I'm starting to find that more large entities (St. Louis University, etc.) are starting to filter mail more aggressively. This by itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but many of them are doing it poorly, by silently dropping e-mails that they filter. It's really frustrating when many of your e-mails get through, but one doesn't, and you never know about it. Did they receive it? Did they just miss it? And if they're filtering on content, you can't just reply to your first e-mail and ask "Did you have a chance to look at this?" because that one will get dropped too.
Consequently, e-mail becomes unreliable (at least to people at that organization), so you phone or IM them instead.
Why didn't the stewardesses call them back and tell them it was an iPod and that a passenger had just reported it missing?
It's entirely possible that they did. It's plausible that the procedure for handling events like this requires follow-through, even if an obvious explanation arises after they've initiated it. "If it was suspicious enough for you to invoke the process, then it's suspicious enough for OUR investigation to determine that it was harmless after all." They might be trying to avoid a situation where a flight attendant presses the panic button in response to something suspicious, and the perpetrator comes out and convinces (with or without threat) the flight attendant to call it off. And then the plane blows up.
My next thought was, "Yah, but they could still have completely avoided pissing all of those people off, and treating the guy like he was a criminal, if they had just waited until the device was inspected and deemed to be an iPod after all."
But then you have to consider that IF it was something bad, it's in their best interests to collect as much information as is humanly possible as quickly as is humanly possible. So while the bomb guys are checking to make sure it really was an iPod, you'd better have everyone available collecting as much information from the passengers (including the owner) as you can, "just in case" you learn something suggesting this is more than what it appears. If it takes the bomb squad an hour to figure out that it was a bomb after all, that's an hour of interrogation time you've lost, and an hour of time potential co-conspirators have had doing the same thing on other planes.
So, sadly, I have to say that, IMO, they did everything right. I certainly do feel for the guy, though.
In most cases, laws are easily understood by the common (well, educated) man. The problem is writing them. Over the last few hundred years, judges have hammered out interpretations for a lot of very similar words and phrases, in a variety of different contexts. When a common person writes a law, they get their point out using simple language. Unfortunately, when lawyers argue and judges interpret what you've written, subtleties become very important, and poor word choice could make the law do something you didn't intend, or fail to do something you did intend. Or, worse, one part of the law will disagree with another part, or some other ambiguity will arise. This puts judges in an awkward position of trying to come up with one interpretation that is consistent with the law as a whole, because they must assume that the law is written the way it is for a reason. They can't just say, "Oh, this is clearly a goof, we'll pretend it says what the legislature clearly meant to say." Language trumps intent, always.
So while the common (educated) man should be able to read and understand most all of our laws without a problem (fine details notwithstanding), only someone with a law background should really be put in the position to write them.
I didn't say all legislators had to be lawyers, but you do have to keep in mind that lawyers will be looking for ways to exploit the language of what you have written, and judges will interpret those laws according to very specific rules of law that most laypeople (which most congressmen are) simply do not understand. A minor wording problem could easily make a law inconsistent with itself, which puts judges in an awkward position of having to assume the law is written that way for a reason, even though everyone knows that the legislature just goofed. People trained in the language of law make less stupid mistakes like that. So while requiring our legislators (representatives) be lawyers might be overkill, they ought to have some law background just as a matter of qualification.
While I'm nearly positive that the politicians backing this legislation were doing it exactly as you describe, for purely political reasons, this also serves to point out something that most people don't really notice: Fewer of our legislators (either state or federal) have any law background than many would think. I would wager that many legislators don't realize that the law they're writing or sponsoring has any constitutional implications. Yes, it eventually comes out, and yes, sometimes law-trained individuals fix up the language of a bill or advise a legislator, but shouldn't the people writing our laws have a background in law? This seems somewhat obvious to me, but we seem to be more interested in what party a representative affiliates him/herself with than their qualifications.
Part of me hopes that we're left hanging, with no resolution on the Ori. This gives competing networks a pretty good reason to pick up SG-1 after SciFi drops them. If you wrap everything up neatly, it's almost like you're starting a new spin-off series, since you need new villains, etc.
