...which "caring" company it was that pursued a deliberate strategy of "Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish" towards competing standards and products for most of the back end of the 20th century?
My memory is a getting little unreliable these days - but I'm almost sure that it started with an M.
Got it in one. Anyone whose ego, sense of entitlement or personal insecurity makes them view user input as a personal affront, let alone a snipe at their gender, should go get a different career. The input may be valid; it may not. But if you're not prepared to consider it and either take it on board, quietly ignore it or politely reject it, the sooner you're out the door the better.
Background: I worked as a tester for two decades for a well-known computer multinational computer, in an environment with a near-equal gender balance (I happen to be male - so what?). Prior to that I also had considerable "previous" giving me a user's perspective. I worked with some great, very talented people of both genders, who were always open to considered input from another perspective. Sadly I also had the more dubious "pleasure" of working with a few people of both genders who were technically competent, but frankly either arrogant or insecure, and either way not prepared to admit of any viewpoint but their own - and it is a seriously unhelpful way to behave, because technical ability isn't enough. You have to deliver what the user wants. With only one exception the result was always an unmitigated disaster that either had to be thrown away completely after multiple person-years of investment, or cleaned up later at considerably more expense than getting it right the first time would have cost. I never let the fact of their mere technical competence stop me attempting to explain my viewpoint and argue my corner at length, nor did I let their gender make any difference either. I only once experienced an overt case of "my job, not yours"; customer feedback after the event made my point for me far better than any "Told you so" would have. And, frankly, if someone had accused me of "mansplaining" simply because I happened to be spelling something out in detail to someone who happened to be female, I would have given them extremely short shrift indeed. Professionals need to be professional, or get out.
As the saying goes - "A little learning is a dangerous thing".
What these people always miss, is what most grammars ARE - namely static models of a language. A model is NOT the thing itself, and anyone who forgets that fact has left the path of wisdom. A real language such as English is both more complex than the model and is continuously evolving. And, definitively, when normal, accepted language usage takes a form that doesn't match the grammar, the discrepancy is a shortcoming of the grammar - it is not the fault of the language for being "ungrammatical".
In other words - you can choose to follow a grammar if you wish - and for some purposes that's a useful thing to do - but that is a CHOICE. And the correct response to being criticised for "bad grammar" is, "So what?"
I have no basic problem with the Doctor being female; it was always on the cards, and I personally don't even care if it's canon or not; it's a TV show, for goodness sake, and if it's fun to watch, I'll watch it. If I have DO any concern with it, it's that I wait with some trepidation to see what sort of Doctor, Jodie Whittaker is actually allowed to be by the writers/director(s) (will she always, not to put too fine a point on it, be a female Doctor - which would be disastrous - or can everyone forget that she's a woman and let her become, simply, The Doctor?). I also. more to the point, wait to see whether a female lead actually WORKS within the format (it could; it probably ought to; but it's possible that it simply won't gel). Either way - I certainly think one of the biggest mistakes the team could make, would be to keep rubbing our faces in the fact that Whittaker is a woman, in the way that, as others have said, they kept so clumsily reminding us that Bill was gay. (Yes, we got that, way back in her first episode. Very PC of you, have a sweetie. But frankly it added precisely zilch to the story lines or to her character; it felt like it was basically only there so that the team could feel smug about it. Yawn, nothing to see here, move on.)
Oh, and on the evidence, I'd say the money is probably odds-on for an "ethnic" casting of some sort for her successor, too. My only surprise is that they didn't go for that this time as well as a woman, and kill two birds (so to speak) with one stone.
After a few years you'll get boringly familiar with journalists misreporting familiar things in lurid terms. Media hacks usually know next to nothing about science - and a good headline is much more desirable than strict accuracy even when they do.
Put in perspective: this was an undergraduate research project, such as just about every student who takes a degree will undertake at one point or another. Such things are about getting the students to practice and demonstrate their abilities to investigate a problem, draw useful conclusions and present the results. They MAY break new ground, but that's certainly not a requirement - that's what PhDs are for.
Essential reading for anyone who values critical thinking; ought to be required school reading at age 12 or so.
During WWII, the US Army engaged a magician and ex-cardsharp, John Scarne, to educate the farm-boys being drafted on the many ways of cheating in crooked games of "chance", and how to spot them. This is something akin to the civilian equivalent: an utterly readable look at the ways that raw numbers can be misused or presented by someone with an agenda, whilst not actually (or deliberately) lying. Arguably more relevant today than ever.
