Your auto premiums are based upon YOUR past/predicted future performance as a driver, something over which you have control.
Plus they're based on gender and age, as I stated. I _don't_ have any control over these factors. If I was 5 years older, I would be paying several orders of magnitude LESS for insurance. Those stats should not be considered valid. If I get in an accident that I cause, by all means charge me more, because I'm obviously an unsafe driver. I DO have control over my driving habits, but those are not the only factors that dictate my premium.
As you age, your car premiums will go down based on your age AND your continued good performance.
Sure, I know that, but I'm paying a small fortune every month right now for insurance, simply because some mathdroid figured out that a bunch of 16-25 year old guys get in accidents every year.
That's like tracking people (through grocery membership savings programmes) that buy a lot of red meat, and charging them more for life insurance.
It's pigeonholing, and it should not be legal. I'm not a number. What might be true for most of the rest of my demographic is not necessarily true for me.
[as the subject says, this is slightly offtopic, but it IS about insurance, and rates and stuff.]
This is a rant I've been thinking on for the last year or so.
I'm a 20 year old male, leasing my own new car and not living with my parents. I pay a huge amount for insurance on said car every month. My lease payment is $300/month. My insurance payment is $250/month. Yes, that's right. No, I didn't accidentally put that 0 at the end of $250.
Why, you ask, is my insurance so high? I must've totalled my last car so my premiums went up, right? Or I must have at least been driving under then influence, without a seatbelt, doing 175 in a 60, with expired license plates, right?
Nope, truth is that my driving record is spotless. I've never been in an accident, or even received a traffic violation.
I'm victim to statistical analysis, based on age, and gender. You see, statistics PROVE that I am VERY likely to get into an accident because lots of other people my age and gender have done so.
This is similar to what these people are trying to do. It's not terribly bad YET, but this definately opens the door to a Gattaca type situation where the insurance company decides that my DNA is CLOSE to someone who had (ie)Lukemia, so I am likely to get it or have it or whatever, so my life insurance should be higher.
Sounds a little like my current situation, huh? My question is: How is gender profiling even legal? I mean, what if the SAME stats proved that Black(or Hispanic, or whatever the politically correct terms are... sorry.) people get in more accidents than white people? Well, obviously, there would be minority groups protesting as far as the eye can see. Or what if outspoken gay people get in more accidents than non-gay people? Same.
But what can I do? I'm just a straight white guy. I'm walking politically incorrectness.
---
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. - Benjamin Disraeli
---
Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forfty percent of all people know that. - Homer Simpson
---
Way to twist his words. There's this crazy thing called CONTEXT that we should consult before bashing someone/thing.
Obviously, when he said "We did a lot of QA," he was talking about the snapshot of GCC, and not the OS as a whole.
Sure, they should have caught this bug, or better, it should have been considered at design time, but (and I'm not trying to make excuses for Red Hat here), to catch this bug, they prolly would've had to have had a 7.0 system up and running for 3 weeks straight. Maybe their test cycle is shorter than that. If their test cycle was say.. 6 weeks, then who knows what kind of bugs might pop up at the 6 1/2 week mark? You can only allow so much testing for a product before releasing it, or you'd never release anything.
As I said, yes, they should have caught this, but as we all know, no software works perfectly, and sh*t happens. At least there's a fix for it.
The band houses a tiny microphone, plus a device that converts audio signals into vibrations.
I certainly hope they get a patent on the as-yet-unnamed 'device that converts audio signals into vibrations' before someone tries to copy it. I mean, jeez, they're definately onto something here! This whole time, I thought that audio signals WERE vibrations!
(I love it when journalists pad stories to make them more.. uh.. interesting. Good thing there's no -1 sarcastic (-: )
Not only a rating of 1 to 5, but also also a topical rating that does not directly affect score. F'rinstance, this story could be marked "Repeat". Others could be marked "This is not news" etc.
Numbers could be important for threshold, but it would be great to automagically ignore all stories marked "repeat" even though I'd often like to see stories that others don't find worthwhile on my front page.
It's not Rob's job to write new pieces of slash right now. Slash is open source, and as Rob stated over and over again in #forum last week, if someone adds a feature to the code, he will consider it.
I suspect that if someone added a method of moderating articles, and defining user thresholds, it would make its way from slash to slashdot.org.
So, in short, if you want something done, do it yourself.
