For example a $1000 start would pay out $131,501.26 like this over 100 iterations if they keep reinvesting the funds on their next spam crusade (using 5% return per iteration).
But do those stocks trade at a high enough volume to enable you to fully reinvest that way? Would it be possible to buy over $100,000 worth of, say, a.05 stock in one day? Not saying the scam wouldn't work; just wondering how far it would "scale."
The only conslusion one can rightfully come to is either our lawmakers are hopeless inept or they are trying to kill us.
...or that the various big business entitites that produce, distribute and serve alcoholic beverages have more influence over the government than the people who deal in illegal drugs.
People who eat cheeseburgers while driving do so because they need to eat. But the time they might spend eating at a static location is better spent eating on the move. The benefits they gain from eating on the go outweighs the percieved increase in risk.
Well, the thing is, "better spent" is his own perception, and it's one that you or I might not agree with. Also, the benefits he gains are not my concern. The risk he's taking is my concern, though, if I'm on the road with him.
And I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that occasionally, you might find yourself in some sort of screwed-up situation where you'd really and truly see the need to eat a cheeseburger while driving. I'll confess I've done it. But if you find yourself doing it regularly, you might want to re-evaluate the way you organize your time.
If you want to hold to your idea that eating cheeseburgers while driving is poor risk assessement, then I might ask you if you drive for any reason that isn't life and death.
I'm not trying to eliminate risk altogether. I'm saying, why introduce further risk factors?
You, however, seemed to advocate discarding a statistic that is the either the best available or most efficient data we have about accident risk and discard it, though it cost you only the time it took to read it.
I don't advocate discarding it. I advocate not presenting it as something more meaningful than it really is.
A stat about cheesburger eating drivers reaches a smaller group of people, but cheesburer eating drivers aren't any worse at risk assessment.
I'd suggest that the mere fact of eating while driving could be viewed as evidence that they have at least a slight deficiency in that area.
On the other hand, it's not so clear if you want to break it down into individual factors. We don't know how much driving people do in some sort of impaired or distracted condition, but with no incident.
No, we don't. So what? You're on a different track here. Such a statistic wouldn't have anything to do with accidents. If you succeeded in generating the statistic, you'd know absolutely nothing about the probability those factors cause accidents.
No, I'm on the same track, and the statistic would have something to do with accidents. I guess I just failed to make it apparent because I didn't feel like writing a longer post.
If you want to know how risky a given factor is, one of the things you have to know is how prevalent that factor is. For example, let's define "driver who eats cheeseburgers while driving on a regular basis" as someone who does it at least once a week, just as an arbitrary standard for the sake of illustration.
If "drivers who eat cheeseburgers while driving on a regular basis" are known to cause 1,000 accidents a year, that would give you an indication of how likely it is that you'd be involved in an accident caused by such a driver. But so what? That's not worth worrying about because you don't have any control over how other drivers behave.
But how risky is it for the "drivers who eat cheeseburgers while driving on a regular basis" themselves? Well, if there are only 1,100 such drivers, it's clearly one hell of a risky behavior. If we find that 90 percent of all drivers are "drivers who eat cheeseburgers while driving on a regular basis," then maybe it's not so risky. Knowing that would mean something in the real world.
Sooo.. Is it your contention that, even if the general stat is the most efficient approximation, we should ignore it in our decision making process? That would seem foolhardy. Discard the data we have because we don't have the data we want. And in its place, we'll use data with even less confirmation?
Well, someone -- I think it was you -- said something to the effect that you don't need statistics to tell you that driving while blindfolded is a bad idea.
No, no, no, and may I say.. no. All of what you say are ways for potentially ways for individuals or organizations to act in the hopes of reducing the American driver crash statistic.
So, apparently erroneously, I took your mention of "taking action" to mean becoming an activist in some way. I suppose what you really meant was to take steps to improve your own driving habits?
And if you assert that people don't generally/don't at all respond to a general accident statistic, I'd respond that there's no reason to believe they'd respond to a detailed accident statistic.
