Huh? They have offline navigation from address to address. All the addresses are available offline, as well.

Borland Pascal wasn't really meaningfully simpler than Modula-2, though. It had modules (units) with separate compilation, and all kinds of low-level primitive, down to inline assembly. At some point (IIRC it was version 5.5? either way, still late 80s) it even became a full-fledged object-oriented language. In terms of what you could do with it, it was definitely comparable with C and C++ compilers available for DOS at the time, and separate compilation helped compile speeds - the short compile time of Pascal, and later Delphi, was truly legendary. They also had what was by far the best DOS IDE, with syntax highlighting, integrated debugger and help system etc. Granted, this was also true for Borland C++, but that was more expensive.

Yeah, on Unix, it never really got off the ground because C was the system language there. On DOS, it was a whole different world.

But why not? Clearly, if a robot can do hard labor instead of a human, that should be preferable on humanitarian grounds. If it can also do it for cheaper, then, as you rightly note, it should also be preferable on economic grounds. The only argument to the contrary is that people who are pushed out of jobs by robots (and this will clearly keep encroaching, so a laborer can only "retreat" by re-qualifying etc so far) are out of their source of income. But if the sole reason why we give them jobs is to provide them with income, then it's basically just a thinly veiled form of the broken window fallacy.

That was the point that I was trying to make. Automation is inevitably going to drive down the cost of labor so much that selling it to obtain basic income will cease to be a realistic proposition for a significant part (long term, probably the vast majority) of the population. At that point we'll need to come up with some other arrangement.

Note though that the long-term proposition is not "some people supported by the public". It's the reverse - "the public" supported by a few people (those who would still have jobs - like programming the robots). In fact, it's not even clear what "support" would mean, since, if most of society is basically on free welfare, then money is not really a universal medium of exchange anymore... the few people who still work - whom would they get the money for their work for, and what would they spend it on?

Hell, get that proportion high enough, and you'd probably have people competing to get a chance to do "real work" - for free.

Pascal had fucked up string handling, though some dialects partially rectified that.

Also, back in the golden age of DOS (late 80s to early 90s), [Borland] Pascal was in fact the language in which many "real" applications were developed, as well; even games. Delphi was also pretty popular on Windows in late 90s to early 00s.

It doesn't have pointers, but it does have references - which are basically pointers without arithmetic. In fact, in Python, everything in a reference (even primitive types like int are reference types). This is sufficient to explain the core notion of indirection, and data structures built on that notion, like linked lists or binary trees.

You may well be right - that's why I said "in theory". The way the originators of the movement saw it is that they would first need to temporarily establish a socialist system with a strong state that would have to be there for some period of time to 1) advance technology to the point where scarcity is not an issue anymore (they believed it is only possible under socialism), and 2) raise several generations educated and indoctrinated with the outlook that is necessary for such an economic system. The actual amount of time necessary for this was never specified by the theorists, though Marxist-Leninist states often declared goals like "building communism in 10 years" (and then, of course, it would still be 10 years away after 10 years).

Regarding altruism, it is actually a well-established fact that it is a basic instinct in humans. There are many anthropological and ethological studies that demonstrate it, even in very young children. The catch is that it's not universal altruism, but what they call "parochial altruism" - basically, mentally dividing everyone into "us" and "them", and extending altruism only to "us", often at the expense of "them" (which makes sense, since the evolutionary mechanism that causes altruism to appear in the first place necessitates such divisions to maximize gene propagation).

We don't know what people do under communism, since we didn't have it anywhere (nor did anyone ever claim to have it implemented).

The way it is supposed to work in theory is through education and upbringing, by making people (most of them, anyway) conscious of common welfare and willing to participate in the scheme that maximizes it for all, rather than freeloading to maximize it for themselves. You'd inevitably get some freeloaders, anyway - this is a fairly common story device in communist sci-fi - but the majority of people are not sociopaths, and altruism is in fact a strongly ingrained instinct, and you only really need a majority to keep the system going.

Do you understand the meaning of the English word "everyone"? If not, try consulting a dictionary.

I actually have some idea what I'm talking about, precisely because I have read my Marx and my Engels. Have you?

"The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not “abolished,” it withers away."

"The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong – into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax."

Have you tried Nokia maps? They seem to be more detailed than Bing, and have a more mature navigation mode. They also work offline.

HERE Maps (by Nokia) also work offline, at least on Win8 and WP8.

So what happens when there are no "other jobs", and the ones where you could ostensibly provide more value than a robot are all filled?

How many of those specialists are you going to need? Surely not one for every customer. What are the rest going to do? More importantly, what are their customers going to do?

You can't just handwave automation away. Like it or not, but most people who are in the labor force today work in jobs that do not require any creative input that machines either cannot handle already, or won't be able to handle in near future. Yes, previous advances in technology have created more work openings than they destroyed, because the needs of the world (and therefore the potential market size) have still outstripped the supply capacity. But we're rapidly approaching the point where that is no longer the case. When a single man can run (program, maintain etc) a factory that can supply thousands of people, in a fully self-contained cycle complete from mining raw materials to packaging and delivery, what are those thousands going to do? And where are they going to get the money to pay?

Simply put, automation decreases the cost of labor, and the limit - never achieved, but getting exponentially closer - is zero. On the other hand, the amount of labor that a single man can offer is bounded (basically, you can learn to do more complicated things, but the capacity to learn is limited). Therefore, at some point an economic system that is based on trading labor for goods is going to fail.

Dictatorship is an innate characteristic of the (claimed to be) transitional period to communism, as described by one particular branch of Marxism, namely Marxism-Leninism.

Since communism is meant to be a stateless society, who would be doing the whole murder part?

You sound like one of those people who think that the socioeconomic system that existed in, say, USSR is communism. It wasn't, and not even Soviets themselves claimed that it was (that's why it was called Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not Communist Republics).

For starters, communism is not about "average effort". It's about what effort every particular person can and is willing to put in - "from everyone according to their ability".

"To everyone according to their needs".

What happens if you claim more than what your needs are, attempting to justify it by increased contribution? Well, communism is only possible, even theoretically, in a society where the vast majority embrace the underlying notions. So what you'd get in that case is them simply not sharing with you. In a society that does not recognize private property, even without the use of force, you'd basically only be able to claim that which you possess at any given moment - anything beyond that would be beyond your claim, as there is no state to enforce your property rights against other people's claims (that's what many ancaps get completely wrong - they think that the abstraction that is private property beyond personal possessions can exist without a state to back it).