Agh.

We've had a number of problems caused by contractors who behave like naughty children in this fashion. So much so that our briefing to people let into the machine room (our estates people will just let contractors in and leave them unsupervised!) includes "if you accidentally hit the big red button (that has a cover over it these days because it is right where you'd expect a lightswitch to be, and we've been stung by that before) or pour your marguerita into the UPS stack, yank out a power cable because you've climbed up a rack ratehr than getting the ladder*, or ANYTHING, do not try to turn stuff back on. Let us know what happened. We are aware that accidents happen and there will be no recriminations for honesty."

* or the guy with a hacksaw in his hand who says: "whilst I was being careful and not sawing through your fibre runs, I noticed that someone had sawn through your fibre run. Honest." It really is a bloody circus.

It is cool, but there's wiggle-room in the debate :-)

The device extracts energy from the wind, and using only that, the vehicle *as a whole* progresses downwind faster than the windspeed.

The cunning part is the prop; because it's rotating, the blades themselves aren't moving directly downwind (well, considered instantaneously, they're moving across it), and that's the "trick" of it. It's a very clever idea indeed.

That is not the case. The wording of the caution is that if you do not mention anything when questioned that you later use in your defence, that may prejudice your defence.

That is to say: a prosecuting barrister is, these days, within their rights to sneer and imply to the jury that what you've said in that regard was clearly made up after the fact.

That depends on the student. Chalk and talk works well for particular learning styles. There's also plenty of evidence that transcription assists recall for lots of people. You mention "listening, thinking, and asking questions" - what you really want is for students to be in a high state of alertness rather than switched off. Different people achieve that different ways, so don't pooh-pooh the idea out-of-hand.

What would be the relative velocity of a cosmic-ray-generated black hole to the earth, as compared to one that may or may not come out of the LHC?

So, the chances depend on how long such a relatively stationary (that is, oscillating in the earth, effectively) black hole would take to evaporate before it actually managed to consume much mass - which does involve it coming fairly close to matter, in itself no mean feat - but the two numbers you quote aren't enough to do that calculation, I think.

(I'm not a crank, by the way. The LHC won't destroy the planet. But counter-arguments need to be well-thought-out and not more woolly nonsense.)

The university in question has been hauled over the coals in the past after laptops containing confidential information were sold. It's not the only one.

(That was about a decade ago; our DPO still has to make regular court appearances to update on the process of contacting the people affected and mitigaion of the damage.)

Encrypted laptops, etc, are all well and good; however, there'salso a cost in convenience when someone can't get at their data because rather than slap it on some robust bit of network storage that's properly backed up, they've kept it on their desktop for the last three months and everything has gone up in smoke.

The bonus is that the data stays on-site where it can be properly curated. And doesn't wind up on J.Random User's home laptop that then gets nicked going through customs.

The organisation I work at (it's a university) spends about a million quid a year because people fail to turn off PCs overnight. The running costs of your cheap Dell POS are much higher; the power consumption too.

For clerical and administrative staff, we can put 7-14 virtualised desktops onto a single box/blade - more with non-whole-stack virtualisation or terminal services. We put our heat generation in a few places, we do get better utilisation. We also export pictures of our data to users, not the data itself, which is quite a bonus.

The downsides are what you'd expect: mostly, we have fewer spindles to deliver storage to the desktops (this is the biggest issue we face, I think); multimedia is okay-ish; for heavy computational users there aren't really gains to be had.

It's certainly got its place. Anyone selling you a "one size fits all" for your organisation probably doesn't understand your organisation, but this isn't not a completely incredible approach.

In this case it was Mandy. "Otherwise respectable"?!

I'm not sure you know quite what "-" means.

You don't rely on RAID to avoid data loss; you rely on it as a first line in providing continuity. We run backups of large systems here, but we tend to do other things too: synchronous live mirroring between sites of the critical data. And beter system design. There are some systems where, whilst we _could_ go back to tape (or VTL) at a pinch, having to do so would be a disaster in itself.

We're designing systems that permit rapid service recovery (the most live critical data) and a second tier of online recovery to get the rest back. We just can't afford the downtime.

Double-spindle failures on RAID systems are just one of those things that you _will_ see. Deciding whether a system deserves some other measure of redundancy is mostly an actuarial, rather than a technical, decision.

Since what you have written can be read in the UK, a libel case against you can still be brought here. That's the first broken part.

The second issue is that UK libel law does not observe the use/mention distinction: so the NYT article linked, although it is quoting what Singh wrote, is also actionable.

Our libel law is bloody awful.

The point of this is that the security vetting process is intended to air anything that you might be embarrassed about with the vetters (and by extension the state machinery). If they already know, (and you'd be surprised how much they _do_ know by the time the interviews actually happen) and you know they know, the idea is that the information can't be used to blackmail you. For most low-level security clearances the only way you fail is by omitting stuff.

[[[
What this means

The other overwrite patterns actually produced results as low as 36.08% (+/- 0.24). Being that the distribution is based on a binomial choice, the chance of guessing the prior value is 50%. That is, if you toss a coin, you have a 50% chance of correctly choosing the value. In many instances, using a MFM to determine the prior value written to the hard drive was less successful than a simple coin toss.
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I hate to say it, but anyone who'd claim this clearly has no clue what they're talking about. Because otherwise "pick the opposite of what the MFM says" is a viable algorithm that's about 60% accurate.