For starters, you're seeing everything from the perspective of an insured. Insurers take on risk they wouldn't otherwise have in the hope that they've calculated the odds correctly and stacked the cards in their favor. What's the difference between that and gambling? None.
Suicide is not a natural response to bullying, especially when that's not even face-to-face, which is what we experienced. If it was, most of us wouldn't be here. Either the girl had other problems which lead to her suicide (likely) or she was simply mentally unstable. In either of those cases the medium through which the straw that broke the camels back travelled is not relevant.
The link to the older Slashdot story links to a Wired article that says the girl was clinically depressed. It's not clear whether the neighbor who did the bullying knew this. It's possible she did since the neighbor's daughter and the victim knew each other, but it's also possible that she didn't.
I will grant that traditionally there has been the concept of an "insurable interest." The hair between insurance and gambling was split by saying you couldn't insure a property or a life unless you had an insurable interest. So, for example, I couldn't buy a policy on my neighbor's house just to speculate because that was considered against public policy (aside from the moral hazard issues).
But that concept is harder to apply to newer lines of insurance. Take credit default swaps. You can buy CDS "insurance" against default on bonds you don't own. Sounds like a good way to speculate, eh? That example makes the reality more obvious, but it doesn't have to be so clear cut. If you're playing with probabilities, you're gambling. You're making a bet that your view of the future will be at least close to the actual future experience on your book (yes, we call them our books, we're just bookies) if you place enough bets (law of large numbers). Of course, as we humans keep learning and forgetting over and over again, the law of large numbers doesn't work so well when policies are correlated, but that's a whole 'nother story. So, yes, insurance is gambling. The Academy of Actuaries can spout whatever nonsense they want to justify or prettify what they do (which is not quite but very close to pulling numbers from thin air). Reserves for insurance companies are plug numbers. They decide what they want their profit to be, then figure out the required change in reserves based on that. The actuaries, whether they know it or not (the higher-level ones do) are just backing into those numbers. Later, when actual results are known, the differences are trued up and taken in a big bath.
Any sort of gamble, if it offsets an exposure you already have, can be considered risk transfer or hedging. If you're a pro athlete, you could make an argument that betting against your team is the financially prudent thing to do. It offsets your long exposure, similar to an exec with stock options buying puts. But you probably wouldn't get very far with that argument. Some types of speculation/risk transfer/whatever you want to call it make sense for both insured and underwriter; some don't. My opinion is that most of modern risk management is a scam and a massive waste of resources. All contracts total up to a a zero-sum game. Compensation costs and transaction costs are huge. Models are inductive and woefully inadequate compared to a thinking, skeptical human brain seeking out trend reversals and seeking to protect against truly catastrophic, goal-breaking events. The athlete doesn't bet against his team because (1) we arbitrarily consider it gambling and don't allow it and, more importantly, (2) he doesn't want to transfer the risk. Duh. He's shooting for the moon. But wait... isn't that gambling? If you fail to transfer a known risk, is that gambling?
We live in a world of probabilities. Risk transfer versus gambling... mostly semantics.
That's ridiculous. Specialist or not, a President without good judgment on important issues doesn't know enough to delegate to the right person. I substitute no one else's judgments for my own, and I hope for the same in a President. Asking for information from specialists one thing. But over-reliance is dangerous, as demonstrated by the current idiot residing in the White House.
I think it would have been more hypocritical for them not to have admitted that they were picking on Apple. Of course they picked their target so as to get the widest possible audience for their message. Anyone trying to raise public awareness about anything would do that.
I know that you're just sharing your opinion, so I won't argue with your main point (that you think Windows is superior for desktop). But just in case someone reading this might pick up some bad information, I do want to correct you on one point. I run more than one monitor in Linux, and it's really no big deal. I've been doing it for years, as far back as Redhat 6 I think. (It was probably supported before then, I just didn't use it.) I use Ubuntu now.
As of this moment, believe it or not, Linux has better support for multiple monitors than Windows does. Vista requires the monitors to be connected to either the same video card or to video cards of the same type. In other words, in Vista, I couldn't both my evga nvidia and ati radeon (pci) together. In Ubuntu, it's no problem to set this up if you know what you're doing.
Imagine if the Lincoln-Douglas debates had been kept to under 20 minutes? Or do you think maybe Douglas did some demonstrations to keep his audience interested? I tend to think the people listening had fewer immediate distractions and longer attention spans.
(If you think this argument sounds familiar, it is lifted from Neil Postman. circa 1980ish?)
OK, my bad. I thought you must have meant epidemic since endemic is usually used to refer to something that is inherently the case. I didn't think that was your meaning, but in retrospect I suppose you could argue that our current system of higher learning does inherently encourage cheating and grade-grubbing as opposed to actual learning.
