I disagree about his math... when you say "1/1000 chance of dying each year, which means you live to 1000 years 50% of the time", that implies that the numbers match up (the bottom of the ratio and the # of years), which they most certainly do not. And I don't consider 36% to be "close enough" to 50%. If he had said about 50%, I'd agree with you on the close enough, but still not on the implication he implies.
Anyway, my fat fingering of 50 instead of 1000 has been beaten into the dirt enough that I'm done replying about it;-)
So this guy says the person to live to 1000 years old might already be 60... and about how old does he look in the picture? It sounds a lot like the needs instead of the fact dictating the expectation.
Secondly, this is apparently a major field of interest for this fellow, but he has basic facts that are way off...
From the article: "If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000."
Uh, no, that's not at all what it means. If you have a.001 chance of dying each year, that means you have a.999 chance of living, and over 50 years you have a.999 ^ 50 = about.95 chance of living. 95% is very different from 50%.
In fact, I agree with his philosophy that life extension is a soluble problem, and that it is a very good thing. However, he's sure as heck not the spokesman I would choose unless he's being misquoted badly.
The city of Philadelphia made a deal with Verizon to let them break new PA communication laws?
Can I make a deal with Smith & Wesson to legally shoot the people who made those laws?
More seriously - if this is a law generally governing how the government can (or can't) compete with commercial wireless services, how the hell can one company give the city the OK to break the law? If the law is actually written to prevent competition with Verizon specifically, how can PA citizens not be rebelling?
So you're saying that if someone chooses a life in which they make great sacrifices for the common good, they're not a hero. Only if they make an on the spot decision to make greater than expected sacrifices are they a hero. I disagree completely.
The guy who had only a moment to think about it and did the right thing is a hero, but I would say he is *less* of a hero than someone who made their whole life around doing right for others, then carried through. Of course, if they got exceptional pay or renoun for their career choice I would say that counts against their hero status, but I don't think they do for the most part.
I agree about overuse of words; I just disagree that it applies in that context.
OK, you say increase your billing by a third, then you say go from $20/hour to $50/hour (an increase of 150%, not 33%)
Your general advice is right, but the numbers are way off.
I have been contracting (1099) for about 6 years. Here's what I can think of that you need to worry about:
* save the taxes your employer would have deducted
* also save the additional 6.2% on the first $87,000 you make for the employer's portion of social security and 1.45% of your salary for employer's portion of Medicare/Medicaid
* you may choose to pay your unemployment taxes (pretty low)
* pay worker's compensation (also pretty low)
* provide your own insurance. This is expensive; expect to pay more than $300 per month
* provide for your own vacation *and holiday*
* file estimated taxes 4 times per year. You can do without this, but you pay a penalty
* if you incorporate (I recommend it) DO IT IN DELAWARE. I paid $7000 in franchise taxes last year because I foolishly incorporated in TX.
* if you incorporate, pay your franchise tax. It should be $100/year
* you can deduct TONS of stuff. Insurance, medical bills, travel (track your miles driven for business), possibly rent a portion of your house to your business for office space, business meals, business trips,... I'm sure I'm missing some stuff here.
Overall, I think the +30% figure is probably about right; maybe it's a little high. I figure it by a % added (8% for FICA + 7% for vacation) + my insurance cost (about $5k) and a little extra for the trouble. Of course, that's only for when you're asked to choose between contracting vs salary rates - you always ask for as much as you can get.
He gets 4 million emails a day. I'm sure 3.9 million of them are spam. However, 100,000 of them are almost certainly emails that are unique, and not easily filterable. Why in the hell wouldn't it require basically a whole department (by which I mean > 30 people, probably more like 100) to filter out the 100 emails that deserve a decision maker's opinion, and the 20 that require BillG himself to look at them?
To be more specific: if you reuse it, then you can XOR the two encrypted parts that are reused (EA and EB) and the result is the same as XORing the text from the two parts, unencrypted (A and B). Therefore the letter & word frequencies are the same as two XORed pieces of english text, and easily recognizable. You can now guess from a much reduced set what the letters are, and you know you got it right when XORing your guess for A against the XORed combination from their encrypted message (EA xor EB) yields the *other* encrypted message (B).
Now you can XOR A against EA to get the random key. So reusing the pad gives up the message from all times you reused it and gives up the random key itself.
