As has been stated before, it's not a mermory leak, firefox by default was designed to use as many resources as are available, increasing responsiveness when the computer is not bogged down. When other applications require memory firefox gives it up without much of a fight.
That's pure bullshit. Firefox on my systems (Linux desktop, work laptop on Windows 2000, other laptop on Windows XP until I can get the time to install Linux) all keep eating more and more memory, until the systems slow to a crawl and trash constantly.
There is a consistently slow increase in memory usage over time, regardless of what else I do on any of these machines. It's most noticeable on my Linux box as it runs constantly, and Firefox is usually running until I have to kill it to prevent my system from becoming unusable (by then Firefox is generally starting to get so sluggish anyway, that sometimes I have to kill it from a terminal because the windows doesn't respond) - I regularly have it eating half a GB of memory.
Trying to pretend the memory leak isn't there does noone any good, when it is so obvious and such a huge pain for those it affects.
I'll never switch to IE, but the memory leaks in Firefox is a constant annoyance.
I live in London, but I'm not British, and I have no qualms of walking away if I haven't picked something I really want to buy first. I remember once in particular when I was in a store looking at some fairly expensive goods and talking to my fiancee about it, when this annoying sales person interrupted us and started meddling with my conversation. I just shut up, turned my back to him and walked out of the store.... Ahh, that felt great. I almost feel like going back there just to do the same thing again.
I've long been tempted to go to Dixons, pick out the most expensive item I can find, and then just tell them to shove it and walk out once they start trying to sell me the warranty, though...
Because Dixons are everywhere and other chains aren't. They are sometimes convenient because they have stores in all the prime high street locations. And they do sometimes have cheap stuff - they're just betting that most people will end up buying some expensive crap too.
And they will go through all that crap and even get argumentative about it before processing your purchase.
Dixons isn't a specialist shop - it's a highly generic, bland electronics goods shop that generally sell the top brands in the most popular categories of electronic goods only, most of them in expensive high street locations. If you have specialist needs (and film cameras have become a specialist need), then there's a huge variety of specialist chains catering for specific types of electronic goods.
If you want a camera specialist shop in the UK, for instance, Jessops is available pretty much everywhere.
I think the point is the range of temperatures it can handle. Perhaps the available extremeophiles from cold areas aren't capable of surviving over as large ranges, and perhaps they believe it is easier to later extend the range downward than expand the range of the other available extremeophiles.
See, it is actually possible for 6 billion people to focus on more than 1 thing in total.... And besides, if you RTFA, you might have noticed some of the other uses for their work: Breeding plants that can handle more extreme conditions on earth, such as surviving longer in drought stricken areas. I think the people living in sub-Saharan Africa for instance would put that as far higher priority than withholding pollutants.
This hit home, as just today I got an e-mail from one of my credit card companies... I regularly (as in several times daily) get phishing attempts to that e-mail accounts pretending to be from all kinds of banks I've never used, so I assumed it was yet another one from the start. But I got curious anyway. After lots of checking it turned out to be genuine.
The scary part, however, was that it greated me with my first name, suggested I log on to their site, then ended with a paragraph going roughly like this:
"To make sure you c"n recognise genuine e-mails from us, we will always include the post code of your registered account with us"
Now, it does stop a phisher from firing off a million random e-mails. What it doesn't do is prevent someone from following your local mail man a couple of days and writing down who gets a statement from said bank (which is one of the worlds largest credit institutions) and firing off messages. That is worse than a random phisher as the bank itself is teaching it's clients to trust messages that include their postcode, even though their postcode is an easily available piece of information, so people are more likely to take the e-mail at face value and not scrutinise it as well as they should. What's worse is that the e-mail included links instead of asking people to go to the site listed on their statements, or similar, teaching people that hey, it's ok to click on links in mails that claims to be from their bank...
The worst thing is that this kind of behaviour is the norm for British banks.
The fuckwits deserve everything they get from these phishers. What sucks is that their customers will get screwed over in the process.
I've twice been called up by one of my other banks fraud department because they wanted to verify transactions. In both cases they wanted me to provide the security information for my account over the phone when they had called me and I had no way of verifying that they were who they said they were (caller id is trivial to fake, and you wouldn't even need that if the number is unknown but looks plausible to the person taking the call). So again, the fraud department of my bank is teaching its customers that it's ok to give out the very same security details that are sufficient to a) do transfers, b) get passwords for online banking reissued, c) get credit cards reissued.
