It sounds like they just divided women into two sub-groups, one of which has a zero risk of getting cervical cancer.
The overall risk of cancer for women is still the same.
Depending on what you are using the statistic for (e.g. assessing your own risk of getting cervical cancer, large-scale targeted prevention efforts, allocating government health-care funding based on overall population, etc.), you may find the new set of statistics more useful than the old one, or vice-versa.
Problems like this have existed for decades or more and we know how to prevent it.
It's a business decision whether to invest in prevention, mitigation, both, or neither.
The "foreign government cyber-warfare" problem is less well-understood and is ever-evolving.
---- For what it's worth, most "mother nature" problems can be handled by having adequate redundancy and/or backup systems and, for most users, having an expected service level that allows for the grid (or internet, or other utility) to be offline for several seconds at a time while backup systems kick in. A state-level attacker is likely to be aware of the backup systems and attack both simultaneously.
Why go into engineering when management or sales pays double for less work?
Because, if you are in a good work environment in a good company, it's a whole lot more fun to follow your heart than to follow your wallet.
For those whose hearts lead them to engineering and who are fortunate enough to have a good work environment in a good company, there's plenty of reasons to stay rather than go with a less-work/higher-paying position in management or sales.
On the other hand, if your heart isn't in engineering, you probably shouldn't be there. If it is in engineering but you are in a lousy work environment or lousy company, change employers, not careers.
I tell teenagers who want to go into IT or computers for a career to only do it if they really want to. If they are doing it for the high salaries, they are taking a big risk.
You will still have a need for low-level customer-service work and high-level design/research work in 20 years.
The mid-level stuff that your run-of-the-mill programmer and system administrator does today will be largely be automated.
Hopefully, new, fun, decent-paying tech jobs that use similar parts of the brain that we haven't even thought of will fill the void.
Browsers should present a "generic" capabilities list to web sites unless the user white-lists that site to receive some or all of the "real" capabilities. An online video-gaming site may need to know if I can play a GPU-intensive online game through the web browser, but very few other sites need to know.
For example, "generic capabilities" would be:
Screen size would be "small" for tablets, phones, and small notebooks, or "normal" for everything else. Pixel density would not be disclosed. "List of fonts" would be the most common "web fonts" in the main language of the operating system. As for the rest, they would be shown as "not disclosed."
In a more perfect world, a lawyer's ethical obligations would preclude him from taking on a case that is "obviously frivolous."
If a judge found that a case was "obviously frivolous" then the judge would be encouraged to fine the lawyer personally and would be required to refer the lawyer to the state bar, which would likely fine him an additional amount equal to what his client paid him for that case. Lawyers who got many such referrals relative to their peers (lawyers with similar caseloads and specializations) would see judges scrutinize their future cases much more closely, and those with huge numbers of referrals would see their license suspended or otherwise sanctioned.
... use crystallographic authentication and limit what can talk to what.
For example, if a "black box" at my electric company needs to talk to my electric meter over a public IP network (why? I don't know, but suppose it does), put a firewall on the electric meter that won't even acknowledge an connection unless it is encrypted specifically for that particular electric meter and signed by that particular "black box." Likewise, the "black box" will not continue the conversation unless the electric meter responds not only with an encrypted, signed message, but it also follows other handshaking protocols to the letter.
The specific keys and protocols for the electric meter were installed in the device prior to installation.
Now, as for consumer devices where the consumer will want to access the device from his phone, or for devices which will need to change who they talk to over the life of the device, well, that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Patent troll borrows money from a bank at very high interest rates or sells junk bonds to raise money to file lawsuits. The loan will be a "balloon" loan or the bonds will be zero-coupon bonds, so the patent troll won't have any expenses for several years.
If he fails, the bank or bondholders are left holding the bag.
If he wins, the bank or bond-holders make a tidy profit.
Do like Hollywood does and form a new legal entity for every lawsuit.
If it takes X amount of evil to do something, and a sane, calculating person with that much evil does the deed, it's fair to describe the act as "pure evil," even if it is NOT fair to describe it as "extremely evil."
