It was in fact quite common at one time. Kaiser Wilhelm (Victoria's grandson) was an Admiral of the British Navy and Colenel-In-Chief of the 1st Royal Dragoons and exchanges and friendships were common enough that meetings between opposing officers after engagements in the early days of the war were often friendly reunions.

I find it a bit odd, because this is stuff that's been around for ages. You can buy commercial packages off the shelf for many instruments, particularly piano, and they sound fantastic.

Essentially, yes. This is seriously embarrassing but from an operational point of view, barely note-worthy. They'll spend more money hedging liabilities. The real impact of this is reputational (and for the person responsible, who is now Executive Director in Charge of Applying for New Careers).

Actually, Israel has a serious problem, and they need to come to an accommodation sooner rather than later. The problem is, they can't manage their internal disputes to achieve significant action.

The problem is that the Palestinians have a significantly higher birth rate and Jews will effectively be a minority in the not-too-distant future. At that point, they lose democratic legitimacy, so they need to come up with a satisfactory settlement before that happens.

You make a good point. For most people, the real value of insurance is covering catastrophes - not in a Katrina sense, but house burning down and destroying everything kind of way. If you've ever added up the total replacement cost of every item you own, you'll know it is a terrifying number.

You're assuming all people who take out warranties use them to their full coverage. It's well known that in home/contents insurance a massive portion of covered events are never claimed. It's not unknown for people to have their house burnt down and they don't claim on their insurance. No, I don't understand it either.

I'm not talking about race as such, just the simple fact that in a company of hundreds of people, finding one who was born or brought up within a couple of miles is like finding hens teeth. That seems odd to me. I don't blame anyone in particular for this state of affairs, but once you recognise it I think there's an argument to be made for addressing it.

Yeah, actually I don't care that much. I work in central London and it's painfully obvious that none of our workforce come from local communities. I'd be quite happy to see us lower our hiring standards just a little to bring some of these people in. I don't believe for a second they're actually worse - I think they just don't know how to play the corporate game.

I agree it is user error, but I feel very strongly that this is the fault of Excel, not the user. My job is effectively being a professional spreadsheet driver and you eventually learn to become rigid about range checking, row counting, balancing totals, etc, because the structure of Excel makes these errors inevitable.

Well, no. There may be a pay-off but it's unlikely you'd ever trade anyone else's money again. And if the risk controls are done right, then such actions are entirely transparent to the SEC.

Traders have limits they cannot (well, should not) breach. And normally, you'd hedge your exposure as well, so you're not just exposed to the stock going up in smoke.

If your risk controls work properly, you treat unauthorised wins as severely as you do losses. Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen. However, it does happen more often than you think - just with no attendant publicity.

Actually, once you strip out the effects of child mortality and the violence, healthy lifespan through history is not much different. Nowadays we get an extra ten-twenty years through geriatric medicine, but if you were a healthy 30yo back then you had more or less the same chance of ending up a 70yo as you do now.

It's simpler than that. We understand very little about the internal dynamics of the North Korean government, but you can be fairly sure of one thing: Kim does not have the option of picking up the phone and asking the US or anyone else for a quiet chat. He's riding a tiger, and he has to ride the line between being killed by one of his people and starting a war where he'll be killed by one of ours. As for our response, it's the best way to manage it. NK would not take kindly to a short sharp shock and they have the manpower to be a bloody nuisance - fighting them would be Japan 1945, not Iraq 2003.

In addition to the other replies, presumably a major use case for this technology is stupid tourists, who rarely go swimming during major storms.