevant US Government website is ridiculously complex (dozens of legal submissions pdf format per case) and no brief summaries exist, while the Mexican cases are not only complex but also only in Spanish, unlike the information available from the Government of Canada.
We can learn some things, however, from what is available. For one, we have a roughly 30 year history to look at (the original Canada-US FTA dates back to the late 1980's). Despite losing some of these cases in Court, Canada merely paid the assessments and carried on. The amounts fall into the "trivial" area as far as lawsuits go, let alone spending by Government. The winners in these tribunal cases were not allowed to carry on the practices or go about a project.
Even when the Government in question loses, it's a matter of pay the money and that's the end of it. In no circumstance was any Government "forced" to "allow" anything.
A reasonable dispute settling mechanism is a feature of all treaties, let alone Free Trade Agreements. Virtually any World Trade Organization ruling (which just about everyone is a member of, and therefore subject to it's rulings) costs more and reaches further, often requiring changing the law in the loser Nation. I don't see what the fuss is about with the considerably more benign FTA dispute settlement mechanisms.
Do you remember the Monty Python script, where they were offering up offensive nicknames for the various peoples of the world.
... we cannot think of any name more offensive than Belgian".
For Belgium "
Well, I'm not sure I'd put it as you did ( " a fake approval "), but you are describing the Standard Operating Procedure for most International Treaties by most Nations (including the United States). A Treaty is signed, and then it is ratified. The Ratification process usually involves passage by a legislature of some kind (Congress, Parliament, House, etc) and the process is defined by the laws of each Nation.
So, yes, this Treaty has to be ratified in Europe and in Canada. I believe there is a two year window to get it done.
In practical terms, though, it's rarely an issue. Sometimes you have Treaties amongst sworn enemies that aren't ratified; it's very rare for a Treaty amongst allies or friendly Nations to not be signed into law by the elected body.
There is little chance this particular Treaty won't be ratified. It has to pass the European Parliament and the Canadian House of Commons. Both have enough support.
Canada in particular has never failed to ratify a Free Trade Agreement, and there are a lot of them (Israel, Chile, USA/Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, Columbia, Jordan, Panama, Honduras, South Korea) and will soon ratify this European FTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States of America, Vietnam) and another with Ukraine.
Canada is currently negotiating individual FTAs with the Caribbean Community (CARICOM members are Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago), and separately with Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, Dominican Republic, India, Japan, Morocco and Singapore.
Exploratory discussions are underway with Turkey, the Philippines, and Thailand.
<quote><p>It's not a separate country. It's a region of Belgium and Belgium has a very complicated federal system. In many cases, Belgium can only sign contracts, if all regions agree to said contract.</p></quote>
<p>Same deal for Canada. All provinces and Territories have to agree.</p></quote>
Bull. Provinces have nothing to do whatsoever with Treaties with other Nations.
Yeah, a super-majority is needed to change the Constitution, and no, all Provinces and Territories don't even have to agree for that.
Whatever number of Provinces that represent two thirds of the population have to agree. When Canada became truly independent of Britain in 1980 (when the Queen of England gave up her very last Rights over Canada) the Province of Quebec
Bonus points for being wrong on two counts, though. The Federal Government has, and always had, the power to deal with any international business of any kind alone without the approval of even a single Province.
" ... It says Tennessee product liability law holds a seller responsible if the manufacturer cannot be found. ..."
Assuming that's true and complete, Amazon, who handles the cash for the transaction, is on the hook.
Regardless, when you sue someone, you sue everybody who even looked like they were near the situation in question, to get at the deep pockets when the losers are found to be jointly and severally liable. It's up to each of them to convince the courts they should be dropped from the suit. So, regardless of what happens next, Amazon is going to be chased in this case.
I think the real question here is why are they keeping logs so old? The probable victim went missing almost a year ago (Dec. 17, 2015).
<quote><p>(1) He's 18 years old - that's an adult with the right to vote, the ability to make contracts, etc.</p></quote>
<p>But not old enough to drink, so clearly under law he has diminished responsibility.</p></quote>
Maybe. But that is a factor in sentencing, not a factor in finding guilt.