I'm doing 100Mbps using 3com NICs and Cisco Catalyst switches and have the same experience as the original poster. RDP doesn't seem to do a good job with video (and, for me, synchronizing the sound with the video). It may be that the original poster tends to watch videos that aren't that complex, or are shrunk to a small size, or maybe just doesn't mind the impact to the video's quality. (If that's all you've ever experienced...)
I don't think your "cheap hardware" drawbacks are quite as bad as you think. I can't imagine any combination of cheap hardware rated at 100Mbps will ever give you 10Mbps performance, unless your combination is contrived or your network is congested.
It is almost certainly due to the legal climate in the US.
In defense of "mandatory reporters", keep in mind that many occupations are legally required to report something that they think is questionable. These people may not necessarily believe that you're being a bad parent, but if they've lost the ability to plausibly deny that they saw it, they could go to jail (and/or lose their job) for not reporting it, if it comes up later and is determined to be abuse. That being said, when these people do call the hotline to report some event, nothing is likely to happen to you. You might get a phone call or a visit asking for details about what happened, if they agree that the event was potentially abusive. But if you're just Average Mom, and your kids are responsible enough to be fine for a few days on their own, they're going to see that and not bother you.
If your house is falling apart and your kids are sitting in piles of their own feces when they stop by to check on allegations that you're leaving your kids unsupervised in an unsafe place, that's another story.
Regarding the safety of children in public, I'm reminded of a news story that made headlines a while back about tourists that parked their strollers outside a store while they went in to shop. Could their home country really have fewer messed up people than we do? Or is it possible that it really isn't that unsafe to do this, but our own society (as a consequence of our sensationalist media) has grown up with the belief that the world is full of people that will do unspeakable things to your children the moment you turn your head?
I'd be less worried about planned events and more worried about the unplanned ones. These pre-programmed only-dial-this-one-number cell phones don't send text messages, don't take photographs, and don't connect our children to anyone other than their parents.
While I'm all for teaching the lesson of planning ahead and being prepared, neither your children nor the environment that they live in is perfect. What's wrong with an extra bit of safety?
This is a different kind of a VM..NET and Java run application logic with their own type of VM that allows their applications to interact with the OS, in many cases, just like any other native application. VMware and other VM solutions attempt to emulate an entire host computer to run an operating system, which can then run applications. These applications are constrained to accessing only the things available to them in their operating system and cannot interact with the host operating system, except through emulated networks and devices.
Java and.NET simply make the native operating system's 3D APIs available to its applications. A full VM solution would have to implement a "virtual" 3D-capable video card that a guest OS would be able to use, and then find a way to hook that emulated video card up to a variety of real video cards. This is considerably more difficult.
VMware has actually had 3D support for a while, but it's been painfully slow. The latest versions do make some attempt at using hardware 3D acceleration through the host operating system. I'm not sure how well at works, though.
We'll need to record life for literally hundreds of thousands of years before we know that evoluation actually occurs and isn't just a bunch of bs.
What do you think the fossil record is? One big practical joke? You have dated, complete skeletons (if not more) from thousands (if not millions) of species over millions of years.
We can watch evolution as it happens. Not all species evolve as slowly as we do. Bacteria and small insects have incredibly short life spans and evolve extremely quickly when you change their environment. In easily observed time frames, we can observe speciation.
Why do you think "antibiotic resistant infections" are on the rise? Bacteria are evolving, in the wild, right in front of our eyes. When you start killing them off with antibiotics, they're going to adapt and evolve into bacteria that can't be killed so easily by those antibiotics. These types of things are going on all around us right now. This is the very definition of evolution.