Product liability law is a bit different from standard negligence law. If liability can be attached, the law specifically allows claimants to recover damages from any part of the supply chain, not just the manufacturer or original supplier. I.e., even Best Buy could be held liable. This common law feature is called strict liability of torts, I think, and probably evolved to prevent passing of the buck.
The constitution applies to Federal laws, and perhaps state and local ones in some cases. It has no applicability to schools, employers, or anything else.
Check out Brown v. Board of Education, and the many other decisions based on consititutional law that have applicability to schools and employers.
Your name wouldn't happen to be Harriet Miers, would it?;)
I think you're missing the point of why this paper will be controversial. It is not that most people who would read such a paper might confuse knowledge with intelligence. It is that even if you accept the (arguable) precept that intelligence can be readily defined and quanitified, making broad generalizations about the intelligence of men v women is dangerous and serves no legitimate scientific or social purpose.
My IQ puts me above the 99.99 percentile. This means that on average at least 9,999 out of every 10,000 people I meet in life will be less intelligent than I am. (However, as you rightly point out, that doesn't make me more knowledgeable than they about any given subject. In fact, you could even say that I suffer from a severe case of amotivation and am indeed less knowledgeable than most about many subjects.) I also happen to be a woman. For any of those 9,999 people to make assumptions about my intelligence based on averages and an imperfect understanding of the nature of intelligence would be... well... not a very intelligent thing to do.
In response to #1, I would say this is the best argument against copy protection. The ability to make back-ups of discs I buy is very important to me, and becomes more important as storage capactities increase.
I don't find this comment particularly "Interesting." If someone calls your home, that should be opt-in. If you are visiting a site, the developer of that site has every right to track your page views while you're there, to show you advertisements while you're there, and even to use whatever information you may have provided when you registered to use the site, along with information derived from your pattern of usage, to show you advertisements that might be more relevant to your tastes. Revenue from such ads is probably how the site stays in business (if it is a for-profit organization). If you don't like that, you have every right to not go to such sites.
I don't understand the controversy over cookies. Unless you share a computer with someone you don't trust or are visiting sites you don't care to admit you visit, why even bother to delete them? What do I care if sites track my browsing activities? If you go to the bodega on the corner to do your shopping, the guy who works there has every right to track how often you visit, what you normally buy (so he can keep it in stock) and even to ask about your grandmother whom he happens to know was sick last week. He has every right to track his customers, whether formally or just mentally.
I don't really mind cookies on my computer. On the other hand, I do mind havng to re-type my username and password for subscription sights whenever I get jumpy and decide to delete all my cookies, "just in case." Cookies allow developers to do more useful things with a stateless medium. I'm surprised that 58% of users regularly delete them.
I'm sure the claim was noticed under the policy, but it should not be paid. This type of claim is not what D&O policies are designed to cover. Also, D&O policies have what are known as conduct exclusions, which carve out coverage for fraud, among other things. However, if the suit proves legitimate and this causes the stockholders of eBay to sue the D's and O's for failure to supervise or some other such cause of action, the policy might then respond (depending on the specific policy terms, like whether there is severability for the innocent D's & O's).
Secondly, I doubt eBay has "hundreds of millions" of limit in their D&O program. Even if every insurance carrier who cared to was participating on a given program, there's limited capacity. I think the most even an AIG would put up on a risk is $25 million, perhaps up to $50 million if there is reinsurance. Large companies build a program with many layers to a total of maybe $100 million, sometimes (but rarely) more.
Disclaimer: I am an underwriter, but the statements above are not professional advice or opinion. I am not an underwriter on eBay's program.
Agreed. It's $10.50 here in NYC, which leads me to the ironic choice of only seeing mediocre movies in the theatre, and NOT seeing movies I know I will like... May as well wait for the good movies to come out on DVD, because I'm sure I'll want to buy them anyway. Saves me the $10.50.
I'm really not trying to get into a trenchant or pointless argument here... But I must say, I still think you were too quick to disrregard the original point. "[I]magine that it was..." In other words, "I'm not assuming that it was, but for the sake of illustrating this point, let's enter the hypothetical world and imagine that it was." The original post explicitly holds open the possibility that that his comment doesn't apply in this particular case: "This being said, if SG just used the terms Metroid and Zelda in the text of a web page, I think they should be entirely in the clear..."
Slashdot Mirror
Educators are typically salaried, no?
You're arguments are very bad. Why do you persist?
First, most new businesses fail.
Second:
Main Entry: venture
Function: noun
Date: 15th century
1 obsolete : destiny, fortune, chance
2 a: an undertaking involving chance, risk, or danger; especially : a speculative business enterprise b: a venturesome act
3: something (as money or property) at stake in a speculative venture
â" at a venture: at random
Kate Winslet too chunky? Seriously? And some of you males of the geek species wonder why you don't get laid regularly.
Why do you think they call them business ventures?
