There's only so much entropy a human brain can memorize easily
Check out this site on entropy. It provides some very interesting insights on ways to encode entropy memorably. http://www.leemon.com/crypto/MakePass.html
So the TFA proves that password cracking is exponential in the length of the password, and that GPUs cut down on the rather large constant in front of the exponent. This still does not eliminate the fact that each digit added increases the cracking time exponentially. In other words, use a longer password. Of course, NTLM is a farce since it only hashes 8 byte chunks, so you can't up the cracking time by more than X^8. The moral of the story here is that GPUs are faster than CPUs (for some specialized applications), yet you can still overwhelm them using a longer password. The other moral is that NTLM is an utter failure, but we all knew that.
If anyone really cared enough, they could build a single-purpose circuit to calculate hashes and compare with the hash file. With enough money invested, you could easily beat any GPU by a couple orders of magnitude. That still doesn't make this news worth discussing as the other side can up the ante by adding to the password length again (among many other things already mentioned such as salts).
I wouldn't write off Turing Machines as useless. You're right that it really doesn't help to say that a CA is a UTM just like an I7 processor. You're just as correct in saying that processors technically are not UTMs, they are finite tape TMs with somewhat less power than a UTM. The real importance of TMs in general is that there are problems that cannot be solved, no matter how much time or memory you have. That's a pretty big statement to make, yet there it is, and it's anchored solidly in logical argument. Take that a step further and show the equivalence of Post's Correspondence Problem to the Halting Problem, and now you have a practical, real-world problem (which I have watched many programmers who turned their nose up at theory attempt to solve in one form or another).
My personal belief is that we're Turing Complete. I just don't think we've developed enough knowledge of how the brain works to categorically make that statement.
Your rant would make perfect sense if all rich people are rich for life and all poor people are poor for life. Fortunately for us, that's not the case in America as opposed to some other countries. Do some reading http://www.jstor.org/stable/2646760, http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/income_mobility_in_the_united_states/.
Of particular note from the Treasury Department's report on Income Mobility are (taken from the second link above)
There was considerable income mobility of individuals in the U.S. economy during the 1996 through 2005 period with roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom quintile moving up to a higher income group within 10 years.
About 55 percent of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile within 10 years.
Among those with the very highest incomes in 1996 — the top 1/100 of 1 percent — only 25 percent remained in this group in 2005. Moreover, the median real income of these taxpayers declined over this period.
The degree of mobility among income groups is unchanged from the prior decade (1987 through 1996).
Economic growth resulted in rising incomes for most taxpayers over the period from 1996 to 2005. Median incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two-thirds of all taxpayers increased over this period. In addition, the median incomes of those initially in the lower income groups increased more than the median incomes of those initially in the higher income groups.
The major gem in this is
More than half (57.4 percent = 100 — 42.6) of the top 1 percent of households in 1996 had dropped to a lower income group by 2005
So while you bemoan income inequality, over half of those top 1% earners are dropping out of that group, meaning that others have moved up from below.
Keep up your class warfare. You'll find that this mobility decreases as you fight to take more from the top and give it to the bottom. Instead, try to educate yourself, work hard, save and make wise investments, and you might just find yourself in that top 1% some day instead.
There shouldn't be any fucking choice about whether you "expose" income to taxation! If it's income, it gets taxed.
I think your Congressional representative would disagree with you there. It's called a tax code and it's full of exemptions that people use to legally reduce their tax burden. We can probably agree that these exemptions shouldn't exist, but to villify "the rich" for minimizing their losses legally is ludicrous. Case in point, I bet you probably made a charitable donation or two last tax year and claimed in on your return, or perhaps you deducted mortgage interest - either way, that means you're just part of the problem you hate. The tax code is, and always has been, a tool for modifying behavior. The problem is that the law of unintended consequences always bites even the best of intentions in the ass.
First, a link to a congressional committee is hardly a partisan statement. The Joint Economic Committee is a Congressional Committee that is representative of the government at the time and the report had inputs from all members.
