Is there any list of successful software created entirely inside universities' labs that became widely used?

There is now.

Ah ha! But how do you tax a yacht made out of bread!? :D

Anyway, I'm glad to hear it's that easy.

Well, I'm not an economist, as I said. My field is even less scientific. My guess is that incidence differs under different conditions. In the human sciences, any more consistent result would surprise me.

At a certain point this starts to get into the territory of: go look for the evidence your own darn self. However, because I'm looking for a distraction and I have access to scholarly papers that publish this kind of evidence, I'll point you (and anyone else who's interested, because it's always possible I'm replying to a troll or to a rhetorical question -- those should be banned online, by the way) toward some resources that I've found but haven't read.

• Corporate Tax Burden in the European Union. By: García, Santiago Álvarez, Rodríguez, Elena Fernández, Arias, Antonio Martínez, EC Tax Review, 09282750, Feb2011, Vol. 20, Issue 1
• Sales tax equity: Who bears the burden? By: Derrick, Frederick W., Scott, Charles E., Quarterly Review of Economics & Finance, 10629769, Summer98, Vol. 38, Issue 2
• The Economic Incidence of Replacing a Retail Sales Tax with a Value-Added Tax: Evidence from Canadian Experience. By: SMART, MICHAEL, BIRD, RICHARD M., Canadian Public Policy, 03170861, Mar2009, Vol. 35, Issue 1
• INCIDENCE AND ACCIDENTS: REGULATION OF EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION THROUGH THE TAX CODE. By: Mullane, Joy Sabino, Lewis & Clark Law Review, 15576582, Summer2009, Vol. 13, Issue 2
• PERFECT COMPETITION, URBANIZATION, AND TAX INCIDENCE IN THE RETAIL GASOLINE MARKET. By: ALM, JAMES, SENNOGA, EDWARD, SKIDMORE, MARK, Economic Inquiry, 00952583, Jan2009, Vol. 47, Issue 1

This is fun, it brings back the stale smell of undergraduate economics courses. IANAE, but if I recall correctly, one problem with a sales tax is that it's regressive. Its burden falls disproportionately on the less well off. Assuming an equal tax rate on all goods and of all consumers, it's a flat tax: everyone pays the same percentage. However, the same percentage of expenditure means more to someone with less. It's "fair" in that it treats everyone equally, but it's not fair in that it doesn't effect everyone equally. Of course fairness comes up when you're discussing tax policy, but I think you have to remember that life isn't fair and you're not going to solve that through the US tax code.

As you say, at first blush, a sales-tax-only code looks like it would also create an incentive to take money out of the country. People from elsewhere would want to be paid in dollars in the US and spend them abroad. Tax law isn't easy and anyone who says it is... well they're wrong!

While I didn't take economics in Junior High, my High School course taught me that the supply of most goods is not perfectly price elastic. It taught me that in theory taxes are only partially passed on to the consumer except in cases of perfect price elasticity. It taught me that in theory, except in cases of perfect price inelasticity of supply, higher taxes on businesses will result in higher prices and fewer goods being sold in that market. Apparently this concept is called tax incidence, though I don't remember that from High School. It also taught me that a tax on individuals is not the same as the tax on corporations. Therefore, based on what I learned many years ago in high school economics, in the case you're talking about, which has very little to do with the proposed tax on individuals, it's true that the consumer bears some of the burden of those taxes. However, it's also true that corporations do in fact pay taxes. That is, ceteris paribus, assuming things like that they don't totally avoid the taxes by using loopholes.

The author of the linked blog post is Will Wilkinson. That wasn't immediately obvious to me when I clicked through, so I thought I'd share it. Wikipedia describes his approach as libertarian and "a mixture of John Rawls's principles and Friedrich von Hayek's methods".

Interesting guy and a good writer.

As a matter of fact that's just about correct, if I understand it right. I know you're trying to be snarky, but I think in approximation and analogy that's how it works. The issue isn't directly how much US owes compared with its wealth (it would never be the absolute value of the debt, anyway), but whether creditors are willing to keep lending, which of course depends on other interrelated things like the growth of the US economy, the money supply, the rate of inflation, interest rates, and how the play of all of these factors and others in the economies of other countries in the world effect their credit-worthiness relative to the US. If lenders start to decide they don't trust the US to hold their money, more than they do any other country, that's when the American national debt becomes a huge problem for everyone. And I think it's true that one of the reasons this could happen is if people start to see the risk of American default because of the overwhelming size of the debt relative to the US economy.

You're absolutely right I should support all this with evidence, and I'm astonished that it seems to be really hard to find reliable explanations of the dynamics of government debt online. Maybe I'm using the wrong keywords. However, the US Government Accountability Office has a pretty good explanation of the reasons why creditors generally buy US debt. It doesn't say exactly what I'm saying, but gives a more detailed explanation of the way US debt works.

I'm not an economist, of course, so possibly talking out of the wrong end.

IANAWD, but a few weeks ago I heard Raphael Sofaer and Dan Grippi do a presentation on Diaspora. They said they're hoping for a release version by the end of the year. One reason they said they're keeping a low profile is that they don't want to worry about scaling problems at the moment. There are other problems too, such as that its a bit of a pain to set up a pod, right now. They seem like cool, smart guys. They've got bigger goals than just duplicating facebook's functionality, but I didn't take good notes during that part and can't reproduce it from memory.

It's not just about copyright. Sites whose only function (or just about) is related to trademark violations or is about helping people get around DRM would be targeted by this law too, if it passes. Look at the definitions section (Sec. 2, par. 7.a.ii and ii).

Yes, that's exactly what's happening, though it's not quite a free-for-all of cries for inclusion. Those invited to this "E-G8" include 'civilian groups' such as representatives of the press and business leaders. For example Cory Doctorow was invited and Larry Page apparently attended. Now the civil society groups are saying: we know all about the internet and society, you should listen to what we have to say.

These groups (including Privacy International and La Quadrature du Net) aren't entirely naive. They were left off the guest list because Sarkozy didn't want to hear what they have to say. They recognise this and their press release is really just a way of pointing out that the meeting has left out some of the most important voices on net freedom and digital rights.