If you're sitting there saying "stupid pilots should know not to fly into restricted airspace", keep in mind that the number of restricted spaces EXPLODED in the last few years because of You Know When...and these spaces are frequently around insignificant things like, say, a major grain processing plant that Homeland Insecurity classified as "critical infrastructure". Things that are NOT marked on charts. They're also frequently date/time specific (ie, some big concert is going on somewhere, and DoHiS issues a restriction just for the event. There are a half dozen KINDS of restricted airspaces, with all sorts of varying altitude limits and such.
These things are all marked very clearly on aeronautical charts, which pilots are required to keep up-to-date and review before their flights.
Morgan Freeman has been trying to get Rendezvous on the big screen for some time now. I think he's having a hard time getting people to buy into it without popularizing it. It's really too bad, because I think this book would translate well to a film.
One of the book's sequels could make for the basis of a good TV series.
You talk about insurance companies as if they exist to be fair to people.
I absolutely do not think that insurance companies are in it to be fair to people. They're in it to make money, like every other company. But I do also realize that insurance companies are in competition with one another, and the only way they are able to offer lower premiums is by having extremely accurate statistics and risk assessments.
Insurance companies are unlike Microsoft in that Microsoft has no competitors. Microsoft doesn't have to woo its customers or keep its prices low. Insurance companies are playing an entirely different game. It is not in the best interests of an insurance company to artificially inflate premiums or stick it to you, because there are other insurance companies who would be glad to step in with a lower premium or a "no stickin' it to you" guarantee.
Looking beyond simple statistics, it might even be LESS likely to happen again since a person whose car has recently been damaged while parked is more likely to park in a less crowded part of the lot in spite of the longer walking distance.
I agree. But given that having accurate statistics and making accurate risk assessments is the very lifeblood of an insurance company, and the primary way that insurance companies are able to compete with one another, I really have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
But keep in mind that I wasn't trying to explain the increase due to his parked car. That appeared (to me at least) to be an independent thought. I was just trying to explain why premium increases seemed to exceed the actual cost of the claim that was paid out.
Obviously, I did read the post. I was responding to the statement that I quoted in my post. The "parked car" bit was part of the following "my own insurance premiums rise", which was not what I was responding to. These are independent of one another. I was attempting to explain why premiums rise to the point where the insured ends up paying the insurance company above and beyond the amount the insurance company paid in the claim. I am not attempting to explain why his premiums rose after his parked car was hit.
Please drop the attitude. If you disagree with something I said, feel free to disagree, but making ad hominem attacks is really unnecessary, and make you look stupid when it turns out you're wrong. But then again, this is Slashdot, right? Personal attacks first, intelligent discussion if you have time?
Really, do you believe this bullshit? My auto insurance company charges me a higher premium because of my credit (which isn't bad, just non-existant). Their justification is that drivers with low credit scores are more prone to have accidents! Really?
Yes, really. Why is this so hard to believe? Get a quote from other insurance companies. They're all going to tell you the same thing. Either they're in collusion with each other to stick it to you, or perhaps they've all done their homework and come to the same conclusion.
If I am a sensible driver, which the previous 20 years should've proven, wouldn't this experience make me an even better driver since now I will be more cautious?
This is conjecture. The raw statistics disagree with you. But don't listen to me. Do your own research!
The 'statistics' that insurance companies go by to adjust premiums are compiled BY the companies themselves which tends to put the results into question.
Ask yourself WHY they compile the statistics, though. All insurance companies produce the same "product". One insurance company's money is the same as another's. The way they compete is by lowering premiums as much as they dare, to entice people to use their services over someone else's. How do you get your premiums low? By gathering every piece of information about drivers and accidents that they can, putting people into groups, and calculating the risk associated with each driver. If you can collect enough information that shows that a driver is a safe driver, you can lower his premium more than your competitors and get that person's business.
It's simple economics. Stop assuming companies are out to get you. They're out to make money, and they have competitors. The free market has a way of making businesses very predictible.
I buy insurance for the major events. There's a reason they tell you to drop collision/comprehensive when your vehicle's value drops below a certain value ($10k?). If you can afford a new car if you accidentally total yours, then you don't need comprehensive or collision coverage and you'll save a lot of money by dropping it.