OTP is great if you can keep the key secret, have a way to xfer the key, and NEVER EVER REUSE IT. Otherwise, i.e. in virtually every real world situation, it sucks.
Great, if what you care about is reality, then what Richard Clarke has to say should be right up your alley. You see, Richard Clarke points out to us how he and a couple of other advisors to the president kept trying to tell him before 9/11/2001, that Al Qaeda had a lot of suspicious activity going on. More than had been seen since right before the Y2K new year.
Wait, you say - there was no terrorist attack at Y2K new year. Exactly! When Richard Clarke made the same warnings to Clinton that he made to Bush, Clinton began meeting with him every morning, and they established measures to help hinder terrorists.
What I'm telling you is that Bush did a bad job of preventing the terrorist act that actually happened, that he had advisors telling him to watch out for it, and that the American people rewarded him for his willful ignorance.
When did I belittle the tragedy? It is you who pile tragedy upon tragedy by using the deaths of those innocent people as an excuse for the government to take away every American's civil rights. If you want to live in a nanny state, go found your own somewhere without that pesky Bill of Rights.
Secondly, try looking into what Richard Clarke has to say about the great protection the Bush administration has given us from terrorism. He should know, as a National Security advisor.
I never said that terrorists aren't horrible, evil people - but becoming more like the hyper-conservative religious states that foster terrorism is not a solution to the problem. Our devotion to freedom for everyone who doesn't harm others; our devotion to fair trail, probable cause, and public trial - those are the things that make America great. Those are the things being destroyed as a response to terrorist actions. Terrorists can't destroy America - but we can.
"Normal Americans" are sheep like you who've been led to react like Pavlov's dog to the magic word "terrorism". Normal Americans are unAmerican, and have the gall to tell me that *I* am.
You think about the situation when the Constitution was written, and try to tell me that they didn't have a hundred times the reason to worry about their security. Then think about why they chose to protect their security by securing their liberty. I am ashamed at how we've honored that choice.
*One time* foreign terrorists killed 3000 people in the US. It's a terrible tragedy, but so are the 45,000 people who died in car accidents that year. And the 700,000 people who died of heart disease.
We have gone insanely overboard in how we handle terrorism. America is founded on the freedom of the people. So much so that these freedoms are written into our founding document - the Constitution. When someone tells me that we need to "protect America" from something that had a negligible statistical effect by taking away my Constitutional rights, I'll rightly tell them they're stupid, crazy, or very ignorant.
1st amendment - "right of the people peaceably to assemble" - except near the Republican National Convention in 2004.
4th amendment - "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause" - except when the Patriot Act says it's OK.
5th amendment - "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" - except if we can find some way to call them enemy combatants, or we declare they can't be tried publicly due to security considerations.
6th amendment - "accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial" - see above.
8th amendment - "nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted" - except in Abu Ghraib, or (maybe, how can we know?) Guantanamo.
10th amendment - "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." - this one's been shot to hell for ages:-(
If I tried to live by the Constitution, I'd end up shot by federal agents inside of five years.
Actually, sunsets look red due to particles scattering the light. http://www.sundog.clara.co.uk/atoptics/sunsets.htm And the blue sky is not specifically attributable to water vapor, just to those same particles (viewing the scattering from a different position, as you said).
The * was expanded at the command line, by the shell. rm never sees it. It's *possible* that rm could say "well, all files in the directory are listed, except this -r one, and we have a -r flag, so we'll ignore the -r flag and delete the -r directory", but I don't buy it.
I don't disagree with the viewpoint you're listing here. It's new to me, and I really appreciate seeing it. I will be researching it to see if I agree after reflection.
But are you asserting that Bush falls in this category too? Bush whose administration pushed agencies into giving false and misleading intelligence, the same administration that knowingly used false intelligence (documents about Iraq attempting to purchase plutonium), to support a war with Iraq? The same administration that continues to attempt to tie Iraq to 9/11, and is pushing to define US policy wholesale based on a one time tragic event in which 3000 people died? (>40,000 died the same year in traffic accidents.) The same administration that passed the so-called Patriot Act, and carefully established that no US or international law applies to the people in Guantanmo, so we can treat them however we like? The same administation that gave billions of taxpayer money to Halliburton in a no-bid contract? The same administration that is perpetuating the expanding divide between rich and poor with one-sided tax cuts, and at the same time reduces funding to educational and environmental programs, and still manages to run up the national debt by almost a half trillion dollars a year? The same administration that asked Enron to help define national energy policy?