Good point. I can often pull down 1/4 meg/sec from menace.csd.unb.ca (linux site 150km away (in F'ton), which I'm sure you're aware of). And I don't think I've ever been charges extra usage for DSL, but my point was that they ARE monitoring our usage.
And I've never had DSL in those other provinces, but is it normal that service just dies for 1/2 hour at a time once a week or so?
New Brunswick sucks when it comes to the net which is another reason I'm moving to Montreal.
In NB now, we can get DSL in 3 (maybe 4 now) cities. And only in certain parts of those cities.
Cable service is a joke. Last I checked, you needed a modem and had to use your phone line for the upstream. So, really, the only choice for broadband is the DSL I explained earlier, and it's only available through one provider, who also happens to be our ever-growing telco.
Unless you're rich. Then you can get a T1 or ISDN or whatever for outlandish prices.
So, as I said, I'm moving to Montreal, where at least there are more options.. but I've heard that Bell Canada likes to.. uh.. flex their power up there.
I get 5 gig/month (which is ACTUALLY 5,000,000,000 bytes, not 5 gig). As the base package, and after that, I pay 7cents per megabyte(1,000,000 bytes).
So, if I download in excess of 5 gigs, it costs me an additional $70 per pseudo-gigabyte. Fortunately, I don't use that much, but my ISP offers a larger package of 20 gigabytes for an additional $20/month, but you must already be on the plan to take advantage of the package.
Why don't I use another ISP? NBTel is the only ISP in the province that will provide DSL.
(note: 7c/meg WAS the rate, I'm not 100% certain that it's still that high, but I haven't heard otherwise).
From a practical standpoint, it is incredibly simple to forge a timestamp. If this document is about to "expire", I could just update the timestamp (touch for instance).
The only practical way I could think of in the 30 seconds I devoted to making this work is through a trusted third party that stores timestamps in a secure manner, and can be used as a reference. But don't expect people to have a third party stamping mail for them. I certainly wouldn't trust this 'generally trusted' party.
I was under the assumption that apart from making Netscape WORK, one of the goals of the mozilla project was to reduce the size of the code base significantly (I heard down to the size of a floppy). Is this no longer the case? Or is there 14 megs of debugging pre-release info (even though I didn't install the quality feedback agent)?
This is not a troll or flame, I'm just wondering what happened to those ideals.
Sony Releases the PS2, people rush to the stores to drop dead at the outlandish price tag. Nintendo cleans up by selling their cube at a reasonable price.
(I checked at Sony store yesterday. PS2 is $575CDN. That's crazy.)
Cable service in my area is a joke (it MAY have changed recently with Rogers and Shaw trading off cable rights). Cable modems are DOWNSTREAM ONLY. You need to use regular dialup for upstream (requesting pages, uploading files, etc). They charge you by the hour, and there is no always-on service. Like I said, it's a joke.
DSL service isn't TOO bad, but I have the choice of a whopping ONE provider (my telco) to get DSL service from. I've had it for over a year now (DSL) and it goes down regularly, for 10 minutes at a time. It IS always on, and I can pull in 1/4 meg a second from a machine within the province if it can put out that much. (menace.csd.unb.ca is my friend mmmm local linux mirror with VERY few users #1 of 1000 usually.)
Anyway, I hope I never piss off my telco, because I don't even OWN a modem anymore, and Cable service isn't much better than dialup here.
Above an average of about 40FPS, nobody notices anymore - they can't!
Maybe not conciously, but it DOES make a difference. Ever seen an I-Max movie? They're shot at 48FPS instead of 24, and it definately makes a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Your auto premiums are based upon YOUR past/predicted future performance as a driver, something over which you have control.
Plus they're based on gender and age, as I stated. I _don't_ have any control over these factors. If I was 5 years older, I would be paying several orders of magnitude LESS for insurance. Those stats should not be considered valid. If I get in an accident that I cause, by all means charge me more, because I'm obviously an unsafe driver. I DO have control over my driving habits, but those are not the only factors that dictate my premium.
As you age, your car premiums will go down based on your age AND your continued good performance.
Sure, I know that, but I'm paying a small fortune every month right now for insurance, simply because some mathdroid figured out that a bunch of 16-25 year old guys get in accidents every year.
That's like tracking people (through grocery membership savings programmes) that buy a lot of red meat, and charging them more for life insurance.