I don't have specific experience as a contractor, but - with a different spin - it seems eminently plausible. I was a permanent employee for decades, and IBM was always keen to encourage people to develop potential patents, in any area and on any topic whatsoever (and reward them for doing so - a few people made serious money in the process). The attitude was basically that a patent you owned was of value, whatever it might be and whether it had any relevance to your direct business or not, even if it only meant that a competitor agreed more readily to mutual access to THEIR patents (which is why I always smile wryly whenever I see another, outraged "IBM has patented xxxxxx!" post). Ideas that were good, but not quite up to true patent quality, were disclosed, to put them in the public domain and render them useless to other potential filers. I have no doubt that they would have attempted to get contractors involved as well. I guess that if you see yourself as a body for hire, only there in the short term, you might see the process as an attempt at "strip-mining", but seen from another angle I knew plenty of people who had multiple patents to their names (and on their CVs), who would never have brought them to publication without the program in question.
Sounds like a variant of Electric Mountain in the UK. The same thing is done, only instead of moving trains up the hill they move water instead. There's more in the Wikipedia article - essentially though, this idea works fine.
Can't help thinking that water is the better option (where it's an option at all). Whether or not this method is, as claimed, more efficient - which caim, frankly, strikes me as more of an issue of politics and engineering than of physics - it's still going to take one heck of a lot of trains to store the same amount of mass (and therefore potential energy) as one decent-sized reservoir.
Elevated CO2 levels might, up to a point, have at least some useful, maybe even vaguely beneficial, effects (I'm no expert - I'll defer to those who are). But even if that's true, like everything in the whole climate discussion, it's wise not to forget that changes aren't likely to just stop at some convenient point - they're not only likely to keep going, but in a worst case to snowball utterly beyond our ability to do anything but hang on and watch (in a worst-case scenario, that may already be the case).
To draw a vague (but possibly familiar) parallel...
Anyone who's done any home brewing, or who simply understands roughly how brewing works, knows that it takes yeast. And yeast feeds on sugars. Add a little bit more sugar to your brew, you'll increase yeast productivity. Unfortunately, that's only part of the story - because the effect doesn't scale indefinitely. Add TOO much sugar, and the yeast won't grow at all. (It's also worth pointing out that things don't normally exactly end well for the yeast. which eventually dies from its own waste products - roughly what we're in danger of doing, in fact. But that's a slightly different point.)
Sadly true. I worked inside a big, household name corporation for years, and my reaction was exactly the same as yours - if you want to change your culture fast, the only way you'll do it is to rip people out, root and branch, all the way up the corporate tree. You CAN turn the culture of a company around less dramatically, but it usually takes years to decades, because mostly the culture is the people, and just telling everyone to work, let alone think, differently, simply isn't enough to make it happen - even if they want it to. They simply come with too much personal (and interpersonal) baggage. From observation, I used to reckon that you could manage just about ONE big process or methods change a year (out of maybe a dozen or more that most people were involved in). Anything beyond that, and it didn't happen - sure, people would say that they were doing the new stuff, but in practice they were simply too overloaded with the need to actually get a job done to focus on doing everything the "new" way - and whenever the chips were down, they'd pay lip-service to the new stuff, but fall back on the old, tried-and-tested ways under the covers.
Please - next time you get pulled up for speeding, trying arguing that the law allows you to accelerate, so you weren't doing anything illegal. Then come back and tell us how you got on - I'm sure we could all do with a good laugh.
No, algorithmic traders don't do what he's accused of. The accusation is basically that he routinely placed and then deliberately cancelled big buy or sell orders with no intent of completing them. The reason for doing that would be to bounce precisely those software traders into responses that he could predict and profit from. The facts don't seem to be greatly in dispute, but what's odd here is that, whilst what he's doing is an offence in the US. It's NOT, in and of itself, an offence in the UK. And the treaty under which extradition is being sought is SUPPOSED to only apply to behaviour that is illegal in both jurisdictions. The problem is that a court has ruled that he can be extradited, and it's normally hard to see that renowned bastion of individual freedom, the Honourable Member for Maidenhead (a.k.a. Theresa may, the Home Secretary) actually telling the US it can't have whatever takes its fancy.
...a conviction is another. The PIPCU will have taken legal advice, I'm sure, but just because the police bring a case, that doesn't automatically mean that a court will see things their way. It may yet prove an interesting one to watch.
