We used to see this behaviour quite often in the transit union in our city which encompasses all city bus drivers in Ottawa. Several years ago there were a number of public scandals where drivers were caught on cellphone video doing something illegal. I specifically recall one incident where the driver had a newspaper spread out over the wheel while driving. The union's public response in every single case was to spring to the driver's defense by denouncing the videos as a violation of the driver's privacy and completely brush aside the safety risks.

Now, in my office, I haven't heard of this kind of "defend everyone at all costs" behaviour, but managers are definitely fearful of it.

And as you slowly replace your forest with your children's homes, and your children build more homes for their children, etc, etc... you end up with overpopulation. You are proposing the same solution as every one else - more efficient use of existing resources. The problem is that eventually you will maximize your usage of those resources but your progeny will continue to propagate.

Russia's current argument for ignoring the agreement:

America is neither a country nor a continent when there is no context, and it is not the official name of any of those things. Mlts clarification was justified. To say that because you colloquially refer to yourself as America and therefore everyone else also must do so is... stereotypical I guess. I'm sure you'll assume I'm biased because I'm Canadian, but we don't normally refer to our southern neighbour as America either, we usually call it "the US" or even "the states". But then we probably do so just to piss off everyone that demands we call it America :)

How exactly are phishing/scam sites abusing a stylesheet change in google search results?

Yes, the government can take your house from you. However, also consider that without the government enforcing property ownership rights, anybody could break into your house, change the locks, and claim they are the owner. Which does your friend think would work better?

I'm sure Apple's Irish divisions have great talent and produce great output, but I bet that those 4,000 employees do not work for the specific Apple subsidiary that is claiming the global profits. Even if it's the same company, claiming all the global revenues there is still a gross misrepresentation of Apple's business since 4000 employees would only account for 5% of Apple's global work force (60% are based in the US). I also believe in Apple's case specifically, they don't even pay the normal Irish corporate tax rates due to some other loopholes or agreements. Forbes has a good write-up on it that is way over my head.

Ireland has corporate taxes, they are just MUCH lower than most other developed countries. So Ireland gains by taxing these corporations. It is extremely lucrative for Ireland because they get billions in tax dollars from the shell company that only has a few employees. The social cost to Ireland is nil compared to the tax revenue, but quite the opposite for Australia.

Also, to advance to management levels within the federal government a certain level of certified bilingualism is required. About 95% of management positions require it, regardless of whether or not your duties will require you to speak the other language to anyone. Full-time language training is provided for people who are lucky enough to get a position that will give it (i.e. they send you away for a concentrated year of learning), but that option is available less and less these days. I am not sure what the statistics on training are, but I have heard many times that the overwhelming majority of people being trained in an official language are anglophones learning french.

Personally I started taking some french courses when my work offered them, however the only offering was a 2 hour per week course which they ended after 6 months. I stopped going after it was clear that the course's pace would never get me anywhere since the knowledge needed to be applied to retain it, and I work in an IT shop where there are only one or two french people that are not on my team (though I'd have much more luck learning chinese). People who get sent to full-time language training learn french for 8 hours a day for an entire year, and even then many often fail the test a couple times before passing. The french oral test is notoriously difficult, though oddly the english equivalent is apparently quite easy. Anyway, this is just to reiterate that many anglophones are trying to learn french - they are only doing this to advance their career because the Official Languages Act made it a requirement, but they are still trying.

And to go off on another tangent, the Official Languages Act is a monumental waste of money, I would ballpark it as tens of billions yearly. I agree that francophones have rights, and should have those rights, but the current strategy of forcing the french language on majority english populations is an extremely inefficient use of resources at best. And I am not talking about within Quebec borders.

Seems to me that this line sums things up nicely. The problem is not the new drug, it is the over-prescribing of the existing drugs.

Very much agree! Regardless of the actual acceptance levels, one incident is statistically insignificant. If you replaced the gadget in this case with a hand-held camcorder, would you suggest that camcorders are not generally accepted? Or maybe just recording devices in general are not accepted in this context.

Also I would say that the number of Google Glass related violent incidents is over-reported compared to other tech-gadget related incidents, since this is only news because it involves Glass.

Is that true that there is a level of entitlement if your trademark is photographed in a public place? I recall that the IoC have successfully forced take-downs of videos that happened to have the olympic rings in the background of them, citing trademark protection even though the video had nothing to do with the Olympics.

Are you really suggesting that across the US, 11 times per day, people are organizing in protest against their societal plight by shining lasers at planes?

Which is also correct. Your point?

Unfortunately unless we build some really high walls and segregate people by their beliefs, there will always be friction when the world has such widely varying values. From your own example, Group A thinks cows are sacred, but they are currently forced to live with watching Group B eat their sacred animals which they find horribly disturbing and cannot avoid it. It's shoved in their faces on TV commercials. It's in the food courts at the malls. Even if they didn't see it all the time, Group A feels that Group B is damaging their world by doing it. If Group A had the power, they would most certainly try to restrict the behavior of Group B to stop murdering and butchering their beloved cows, and Group B certainly will never relinquish such rights willingly.

Now, replace "cows" with any of the following and see if you always fall on the same side of the equation: chicken, fish, dolphin, baby cow, seal, baby seal, animal crackers, dead fetus.