The articles presumably correspond with reality, but do not in any way contradict the grandparent post, which merely claimed that "even after considering the tax benefits, one does not magically wind up with more money after donating than if they didn't."
In the first article, the examples were as follows:
Donate $20,000 to save $6,300 in taxes.
As a result of a $10,000 loss, save $1,545 in taxes this year, and carry over a $4,000 loss to the following year. The $4,000 would allow savings of some fraction of that amount, quite likely less than the $1,545 that the $6,000 loss you'd have already taken allowed, but in any event the total would be far less than $10,000.
Donate $10,000 to save $3,150 in taxes.
In the second article, Kerkorian is selling stock that has already lost money. He is not deliberately losing money, but rather recouping some fraction of the amount he lost in tax savings. If, rather than sell it for a loss to save on taxes, Kerkorian could have somehow sold the stock at his original purchase price, it would have been greatly to his benefit to do so.
That's the wrong SCO. The SCO Group, fromerly Caldera Systems International, acquired various Unix properties as well as the SCO name from the Santa Cruz Operation, now Tarantella, in 2000, and sued IBM in 2003.
RTFA. If a password is set, the drive cannot even be erased without it. Setting a random password is thus different from erasing the drive even with a backup because, for all practical purposes, it physically destroys the drive.
The value p will vary depending on whether you are finding partners for long-term relationships, short-term relationships, one-night stands, etc. Thus, if you first have two long-term relationships and then have a one-night stand, the latter certainly increases your risk more than linearly.
If that is all you're saying, we agree.
I do maintain that if you're having a number of sexual encounters all of the same type, the risk is as I described.
As for the passphrase idea, it's great for local security, but I wouldn't trust it farther than I trust VeriSign online, and I don't trust any company that makes over $100 a year of pure profit for any "secure" domain. Last I checked, the way you use passwords online is by hashing them, so all you really have to do is sniff the hash and hack the client software. Has this changed?
I sit astonished that someone familiar with public key crytography doesn't know how SSL works.
SSL provides transport layer security. All data sent from you to the server or vice versa is encrypted. Web browsers do not do anything special with password fields in forms other than display them as asterisks. If your channel to the server is encrypted, then naturally the password will be; otherwise, it will transmitted in plaintext.
The channel is encrypted using a symmetric cipher with a key exchanged via public key cryptography. Typically, the server has a certificate, signed by a certificate authority (CA) such as [drum roll] VeriSign or Thawte, which includes the server's public key as well as identifying information like the domain name and the name of the company which paid to have the certificate signed. The public keys of various CAs come preloaded in your browser. You hope that these CAs will verify that the entity paying to have a certificate signed actually owns the domain indicated in the certificate. Your web browser should display a warning if the domain given in the certificate does not match the address you navigated to or if it is not validly signed.
Typically, the client has no public key known to the server in advance or signed by any authority, which is why the user is typically required to enter a username and password in a form. However, it is certainly possible for the client to have its own certificate.
Ammo and guns??? WTF kind of crazy sport are you trying to play?? [Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.]
People in low population areas might as well not vote at all in this scheme.
What the hell are you talking about? If the electoral college were abolished, the vote of any particular person in a low-population area would have exactly the same influence as that of any particular person in New York.
Under such a system, deciding, e.g., not to bother to vote for Bush because one lives in Wyoming and many people in New York will vote Kerry is exactly as rational as deciding not to bother to vote for Bush because one lives in Los Angeles and many people in New York will vote for Kerry.
No one seriously advocates that Condercet be implemented by allowing voters to create the full pairwise matrix, but rather that voters rank the candidates in order of preference. Obviously, in extreme cases like the California recall election, it would probably be necessary to only allow the voters to rank their top N choices, where N is sufficiently small. However, this is presumably the same thing that you think should be done for IRV, because I don't know how else you'd get need 3 decisions rather than 149. Condercet and IRV are both methods that rely on exactly the same information from the voters: a ranked list of candidates. You are simply misinformed if you believe otherwise.
Your calculations are astronomically wrong. Making all the pairwise decisions for 5 candidates requires 5*(5-1)/2=10 decisions, and making all the pairwise decisions for 150 candidates requires 150*(150-1)/2=11175 decisions. 2^5 and 2^150, the numbers you gave, are the numbers of subsets of candidates, not the number of pairs of candidates.
However, as I said, no one advocates that voters create a pairwise matrix. Voters would make the same number of decisions in Condercet and IRV. I cannot stress this enough if you think otherwise.
The parent made it sound like to a man, having sex with a single woman is what any man instinctively craves, whereas it's a commonly known fact that monogamy is definitely not natural behaviour for humans, and might possibly contribute to the sharp rise in genetic defects we're witnessing.