Is this administration going to give us something to make up for what they've taken away, or are my children going to be paying 50% taxes to pay the interest on the national debt and to pay the salary of all of the snitches employed to listen in on their phone calls and watch them on infrared camera, while we kill tens of thousands of civilians in some oil field somewhere and ignore racial cleansing in Africa?
Whoah, there, hoss. I tell you that you made a minor error; instead of admitting it, you come back with some unfunny humor that appears to attempt to refute my comment. When I point out yes, in fact, I was right, now I'm a humorless man awaiting destruction?
I see responses to you suggesting Snow Crash and Diamond Age. I would like to second (or third, or nth, or whatever) those suggestions. The baroque cycle books are good, but SC and DA (aka A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer) are much better.
I think you're right, as a first try. However, it's quite possible that you would get caught up in "and this function calls that function which calls that other function which calls a forbidden function...", so it wouldn't be a simple search for forbidden functions but rather a search for forbidden, then a search for calls to the functions that call the forbidden, then searches for those functions, etc. strace keeps you from having to do that.
I had no way of knowing Asa is a Mozilla developer, secondly there are a lot of developers working on Mozilla and he wouldn't necessarily know if someone else put in a call to a verboten function. I am a developer and I can tell you on big projects often people use functions they shouldn't simply because it's impossible to keep everyone informed of everything they should or shouldn't do. Finally, it's really really easy to grep an strace for any of the functions declared in a library, so there's no reason not to do the test.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree about his math... when you say "1/1000 chance of dying each year, which means you live to 1000 years 50% of the time", that implies that the numbers match up (the bottom of the ratio and the # of years), which they most certainly do not. And I don't consider 36% to be "close enough" to 50%. If he had said about 50%, I'd agree with you on the close enough, but still not on the implication he implies.
;-)
Anyway, my fat fingering of 50 instead of 1000 has been beaten into the dirt enough that I'm done replying about it
And it's worth noting that that figure (999.5 years) is your expected remaining life regardless of your current age.
Gah, wtf was I thinking? I have no idea how I got 50 in there instead of 1000... I do know the way to calculate odds, I promise ;-)
:-)
Oops
Still, his "which means" was totally bogus, as evidenced by your 36% figure for 1000 years.
So this guy says the person to live to 1000 years old might already be 60... and about how old does he look in the picture? It sounds a lot like the needs instead of the fact dictating the expectation.
.001 chance of dying each year, that means you have a .999 chance of living, and over 50 years you have a .999 ^ 50 = about .95 chance of living. 95% is very different from 50%.
Secondly, this is apparently a major field of interest for this fellow, but he has basic facts that are way off...
From the article:
"If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000."
Uh, no, that's not at all what it means. If you have a
In fact, I agree with his philosophy that life extension is a soluble problem, and that it is a very good thing. However, he's sure as heck not the spokesman I would choose unless he's being misquoted badly.
See, it pays to be too lazy to read the link. Or something.
Thanks for making that clearer... it does sound a lot better than I thought it was (if still sucky).
The city of Philadelphia made a deal with Verizon to let them break new PA communication laws?
Can I make a deal with Smith & Wesson to legally shoot the people who made those laws?
More seriously - if this is a law generally governing how the government can (or can't) compete with commercial wireless services, how the hell can one company give the city the OK to break the law? If the law is actually written to prevent competition with Verizon specifically, how can PA citizens not be rebelling?
So you're saying that if someone chooses a life in which they make great sacrifices for the common good, they're not a hero. Only if they make an on the spot decision to make greater than expected sacrifices are they a hero. I disagree completely.
The guy who had only a moment to think about it and did the right thing is a hero, but I would say he is *less* of a hero than someone who made their whole life around doing right for others, then carried through. Of course, if they got exceptional pay or renoun for their career choice I would say that counts against their hero status, but I don't think they do for the most part.
I agree about overuse of words; I just disagree that it applies in that context.
OK, you say increase your billing by a third, then you say go from $20/hour to $50/hour (an increase of 150%, not 33%)
... I'm sure I'm missing some stuff here.
