I'd think it would be better (and a lot easier) to just head for home when navigation / communication breaks down, using a simple compass and dead reckoning to navigate, and hope that the comms will come back up after flying out of hostile territory. Use a soft landing or crash as a last resort when fuel gets low.
100 years? I give it less than 10. Not for sharia law to be implemented, but for someone to get prosecuted for publicly claiming there is no god. Already, many EU countries have laws against insulting religion, and with tensions between various religious groups in Europe on the rise, that law is being applied more strict than before, and the European Court isn't making things any better with their guidelines on this matter. Already, advertising companies refusing ads like the "there's probably no god" campaign draws very little comment except statements like "that's understandable", while the same companies do show ads like "god is great" or "jesus loves". This same kind of thinking is argued in court cases: promoting your god is merely the exercise of freedom of religion, whereas stating that there is no god amounts to an insult to religion. As I said, I give it less than 10 years before this makes it into law, or at least into a EU court directive or guideline, or a ruling from the (batshit insane) EU Human Rights Committee.
The captain does more than urge on the crew. He coordinates, directs effort where needed, and maintains and disseminates a situational overview. Perhaps the crew did well enough in their own in this case, but remember that the captain has his role to play in the subsequent rescue operation as well. He might well have needlessly endangered the lives of the remaining crewmen and rescue guys as he was sitting out in a lifeboat instead of doing his job of coordinating the search&rescue, and I can understand the frustration and anger that was so apparent in that recorded radio call from the Coast Guard.
Also, it's highly annoying to have to raise your voice just to adjust the volume while watching a movie. I'd prefer having a remote with a couple of buttons for the more commonly used functions, and perhaps a button-activated voice control system a la Siri which responds to commands like "Turn on English subtitles".
But what I'd really like to see is a better unified control for all the systems that make up my A/V setup: TV, Amp, Media player, PVR, Apple TV, etc. Currently, the only way I have to control these devices together is by using a universal remote like the Harmony. (This works quite well by the way, but unfortunately there are still some idiot manufacturers who do not understand that the remote control to their device needs to be stateless except in a few exceptional cases like channel/volume control. So instead of providing infrared commands for InputHDMI1, InputHDMI2 etc, they only have a command for NextInput.)
I personally always find resistance from IT people when trying to get them to do something
A funny post, but there's a lot of truth to this part. IT is a "no" department; we (I am in IT myself) have gotten great at telling other why something is impossible or why something shouldn't be done. When faced with change, we come up with issues and blockers rather than solutions. In my experience, other departments like Legal, Marketing & Sales etc often start out in the same manner, but it is easier to switch them from problem mode to solution mode. IT is more stubborn and arrogant about things that go against the current way of thinking and way of doing things.
Spot on. The truth of this becomes apparent when you're reading ebooks that are straight conversions to PDF or ePub. No programmers were directly involved in the conversion, yet these books are often rife with typographical glitches and lexical errors that are clearly the result of OCR errors being incorrectly fixed by the spelling checker. This sloppiness is particularly common in ebooks of older publications, even those from reputable publishers.
I paid to watch a movie though and the 3D didn't add anything.
Actually, with Avatar and Sanctum, I found that it added to the movie rather than detracted from it.
So make what you will of the founder of Oakley and RED telling you active shutter glasses are not the future;)
I'll make precisely nothing of it. Since the investment in my current 3D capability amounts to $0 (free glasses with the TV I had already picked for 2D viewing), I don't care what the best future 3D tech will be, at home or in the cinemas. Whatever it is, I know it will most likely be better and cheaper than what I have now:) My point is: 3D technology is already good enough to enjoy now; there's no point in holding out for whatever better option is coming along in a few years... that is, unless you plan to invest in a very expensive setup that'll have to last you 10 years or so.
I'd have to respectfully disagree there. True, the Jaws movie and other flicks from the eighties had terrible, gimmicky 3D. And Avatar has shallow characters and a flimsy script, even it is a decent enough action SF flick. But Avatar's 3D is amazing, especially in the cinema; a very different way to experience a movie, and the setting lend itself well to 3D. Another example of good rather than gimmicky 3D is Sanctum.
Not sure what I am supposed to make of the Reduser link. 3D on active glasses is the best we can get at home (barring a twin projector setup), and it's are certainly good enough for me. Good enough to enjoy the occasional movie in 3D... there just aren't that many worth watching that way. Yet.