You must work for an insurance company, because only someone who profited from such piracy would defend actions as logical.
I do not work for an insurance company, but I do see their use of statistically-derived premiums to be logical. Shouldn't people that drive safely, without tickets, with an inexpensive but safe vehicle be rewarded for that?
Suddenly I become more of a risk because someone else runs into my parked car?
I may have misunderstood your original comment. I wasn't attempting to justify what they're doing here. I do not understand why they would bump up premiums significantly for people that were victimized like that. You didn't cause it, so why are you being considered a greater risk? The only explanation that I can come up with is the fact that there is such a thing as a "chronic victim". People that regularly park poorly or otherwise leave their vehicles in an unsafe area. These people will be the victims of these types of accidents more often because of their habits, not bad luck. They may not be at fault in any of them, but they're still contributing to the fact that the insurance company has to pay something out. Maybe that warrants an increase in premiums. Of course, this is a lot of conjecture. I'm just guessing.
Look: Insurance companies are in business to make money. The "product" that these companies produce doesn't vary between companies. In order to compete with each other, they have to do a better job of calculating risk and pressuring high-risk clients to pay more or leave. It is in their best interests to get their statistics and risk assessments right. That's their whole mode of operation. It's hard to adopt a "stick it to the customer" business model in a free market economy (unless they're all in collusion, which could be the case I suppose), and since their behavior can be more easily explained by guidance from a statistical risk assessment, I have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
... paid claims with increased premiums that beyond-covered the paid-out claim
The goal of bumping up your premium is not to compensate the insurance company. By having an accident, you have shown your insurance company that you are now in the class of people that have recently had an accident. Statistically speaking, you are more likely to have another accident than someone who has not recently had an accident. Your premium is adjusted to match their new information, not to compensate them for the amount they paid out.
Once you are no longer in this class, your premium will drop back down. Your premium isn't dropping because you've "paid them back"; it's dropping because you are now in the class of people that haven't had an accident in a long time. Statistically speaking, you're less likely to have an accident than you were before, so your premium is adjusted.
Just because the label has its roots in the English language doesn't change the intent of the domain name. It's not possible to come up with a single word for these concepts that is meaningful in every language. You could make a similar argument for.cn and.jp. The dominant languages in those countries don't use the Latin alphabet, so is their country code really intended for that country's exclusive use? Yes, of course it is.
While I grimace when I hear "control of the Internet" equated with "control over the DNS root", it's not actually that much of a misnomer. You can "bypass" US control by either using IP addresses, or by pointing your name servers to an alternative root. The problems that the latter approach causes tend to completely outweigh the benefits. It is generally agreed that fragmenting the DNS root is a Bad Thing for a variety of reasons.
And since the Internet is relatively useless without a mechanism to locate hosts on it, and since nobody seems to be willing (or able) to consider alternatives to DNS (such as a proper directory service that could be immune to intellectual property disputes), the DNS root is the key to that.
Of course, ICANN encompasses more than just the DNS root, including most of the functions other organizations previously had, including the relatively mindless allocation of numbers for protocols, IP address blocks, etc.
I think perhaps you misunderstand the purpose of domain names like.com. They're intended to be generic, not tied to any particular country. They are not US-centric, even though that's where most of the original.com registrants were. The reasons for that have nothing to do with the domains' purposes. Commercial entities are free to register example.us if they want a US-specific domain name. Commercial entities abroad are free to register example.com without being tied to the US in any way.
Each country has its own naming scheme beneath its country code domain. The US, originally, was based on geography (which might be part of the reason companies didn't register names there; who would want to visit www.widgets.saint-louis.mo.us when they could get www.widgets.com?) Other countries adopted more useful hierarchies, which is why you tend to see more example.co.uk names. The US recently eliminated the geographical taxonomy, though, so people can register whatevertheywant.us.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm starting to find that more large entities (St. Louis University, etc.) are starting to filter mail more aggressively. This by itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but many of them are doing it poorly, by silently dropping e-mails that they filter. It's really frustrating when many of your e-mails get through, but one doesn't, and you never know about it. Did they receive it? Did they just miss it? And if they're filtering on content, you can't just reply to your first e-mail and ask "Did you have a chance to look at this?" because that one will get dropped too.
