If you only tax spending, hoarders will get rich. They will invest their savings and at some point they will own everything. We should tax production means as well. That means taxing corporations. I am not against taxing spending, but you can't stop taxing corporations.

In fact, my point is that we should stop taxing labor. If a Robot produces some good, the corporation owning the robot pays corporation tax and sales tax. If a person produces the same good, the corporation pays corporation tax, sales tax, social security tax and the person pays income tax. That situation is easy to change. You remove income tax from labor rents and social security. Removing taxes is better than throwing subventions around. Instead of getting money to go through the government with all of the inefficiencies and associated waste, you leave money in the hands of workers. You incentive work.

Then you need to raise taxes in the other areas. What is left? corporation earnings, financial transactions and sales .

Most people will never make it to higher education. It is never mentioned but the educational system works by setting up a threshold on people, not on knowledge. The 20% (or whatever) with the best mathematical skills get to be engineers or scientists. Exams are designed to filter that 20%.

In the US, people with some college is 56.86% of the population, as per wikipedia. The rest of the people are doing jobs that are being automated now or will be automated during the next decade. For example, drivers (self driving cars), factory people (robots), call center (the web and call center speech recognition), and many more. At some point robots will be flipping burgers, it is not that difficult.

We don't have time to educate all this people and create paid jobs for them before the next wave of technology comes around in another ten years. When it comes, it will take away even more jobs.

So we have two choices. We own the robots collectively as a society, or a few rich people owns them. The way things are going, it seems to be the former. This could bring a dystopia if we don't find a way out.

So here is my proposal.

Right now governments get most of their money from labor taxes, but soon this money will dry out. We should stop taxing human labor completely. We are penalizing it. Instead we should tax corporate earnings and financial transactions. That is where all the tax money need to come from. That would keep worthy humans productive even if their marginal value compared to robots is small.

We need to come to terms with the fact that a big and growing proportion of people will not be employed. They should not be considered guilty. In any case they should be considered owners of the automated workforce the same as the rest of people is. So they should be given a cut of the taxes so they can live meaningful lives.

Is it finally ready for prime time? any one with experiences/horror stories?

There is a problem with this. You don't want to wait 20 years if the technology is available now and you really need it (as in quadriplegic). So you will have to settle with two or three years in animal tests and with tissue samples showing no measurable damage to the brain tissue.

Worst of cases, if you are quadriplegic and using this technology, probably the independence gained with it would be worth one operation every five years.

The French government obviously has it backwards. Instead of making new law and all that shit, they should get google to stop dodging taxes with the double dutch.
There is plenty of money that can be had that way. Then they can share it with newspapers or whatever.

From your comment and his comment I suspect that his test involved getting huge documents from different MS office versions and loading them. Then deciding that OO can't handle big documents in general. This is a very skewed test. For people moving completely to OO that's a non issue.

I hoped it is clear I was kidding.

Yes, and China is leading the way in this area too, exporting civilization to the west for thousands of years.

You could introduce a "bug" into a processor that given a specific input (e.g. some GUID) will jump to a memory location and execute it. I guess that would be pretty difficult to find unless it is actually exploited.

They are opening a can of worms.

Obviously, the US has been doing exactly that. There are documented cases of back doors introduced into US software and hardware. It could bite them back with other countries using exactly the same argument against them.

I do not fault the US for defending their interests. It is clear that China will use all opportunities available to them, exactly as US did. But they are going to face the same issues that countries like Iran face now. They can use foreign technology that is better than domestic products, or they can try to stop it from entering the country. The fact is that US is quickly becoming irrelevant in hardware manufacturing, so it is a difficult call.

What seems clear is that this won't be good for the economy since it will be interpreted as tariffs by the other side.

I have thought a lot about this lately. In a very short time during this decade, we will see most of this factory work automated (e.g. Foxconn), then we will see road transportation automated (e.g. google cars) and farm work automated. I don't think there is time for the economy to generate jobs for the growing unemployed part of the population. We are told that western jobs are moving to the east, but this is only a part of the story. Globally, jobs are being lost (Unemployment has risen globally to 210 million, or 30 million jobs lost since 2007 according to the IMF).

But this is only the current round of automation. If the singularity is near, and I believe it is, probably around 2035 as per Kurszweil's extrapolations of current trends, by the 2020's the value of human work will tend quickly to zero.

So it is clear to me that:

1) We should stop taxation of work, asap. Instead we need to tax corporate profits. Google, Microsoft and most of the big corporations pay close to zero taxes. That is unacceptable. For two companies with the same income, the one employing most people pays the more taxes. Also, people is taxed on their job income at a higher rate than its investment profits.

2) Society needs to come to terms with the fact that most people will not be able to work. World citizens need to have their basic needs covered. Then if they manage to work, they can have extra income. Most people I know would work just to be occupied in something useful.

Right now, the world is going the wrong direction. Income inequality is at its highest for the last decades all around the world. Economic output is going down and middle class standard of life is going down. What happened in Spain and Greece will soon happen in France, US and other western countries. The sooner the elites realize that they need consumers, the sooner we can change the system so we produce what people needs to survive and we can all move to the next level.

The alternative is for the elites (and this means 1% of the population, so most of us smartass IT people won't be there) to transcend and the rest of the world to be left in the dust fighting to survive miserable lives. I may be too optimistic, but I don't think that is what the elites want.

The most active area seems to be btrfs. What is the general opinion, is it ready for general usage?

Any one with feedback from production setups?

Insurance is not gambling, it is bookkeeping.

If you consider that the banks and investment firms dictate to a great extent the government's macro policy, you get the right picture.

Google spanner of code ?