If it takes 10X amount of evil to do something if you are sane but only 9X amount to do something if you are mentally ill, and a person who is "9X evil, but mentally ill" does the deed, it's fair to describe it as "extremely evil" but not "pure evil" - if it weren't for the mental illness the person would not have done the deed, as he wasn't evil enough to do the act absent the mental illness.
Rape and murder are extremely evil. Financial crimes are much lower on the numerical evil scale, but, as another poster pointed out, they are frequently done by people who are sane, rational, and who are driven to act by evil (greed, usually) alone, hence the act can be described as a "pure evil action."
Nothing shuts up a former employer giving an unfair bad reference than a signed cease and desist letter from an employment lawyer sent to them, their boss, their bosses boss and all the way up the chain to the CEO. I have done this and they give me good references now.
Thanks to the threat of lawsuits - real or imagined - some employers no longer give "good" or "bad" references - at least not officially. They only give dates of employment, final salary, and eligibility for rehire.
A/C's out-of-the-box reply above, Easy - Play to there Ego [sic], may work but assuming it doesn't, you have few options.
The obvious ones include: * Quit quietly * Document the hell out of everything then quit, and provide the reasons in a professionally-written resignation letter to not only this person's boss, but his boss's boss. Provide copies of the documentation. * Assuming you want to keep your job or at least come away vindicated, hire an employment lawyer and follow his advice. Warning: Only do this if you are prepared for a years-long, unpleasant, expensive battle. * Seek other opportunities within the organization.
I'm taking it on faith that talking to this person or to management really won't work. I'm also assuming that there is no intermediary that the fellow employee respects who can intervene on your behalf. If I'm wrong, if there is such a person, consider asking him to help.
The loan-payout portion is fixed if it's a fixed-rate home loan. The insurance, property taxes, neighborhood association fees, and other costs most people think about when they talk about a "house payment" are typically variable. If the dollar suffers inflation, or if the local taxing authority just raises taxes for whatever reason, your total payment will go up.
Fiat currency does have one advantage over bitcoin: It is almost always legal tender for paying current and past-due domestic debts, including tax debts.
There are of couse exceptions - minor coinage is typically legal tender for only small amounts, a particular bank note can by de-monitized like India just did, an entire currency can be scrapped as Zimbabwe did a few years ago, and some highly-regulated countries have government-run "hard currency stores" for tourists that won't accept local currency (e.g. the old Soviet Union).
A useful currency is stable for the time you hold it.
If you are a merchant that takes bitcoin but sells it for local currency by the end of the day, you need intra-day stability.
If you are holding it as a currency for days or weeks at a time, you need short-term stability.
If you are holding it as a currency for longer, you need medium- or long-term stability.
On the other hand, if you are buying it as an investment, like a stock, or as a speculative "investment" (aka "gambling") then in addition to a long-term upward trend, you want instability so you can benefit from dollar-cost averaging as you buy and "dollar cost averaging in reverse" - selling a fixed amount of BC every day - when you eventually sell.
Of course, if you are a day trader who depends on intra-day changes in value, you want short-term instability and either a knack for timing the market right or a dose of good luck to keep from coming out in the red that day.
DO set the firmware to disallow charging beyond a known-safe level and/or slow down the charging rate to a slow, known-safe speed.
DO throw up the "this device has been recalled" alert every time the user wakes the machine up.
If you must, disable non-emergency calling and throttle the bluetooth and WiFi to painfully slow speeds to encourage people to stop using the device.
But don't set it to brick when the power runs out.
Why not?
If Aunt Jane or Uncle Bill lost his phone the day before the recall was announced, when he finds it he'll need to be able to plug it in and get his photos off of it.
And I'd argue, due to the prevalence of people thinking like you do, the current high risk investments out there are probably better than the low risk do to their lack of popularity (it's a buyers market)
You have a point - but only to an extent.
A high-risk investment is inappropriate for someone who can't afford to lose all or most of their investment. A $10 share in a particular penny stock may be a good "gambler's bet" in that if trades costs zero and I could put $10 in a thousand different penny stocks in a broad spectrum of the market, I would probably get lucky on a few of them and at the end of 5 years I might be in a similar position - or maybe a slightly better one - than if I had invested in blue-chip stocks over the same market segments. However, with penny stocks, trading costs per dollar invested are typically higher, and there is also a higher "market manipulation/pump-and-dump" risk that works against the long-term investor.