To be more precise, I would assert that most people don't respond to statistics as the "primary motivator" for them to take some kind of action (although I'm sure that some do). But statistics could very well be a supporting part of a larger set of arguments that will be persuasive. I would also assert that a general statistic such as "all drivers" is not going to have the power that a more specific statistic such as "people who eat cheeseburgers while driving" will have if you, indeed, are a person who eats cheeseburgers while driving. People tend to respond more strongly to details they can relate to personally. It becomes more real to them. "All drivers" is too vague; almost everyone who's legally allowed to drive, drives. At least in the U.S.
So while you may think its merely an interestic statistic, I'd contend that the general crash statistic is the most efficient approximation of driver risk. Why would I make this contention? Because, with the variety of groups and corporations that stand to gain from less accidents, I haven't seen the statistics you want.
It might very well be the most efficient approximation we can get. We know how many drivers there are, we know how many accidents there are, and we know how many traffic fatalities there are.
On the other hand, it's not so clear if you want to break it down into individual factors. We don't know how much driving people do in some sort of impaired or distracted condition, but with no incident. And if the police find a half-eaten cheeseburger in a car at a crash site, did the distraction of eating cause the accident? We can't be sure. The driver, if he survives, isn't likely to admit to it. So although I'd like to see statistics like that, I don't really think we can get them with any degree of confidence.
Even if the general statistic is the best indicator we can realistically get, where I get off the bus is the place where people present it as anything that deserves attention beyond the aforementioned "yes, that's interesting" reaction. Even if the reality is that we're not likely to get anything more accurate, I say we shouldn't make this into something it's not.
Does the stat as given earlier explicitly tell you that you're __% more likely to crash when fiddling with the radio? No. But it might be useful in soliticing funds for a study into accident factors.
In such a case, your ultimate goal is to find the statistics I want.
And as I said in my other post, the stat as given is a rough approximation. If I find the rough approximation alarming, I may take action.
What kind of action are you going to take? Join MADD? Support a group that's promoting laws against using a cell phone while driving? Circulate petitions to install traffic lights at dangerous intersections? If you're using statistics as a basis for your actions, your next step is going to have to be finding statistics on individual factors.
In reality, I don't think many people make decisions on that basis. Usually the story is that activists become active when a problem causes some sort of tragedy for them, personally. I would hope that government agencies take statistics into account when they disburse funds for reasearch, on the basis of which problems appear to be the most widespread. But then again, with the nagging feeling that it's not really that simple (as some problems are more complex than others), I'd also hope that numbers aren't the only thing they look at.
I'll give you the point that the "overall" statistic isn't literally meaningless, in an absolute sense. But, to come back to the context that prompted my original remark that it was meaningless, throwing the statement that flying is safer than driving out to the general public is, I contend, meaningful only as something you'd look at and say, "Hmmm, yes, that's interesting," and argue about on Internet discussion boards.
I myself am very angry at the absurdity of age/license checks for purchasing cough medicine. As if the big drug dealers will be buying 6 oz bottles of cough syrup to make the hundreds of gallons of narcotic. "But a few high school students made small amounts of drugs with this!", cry the Nanny-State bleeding hearts!
Right. And, of course, these "bleeding hearts" are simply taking the easy way out. The problem that actually needs to be addressed is not that kids (or other members of the general public) are misusing that stuff. The problem that needs to be addressed is that they want to misuse it. Ah, but that problem doesn't lend itself so easily to a simple, one-size-fits-all solution.
You miss the point. The usefulness of a statistic showing the probability of being involved in a car crash or a plane accident or getting cancer is not that you expect it to be a predictor.
The usefulness is that if you account for the most important factors that can cause a crash or a disease or whatever you want to avoid, you gain some understanding of what you can do to improve your chances. For example, it was mentioned earlier that statistically, commercial airlines are safer than private planes. So if I'm flying somewhere and have a choice, that knowledge tells me to go commercial.
Oh, and there's the fact that most air-related deaths are on private planes. If you only fly commercial, especially domestic, your odds of dying go WAY down.