For my money, the most disruptive technology of the last century - the one that has genuinely done THE most to change the society we live in and the lives of everyone in it - is the humble standardized shipping container. Containers and the infrastructure to handle them mean that we can now ship immense quantities of goods of all shapes, sizes and types from one side of the planet to the other, at a cost per mile per item that's so small it's barely measurable. They mean that it is, literally, cheaper now to move many manufactured goods from one side of the planet to the other, than it used to be to ship them 10 miles down the road. As a manufacturer, it means that, in principle, you can source your materials and parts from anywhere on the globe. Want to manufacture part of your product in Europe, but assemble it in Asia? Do it. Ban shipping containers tomorrow, and the global economy would grind to a shuddering halt in days. And it doesn't matter what other technology you care to point to as a candidate - it's shipping containers that make it globally available. Head and shoulders the winner.
I have slides that my parents took. Sadly, the colour decayed in many of them, and my mother threw far too many of the "worst" ones out (including ones of several episodes in my life that I'd love to have the record of now). A real shame, as when they came into my possession on her death, and I scanned such as were left so that various branches of the family could have copies, the scanner software was perfectly capable of restoring the colour balance. But the message is still there - slides decay, and they're irreplaceable. Take a backup.
I keep my important files under single directories on a hard drive on each of my two desktop machines. I back them up regularly with an incremental backup, excluding deletes, to (a) a second hard drive internal to the machine, and (b) an external hard drive. I don't delete images from my cameras until I'm happy that I've backed them up successfully, both internally and externally. I also swap to new directories on the backup drives from time to time and do a new, complete backup, and to new drives every couple of years or so. I check-sample the content of the originals and backups every once in a while. I can't guarantee that I won't lose something important eventually, but in practice I have quite a few copies of just about anything you care to name, and it's going to take something pretty extreme to do it.
Presuming they were able to detect the CMB - which would NOT look the same in all directions - and "correctly" identify it (i.e., presuming that that's what we've done), they would then also be able to calculate their own relative movement, and correct for it. So they'd reach pretty much the same answer that we do.
It's an utterly traditional British usage - deliberately OTT stereotyping to make a point. We have: "White Van Man". "Mondeo Man". "'Disgusted' of Tumbridge Wells". "The Man on the Clapham Omnibus" (a term met in the courts here, no less). "NIMBYs" ('Not In My Back Yard'). Even, going back a bit further, "Colonel Blimp". Probably half a dozen more that don't spring to mind right now. They all use exaggerated characterisation to draw an impression of a certain type of person. You'd need to be either foreign or pretty new to the UK not to understand that the speaker isn't using the description literally.
OK, so there's a security patch available. So what? "We regret that you crashed at 85mph yesterday - please download our latest patch?"
The problem is not the software per se, but the mere fact that there's external access at all. Because there's simply no such thing as "flawless" code. And the internet's been around long enough to show us that, if there's any legitimate way in, people who want to abuse the system will get in as well, and find a way to subvert it. And right now all we're seeing are "white hat" attacks; just wait until the black hat guys start getting creative.
1) How does a CIO NOT know that IBM has been using Agile for years, and
2) Why does he think that it's suddenly going to make a difference NOW?
IBM has (supposedly) been using Agile for at least 7 years - I spent a couple of decades inside an IBM software lab until I was purged in the infamous "Project Waltz" in 2011. Agile was management "golden-bullet-of-the-month" for at least the last 3 years of that - and just as ineffective as all the others that I'd seen come and go. My perception was that it was largely inappropriate to the scale of code (millions of lines) that we were producing and managing. Much of what was good about it was the stuff paid lip-service to but otherwise ignored; most of what was bad about it was almost anything that management could see and enforce (scrums in particular were mostly a pointless and expensive waste of time - a day or more of cumulative development effort spent daily so that everyone could report on stuff that affected no-one else, and management could put a tick in the box). Frankly, it was a mechanism by which development was obliged to churn out code with less thought in design and less opportunity for customer-scale testing, on a release schedule that no customer would want to follow, in a way that middle management could spin to the higher echelons as positive accomplishment. I'd really love to see the APAR (customer problem report) rates now that that code's had time to get out there and fester; I strongly suspect that they're - to choose a word at random - "interesting". But, naturally, I'm long in the tooth and jaundiced about new-fangled stuff (mostly because I've seen all the hype 20+ times before, and seen the vast difference between that and reality - but experience and cynicism doesn't count when management is clutching at straws).