Investing in single oil wells, single pieces of real estate, single film projects, etc. tend to be more like non-blue-chip stocks than blue-chip stocks, and are not for the investor who can't afford to "lose it all." Note: Even quality investments can totally fail - we only have to witness the bankruptcy of some one-time-Dow-30 stocks for evidence. However, it is far less common and there tends to be enough warning that investors can get out without losing their entire investment.
I still contend that investments which have a significant likelihood of losing most or all of your investment without having enough lead-time to see a total failure on the horizon and pull out is a gamble and is best avoided unless you are in it for the thrill of the risk. If you are in it for the thrill of a risk, you may find better entertainment value in Vegas.
While you can argue that the last one [speculative movie-making] is technically an investment - the IRS treats it as such - it's hard to argue that it isn't much less risky than any other not-truly-random form of gambling, such as poker or sports betting. In other words, it's reasonable to say that even if it is technically an investment, for all but the most studied expert investor, it is a gamble.
Or in this case, you may lose $300. High risk investments with tremendous upside and little downside aren't gambling. They are investments.
So, buying $300 in lottery tickets isn't gambling? What about investing $300 for a very-small-percentage stake in a co-op that will produce "the next Hollywood blockbuster (we hope)?"
While you can argue that the last two are technically investments - the IRS treats them as such - it's hard to argue that they aren't much less risky than any other not-truly-random form of gambling, such as poker or sports betting. In other words, it's reasonable to say that even if they are technically investments, for all but the most studied expert investor, these are a gamble.
Slashdot Mirror
Pics from the studies that reproduce these results or it might as well have never happened.
Okay, I don't need the pics, just the reproducible results.
It sounds like they just divided women into two sub-groups, one of which has a zero risk of getting cervical cancer.
The overall risk of cancer for women is still the same.
Depending on what you are using the statistic for (e.g. assessing your own risk of getting cervical cancer, large-scale targeted prevention efforts, allocating government health-care funding based on overall population, etc.), you may find the new set of statistics more useful than the old one, or vice-versa.
But there were two particular days in 1945 when that wasn't the case.
Problems like this have existed for decades or more and we know how to prevent it.
It's a business decision whether to invest in prevention, mitigation, both, or neither.
The "foreign government cyber-warfare" problem is less well-understood and is ever-evolving.
----
For what it's worth, most "mother nature" problems can be handled by having adequate redundancy and/or backup systems and, for most users, having an expected service level that allows for the grid (or internet, or other utility) to be offline for several seconds at a time while backup systems kick in. A state-level attacker is likely to be aware of the backup systems and attack both simultaneously.
Indictments in 3...2...1...
The only question is will that be days, weeks, months, or years?
Why go into engineering when management or sales pays double for less work?
Because, if you are in a good work environment in a good company, it's a whole lot more fun to follow your heart than to follow your wallet.
For those whose hearts lead them to engineering and who are fortunate enough to have a good work environment in a good company, there's plenty of reasons to stay rather than go with a less-work/higher-paying position in management or sales.
On the other hand, if your heart isn't in engineering, you probably shouldn't be there. If it is in engineering but you are in a lousy work environment or lousy company, change employers, not careers.
I tell teenagers who want to go into IT or computers for a career to only do it if they really want to. If they are doing it for the high salaries, they are taking a big risk.
You will still have a need for low-level customer-service work and high-level design/research work in 20 years.
The mid-level stuff that your run-of-the-mill programmer and system administrator does today will be largely be automated.
Hopefully, new, fun, decent-paying tech jobs that use similar parts of the brain that we haven't even thought of will fill the void.
I call for a mandatory kill switch on Regulators! is funnier.
Browsers should present a "generic" capabilities list to web sites unless the user white-lists that site to receive some or all of the "real" capabilities. An online video-gaming site may need to know if I can play a GPU-intensive online game through the web browser, but very few other sites need to know.
For example, "generic capabilities" would be:
Screen size would be "small" for tablets, phones, and small notebooks, or "normal" for everything else. Pixel density would not be disclosed.