Consequently, e-mail becomes unreliable (at least to people at that organization), so you phone or IM them instead.
Why didn't the stewardesses call them back and tell them it was an iPod and that a passenger had just reported it missing?
It's entirely possible that they did. It's plausible that the procedure for handling events like this requires follow-through, even if an obvious explanation arises after they've initiated it. "If it was suspicious enough for you to invoke the process, then it's suspicious enough for OUR investigation to determine that it was harmless after all." They might be trying to avoid a situation where a flight attendant presses the panic button in response to something suspicious, and the perpetrator comes out and convinces (with or without threat) the flight attendant to call it off. And then the plane blows up.
My next thought was, "Yah, but they could still have completely avoided pissing all of those people off, and treating the guy like he was a criminal, if they had just waited until the device was inspected and deemed to be an iPod after all."
But then you have to consider that IF it was something bad, it's in their best interests to collect as much information as is humanly possible as quickly as is humanly possible. So while the bomb guys are checking to make sure it really was an iPod, you'd better have everyone available collecting as much information from the passengers (including the owner) as you can, "just in case" you learn something suggesting this is more than what it appears. If it takes the bomb squad an hour to figure out that it was a bomb after all, that's an hour of interrogation time you've lost, and an hour of time potential co-conspirators have had doing the same thing on other planes.
So, sadly, I have to say that, IMO, they did everything right. I certainly do feel for the guy, though.
In most cases, laws are easily understood by the common (well, educated) man. The problem is writing them. Over the last few hundred years, judges have hammered out interpretations for a lot of very similar words and phrases, in a variety of different contexts. When a common person writes a law, they get their point out using simple language. Unfortunately, when lawyers argue and judges interpret what you've written, subtleties become very important, and poor word choice could make the law do something you didn't intend, or fail to do something you did intend. Or, worse, one part of the law will disagree with another part, or some other ambiguity will arise. This puts judges in an awkward position of trying to come up with one interpretation that is consistent with the law as a whole, because they must assume that the law is written the way it is for a reason. They can't just say, "Oh, this is clearly a goof, we'll pretend it says what the legislature clearly meant to say." Language trumps intent, always.
So while the common (educated) man should be able to read and understand most all of our laws without a problem (fine details notwithstanding), only someone with a law background should really be put in the position to write them.
I didn't say all legislators had to be lawyers, but you do have to keep in mind that lawyers will be looking for ways to exploit the language of what you have written, and judges will interpret those laws according to very specific rules of law that most laypeople (which most congressmen are) simply do not understand. A minor wording problem could easily make a law inconsistent with itself, which puts judges in an awkward position of having to assume the law is written that way for a reason, even though everyone knows that the legislature just goofed. People trained in the language of law make less stupid mistakes like that. So while requiring our legislators (representatives) be lawyers might be overkill, they ought to have some law background just as a matter of qualification.
While I'm nearly positive that the politicians backing this legislation were doing it exactly as you describe, for purely political reasons, this also serves to point out something that most people don't really notice: Fewer of our legislators (either state or federal) have any law background than many would think. I would wager that many legislators don't realize that the law they're writing or sponsoring has any constitutional implications. Yes, it eventually comes out, and yes, sometimes law-trained individuals fix up the language of a bill or advise a legislator, but shouldn't the people writing our laws have a background in law? This seems somewhat obvious to me, but we seem to be more interested in what party a representative affiliates him/herself with than their qualifications.
Part of me hopes that we're left hanging, with no resolution on the Ori. This gives competing networks a pretty good reason to pick up SG-1 after SciFi drops them. If you wrap everything up neatly, it's almost like you're starting a new spin-off series, since you need new villains, etc.
