U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

Re:U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination by tomohawk on Thursday January 19, 2017 @04:35AM (#13434369)

If you start with $1 million in pennies and I start with $1 million in pennies and we play a game with a fair coin: heads I win, tails you win - with the winner getting a penny, guess what happens if we play the game over and over again? Over time, one of us will have $0, and the other will have $2 million.

So, even with equality of opportunity, there can be gross disparity of outcome over time.

The pursuit of happiness is still the best policy, though.

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Re:U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination by wallace_f on Thursday January 19, 2017 @07:11AM (#13435137)

That's not true, but I agree with you that people should work together to pursue happiness.

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Re:U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination by uiri on Thursday January 19, 2017 @10:43AM (#13436617)

A fair coin means that it is equally likely for you to take a penny from me as it is for me to take a penny from you.

For instance, if we play the game 1000 times, heads might come up 505 times and tails might come up 495 times. Over time, the difference between the number of times tails comes up and head comes up will go to 0.

Therefore, over time, we'll both stay at $1 million.

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Re:U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination by WildUtah on Thursday January 19, 2017 @11:15AM (#13436883)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_ruin

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Re:U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination by digler999 on Thursday January 19, 2017 @02:22PM (#13438670)

> Over time, the difference between the number of times tails comes up and head comes up will go to 0.

That doesn't preclude arbitrarily-large variances in between that could add up to a Head/Tail difference > 10^6.

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