"List of fonts" would be the most common "web fonts" in the main language of the operating system.
As for the rest, they would be shown as "not disclosed."
If you have a short-range radio like bluetooth on your PC and phone, it should be trivial to monitor for a loss of connectivity.
The hard part is that it would drain both your phone's battery and, if it was a laptop running on battery, its battery.
In a more perfect world, a lawyer's ethical obligations would preclude him from taking on a case that is "obviously frivolous."
If a judge found that a case was "obviously frivolous" then the judge would be encouraged to fine the lawyer personally and would be required to refer the lawyer to the state bar, which would likely fine him an additional amount equal to what his client paid him for that case. Lawyers who got many such referrals relative to their peers (lawyers with similar caseloads and specializations) would see judges scrutinize their future cases much more closely, and those with huge numbers of referrals would see their license suspended or otherwise sanctioned.
In a more perfect world.
Not gonna happen. Sigh.
... use crystallographic authentication and limit what can talk to what.
Obviously, the cryptographic authentication on my spell-checking IoT device wasn't working right and the device got hacked. GRRR.
... use crystallographic authentication and limit what can talk to what.
For example, if a "black box" at my electric company needs to talk to my electric meter over a public IP network (why? I don't know, but suppose it does), put a firewall on the electric meter that won't even acknowledge an connection unless it is encrypted specifically for that particular electric meter and signed by that particular "black box." Likewise, the "black box" will not continue the conversation unless the electric meter responds not only with an encrypted, signed message, but it also follows other handshaking protocols to the letter.
The specific keys and protocols for the electric meter were installed in the device prior to installation.
Now, as for consumer devices where the consumer will want to access the device from his phone, or for devices which will need to change who they talk to over the life of the device, well, that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Patent troll borrows money from a bank at very high interest rates or sells junk bonds to raise money to file lawsuits. The loan will be a "balloon" loan or the bonds will be zero-coupon bonds, so the patent troll won't have any expenses for several years.
If he fails, the bank or bondholders are left holding the bag.
If he wins, the bank or bond-holders make a tidy profit.
Do like Hollywood does and form a new legal entity for every lawsuit.
If it takes X amount of evil to do something, and a sane, calculating person with that much evil does the deed, it's fair to describe the act as "pure evil," even if it is NOT fair to describe it as "extremely evil."
If it takes 10X amount of evil to do something if you are sane but only 9X amount to do something if you are mentally ill, and a person who is "9X evil, but mentally ill" does the deed, it's fair to describe it as "extremely evil" but not "pure evil" - if it weren't for the mental illness the person would not have done the deed, as he wasn't evil enough to do the act absent the mental illness.
Rape and murder are extremely evil.
Financial crimes are much lower on the numerical evil scale, but, as another poster pointed out, they are frequently done by people who are sane, rational, and who are driven to act by evil (greed, usually) alone, hence the act can be described as a "pure evil action."
Nothing shuts up a former employer giving an unfair bad reference than a signed cease and desist letter from an employment lawyer sent to them, their boss, their bosses boss and all the way up the chain to the CEO. I have done this and they give me good references now.
Thanks to the threat of lawsuits - real or imagined - some employers no longer give "good" or "bad" references - at least not officially. They only give dates of employment, final salary, and eligibility for rehire.
A/C's out-of-the-box reply above, Easy - Play to there Ego [sic] , may work but assuming it doesn't, you have few options.
The obvious ones include:
* Quit quietly
* Document the hell out of everything then quit, and provide the reasons in a professionally-written resignation letter to not only this person's boss, but his boss's boss. Provide copies of the documentation.
* Assuming you want to keep your job or at least come away vindicated, hire an employment lawyer and follow his advice. Warning: Only do this if you are prepared for a years-long, unpleasant, expensive battle.
* Seek other opportunities within the organization.
I'm taking it on faith that talking to this person or to management really won't work. I'm also assuming that there is no intermediary that the fellow employee respects who can intervene on your behalf. If I'm wrong, if there is such a person, consider asking him to help.
But my house payment will be $1000 US dollars
The loan-payout portion is fixed if it's a fixed-rate home loan. The insurance, property taxes, neighborhood association fees, and other costs most people think about when they talk about a "house payment" are typically variable. If the dollar suffers inflation, or if the local taxing authority just raises taxes for whatever reason, your total payment will go up.
