glennsl

It might be conceivable to fund a basic income via money creation, but that would require more than simply printing money, a complete revamp of the banking system and monetary policy. It's an interesting idea, but somewhat above my head.

I'm from Norway, where we already have a big welfare system funded by a progressive tax system. And which would already be able to fund most of a basic income. So obviously the idea of redistribution isn't that big of an issue around these parts. As a result, I'm perhaps too quick to assume funding would be done through taxation.

Not sure what you mean by "other sectors". Other relative to which sector(s)?

How would redistribution cause inflation? In order to redistribute, you would need to collect the money to distribute through taxes, removing just as much money from the system as it injects, thus maintaining average purchasing power.

If the money would just be printed, it would of course cause inflation, but that's not redistribution, it's just distribution.

It doesn't erase it, no, but certainly negates it. At least in terms of quantity and diversity. As for quality, I don't think I'd personally miss any content that would cease to exist without the monetary incentive. Though others may differ.

Sure people would want more than just the basic necessities, but it would still offset the cost by a significant amount. Having your living costs covered and being able to take a break from a job that pays well to work on something you are passionate about without having to fear homelessness and starvation makes a big difference.

People have been forking up $3-4 million for very niche adventure and old-school rpg games. Star Citizen is closing in on $60 million. This is with crowdfunding still in its infancy and projects that have orders of magnitude less interest than Game of Thrones. If people, both producers and consumers, don't care enough about Game of Thrones to make it happen, then so be it. But I don't believe that would be the case.

Game of Thrones isn't actually made of dollar bills, it's ultimately made of labour. And a basic income would make that labour available without requiring that the project cover living costs. Which means most of the cost would just disappear.

How do connections relate to paid content? Do they somehow come at a massive cost?

I did point out that I might be constructing a strawman, but seeing as you have yet to propose any alternative and copyright is in fact the status quo, it seemed like a reasonable assumption. Perhaps I should have added a question mark for emphasis, but feel free to clarify your position at any time.

Why would it not be adequate? What more is needed? The prospect of becoming a billionaire?

And, assuming you are an advocate for copyright since you haven't proposed anything else, have you ever considered what we're missing out on because of it? Copyright excludes a metric ton of content production by definition. It doesn't allow you to do anything that would otherwise not be possible, but forbids a lot that otherwise would be possible. Of course it's somewhat harder to point to examples that cannot even exist under the current regime, but use your imagination. There's a huge advantage in cost and effort in being able to build on what came before, compared to making everything from scratch every single time.

Open Source software and Wikipedia are perhaps the closest examples to what would be possible, but they're still very much hindered by copyright.

Copyright is not a benefit to society.

Copyright doesn't encourage content production, it actively discourages it. It doesn't allow anyone to do anything they couldn't have done without copyright, but forbids you to do a whole bunch of things you otherwise could. And even what's constituted "fair use" is often practically impossible because the various draconian enforcement schemes (e.g. Youtubes ContentID) don't understand the concept.

Copyright doesn't give anyone any rights. It takes rights away from everyone other than the "rights holder". It doesn't protect, it punishes.

Beware of the newspeak.

To find the right answers, one needs to pose the right questions. In this case, the problem is not that it is difficult to get paid for digital content, but that it is difficult to make a living by producing digital content. The question you ought to be asking, then, is how do we encourage the production of quality digital content?

To that question my answer would be a combination of basic income and crowdfunding.

Since it's not very stable yet, production use is actively discouraged. I do know Tilde is using Rust for Skylight (http://skylight.io), but I don't know how far from production they are.

You might get some of the good stuff, but you won't get its killer feature, robustness, without sacrificing backwards compatibility. And that's not going to happen.

Eventually we have to move on to more robust programming languages where null pointers and pointers to freed memory are not allowed.

Statically typed mainstream languages would not allow you to do that, but languages with algebraic type systems, like Haskell, Scala and Rust, do. This is also how they get around not having null pointers. You just define a type that can be either a string, or the symbol "None". Or any other symbol that might be more fitting for the situation.

> - unstable API

Seeing as Ember just hit 1.0 RC, the API should now be pretty stable. It's been pretty bad the last few months though.

Also, with a stable API, the docs will hopefully see significant improvement.

They also used to focus on the desktop market. Now they focus on the tablet market, to the point of sacrificing the desktop user experience to gain entrance to that market. That might prove to be a big mistake.

I agree that it will greatly benefit their tablet ecosystem. No doubt. But at the cost of a lesser desktop user experience.

They're throwing away the market domination they already have (to some extent at least), which of course is the backbone of their business, to try to get the money to pay the entrance fee in a market dominated by others, as a late comer with slim chances.

Metro on the desktop isn't about creating a better user experience for desktop users. It's about getting developers to make metro apps that provide a good user experience on tablets.

Microsoft's biggest problem when entering the tablet market is the sad state of their ecosystem. And to try to fix that, they decided to sacrifice the desktop user experience.

I think that's a pretty bold move. It's also a really really stupid move.

Norwegian. Many european countries use the same placement for semicolon. All the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, Germany and Netherlands to name a few.

Russia uses shift+4. Can't imagine how annoying that is.

Hello American. I'm from one of those other pesky countries that make up most of the human population of earth, and which usually have other keyboard layouts. I have to type shift+, to get the semicolon.

TypeScript will not abort compilation, but it will give you a warning. In the playground, that would be the red squiggly line indicating an error.

Gecko has a really nice css feature called -moz-element (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/-moz-element) that can be used to apply a _live_ view of a dom subtree as the background of another element.

People have done some awesome stuff with this, such as reflections, transition effects, and even recreating the blurred aero skin, by combining it with svg effects.

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/08/mozelement/ https://developer.mozilla.org/media/uploads/demos/D/a/David%...

And what's even cooler, this has been added to the CSS3 draft spec, so it might actually soon be implemented in the other layout engines! http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-images/#element-reference

There's an indicator available for this already, although it lacks the fancy graphs.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/03/indicator-sysmonitor-simp... (seems to be down atm) https://launchpad.net/indicator-sysmonitor/+download