Just the other day I overheard a woman on the train to work complaining to her boyfriend about the same thing. In my cases I know it was genuine calls because I called back on numbers I knew belonged to the bank.
This same bank also tends to accept corporate id cards to let you sign for your credit cards if they're ordered to an office. So, trick people with a phony call, get the credentials, call the bank to get the card reissued, create your own plastic laminated id card, and order it sent to a serviced office somewhere where you rent a room with cash for a day or two... The same bank have twice refused to deliver cards to my home address because dropping it through the letter box was apparently too insecure.
The great thing about getting a credit card reissued, is that many banks here will accept it as ID. So get a credit card reissued, and voila, instant access to all the poor persons other accounts as well, and from past experience they'll happily offer to let you do over the counter cash withdrawals of however much you want from your credit card accounts.
They're so clueless it's scary to think I trust them with my money (but the rest of them are just as bad).
Why did I have to move to a country with a banking system from the dark ages?
So why don't you present us with some of these "strong arguments" against evolution then? I see creationism apologists like you claiming there are so many strong arguments against it all the time, yet to this date I have never once seen any such claim which has shown even the faintest little understanding of science.
Besides, you don't prove scientific theories, you attempt to use them to make predictions that can be falsified. The more and simpler falsifiable conditions that can be made for a theory, the more attempts are made at proving them false without succeeding, the surer we get that the theory is true.
As an example, if someone presented as a theory that Santa Claus really existed, and does come down the chimney of every house where a child lives every Christmas, a falsifiable prediction would be that he would come down a set of specific chimneys within a specific time interval. If he doesn't, then the theory can be discarded with relative ease.
Evolution has the support of the scientific community because a wide range of falsifiable predictions can be made from it, and a wide range of those predictions are within our ability to test, and have been tested with success.
Thats the fundamental difference between evolution and intelligent design: There is no coherent theory of intelligent design from which one can extract conditions with which to prove it false. It's not even attempting to be a scientific theory. Something that isn't specific enough that you can prove it false if it indeed is false is useless as a theory because you can only take it on faith.
At which point we might as well believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy - creationism has no more scientific basis than either of them.
Unless you can present a framework for creationism that can withstand even a tiny fraction of the scrutiny that the theory of evolution has withstood, creationism is nothing but an idea with no scientific basis, while evolution is well tested, well understood and supported by a barrage of experiments and observations that have supported predictions based on it.
I think a lot of the reason why so many people in the US dislike unions directly or indirectly is the peculiar way unionised labor works in the US.
Most other places union membership is a purely individual matter, as is the choice of unions. There are few countries that have the concept of "voting in" unionisation of a specific workplace. Instead you will find that unions are generally protected and can recruit members wherever they want, and staff can join whatever union they want.
In other words you'll rarely find places with only unionised staff, and even if you do they rarely all belong to the same union - though it does happen, particularly in manufacturing and other traditional union strongholds.
What typically happens then is that the larger unions negotiate pay deals directly with the larger employer organisations, and a lot of local negotiation happens with larger individual employers, or between smaller unions and individual employers, in addition to the occasional individual negotation.
Yes, that means a single employer may have to deal with multiple unions, but on the other hand it also means that most smaller employers never have a situation where a single union can cripple them, while larger companies that are in a better position to be able to deal with the consequences, may have to face a single union organising most or all of their workforce.
In many workplaces, the union with largest membership may end up negotiating a deal that gets offered to all the rest of the employees, often minimising the number of parties the employer has to deal with. In other cases, the employer will be a member of an employer organisation and won't need to do any local negotiation at all unless particular unions, groups or individual employees feel there are issues particular to that employer tht needs to be dealt with.
The main unions and employer organisations in many countries tends to negotiate limits on what their local chapters and employers can negotiate locally as part of their overall negotiations to ensure stability.
All in all, most places a union system like that leads to a lot better balance. There are cases of extremely strike happy unions (France always sticks out like a sore thumb;) ), particularly in professions where a single union have total dominance (for a non-French example, in Norway there are two such unions: The lift mechanics union and the air traffic controllers union - both of them are extremely aggressive), but in general unions co-exist relatively peacefully with most employers because the unions as well realise that their continued existence depends on being able to attract members on an individual basis, and a union that keeps pushing firms that employs it members into bankrupcy isn't going to be a very attractive union to join. Nor is it going to have the money to do anything, as union dues tend to be tied to income levels, so having lots of members out of work isn't a very good prospect...