How might monogamy contribute to the rise in genetic defects? I can see that in excessively small and isolated populations, it would be best for women to have children by different partners to maximize genetic diversity, but I wouldn't think it would have any significant effect in the large modern gene pool, given that actually having children with close relatives is rare.
I thought they already did do away with it. But I could easily be wrong.
It's really weird. The estate tax has been decreasing since 2001, when some tax law changes were passed, and will in fact be zero in 2010. However, in 2011 the changes will sunset and the estate tax will return to its original level. So, it hasn't actually been done away with.
An example of todays bad IP-laws; After the artists death the copyright is still valid up to 70(?) years after. That is not protecting the rights of the artist, that is protecting the rights of the owner of the copyrights. - and those are separate issues.
That is, at best, a side issue. For if you assume for the sake of argument that copyright protection until the artist's death is beneficial, then it is easy to argue that it should be extended after the artist's death. Otherwise, artists who wanted to sell the copyright to their work outright would find that it would be worth much less if they were in poor health. In the present system, the duration which copyright lasts after the artist dies is long enough that no one to whom they might sell their copyrights will care in practice.
I'm not trying to start an argument about copyrights. I'm just pointing out that what you say is backwards. Whether copyrights after the artist's death are good depends on whether copyrights are good in general.
For the record, by "quantum computer" Penrose does not mean the things of the same name that could potentially be used to break encryption and whatnot, as the latter exhibit computable behavior. Their superior time and space complexity is of no relevance.
Determinism versus nondeterminism is of no relevance whatsoever for Penrose's arguments. Penrose believes that our minds exhibit noncomputable behavior. That is, he believes that, given a description of the behavior of a person's brain over time, it is impossible in principle for a computer to determine whether said description is consistent with the laws of physics. This is a very different thing than simple nondeterminism -- the existence of multiple such descriptions consistent with the laws of physics.
Strong typedefs... What's really being said here is that D lacks a "type alias", which is what a C++ typedef is -- just a shorthand for another type. Does D have that?
Er, yes. It's listed 2 lines after strong typedefs.
If there were a gcc front-end for D, that would go a long way to addressing this issue...
One exists, but note the huge caveat at the top of the page about the runtime library. Because it has to handle GC, I guess?
Slashdot Mirror
The articles presumably correspond with reality, but do not in any way contradict the grandparent post, which merely claimed that "even after considering the tax benefits, one does not magically wind up with more money after donating than if they didn't."
In the first article, the examples were as follows:
In the second article, Kerkorian is selling stock that has already lost money. He is not deliberately losing money, but rather recouping some fraction of the amount he lost in tax savings. If, rather than sell it for a loss to save on taxes, Kerkorian could have somehow sold the stock at his original purchase price, it would have been greatly to his benefit to do so.
The price of gold you quoted is for a troy ounce, but you converted to avoirdupois ounces, so it actually comes to 2.41*10^14 dollars.
Fission energy (ie. uranium) will peak just like oil.
What's the timeframe for that if fast breeder reactors are used?
That's the wrong SCO. The SCO Group, fromerly Caldera Systems International, acquired various Unix properties as well as the SCO name from the Santa Cruz Operation, now Tarantella, in 2000, and sued IBM in 2003.
Microsoft has brought in money for the SCO Group, but that has no particular relationship to its investment in the Santa Cruz Operation.
RTFA. If a password is set, the drive cannot even be erased without it. Setting a random password is thus different from erasing the drive even with a backup because, for all practical purposes, it physically destroys the drive.
The value p will vary depending on whether you are finding partners for long-term relationships, short-term relationships, one-night stands, etc. Thus, if you first have two long-term relationships and then have a one-night stand, the latter certainly increases your risk more than linearly.
If that is all you're saying, we agree. I do maintain that if you're having a number of sexual encounters all of the same type, the risk is as I described.
But a more important thing to remember is this: the probability of contracting something nasty increases exponentially with the number of partners.
It does not even increase linearly. The probability will be something like 1-(1-p)^n as a function of the number of partners n.
As for the passphrase idea, it's great for local security, but I wouldn't trust it farther than I trust VeriSign online, and I don't trust any company that makes over $100 a year of pure profit for any "secure" domain. Last I checked, the way you use passwords online is by hashing them, so all you really have to do is sniff the hash and hack the client software. Has this changed?
I sit astonished that someone familiar with public key crytography doesn't know how SSL works.
SSL provides transport layer security. All data sent from you to the server or vice versa is encrypted. Web browsers do not do anything special with password fields in forms other than display them as asterisks. If your channel to the server is encrypted, then naturally the password will be; otherwise, it will transmitted in plaintext.
