Linux going to be big in China 3747

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Mathew P. wrote on Fri, 21 Apr 2006 10:17:49 GMT

Yes, it does. :-) Well, OK, just for the sake of argument.

Exactly, and that's a problem, at least to those who would love to collect lots of taxes.

Personally, I'm still trying to figure out how exactly one represents money in such a system without screwing it up totally, and there's going to be a fair amount of trouble methinks before we standardize on a system that more or less works for almost everybody. (No system can work for everybody; there's too much delta in the human condition. A fair number of poor people are already outside of or straddling the commercial system, either "paying" by barter or paid "under the table".)

And then there's the more troubling question: what would we allow in this context? To the Internet, money is merely a series of figures...

In other words, scofflaws, bandits, and cheats cannot be identified by the authorities so that said authorities can collect their rightful and proper taxes therefrom. This of course is predicated on 1, which verges on the silly, but never mind; greater minds than I are probably even now pondering this problem.

Hopefully they'll come to the same conclusion that Internet taxation is messy and unworkable. However, not everyone is as brilliant and humble as I am. :-)

Touche! Of course you're right, but it is clear that there are those who would still think that information should be hoarded, dribbled out, and exchanged for payment. (And they'll get it too, for such things as market analyses.)

Me, I'm not sure exactly how an "information age" economy would look like yet. We're not anywhere near there yet, and even in an "information age" one still has to buy things such as fertilizer, food, and fuel. The only thing that changes for these things is the method of payment, which can now be electronic, unless we go back to something along the lines of a promissory note-gold standard.

And that disturbs me, especially considering that the gold standard is alleged (I wish I knew for sure) to have brought the Great Depression in the late 1920's. What is money? Are we verging on a pseudo-gold standard? Will the only way to make profit be to play the currency market deltas? Is this going to be a gigantic game of "managing Consumer Debt expectations"? Will we repeat the slow but inexorable downfall of the Roman Empire? (Are we that different from the ancient and at one point noble Romans?)

And then there are suggestions such as "penny a page", which was floating around some months back as a somewhat serious proposal. Briefly put, an author gets $0.01 per page hit. Trouble is, that page might be as simple as the HTML equivalent of "Hello world!" or a vastly complicated panoply of HTML, Flash, images, little anims or movies, applets, and Javascript.

While P-P could handle that (the initial HTML is the first thing loaded), it will not be able to handle AJAX at all, unless one charges a penny a packet or something. Briefly, AJAX stands for "Asynchronous Javascript And XML", which isn't quite right but I guess "AJCSC" (Asynchronous Javascript Client-Server Communications) wasn't quite as pronounceable :-), and even the "Asynchronous" isn't quite right either but never mind, the general idea is that one clicks on a button or types in some text in a widget, and thereby executes some Javascript, which goes back to the server to get a page fragment or just some data, then the javascript processes that page fragment or data and incorporates it into the already-existing page.

So does the new page get charged a penny as well? Especially since that Javascript can do multiple requests?

And then there's proxy caching (e.g., Squid), Java applets, ActiveX objects, and JNLP, but this already runs overlong.

Ah, but who makes *that* determination? You? Me? Donald "I never saw a plant I didn't like" Rumsfeld? George W "I never saw a plant I could understand" Bush? :-) privates "that's no bird!" Cheney?

It's a problem.

Hmmm....I don't know if it's quite that cut and dried, admittedly. I wish it were. It is presently illegal to possess child love, for example, yet to a computer that's merely another file to store. Never mind whether it contains Mozart works, scientific data, the latest fashions from Paris, a movie protected by copyright, a book detailing various procedures guaranteed to leave her (or him) gasping and wanting more, or child molestation of the most brutal sort -- the computer will happily store it.

(FSVO "happily", admittedly. But emotions are probably best debated elsewhere, and "unemotional robots" has been a meme in sci-fi for decades -- the main problem is what precisely "unemotional" means in various contexts. One might make a case that the Internet is a gigantic dreamland, for example; humans interpret generally random impulses as something that might have meaning.)

It has them *now*. It didn't have them *then*. Studying, for example, the godawful mess HTTP and HTML is may be somewhat instructive. Time was that HTTP was a stateless, simply cacheable protocol, with little more than the ability to fetch a file. That all changed with commercial "cookies".

For its part SGML, the precursor of HTML, was fairly simple, and HTML isn't too bad -- its main failing perhaps is that it is now being used in places where it really shouldn't be, and being asked to position things absolutely, which is problematic for a format originally designed to flow in a browser according to the whims of the font and the width of the display window.

The main complexities with XML have to do with higher layers (e.g., XmlSchema, XSLT).

That's the idea, sometimes. :-) But it's an interesting set of gray shades, to say the least, and not all black and white. That much I've learned.

-- Windows Vista. Because it's time to refresh your hardware. Trust us.