Beat me to it! My first thought when I saw the headline was "Golgafrincham B Ark".

The other side of that coin is that business goes in cycles; even fundamentally sound companies don't return bigger profits quarter, after quarter, after quarter.

Case in point: personal computing manufacturers typically have big Q4s. Companies spend the last of the current year's budget, and consumers buy laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc. for themselves or others for Christmas. Q1, by comparison, is always quiet; something that a significant percentage of shareholders always seem surprised by.

CFO asks CEO: "What happens if we invest in developing our people and then they leave us?"

CEO: "What happens if we don't, and they stay?"

The ticket ToS specifically forbids any posting of match content. In fact you cannot bring any dedicated "audio, visual, or audio-visual" equipment into the ground. You can bring your mobile phone with you but, if you use it to capture any of the action, nothing you capture "may be published or otherwise made available to any third parties including, without limitation, via social networking sites."

The copyright angle is pretty moot. By buying your ticket, you've signed up to these terms and conditions.

TFA was clear enough. Licensed taxi drivers (certainly in most EU countries) are expected to demonstrate a level of competence and suitability to operate as a commercial driver; e.g. must not have a criminal record, must pass an advanced driving test, must pass a medical, must have proper commercial vehicle insurance, etc. And it is illegal to transport passengers for money without a commercial license and commercial vehicle insurance.

Uber's position is that anybody who downloads their app can call themselves a taxi driver and, if they don't meet the licensing standards, well it's the drivers's problem not Uber's. That is disingenuous. Uber are operating as a "driver for hire" service but trying to avoid any of the responsibilities being a "driver for hire" operator. Uber could easily resolve this by verifying that anybody signing up with them has a valid commercial license and insurance. But they seem strangely reluctant to do that. That's neither good competition nor good for the consumer.

Cynicism yes. But healthy skepticism is always good!

In my experience Gartner have some good people - recognised subject matter experts - and if they are working in topic areas important to you then the reports are worth it. As mentioned by others, the reports carry weight with PHBs and if you can show that Gartner agrees with what you are proposing it can be a huge help. Of course, not everybody is at that level. YMMV.

For the same reason, the Hype Cycle is useful for positioning new technologies. It's interesting that TFA's title is actually very misleading. The Gartner graphic shows cloud computing entering the "Trough of Disillusionment" (where reality bites the folks who drank the kool-aid) and not "going mainstream".

No offense, but you don't know much about the pharmaceutical industry. Ben Goldacre's book Bad Pharma is a good place to start. And this article explains how, contrary to being great innovators, the big pharmaceuticals are running down their own R&D in favour of cherry picking the work of small biotech outfits and publicly funded researchers and rebranding it as their own.

The funny thing is that new features (like closures) have been appearing much more regularly since Oracle took over. The author of TFA seems to forget that after Sun released Java 6 (in 2006) there wasn't major release for years, and Java developers despaired as useful proposed new features got mired in the JCP.

Since Oracle took over we've had two major releases - Java 7 (in 2011), and Java 8 (in 2014) - as well a multiple minor releases. Java 9 is targeted for 2016. It's hardly a language that is stagnating.

And they don't learn anything that you don't know (or don't want them to know).

Exactly. You would think that a self-proclaimed "Strategic Developer" would know that! :-)

You don't have to imagine. They are already working on it.

I have a Sony reader too, which I still use and like a lot (I much prefer e-ink displays to backlit displays). But I never used the software that came with it. I got bitten before by the software that came with a Sony MP3 player which was a bloated piece of crap (I need a service running all the time just to occasionally copy music onto the player - really?)

So I used Calibre from day one and, when the Sony eventually dies, I'll continue to use Calibre with whatever replaces it. There's a lot to be said for having the software independent of the device.

Yes indeed. In my current job, we are currently looking at cloud providers. We'll be watching this case (and the appeal) with great interest!

Eh, no. You seem to have missed the point. Those buyers got something they definitely *did not* want as a result of aggressive price cutting by the retailers. The mantra of "cheaper is always better for the consumer" is simply not true.