For starters, you're seeing everything from the perspective of an insured. Insurers take on risk they wouldn't otherwise have in the hope that they've calculated the odds correctly and stacked the cards in their favor. What's the difference between that and gambling? None.
Suicide is not a natural response to bullying, especially when that's not even face-to-face, which is what we experienced. If it was, most of us wouldn't be here. Either the girl had other problems which lead to her suicide (likely) or she was simply mentally unstable. In either of those cases the medium through which the straw that broke the camels back travelled is not relevant.
The link to the older Slashdot story links to a Wired article that says the girl was clinically depressed. It's not clear whether the neighbor who did the bullying knew this. It's possible she did since the neighbor's daughter and the victim knew each other, but it's also possible that she didn't.
Semantics. Ask any underwriter. We gamble.
I will grant that traditionally there has been the concept of an "insurable interest." The hair between insurance and gambling was split by saying you couldn't insure a property or a life unless you had an insurable interest. So, for example, I couldn't buy a policy on my neighbor's house just to speculate because that was considered against public policy (aside from the moral hazard issues).
But that concept is harder to apply to newer lines of insurance. Take credit default swaps. You can buy CDS "insurance" against default on bonds you don't own. Sounds like a good way to speculate, eh? That example makes the reality more obvious, but it doesn't have to be so clear cut. If you're playing with probabilities, you're gambling. You're making a bet that your view of the future will be at least close to the actual future experience on your book (yes, we call them our books, we're just bookies) if you place enough bets (law of large numbers). Of course, as we humans keep learning and forgetting over and over again, the law of large numbers doesn't work so well when policies are correlated, but that's a whole 'nother story. So, yes, insurance is gambling. The Academy of Actuaries can spout whatever nonsense they want to justify or prettify what they do (which is not quite but very close to pulling numbers from thin air). Reserves for insurance companies are plug numbers. They decide what they want their profit to be, then figure out the required change in reserves based on that. The actuaries, whether they know it or not (the higher-level ones do) are just backing into those numbers. Later, when actual results are known, the differences are trued up and taken in a big bath.
Any sort of gamble, if it offsets an exposure you already have, can be considered risk transfer or hedging. If you're a pro athlete, you could make an argument that betting against your team is the financially prudent thing to do. It offsets your long exposure, similar to an exec with stock options buying puts. But you probably wouldn't get very far with that argument. Some types of speculation/risk transfer/whatever you want to call it make sense for both insured and underwriter; some don't. My opinion is that most of modern risk management is a scam and a massive waste of resources. All contracts total up to a a zero-sum game. Compensation costs and transaction costs are huge. Models are inductive and woefully inadequate compared to a thinking, skeptical human brain seeking out trend reversals and seeking to protect against truly catastrophic, goal-breaking events. The athlete doesn't bet against his team because (1) we arbitrarily consider it gambling and don't allow it and, more importantly, (2) he doesn't want to transfer the risk. Duh. He's shooting for the moon. But wait... isn't that gambling? If you fail to transfer a known risk, is that gambling?
We live in a world of probabilities. Risk transfer versus gambling... mostly semantics.
That's ridiculous. Specialist or not, a President without good judgment on important issues doesn't know enough to delegate to the right person. I substitute no one else's judgments for my own, and I hope for the same in a President. Asking for information from specialists one thing. But over-reliance is dangerous, as demonstrated by the current idiot residing in the White House.
I wish I could meta-mod this. This post is not a troll. It's funny. Laugh.
Agreed. There's a great book called _Fight the Feed_. It's geared toward the "young adult" segment, but I found it thought-provoking.
There are still shares (or partnership interests or member interests), even if they aren't publicly-traded.
I think it would have been more hypocritical for them not to have admitted that they were picking on Apple. Of course they picked their target so as to get the widest possible audience for their message. Anyone trying to raise public awareness about anything would do that.
I know that you're just sharing your opinion, so I won't argue with your main point (that you think Windows is superior for desktop). But just in case someone reading this might pick up some bad information, I do want to correct you on one point. I run more than one monitor in Linux, and it's really no big deal. I've been doing it for years, as far back as Redhat 6 I think. (It was probably supported before then, I just didn't use it.) I use Ubuntu now.
As of this moment, believe it or not, Linux has better support for multiple monitors than Windows does. Vista requires the monitors to be connected to either the same video card or to video cards of the same type. In other words, in Vista, I couldn't both my evga nvidia and ati radeon (pci) together. In Ubuntu, it's no problem to set this up if you know what you're doing.
>> Intolerance should never be tolerated
Possibly my favorite Slashdot-ism ever.
Imagine if the Lincoln-Douglas debates had been kept to under 20 minutes? Or do you think maybe Douglas did some demonstrations to keep his audience interested? I tend to think the people listening had fewer immediate distractions and longer attention spans.