As a result you frequently see unions negotiating pay reductions in specific areas or professions or for specific employers where the local conditions warrant it, because everybody recognise it's better to get a smaller piece of the pie than there being no pie at all for anyone.
This also means a lot less aggressive attitude regarding scabs - except where the vast majority of employees are employed by the same union, it tends to be accepted that work goes on during a strike, as long as no replacements for the particular employees striking are brought in.
Seems to me that the union system in the US is set up in a way that's optimized for encouraging conflict, and it's probably damaging unions just as much as it is damaging employers.
And again, you need to reread the article. Regulating co-workers dating was already possible without this change in how they interpret the rules. I think that's stupid enough, but at least it has a sort of reasonable explanation in that a company has a significant duty to fight sexual harassment, and that is seen as one of their legal tools. Off duty fraternizing refers to activity other than dating, that is explicitly covered elsewhere.
The rest of your message keeps dealing with on-duty fraternising as well.
Exactly what part of "off duty" is it you don't get? This affects people working together who decide to go for a meal as a group at the end of the day. This affects people that go for drinks together, or decide to go bowling or to see a movie together - not just one of those pesky couples you hate so much that are already covered under other rules, but also people doing it as a group where nobody would ever dream of dating eachother. This affects co-workers deciding to form a book club, or to meet up after work to pursue other common hobbies.
Now, exactly why should your employer be able to regulate this kind of activity?
Especially when combined with lax working time regulations that mean work for many people is their primary place for meeting friends.
The problem with that is that in most areas of business there is a fundamental power imbalance between employers and employees - the individual employee at lower levels sees much less impact from turning away a few prospective employees than prospective employees see from turning down potential job offers. That is why practically no countries or states, including most states in the US, will let employers put whatever they want in an employment contract and expect it to stick up in court.
That is why you have minimum wage. It is why there are regulations on working time. It's why there are health and safety regulations. It's why there are whistleblower laws.
The idea that you can rely on employers and employees to negotiate fair terms - even to the point of not putting the health of their employees at risk - has been proven over and over again not to work. US employees, for instance, ought to remember those of their forefathers who in many cases gave their life to the decades long fight for the 8 hour working day. A fight that took place because employers were completely unwilling to consider reducing the then 12-14 hour working days through negotiation.
Contract law requires consideration. If one of the parties feel they have no choice there is no real consideration, and that is frequently the case in employer-employee relationships.
To go more specifically into the case at hand - as the article points out, this ruling shifts the balance even further towards the employers, by making it harder to coordinate action between employees (even if union type activities are explicitly protected by law, it's going to have a significant chilling effects with people that don't know/understand their rights and don't dare risk their job - spreading information on those rights is going to be hard if people are concerned about talking to you), and harder for people to build the personal relationships that makes proper organising possible in the first place.
Rights are already shifted so far towards the employer side in the US as is (few other industralised nations allows contracts that lets employers fire employees with no notice, for instance - in most European countries limits of 1 to 3 months is usually enshrined in law, with some exceptions for temporary workers or specific professions).
I keep being amazed at what US workers are willing to put up with. And that is after being amazed at what UK workers put up with after I first moved to London - I'm used to 37.5 hour weeks, 3 month notice periods and an environment where it was next to impossible to fire someone unless they are provably incompetent or unsuited for the job (that's how it works in Norway).
But even here it takes exceptional circumstances before you can even be asked to work more than 48 hours (with 37-40 being the norm) a week, 25 days paid holiday (+ public holidays) a year is the norm, and less than one months notice is almost unheard of for permanent employees. Yet the average UK salary is still slightly above the average US salary - enough to make up for the slight difference in taxation.
Edisons lab actually came up with quite a few things that were genuinely new. But even so, I doubt many people that know how Edison did business would put him forward as a beacon of good corporate governance. In fact, comparing Edison's way of doing business with Gates' seems quite appropriate given the anti trust lawsuits Edison was involved in.
Edison was also a money grabbing business man that didn't hesitate to abuse the advantages he got from his earlier inventions to try as hard as he could to stifle competition in the cases where he couldn't compete by providing a better product.
You mean almost like in the UK and most of the rest of the world.