I'd realised of late that Sir Terry's light would probably go out soon, and that there couldn't be all that many more Discworld books to come; It's still sad to know it's happened. Thanks for the many, many hours of pleasure, Terry; I shall miss keeping an eye on the bookshop window your latest book.
First and foremost, the main point of the original post notes that playing the lottery (like many other frivolous actions) has entertainment value that has to be factored in. Unless you never, ever, spend money on frivolities - a movie night simply because, "Why not?"; a "better" bottle of wine; a new handbag to go with the 50 you already have; that scroll-saw with all the features you'll never actually use - you frankly have no right to ignore that side of things. And on the weeks where the jackpot is huge, that entertainment value is high; well worth the meagre cost.
Secondly, though. Straight financial analyses of ROI assume that all money is equal. It isn't. If you're penniless and starving, £10 could save your life. Whereas, if the courts have given you until tomorrow to find another £20,000 or go to jail, £10,000 isn't going to be much use.
Similarly. If your finances are such that you can expect to earn lottery-win figures across your life, or to at least consistently have enough finance (whatever "enough means") to go do the things you want to, then, sure, playing the lottery for financial reasons alone is stupid (playing it for others, which is what the OP is about, is another matter entirely). Or at the other end, if you have so little money that the cost of a ticket will make a noticeable dent in your finances, then, again, it's something you should clearly think twice about.
If you are in the middle ground between those two extremes, though - and a LOT of people are - then simple maths isn't what it's about. Ticket costs are negligible - to the extent that buying or not will affect your life, they might as well be zero. Whereas a big win is extremely unlikely but potentially life-changing - out of all proportion to the straight numbers. Sure, the overwhelming probability is that most every tickets bought will be money you'll never see again. So what? You can afford it, and nothing less risky that you can do with that ticket money is going to give you any chance at all of such a life-changing win (as so many lotteries like to point out, "you have to be in it to win it"). Why on earth wouldn't you play?
Slashdot Mirror
(Or not. Shame about the energy levels involved, and all that... But then again - that's an engineering problem...)
...which "caring" company it was that pursued a deliberate strategy of "Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish" towards competing standards and products for most of the back end of the 20th century?
My memory is a getting little unreliable these days - but I'm almost sure that it started with an M.
Got it in one. Anyone whose ego, sense of entitlement or personal insecurity makes them view user input as a personal affront, let alone a snipe at their gender, should go get a different career. The input may be valid; it may not. But if you're not prepared to consider it and either take it on board, quietly ignore it or politely reject it, the sooner you're out the door the better.
Background: I worked as a tester for two decades for a well-known computer multinational computer, in an environment with a near-equal gender balance (I happen to be male - so what?). Prior to that I also had considerable "previous" giving me a user's perspective. I worked with some great, very talented people of both genders, who were always open to considered input from another perspective. Sadly I also had the more dubious "pleasure" of working with a few people of both genders who were technically competent, but frankly either arrogant or insecure, and either way not prepared to admit of any viewpoint but their own - and it is a seriously unhelpful way to behave, because technical ability isn't enough. You have to deliver what the user wants. With only one exception the result was always an unmitigated disaster that either had to be thrown away completely after multiple person-years of investment, or cleaned up later at considerably more expense than getting it right the first time would have cost. I never let the fact of their mere technical competence stop me attempting to explain my viewpoint and argue my corner at length, nor did I let their gender make any difference either. I only once experienced an overt case of "my job, not yours"; customer feedback after the event made my point for me far better than any "Told you so" would have. And, frankly, if someone had accused me of "mansplaining" simply because I happened to be spelling something out in detail to someone who happened to be female, I would have given them extremely short shrift indeed. Professionals need to be professional, or get out.
As the saying goes - "A little learning is a dangerous thing".
What these people always miss, is what most grammars ARE - namely static models of a language. A model is NOT the thing itself, and anyone who forgets that fact has left the path of wisdom. A real language such as English is both more complex than the model and is continuously evolving. And, definitively, when normal, accepted language usage takes a form that doesn't match the grammar, the discrepancy is a shortcoming of the grammar - it is not the fault of the language for being "ungrammatical".
In other words - you can choose to follow a grammar if you wish - and for some purposes that's a useful thing to do - but that is a CHOICE. And the correct response to being criticised for "bad grammar" is, "So what?"