The legal drinking age isn't 18 in most North American jurisdictions because when it is (and it has been tried, based on legislators buying the "go to war" argument) then High School seniors can buy booze and attend school drunk, with little recourse for the school to address the disruptive behaviour.
... I was actually grandfathered in, when they changed it back (to 19) after one year, but wasn't effective until after my birthday. Pure Fucking Chaos in the High Schools, at after-hours sports events, you name it.
We had it here
Which kind of shows that, *supervised* you can send a kid to war but on their own, they act like big-bodied children.
We now live in a world where people who are still far too young and immature to fully understand the consequences of their actions can take actions that cause tremendous harm.
Our legal system is not well-equipped to handle this. So we are going to see a lot of weird on all sides.
Of course, the real reason such people can cause so much harm is because of:
1) the overwhelming majority of people (adults included) being stupid enough to click random links (seriously, this is a stupidity epidemic).
2) the economic leaders who are driving technical decisions that power our digital infrastructure continue to opt for cost-cutting measures over safety features.</p><p>So, the kid isn't at fault for these two problems, but he did exploit them to cause a lot of harm, so now he is about to learn a very hard lesson about consequences.</p></quote>
If you read the article, 12,000 people were sent the link, and about 10% clicked on it. Far from "the overwhelming majority".
A telemarketer is doing a job. Some people may actually benefit from being exposed to a new product. Dont lump them with scammers
I'm sorry, but NO, there is no such thing as a legitimate Telemarketer, and not one single person in the history of the planet has ever "benefit[ed] from being exposed to a new product" over the phone
I lump them in with scammers because they are scammers, regardless of whether they are technically legal or not. If they are so wonderful, why won't they tell a recipient their physical location? Because they know someone might just go there and perform some corrective justice. And normal, law-abiding people don't do that unless provoked.
It's akin to a mobster claiming a puppet corporation setup by laundered money is "running a legitimate business here". Really? I think not.
Just this morning I read a news report from South Korea (English media) that said 85% of buyers of the Note7 in South Korea have so far refused to turn in their phones. It seems likely that a similar sentiment, regardless of exactly what percentage, exists in other markets.
Apple learned a long time ago ... in the System7/7.5/8/OS9 days ... that if you want third parties to develop on your platform, you need to stand back and let that happen. They have introduced software (much of which is cited in the summary) to fill holes in the ecosystem, but they are pointers to lead third party developers to create something better and sell it.
They learned that lesson because they sometimes did step in and kill interest in developing for the Mac (more so with OS9, but the lesson stuck).
iTunes is a little different, in that it's a gateway to Apple income, so updates concentrate on that area, but it's wrong to expect it to be a state-of-the-art audio application. iTunes actually has no audio abilities; it uses QuickTime and Core Audio (built into the OS itself), and both are usable by any third party developer to make their own audio related apps.
When there was a glaring hole in the software ecosystem (Keynote, etc) Apple built a simple but functional app to be included with the OS It was never as functional as Microsoft PowerPoint; it was never intended to be. It was a kick in Microsoft's pants to keep developing PowerPoint for the Mac.
The point is the lack of feature enhancement is not by accident; it's deliberate. Apple wants developers to develop for the Mac, and they've learned that one way to do that is to leave room for 3rd Party Developers to fill in the void themselves.
<quote><p>Productivity and "working more" are not the same thing.</p></quote>
<p>This poster was replying to a post that tried to imply that europeans were just more efficient. Also, one common thread you hear is that productivity starts to fall as hours increase. This poster was saying that for the USA, even working more than other people we still seem to have the most productivity per hour worked. I think it still wouldn't hurt to try to reduce the number of hours worked but to be working the most hours per week and still have the most productivity per hour is actually kindof impressive.</p></quote>
I would suggest that we don't actually know what "productivity" actually is. Not that we don't have figures to represent productivity, or that we haven't established categories of economic data that we use to generate productivity estimates
But it's a measure of something that changes depending on what you are measuring, and what you choose to measure often comes down to what you do in the first place. A nation that has a large agricultural economy will choose to use different parameters than a nation that has a large automated manufacturing sector, and one that has a large fundamental industrial capacity (steel making or shipbuilding, for example) a different set again.
