More talented coders might write elaborate routines with more levels of indentation. With tabs, the inner level lines would wrap around more and make it harder to read.

I normally try to read the whole article before commenting, but it starts with a list of straw men claims, so I didn't bother.

It would be more accurate to say that the claim is that Artificial Intelligence is increasing faster than ours, which is hard to dispute. Saying "getting smarter" makes it sound like a claim that AI is already smarter, which I don't think anyone has made.

Why not? The ability to learn to play Go and Poker better than humans, without having detailed algorithms built in, shows that computational brute force goes a long way, even when humans don't understand how the program works. Until recently it was thought that there would have to be conceptual advances specific to those games in order to defeat human champions (and in any case it was already possible to defeat the average human).

It's unnecessary for AI to emulate human intelligence (and chauvinistic to suggest that it has to). Its capabilities can match or exceed humans, while working in a completely different way.

Why? All that's necessary is for AI to equal or exceed human capabilities. Even if one makes the farfetched assumption that humans are at the peak of intelligence, simply being able to match the most intelligent humans would exceed the capabilities of 99.9+% of the population.

It would probably allow solving most of our existing problems, and create new ones. Life goes on. In any case what it could accomplish is completely independent of whether it's possible.

I think they meant to say tissues, not cells. Printing living cells is a bit more advanced.

Thank you. I googled Dynabook and it was also proposed by Alan Kay.

Laptops were predicted in the September 1977 Scientific American article Microelectronics and the Personal Computer by Alan C. Kay. That's just one prediction I happened to know, there may be earlier ones.

It should work fine with quotes (for example search for "ubuntu 18.04", including quotes) as long as there are no typos.

Countries with longer lifespans have lower population growth, or even decline. This is plausible because people in those countries don't have to have extra children to be certain that some will survive. If life extension also increases the maximum reproductive age, people could put off having children which would reduce population growth even more. A lot of people in developed countries only choose to have children because their biological clock is ticking.

They are easily detectable on earth - for example see here (picture here). They've also been detected in the atmosphere of Venus, which has winds over 200 miles per hour.

That, and the fact that people with good internet access should be more productive and hence pay more in taxes, so it's an investment. (I throw that in because his answer would probably be "but why have internet subsidies at all?".)

Tax evasion, by definition, is illegal. What's being discussed here is tax avoidance, which isn't. And if nobody ever engaged in tax avoidance, what incentive would politicians have to fix tax law? If anything, there needs to be more tax avoidance, preferably highly public, to shame them into acting. And the public needs to start putting the blame on the politicians, where it belongs. If the politicians are letting themselves be bought off, one more reason to blame them.

Yes, keep confusing legal and illegal, so politicians can keep people thinking that they've done their job and continue to do nothing. That's what they want. (And as long as they do nothing, companies will keep "stealing", as you put it.)

Next Patch Tuesday is March 14. Let's not make it any later than it is.

Google "personal expenditure tax". Economists have been fond of it for a long time, although it's almost never been implemented. Basically it's just a modification of the current income tax, where instead of computing income once a year, you compute consumption = income - savings (where debt is equivalent to negative savings, so borrowing is added, eliminating the buy/borrow loophole, and paying off debt is subtracted). The current system already has income being reported to the IRS, and I don't recall reading any concerns that the invasion of privacy would be worse than now.

Yes, basically to give everyone an unlimited 401k (with no RMD at age 70.5). Like a 401k, the money gets taxed when it's taken out (when it's spent). And if the tax rate is highly progressive, when the balance gets high enough, there's no way to spend it as fast as it's growing without incurring a very high tax rate. The only other ways to avoid that are to either watch it grow forever, without ever spending more than enough to avoid the high tax rate (which is unlikely given that inherited money is usually squandered within 3 generations, and also pointless, because then why have that much money?), or to give it away. I suppose a rich family could theoretically breed like rabbits as a loophole if they didn't want to give it to charity.

Sorry, I meant "personal expenditure tax", not "personal consumption tax".