It's pigeonholing, and it should not be legal. I'm not a number. What might be true for most of the rest of my demographic is not necessarily true for me.
I DID shop around that's the best price I could get. I had a quote for $4986/year (== ~$415/month)
[as the subject says, this is slightly offtopic, but it IS about insurance, and rates and stuff.]
This is a rant I've been thinking on for the last year or so.
I'm a 20 year old male, leasing my own new car and not living with my parents. I pay a huge amount for insurance on said car every month. My lease payment is $300/month. My insurance payment is $250/month. Yes, that's right. No, I didn't accidentally put that 0 at the end of $250.
Why, you ask, is my insurance so high? I must've totalled my last car so my premiums went up, right? Or I must have at least been driving under then influence, without a seatbelt, doing 175 in a 60, with expired license plates, right?
Nope, truth is that my driving record is spotless. I've never been in an accident, or even received a traffic violation.
I'm victim to statistical analysis, based on age, and gender. You see, statistics PROVE that I am VERY likely to get into an accident because lots of other people my age and gender have done so.
This is similar to what these people are trying to do. It's not terribly bad YET, but this definately opens the door to a Gattaca type situation where the insurance company decides that my DNA is CLOSE to someone who had (ie)Lukemia, so I am likely to get it or have it or whatever, so my life insurance should be higher.
Sounds a little like my current situation, huh? My question is: How is gender profiling even legal? I mean, what if the SAME stats proved that Black(or Hispanic, or whatever the politically correct terms are... sorry.) people get in more accidents than white people? Well, obviously, there would be minority groups protesting as far as the eye can see. Or what if outspoken gay people get in more accidents than non-gay people? Same.
But what can I do? I'm just a straight white guy. I'm walking politically incorrectness.
---
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. - Benjamin Disraeli
---
Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forfty percent of all people know that. - Homer Simpson
---
Can we see support in Linux 2.6, please?
Wouldn't this be more of a 'Forced Feedback Driver for X' thing than a kernel support in 2.6 thing?
Way to twist his words. There's this crazy thing called CONTEXT that we should consult before bashing someone/thing.
Obviously, when he said "We did a lot of QA," he was talking about the snapshot of GCC, and not the OS as a whole.
Sure, they should have caught this bug, or better, it should have been considered at design time, but (and I'm not trying to make excuses for Red Hat here), to catch this bug, they prolly would've had to have had a 7.0 system up and running for 3 weeks straight. Maybe their test cycle is shorter than that. If their test cycle was say.. 6 weeks, then who knows what kind of bugs might pop up at the 6 1/2 week mark? You can only allow so much testing for a product before releasing it, or you'd never release anything.
As I said, yes, they should have caught this, but as we all know, no software works perfectly, and sh*t happens. At least there's a fix for it.
The band houses a tiny microphone, plus a device that converts audio signals into vibrations.
I certainly hope they get a patent on the as-yet-unnamed 'device that converts audio signals into vibrations' before someone tries to copy it. I mean, jeez, they're definately onto something here! This whole time, I thought that audio signals WERE vibrations!
(I love it when journalists pad stories to make them more.. uh.. interesting. Good thing there's no -1 sarcastic (-: )
I think it should be 2 dimensional.
Not only a rating of 1 to 5, but also also a topical rating that does not directly affect score. F'rinstance, this story could be marked "Repeat". Others could be marked "This is not news" etc.
Numbers could be important for threshold, but it would be great to automagically ignore all stories marked "repeat" even though I'd often like to see stories that others don't find worthwhile on my front page.
It's not Rob's job to write new pieces of slash right now. Slash is open source, and as Rob stated over and over again in #forum last week, if someone adds a feature to the code, he will consider it.
I suspect that if someone added a method of moderating articles, and defining user thresholds, it would make its way from slash to slashdot.org.
So, in short, if you want something done, do it yourself.
...you can be raising your kill count in Quake...
Raising SOMETHING by fiddling in your pockets...
uh.. I can look up the street and see the telco. (-: so I doubt that's ther problem.
Good point. I can often pull down 1/4 meg/sec from menace.csd.unb.ca (linux site 150km away (in F'ton), which I'm sure you're aware of). And I don't think I've ever been charges extra usage for DSL, but my point was that they ARE monitoring our usage.
And I've never had DSL in those other provinces, but is it normal that service just dies for 1/2 hour at a time once a week or so?