(If you think this argument sounds familiar, it is lifted from Neil Postman. circa 1980ish?)
OK, my bad. I thought you must have meant epidemic since endemic is usually used to refer to something that is inherently the case. I didn't think that was your meaning, but in retrospect I suppose you could argue that our current system of higher learning does inherently encourage cheating and grade-grubbing as opposed to actual learning.
I think you meant to type "epidemic." I'm really not trying to be a smartass, just thought I'd clarify.
Product liability law is a bit different from standard negligence law. If liability can be attached, the law specifically allows claimants to recover damages from any part of the supply chain, not just the manufacturer or original supplier. I.e., even Best Buy could be held liable. This common law feature is called strict liability of torts, I think, and probably evolved to prevent passing of the buck.
The constitution applies to Federal laws, and perhaps state and local ones in some cases. It has no applicability to schools, employers, or anything else.
Check out Brown v. Board of Education, and the many other decisions based on consititutional law that have applicability to schools and employers.
Your name wouldn't happen to be Harriet Miers, would it? ;)
http://brownvboard.org/index.htm/
I think you're missing the point of why this paper will be controversial. It is not that most people who would read such a paper might confuse knowledge with intelligence. It is that even if you accept the (arguable) precept that intelligence can be readily defined and quanitified, making broad generalizations about the intelligence of men v women is dangerous and serves no legitimate scientific or social purpose.
My IQ puts me above the 99.99 percentile. This means that on average at least 9,999 out of every 10,000 people I meet in life will be less intelligent than I am. (However, as you rightly point out, that doesn't make me more knowledgeable than they about any given subject. In fact, you could even say that I suffer from a severe case of amotivation and am indeed less knowledgeable than most about many subjects.) I also happen to be a woman. For any of those 9,999 people to make assumptions about my intelligence based on averages and an imperfect understanding of the nature of intelligence would be... well... not a very intelligent thing to do.
In response to #1, I would say this is the best argument against copy protection. The ability to make back-ups of discs I buy is very important to me, and becomes more important as storage capactities increase.
I don't find this comment particularly "Interesting." If someone calls your home, that should be opt-in. If you are visiting a site, the developer of that site has every right to track your page views while you're there, to show you advertisements while you're there, and even to use whatever information you may have provided when you registered to use the site, along with information derived from your pattern of usage, to show you advertisements that might be more relevant to your tastes. Revenue from such ads is probably how the site stays in business (if it is a for-profit organization). If you don't like that, you have every right to not go to such sites.
I don't understand the controversy over cookies. Unless you share a computer with someone you don't trust or are visiting sites you don't care to admit you visit, why even bother to delete them? What do I care if sites track my browsing activities? If you go to the bodega on the corner to do your shopping, the guy who works there has every right to track how often you visit, what you normally buy (so he can keep it in stock) and even to ask about your grandmother whom he happens to know was sick last week. He has every right to track his customers, whether formally or just mentally.
I don't really mind cookies on my computer. On the other hand, I do mind havng to re-type my username and password for subscription sights whenever I get jumpy and decide to delete all my cookies, "just in case." Cookies allow developers to do more useful things with a stateless medium. I'm surprised that 58% of users regularly delete them.
I'm sure the claim was noticed under the policy, but it should not be paid. This type of claim is not what D&O policies are designed to cover. Also, D&O policies have what are known as conduct exclusions, which carve out coverage for fraud, among other things. However, if the suit proves legitimate and this causes the stockholders of eBay to sue the D's and O's for failure to supervise or some other such cause of action, the policy might then respond (depending on the specific policy terms, like whether there is severability for the innocent D's & O's).
Secondly, I doubt eBay has "hundreds of millions" of limit in their D&O program. Even if every insurance carrier who cared to was participating on a given program, there's limited capacity. I think the most even an AIG would put up on a risk is $25 million, perhaps up to $50 million if there is reinsurance. Large companies build a program with many layers to a total of maybe $100 million, sometimes (but rarely) more.
Disclaimer: I am an underwriter, but the statements above are not professional advice or opinion. I am not an underwriter on eBay's program.
Agreed. It's $10.50 here in NYC, which leads me to the ironic choice of only seeing mediocre movies in the theatre, and NOT seeing movies I know I will like... May as well wait for the good movies to come out on DVD, because I'm sure I'll want to buy them anyway. Saves me the $10.50.
I'm really not trying to get into a trenchant or pointless argument here... But I must say, I still think you were too quick to disrregard the original point. "[I]magine that it was..." In other words, "I'm not assuming that it was, but for the sake of illustrating this point, let's enter the hypothetical world and imagine that it was." The original post explicitly holds open the possibility that that his comment doesn't apply in this particular case: "This being said, if SG just used the terms Metroid and Zelda in the text of a web page, I think they should be entirely in the clear..."