Your general advice is right, but the numbers are way off.
I have been contracting (1099) for about 6 years. Here's what I can think of that you need to worry about:
* save the taxes your employer would have deducted
* also save the additional 6.2% on the first $87,000 you make for the employer's portion of social security and 1.45% of your salary for employer's portion of Medicare/Medicaid
* you may choose to pay your unemployment taxes (pretty low)
* pay worker's compensation (also pretty low)
* provide your own insurance. This is expensive; expect to pay more than $300 per month
* provide for your own vacation *and holiday*
* file estimated taxes 4 times per year. You can do without this, but you pay a penalty
* if you incorporate (I recommend it) DO IT IN DELAWARE. I paid $7000 in franchise taxes last year because I foolishly incorporated in TX.
* if you incorporate, pay your franchise tax. It should be $100/year
* you can deduct TONS of stuff. Insurance, medical bills, travel (track your miles driven for business), possibly rent a portion of your house to your business for office space, business meals, business trips,
Overall, I think the +30% figure is probably about right; maybe it's a little high. I figure it by a % added (8% for FICA + 7% for vacation) + my insurance cost (about $5k) and a little extra for the trouble. Of course, that's only for when you're asked to choose between contracting vs salary rates - you always ask for as much as you can get.
I wrote the site in my sig; it's all Apache + Tomcat + Spring + Hibernate + MySql.
re: your sig
:-)
Don't tell me the answer if that one's wrong, though
He gets 4 million emails a day. I'm sure 3.9 million of them are spam. However, 100,000 of them are almost certainly emails that are unique, and not easily filterable. Why in the hell wouldn't it require basically a whole department (by which I mean > 30 people, probably more like 100) to filter out the 100 emails that deserve a decision maker's opinion, and the 20 that require BillG himself to look at them?
To be more specific:
if you reuse it, then you can XOR the two encrypted parts that are reused (EA and EB) and the result is the same as XORing the text from the two parts, unencrypted (A and B). Therefore the letter & word frequencies are the same as two XORed pieces of english text, and easily recognizable. You can now guess from a much reduced set what the letters are, and you know you got it right when XORing your guess for A against the XORed combination from their encrypted message (EA xor EB) yields the *other* encrypted message (B).
Now you can XOR A against EA to get the random key. So reusing the pad gives up the message from all times you reused it and gives up the random key itself.
OTP is great if you can keep the key secret, have a way to xfer the key, and NEVER EVER REUSE IT. Otherwise, i.e. in virtually every real world situation, it sucks.
Wait, you say - there was no terrorist attack at Y2K new year. Exactly! When Richard Clarke made the same warnings to Clinton that he made to Bush, Clinton began meeting with him every morning, and they established measures to help hinder terrorists.
What I'm telling you is that Bush did a bad job of preventing the terrorist act that actually happened, that he had advisors telling him to watch out for it, and that the American people rewarded him for his willful ignorance.
See:
When did I belittle the tragedy? It is you who pile tragedy upon tragedy by using the deaths of those innocent people as an excuse for the government to take away every American's civil rights. If you want to live in a nanny state, go found your own somewhere without that pesky Bill of Rights.
Secondly, try looking into what Richard Clarke has to say about the great protection the Bush administration has given us from terrorism. He should know, as a National Security advisor.
I never said that terrorists aren't horrible, evil people - but becoming more like the hyper-conservative religious states that foster terrorism is not a solution to the problem. Our devotion to freedom for everyone who doesn't harm others; our devotion to fair trail, probable cause, and public trial - those are the things that make America great. Those are the things being destroyed as a response to terrorist actions. Terrorists can't destroy America - but we can.
"Normal Americans" are sheep like you who've been led to react like Pavlov's dog to the magic word "terrorism". Normal Americans are unAmerican, and have the gall to tell me that *I* am.
You think about the situation when the Constitution was written, and try to tell me that they didn't have a hundred times the reason to worry about their security. Then think about why they chose to protect their security by securing their liberty. I am ashamed at how we've honored that choice.
*One time* foreign terrorists killed 3000 people in the US. It's a terrible tragedy, but so are the 45,000 people who died in car accidents that year. And the 700,000 people who died of heart disease.