Okay, so if you get to separate private planes out of the mix, I get to separate out all the drivers who are drunk or applying makeup or eating cheeseburgers, etc., and truckers who are jacked up on speed, and so on.
But mainly, as I said elsewhere, the bottom line to what I'm saying is not so much that driving is safer. Rather, it's this: A statistic that lumps all drivers together as equal is meaningless because in the real world there's too much variation.
Here's an analogy (and it's not about cars!): Suppose, in the course of chatting here, you find out I'm a doctor (I'm not, but just for the sake of argument). You ask me, for whatever reason, "Hey doc, what are my chances of getting cancer?"
I could blow off the question with a superficial answer like, "Well, the population of Earth is x, and the number of people who have been diagnosed is y, so your chances would appear to be something like y/x." And what do you do? You say, "Gee, thanks," and roll your eyes because I haven't told you anything useful. Well, that's the equivalent of your stat that includes all drivers.
Were I moved to give you an answer that's actually somewhat informative, I'd first ask about your family's medical history, your diet, smoking habits, and maybe even inquire about places you've lived and worked to see if you might have been exposed to something dangerous. Even considering all that, it's likely I'd still be reluctant to reduce it to a number, but I'd be able to tell you something meaningful.
... you'll still be far more likely to get plowed by a drunk driver than have a terrorist fly you into a building.
Terrorists aren't the only problem to consider when you're talking about air safety. Crashes can happen for all sorts of reasons not related in any way to terrorism. And maybe air travel is indeed safer than driving even if, as a driver, you do everything you can to be careful.
But still, I say a safety statistic that lumps all drivers into one category is meaningless.
I've read that they're equally safe per hour (or other unit of time) spent travelling. So when you look at a 12-hour car trip vs a 3-hour plane trip, the plane trip is several times safer. (And then, of course, you add in all the time you spend driving that couldn't be done in a plane...)
But what these rather generalized statistics don't show is that when you're driving, you're in control of a number of significant factors. Keep your car in good repair, observe the rules of the road, don't drive impaired, avoid distractions as much as possible, watch other drivers carefully. Do all that as well as you can, and you improve your chances quite a bit.
When you fly, all you can do is sit down and hope for the best.
If they had jumped on this moneymaking bandwagon years ago, they could've been making tons of money on Official Lyrics Websites. Alas, as with P2P, they jumped into the game too late, and will now sue their way out of their hole.
They might have been missing out on money they could have been making for the last ten years, but it's not too late to get into it. It seems to me that an "official site," if done well, could very possibly run the other sites out of business through plain ol' fair competition. If fans want to make sure the lyrics they get are accurate, they'll go to the official site.
My initial thought would be the ability to filter your Google searches so that websites that are potentially carrying MalWare are either flagged or not shown at all.
I thought of that, too. But then it occurred to me that the legal folks at Google would probably see it as nothing more than a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Go to any random person on the street and ask them if they've heard of Ubuntu. Dollars to donuts, they won't have.
You're probably right. But ask them if they've heard of Linux, and I bet the percentage of people who say yes will be quite a bit higher than it would have been five years ago. Of course, it's still not going to be a big enough number to realistically predict that this is the "year of the Linux desktop," but I think there's been some progress in awareness. And that's the first thing you need if you're looking for large numbers of new users.
It's not a happy thing that some people will take something and edit it to fit their own vision, and it would be wrong if that's what these companies are doing. But it's not.
Well, yes, it most likely is. If you watch a version of Blue Velvet with all instances of Dennis Hopper saying "fuck" edited out, you're having a fundamentally different experience of the movie than I had when I saw it.
There is no motivation to attack Macs. The motivation here is money. The bottom line. Am I going to write a worm that attacks less than 4% or 80% of the machines? I would definitly go after the larger number because that increases my odds of a return.
Why does it have to be one or the other? If I were writing malware, I'd go after both.
Well, consider that in most stores, PCs are the only type of computer for the salespeople to push. In my city, there are dozens of stores I could walk into and buy a PC off the shelf. There are only two places where I could buy a Mac. One's a CompUSA and the other is a freestanding Apple store.