You can, apparently. There are people setting up 3D using twin projectors with polarized filters in their home theaters now. These screens are more expensive than regular projection screens, but well within the budget of a 3D afficionado.
It's because of the way cinemas project the movie. I'm not sure about the exact setup they generally have, but they project the left and right frames on top of each other using opposing circular polarisation. This works well with passive glasses and is very easy to achieve with a special projector. On a TV where you don't project anything but stare at the pixels themselves, managing varying polarisation is a bit harder. LG somehow found a way to get 3D on a TV panel with passive glasses; you do get proper 3D but the quality suffers visibly.
By the way, any 3D will work a lot better with less ambient light, be it a cinema, shutter glasses at home, or a TV with passive glasses
A premium? It doesn't take much to add 3D to a modern (high refresh rate) panel, and these days 3D is a feature that comes for free on a lot of sets. Mine even came with 2 glasses. I expect that 3D will be an affordable, amusing option for anyone with a reasonably new TV; no need to go and buy a special TV set, just pick up the $25 glasses if you want 3D.
I find that 3D on larger television sets (55" and up) does work. It is not as good as viewing the same movie in the cinema, but sometimes it's good enough, and I usually pick up the 3D version of a movie instead of the regular one, if available.
But just as in the cinema, you need to settle down to watch the movie in order to get "sucked in" by the 3D. Same as in the cinema, were you generally won't "scan email, skim through a magazine, or keep watching out the corner of my eye from another room.". If you let yourself be distracted every minute, 3D is going to suck, whether you're in your home theater or a proper one.
By the way, I too am curious about no-glasses 3D but I'm not holding my breath. LG is already selling sets with passive 3D glasses, but the viewing experience is decidedly poorer than with good shutter glasses.
I loved the C64 because of its hackable nature. Unlike my dads Digital Group and TRS80, the C64 was very accessible from both software and hardware perspective, and easy to mess with for a highschooler like I was back then. I built tape copiers,font cartridges and light control modules for the thing, and later on I started modifying the machine itself. I picked up the C64 Reference Guide early on, it had a fold-out schematic of the complete machine in the back. How cool is that?
Part of the charm was that it was not all that hard to know and understand the complete machine, yet with some outside-the-box tricks it could be made to do amazing stuff.
With a murder rate less than a 6th of that rate in gun loving USA, I consider this wise.
1) There are several countries with a high number of gun owners (some higher than the USA), yet with a low murder rate
2) A number of countries are very strict on ownership of firearms, yet have a relatively high number of gun-related violent incidents
3) Non gun-related violence in the USA is higher than average as well
I think there should be some form of control of firearms, but in view of these 3 points I don't find the reasons and examples that are usually cited to be all that compelling. There might be less of a relation between gun ownership and crime rates than both proponents and opponents of the 2nd amendment would like to think there is.
The good news is that it is rather easy these days to build equipment using multiple satellite positioning systems. The Apple 4S for example uses both GPS and Glonass, which is nice as Glonass apparently provides better coverage in western Europe. When Galileo goes live, we'll see circuitry for 3 systems. And at some point it'll be 4 when the Chinese one goes online.
Meh, I was just poking fun at your somewhat dismal view of the current state of affairs. But since you brought up the subject, Ayn Rand "claimed" (quote marks because it was just a novel, after all) a great many things in that book, some silly, some outlandish, some insightful... but she did not claim that.
As the one responsible for your company's tech strategy, you need to understand your company's business. That's most likely a major change of focus. You'll also have to change how you keep up with the tech side of things, have a broad understanding of the technology out there, and try to understand what changes you can expect in the next few years ahead:
- Depending on your company's size/type, a mini-MBA may be useful. (take a formal course program, certain specific courses, or self-study). The goal is not to get a shiny title, and many (myself included) will argue that an MBA is a poor way of learning how a business should be run, but understanding how the business is run will greatly help you understand how IT can contribute to that. Knowing something about business administration comes in handy.
- Find a mentor amongst your fellow managers. Not someone who'll just vaguely promise to "yeah, I'll help you", but someone who can commit to actually spending time helping you when things get rough or when you need advice, and above all someone whom you can trust. It may be hard finding one, but if you can find a trustworthy, competent manager to coach you, he'll be worth his wweight in gold to you.
- Understand who your stakeholders are and where they sit in the organisation. Don't assume they'll come to you when they need you, and certainly don't assume anything about their needs and issues. Engage with the business on a regular basis.