Second, the parts of the report I quoted were illustrative of the fact that tax decreases from 70% to 50% would increase, rather than decrease revenue. The amount of tax burden paid by higher income earners was also part of higher revenues. If you doubt that, here are the numbers in 2010 constant dollars using CPI data (sources http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals/,ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt). For the rest of this post, everything will be in 2010 constant dollars. The numbers are:
Year Revenue
1981 $1428.54M
1982 $1387.16M *first year ERTA was in effect
1983 $1306.56M
1984 $1389.87M
1985 $1478.21M
1986 $1520.67M
1987 $1629.52M
1988 $1665.43M
1989 $1731.93M
1990 $1710.90M
You could argue that the increased revenues were due to improved GDP, but that argument would be wrong. Assuming revenue would grow at the same rate as GDP, and using GDP numbers from http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=5&ViewSeries=NO&Java=no&Request3Place=N&3Place=N&FromView=YES&Freq=Year&FirstYear=2010&LastYear=2011&3Place=N&AllYearsChk=YES&Update=Update&JavaBox=no#Mid we have the following table
Year GDP($M) %Change Expected_Revenue($M) Actual_Revenue($M) Difference($M)
1981 $7,500.74 0.82%
1982 $7,351.09 -1.01% $1,414.15 $1,387.17 -$26.98
1983 $7,738.36 2.57% $1,422.77 $1,306.57 -$116.21
1984 $8,249.82 3.20% $1,348.36 $1,389.88 $41.52
1985 $8,546.94 1.77% $1,414.47 $1,478.22 $63.75
1986 $8,873.65 1.88% $1,505.94 $1,520.67 $14.73
1987 $9,091.55 1.21% $1,539.12 $1,629.52 $90.40
1988 $9,401.29 1.67% $1,656.81 $1,665.43 $8.62
1989 $9,640.36 1.26% $1,686.34 $1,731.93 $45.60
1990 $9,677.38 0.19% $1,735.25 $1,710.90 -$24.35
The total revenue collected over this period was $13820.29M, but GDP growth only accounts for $13723.20M. In other words, the government collected $97.08M more than if ERTA was not enacted, all other considerations held constant.
Third, you're correct in saying that tax reductions didn't necessarily lead to increased tax revenues, but GDP growth doesn't account for that either. The fact that upper income brackets increased their wealth has a lot do with with the reduction of capital gains tax from 28% to 20% which led to many top earners realizing their capital gains, thus increasing their net income. That behavior is documented (but I didn't keep track of that url, sorry) and would explain both phenomenon. GDP growth alone does not.
Again, this is all in reaction to the assertion that we need to go back to 75% tax rates, not an argument for or against much smaller tax cuts or raises in the present per se. You can do the same analysis with the Clinton's 1993 tax increase and you'll find that the tax revenues grow at a lower rate than the overall GDP, indicating that people who can shelter their money, are doing just that, once more highlighting the argument that increasing taxes reduces revenues in the long run.
Just raise the income tax back to pre-Regan era levels
I would say I'm amazed at the economic illiteracy of
During the 1980s ERTA had reduced personal tax rates by about 25 percent, while the Tax Reform Act of 1986 chopped them yet again.
after the high marginal tax rates of 1981 were cut, tax payments and the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent climbed sharply. For example, in 1981 the top 1 percent paid 17.6 percent of all personal income taxes, but by 1988 their share had jumped to 27.5 percent, a 10 percentage point increase.
The share of the income tax burden borne by the top 10 percent of taxpayers increased from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. Meanwhile, the share of income taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers dropped from 7.5 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1988.
The 1993 Clinton tax increase appears to [sic] having the opposite effect on the willingness of wealthy taxpayers to expose income to taxation. According to IRS data, the income generated by the top one percent of income earners actually declined in 1993.
according to the FY 1997 Clinton budget submission, individual income tax revenues as a share of GDP will be lower during the first four years of the Clinton tax increase, which include the effects of the 1990 tax increase, than under the last four years of the Reagan tax changes (FY 1986-89)
Even so, individual income tax revenues rose from $244 billion in 1980 to $446 billion in 1989.
We're the lowest taxed generation since WWII. The highest rate now is 35%, and few pay it. The highest tax bracket in the 90s was 39.6. The highest tax bracket under most of Regan was 50%. Under Nixon was 70%. Kenedy was 91%. Eisenhower was also 91%. The rate coming out of WWII was 94%.
And yet revenue as a percentage of GDP has been increasing all the way up to 2000 (the last decade has many explanations, and I doubt any of them fully capture what really happened) http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/downchart_gr.php?year=1900_2010&units=p&title=Revenue%20as%20percent%20of%20GDP
It's a well understood phenomenon that tax rates and tax revenues are typically not highly correlated.
"Just think, with VLSI we can have 100 ENIACS on a chip!" -- Alan Perlis
