In Croatia, the law determines the minimum amount of notice, which applies when the employer terminates the employment. When the worker quits, there is no such requirement. This is likely because the labor law always assumes that the worker is the weaker party, so it serves mostly to give the workers more leverage in their dealings with companies. Even so, workers almost never want to leave on bad terms, so they simply use this leverage to negotiate a reasonable compromise.

LOL - mod parent up

I'm in complete agreement with regard to the mobile vertical space issue. At the same time, I noticed on desktop it was no longer possible to roll up a thread by clicking on that very space. So different solutions are necessary for different platforms.

It seems there's a big disconnect between the two continents in how people look at taxis or more generally road transport in urban settlements. There are large cities in the US that simply don't have widespread sidewalks, I recently read about Oklahoma City slowly dealing with that problem. In Europe OTOH they're pretty much ubiquitous. When you literally don't have a safe walking route to a place, your take on taxis has to be significantly different from someone who does.

This pretty much cements the trend - Ansible has been increasingly popular over the last couple of years: http://www.google.com/trends/e...

Wonder if they'll soon find a good way to integrate it with Spacewalk (Satellite).

Also, will Canonical grab SaltStack now? :)

I recently worked for a 1000+ employee company that decided to downsize the workforce by 10% after having two years of falling profits and finally three consecutive quarters of having profits lower than their two direct competitors. Which is to say, no, apparently you don't do it only when profits are dropping below 0.

No, layoffs don't just happen at the end of the line, it's become common for companies to engage in restructuring as soon as they see a downward trend in profits.

The whole idea of human *resources* shows that capital mainly sees labor as another asset comparable to others. That's why the ILO has continued to promote the idea that labor is not a commodity.

It's good to hear that there are some large companies that aren't doing this. Let's hope they keep at it.

No, they generally are not. At least not in the same way. Businesses care for financial stability and security of themselves and thereby their shareholders; the general stability and security of their various stakeholders, including the employees, is of peripheral interest to them, because they primarily consider them a risk that is to be managed, as opposed to humans whose lives shouldn't be ruined. This is particularly exacerbated with huge companies employing thousands - an individual employee's stability and security is easily considered trivial for the company.

Not sure which part of Europe this refers to, but in my experience the European labor laws are geared primarily towards worker protection - companies engaging in layoffs are required to give workers advance notice in the time roughly proportional to their tenure at the company, but a worker who found a new job is not actually bound by the same rules and is instead allowed to just quit. Generally, workers care for their reputation so they then negotiate a reasonable transitional period with their former employer.

There is a bit of an intricate detail depending on the specific laws - sometimes the employer also has a bargaining chip by way of accrued vacation time - for example if it's July 1st and you haven't yet spent 50% of your yearly vacation time, the employer is allowed to send you off to vacation so they wouldn't have to pay it out in cash when you leave. This time can then be spent answering phone calls from coworkers scrambling to take over your duties, or you just cede another week of notice and then actually go spend that vacation time as vacation (or perhaps prepare for your new job).

Quite. And when a screwed-up corporation sends you to a people skills class, they basically teach you how to deal with the mess that they created by nurturing and promoting experts at office politics. So unnecessary.

And the logical result of this kind of behavior is that management is now going to have to bite the bullet and actually acquire someone else's social network. Twitter and LinkedIn seem like the obvious choices, but does Google have 50 billion USD to spare?

So, in your opinion, all relevant innovation in hi tech is related to social networks (that may in turn be vulnerable to defamation lawsuits)? What a dystopian view.

You're talking about a city of 100k people. It's statistically possible that you've just managed to meet the bulk of the assholes.

This Firefox add-on continues to work just fine for me, and I'm practically unaffected if someone tries to kill it. It has three panes so it looks like a mail client, which is a simple and straightforward way of navigating and reading the bulk of RSS content.

You shouldn't really put OpenSSH and OpenNTPD in the same sentence... 2k http://qa.debian.org/popcon.ph... vs. 65k http://qa.debian.org/popcon.ph...