It can be both, GP likely does not know what either word means.

The locusts!! There will be plenty of locusts for the frogs.

I was going to say "you must be new here", but you have a four digit ID.

511s.... pffft. I upgraded to 550s 35 years ago and never looked back.

The economic benefits can add to safety.

I think most will agree that at some point, cars controlled by a computer will be statistically safer than cars controlled by a human. That point might have been reached a year ago, it might be reached next year, it might be reached in 10 years. For the sake of this discussion lets assume that point was reached today.

If I own a trucking company, I know I can make my trucks safer by adding a self driving module. Maybe this module costs $50,000. If I have to pay for a driver to sit in the seat as a backup anyway, I may decide that I can not afford to add $50,000 to the cost of every truck. So I may decide to go with the cheaper option of having the less safe human controlling the truck full time. If my $50,000 module replaces the driver, then I have a financial incentive to go with the safer option.

If this laptop was worth anywhere near that amount, he should surely have a full disk backup running every hour. Just spin up a virtual machine of the laptop from the backup image, should take about 10 minutes. He can work off the VM from any computer with an RDP client to get him through the day. Then restore the backup to the laptop, should take a few hours depending on size and speed.

I'm sorry. Random price increases / decreases happen all the time. All businesses have to deal with them. Smart businesses plan for them. Every farmer worth his salt knows that sometime in the next five years the price of diesel will shoot up for some reason. In another year the price of the grain he is selling will fall for some reason. He may not know what year or what budget item will cause him trouble, but he will budget for SOMETHING to go wrong.

Should't the people writing budgets for scientific projects be smart enough to add some margin, just like everyone else does?

Are there not odd peer reviewing rules for Journals? Actual question, not trying to be sarcastic or flippant. I have no experience, I am just assuming there would be.

Good thing I did not read your post before I did exactly that.

Right there with you on the wrong part, but there is nothing so trivial that it will not be worried about on slashdot.

If it were just a matter of being hard to determine, then roughly half of all such projects would come in under budget. I don't know what the stats are, but I am going to go out on a limb and guess that is not the case.

Don't be so sure, your mother-in-law might be 1337 H4x0r

The reconfiguration to enable numeric keypad is fairly minimal. You have to press the NumLock key. Then it works.

You can stop playing if you are loosing. Why should they be obligated to play with you if you are not obligated to play with them? If you stop playing does that "change the odds"?

I don't think it is the dirty and sharp part that most people are afraid of. I think it is the last sentence of the summary that scares off most people