The channel is encrypted using a symmetric cipher with a key exchanged via public key cryptography. Typically, the server has a certificate, signed by a certificate authority (CA) such as [drum roll] VeriSign or Thawte, which includes the server's public key as well as identifying information like the domain name and the name of the company which paid to have the certificate signed. The public keys of various CAs come preloaded in your browser. You hope that these CAs will verify that the entity paying to have a certificate signed actually owns the domain indicated in the certificate. Your web browser should display a warning if the domain given in the certificate does not match the address you navigated to or if it is not validly signed.
Typically, the client has no public key known to the server in advance or signed by any authority, which is why the user is typically required to enter a username and password in a form. However, it is certainly possible for the client to have its own certificate.
Ammo and guns??? WTF kind of crazy sport are you trying to play?? [Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.]
Hunting or target shooting.
And how do you know that the lady who bought the cat didn't spend an equal or greater amount of money improving other's lives than she did on the cat?
We do not need genetically modified cats of any sort out in the wild.
Sorry, you're a few thousand years too late.
What the hell are you talking about? If the electoral college were abolished, the vote of any particular person in a low-population area would have exactly the same influence as that of any particular person in New York.
Under such a system, deciding, e.g., not to bother to vote for Bush because one lives in Wyoming and many people in New York will vote Kerry is exactly as rational as deciding not to bother to vote for Bush because one lives in Los Angeles and many people in New York will vote for Kerry.
I'm inept.
Actually, in Condorcet voting you may gives candidates the same rank if you wish.
Um, no.
However, as I said, no one advocates that voters create a pairwise matrix. Voters would make the same number of decisions in Condercet and IRV. I cannot stress this enough if you think otherwise.
The parent made it sound like to a man, having sex with a single woman is what any man instinctively craves, whereas it's a commonly known fact that monogamy is definitely not natural behaviour for humans, and might possibly contribute to the sharp rise in genetic defects we're witnessing.
How might monogamy contribute to the rise in genetic defects? I can see that in excessively small and isolated populations, it would be best for women to have children by different partners to maximize genetic diversity, but I wouldn't think it would have any significant effect in the large modern gene pool, given that actually having children with close relatives is rare.
Indeed! All this talk of Python and BASIC is silly. She should teach her mother Unlambda.
So? They can still pay all related taxes if they take that into account.
That's $2.75 million a year.
I thought they already did do away with it. But I could easily be wrong.
It's really weird. The estate tax has been decreasing since 2001, when some tax law changes were passed, and will in fact be zero in 2010. However, in 2011 the changes will sunset and the estate tax will return to its original level. So, it hasn't actually been done away with.
I guess the voice actors asked for a raise realising that whatever they get now is going to be their pension.. .. Worst .. Raise .. Ever ..
Yeah, I deeply pity them. I can't imagine how one could afford to retire after making $27.5 million in one year.
An example of todays bad IP-laws; After the artists death the copyright is still valid up to 70(?) years after. That is not protecting the rights of the artist, that is protecting the rights of the owner of the copyrights. - and those are separate issues.
That is, at best, a side issue. For if you assume for the sake of argument that copyright protection until the artist's death is beneficial, then it is easy to argue that it should be extended after the artist's death. Otherwise, artists who wanted to sell the copyright to their work outright would find that it would be worth much less if they were in poor health. In the present system, the duration which copyright lasts after the artist dies is long enough that no one to whom they might sell their copyrights will care in practice.
I'm not trying to start an argument about copyrights. I'm just pointing out that what you say is backwards. Whether copyrights after the artist's death are good depends on whether copyrights are good in general.
For the record, by "quantum computer" Penrose does not mean the things of the same name that could potentially be used to break encryption and whatnot, as the latter exhibit computable behavior. Their superior time and space complexity is of no relevance.
Determinism versus nondeterminism is of no relevance whatsoever for Penrose's arguments. Penrose believes that our minds exhibit noncomputable behavior. That is, he believes that, given a description of the behavior of a person's brain over time, it is impossible in principle for a computer to determine whether said description is consistent with the laws of physics. This is a very different thing than simple nondeterminism -- the existence of multiple such descriptions consistent with the laws of physics.
Strong typedefs ... What's really being said here is that D lacks a "type alias", which is what a C++ typedef is -- just a shorthand for another type. Does D have that?
Er, yes. It's listed 2 lines after strong typedefs.
If there were a gcc front-end for D, that would go a long way to addressing this issue...
One exists, but note the huge caveat at the top of the page about the runtime library. Because it has to handle GC, I guess?