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.

Congratulations, you're not far off. Humans use music as a group bonding tool, and once we form groups (goths, emos, punks, indie...) with close-knit social bonds, the need for the music is no longer as strong and it fades over time.

I actually think Stroustrup's introductory textbook does this quite well. He clearly separates out the simple drills that get you familiar with syntax and assigns more complex exercises, and frequently relates it back to real world operations.

My own servers have not been down at all in the last few years.

Well, thanks for that entirely statistically irrelevant anecdote.

Giving out free champagne is fun until the hangover kicks in. The worst thing about Chavez dying now is that it will cement his cult, because all the good things are conveniently coming to an end after his death.

And your solution is?

And you know that they knew their status at the time how?