:-(
We have gone insanely overboard in how we handle terrorism. America is founded on the freedom of the people. So much so that these freedoms are written into our founding document - the Constitution. When someone tells me that we need to "protect America" from something that had a negligible statistical effect by taking away my Constitutional rights, I'll rightly tell them they're stupid, crazy, or very ignorant.
1st amendment - "right of the people peaceably to assemble" - except near the Republican National Convention in 2004.
4th amendment - "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause" - except when the Patriot Act says it's OK.
5th amendment - "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" - except if we can find some way to call them enemy combatants, or we declare they can't be tried publicly due to security considerations.
6th amendment - "accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial" - see above.
8th amendment - "nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted" - except in Abu Ghraib, or (maybe, how can we know?) Guantanamo.
10th amendment - "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." - this one's been shot to hell for ages
If I tried to live by the Constitution, I'd end up shot by federal agents inside of five years.
Actually, sunsets look red due to particles scattering the light. http://www.sundog.clara.co.uk/atoptics/sunsets.htm And the blue sky is not specifically attributable to water vapor, just to those same particles (viewing the scattering from a different position, as you said).
I'm sorry! I assumed you were replying to the first visible comment before yours. I must remember to always hit the parent link before replying!
The * was expanded at the command line, by the shell. rm never sees it. It's *possible* that rm could say "well, all files in the directory are listed, except this -r one, and we have a -r flag, so we'll ignore the -r flag and delete the -r directory", but I don't buy it.
I don't disagree with the viewpoint you're listing here. It's new to me, and I really appreciate seeing it. I will be researching it to see if I agree after reflection.
But are you asserting that Bush falls in this category too? Bush whose administration pushed agencies into giving false and misleading intelligence, the same administration that knowingly used false intelligence (documents about Iraq attempting to purchase plutonium), to support a war with Iraq? The same administration that continues to attempt to tie Iraq to 9/11, and is pushing to define US policy wholesale based on a one time tragic event in which 3000 people died? (>40,000 died the same year in traffic accidents.) The same administration that passed the so-called Patriot Act, and carefully established that no US or international law applies to the people in Guantanmo, so we can treat them however we like? The same administation that gave billions of taxpayer money to Halliburton in a no-bid contract? The same administration that is perpetuating the expanding divide between rich and poor with one-sided tax cuts, and at the same time reduces funding to educational and environmental programs, and still manages to run up the national debt by almost a half trillion dollars a year? The same administration that asked Enron to help define national energy policy?
Is this administration going to give us something to make up for what they've taken away, or are my children going to be paying 50% taxes to pay the interest on the national debt and to pay the salary of all of the snitches employed to listen in on their phone calls and watch them on infrared camera, while we kill tens of thousands of civilians in some oil field somewhere and ignore racial cleansing in Africa?
Whoah, there, hoss. I tell you that you made a minor error; instead of admitting it, you come back with some unfunny humor that appears to attempt to refute my comment. When I point out yes, in fact, I was right, now I'm a humorless man awaiting destruction?
Your defense reaction is set a little high.
It expresses two complete thoughts, noun, verb & all. It is grammatically incorrect to put both together with a comma instead of a semicolon.
It's a comma splice. See http://ace.acadiau.ca/english/grammar/comma.htm
It was one of the few grammatical errors I made consistently before getting marked off for it in 3xxx level English in college.
Your comma should be a semicolon.
I see responses to you suggesting Snow Crash and Diamond Age. I would like to second (or third, or nth, or whatever) those suggestions. The baroque cycle books are good, but SC and DA (aka A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer) are much better.
I think you're right, as a first try. However, it's quite possible that you would get caught up in "and this function calls that function which calls that other function which calls a forbidden function...", so it wouldn't be a simple search for forbidden functions but rather a search for forbidden, then a search for calls to the functions that call the forbidden, then searches for those functions, etc. strace keeps you from having to do that.
I had no way of knowing Asa is a Mozilla developer, secondly there are a lot of developers working on Mozilla and he wouldn't necessarily know if someone else put in a call to a verboten function. I am a developer and I can tell you on big projects often people use functions they shouldn't simply because it's impossible to keep everyone informed of everything they should or shouldn't do. Finally, it's really really easy to grep an strace for any of the functions declared in a library, so there's no reason not to do the test.