The problem, of course, comes when you throw these various economies together and compare them
So, productivity numbers are generally useful but specifically useless. You can use them to establish baselines and glean trends that are useful to a certain extent, but to compare two different economies the value becomes diluted and of dubious merit.
Maybe Germany might find productivity values useful in making economic goals for the future, to assess where it should be putting it's assets for competitive advantages versus the rest of the world, and the US might find similar value in similar fact gathering, but comparing Germany to the US, it becomes much more difficult to come up with a set of measurable criteria that doesn't favour one over the other, because they are significantly different economies structurally.
I remember in the 1990's if you were to compare productivity figures for various nations worldwide, they all came down to a single metric
I have no doubt that adopting computers were important factors in how efficiently work got done, but it's absurd that a single metric represented the entire picture. The result was Productivity figures that said one economy (the US) apparently became many times more productive than any other economy on Earth, overnight.
Plus, and I say this as an Economics major in college, anything that involves an economist is tantamount to guessing.
And you are better off for it. Sure I'd love to slash the military budget to 1/10th its current size and bring all our armed forces home for pure defense purposes, but Europe has done a piss poor job of showing that it is willing to fund the military presence needed to ensure stability. So we do that. You're welcome, and STFU.
America cannot "slash it's military budget to 1/10th" and "bring all our armed forces home" and expect to maintain it's profits from trade. No nation has ever earned money from foreign trade without a strong military presence; one goes hand in hand with the other, and a failure to maintain the military side of the equation inevitably leads to the trade income disappearing, having been taken over by a foreign rival who understood the necessity for military might abroad.
Some might assume that the US, with a falling manufacturing base, no longer has a robust international trade to protect. They would be wrong.
Although things like machinery or textiles or electronics may no longer be large parts of the export pie, the US has robust trading products such as agriculture, software, fast food franchises, entertainment, and even sports to offer in international trade, and in essence, all these products are equivalent to manufactured goods which, although certainly valuable commodities, are old economy products. Despite all the advantages a manufacturing export economy offers, it is important to realize there is more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak.
Another might suggest that maybe others should step up and provide "their share" of the military resources the US has deployed internationally. Regardless of what that should involve
These represent long term, relatively fixed costs that cannot be reduced to any significant level without jeopardizing their very existence.
And when one nation closes a base, or moves out of an anchored position somewhere on the planet, another nation is always eager and ready to move into the vacuum created. And that is how the world's larger trading nations grow their domestic economies.
<quote><p>Of course. I forgot that Europeans were able to prevent Russia from moving in all by themselves. Oh wait. No they didn't. Russia moved in and installed puppets in all those Eastern bloc countries and the other European countries did nothing. The US was tired and left Europe to do something and Europe failed</p></quote>
<p>If by "Europeans" you mean Nazi Germany, then no, they had a treaty with the Soviet Union.
If you mean other major European powers, well, they were more concerned about Nazi Germany at the time.
In the period of 1918 to 1940, there was no real U.S. military presence in Europe.
I think we all agree that it was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the USA into WW2 - otherwise they would have been quite content to sit it out, like they did most of WWI.</p></quote>
And the US was so reluctant to get involved in WWII that even after Pearl Harbour, wherupon the USA declared war on Japan, the vote to declare war on Germany was defeated. It was Germany whom, after waiting about a week for the US to act and realizing it wasn't going to happen, declared war on the US.
When you retire, you're not out buying new Tesla's or a new phone every year, you don't really need to....having things paid off and money in the bank, and with age, your "fun" needs decrease really, no kids to take care of, etc. That's pretty easy in most parts of the US.
Or buying a new Tesla ever.
</quote>
Bingo!
Now, I can't remember who did it or even when I read the summary, but in a survey of US millionaires, there were some consistent traits that stood out against the common practice of those who had net worth less than $1 million.
One of those traits was the Millionaires bought (gently) used cars, the poorer Americans bought new cars.
Can we pretty-please, with sugar on top, not refer to: Explode? As an old electronics guy who has seen more than his share of fried electronics, the word "Explode" does not compute with low-voltage electronics. Smoked? Burned? Yes! Explode? No!!!
So all the failed electrolytic capacitors you've ever encountered just sat there, sharing cigarettes?