Like I said, modern applications. That means applications designed for modern computers, not just ones written recently. Sure, you can stick to X11 primitives provided you don't care about performance or power consumption or your UI looking like it dates back to the 90s. Apps written for X11 will continue to work using the same network protocols they've always used via XWayland, inefficiently emulating ancient hardware. However, programs written with modern graphics subsystems in mind will benefit from the remoting approach taken by Wayland.

The use of a vaguely VNC-like protocol optimized for forwarding compressed video over a network rather than the X11 protocol optimized for primitive drawing operations very few applications actually use is not a downside. If you prefer, think of it as X11 as it's actually used by modern applications (a series of pixmaps), but with compression and fewer latency-sensitive round-trips. Or even better, like xpra with fewer rough edges.

No, I'm assuming that even in a society technologically advanced enough that almost everything is done by machines, there will still be ways you can make yourself useful enough to someone to earn what you need to survive. If nothing else, you can always grow your own food, build your own shelter—it's not much, but with knowledge of modern science and access to cultivated seedstock you'd still have an advantage over most humans throughout history. Of course, we're talking about the bottom 0.01% here, under the assumption that they don't have any marketable skills whatsoever and can't rely on charity or salvage to get by, none of which seems very realistic to me.

It goes further than that. The commune has to do more than just force you to nominally join; it has to force you to contribute. Without, needless to say, offering positive incentives conditioned on your contribution, since that would go against the whole point of a commune. The commune essentially has to consider each individual's skills and labor property of the commune rather than the individual, with failure to contribute according to one's ability punishable as a form of theft from the commune. As I see it, a system where each individual is a slave to the group is no better than one with distinct slaves and masters.

I'm glad to see that we're in agreement, then. I thought you were advocating a communist society.

It wouldn't be up to them. The organization's charter would dictate its purpose as providing a basic income to as many people as it can afford, starting with those most in need, after targeting a particular rate of growth. A bit like a trust, really. The idea would be that you start with a some donated seed money, say $10M. That gets invested at a real return of, say, 7%. You want to target 6% growth, so that leaves 1% of $10M ($100k), which you split five ways to provide a basic income of $20k each for five individual members. Assuming conditions remain unchanged, after 25 years you could support up to 21 members. After a century, nearly 1700 members. After three centuries, 3.5 billion members. Of course, the real world won't be this tidy, and there is plenty of room for fine-tuning, but the basic principle seems sound.

For a start, if they understood that then they could start working toward it. Naturally, if they really have no capacity for earning money beyond the minimum needed to survive then they'll need help of some sort. Apart from that (rare) case, there is always some opportunity to set some savings aside. Over time, perhaps several generations, those savings add up. Also, the flip side of the technology-driven obsolescence of labor is dramatically lower prices. After all, the whole point of using machines is that they're cheaper than humans for the same tasks. That means you don't have to earn as much to support yourself.

It's not quite that simple. Capital doesn't just magically appear for each new person, you know. It's a scarce resource, like anything else. If everyone is entitled to sufficient capital to sustain them simply by virtue of being born, then you have to somehow limit births to what you can accommodate out of surplus capital. People tend not to appreciate that sort of interference in their personal lives, which means some of them will want to leave. If they are prevented from leaving then you have an authoritarian dystopia. However, if you let them leave then your system is no longer universal; those who are born outside become second-class citizens from the commune's perspective. If those who leave happen to prosper more than the commune (which is historically likely) then more will leave and the commune will fade away. If not, you still have the problem that there are more people than your commune can support, so you can't just invite the extras back into the fold.

A capitalist society will respect the rights of the communists living in it to join together for their own common good; the problem is more the reverse, as the communists, eschewing property rights among themselves, often fail to respect the property rights of those who choose not to join the commune. You're quite welcome to start up a commune along the lines of your ideal system of government, provided you accept its boundaries and don't force anyone to join (or stay). I think you'll find, however, that if you want it to last you'll have to impose some conditions; simply granting a full share to anyone born into the commune won't work over the long run for the same reason democracy stops working once enough people learn they can simply vote themselves money from the treasury. It's fine as long as you have enough people dedicated to the ideal of the commune and willing to put in the necessary extra effort voluntarily, but that never lasts.