I have no basic problem with the Doctor being female; it was always on the cards, and I personally don't even care if it's canon or not; it's a TV show, for goodness sake, and if it's fun to watch, I'll watch it. If I have DO any concern with it, it's that I wait with some trepidation to see what sort of Doctor, Jodie Whittaker is actually allowed to be by the writers/director(s) (will she always, not to put too fine a point on it, be a female Doctor - which would be disastrous - or can everyone forget that she's a woman and let her become, simply, The Doctor?). I also. more to the point, wait to see whether a female lead actually WORKS within the format (it could; it probably ought to; but it's possible that it simply won't gel). Either way - I certainly think one of the biggest mistakes the team could make, would be to keep rubbing our faces in the fact that Whittaker is a woman, in the way that, as others have said, they kept so clumsily reminding us that Bill was gay. (Yes, we got that, way back in her first episode. Very PC of you, have a sweetie. But frankly it added precisely zilch to the story lines or to her character; it felt like it was basically only there so that the team could feel smug about it. Yawn, nothing to see here, move on.)
Oh, and on the evidence, I'd say the money is probably odds-on for an "ethnic" casting of some sort for her successor, too. My only surprise is that they didn't go for that this time as well as a woman, and kill two birds (so to speak) with one stone.
After a few years you'll get boringly familiar with journalists misreporting familiar things in lurid terms. Media hacks usually know next to nothing about science - and a good headline is much more desirable than strict accuracy even when they do. Put in perspective: this was an undergraduate research project, such as just about every student who takes a degree will undertake at one point or another. Such things are about getting the students to practice and demonstrate their abilities to investigate a problem, draw useful conclusions and present the results. They MAY break new ground, but that's certainly not a requirement - that's what PhDs are for.
(Darrell Huff).
Essential reading for anyone who values critical thinking; ought to be required school reading at age 12 or so.
During WWII, the US Army engaged a magician and ex-cardsharp, John Scarne, to educate the farm-boys being drafted on the many ways of cheating in crooked games of "chance", and how to spot them. This is something akin to the civilian equivalent: an utterly readable look at the ways that raw numbers can be misused or presented by someone with an agenda, whilst not actually (or deliberately) lying. Arguably more relevant today than ever.
It's easy to get to "good numbers" by just shutting down all the bad stuff. Unfortunately, that basically leaves us with 50% of Not Enough.
I don't have specific experience as a contractor, but - with a different spin - it seems eminently plausible. I was a permanent employee for decades, and IBM was always keen to encourage people to develop potential patents, in any area and on any topic whatsoever (and reward them for doing so - a few people made serious money in the process). The attitude was basically that a patent you owned was of value, whatever it might be and whether it had any relevance to your direct business or not, even if it only meant that a competitor agreed more readily to mutual access to THEIR patents (which is why I always smile wryly whenever I see another, outraged "IBM has patented xxxxxx!" post). Ideas that were good, but not quite up to true patent quality, were disclosed, to put them in the public domain and render them useless to other potential filers. I have no doubt that they would have attempted to get contractors involved as well. I guess that if you see yourself as a body for hire, only there in the short term, you might see the process as an attempt at "strip-mining", but seen from another angle I knew plenty of people who had multiple patents to their names (and on their CVs), who would never have brought them to publication without the program in question.
Sounds like a variant of Electric Mountain in the UK. The same thing is done, only instead of moving trains up the hill they move water instead. There's more in the Wikipedia article - essentially though, this idea works fine.
Can't help thinking that water is the better option (where it's an option at all). Whether or not this method is, as claimed, more efficient - which caim, frankly, strikes me as more of an issue of politics and engineering than of physics - it's still going to take one heck of a lot of trains to store the same amount of mass (and therefore potential energy) as one decent-sized reservoir.
Elevated CO2 levels might, up to a point, have at least some useful, maybe even vaguely beneficial, effects (I'm no expert - I'll defer to those who are). But even if that's true, like everything in the whole climate discussion, it's wise not to forget that changes aren't likely to just stop at some convenient point - they're not only likely to keep going, but in a worst case to snowball utterly beyond our ability to do anything but hang on and watch (in a worst-case scenario, that may already be the case).
To draw a vague (but possibly familiar) parallel...