- Your tech focus will probably shift from a limited set of products, skills, and technologies that were part of your day-to-day, to a broader but much less in-depth scope. Some of the publications that us techies like to laugh about like CIO magazine or Gardner reports can actually be very useful for understanding the broad tech landscape of today and the near future, and understand the trends. Don't base your decisions on those publications, though, and learn to separate news, opinions, sales talk, and bullshit. Use this info to find out what stuff is or may become relevant for your organisation, and then investigate further together with your team and come up with a strategy.
Which is why I went with a DIY (i.e. non-preassembled) solution, mostly consisting of EKWB parts. That way you can choose fans, pumps and a radiator to suit.
The reason I went with water cooling wasn't extreme cooling performance, but noise. The CPU fan was fairly quiet but I have a 480GTX GPU that sounded like a jet engine, even when idling. Switching to water cooling eliminated a lot of noise, and I found that the pump noise can be reduced a great deal by mounting it on adhesive foam rather than screwing it directly to the case. Using a large radiator helps too, two fans at low RPM make a lot less noise than one fan on a small radiator working overtime.
For the rest, mounting fans and HDDs on rubber further reduces noise. My gaming rig will never be whisper quiet, but this water cooling setup beats any air based one I have ever used, and even under heavy load the GPU and CPU barely touch 45 degrees C.
The point of a range extender is to provide extra range for that 1% of your trips that cannot be made on a single battery charge. A lot of people, myself included, would be able to use an electric vehicle with a 350km range for the vast majority of our trips. But there's still that 1% trips that are longer, which is why people might hold off on going electric. That's where the range extender comes in... and to serve its purpose, it doesn't need to be all that efficient since you won't even be using it most of the time.
Making it more efficient is nice of course, but efficiency is not the point. Especially not if it means sacrificing comfort or utility by redesigning the car to be ultra light or super aerodynamic.
I'd be more interested to learn if your company has any controls regarding access to privileged data. Is admin access logged (in immutable logs)? Are those logs reviewed by someone outside the sysadmin group? Is there a work order / trouble ticket / other reason logged against each instance of admins accessing client data?
Where I live, there are still a couple of good current affairs programs, and I find that lately there have been a couple of very good series (most notably from HBO). TV isn't all shite... but some years ago I've discovered that watching TV live (not live tv) is an utterly rubbish experience. Well, I didn't really discover it; it's just that before PVRs made time-shifting practical and easy, there was no real alternative to viewing everything as it was broadcast. That meant wasting time channel surfing, waiting for your favourite show to come on, and sitting through endless, repetitive commercial breaks... I can't imagine how people were/are able to handle that crap.
I still watch a fair amount of TV, but it's all time-shifted. I can download the series I want to watch, and most of our TV channels have a rather good service for watching their shows of the past few weeks on-line. And I still own a TV to watch it all on.
In my admittedly not all-encompassing experience, it's often the pesky high-paid middle managers who like to run the company by the numbers. I've had a few very large corporations as a client, and I found the upper management to be suprisingly level-headed (although rather stubborn as well, and not always that smart). They appreciate jacks of all trades and guys who can get things done. But middle managers hate that; they prefer 3 lumps of warm meat of type A B and C over one guy who can actually deliver something of value, as long as A, B and C cover the job description for positions A, B and C, and those positions are adequately descriped in the 700 page project document, and all due contracting and procurement processes have been followed. Middle managers are very good at managing resources... but they are very poor managers of people; there's a difference.
Running a company by the numbers is a middle manager's game, not something imposed by the executives. And often the executives are as much a prisoner of it as the peons; I have often heard their laments on the inability of the organisation to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time. Sergei Brin recently complained that Google is now too big and bureaucratic to be truly innovative; this is a sympton of the same ailment. Sadly, getting around middle management, eliminating it, or at least eliminating the risk-averse MBA shopkeeper mentality has proven to be very hard.
Do you have insurance? I bet you do... and it's almost the same thing; you are just betting on something bad happening to you (and probably hoping that it never happens). But in the end, insurance companies are not charities; they make money and plenty of it. On average, you will pay more in premiums than you will ever get back in claims, just like gamblers. So: don't gamble with money you cannot afford to miss, and don't take out insurance unless you cannot afford to self-insure.