I'm doing 100Mbps using 3com NICs and Cisco Catalyst switches and have the same experience as the original poster. RDP doesn't seem to do a good job with video (and, for me, synchronizing the sound with the video). It may be that the original poster tends to watch videos that aren't that complex, or are shrunk to a small size, or maybe just doesn't mind the impact to the video's quality. (If that's all you've ever experienced...)
I don't think your "cheap hardware" drawbacks are quite as bad as you think. I can't imagine any combination of cheap hardware rated at 100Mbps will ever give you 10Mbps performance, unless your combination is contrived or your network is congested.
It is almost certainly due to the legal climate in the US.
In defense of "mandatory reporters", keep in mind that many occupations are legally required to report something that they think is questionable. These people may not necessarily believe that you're being a bad parent, but if they've lost the ability to plausibly deny that they saw it, they could go to jail (and/or lose their job) for not reporting it, if it comes up later and is determined to be abuse. That being said, when these people do call the hotline to report some event, nothing is likely to happen to you. You might get a phone call or a visit asking for details about what happened, if they agree that the event was potentially abusive. But if you're just Average Mom, and your kids are responsible enough to be fine for a few days on their own, they're going to see that and not bother you.
If your house is falling apart and your kids are sitting in piles of their own feces when they stop by to check on allegations that you're leaving your kids unsupervised in an unsafe place, that's another story.
Regarding the safety of children in public, I'm reminded of a news story that made headlines a while back about tourists that parked their strollers outside a store while they went in to shop. Could their home country really have fewer messed up people than we do? Or is it possible that it really isn't that unsafe to do this, but our own society (as a consequence of our sensationalist media) has grown up with the belief that the world is full of people that will do unspeakable things to your children the moment you turn your head?
I'd be less worried about planned events and more worried about the unplanned ones. These pre-programmed only-dial-this-one-number cell phones don't send text messages, don't take photographs, and don't connect our children to anyone other than their parents.
While I'm all for teaching the lesson of planning ahead and being prepared, neither your children nor the environment that they live in is perfect. What's wrong with an extra bit of safety?
This is a different kind of a VM. .NET and Java run application logic with their own type of VM that allows their applications to interact with the OS, in many cases, just like any other native application. VMware and other VM solutions attempt to emulate an entire host computer to run an operating system, which can then run applications. These applications are constrained to accessing only the things available to them in their operating system and cannot interact with the host operating system, except through emulated networks and devices.
.NET simply make the native operating system's 3D APIs available to its applications. A full VM solution would have to implement a "virtual" 3D-capable video card that a guest OS would be able to use, and then find a way to hook that emulated video card up to a variety of real video cards. This is considerably more difficult.
Java and
VMware has actually had 3D support for a while, but it's been painfully slow. The latest versions do make some attempt at using hardware 3D acceleration through the host operating system. I'm not sure how well at works, though.
We'll need to record life for literally hundreds of thousands of years before we know that evoluation actually occurs and isn't just a bunch of bs.
What do you think the fossil record is? One big practical joke? You have dated, complete skeletons (if not more) from thousands (if not millions) of species over millions of years.
We can watch evolution as it happens. Not all species evolve as slowly as we do. Bacteria and small insects have incredibly short life spans and evolve extremely quickly when you change their environment. In easily observed time frames, we can observe speciation.
Why do you think "antibiotic resistant infections" are on the rise? Bacteria are evolving, in the wild, right in front of our eyes. When you start killing them off with antibiotics, they're going to adapt and evolve into bacteria that can't be killed so easily by those antibiotics. These types of things are going on all around us right now. This is the very definition of evolution.
Unless you have some other explanation?
If you're sitting there saying "stupid pilots should know not to fly into restricted airspace", keep in mind that the number of restricted spaces EXPLODED in the last few years because of You Know When...and these spaces are frequently around insignificant things like, say, a major grain processing plant that Homeland Insecurity classified as "critical infrastructure". Things that are NOT marked on charts. They're also frequently date/time specific (ie, some big concert is going on somewhere, and DoHiS issues a restriction just for the event. There are a half dozen KINDS of restricted airspaces, with all sorts of varying altitude limits and such.
