It sounds like you might be somebody who learned to program someplace other than a CS degree, or who got a CS degree and forgot some academic stuff that you haven't used in your day-to-day work.

You've run afoul of the "functional" doesn't mean "uses function calls a lot" problem and some chest-pounders here are slamming you for that. As an EE who only had a few undergrad CS courses, I've had similar problems. Somewhere out there is a USENET thread in which I'm assuming that "side effects" are "bad side effects" as opposed to manageable outcomes of calling non-pure functions. Thus, I can empathize with you.

Chances are you're a fine programmer who just never studied functional programming. Forget the pedants, and google Lisp, Haskell, "pure function", "functional programming", etc. I'll wager you won't want to write programs in those languages but will find it interesting. You'll also be less likely to bring pedants out of the wood work once you're familiar with the terminology.

If all these immigrants are so beneficial to me, I want a citizen's dividend to prove it and I do _not_ want my citizenship's equity diluted by making "voting share holders" out of these immigrants.

Oh, you can't provide that for me?

Take your immigration propaganda and shove it.

Thou shalt not suffer a furry to live.

That would generate energy out of nowhere, making every atom, nucleus and baryon unstable.

If the services being attacked are distributed then the distributed attacks are less likely to be effective as there are fewer choke-points.

From a Viewdata Corp of America proprietary white paper: "Rational and Overview of Requirements for a Videotex Local Programming Capability" by Jim Bowery circa 1982, section "The Primary Discipline":

At no point in the specification of the user interface should there appear artifacts of the physical distinction between the terminal and the network as a whole. The terminal should, at every point in the interface, be treated as a cohesive extension of the network. For functions that relate to ownership, operating environment and security, the terminal should be treated as a host system. Artifacts of the network's physics that relate to timing and reliability can only be minimized to the extent possible without compromising the specification of the user interface. This kind of simplification of the user interface is what sets user-oriented service apart from technology-oriented service. The difficulty of maintaining this discipline should not be under-estimated, nor should its import...

The local system is simply the host system closest to the user. The relationship between the local system and its host should be analogous in every way possible, to the relationship between central host systems. The local system, like any host system, has its own processor, memory, operating environment and ownership. Perhaps the only real distinction between a local system and a conventional host system is that it services only one user.

To those accustomed to dealing with "dumb" terminals, this seems like a radical departure, but if one accepts the need for local programmability, it is a necessary switch in perspective. Once one accepts this analogy, the strategy for implementing the primary discipline on the network as a whole becomes more apparent. The local/network interface specification needs to be, at least at the application level protocol, the same as the intra-network interface specification.

Graham pretends that there hasn't been massive fraud in guest worker visas.

Why should anyone pay any attention to him on the issue of immigration at all?

The abuses of immigration statutes mean one thing and one thing only: Shut down immigration and repatriate those that were let in during the period of systemic fraud -- then after we've put our own house in order to a level of prudence commensurate with the history of fraud in this area, reconsider.

Good point. You left out the generation gap, and of course The Gap, which derived its name from the generation gap because it was selling casual clothing to Boomers.

Eh? I have yet to see a single case of it getting a single sentence transcribed correctly. And I mean this literally: a ten or so years ago we spent a few hours with friends playing with IBM ViaVoice trying to get a single sentence through, and failed. Recently, I tried Google Chrome's transcriber, with exactly as much luck.

Usually the result of speech-to-text is some nonsense poetry that matches the general rhythm of what was said and possibly rhymes with it, but the similarities end there.

Thanks for the links to Norris's papers. I had attempted to gain access to those when I visited the Twin Cities a few years back -- as they were part of the UMN Norris archives -- but they kept worse than bankers' hours so I wasn't able to gain access to them during that visit.

In particular the long-lost paper "Back to the Countryside Via Technology" by William C. Norris, then CEO of Control Data Corporation, January 1978, was what I recalled. It delves into some of his vision for the PLATO network as a way of preserving the Nation of Settlers against the onslaughts of urbanization (and what has turned out to be a resulting demographic catastrophy in loss of total fertility rates among the baby boom generation).

Norris was one of my inspirations for county currency, as well as my early promotion of mass market computer networks. Sadly, perhaps even tragically, I did not get through his middle management at CDC to Norris about the mass market version of PLATO a group of us young engineers had demonstrated right under his nose at CDC circa 1980. The world might have been a very different place. It is my greatest professional regret that I didn't just barge into his office and chain myself to a door to get his attention.

When you see "Internet of Things" you know everything that comes after is usually pure idiocy anyway.

The approach of replacing net asset taxation with what amounts to property insurance is a good one and indeed one I've suggested as part of an anarcho-capitalist model for government as mutual insurance company (ala Lysander Spooner). The basic income then becomes, literally, a dividend to the shareholders in the mutual insurance company -- which maintains defense of national territory as the foundation for all other property.