New Brunswick sucks when it comes to the net which is another reason I'm moving to Montreal.
In NB now, we can get DSL in 3 (maybe 4 now) cities. And only in certain parts of those cities.
Cable service is a joke. Last I checked, you needed a modem and had to use your phone line for the upstream. So, really, the only choice for broadband is the DSL I explained earlier, and it's only available through one provider, who also happens to be our ever-growing telco.
Unless you're rich. Then you can get a T1 or ISDN or whatever for outlandish prices.
So, as I said, I'm moving to Montreal, where at least there are more options.. but I've heard that Bell Canada likes to.. uh.. flex their power up there.
I pay on my DSL connection right now.
I get 5 gig/month (which is ACTUALLY 5,000,000,000 bytes, not 5 gig). As the base package, and after that, I pay 7cents per megabyte(1,000,000 bytes).
So, if I download in excess of 5 gigs, it costs me an additional $70 per pseudo-gigabyte. Fortunately, I don't use that much, but my ISP offers a larger package of 20 gigabytes for an additional $20/month, but you must already be on the plan to take advantage of the package.
Why don't I use another ISP? NBTel is the only ISP in the province that will provide DSL.
(note: 7c/meg WAS the rate, I'm not 100% certain that it's still that high, but I haven't heard otherwise).
From a practical standpoint, it is incredibly simple to forge a timestamp. If this document is about to "expire", I could just update the timestamp (touch for instance).
The only practical way I could think of in the 30 seconds I devoted to making this work is through a trusted third party that stores timestamps in a secure manner, and can be used as a reference. But don't expect people to have a third party stamping mail for them. I certainly wouldn't trust this 'generally trusted' party.
Not only in the Netherlands. Even in Canadia, we're taxed^H^H^H^H^Hcharged a levy on blank audio(and data) media. Info here.
Heck, with the number of journaling file systems, it's like being at a file system buffet at this point.
Mmmmm.. all you can eat inodes.
I was under the assumption that apart from making Netscape WORK, one of the goals of the mozilla project was to reduce the size of the code base significantly (I heard down to the size of a floppy). Is this no longer the case? Or is there 14 megs of debugging pre-release info (even though I didn't install the quality feedback agent)?
This is not a troll or flame, I'm just wondering what happened to those ideals.
No kidding.
And a bonus is that next time I lose my passkey, screw doing the paperwork! I have a stack of them, freshly Xeroxed, sitting in my drawer.
Thank you Cu::e::::::Ca:::t
I've said it before, but Rob wants:
http://slashdot.dot/
(H-T-T-P-COLON-SLASH-SLASH-SLASH-DOT-DOT-DOT)
Sony Releases the PS2, people rush to the stores to drop dead at the outlandish price tag. Nintendo cleans up by selling their cube at a reasonable price.
(I checked at Sony store yesterday. PS2 is $575CDN. That's crazy.)
despite the fact that Thanksgiving (or even Halloween, for that matter!)
OR, despite the fact that Halloween (or even Thanksgiving, for that matter!) hasn't been celebrated yet.
Yay for Canadia.
I live in New Brunswick, Canada.
Cable service in my area is a joke (it MAY have changed recently with Rogers and Shaw trading off cable rights). Cable modems are DOWNSTREAM ONLY. You need to use regular dialup for upstream (requesting pages, uploading files, etc). They charge you by the hour, and there is no always-on service. Like I said, it's a joke.
DSL service isn't TOO bad, but I have the choice of a whopping ONE provider (my telco) to get DSL service from. I've had it for over a year now (DSL) and it goes down regularly, for 10 minutes at a time. It IS always on, and I can pull in 1/4 meg a second from a machine within the province if it can put out that much. (menace.csd.unb.ca is my friend mmmm local linux mirror with VERY few users #1 of 1000 usually.)
Anyway, I hope I never piss off my telco, because I don't even OWN a modem anymore, and Cable service isn't much better than dialup here.
Woah! Now _THAT'S_ not something you see every day. Americans wanting to watch Canadian media.
Generally speaking, our (Canadia) mass media is a joke.
I saw Redhat 7.0 beta on my local FTP at LEAST a week ago. I suspect that's what was being reviewed.
Above an average of about 40FPS, nobody notices anymore - they can't!
Maybe not conciously, but it DOES make a difference. Ever seen an I-Max movie? They're shot at 48FPS instead of 24, and it definately makes a difference.