Anyone who's done any home brewing, or who simply understands roughly how brewing works, knows that it takes yeast. And yeast feeds on sugars. Add a little bit more sugar to your brew, you'll increase yeast productivity. Unfortunately, that's only part of the story - because the effect doesn't scale indefinitely. Add TOO much sugar, and the yeast won't grow at all. (It's also worth pointing out that things don't normally exactly end well for the yeast. which eventually dies from its own waste products - roughly what we're in danger of doing, in fact. But that's a slightly different point.)
Sadly true. I worked inside a big, household name corporation for years, and my reaction was exactly the same as yours - if you want to change your culture fast, the only way you'll do it is to rip people out, root and branch, all the way up the corporate tree. You CAN turn the culture of a company around less dramatically, but it usually takes years to decades, because mostly the culture is the people, and just telling everyone to work, let alone think, differently, simply isn't enough to make it happen - even if they want it to. They simply come with too much personal (and interpersonal) baggage. From observation, I used to reckon that you could manage just about ONE big process or methods change a year (out of maybe a dozen or more that most people were involved in). Anything beyond that, and it didn't happen - sure, people would say that they were doing the new stuff, but in practice they were simply too overloaded with the need to actually get a job done to focus on doing everything the "new" way - and whenever the chips were down, they'd pay lip-service to the new stuff, but fall back on the old, tried-and-tested ways under the covers.
..."prove" and "probably".
Please - next time you get pulled up for speeding, trying arguing that the law allows you to accelerate, so you weren't doing anything illegal. Then come back and tell us how you got on - I'm sure we could all do with a good laugh.
No, algorithmic traders don't do what he's accused of. The accusation is basically that he routinely placed and then deliberately cancelled big buy or sell orders with no intent of completing them. The reason for doing that would be to bounce precisely those software traders into responses that he could predict and profit from. The facts don't seem to be greatly in dispute, but what's odd here is that, whilst what he's doing is an offence in the US. It's NOT, in and of itself, an offence in the UK. And the treaty under which extradition is being sought is SUPPOSED to only apply to behaviour that is illegal in both jurisdictions. The problem is that a court has ruled that he can be extradited, and it's normally hard to see that renowned bastion of individual freedom, the Honourable Member for Maidenhead (a.k.a. Theresa may, the Home Secretary) actually telling the US it can't have whatever takes its fancy.
...a conviction is another. The PIPCU will have taken legal advice, I'm sure, but just because the police bring a case, that doesn't automatically mean that a court will see things their way. It may yet prove an interesting one to watch.
For my money, the most disruptive technology of the last century - the one that has genuinely done THE most to change the society we live in and the lives of everyone in it - is the humble standardized shipping container. Containers and the infrastructure to handle them mean that we can now ship immense quantities of goods of all shapes, sizes and types from one side of the planet to the other, at a cost per mile per item that's so small it's barely measurable. They mean that it is, literally, cheaper now to move many manufactured goods from one side of the planet to the other, than it used to be to ship them 10 miles down the road. As a manufacturer, it means that, in principle, you can source your materials and parts from anywhere on the globe. Want to manufacture part of your product in Europe, but assemble it in Asia? Do it. Ban shipping containers tomorrow, and the global economy would grind to a shuddering halt in days. And it doesn't matter what other technology you care to point to as a candidate - it's shipping containers that make it globally available. Head and shoulders the winner.
Back them up.
I have slides that my parents took. Sadly, the colour decayed in many of them, and my mother threw far too many of the "worst" ones out (including ones of several episodes in my life that I'd love to have the record of now). A real shame, as when they came into my possession on her death, and I scanned such as were left so that various branches of the family could have copies, the scanner software was perfectly capable of restoring the colour balance. But the message is still there - slides decay, and they're irreplaceable. Take a backup.
I keep my important files under single directories on a hard drive on each of my two desktop machines. I back them up regularly with an incremental backup, excluding deletes, to (a) a second hard drive internal to the machine, and (b) an external hard drive. I don't delete images from my cameras until I'm happy that I've backed them up successfully, both internally and externally. I also swap to new directories on the backup drives from time to time and do a new, complete backup, and to new drives every couple of years or so. I check-sample the content of the originals and backups every once in a while. I can't guarantee that I won't lose something important eventually, but in practice I have quite a few copies of just about anything you care to name, and it's going to take something pretty extreme to do it.
Presuming they were able to detect the CMB - which would NOT look the same in all directions - and "correctly" identify it (i.e., presuming that that's what we've done), they would then also be able to calculate their own relative movement, and correct for it. So they'd reach pretty much the same answer that we do.
