Yeah yeah, don't beat up on webshield, it isn't their fault Conroy is a bastard. If the marketing-quote-people like a filter, let them buy it. Don't be too disturbed if consenting adults use a filter in private. Nobody accidentally signs a contract with webshield etc. If you don't like how other people bring up their kids, tough. I think the world is a better place because of the choice webshield etc present.
I'd be more concerned if webshield's filter doesn't work the way it's marketed. That might border on misleading advertising.
And one of the ISP's, Webshield, is only known because it's business model is based on already offering a "clean-feed" connection.
Which is a fine business model---it's selling something that people want. And by participating in this trial, they might demonstrate that they've got a product that works. (Maybe. For some value of "works.") Or get some free publicity.
What's not OK is imposing a filter on people who don't want it.
There is a very big difference between "want to buy" and "like." I often don't buy things that I want to buy because I have an ethical objection to them, or I just don't like the person selling it. Or, I don't like the/way/ something is being marketed, or the DRM with which it comes.
So the music industry has to figure out how to be likeable or they do not have a product.
As a fairly conservative, married, straight Christian, I'm comfortable with gay marriage being legalised. It doesn't affect me a great deal either way. I feel pretty strongly about letting people do as they please, and recognise that a liberal approach to law benefits me just as much as anyone else.
I also tend to think that gay people probably make fairly ordinary parents. Not especially good, not especially bad, just middle-of-the-road.
But. The argument that sexuality (homo- or otherwise) is a purely private matter that can be conducted in privacy is just wrong. There are clearly private aspects of sex, but there are also ways it impacts other people. And some of those impacts might be negative, and they might also be correlated or even causally related to homosexuality.
For example, it is a possibility, at least theoretically, that gay parents might typically be inferior to straight parents. And if they are, there might be a case for legal or social discrimination. I'm not going to make that argument, because even if I thought it true, there are bigger moral problems to address---alcohol, obesity, education, violence.
It really ticks me off when people say "it's just a private matter, so everyone do what I want." Even though I agree with your conclusion, it isn't just a private matter. You still actually have to argue your case... and being rude about the Bible doesn't count either.
If I were a manufacturer, I wouldn't make anything in the US either. I wouldn't even consider it.
Good. We wouldn't want someone like you making things.
The point of regulations is to stop people irresponsibly polluting the environment. If you aren't smart or caring enough to manufacture things without destroying the country, please do take your business somewhere else.
Mmmm... every time I read a post like yours, I roll my eyes. People often have problems because of incompetence, unreasonable expectations, unwillingness to learn, and/or prejudice against the platform. Sometimes---relatively rarely these days---somebody can't work with linux for a genuinely good reason.
Oh, you're talking about Wine, not Linux. Same story, different characters, plot slightly less advanced. If you can't hack it, get a Mac. You'll get the advantages of Unix, the compatibility of Windows, the irritations of Steve Jobs, and maybe even a girlfriend.
The bottom line: use what works for you. If you've had a bad experience with Wine, that sucks, but I've had great experiences. Rolling your eyes does not alter the fact that Wine is impressive software and has real uses.
Unfortunately it is OK in the America you come from (unless you're referring to South America or something) because it happens there and empirically, nobody is really making it "not OK."
If you'd like it to be the case that it is not OK in the USA, make it so.
What I find works (and not a doctor, the nick was whimsical, a public health scientist) is to tell people of the threat their first child will pose to their next child. "Vaccines protect other children. Your first child probably won't get X as an infant when it is most dangerous, but if he gets it as a two or three year old, that might kill his baby sister or give your unborn child brain damage."
It's not just an emotive argument that works on young mothers, it's true!
No it isn't and if the EFF wanted it, the EFF were wrong too.
The EFF proposal is pretty thin on details: it skates over the crucial issue of how monopoly abuses would be avoided. It is theoretically possible to have such an arrangement, but why would anyone trust Warner to administer it, when they are busy abusing their oligopoly position at the moment?
If I see evidence of Warner speaking out against the abuses of the RIAA then I might consider trusting them.
Oh, and nothing personal, but your story doesn't fill me with trust... Big Business ABC persuading one university IT admin that XYZ is a good idea? Sounds like a recipe for a disaster. You need to show a/lot/ of your working or I assume you're either a sock puppet or yet another lousy administrator. Unfortunately those hypotheses are rather more consistent with the observed facts than is the notion that Warner has started being fair-minded!