The US is almost alone in having fuel prices as low as they are. Adding significant fuel taxes won't change everything, but taxes on those levels for fuel does push people to consider fuel economy to a lot higher degree than what people in the US currently does. It also inevitably lead a lot of people to seriously consider public transport (with the US public transport system being what it is, for that effect to make a difference pushing any increases in fuel taxation straight into public transport investments would probably be almost neccessary)
Additionally, high fuel taxes create a lot of room for using taxation to influence other product choices - like pushing people to consider cars and fuels that are less polluting in other ways by warying the tax.
The UK is one of the highest taxing countries in the world for fuel, with 72.3% tax. This is actually down from around 85% in recent year, but the percentage drop is a result of rising oil prices - the total price of fuel including taxes has still increased above the rate of inflation.
They were never given a majority in an election. At the time they grabbed power and arrested the opposition they still had "only" a minority position in parliament, despite a lengthy period of massive intimidation of the electorate.
Many oppressive dictators have done reasonably well in elections in the run-up to the coup that gave them control - that doesn't make their government any less dictatorial or more democratic.
It only needs to last long enough for the crowd to get up to the police, and the police will get to see what a real riot looks like. I doubt people will take too lightly to attempts to fry them with a weapon like this.
Only if the training data contains games where the players makes different moves from the same board state depending on history. In which case it may make sense - I'd expect a lot of humans to reveal more of their strategy from the recent history of moves than from the exact current state.
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And all of these "issues", and many more, have been answered many times. Go read the rebuttals, and stop believing everything the tin foil mafia tells you to.
Funny. I prefer my one hour commute by walking or bus to the station + train + walking the last distance over the one and a half hour (at best) drive that would end up costing me more. That's what it's like here in London.
The very reason it is faster for you is exactly that US city planners almost exclusively focus on making it convenient to get around by car vs. public transport.
Mass transit works well even in countries like Norway (average population density: 13 per square kilometer) - they just don't work everywhere. I don't think anybody suggests that someone living in a rural area should rely entirely on public transport. But vast areas of major population centres in the US consists of out of control sprawl because public transport hasn't been given priority.
The times I've visited the parts of Virginia near D.C. for instance, I've constantly been shocked at how hard it was to get around even by foot. I stayed in a hotel what should have been a 15 minute walk away from a restaurant, and we were faced with having to cross several 4-6 lane roads and several sections where there was no proper sidewalk.
This was an area with a population density far higher than anywhere in Norway (where I'm originally from), yet so pedestrian unfriendly and with such a useless public transport system that the typical 5000-10.000 inhabitant village in Norway would have more people using public transport on a daily basis.
I've never owned a car or gotten a drivers license, because I've never had a reason to. Perhaps I'll get one whenever I get kids, but for now public transport serves 95%+ of my transport needs, and the rest is solved with cabs, and I end up saving both time and money that way. However it always makes it interesting whenever I visit the US (going again this weekend, and will be staying in Palo Alto).
To be fair, some areas are quite good - the D.C metro was quite nice when I went there, and SF has a reasonable transport system, though it's still slow and inefficient if you want to go out to any of the smaller towns that don't have rail links.
But to claim that you need "very high population densities" for mass transit to work is bullshit, as anyone who has visited some of the European countries with lower population densities can tell you. Once density drops down you may need to have access to a car now and again, but there's a huge difference between having a transport system you can easily use for 80% of your journeys and not having one at all.
I also find it interesting that in Europe, most families will own a car, but will still take train/buses/undeground etc. into account when deciding how to get somewhere, while in large parts of the US (outside some of the major metro areas like NYC) it seems that the assumption is that if you have a car it will be your sole mode of transport apart from planes, regardless of whether a particular trip might be just as convenient or faster or cheaper with public transport.
That unwillingness in many areas to consider public transport unless you are forced to by not having a car fascinates me - it's very clear that there is a
social status consideration in what mode of transport you consider in the US, which is much less pronounced in Europe, and that is more important than whether or not public transport is convenient, cheap or fast.
They don't - they come from all over the place, though the most popular form may have originated in Nigeria. One of the reasons may be that Nigeria is well known as one of the most corrupt countries in the world (though apparently the government have started doing a lot to try to clean it up after they finally got an elected government again a few years ago), and is recognised as such even among Nigerians themselves. That makes some of the messages seem a bit more plausible - it IS after all well known that the Abacha family (that frequently figures in the mails) probably siphoned off billions to foreign bank accounts etc.
Combine that with an average daily salary of about 1 USD and it doesn't take much success to live off a scam like that.