It's an utterly traditional British usage - deliberately OTT stereotyping to make a point. We have: "White Van Man". "Mondeo Man". "'Disgusted' of Tumbridge Wells". "The Man on the Clapham Omnibus" (a term met in the courts here, no less). "NIMBYs" ('Not In My Back Yard'). Even, going back a bit further, "Colonel Blimp". Probably half a dozen more that don't spring to mind right now. They all use exaggerated characterisation to draw an impression of a certain type of person. You'd need to be either foreign or pretty new to the UK not to understand that the speaker isn't using the description literally.
OK, so there's a security patch available. So what? "We regret that you crashed at 85mph yesterday - please download our latest patch?" The problem is not the software per se, but the mere fact that there's external access at all. Because there's simply no such thing as "flawless" code. And the internet's been around long enough to show us that, if there's any legitimate way in, people who want to abuse the system will get in as well, and find a way to subvert it. And right now all we're seeing are "white hat" attacks; just wait until the black hat guys start getting creative.
1) How does a CIO NOT know that IBM has been using Agile for years, and
2) Why does he think that it's suddenly going to make a difference NOW?
IBM has (supposedly) been using Agile for at least 7 years - I spent a couple of decades inside an IBM software lab until I was purged in the infamous "Project Waltz" in 2011. Agile was management "golden-bullet-of-the-month" for at least the last 3 years of that - and just as ineffective as all the others that I'd seen come and go. My perception was that it was largely inappropriate to the scale of code (millions of lines) that we were producing and managing. Much of what was good about it was the stuff paid lip-service to but otherwise ignored; most of what was bad about it was almost anything that management could see and enforce (scrums in particular were mostly a pointless and expensive waste of time - a day or more of cumulative development effort spent daily so that everyone could report on stuff that affected no-one else, and management could put a tick in the box). Frankly, it was a mechanism by which development was obliged to churn out code with less thought in design and less opportunity for customer-scale testing, on a release schedule that no customer would want to follow, in a way that middle management could spin to the higher echelons as positive accomplishment. I'd really love to see the APAR (customer problem report) rates now that that code's had time to get out there and fester; I strongly suspect that they're - to choose a word at random - "interesting". But, naturally, I'm long in the tooth and jaundiced about new-fangled stuff (mostly because I've seen all the hype 20+ times before, and seen the vast difference between that and reality - but experience and cynicism doesn't count when management is clutching at straws).
('cos it's American Pi...)
I'd realised of late that Sir Terry's light would probably go out soon, and that there couldn't be all that many more Discworld books to come; It's still sad to know it's happened. Thanks for the many, many hours of pleasure, Terry; I shall miss keeping an eye on the bookshop window your latest book.
First and foremost, the main point of the original post notes that playing the lottery (like many other frivolous actions) has entertainment value that has to be factored in. Unless you never, ever, spend money on frivolities - a movie night simply because, "Why not?"; a "better" bottle of wine; a new handbag to go with the 50 you already have; that scroll-saw with all the features you'll never actually use - you frankly have no right to ignore that side of things. And on the weeks where the jackpot is huge, that entertainment value is high; well worth the meagre cost.
Secondly, though. Straight financial analyses of ROI assume that all money is equal. It isn't. If you're penniless and starving, £10 could save your life. Whereas, if the courts have given you until tomorrow to find another £20,000 or go to jail, £10,000 isn't going to be much use.
Similarly. If your finances are such that you can expect to earn lottery-win figures across your life, or to at least consistently have enough finance (whatever "enough means") to go do the things you want to, then, sure, playing the lottery for financial reasons alone is stupid (playing it for others, which is what the OP is about, is another matter entirely). Or at the other end, if you have so little money that the cost of a ticket will make a noticeable dent in your finances, then, again, it's something you should clearly think twice about.
If you are in the middle ground between those two extremes, though - and a LOT of people are - then simple maths isn't what it's about. Ticket costs are negligible - to the extent that buying or not will affect your life, they might as well be zero. Whereas a big win is extremely unlikely but potentially life-changing - out of all proportion to the straight numbers. Sure, the overwhelming probability is that most every tickets bought will be money you'll never see again. So what? You can afford it, and nothing less risky that you can do with that ticket money is going to give you any chance at all of such a life-changing win (as so many lotteries like to point out, "you have to be in it to win it"). Why on earth wouldn't you play?