Math isn't the whole story; the simple fact is that it is never about the averages / expectation value (though it will help you find the better deal for your dollar). Insurance buys you peace of mind. Gambling gives you a small chance at winning more money than you could possibly amass in your lifetime with hard work. Both these things have value.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd think it would be better (and a lot easier) to just head for home when navigation / communication breaks down, using a simple compass and dead reckoning to navigate, and hope that the comms will come back up after flying out of hostile territory. Use a soft landing or crash as a last resort when fuel gets low.
100 years? I give it less than 10. Not for sharia law to be implemented, but for someone to get prosecuted for publicly claiming there is no god. Already, many EU countries have laws against insulting religion, and with tensions between various religious groups in Europe on the rise, that law is being applied more strict than before, and the European Court isn't making things any better with their guidelines on this matter. Already, advertising companies refusing ads like the "there's probably no god" campaign draws very little comment except statements like "that's understandable", while the same companies do show ads like "god is great" or "jesus loves". This same kind of thinking is argued in court cases: promoting your god is merely the exercise of freedom of religion, whereas stating that there is no god amounts to an insult to religion. As I said, I give it less than 10 years before this makes it into law, or at least into a EU court directive or guideline, or a ruling from the (batshit insane) EU Human Rights Committee.
The captain does more than urge on the crew. He coordinates, directs effort where needed, and maintains and disseminates a situational overview. Perhaps the crew did well enough in their own in this case, but remember that the captain has his role to play in the subsequent rescue operation as well. He might well have needlessly endangered the lives of the remaining crewmen and rescue guys as he was sitting out in a lifeboat instead of doing his job of coordinating the search&rescue, and I can understand the frustration and anger that was so apparent in that recorded radio call from the Coast Guard.
Also, it's highly annoying to have to raise your voice just to adjust the volume while watching a movie. I'd prefer having a remote with a couple of buttons for the more commonly used functions, and perhaps a button-activated voice control system a la Siri which responds to commands like "Turn on English subtitles".
But what I'd really like to see is a better unified control for all the systems that make up my A/V setup: TV, Amp, Media player, PVR, Apple TV, etc. Currently, the only way I have to control these devices together is by using a universal remote like the Harmony. (This works quite well by the way, but unfortunately there are still some idiot manufacturers who do not understand that the remote control to their device needs to be stateless except in a few exceptional cases like channel/volume control. So instead of providing infrared commands for InputHDMI1, InputHDMI2 etc, they only have a command for NextInput.)
I personally always find resistance from IT people when trying to get them to do something
A funny post, but there's a lot of truth to this part. IT is a "no" department; we (I am in IT myself) have gotten great at telling other why something is impossible or why something shouldn't be done. When faced with change, we come up with issues and blockers rather than solutions. In my experience, other departments like Legal, Marketing & Sales etc often start out in the same manner, but it is easier to switch them from problem mode to solution mode. IT is more stubborn and arrogant about things that go against the current way of thinking and way of doing things.
Spot on. The truth of this becomes apparent when you're reading ebooks that are straight conversions to PDF or ePub. No programmers were directly involved in the conversion, yet these books are often rife with typographical glitches and lexical errors that are clearly the result of OCR errors being incorrectly fixed by the spelling checker. This sloppiness is particularly common in ebooks of older publications, even those from reputable publishers.
Actually, with Avatar and Sanctum, I found that it added to the movie rather than detracted from it.
I'll make precisely nothing of it. Since the investment in my current 3D capability amounts to $0 (free glasses with the TV I had already picked for 2D viewing), I don't care what the best future 3D tech will be, at home or in the cinemas. Whatever it is, I know it will most likely be better and cheaper than what I have now :) My point is: 3D technology is already good enough to enjoy now; there's no point in holding out for whatever better option is coming along in a few years... that is, unless you plan to invest in a very expensive setup that'll have to last you 10 years or so.
I'd have to respectfully disagree there. True, the Jaws movie and other flicks from the eighties had terrible, gimmicky 3D. And Avatar has shallow characters and a flimsy script, even it is a decent enough action SF flick. But Avatar's 3D is amazing, especially in the cinema; a very different way to experience a movie, and the setting lend itself well to 3D. Another example of good rather than gimmicky 3D is Sanctum.
Not sure what I am supposed to make of the Reduser link. 3D on active glasses is the best we can get at home (barring a twin projector setup), and it's are certainly good enough for me. Good enough to enjoy the occasional movie in 3D... there just aren't that many worth watching that way. Yet.
You can, apparently. There are people setting up 3D using twin projectors with polarized filters in their home theaters now. These screens are more expensive than regular projection screens, but well within the budget of a 3D afficionado.