But I've recently started receiving more and more variations from other countries. Mainly other developing countries, but I did recently receive one that purported to be from a former bank manager at a Scottish branch of Lloyds TSB (one of the largest banks in the UK)...
This may be the case for many companies, but SAS must be doing something right as they've consistently throughout their history been ranked by various different sources worldwide as one of the best companies to work in, and it seems to be something they are genuinely proud of and working hard to achieve judging from their website and from other public presentations.
That it's not economically advantageous doesn't mean it isn't worth being prepared for it. Presenting a credible threat means noone in the pentagon will suddenly get the bright idea of trying to pull another Iraq on them. Keep in mind that China won't be planning just for today, but need to take into account what might happen if the US government keeps getting more aggressive over the next decades.
There is a serious memory leak somewhere. I use tags a bit extremely, and I typically have to restart Firefox about once a day because it grows steadily (currently it's using about half a gigabyte of memory). It's the only problem I have with it, but it's quite annoying.
I assume that's supposed to refer to Palestine? You really haven't been following things, have you? ".ps" was assigned to Palestine in March 2000 by IANA. No need for the UN for that.
As for eliminating ".il" that wouldn't fly any more than China trying to eliminate ".tw" - in fact, the ISO 3166-1 country code list that is used as one of the main sources for deciding on cc tld's is mostly based on what countries and territories are recognised by the UN for administrative purposes, so why you think the UN would act differently for TLD's than what their other organisations do is beyond me.
No. Taxation without representation was one of the reasons, not taxation in and of itself.
As it stands, the rest of the world are paying "taxes" to ICANN,a US controlld organisation, in the form of fees that the TLD operators are expected to pay for domain names. ICANN voted away most of the international representation by crippling the original board structure, so at the moment it is the rest of the world that's being taxed without representation for domain names.
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That's pure bullshit. Firefox on my systems (Linux desktop, work laptop on Windows 2000, other laptop on Windows XP until I can get the time to install Linux) all keep eating more and more memory, until the systems slow to a crawl and trash constantly.
There is a consistently slow increase in memory usage over time, regardless of what else I do on any of these machines. It's most noticeable on my Linux box as it runs constantly, and Firefox is usually running until I have to kill it to prevent my system from becoming unusable (by then Firefox is generally starting to get so sluggish anyway, that sometimes I have to kill it from a terminal because the windows doesn't respond) - I regularly have it eating half a GB of memory.
Trying to pretend the memory leak isn't there does noone any good, when it is so obvious and such a huge pain for those it affects.
I'll never switch to IE, but the memory leaks in Firefox is a constant annoyance.
I've long been tempted to go to Dixons, pick out the most expensive item I can find, and then just tell them to shove it and walk out once they start trying to sell me the warranty, though...
And they will go through all that crap and even get argumentative about it before processing your purchase.
If you want a camera specialist shop in the UK, for instance, Jessops is available pretty much everywhere.
This program is likely going to take years. It's not like they're ready to start shipping seeds tomorrow...
I think the point is the range of temperatures it can handle. Perhaps the available extremeophiles from cold areas aren't capable of surviving over as large ranges, and perhaps they believe it is easier to later extend the range downward than expand the range of the other available extremeophiles.
See, it is actually possible for 6 billion people to focus on more than 1 thing in total.... And besides, if you RTFA, you might have noticed some of the other uses for their work: Breeding plants that can handle more extreme conditions on earth, such as surviving longer in drought stricken areas. I think the people living in sub-Saharan Africa for instance would put that as far higher priority than withholding pollutants.
The scary part, however, was that it greated me with my first name, suggested I log on to their site, then ended with a paragraph going roughly like this:
"To make sure you c"n recognise genuine e-mails from us, we will always include the post code of your registered account with us"
Now, it does stop a phisher from firing off a million random e-mails. What it doesn't do is prevent someone from following your local mail man a couple of days and writing down who gets a statement from said bank (which is one of the worlds largest credit institutions) and firing off messages. That is worse than a random phisher as the bank itself is teaching it's clients to trust messages that include their postcode, even though their postcode is an easily available piece of information, so people are more likely to take the e-mail at face value and not scrutinise it as well as they should. What's worse is that the e-mail included links instead of asking people to go to the site listed on their statements, or similar, teaching people that hey, it's ok to click on links in mails that claims to be from their bank...