Nobody owns security offline either, and nobody should. If you own something, or care about something, you protect it. Some things have additional protection from the police or the military (e.g. I have a reasonable expectation that the police will prevent me from getting beaten up in some circumstances), but in the most part "the authorities" have a fairly punitive deterrent role. But anything that needs special protection gets it: got valuables in your house? Alarm, strong doors, insurance. All privately paid-for and provided. Got valuables on your computer? Backups, firewall, antivirus. Also privately provided.
Basically, the people who care about things know how much they're worth protecting. It isn't sensible to have military-grade security around my old Corolla, but my laptop's pretty secure because it's got a few worthwhile things. If the good General has infrastructure or secrets worth protecting, he should protect them. If it makes sense to exploit economies of scale and worth with other branches of the community, great.
It's also not true that there's a loose confederation of people (Vixie & co) protecting the internet. There are plenty of people around who want to protect or improve their own reputation, and security is one of those ways. If the military wants contact points in the wider security community, they shouldn't be looking for an owner, but they should be working with reality: getting out there making those contacts.
Normally I think such anarchy is stupid, but in this case it actually is common sense.
The doctrine of the thin-skulled plaintiff only applies to damages. It cannot create liability for an act that is not a tort to begin with.
Yeah yeah...;-). I'm more interested in the ethics of it than the law. To the extent that the notion of "you take your victim as you find him" makes any sense, Lori Drew can be reasonably held accountable for her actions.
The moral question should not be "if Lori Drew targeted a normal person, would they have died?" The fact is that she targeted an especially vulnerable person who died as a result.
Don't put a stumbling block in front of a blind person--just because a person with full sight could avoid it doesn't make it OK. You all learned it in Sunday School.
Just because the rich get it first doesn't mean we won't get it, too. Look down at the device under your hands as you flame me for proof.
Wrong, and good proof that auto-bailouts aren't that smart. Computers were not developed as toys for the rich or super-rich. Government spent huge R&D on computing for the general population's benefit (scientific R&D, space, military, etc.) Those are all legitimate functions of government and a good way for government spending to stimulate an industry and provide benefits for everyone. Also, when the government is a genuine customer and participant in the R&D process, they will spend their money far more wisely.
The government should be providing R&D money for auto manufacturers if and only if the government actually needs that R&D done. There is no point the government dictating that the wider population wants the R&D done. If the government needs to manipulate an industry, they can do so by negative stimulus---taxation, civil and criminal sanctions. (I.e. the government should penalise purchasers or manufacturers of inefficient cars.)
So what should the government do? Probably it would a good enough to commit to buying electric cars for government use. But they'd have to stand up to the Detroit lobbyists...
Exactly. In New South Wales, at least, "Negligent driving" and "Negligent driving occasioning death" are different charges. Not that different (the dangerous driving bit being the same) but the law explicitly incorporates the consequence of the action into the charge.
I suppose it's a rough way of quantifying something that is pretty hard otherwise---the degree of negligence.
Same for Lori Drew. You can maybe estimate the degree of malice from the victim she chose---you can tell that it was an especially irresponsible or malicious choice from the victim's response.
I'm considered by some to be in my right mind, and I want to abolish copyright.
We don't depend on copyright law to keep our creations free: we use it, it helps, but there was free software before the GPL and there will be afterwards. The GPL provides a rather interesting kind of freedom that might be difficult to obtain otherwise, but there are plenty of free software projects that don't depend on it.
The GPL was a fantastic ride but it isn't terribly sustainable. It's been watered down in various ways by the likes of Tivo, MySQL and Linus Torvalds, and that is essentially unavoidable. Enforcing copyleft through copyright was a work of genius, but it is pushing water uphill.
Personally, I'd like to see copyleft enshrined in law, and copyright abolished entirely: if you don't want something to be copied, don't publish it. The default legal position for created material should be "you can use it, and not restrict others from using it; authors' moral rights should be respected." Of course, authors would have the possibility of releasing something into the public domain.
Fair question. I agree the lock-in is not very tight. But once I decided I wanted no lock-in, I also figured that I wanted things to be as portable as possible, and C++/Boost seemed to be the go.
HDCP is a good thing? I find that notion about as attractive as eating babies.
