Insurance exists solely to spread risk around to a large number of people, so that any single risk-adverse individual can pay a fee to mitigate risk that would otherwise bankrupt or kill him.
Insurance companies, by virtue of the fact that they have a large number of clients, can estimate their costs with a very high degree of certainty. They know that on average, 5% (for example) of their clients will suffer from heart attacks and the associated costs. I, on the other hand, can't estimate my own chance of a heart attack with as much certainty, so I am exposed to much more risk financially. The difference between my individual risk and the risk that the insurance company is exposed to (very little) is what creates value.
The ONLY reason it's EVER worth your while to own insurance is if you're completely unable to cover the costs of what the insurance covers out of your own pocket. Otherwise, if you choose to pay out of your own pocket in the event that something happens, the "something" might not happen at all, and you'll retain your money. The insurance company will never, ever, be able to beat the out-of-pocket price because they have overhead.
So if your insurance covers routine things that you could afford to pay for yourself, you are paying the cost of the medical bills, plus overhead, which is more than paying the medical bills alone.
The more likely a certain event is to happen, the less it pays to buy insurance for it.
I'm interested in games like Super Mario World that I can play with my wife. Something easy to learn and semi-cooperative. I don't typically play single player games except for Final Fantasy.
I guess the ideal system for me would be a hi-def Wii. The PS3 could handle that already, though, and it's generally a more useful machine.
Someone needs to compile a list of these companies, their owners, and their owners' phone numbers. There are a few things I'd like to try to sell to Christopher Cowart, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
"Good morning, Mr. Cowart. This morning I have a beautiful jogging stroller for sale that has fallen into disuse since my children have gotten older. No? Ok, talk to you this afternoon!"
One thing I'd love to see is for a console to open up their development process and create an App Store similar to the iPhone.
That's the future, especially if they made it simple (relatively) to develop for, say by including some 2-D API's.
The Linux portion of my PS3 is promising right now, but it took a loooong time from launch for all of the hardware to work (controllers, wireless, etc.) such that development on the system wouldn't be a pain.
I'm happy with a system that can display good games in high definition and take advantage of my home theater setup. The PS3 delivers that for me, but I'd like to see better games available. That said, Rock Band 2 gets a lot of play, and I really appreciate that the PS3 can play just about any media you throw at it.
The Wii has some fun games, and I have one of those too, but they look like absolute crap on a hi-def TV.
An updated Wii makes sense, a new PS3, no way. The PS3 has all the hardware I need -- just make some games already.
Maybe we could have one with large treads on it so that it could cover large distances quickly, and strong plating and explosive armor so that it would be immune to all but the largest projectile. And why stop at one operator? It could be large enough to hold a small crew of people who could operate the machine as a team, and possibly provide some sort of situational awareness/intelligence function.
All you'd need then is a turret with a large cannon on it and you'd have the perfect military land robot.
I know their audience isn't exclusively kids. That's obvious. However, it would be nice if they made a bit of effort toward that direction, because frankly, the less kid-friendly aspects of their newer movies are crap.
The folks at Pixar should be commended for their (mostly) quality work, but the whole "we're not making kids' movies" line is a steaming pile of shit when you're making movies featuring cute talking animals and selling the toys with happy meals.
I mean, really, how adult is a movie about a cute talking rat that wants to learn to cook? Is this the kind of cinema we all crave? When was the last time you got an Anthony Hopkins figure with a cheeseburger and fries?
And while I'm bashing Pixar, would it have killed them to shave about twenty minutes of scenes from Cars, Wall-E, and Ratatouille that don't serve the story at all? Finding Nemo has so many "peril" scenes I want to shoot myself by the end of the fiftieth act, and they're all scary for kids. That movie in particular would lose nothing if the violence were toned down and edited by someone who's not in love with every scene.
Be that as it may, there is an overall dearth of quality movies for families, and Pixar is the best it gets for now. What makes the situation really odd is that when anyone makes a movie for kids that's even close to being good, it's inevitably one of the highest grossing movies of the year. You'd think we'd be flooded with these things.
Hopefully they'll start making good movies for young children again.
There are about five or six quality movies made over the past twenty years that I can feel good about showing to my 2 and 4 year old without worrying about them picking up extremely bad behaviors, being scared to death by the obligatory and unnecessary "scary part", or being bored to tears. Other than Curious George and Charlotte's Web, they're all Pixar movies.
They love Cars, Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles, and both Toy Story movies, and I don't mind watching those more than once either. But lately it seems like Pixar is making movies to impress themselves while forgetting who their audience is.
What's relevant is getting the answer right. I'm not a farmer, but I can calculate the most efficient use of a barbed wire fence to cover multiple grazing areas.
Nobody thinks math is going to be relevant later on, and most of the time it's because it's not directly relevant. Trying to convince kids otherwise is a fool's game, because (like your example showed,) you end up looking more ridiculous than if you just made them memorize the damn multiplication tables.
What's important is that people understand enough of the procedure that they can apply the concept to new problems.