The worst thing is that this kind of behaviour is the norm for British banks. The fuckwits deserve everything they get from these phishers. What sucks is that their customers will get screwed over in the process.
I've twice been called up by one of my other banks fraud department because they wanted to verify transactions. In both cases they wanted me to provide the security information for my account over the phone when they had called me and I had no way of verifying that they were who they said they were (caller id is trivial to fake, and you wouldn't even need that if the number is unknown but looks plausible to the person taking the call). So again, the fraud department of my bank is teaching its customers that it's ok to give out the very same security details that are sufficient to a) do transfers, b) get passwords for online banking reissued, c) get credit cards reissued.
Just the other day I overheard a woman on the train to work complaining to her boyfriend about the same thing. In my cases I know it was genuine calls because I called back on numbers I knew belonged to the bank.
This same bank also tends to accept corporate id cards to let you sign for your credit cards if they're ordered to an office. So, trick people with a phony call, get the credentials, call the bank to get the card reissued, create your own plastic laminated id card, and order it sent to a serviced office somewhere where you rent a room with cash for a day or two... The same bank have twice refused to deliver cards to my home address because dropping it through the letter box was apparently too insecure.
The great thing about getting a credit card reissued, is that many banks here will accept it as ID. So get a credit card reissued, and voila, instant access to all the poor persons other accounts as well, and from past experience they'll happily offer to let you do over the counter cash withdrawals of however much you want from your credit card accounts.
They're so clueless it's scary to think I trust them with my money (but the rest of them are just as bad).
Why did I have to move to a country with a banking system from the dark ages?
Besides, you don't prove scientific theories, you attempt to use them to make predictions that can be falsified. The more and simpler falsifiable conditions that can be made for a theory, the more attempts are made at proving them false without succeeding, the surer we get that the theory is true.
As an example, if someone presented as a theory that Santa Claus really existed, and does come down the chimney of every house where a child lives every Christmas, a falsifiable prediction would be that he would come down a set of specific chimneys within a specific time interval. If he doesn't, then the theory can be discarded with relative ease.
Evolution has the support of the scientific community because a wide range of falsifiable predictions can be made from it, and a wide range of those predictions are within our ability to test, and have been tested with success.
Thats the fundamental difference between evolution and intelligent design: There is no coherent theory of intelligent design from which one can extract conditions with which to prove it false. It's not even attempting to be a scientific theory. Something that isn't specific enough that you can prove it false if it indeed is false is useless as a theory because you can only take it on faith.
At which point we might as well believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy - creationism has no more scientific basis than either of them.
Unless you can present a framework for creationism that can withstand even a tiny fraction of the scrutiny that the theory of evolution has withstood, creationism is nothing but an idea with no scientific basis, while evolution is well tested, well understood and supported by a barrage of experiments and observations that have supported predictions based on it.
Most other places union membership is a purely individual matter, as is the choice of unions. There are few countries that have the concept of "voting in" unionisation of a specific workplace. Instead you will find that unions are generally protected and can recruit members wherever they want, and staff can join whatever union they want.
In other words you'll rarely find places with only unionised staff, and even if you do they rarely all belong to the same union - though it does happen, particularly in manufacturing and other traditional union strongholds.
What typically happens then is that the larger unions negotiate pay deals directly with the larger employer organisations, and a lot of local negotiation happens with larger individual employers, or between smaller unions and individual employers, in addition to the occasional individual negotation.
Yes, that means a single employer may have to deal with multiple unions, but on the other hand it also means that most smaller employers never have a situation where a single union can cripple them, while larger companies that are in a better position to be able to deal with the consequences, may have to face a single union organising most or all of their workforce.
In many workplaces, the union with largest membership may end up negotiating a deal that gets offered to all the rest of the employees, often minimising the number of parties the employer has to deal with. In other cases, the employer will be a member of an employer organisation and won't need to do any local negotiation at all unless particular unions, groups or individual employees feel there are issues particular to that employer tht needs to be dealt with.
The main unions and employer organisations in many countries tends to negotiate limits on what their local chapters and employers can negotiate locally as part of their overall negotiations to ensure stability.
All in all, most places a union system like that leads to a lot better balance. There are cases of extremely strike happy unions (France always sticks out like a sore thumb ;) ), particularly in professions where a single union have total dominance (for a non-French example, in Norway there are two such unions: The lift mechanics union and the air traffic controllers union - both of them are extremely aggressive), but in general unions co-exist relatively peacefully with most employers because the unions as well realise that their continued existence depends on being able to attract members on an individual basis, and a union that keeps pushing firms that employs it members into bankrupcy isn't going to be a very attractive union to join. Nor is it going to have the money to do anything, as union dues tend to be tied to income levels, so having lots of members out of work isn't a very good prospect...