A co-op which guaranteed a basic income to its members out of capital gains and/or dividends on shared investments would be an interesting and practical experiment. I think it would be necessary to limit the induction of new members, however. If the system works it could be gradually expanded over time.

If by "almost all of us" you mean "people who agree with me"... well, that's obvious. Otherwise, no, you haven't had your work "stolen". Not legally, not morally. Unless your client agreed to a contract to purchase the program from you, you never had any claim to the money you expected to sell the program for at the end, just the program itself, the actual product of your labor, which you still have. The just reward for producing something is you have the product and can use it as you please; there is nothing inherently exclusive about the arrangement, particularly when it comes to non-scarce goods like information.

Now, if you did have a contract in place (which would have been the smart way to arrange matters, as opposed to working on speculation) then the promised money became yours when you delivered the program. At that point the client is in possession of your money, and if they refuse to turn it over to you on request then they are withholding your property from you and actual theft has taken place. You don't need copyright for that, of course, just regular property rights and contract law.

If they want a pension they can buy one (more commonly known as an "annuity") with the money they bring in up front. This is no reason to grant them a distribution monopoly for life at the expense of others' natural rights.

Your enemy having a gun puts you at risk, whether you have one or not. Possessing a gun yourself (and knowing how to use it) doesn't make you safe in that situation, but it does even out the situation and give you a fighting chance you wouldn't otherwise have.

Even assuming gun-control laws were actually effective (a bit of a stretch, I know), two random people both armed with guns are much more likely to be evenly matched than two random people armed with close-range weapons or just their fists. Being armed means that the outcome depends more on preparation and training than brute strength. Perhaps if you are uncommonly strong or accustomed to hand-to-hand fighting you would personally be better off in a gun-free environment, but others who lack your natural prowess with violence benefit from the ability to rely on effective defensive tools when threatened.

Capitalism isn't about labor, it's about capital—of which the capacity for labor is but one example. The advanced technology you speak of is another form of capital. If anything, the emergence of more advanced forms of capital requires a more capitalistic form of economy. More people will need to become capitalists, owning and managing the machines which do the work, rather than trying to market their own labor.

Sure, that sounds like it would work just fine, as long as you couple it with a reasonable set of individual rights to protect against tyranny of the majority. People would get a voice (ideally a veto right) regarding any decisions which negatively affect them, and the freedom to act as they wish otherwise. This system even has a name already: capitalism.

While I mostly agree with you, it's worth considering that comments have a cost as well. Duplication of the same information between the code and the comments, in particular, increases the maintenance burden and makes it more likely that the code and comments will get out of synch in the future—and one incorrect, misleading comment can outweigh a thousand correct ones. For that reason, comments which fail to add any useful information should be pruned away no matter how accurate they may be.

Exactly! Good code will have comments, in moderation, which tell you things you couldn't get simply by reading the code. Well-chosen names are part of those comments, however, and can be significantly more valuable when used appropriately.

Which would you rather read:

Personally, I'd much rather have the latter version, despite the absence of formal comments. The descriptive names more than make up for the lack.

Wouldn't that only allow storing three bits, not eight? You can't tell which of the eight electrons are in the outermost shell, just how many there are, so the possible values are 0-8, not 0-255. Nine unique states gives you three bits plus one state left over.

Really? It seems to me that we end up with a tangle of incompatible browser extensions either way. Why would it make any difference whether it's in the form of browser-specific tags or browser-specific DRM plugins?

The goods and services the money buys are taken from some to give to others, even if the money itself is made up out of thin air. The supply of money may be theoretically unlimited, but there is only so much actual production to go around.