I doubt this is how the machines work, but to answer your question, assume thread A and B are voting machines trying to update a single vote count.
The three steps in doing that are:
1) Read the current value 2) Increment the current value 3) Store the result back in the memory location
If thread A and B read the current value at the same time, they will both increment that same value and both try to restore the new incremented-by-one value. So if current votes is 55, thread A and B will both simultaneously read that value, increment 55 to 56 and store that result. The end result is that a vote is dropped.
This problem can be solved any number of ways, and only the most boneheaded programmer would get bitten by such an obvious bug. I seriously doubt the problem with the voting machines is as simple as this.
Most people consider their own children to be intellectually gifted, even though they're not.
That doesn't mean, however, that NOBODY has gifted children. The grandparent may indeed be a safe driver. The pro's at these statistics (insurance companies) recognize that safe drivers do exist.
The only questions left are how much does being a safe driver reduce your risk, and can you drive safely enough to lower your risk of death to where it's safer to drive than to fly.
The other factor is time; most people spend significantly more time in a car than in a plane. What we really want to know is that if I have to get from New York to Los Angeles, which is a five hour flight or a three-four day car trip, what's the safest option if I'm in the "low risk" category as a driver? What are my chances of dying in a five hour flight vs. a 96 hour car trip?
These are the statistics I want to see. I'm sure that air travel is indeed safer, but let's compare apples to apples to really see how much.
For those who aren't aware of the technical terminology used in aviation, Vne is the velocity you must achieve for 80% of the passengers on a typical jet-liner to shit themselves.
It made me feel exactly the same way, but I liked the programming aspect. It removed the tedium of doing the same thing (in previous games, didn't you just wish you could teach the characters a strategy instead of being forced to repeat the same commands ad infinitum?) I even started wishing for more advanced gambits to prevent characters from doing stupid things given certain situations.
But maybe that's just me. I think there were still plenty of challenges in that game even with the gambits. Yiazmat was a particularly meaningful and involved battle.
Putting limits on powerful weapons is a great idea. I'd really like to see an RPG where strategy trumps leveling and items as the key to winning.
Slashdot Mirror
Insurance exists solely to spread risk around to a large number of people, so that any single risk-adverse individual can pay a fee to mitigate risk that would otherwise bankrupt or kill him.
Insurance companies, by virtue of the fact that they have a large number of clients, can estimate their costs with a very high degree of certainty. They know that on average, 5% (for example) of their clients will suffer from heart attacks and the associated costs. I, on the other hand, can't estimate my own chance of a heart attack with as much certainty, so I am exposed to much more risk financially. The difference between my individual risk and the risk that the insurance company is exposed to (very little) is what creates value.
The ONLY reason it's EVER worth your while to own insurance is if you're completely unable to cover the costs of what the insurance covers out of your own pocket. Otherwise, if you choose to pay out of your own pocket in the event that something happens, the "something" might not happen at all, and you'll retain your money. The insurance company will never, ever, be able to beat the out-of-pocket price because they have overhead.
So if your insurance covers routine things that you could afford to pay for yourself, you are paying the cost of the medical bills, plus overhead, which is more than paying the medical bills alone.
The more likely a certain event is to happen, the less it pays to buy insurance for it.
But password resets should be self service and at some point they are going to be.
No security problem there!
Uggggh.
Awesome. Mod parent up.
Me too. Although I couldn't say /. looks very, very good :-(
But at least you can say it's rendered properly.
I'm interested in games like Super Mario World that I can play with my wife. Something easy to learn and semi-cooperative. I don't typically play single player games except for Final Fantasy.
I guess the ideal system for me would be a hi-def Wii. The PS3 could handle that already, though, and it's generally a more useful machine.
Someone needs to compile a list of these companies, their owners, and their owners' phone numbers. There are a few things I'd like to try to sell to Christopher Cowart, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
"Good morning, Mr. Cowart. This morning I have a beautiful jogging stroller for sale that has fallen into disuse since my children have gotten older. No? Ok, talk to you this afternoon!"
One thing I'd love to see is for a console to open up their development process and create an App Store similar to the iPhone.
That's the future, especially if they made it simple (relatively) to develop for, say by including some 2-D API's.
The Linux portion of my PS3 is promising right now, but it took a loooong time from launch for all of the hardware to work (controllers, wireless, etc.) such that development on the system wouldn't be a pain.
I'm happy with a system that can display good games in high definition and take advantage of my home theater setup. The PS3 delivers that for me, but I'd like to see better games available. That said, Rock Band 2 gets a lot of play, and I really appreciate that the PS3 can play just about any media you throw at it.
The Wii has some fun games, and I have one of those too, but they look like absolute crap on a hi-def TV.
An updated Wii makes sense, a new PS3, no way. The PS3 has all the hardware I need -- just make some games already.
Maybe we could have one with large treads on it so that it could cover large distances quickly, and strong plating and explosive armor so that it would be immune to all but the largest projectile. And why stop at one operator? It could be large enough to hold a small crew of people who could operate the machine as a team, and possibly provide some sort of situational awareness/intelligence function.