Of course, HDCP / Palladium / whatever you want to call it could be good if it genuinely was a "pro-user security measure." But it is not. In the current political climate, "security" is a word that means "ostensibly pro-consumer, actually preserving entrenched interests" whether those interests be corporate, political, etc..
Tech is only pro-user if the right to tinker is preserved. That includes hardware as well as software.
Me too. I've purchased about $15,000 in Apple hardware, mostly work rather than personal purchases.
It was an interesting excursion from linux, but I think the "alpha geeks" who apparently adopted macs in the early days of OS X will be switching back. I've been increasingly careful to avoid Objective C lock-in, and I am ready to switch back to linux.
As they say, "developers, developers, developers."
Very funny. Mac fan here, but a realist: My MBP is on the way---paid by work, fortunately. Being a work machine, I don't really care what the restrictions are. But it looks like I'm back to Linux for home use for the foreseeable future---or maybe a hackintosh if they work nicely.
And while I like it a great deal, if Apple doesn't lighten up, I've bought my last iphone too. Go Android!
This whole mess is a failure of socialist banking policy NOT capitalism or free market ideas.
Horse poo. It's nothing to do with socialism. There are much more regulated (let's drop the "socialist" distraction) economies out there, and they just aren't doing as badly in this little mess as is the USA.
It was a property market bubble, and bubbles are a result of unreasonable investor optimism and confidence. There were a few extra contributors to this little problem, but let's not pretend that libertarianism is the answer when there are NO libertarian societies out there in the real world doing better.
Don't get the idea I don't like Americans or the USA. I do---I like you because you're all gooey, ambitious and optimistic, even if that makes you prone to economic bubbles. I hope you get through this problem just ducky. But you do have too much belief in money, and I hope this beats it out of you.
Models have their place, but directing the overall flow of interest rates and investment and market direction is not that place.
No reason to be so prescriptive. A good model will summarise the available knowledge. It will always be useful, for any decision---for example, if you can't get the model to tell you to make an investment, then you probably don't have the knowledge to make the decision you thought you did.
Of course, such models are rarely complex numerical ones.
In this case, financial data is not always something objectively measurable, but rather represents the risk assessments made by human analysts. It's possible to extract the variability in the data, but that will only represent the variability of the assessments by the analysts, not any underlying objective variability in riskiness.
Mmmm.... not an excuse. If you can't quantify the uncertainty in a value, you have no business pretending to make a quantitative model. It really is as simple as that, and any modeller who pretends otherwise is dishonest. Any analyst who gives a number without the associated uncertainty is dishonest.
It may be the case that the analyst risk assessments (rather than masses of numerical computer code) are the true model. It might not be the fault of the person writing the code or designing the program. But I doubt it. Anybody who uses numbers without working out their uncertainty is irresponsible.
Think of numbers as being a language that lots of people don't properly understand. It is the responsibility of those who understand the language to ensure that there are no misunderstandings. It is the responsibility of management to ensure that people who act on the basis of a model fully understand its proper interpretation. Hopefully, they speak the language themselves.
There are plenty of human-factor reasons why these kinds of models fail: management wants certain results, modellers want to feel they are contributing valuable results, people with big-brother pretensions placing too much faith in fancy computing, geeks lapping up the attention, etc..
But the bottom line is that people were not properly using information about uncertainty: if crap data is all you have, you have to tell the model how crap it is. If you don't do that, then your model is misleading and dishonest. Forecasting the future is tricky business, and you just have to know when it's too hard.
The bottom line is that modellers who don't turn around and say "sorry, boss, the model can't tell you that" and insist on it are largely responsible. Unfortunately, as a rule, it is the person who makes the boldest predictions who gets the most attention, and attention becomes credibility.
Collectively modellers are the/only/ people capable of understanding the output of models. Modellers must have enough influence in an organisation that/their/ interpretation of a model prevails--they don't have to dictate decisions, but the CEO needs to know the modellers' interpreattion of the model, not some intermediate's. If not, then I think negligence or fraud charges should be on the table for someone--maybe the modeller who is oversells their result, maybe someone else.
Yes, I'm a modeller. To the extent that our opinions guide decisions (what is a model if not a collection of opinions?) we need a professional code of ethics, just like engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc..
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Yeah yeah, don't beat up on webshield, it isn't their fault Conroy is a bastard. If the marketing-quote-people like a filter, let them buy it. Don't be too disturbed if consenting adults use a filter in private. Nobody accidentally signs a contract with webshield etc. If you don't like how other people bring up their kids, tough. I think the world is a better place because of the choice webshield etc present.