These things are all marked very clearly on aeronautical charts, which pilots are required to keep up-to-date and review before their flights.
Nude beaches. All of those little flesh colored dots.
Morgan Freeman has been trying to get Rendezvous on the big screen for some time now. I think he's having a hard time getting people to buy into it without popularizing it. It's really too bad, because I think this book would translate well to a film.
One of the book's sequels could make for the basis of a good TV series.
You talk about insurance companies as if they exist to be fair to people.
I absolutely do not think that insurance companies are in it to be fair to people. They're in it to make money, like every other company. But I do also realize that insurance companies are in competition with one another, and the only way they are able to offer lower premiums is by having extremely accurate statistics and risk assessments.
Insurance companies are unlike Microsoft in that Microsoft has no competitors. Microsoft doesn't have to woo its customers or keep its prices low. Insurance companies are playing an entirely different game. It is not in the best interests of an insurance company to artificially inflate premiums or stick it to you, because there are other insurance companies who would be glad to step in with a lower premium or a "no stickin' it to you" guarantee.
Looking beyond simple statistics, it might even be LESS likely to happen again since a person whose car has recently been damaged while parked is more likely to park in a less crowded part of the lot in spite of the longer walking distance.
I agree. But given that having accurate statistics and making accurate risk assessments is the very lifeblood of an insurance company, and the primary way that insurance companies are able to compete with one another, I really have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
But keep in mind that I wasn't trying to explain the increase due to his parked car. That appeared (to me at least) to be an independent thought. I was just trying to explain why premium increases seemed to exceed the actual cost of the claim that was paid out.
Obviously, I did read the post. I was responding to the statement that I quoted in my post. The "parked car" bit was part of the following "my own insurance premiums rise", which was not what I was responding to. These are independent of one another. I was attempting to explain why premiums rise to the point where the insured ends up paying the insurance company above and beyond the amount the insurance company paid in the claim. I am not attempting to explain why his premiums rose after his parked car was hit.
Please drop the attitude. If you disagree with something I said, feel free to disagree, but making ad hominem attacks is really unnecessary, and make you look stupid when it turns out you're wrong. But then again, this is Slashdot, right? Personal attacks first, intelligent discussion if you have time?
I haven't had an accident EVER. So, just looking at my own personal statistics, I will never have an accident... So insurance should be free...
Yes, in a world all to yourself, you wouldn't need to pay anything for insurance.
However, insurance companies have to consider a larger sample size than you.
Really, do you believe this bullshit? My auto insurance company charges me a higher premium because of my credit (which isn't bad, just non-existant). Their justification is that drivers with low credit scores are more prone to have accidents! Really?
Yes, really. Why is this so hard to believe? Get a quote from other insurance companies. They're all going to tell you the same thing. Either they're in collusion with each other to stick it to you, or perhaps they've all done their homework and come to the same conclusion.
If I am a sensible driver, which the previous 20 years should've proven, wouldn't this experience make me an even better driver since now I will be more cautious?
This is conjecture. The raw statistics disagree with you. But don't listen to me. Do your own research!
The 'statistics' that insurance companies go by to adjust premiums are compiled BY the companies themselves which tends to put the results into question.
Ask yourself WHY they compile the statistics, though. All insurance companies produce the same "product". One insurance company's money is the same as another's. The way they compete is by lowering premiums as much as they dare, to entice people to use their services over someone else's. How do you get your premiums low? By gathering every piece of information about drivers and accidents that they can, putting people into groups, and calculating the risk associated with each driver. If you can collect enough information that shows that a driver is a safe driver, you can lower his premium more than your competitors and get that person's business.
It's simple economics. Stop assuming companies are out to get you. They're out to make money, and they have competitors. The free market has a way of making businesses very predictible.