That means there's one store in an area with about a million people where you would see both types of computers. Which in turn means the chances are pretty close to zero that a typical computer buyer would have the opportunity to check out a Mac while shopping around.
Not that that's the only factor, and probably it's not the most important one, but I'm sure it's "in play" here.
Yeah? Well music played from an LP on a good turntable is worse than crap compared to the band playing live in my living room!
You realize, of course, that if the band is playing electric instruments, it's going to sound like crap if they're using anything less than the Grateful Dead's "Wall of Sound."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grateful_dead#Wall_of _Sound
We'd press extra buttons to add fictitious viewers for shows we really liked. Etc.
That's possibly why you're no longer a Nielsen home. We do notice these things, believe it or not.;)
I suppose it might look wrong if someone overdoes it, like maxing out all the buttons every time your favorite show is on. We didn't go that far just because we thought it might indeed look suspicious. I assumed the reason we're no longer a Nielsen home is that at the beginning, they said they wanted us to do it for a year, and that's exactly how long they left the box here. Maybe our behavior got us on a list of families they won't ask again, but if that's the case, it's perfectly all right with me. I don't want to do it again.
Is Nielsen doing it differently now? We had a Nielsen box a few years ago, and it had buttons on it you were supposed to press to indicate which members of the family were watching at any given time. It was fun for the first couple hours, just because of the novelty, but then it got real old real quick. Of course, it was terribly inaccurate. People forget to press their buttons when they start or stop watching. We'd press extra buttons to add fictitious viewers for shows we really liked. Etc.
On MySpace, I am independently wealthy, married to *two* supermodels, and have so much Slashdot karma that I have infinite mod points.
Because, as we all know, no one lies on the Internet.:)
Yes indeed. Since the idea behind posting all this info is to make it public, I can't work up much outrage that the NSA wants to look at it (as opposed to other things they want to do that actually are invasive). What I find doubtful is the idea that they'll find anything useful on social networking sites; as a taxpayer, I don't see it as a good use of money I've helped fund them with.
I suspect that the only way to get less accurate data would be to mine the profiles on dating sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Gosh, here I am with mod points, and there's no "Clueless" mod to assign to this.
And I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that occasionally, you might find yourself in some sort of screwed-up situation where you'd really and truly see the need to eat a cheeseburger while driving. I'll confess I've done it. But if you find yourself doing it regularly, you might want to re-evaluate the way you organize your time.
I'm not trying to eliminate risk altogether. I'm saying, why introduce further risk factors? I don't advocate discarding it. I advocate not presenting it as something more meaningful than it really is.If you want to know how risky a given factor is, one of the things you have to know is how prevalent that factor is. For example, let's define "driver who eats cheeseburgers while driving on a regular basis" as someone who does it at least once a week, just as an arbitrary standard for the sake of illustration.
If "drivers who eat cheeseburgers while driving on a regular basis" are known to cause 1,000 accidents a year, that would give you an indication of how likely it is that you'd be involved in an accident caused by such a driver. But so what? That's not worth worrying about because you don't have any control over how other drivers behave.
But how risky is it for the "drivers who eat cheeseburgers while driving on a regular basis" themselves? Well, if there are only 1,100 such drivers, it's clearly one hell of a risky behavior. If we find that 90 percent of all drivers are "drivers who eat cheeseburgers while driving on a regular basis," then maybe it's not so risky. Knowing that would mean something in the real world.
Well, someone -- I think it was you -- said something to the effect that you don't need statistics to tell you that driving while blindfolded is a bad idea.On the other hand, it's not so clear if you want to break it down into individual factors. We don't know how much driving people do in some sort of impaired or distracted condition, but with no incident. And if the police find a half-eaten cheeseburger in a car at a crash site, did the distraction of eating cause the accident? We can't be sure. The driver, if he survives, isn't likely to admit to it. So although I'd like to see statistics like that, I don't really think we can get them with any degree of confidence.
Even if the general statistic is the best indicator we can realistically get, where I get off the bus is the place where people present it as anything that deserves attention beyond the aforementioned "yes, that's interesting" reaction. Even if the reality is that we're not likely to get anything more accurate, I say we shouldn't make this into something it's not.