As a result you frequently see unions negotiating pay reductions in specific areas or professions or for specific employers where the local conditions warrant it, because everybody recognise it's better to get a smaller piece of the pie than there being no pie at all for anyone.
This also means a lot less aggressive attitude regarding scabs - except where the vast majority of employees are employed by the same union, it tends to be accepted that work goes on during a strike, as long as no replacements for the particular employees striking are brought in.
Seems to me that the union system in the US is set up in a way that's optimized for encouraging conflict, and it's probably damaging unions just as much as it is damaging employers.
The rest of your message keeps dealing with on-duty fraternising as well.
Exactly what part of "off duty" is it you don't get? This affects people working together who decide to go for a meal as a group at the end of the day. This affects people that go for drinks together, or decide to go bowling or to see a movie together - not just one of those pesky couples you hate so much that are already covered under other rules, but also people doing it as a group where nobody would ever dream of dating eachother. This affects co-workers deciding to form a book club, or to meet up after work to pursue other common hobbies.
Now, exactly why should your employer be able to regulate this kind of activity?
Especially when combined with lax working time regulations that mean work for many people is their primary place for meeting friends.
That is why you have minimum wage. It is why there are regulations on working time. It's why there are health and safety regulations. It's why there are whistleblower laws.
The idea that you can rely on employers and employees to negotiate fair terms - even to the point of not putting the health of their employees at risk - has been proven over and over again not to work. US employees, for instance, ought to remember those of their forefathers who in many cases gave their life to the decades long fight for the 8 hour working day. A fight that took place because employers were completely unwilling to consider reducing the then 12-14 hour working days through negotiation.
Contract law requires consideration. If one of the parties feel they have no choice there is no real consideration, and that is frequently the case in employer-employee relationships.
To go more specifically into the case at hand - as the article points out, this ruling shifts the balance even further towards the employers, by making it harder to coordinate action between employees (even if union type activities are explicitly protected by law, it's going to have a significant chilling effects with people that don't know/understand their rights and don't dare risk their job - spreading information on those rights is going to be hard if people are concerned about talking to you), and harder for people to build the personal relationships that makes proper organising possible in the first place.
Rights are already shifted so far towards the employer side in the US as is (few other industralised nations allows contracts that lets employers fire employees with no notice, for instance - in most European countries limits of 1 to 3 months is usually enshrined in law, with some exceptions for temporary workers or specific professions).
I keep being amazed at what US workers are willing to put up with. And that is after being amazed at what UK workers put up with after I first moved to London - I'm used to 37.5 hour weeks, 3 month notice periods and an environment where it was next to impossible to fire someone unless they are provably incompetent or unsuited for the job (that's how it works in Norway).
But even here it takes exceptional circumstances before you can even be asked to work more than 48 hours (with 37-40 being the norm) a week, 25 days paid holiday (+ public holidays) a year is the norm, and less than one months notice is almost unheard of for permanent employees. Yet the average UK salary is still slightly above the average US salary - enough to make up for the slight difference in taxation.
Edison was also a money grabbing business man that didn't hesitate to abuse the advantages he got from his earlier inventions to try as hard as he could to stifle competition in the cases where he couldn't compete by providing a better product.
The US is almost alone in having fuel prices as low as they are. Adding significant fuel taxes won't change everything, but taxes on those levels for fuel does push people to consider fuel economy to a lot higher degree than what people in the US currently does. It also inevitably lead a lot of people to seriously consider public transport (with the US public transport system being what it is, for that effect to make a difference pushing any increases in fuel taxation straight into public transport investments would probably be almost neccessary)
Additionally, high fuel taxes create a lot of room for using taxation to influence other product choices - like pushing people to consider cars and fuels that are less polluting in other ways by warying the tax.
The UK is one of the highest taxing countries in the world for fuel, with 72.3% tax. This is actually down from around 85% in recent year, but the percentage drop is a result of rising oil prices - the total price of fuel including taxes has still increased above the rate of inflation.
Many oppressive dictators have done reasonably well in elections in the run-up to the coup that gave them control - that doesn't make their government any less dictatorial or more democratic.
