Oh yeah sure, because intent has nothing to do with culpability in your fantasy world. Meanwhile, back in the real world, it does.

First off, I haven't worked régularly in the US for 30 years so my local taxes are not what you thought.

Secondly, my muslim collegues go without food & water all day for a month every year so in real terms neither is neccesary in 99% of all jobs.

Lastly, while i do not contest that employers in the US must be constrained to make toilets available, to my knowledge, there is no constraint on this being free, so I see no substantive difference between a free lunch & unmetered acces to water for sanitary purposes.

Our major difference of opinion seems to be that you think that free lunches are an exception that it is normal to eliminate as hidden benefits according to current tax laws in the US, whereas I see it as the sign of future micromanagement by pin headed tax assessors that should be fought against.

Say the professor prefers tea & fills his teapot from his university's tap. Does he have an individual meter so that his usage is not coming out of the pocket of the rest of the faculty or the students? If a corporate lunch is an untaxed benefit shouldn't he have one for his tea? Shouldn't he also have one for the toilets he uses? How is his use of these common resources any different from free lunches -- or is it just a matter of time until this becomes the norm as well??

Oh sure, lets just display a serious lack of judgement & Godwin the thread, shall we? Yes, Nixon greatly dis served the US population through Watergate but JFK, that shining knight of US politics & his running mate LBJ, clearly got thousands times more people killed through Viet-Nam & their other adventures than can be laid at tricky Dick's feet.

Foreign policy wise, Nixon was pretty good. Normalizing relations with China while not abandoning Taiwan is an example of something that could have become a festering wound that he avoided.

A major part of your argument is wrong.

India did not say that "Novartis had its run of the full duration of patent protection", India stated that the invention of Gleevec was too old to qualify for protection under India's new IP laws.

Until relatively recently, India did not give patent protection to drugs. When it did so, only new drugs were given protection. The decision handed down rests on the fact that Gleevec was invented before the change in Indian laws, not on any fundamental difference in treatment of Drug Patents. As such, Gleevec is accorded NO patent protection.

Any drugs Invented more than a year or two after Gleevec will qualify for protection under Indian law so your implied difference in treatment of Drug related patents between the USA/Europe & India is false.

Go suck an egg, junior (or is that cultural reference too obscure for you). Ignorance is easily curable through education. Willful stupidity like needing a cite for what is an extremely common occurrence or insulting the president of a country that I do not live in (as can be quickly determined by referring to my /. profile) is harder.

Call me unsurprised to discover that your claimed multi-lingual status & thus comprehension of the french press is not as comprehensive as claimed. Unable to use Google translate either huh? Once again, my references were to what is an extremely common event in France. Learn french & read the french press & you'll discover just how common that is or stay as you are & hope to be spoon fed references.

What no Swahili? No Xosa? No high Elfish or other claims like Tagolog or Kingon? Come on, you cannot seriously claim to have knowledge of even the languages you claim yet be ignorant of how common it is for people in the eu to lump the eu together when it serves us & then split it into individual states when it doesn't.

Tu montres encore ton ignorance quand tu crois pouvoir me faire des lessons sur quoi que ce soit. Mon signature date des années quatre vingts quand l' Europe laissait Milosevic massacrer des civiles et non sur des faits récents alors tu peux fourrer tes propos la ou je penses.

Quel con ignorant tu es...

[learn to use your brain]

I've heard & read the comment "USA biggest polluter on the planet" countless times in the French press (though it has calmed down slightly now that china has bypassed the USA & due to Europe's economic crises pushing the environment almost off the table). Learn a language other than English & start reading the press.

It's funny how when it serves EU pride, like "We have the largest economy in the world", Europeans sum up the GDP, yet when it doesn't, like total amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, that never happens...

The European telecom market is much too fragmented to be called a single market, it's merely an assembly of national markets. Conditions in one national market have very little to do with those in other markets as the actors are generally very different from country to country.

Now as for your contention that all that needs to happen is for one important actor in one country to renounce their contract with Apple & for the rest of the operators to domino after, it's bull. Here in France, Freemobile.fr entered the market a little over a year ago with no Apple contract (& indeed no subsidized phones at all). One year later they have already taken over 6.4% of the french market.

The other 3 French operators have already tried to form anti-competitive cartels a few years ago. They were caught & fined & ever since they have been under serious scrutiny. Were they to attempt doing so again, the consequences would be severe.

In what respect is it hard to use? I've never had a problem with it.

But with intelligent people you think yourself capable of actually making a reasonable point? I find that hard to believe given how you refuse to answer which distasteful group between loony feminists & radical Islamists censure you find censorship acceptable from.

The minitel was built on everyone calling specially taxed numbers that bridged into connections over Transpac, France Telecom's x25 network. Using these 36XX Numbers meant that FT would bill users for per minute fees based on which number was used & then pass some of the money onto the service providers. There were a number of numbers, some where users paid no more than FTs normal per minute connection rate, others where users were billed at a rate which just paid the service providers back for the traffic & other numbers where the uses paid higher & higher rates.

Service providers could see which 36XX number was used for each connection in order to accept/refuse service.

In many ways all this reminds me of what has become known as the AppStore model with FT in the place of Apple/google/...

As Henry Spencer said long ago, Skylon & every other hyperspace plane suffer from the problem where they accelerate slowly & are incapable of performing the last steps in attaining orbit without a rocket motor.

I haven't been able to find Henry's post but here's another one:
http://yarchive.net/space/launchers/space_plane.html