Fiat currency does have one advantage over bitcoin: It is almost always legal tender for paying current and past-due domestic debts, including tax debts.
There are of couse exceptions - minor coinage is typically legal tender for only small amounts, a particular bank note can by de-monitized like India just did, an entire currency can be scrapped as Zimbabwe did a few years ago, and some highly-regulated countries have government-run "hard currency stores" for tourists that won't accept local currency (e.g. the old Soviet Union).
A useful currency is stable for the time you hold it.
If you are a merchant that takes bitcoin but sells it for local currency by the end of the day, you need intra-day stability.
If you are holding it as a currency for days or weeks at a time, you need short-term stability.
If you are holding it as a currency for longer, you need medium- or long-term stability.
On the other hand, if you are buying it as an investment, like a stock, or as a speculative "investment" (aka "gambling") then in addition to a long-term upward trend, you want instability so you can benefit from dollar-cost averaging as you buy and "dollar cost averaging in reverse" - selling a fixed amount of BC every day - when you eventually sell.
Of course, if you are a day trader who depends on intra-day changes in value, you want short-term instability and either a knack for timing the market right or a dose of good luck to keep from coming out in the red that day.
It's all those fan-boys looking for the Star Wars Holiday Special from 1978.
DO set the firmware to disallow charging beyond a known-safe level and/or slow down the charging rate to a slow, known-safe speed.
DO throw up the "this device has been recalled" alert every time the user wakes the machine up.
If you must, disable non-emergency calling and throttle the bluetooth and WiFi to painfully slow speeds to encourage people to stop using the device.
But don't set it to brick when the power runs out.
Why not?
If Aunt Jane or Uncle Bill lost his phone the day before the recall was announced, when he finds it he'll need to be able to plug it in and get his photos off of it.
And I'd argue, due to the prevalence of people thinking like you do, the current high risk investments out there are probably better than the low risk do to their lack of popularity (it's a buyers market)
You have a point - but only to an extent.
A high-risk investment is inappropriate for someone who can't afford to lose all or most of their investment. A $10 share in a particular penny stock may be a good "gambler's bet" in that if trades costs zero and I could put $10 in a thousand different penny stocks in a broad spectrum of the market, I would probably get lucky on a few of them and at the end of 5 years I might be in a similar position - or maybe a slightly better one - than if I had invested in blue-chip stocks over the same market segments. However, with penny stocks, trading costs per dollar invested are typically higher, and there is also a higher "market manipulation/pump-and-dump" risk that works against the long-term investor.
Investing in single oil wells, single pieces of real estate, single film projects, etc. tend to be more like non-blue-chip stocks than blue-chip stocks, and are not for the investor who can't afford to "lose it all." Note: Even quality investments can totally fail - we only have to witness the bankruptcy of some one-time-Dow-30 stocks for evidence. However, it is far less common and there tends to be enough warning that investors can get out without losing their entire investment.
I still contend that investments which have a significant likelihood of losing most or all of your investment without having enough lead-time to see a total failure on the horizon and pull out is a gamble and is best avoided unless you are in it for the thrill of the risk. If you are in it for the thrill of a risk, you may find better entertainment value in Vegas.
That last paragraph should read
While you can argue that the last one [speculative movie-making] is technically an investment - the IRS treats it as such - it's hard to argue that it isn't much less risky than any other not-truly-random form of gambling, such as poker or sports betting. In other words, it's reasonable to say that even if it is technically an investment, for all but the most studied expert investor, it is a gamble.
Or in this case, you may lose $300. High risk investments with tremendous upside and little downside aren't gambling. They are investments.
So, buying $300 in lottery tickets isn't gambling? What about investing $300 for a very-small-percentage stake in a co-op that will produce "the next Hollywood blockbuster (we hope)?"
While you can argue that the last two are technically investments - the IRS treats them as such - it's hard to argue that they aren't much less risky than any other not-truly-random form of gambling, such as poker or sports betting. In other words, it's reasonable to say that even if they are technically investments, for all but the most studied expert investor, these are a gamble.