I'd be more concerned if webshield's filter doesn't work the way it's marketed. That might border on misleading advertising.
And one of the ISP's, Webshield, is only known because it's business model is based on already offering a "clean-feed" connection.
Which is a fine business model---it's selling something that people want. And by participating in this trial, they might demonstrate that they've got a product that works. (Maybe. For some value of "works.") Or get some free publicity.
What's not OK is imposing a filter on people who don't want it.
There is a very big difference between "want to buy" and "like." I often don't buy things that I want to buy because I have an ethical objection to them, or I just don't like the person selling it. Or, I don't like the /way/ something is being marketed, or the DRM with which it comes.
So the music industry has to figure out how to be likeable or they do not have a product.
As a fairly conservative, married, straight Christian, I'm comfortable with gay marriage being legalised. It doesn't affect me a great deal either way. I feel pretty strongly about letting people do as they please, and recognise that a liberal approach to law benefits me just as much as anyone else.
I also tend to think that gay people probably make fairly ordinary parents. Not especially good, not especially bad, just middle-of-the-road.
But. The argument that sexuality (homo- or otherwise) is a purely private matter that can be conducted in privacy is just wrong. There are clearly private aspects of sex, but there are also ways it impacts other people. And some of those impacts might be negative, and they might also be correlated or even causally related to homosexuality.
For example, it is a possibility, at least theoretically, that gay parents might typically be inferior to straight parents. And if they are, there might be a case for legal or social discrimination. I'm not going to make that argument, because even if I thought it true, there are bigger moral problems to address---alcohol, obesity, education, violence.
It really ticks me off when people say "it's just a private matter, so everyone do what I want." Even though I agree with your conclusion, it isn't just a private matter. You still actually have to argue your case... and being rude about the Bible doesn't count either.
I knew it was called SEA-ME-WE for a reason. Dodgy...
If I were a manufacturer, I wouldn't make anything in the US either. I wouldn't even consider it.
Good. We wouldn't want someone like you making things.
The point of regulations is to stop people irresponsibly polluting the environment. If you aren't smart or caring enough to manufacture things without destroying the country, please do take your business somewhere else.
There's an article about putting windows in a submarine, and you're seriously complaining about a flood of cliches?
You fail the Turing test.
Mmmm... every time I read a post like yours, I roll my eyes. People often have problems because of incompetence, unreasonable expectations, unwillingness to learn, and/or prejudice against the platform. Sometimes---relatively rarely these days---somebody can't work with linux for a genuinely good reason.
Oh, you're talking about Wine, not Linux. Same story, different characters, plot slightly less advanced. If you can't hack it, get a Mac. You'll get the advantages of Unix, the compatibility of Windows, the irritations of Steve Jobs, and maybe even a girlfriend.
The bottom line: use what works for you. If you've had a bad experience with Wine, that sucks, but I've had great experiences. Rolling your eyes does not alter the fact that Wine is impressive software and has real uses.
Unfortunately it is OK in the America you come from (unless you're referring to South America or something) because it happens there and empirically, nobody is really making it "not OK."
If you'd like it to be the case that it is not OK in the USA, make it so.
What I find works (and not a doctor, the nick was whimsical, a public health scientist) is to tell people of the threat their first child will pose to their next child. "Vaccines protect other children. Your first child probably won't get X as an infant when it is most dangerous, but if he gets it as a two or three year old, that might kill his baby sister or give your unborn child brain damage."
It's not just an emotive argument that works on young mothers, it's true!
This is a good thing.
No it isn't and if the EFF wanted it, the EFF were wrong too.
The EFF proposal is pretty thin on details: it skates over the crucial issue of how monopoly abuses would be avoided. It is theoretically possible to have such an arrangement, but why would anyone trust Warner to administer it, when they are busy abusing their oligopoly position at the moment?
If I see evidence of Warner speaking out against the abuses of the RIAA then I might consider trusting them.
Oh, and nothing personal, but your story doesn't fill me with trust... Big Business ABC persuading one university IT admin that XYZ is a good idea? Sounds like a recipe for a disaster. You need to show a /lot/ of your working or I assume you're either a sock puppet or yet another lousy administrator. Unfortunately those hypotheses are rather more consistent with the observed facts than is the notion that Warner has started being fair-minded!
