The argument you made was that money woes are caused by people spending poorly

Not woes, BUT worries, and the argument I made is to counter the claim that he removed all money worries from his staff, AND spending poorly is just one of the examples of additional spending It doesn't matter necessarily if it's "poor" spending or not, only that it is more spending, as even people spending within their needs will spend more, and therefore, there will sometimes be money worries regardless. It looks like the dramatic generalizations here are coming from you....

But even I would be pleased if my CEO cut his pay by 93% and used the money to bump my salary up even a modest amount.

I never suggested any employees wouldn't be pleased by the bump up. Only that most of them will probably still have money worries occasionally, as their spending is likely to increase ----- a salary bump up does not make it so people no longer need to budget or think long and carefully about available choices, to avoid problems.

The Robots.txt is just a suggestion, if the blocking was in there MS could just ignore it. I suspect the issue is that Google is detecting and blocking Microsoft's web crawlers, either deliberately or as collateral damage from trying to stop hostile bots.

Duckduckgo is a meta search engine, they don't actually build their own index but create an index based on results from other search engines. Besides, I'm guessing the issue isn't that engines can't index Youtube at all, but they can't build a good index because they keep getting blocked.

They rarely, if ever, produce results that are even vaguely related to what I'm searching for. They don't have market share because THEY SUCK.

Exactly. I find that Google produces better results for searches relating to Microsoft products.

Some time back when Microsoft was advertising their website the showed Google results side-by-side with Bing (with the intent that Bing would give more useful results), I tried the side-by-side website and the Bing side did not even load.

If this keeps up, there may someday be a huge ring around Saturn.

Not directly. Not as an individual. But diverting resources to quackery is bad for society; not so bad in this case that it's high on my list as "health supplements", but not totally benign either.

That's speculation. Feasibility is no guarantee of performance.

I read the attached article, and there were two specific complaints cited. The first was security, which is a non-functional requirement; that could well be a failure of the customer to do his homework on requirements but presumably a competent and honest vendor could have done a better job on security. It's often the vendor's job to anticipate customer needs, particularly in projects of the type customers don't necessarily have experience with.

The other complaint is that the curriculum wasn't completely implemented. If the vendor failed to deliver something it agreed to, that's purely the vendor's fault.

Sometimes bad vendors happen to good customers. Bad vendors happen more often to bad customers, but every project involves taking a calculated risk.

Well, until the details of how the contract was awarded and how the vendor failed have been thoroughly investigated, it's premature to fire anyone.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for accountability and decisiveness, but picking someone plausible and throwing them under the bus isn't accountability. In fact that may actually shield whoever was responsible.

Even if this "large increase" existed, it would not be evidence of causality. But the city leaders say there has been little impact on jobs: City manager Todd Cutts says there has been no impact on sales tax or property tax, and no change in the number of business licenses issued. ... “We’re not seeing the big benefits that proponents said we would because so few people are affected,” said Guppy. “And at the same time, it’s not having a ripple effect through the economy. It just affects so few jobs, it’s not having much impact.”

I'd qualify that and say NASA decided not to spend (precious) fuel on "parking" it in a more stable orbit. But the trade-off would be either a shorter "active" mission or observations not as close to the planet.

Obviously getting the most science from the probe trumps other issues such as museum pieces for great great great grandchildren. I'd slap them myself if they shorted current science to "save" the probe for future museums.

Note that they sometimes decide on a "controlled" crash to reduce biological contamination risk to a planet or moon. But I don't think that's the case here.

Mariners went to Mars also. Thus, "direction" doesn't appear to be the criteria. I was just using a quick and dirty example anyhow.

Pearson made promises of rainbows and unicorns and delivered a sick donkey with a MLP tattoo on it.

Between you and Hognoxious, this thread is so full of win.

+1 funny

"Hope" is never rational. It is an evolutionary mechanism that keeps people going in two circumstances: 1) Then they have grossly miss-estimated the actual risk to them (a very common problem, see for example all the morons that are afraid of terrorism but are willing to drive a car), and 2) when most are going to die, but a tiny number may be enough to keep the genetic group going.

What is rational is actual risk management with real numbers. Your 1 in 1 Billion is not relevant, as the change that you will be killed by a freak accident soon is already far, far higher and hence completely supersedes that small chance. As such it is not rational at all to even consider it a possibility, except in a theoretical sense. Life is messy, and assuming that very rare things will never, ever happen to you is the only rational course of action. Anything else opens you up to scams and prevents you from taking control of your situation. That is also called dysfunctional.

People are a) stupid and b) very much afraid of death. Hence they are easy marks for this scam.

The reality of things is that there is no suitable cryo-technology at this time that allows even reasonable-quality freezing of anything much larger than a single cell. Crystals will form, it takes far too long and storage temperatures may be far too high for long-term storage. Also, the person is dead at the time this is done which may well be to late for any recovery. The other problem is that for the foreseeable future, cryo-revival will be infeasible and after that exceptionally expensive. Why would anybody revive strongly damaged legally dead people when making new ones is so easy and there are already too many anyways? And then there is the little problem that anybody revived will be displaced in time, with nobody they knew still alive.

This whole thing is just one of the tributes the time-honored tradition of separating stupid people from their money.

Only in Euclidean geometry. In other geometries (e.g. in lp =/=2 space or in a gravity well if you want something physical) it doesn't hold.

That's what I love about maths: mathmeticians are an imaginitive bunch and capable of dreaming up truly crazy things.