It only needs to last long enough for the crowd to get up to the police, and the police will get to see what a real riot looks like. I doubt people will take too lightly to attempts to fry them with a weapon like this.
Only if the training data contains games where the players makes different moves from the same board state depending on history. In which case it may make sense - I'd expect a lot of humans to reveal more of their strategy from the recent history of moves than from the exact current state.
And all of these "issues", and many more, have been answered many times. Go read the rebuttals, and stop believing everything the tin foil mafia tells you to.
The very reason it is faster for you is exactly that US city planners almost exclusively focus on making it convenient to get around by car vs. public transport.
Mass transit works well even in countries like Norway (average population density: 13 per square kilometer) - they just don't work everywhere. I don't think anybody suggests that someone living in a rural area should rely entirely on public transport. But vast areas of major population centres in the US consists of out of control sprawl because public transport hasn't been given priority.
The times I've visited the parts of Virginia near D.C. for instance, I've constantly been shocked at how hard it was to get around even by foot. I stayed in a hotel what should have been a 15 minute walk away from a restaurant, and we were faced with having to cross several 4-6 lane roads and several sections where there was no proper sidewalk.
This was an area with a population density far higher than anywhere in Norway (where I'm originally from), yet so pedestrian unfriendly and with such a useless public transport system that the typical 5000-10.000 inhabitant village in Norway would have more people using public transport on a daily basis.
I've never owned a car or gotten a drivers license, because I've never had a reason to. Perhaps I'll get one whenever I get kids, but for now public transport serves 95%+ of my transport needs, and the rest is solved with cabs, and I end up saving both time and money that way. However it always makes it interesting whenever I visit the US (going again this weekend, and will be staying in Palo Alto).
To be fair, some areas are quite good - the D.C metro was quite nice when I went there, and SF has a reasonable transport system, though it's still slow and inefficient if you want to go out to any of the smaller towns that don't have rail links.
But to claim that you need "very high population densities" for mass transit to work is bullshit, as anyone who has visited some of the European countries with lower population densities can tell you. Once density drops down you may need to have access to a car now and again, but there's a huge difference between having a transport system you can easily use for 80% of your journeys and not having one at all.
I also find it interesting that in Europe, most families will own a car, but will still take train/buses/undeground etc. into account when deciding how to get somewhere, while in large parts of the US (outside some of the major metro areas like NYC) it seems that the assumption is that if you have a car it will be your sole mode of transport apart from planes, regardless of whether a particular trip might be just as convenient or faster or cheaper with public transport.
That unwillingness in many areas to consider public transport unless you are forced to by not having a car fascinates me - it's very clear that there is a social status consideration in what mode of transport you consider in the US, which is much less pronounced in Europe, and that is more important than whether or not public transport is convenient, cheap or fast.
Combine that with an average daily salary of about 1 USD and it doesn't take much success to live off a scam like that.
But I've recently started receiving more and more variations from other countries. Mainly other developing countries, but I did recently receive one that purported to be from a former bank manager at a Scottish branch of Lloyds TSB (one of the largest banks in the UK)...
This may be the case for many companies, but SAS must be doing something right as they've consistently throughout their history been ranked by various different sources worldwide as one of the best companies to work in, and it seems to be something they are genuinely proud of and working hard to achieve judging from their website and from other public presentations.
That it's not economically advantageous doesn't mean it isn't worth being prepared for it. Presenting a credible threat means noone in the pentagon will suddenly get the bright idea of trying to pull another Iraq on them. Keep in mind that China won't be planning just for today, but need to take into account what might happen if the US government keeps getting more aggressive over the next decades.
There is a serious memory leak somewhere. I use tags a bit extremely, and I typically have to restart Firefox about once a day because it grows steadily (currently it's using about half a gigabyte of memory). It's the only problem I have with it, but it's quite annoying.
As for eliminating ".il" that wouldn't fly any more than China trying to eliminate ".tw" - in fact, the ISO 3166-1 country code list that is used as one of the main sources for deciding on cc tld's is mostly based on what countries and territories are recognised by the UN for administrative purposes, so why you think the UN would act differently for TLD's than what their other organisations do is beyond me.
As it stands, the rest of the world are paying "taxes" to ICANN,a US controlld organisation, in the form of fees that the TLD operators are expected to pay for domain names. ICANN voted away most of the international representation by crippling the original board structure, so at the moment it is the rest of the world that's being taxed without representation for domain names.