Nobody owns security offline either, and nobody should. If you own something, or care about something, you protect it. Some things have additional protection from the police or the military (e.g. I have a reasonable expectation that the police will prevent me from getting beaten up in some circumstances), but in the most part "the authorities" have a fairly punitive deterrent role. But anything that needs special protection gets it: got valuables in your house? Alarm, strong doors, insurance. All privately paid-for and provided. Got valuables on your computer? Backups, firewall, antivirus. Also privately provided.
Basically, the people who care about things know how much they're worth protecting. It isn't sensible to have military-grade security around my old Corolla, but my laptop's pretty secure because it's got a few worthwhile things. If the good General has infrastructure or secrets worth protecting, he should protect them. If it makes sense to exploit economies of scale and worth with other branches of the community, great.
It's also not true that there's a loose confederation of people (Vixie & co) protecting the internet. There are plenty of people around who want to protect or improve their own reputation, and security is one of those ways. If the military wants contact points in the wider security community, they shouldn't be looking for an owner, but they should be working with reality: getting out there making those contacts.
Normally I think such anarchy is stupid, but in this case it actually is common sense.
The doctrine of the thin-skulled plaintiff only applies to damages. It cannot create liability for an act that is not a tort to begin with.
Yeah yeah... ;-). I'm more interested in the ethics of it than the law. To the extent that the notion of "you take your victim as you find him" makes any sense, Lori Drew can be reasonably held accountable for her actions.
The moral question should not be "if Lori Drew targeted a normal person, would they have died?" The fact is that she targeted an especially vulnerable person who died as a result.
Don't put a stumbling block in front of a blind person--just because a person with full sight could avoid it doesn't make it OK. You all learned it in Sunday School.
Just because the rich get it first doesn't mean we won't get it, too. Look down at the device under your hands as you flame me for proof.
Wrong, and good proof that auto-bailouts aren't that smart. Computers were not developed as toys for the rich or super-rich. Government spent huge R&D on computing for the general population's benefit (scientific R&D, space, military, etc.) Those are all legitimate functions of government and a good way for government spending to stimulate an industry and provide benefits for everyone. Also, when the government is a genuine customer and participant in the R&D process, they will spend their money far more wisely.
The government should be providing R&D money for auto manufacturers if and only if the government actually needs that R&D done. There is no point the government dictating that the wider population wants the R&D done. If the government needs to manipulate an industry, they can do so by negative stimulus---taxation, civil and criminal sanctions. (I.e. the government should penalise purchasers or manufacturers of inefficient cars.)
So what should the government do? Probably it would a good enough to commit to buying electric cars for government use. But they'd have to stand up to the Detroit lobbyists...
Exactly. In New South Wales, at least, "Negligent driving" and "Negligent driving occasioning death" are different charges. Not that different (the dangerous driving bit being the same) but the law explicitly incorporates the consequence of the action into the charge.
I suppose it's a rough way of quantifying something that is pretty hard otherwise---the degree of negligence.
Same for Lori Drew. You can maybe estimate the degree of malice from the victim she chose---you can tell that it was an especially irresponsible or malicious choice from the victim's response.
I'm considered by some to be in my right mind, and I want to abolish copyright.
We don't depend on copyright law to keep our creations free: we use it, it helps, but there was free software before the GPL and there will be afterwards. The GPL provides a rather interesting kind of freedom that might be difficult to obtain otherwise, but there are plenty of free software projects that don't depend on it.
The GPL was a fantastic ride but it isn't terribly sustainable. It's been watered down in various ways by the likes of Tivo, MySQL and Linus Torvalds, and that is essentially unavoidable. Enforcing copyleft through copyright was a work of genius, but it is pushing water uphill.
Personally, I'd like to see copyleft enshrined in law, and copyright abolished entirely: if you don't want something to be copied, don't publish it. The default legal position for created material should be "you can use it, and not restrict others from using it; authors' moral rights should be respected." Of course, authors would have the possibility of releasing something into the public domain.
Fair question. I agree the lock-in is not very tight. But once I decided I wanted no lock-in, I also figured that I wanted things to be as portable as possible, and C++/Boost seemed to be the go.
HDCP is a good thing? I find that notion about as attractive as eating babies.
Of course, HDCP / Palladium / whatever you want to call it could be good if it genuinely was a "pro-user security measure." But it is not. In the current political climate, "security" is a word that means "ostensibly pro-consumer, actually preserving entrenched interests" whether those interests be corporate, political, etc..