All you'd need then is a turret with a large cannon on it and you'd have the perfect military land robot.
I know their audience isn't exclusively kids. That's obvious. However, it would be nice if they made a bit of effort toward that direction, because frankly, the less kid-friendly aspects of their newer movies are crap.
The folks at Pixar should be commended for their (mostly) quality work, but the whole "we're not making kids' movies" line is a steaming pile of shit when you're making movies featuring cute talking animals and selling the toys with happy meals.
I mean, really, how adult is a movie about a cute talking rat that wants to learn to cook? Is this the kind of cinema we all crave? When was the last time you got an Anthony Hopkins figure with a cheeseburger and fries?
And while I'm bashing Pixar, would it have killed them to shave about twenty minutes of scenes from Cars, Wall-E, and Ratatouille that don't serve the story at all? Finding Nemo has so many "peril" scenes I want to shoot myself by the end of the fiftieth act, and they're all scary for kids. That movie in particular would lose nothing if the violence were toned down and edited by someone who's not in love with every scene.
Be that as it may, there is an overall dearth of quality movies for families, and Pixar is the best it gets for now. What makes the situation really odd is that when anyone makes a movie for kids that's even close to being good, it's inevitably one of the highest grossing movies of the year. You'd think we'd be flooded with these things.
Left
Right
B
A
Select
Start
Hopefully they'll start making good movies for young children again.
There are about five or six quality movies made over the past twenty years that I can feel good about showing to my 2 and 4 year old without worrying about them picking up extremely bad behaviors, being scared to death by the obligatory and unnecessary "scary part", or being bored to tears. Other than Curious George and Charlotte's Web, they're all Pixar movies.
They love Cars, Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles, and both Toy Story movies, and I don't mind watching those more than once either. But lately it seems like Pixar is making movies to impress themselves while forgetting who their audience is.
100 Hidden Constellations He Craves!!!
Look great to the naked eye!
Steven Hawking - fun and fearless!
Good idea. My hacked version will seek out other robot dinosaurs and "mount" them. I think it will be great for parties.
What's relevant is getting the answer right. I'm not a farmer, but I can calculate the most efficient use of a barbed wire fence to cover multiple grazing areas.
Nobody thinks math is going to be relevant later on, and most of the time it's because it's not directly relevant. Trying to convince kids otherwise is a fool's game, because (like your example showed,) you end up looking more ridiculous than if you just made them memorize the damn multiplication tables.
What's important is that people understand enough of the procedure that they can apply the concept to new problems.
But that's not what they're teaching in schools, hence the need to update the books constantly.
Where does tweet come from anyway? Shouldn't it be twit?
They'd have to be Dysons, or they'd lose suction.
But I still don't understand how it would work.
You must have missed Laugh-In.
I doubt this is how the machines work, but to answer your question, assume thread A and B are voting machines trying to update a single vote count.
The three steps in doing that are:
1) Read the current value
2) Increment the current value
3) Store the result back in the memory location
If thread A and B read the current value at the same time, they will both increment that same value and both try to restore the new incremented-by-one value. So if current votes is 55, thread A and B will both simultaneously read that value, increment 55 to 56 and store that result. The end result is that a vote is dropped.
This problem can be solved any number of ways, and only the most boneheaded programmer would get bitten by such an obvious bug. I seriously doubt the problem with the voting machines is as simple as this.
Most people consider their own children to be intellectually gifted, even though they're not.
That doesn't mean, however, that NOBODY has gifted children. The grandparent may indeed be a safe driver. The pro's at these statistics (insurance companies) recognize that safe drivers do exist.
The only questions left are how much does being a safe driver reduce your risk, and can you drive safely enough to lower your risk of death to where it's safer to drive than to fly.
The other factor is time; most people spend significantly more time in a car than in a plane. What we really want to know is that if I have to get from New York to Los Angeles, which is a five hour flight or a three-four day car trip, what's the safest option if I'm in the "low risk" category as a driver? What are my chances of dying in a five hour flight vs. a 96 hour car trip?
These are the statistics I want to see. I'm sure that air travel is indeed safer, but let's compare apples to apples to really see how much.
For those who aren't aware of the technical terminology used in aviation, Vne is the velocity you must achieve for 80% of the passengers on a typical jet-liner to shit themselves.
I'm not current on development for the Mac, but I've heard that multiple processes can't share a single window in OS/X.
Do you happen to know how Chrome works around this, or is this not an actual limitation?
It made me feel exactly the same way, but I liked the programming aspect. It removed the tedium of doing the same thing (in previous games, didn't you just wish you could teach the characters a strategy instead of being forced to repeat the same commands ad infinitum?) I even started wishing for more advanced gambits to prevent characters from doing stupid things given certain situations.
But maybe that's just me. I think there were still plenty of challenges in that game even with the gambits. Yiazmat was a particularly meaningful and involved battle.
Putting limits on powerful weapons is a great idea. I'd really like to see an RPG where strategy trumps leveling and items as the key to winning.