It's because of the way cinemas project the movie. I'm not sure about the exact setup they generally have, but they project the left and right frames on top of each other using opposing circular polarisation. This works well with passive glasses and is very easy to achieve with a special projector. On a TV where you don't project anything but stare at the pixels themselves, managing varying polarisation is a bit harder. LG somehow found a way to get 3D on a TV panel with passive glasses; you do get proper 3D but the quality suffers visibly.
By the way, any 3D will work a lot better with less ambient light, be it a cinema, shutter glasses at home, or a TV with passive glasses
A premium? It doesn't take much to add 3D to a modern (high refresh rate) panel, and these days 3D is a feature that comes for free on a lot of sets. Mine even came with 2 glasses. I expect that 3D will be an affordable, amusing option for anyone with a reasonably new TV; no need to go and buy a special TV set, just pick up the $25 glasses if you want 3D.
I find that 3D on larger television sets (55" and up) does work. It is not as good as viewing the same movie in the cinema, but sometimes it's good enough, and I usually pick up the 3D version of a movie instead of the regular one, if available.
But just as in the cinema, you need to settle down to watch the movie in order to get "sucked in" by the 3D. Same as in the cinema, were you generally won't "scan email, skim through a magazine, or keep watching out the corner of my eye from another room.". If you let yourself be distracted every minute, 3D is going to suck, whether you're in your home theater or a proper one.
By the way, I too am curious about no-glasses 3D but I'm not holding my breath. LG is already selling sets with passive 3D glasses, but the viewing experience is decidedly poorer than with good shutter glasses.
I loved the C64 because of its hackable nature. Unlike my dads Digital Group and TRS80, the C64 was very accessible from both software and hardware perspective, and easy to mess with for a highschooler like I was back then. I built tape copiers,font cartridges and light control modules for the thing, and later on I started modifying the machine itself. I picked up the C64 Reference Guide early on, it had a fold-out schematic of the complete machine in the back. How cool is that?
Part of the charm was that it was not all that hard to know and understand the complete machine, yet with some outside-the-box tricks it could be made to do amazing stuff.
With a murder rate less than a 6th of that rate in gun loving USA, I consider this wise.
1) There are several countries with a high number of gun owners (some higher than the USA), yet with a low murder rate
2) A number of countries are very strict on ownership of firearms, yet have a relatively high number of gun-related violent incidents
3) Non gun-related violence in the USA is higher than average as well
I think there should be some form of control of firearms, but in view of these 3 points I don't find the reasons and examples that are usually cited to be all that compelling. There might be less of a relation between gun ownership and crime rates than both proponents and opponents of the 2nd amendment would like to think there is.
+1 Grossly inappropriate... And still funny!
The good news is that it is rather easy these days to build equipment using multiple satellite positioning systems. The Apple 4S for example uses both GPS and Glonass, which is nice as Glonass apparently provides better coverage in western Europe. When Galileo goes live, we'll see circuitry for 3 systems. And at some point it'll be 4 when the Chinese one goes online.
Meh, I was just poking fun at your somewhat dismal view of the current state of affairs. But since you brought up the subject, Ayn Rand "claimed" (quote marks because it was just a novel, after all) a great many things in that book, some silly, some outlandish, some insightful... but she did not claim that.
Who is John Galt?
As the one responsible for your company's tech strategy, you need to understand your company's business. That's most likely a major change of focus. You'll also have to change how you keep up with the tech side of things, have a broad understanding of the technology out there, and try to understand what changes you can expect in the next few years ahead:
- Depending on your company's size/type, a mini-MBA may be useful. (take a formal course program, certain specific courses, or self-study). The goal is not to get a shiny title, and many (myself included) will argue that an MBA is a poor way of learning how a business should be run, but understanding how the business is run will greatly help you understand how IT can contribute to that. Knowing something about business administration comes in handy.
- Find a mentor amongst your fellow managers. Not someone who'll just vaguely promise to "yeah, I'll help you", but someone who can commit to actually spending time helping you when things get rough or when you need advice, and above all someone whom you can trust. It may be hard finding one, but if you can find a trustworthy, competent manager to coach you, he'll be worth his wweight in gold to you.
- Understand who your stakeholders are and where they sit in the organisation. Don't assume they'll come to you when they need you, and certainly don't assume anything about their needs and issues. Engage with the business on a regular basis.