In reality, I don't think many people make decisions on that basis. Usually the story is that activists become active when a problem causes some sort of tragedy for them, personally. I would hope that government agencies take statistics into account when they disburse funds for reasearch, on the basis of which problems appear to be the most widespread. But then again, with the nagging feeling that it's not really that simple (as some problems are more complex than others), I'd also hope that numbers aren't the only thing they look at.
I'll give you the point that the "overall" statistic isn't literally meaningless, in an absolute sense. But, to come back to the context that prompted my original remark that it was meaningless, throwing the statement that flying is safer than driving out to the general public is, I contend, meaningful only as something you'd look at and say, "Hmmm, yes, that's interesting," and argue about on Internet discussion boards.
The usefulness is that if you account for the most important factors that can cause a crash or a disease or whatever you want to avoid, you gain some understanding of what you can do to improve your chances. For example, it was mentioned earlier that statistically, commercial airlines are safer than private planes. So if I'm flying somewhere and have a choice, that knowledge tells me to go commercial.
But mainly, as I said elsewhere, the bottom line to what I'm saying is not so much that driving is safer. Rather, it's this: A statistic that lumps all drivers together as equal is meaningless because in the real world there's too much variation.
Here's an analogy (and it's not about cars!): Suppose, in the course of chatting here, you find out I'm a doctor (I'm not, but just for the sake of argument). You ask me, for whatever reason, "Hey doc, what are my chances of getting cancer?"
I could blow off the question with a superficial answer like, "Well, the population of Earth is x, and the number of people who have been diagnosed is y, so your chances would appear to be something like y/x." And what do you do? You say, "Gee, thanks," and roll your eyes because I haven't told you anything useful. Well, that's the equivalent of your stat that includes all drivers.
Were I moved to give you an answer that's actually somewhat informative, I'd first ask about your family's medical history, your diet, smoking habits, and maybe even inquire about places you've lived and worked to see if you might have been exposed to something dangerous. Even considering all that, it's likely I'd still be reluctant to reduce it to a number, but I'd be able to tell you something meaningful.
But still, I say a safety statistic that lumps all drivers into one category is meaningless.
When you fly, all you can do is sit down and hope for the best.
You're probably right. But ask them if they've heard of Linux, and I bet the percentage of people who say yes will be quite a bit higher than it would have been five years ago. Of course, it's still not going to be a big enough number to realistically predict that this is the "year of the Linux desktop," but I think there's been some progress in awareness. And that's the first thing you need if you're looking for large numbers of new users.
Well, yes, it most likely is. If you watch a version of Blue Velvet with all instances of Dennis Hopper saying "fuck" edited out, you're having a fundamentally different experience of the movie than I had when I saw it.
If by "interested in their lives" you mean "nosy," then yes.
Why does it have to be one or the other? If I were writing malware, I'd go after both.
Well, consider that in most stores, PCs are the only type of computer for the salespeople to push. In my city, there are dozens of stores I could walk into and buy a PC off the shelf. There are only two places where I could buy a Mac. One's a CompUSA and the other is a freestanding Apple store.
That means there's one store in an area with about a million people where you would see both types of computers. Which in turn means the chances are pretty close to zero that a typical computer buyer would have the opportunity to check out a Mac while shopping around.
Not that that's the only factor, and probably it's not the most important one, but I'm sure it's "in play" here.
You realize, of course, that if the band is playing electric instruments, it's going to sound like crap if they're using anything less than the Grateful Dead's "Wall of Sound." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grateful_dead#Wall_of _Sound
Is Nielsen doing it differently now? We had a Nielsen box a few years ago, and it had buttons on it you were supposed to press to indicate which members of the family were watching at any given time. It was fun for the first couple hours, just because of the novelty, but then it got real old real quick. Of course, it was terribly inaccurate. People forget to press their buttons when they start or stop watching. We'd press extra buttons to add fictitious viewers for shows we really liked. Etc.
I suspect that the only way to get less accurate data would be to mine the profiles on dating sites.