As for intellectual property, there are genuinely heroic inventions that need to be rewarded because technology development is damn expensive and money needs to be placed in the hands of proven inventors. The problem is patents are the _only_ asset that is de facto taxed by the Federal government -- when it should be the only asset that is _exempt_, if any. Moreover, the legal fees of maintaining filings world-wide should be picked up as a natural security measure -- as well as defending intellectual property as though it were sovereign territory. Finally, the standard of "non-obviousness" needs to be much more strictly enforced to prohibit patent trolls. For instance, I don't consider my invention of the massively multiplayer first person shooter 3D game to be particularly heroic or "non-obvious", which is why I've never made a big deal about not receiving much in the way of royalties from the follow-on industry. It was something that was bound to happen one way or another as more people got their hands on computers with graphics and networking capability.

On the other hand, probably the most pathological example of intellectual property in history is MS-DOS, so you cite it at length for good reason. However, if the property value assessment is, as I have often suggested, a market-based liquidation value, from virtually the moment that IBM made the decision to distribute MS-DOS with their 4.77MHz 8088 PC, the tax rate on Bill Gates would have been so great that he would have had to very quickly sold MS-DOS to some legal person that had at least as great a vision for the future of operating systems as DRI.

There were a number of operating systems around at that time but few that would run on the 8086/8088 hardware. One with multitasking was the iRMX86 OSsupplied by Intel with its 8086/8088 chips for real time development. I don't know how or why they overlooked that. My suspicion is that the real reason they chose MS-DOS was that Bill Gates's mother had direct contacts with the IBM board of directors.

If that's the case, it would make me feel quite a bit better about my decision to abandon development of an 8086/8088 OS -- a development that started before the first silicon was shipped while I was at the PLATO project where we modified the CDC Cyber COMPASS assembler to produce the instructions documented on the preliminary datasheets, and execute on an emulator running on the Cyber 6500 during off-hours.

The reason I initiated that project, with some of the PLATO system programmers (Ray Ozzie was a system programmer at PLATO but was consumed by his work on the Z80 firmware) was that I foresaw the horror of a bad operating system becoming the network-effect atop Moore's Law, and wanted to head it off. Others, primarily Steve Freyder, agreed and pitched in.

It was obvious to me that whoever got the critical mass OS for that platform would have a natural monopoly and lock out competition -- including superior operating systems.

I abandoned that project only because Mike Pavloff at Control Data HQ offered me a position at the Arden Hills Operations where I could pursue a mass market version of the PLATO network which would have, using Ozzie's Z80 firmware, bypassed the personal computer era entirely with a Mac-like UI and built-in 1200bps modem starting in 1981 with a monthly service charge of $40/month including "terminal" rental. We had that system benchmarked out at a scale that could have deployed nation wide late in 1979, but Wall Street analysts smelled blood and were ripping Bill Norris (the Nebraska farm boy that founded CDC with Seymour Cray) limb from limb due to his billion dollar investment in PLATO. CDC middle management mutinied and reneged on their agreement to let me pursue a mass market
version of PLATO. I fled CDC and tried to revive something similar at Knight-Rider's joint venture with AT&T, but that is another story.

Suffice to say, when I saw MS-DOS I knew a horror had been unleashed and that Gates would become extremely wealthy.

If Freyder and I had been able to, somehow, beat Gates's mother and get our OS distributed by IBM, do I think I would have deserved to be the world's richest man? Hell NO! I consider my foresight to be no more than the ability to identify a bottleneck in the trade routes of Moore's Law that, if one could occupy, one could extract an enormous revenue stream from; and if my position on net asset taxation hasn't made it clear that I would not consider such foresight to be a "creative spark", I don't know what would.

Holy crap, that's the last place I'd expect a cable. It sounds like the only reason they did that is politics because of Chavez. The latency will suck. Why couldn't they get to Mexico? If the relationship with the USA progresses, a cable from the Keys is a no-brainer. You'll get much better round-trips to Miami which a lot of Cubans will want for VOIP, video, etc.

What should happen is a graceful transition from the scarcity-driven model to a virtually non-scarce model. We could start by issuing shares in public companies to the poor (financed by taxes), with the restraint that they aren't allowed to sell shares. They would receive dividends each month in addition to welfare. Eventually they might receive enough so that traditional welfare isn't required. As robots replaced workers, more and more people would end up on this kind of "dole" but it would be less and less onerous, and less and less of a stigma.

Eventually, you end up with almost everybody living off investment income. You still have a free market since there are no restrictions on *buying* new shares--you are only barred from selling your dole account. It's just that the market employment become less important.

That's just the financial aspect of the transition, with a very simple sort of social justice thrown in. It could be lousy or great, depending on a lot of societal factors. I think it's just important to realize that a gradual transition is possible without going to war over words like "socialism", "communism", "libertarianism", "fascism" or whatever -ism du jour is getting blow-hard pundit panties in a bunch.