- Your tech focus will probably shift from a limited set of products, skills, and technologies that were part of your day-to-day, to a broader but much less in-depth scope. Some of the publications that us techies like to laugh about like CIO magazine or Gardner reports can actually be very useful for understanding the broad tech landscape of today and the near future, and understand the trends. Don't base your decisions on those publications, though, and learn to separate news, opinions, sales talk, and bullshit. Use this info to find out what stuff is or may become relevant for your organisation, and then investigate further together with your team and come up with a strategy.
Which is why I went with a DIY (i.e. non-preassembled) solution, mostly consisting of EKWB parts. That way you can choose fans, pumps and a radiator to suit.
The reason I went with water cooling wasn't extreme cooling performance, but noise. The CPU fan was fairly quiet but I have a 480GTX GPU that sounded like a jet engine, even when idling. Switching to water cooling eliminated a lot of noise, and I found that the pump noise can be reduced a great deal by mounting it on adhesive foam rather than screwing it directly to the case. Using a large radiator helps too, two fans at low RPM make a lot less noise than one fan on a small radiator working overtime.
For the rest, mounting fans and HDDs on rubber further reduces noise. My gaming rig will never be whisper quiet, but this water cooling setup beats any air based one I have ever used, and even under heavy load the GPU and CPU barely touch 45 degrees C.
The point of a range extender is to provide extra range for that 1% of your trips that cannot be made on a single battery charge. A lot of people, myself included, would be able to use an electric vehicle with a 350km range for the vast majority of our trips. But there's still that 1% trips that are longer, which is why people might hold off on going electric. That's where the range extender comes in... and to serve its purpose, it doesn't need to be all that efficient since you won't even be using it most of the time.
Making it more efficient is nice of course, but efficiency is not the point. Especially not if it means sacrificing comfort or utility by redesigning the car to be ultra light or super aerodynamic.
I'd be more interested to learn if your company has any controls regarding access to privileged data. Is admin access logged (in immutable logs)? Are those logs reviewed by someone outside the sysadmin group? Is there a work order / trouble ticket / other reason logged against each instance of admins accessing client data?
Where I live, there are still a couple of good current affairs programs, and I find that lately there have been a couple of very good series (most notably from HBO). TV isn't all shite... but some years ago I've discovered that watching TV live (not live tv) is an utterly rubbish experience. Well, I didn't really discover it; it's just that before PVRs made time-shifting practical and easy, there was no real alternative to viewing everything as it was broadcast. That meant wasting time channel surfing, waiting for your favourite show to come on, and sitting through endless, repetitive commercial breaks... I can't imagine how people were/are able to handle that crap.
I still watch a fair amount of TV, but it's all time-shifted. I can download the series I want to watch, and most of our TV channels have a rather good service for watching their shows of the past few weeks on-line. And I still own a TV to watch it all on.
In my admittedly not all-encompassing experience, it's often the pesky high-paid middle managers who like to run the company by the numbers. I've had a few very large corporations as a client, and I found the upper management to be suprisingly level-headed (although rather stubborn as well, and not always that smart). They appreciate jacks of all trades and guys who can get things done. But middle managers hate that; they prefer 3 lumps of warm meat of type A B and C over one guy who can actually deliver something of value, as long as A, B and C cover the job description for positions A, B and C, and those positions are adequately descriped in the 700 page project document, and all due contracting and procurement processes have been followed. Middle managers are very good at managing resources... but they are very poor managers of people; there's a difference.
Running a company by the numbers is a middle manager's game, not something imposed by the executives. And often the executives are as much a prisoner of it as the peons; I have often heard their laments on the inability of the organisation to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time. Sergei Brin recently complained that Google is now too big and bureaucratic to be truly innovative; this is a sympton of the same ailment. Sadly, getting around middle management, eliminating it, or at least eliminating the risk-averse MBA shopkeeper mentality has proven to be very hard.
Do you have insurance? I bet you do... and it's almost the same thing; you are just betting on something bad happening to you (and probably hoping that it never happens). But in the end, insurance companies are not charities; they make money and plenty of it. On average, you will pay more in premiums than you will ever get back in claims, just like gamblers. So: don't gamble with money you cannot afford to miss, and don't take out insurance unless you cannot afford to self-insure.
Math isn't the whole story; the simple fact is that it is never about the averages / expectation value (though it will help you find the better deal for your dollar). Insurance buys you peace of mind. Gambling gives you a small chance at winning more money than you could possibly amass in your lifetime with hard work. Both these things have value.