I buy insurance for the major events. There's a reason they tell you to drop collision/comprehensive when your vehicle's value drops below a certain value ($10k?). If you can afford a new car if you accidentally total yours, then you don't need comprehensive or collision coverage and you'll save a lot of money by dropping it.
You must work for an insurance company, because only someone who profited from such piracy would defend actions as logical.
I do not work for an insurance company, but I do see their use of statistically-derived premiums to be logical. Shouldn't people that drive safely, without tickets, with an inexpensive but safe vehicle be rewarded for that?
Suddenly I become more of a risk because someone else runs into my parked car?
I may have misunderstood your original comment. I wasn't attempting to justify what they're doing here. I do not understand why they would bump up premiums significantly for people that were victimized like that. You didn't cause it, so why are you being considered a greater risk? The only explanation that I can come up with is the fact that there is such a thing as a "chronic victim". People that regularly park poorly or otherwise leave their vehicles in an unsafe area. These people will be the victims of these types of accidents more often because of their habits, not bad luck. They may not be at fault in any of them, but they're still contributing to the fact that the insurance company has to pay something out. Maybe that warrants an increase in premiums. Of course, this is a lot of conjecture. I'm just guessing.
Look: Insurance companies are in business to make money. The "product" that these companies produce doesn't vary between companies. In order to compete with each other, they have to do a better job of calculating risk and pressuring high-risk clients to pay more or leave. It is in their best interests to get their statistics and risk assessments right. That's their whole mode of operation. It's hard to adopt a "stick it to the customer" business model in a free market economy (unless they're all in collusion, which could be the case I suppose), and since their behavior can be more easily explained by guidance from a statistical risk assessment, I have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
... paid claims with increased premiums that beyond-covered the paid-out claim
The goal of bumping up your premium is not to compensate the insurance company. By having an accident, you have shown your insurance company that you are now in the class of people that have recently had an accident. Statistically speaking, you are more likely to have another accident than someone who has not recently had an accident. Your premium is adjusted to match their new information, not to compensate them for the amount they paid out.
Once you are no longer in this class, your premium will drop back down. Your premium isn't dropping because you've "paid them back"; it's dropping because you are now in the class of people that haven't had an accident in a long time. Statistically speaking, you're less likely to have an accident than you were before, so your premium is adjusted.
Just because the label has its roots in the English language doesn't change the intent of the domain name. It's not possible to come up with a single word for these concepts that is meaningful in every language. You could make a similar argument for .cn and .jp. The dominant languages in those countries don't use the Latin alphabet, so is their country code really intended for that country's exclusive use? Yes, of course it is.
While I grimace when I hear "control of the Internet" equated with "control over the DNS root", it's not actually that much of a misnomer. You can "bypass" US control by either using IP addresses, or by pointing your name servers to an alternative root. The problems that the latter approach causes tend to completely outweigh the benefits. It is generally agreed that fragmenting the DNS root is a Bad Thing for a variety of reasons.
And since the Internet is relatively useless without a mechanism to locate hosts on it, and since nobody seems to be willing (or able) to consider alternatives to DNS (such as a proper directory service that could be immune to intellectual property disputes), the DNS root is the key to that.
Of course, ICANN encompasses more than just the DNS root, including most of the functions other organizations previously had, including the relatively mindless allocation of numbers for protocols, IP address blocks, etc.
I think perhaps you misunderstand the purpose of domain names like .com. They're intended to be generic, not tied to any particular country. They are not US-centric, even though that's where most of the original .com registrants were. The reasons for that have nothing to do with the domains' purposes. Commercial entities are free to register example.us if they want a US-specific domain name. Commercial entities abroad are free to register example.com without being tied to the US in any way.
Each country has its own naming scheme beneath its country code domain. The US, originally, was based on geography (which might be part of the reason companies didn't register names there; who would want to visit www.widgets.saint-louis.mo.us when they could get www.widgets.com?) Other countries adopted more useful hierarchies, which is why you tend to see more example.co.uk names. The US recently eliminated the geographical taxonomy, though, so people can register whatevertheywant.us.