Tech is only pro-user if the right to tinker is preserved. That includes hardware as well as software.
Me too. I've purchased about $15,000 in Apple hardware, mostly work rather than personal purchases.
It was an interesting excursion from linux, but I think the "alpha geeks" who apparently adopted macs in the early days of OS X will be switching back. I've been increasingly careful to avoid Objective C lock-in, and I am ready to switch back to linux.
As they say, "developers, developers, developers."
Very funny. Mac fan here, but a realist: My MBP is on the way---paid by work, fortunately. Being a work machine, I don't really care what the restrictions are. But it looks like I'm back to Linux for home use for the foreseeable future---or maybe a hackintosh if they work nicely.
And while I like it a great deal, if Apple doesn't lighten up, I've bought my last iphone too. Go Android!
They believe that ALL money should consist of, or be 100% backed by, a valuable commodity.
Feel free to do your trading with valuable commodities rather than US dollars. Just do it. If you're right, you'll get rich because of it.
It's a sad fact that libertarians are better at telling the rest of us how to live than practising what they preach.
This whole mess is a failure of socialist banking policy NOT capitalism or free market ideas.
Horse poo. It's nothing to do with socialism. There are much more regulated (let's drop the "socialist" distraction) economies out there, and they just aren't doing as badly in this little mess as is the USA.
It was a property market bubble, and bubbles are a result of unreasonable investor optimism and confidence. There were a few extra contributors to this little problem, but let's not pretend that libertarianism is the answer when there are NO libertarian societies out there in the real world doing better.
Don't get the idea I don't like Americans or the USA. I do---I like you because you're all gooey, ambitious and optimistic, even if that makes you prone to economic bubbles. I hope you get through this problem just ducky. But you do have too much belief in money, and I hope this beats it out of you.
Models have their place, but directing the overall flow of interest rates and investment and market direction is not that place.
No reason to be so prescriptive. A good model will summarise the available knowledge. It will always be useful, for any decision---for example, if you can't get the model to tell you to make an investment, then you probably don't have the knowledge to make the decision you thought you did.
Of course, such models are rarely complex numerical ones.
In this case, financial data is not always something objectively measurable, but rather represents the risk assessments made by human analysts. It's possible to extract the variability in the data, but that will only represent the variability of the assessments by the analysts, not any underlying objective variability in riskiness.
Mmmm.... not an excuse. If you can't quantify the uncertainty in a value, you have no business pretending to make a quantitative model. It really is as simple as that, and any modeller who pretends otherwise is dishonest. Any analyst who gives a number without the associated uncertainty is dishonest.
It may be the case that the analyst risk assessments (rather than masses of numerical computer code) are the true model. It might not be the fault of the person writing the code or designing the program. But I doubt it. Anybody who uses numbers without working out their uncertainty is irresponsible.
Think of numbers as being a language that lots of people don't properly understand. It is the responsibility of those who understand the language to ensure that there are no misunderstandings. It is the responsibility of management to ensure that people who act on the basis of a model fully understand its proper interpretation. Hopefully, they speak the language themselves.
There are plenty of human-factor reasons why these kinds of models fail: management wants certain results, modellers want to feel they are contributing valuable results, people with big-brother pretensions placing too much faith in fancy computing, geeks lapping up the attention, etc..
But the bottom line is that people were not properly using information about uncertainty: if crap data is all you have, you have to tell the model how crap it is. If you don't do that, then your model is misleading and dishonest. Forecasting the future is tricky business, and you just have to know when it's too hard.
The bottom line is that modellers who don't turn around and say "sorry, boss, the model can't tell you that" and insist on it are largely responsible. Unfortunately, as a rule, it is the person who makes the boldest predictions who gets the most attention, and attention becomes credibility.
Collectively modellers are the /only/ people capable of understanding the output of models. Modellers must have enough influence in an organisation that /their/ interpretation of a model prevails--they don't have to dictate decisions, but the CEO needs to know the modellers' interpreattion of the model, not some intermediate's. If not, then I think negligence or fraud charges should be on the table for someone--maybe the modeller who is oversells their result, maybe someone else.
Yes, I'm a modeller. To the extent that our opinions guide decisions (what is a model if not a collection of opinions?) we need a professional code of ethics, just like engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc..