It feels weird to be 23 years old and telling Kurt to grow up but here goes:
Grow up
Even programmers need to consider the consequences of decisions.
You say that you would disallow anonymous posting. This is a valid position, but I would like to point out that ACs do sometimes add value to our community. Some very intelligent people (especially in the crypto world) are rabidly paranoid and would REFUSE to post here if they could not do so anonymously.
You would also block all windows clients. This silly piece of rabid *nix bigotry would do more harm than good. Many people here, myself included, use windows machines at work. Some intelligent people here may CHOOSE to use a windows machine for various reasons.
In my opinion, the "good" arguments (as opposed to flamewars) are the most enjoyable part of the/. experience. Start banning people who disagree with you, and the community gets sterilized very fast.
You also suggest that flames would be deleted. I think this is definitely a bad idea (allowing people to filter based on moderation catagory instead of just raw score, however...). Once you start deleting the extremely rude argumentative comments, you have entered a treacherous realm of deciding which comments to delete. The legal issues involved with actually deleting content are extremely thorny, and probably over my head. I have the impression that once you start deleting some content, you take some responsibility for the remaining content.
Like you, I am "only a programmer". The difference is that I realize that my decisions, my ideas have some affect on other people. If my ideas had no influence, I would quit my job. Since my ideas affect other people, I try to think them through.
I see from your user info that you are a "network/server admin". I assume you are good at what you do. You wouldn't blindly install software packages onto a production server without considering what consequences the package would have on the rest of the system. Similarly, if you are serious about wanting/. to be different, even if you are nearly powerless to get your changes implemented, you should consider the consequences to the rest of the community here.
By the way, I respect your decision to take off the automatic +1 and let your comment stand under it's own merit. If I could make one change to/., it would be to allow a user preferences option to automatically disable one's +1 Bonus. It get's annoying to check that box every time!
f you'd bother actually loggin and using your login you too would soon become a Karma whore.
Flaming an AC for being anonymous is chldish. Assuming everybody with a login is a "karma whore" is even more silly.
Notice my account ID is 935. I created my user account and have been posting with it long before Andover even acquired Slashdot. I just recently chnaged my screen name to show that I work for Andover in the spirit of full disclosure.
Bragging about your status as an "old-timer". Sad. Your account ID has nothing to do with the AC's comments about
Your attitude as a "wonderful" representation of your company.
Your automatic comment bonus, even on comments that (in his opinion) should be flamebait or troll.
Try logging in sometime you'll like it
Againg, attacking the AC for staying anonymous. Rude, childish, irrelevant, and totally uncalled for.
Don't worry we won't tell anyone that you're behind the microsoft.com firewall
Are you implying that this AC is a "rebellious" MS employee browsing/. while at work? If that is the case, I say "kudos to the AC"! If instead you are claiming that this person who disagrees with you must be an astroturfing Microsmurf, this comment implies a definite unjustified sense of paranoia, along with a sad attitude of "if you disagree with me, youmust be from THE ENEMY". This primative, warlike mentality is truly distressing in a self-professed Andover employee.
and using IE5 to browse here.
What is wrong with that. I myself often use IE here. When I am stuck at the windows box at work, IE5 is a far better browser to be using than the Netscape 4.x series. True, I grab the Mozilla daily snapshots, but IE is my second browser after Moz breaks. The right tool for the right job, and screw the wartime propaganda.
Actually, it is just the server install that wastes the entire hard drive. All of the workstation prepackaged installs simply waste your existing linux partitions.
The AC (who seems to be trolling, especially with that comment about Outlook and IE) is complaining about NT beeing whiped because he expected lilo to be installed "on the boot partition instead of the mbr". In other words, the NT partitions were not destroyed, he just had to RTFM and figure out how to boot NT (aside from with his rescue disks).
While he may have wanted to use the NT bootloader to boot linux (which is possible), it is far from obvious that that is "the right thing" for the installer to set up his machine to do. A person may want to use the (more flexible) LILO boot loader to bring up the NT boot loader, instead of having NT boot linux. Either configuration is possible, in fact I once had a machine set up both ways: My initial LILO prompt had three options:
linux
be
nt
If you selected nt, the NT boot loader would let you select between
Win98
Nt4
NT4 (SVGA mode)
NT5 Beta
Linux
One last escape option before entering the windows world.
This comment may not make sense to most people. Comment #287 is a rlevant post by an AC, who asks "is it speech or code?" then posts Frank A. Stephenson's paper about the CSS encryption system.
I only noticed this because I normally browse at -1 and notice that there were comments "below my current threshold". If you manually set your threshold to -5 or lower, you will see this along with a few other -5 comments. What happended?
There are some superficial differences. VB is Excel/Word macro language munged into an ugly general-purpose language. Similarly, perl is a powerful text processing language munged into a general purpose programming language.
VB has insanely platform-dependent things built into the core language, such as the Printer object and the registry access functions (DeleteSettings, GetAllSettings, GetSetting, SaveSetting). In parallell, perl has a host of unix-specific functions for System V process communication and management, and working with files such at/etc/passwd,/etc/hosts, and/etc/groups.
VB belies it's heritage as an Excel macro system by having built-in functions for financial calculations. While I don't doubt that these are useful in many cases, I do not feel that they belong in the core language. Similarly, perl demonstrates it's heritage as Practiccal Extrraction and Reporting Language by providing extensive built-in support for regular expressions. Again, this is useful functionality that does NOT belong in the core of the language.
VB has many, many functions. Very few VB programmers know the entire VB language. Again, this sounds a lot like perl.
Many (but not all) VB programmers ONLY know VB. Of these VB-programmers-without-perspective, many believe that VB is the one true greatest language ever. Similarly, many (but not all) perl programmers know ONLY perl, but are very rabid in their worship of perl.
Many (but not all) VB programmers do not know how to program well. It is rare for two VB programmers to solve the same problem in the same way. As I mentioned above, most do not know the entire language. Combine these two facts and you discover that, even for seasoned programmers, VB programs are hideous to maintain. Again, the parallells to perl are blindingly obvious.
I like clean, simple design. A simple core, combined with a an extensive, powerful suite of available tools, is the most pleasing environment for me to work in. That is the real reason I tend not to use VB or perl (even though I have experience with both).
I am also disturbed by the worshipful communities surrounding both of these languages. Both of these communities are mostly composed of people who have no experience of anything else and, based solely on their ignorance, believe that their language of choice is the best language ever. This is the kind of person I mean by "perl weenies" or "VB weenies". I stipulate that there could be (and probably are) "python weenies", "lisp wenies", "C weenies", "Smalltalk weenies", etcetera. Perl and VB seems to be the tqo current focal points for such "weenies" today.
This is not just a case of some whiny, incompetent AOLers complaining about things they do not understand. AOL 5 does ask for permission before making itself the DEFAUL internet connection, but it then goes ahead to make itself the ONLY internet connection by mucking up the TCP/IP configuration and deleting other DUNs.
I agree that AOL provides a fertile ground for uninformed class-action lawsuits. I simply disagree that this is what we are seeing.
#2 "I am going to become your ONLY internet connection" is what is happening. A freind of mine wanted to switch from AOL 5 to FreeI, and required my help to do so. He was able to dial up to freei, but after the modem connection was established, NO TCP/IP connections would work.
It turns out (according to the network control panel applet) that AOL installed their own "AOL Dial up adapter" network driver and that TCP/IP was bound to this driver. We were unable to connect TCP/IP via another ISP until this AOL crap wa ripped out of the network settings and the TCP/IP bindings were reset to the "Normal" Dial-up adapter driver.
I definitely agree with the standard answers of Heinlein, Herbert, Asimov, Niven, Stephenson, Gibson, etcetera. One book I really enjoyed recently was The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter.
This book claims to be a sequel to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, and has a similar feel.
Baxter's books tend to take on a cosmic scale which may be overwhelming to some readers. He also likes to use a LOT of science in his SF - if you find yourself leaning towards SF with multiple timelines, quantum mechanics, nanotechnology, evolution, dyson spheres, and quotes from Godel, this might be something you would want to check out.
This is a point that I wish Kuniavsky had gone into more detail about.
The Open Source movement has no feedback loop to end-users, and no imperative to create one.
The simple truth is the we don't care about UI design much. There are some obvious reasons for this:
For most of free software developers, our livelyhoods do not depend on convincing end-users to use our project. With this mentality, a higher learning curve is acceptable because you do not need a "point and drool" interface to bait the trap of overpriced software.
Many open-source developers work on commercial software for our "day jobs". In this environment, we often see crappy back-end code tacked on to an overdone UI at the last minute before the product is shipped to meet an arbitrary marketing design. Visual Studio is speciffically designed for a development process of
Draw a UI
Attatch a little functionality
These entire process leaves us feeling sick to our somachs and guilt-ridden.
Much open-source software is from "scratch an itch" projects. People develop something because they want to have it. If you are writing software that you are going to use yourself, you create it with the type of interface you want. Since software developers are, pretty much by definition, power users, open-source software projects will tend to be oriented toward power users.
Many of us are online junkies. Unix users are notoriously condescending (people I know have diagnosed me as a *nix junkie from this fact alone (although my "chicks dig Unix" T-shirt may have had something to do with it)). Many of us have had tech-support jobs, and have developed an almost pathalogical hatred of "stupid people". We simply do not careabout the opinion of somebody who cannot (or cannot be bothered to) send email or post to usenet.
The main thing we hate about other environments (windows, macOS) is the extreme emphasis on the front end (the "innovative user interfaces" that Kuniavsky cares so much about) when the program itself IS BROKEN. We switched to the open-source world in the first place because we would rather have software that works and is slightly harder to use than prettier software that falls apart! For example, I see no reason why windows should crash just because I had 17 application windows open at once (2 explorer windows, 3 IE windows, Delphi, Acrobat reader, Crystal Reports, 2 telnet windows, a console ftp session, the python interpreter, Groupwise, a groupwise message, Visual FoxPro, and two gvim windows)(I try to keep less than 10 windows at a time open now - seems more stable). I don't care if Visual Studio has an amazing UI, I would rather code in vim (which has a ui that suits my needs).
Much of the "innovative user-interface" stuff comes across as bloated crap. For exemple:
MS Bob
The Office Assistant (the papercip)
Docking toolbars
tear-off menus
Web-browsers built into other applications (like winamp)
Yes, open-source UIs tend to be lean and mean. I am sure I am not alone in saying that I like it that way.
Too much functionality in the core language, leading to many perl scripts written by people who do not understand the entire language, resulting in convoluted, brain dead solutions.
Perl Weenies. Far too many perl coders believe perl is the One True Language and the Solution to Everything, even though they know NOTHING else.
Not enough functionality in the standard modules. Nearly any worthwhile program written in perl requires at least one module from CPAN
Lack of true functions. subs are not good enough
The perl culture. comp.lang.perl.misc has a nasty attitude, extremely unfriendly to newbies. Most perl gurus seem to cherish obfuscation. I have seen some ugly flamewars started by Tom Christianson, and his attitude scared me.
Perl's special markers for variable types ($, %, and @) make true polymorphic functions difficult.
Perl's ugly reference syntax (reminiscent of pointers) makes OO programming difficult.
Perl's many Unixisms in the core language get in the way of platform-independant code.
Perl's exotic source code (using special i/o functions instead of stdio) make proting perl to exotic systems (such as java). If it was possible, I think many people would love to have a perl equivalent of jpython.
Perl is a good language for text processing and for quick one-time hacks. Unfortunately, perl's negative points are so severe (and many) that I have stopped using perl entirely in this past year.
Perl is not completely garbage, but it is seriously flawed. I have been much happier since I swore it off.
If he continues to ignore us, some of us may become inspired enough to do "slashdot" the right way.
Some people already have worked on rebuilding a Slashdot-like engine from scratch. Take a good look at squishdot. Squishdot is not implemented in Perl (good for quick hacks, ideal for small text processing jobs, unweildy for much else) or Java (bondage and discipline language far too platform dependant ("write once run anywhere" - on a few select platforms)) but instead in Python (not very fast at run-time, but development is fast and code is readable).
This kind of grammatical nitpicking, along with all the millenium/millennium 2000/2001 crap we've had recently, has convinced me that slashdot needs a (-1, Pedantic) moderation category.
Ever since Toy Story and Toy Story II, ehenever I hearr the phraze "Linux zealots" I visualize a crowd of three-eyed penguins saying thins like "The Mystic Kernel. OOOOOOOOOOH."
To my mind a "Visual Basic Weenie" is somebody who knows VB, does not know any other languages, is not interested in learning any other languages, and believes, based solely on his own ignorance and the propoganda that he has digested from his own peers, that VB is the best language ever.
Feel free to substitute other languages (perl, tcl, c, lisp, java, javascript, even by beloved python) into this definition as appropriate.
OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
I'm not paranoid. I do not think it likely that MS is directly behind the CCS mess as an attack against Open Source projects. On the other hand, I doubt MS is unhappy to see our struggling with DVD.
I would have bought a DVD drive a while ago, but I refuse to let windows touch my hard drive again.
ASCII text that has been corrupted/miscreated by windows programs often have "smart quotes", a MS extension to the standard character set. On non-windows systems, these render as question marks.
Your post relies on the assumption that sales tax of some form is needed to keep governments from being "mired in debt."
Many states and nations do quite well today without sales tax of any form. In fact, meny people are completely opposed to the idea of sales tax because it is "too regressive."
I suspect that in 100 years, governments will still be able to tax property and income. Even if they are unable to tax you for spending your money, they will be able to tax you for earning your money and for having your money!
Slashdot Mirror
It feels weird to be 23 years old and telling Kurt to grow up but here goes:
Even programmers need to consider the consequences of decisions.You say that you would disallow anonymous posting. This is a valid position, but I would like to point out that ACs do sometimes add value to our community. Some very intelligent people (especially in the crypto world) are rabidly paranoid and would REFUSE to post here if they could not do so anonymously.
You would also block all windows clients. This silly piece of rabid *nix bigotry would do more harm than good. Many people here, myself included, use windows machines at work. Some intelligent people here may CHOOSE to use a windows machine for various reasons.
In my opinion, the "good" arguments (as opposed to flamewars) are the most enjoyable part of the /. experience. Start banning people who disagree with you, and the community gets sterilized very fast.
You also suggest that flames would be deleted. I think this is definitely a bad idea (allowing people to filter based on moderation catagory instead of just raw score, however...). Once you start deleting the extremely rude argumentative comments, you have entered a treacherous realm of deciding which comments to delete. The legal issues involved with actually deleting content are extremely thorny, and probably over my head. I have the impression that once you start deleting some content, you take some responsibility for the remaining content.
Like you, I am "only a programmer". The difference is that I realize that my decisions, my ideas have some affect on other people. If my ideas had no influence, I would quit my job. Since my ideas affect other people, I try to think them through.
I see from your user info that you are a "network/server admin". I assume you are good at what you do. You wouldn't blindly install software packages onto a production server without considering what consequences the package would have on the rest of the system. Similarly, if you are serious about wanting /. to be different, even if you are nearly powerless to get your changes implemented, you should consider the consequences to the rest of the community here.
By the way, I respect your decision to take off the automatic +1 and let your comment stand under it's own merit. If I could make one change to /., it would be to allow a user preferences option to automatically disable one's +1 Bonus. It get's annoying to check that box every time!
Dude, or chick, whatever you are,
This opening does not bode well...
f you'd bother actually loggin and using your login you too would soon become a Karma whore.
Flaming an AC for being anonymous is chldish.
Assuming everybody with a login is a "karma whore" is even more silly.
Notice my account ID is 935. I created my user account and have been posting with it long before Andover even acquired Slashdot. I just recently chnaged my screen name to show that I work for Andover in the spirit of full disclosure.
Bragging about your status as an "old-timer". Sad. Your account ID has nothing to do with the AC's comments about
Try logging in sometime you'll like it
Againg, attacking the AC for staying anonymous. Rude, childish, irrelevant, and totally uncalled for.
Don't worry we won't tell anyone that you're behind the microsoft.com firewall
Are you implying that this AC is a "rebellious" MS employee browsing /. while at work? If that is the case, I say "kudos to the AC"! If instead you are claiming that this person who disagrees with you must be an astroturfing Microsmurf, this comment implies a definite unjustified sense of paranoia, along with a sad attitude of "if you disagree with me, youmust be from THE ENEMY". This primative, warlike mentality is truly distressing in a self-professed Andover employee.
and using IE5 to browse here.
What is wrong with that. I myself often use IE here. When I am stuck at the windows box at work, IE5 is a far better browser to be using than the Netscape 4.x series. True, I grab the Mozilla daily snapshots, but IE is my second browser after Moz breaks. The right tool for the right job, and screw the wartime propaganda.
Actually, it is just the server install that wastes the entire hard drive. All of the workstation prepackaged installs simply waste your existing linux partitions.
The AC (who seems to be trolling, especially with that comment about Outlook and IE) is complaining about NT beeing whiped because he expected lilo to be installed "on the boot partition instead of the mbr". In other words, the NT partitions were not destroyed, he just had to RTFM and figure out how to boot NT (aside from with his rescue disks).
While he may have wanted to use the NT bootloader to boot linux (which is possible), it is far from obvious that that is "the right thing" for the installer to set up his machine to do. A person may want to use the (more flexible) LILO boot loader to bring up the NT boot loader, instead of having NT boot linux. Either configuration is possible, in fact I once had a machine set up both ways: My initial LILO prompt had three options:
- linux
- be
- nt
If you selected nt, the NT boot loader would let you select between- Win98
- Nt4
- NT4 (SVGA mode)
- NT5 Beta
- Linux
One last escape option before entering the windows world.Read The Friendly Article before you begin spouting off. This suit actually had a positive encounter with linux./P
This comment may not make sense to most people. Comment #287 is a rlevant post by an AC, who asks "is it speech or code?" then posts Frank A. Stephenson's paper about the CSS encryption system.
I only noticed this because I normally browse at -1 and notice that there were comments "below my current threshold". If you manually set your threshold to -5 or lower, you will see this along with a few other -5 comments. What happended?
There are some superficial differences. VB is Excel/Word macro language munged into an ugly general-purpose language. Similarly, perl is a powerful text processing language munged into a general purpose programming language.
VB has insanely platform-dependent things built into the core language, such as the Printer object and the registry access functions (DeleteSettings, GetAllSettings, GetSetting, SaveSetting). In parallell, perl has a host of unix-specific functions for System V process communication and management, and working with files such at /etc/passwd, /etc/hosts, and /etc/groups.
VB belies it's heritage as an Excel macro system by having built-in functions for financial calculations. While I don't doubt that these are useful in many cases, I do not feel that they belong in the core language. Similarly, perl demonstrates it's heritage as Practiccal Extrraction and Reporting Language by providing extensive built-in support for regular expressions. Again, this is useful functionality that does NOT belong in the core of the language.
VB has many, many functions. Very few VB programmers know the entire VB language. Again, this sounds a lot like perl.
Many (but not all) VB programmers ONLY know VB. Of these VB-programmers-without-perspective, many believe that VB is the one true greatest language ever. Similarly, many (but not all) perl programmers know ONLY perl, but are very rabid in their worship of perl.
Many (but not all) VB programmers do not know how to program well. It is rare for two VB programmers to solve the same problem in the same way. As I mentioned above, most do not know the entire language. Combine these two facts and you discover that, even for seasoned programmers, VB programs are hideous to maintain. Again, the parallells to perl are blindingly obvious.
I like clean, simple design. A simple core, combined with a an extensive, powerful suite of available tools, is the most pleasing environment for me to work in. That is the real reason I tend not to use VB or perl (even though I have experience with both).
I am also disturbed by the worshipful communities surrounding both of these languages. Both of these communities are mostly composed of people who have no experience of anything else and, based solely on their ignorance, believe that their language of choice is the best language ever. This is the kind of person I mean by "perl weenies" or "VB weenies". I stipulate that there could be (and probably are) "python weenies", "lisp wenies", "C weenies", "Smalltalk weenies", etcetera. Perl and VB seems to be the tqo current focal points for such "weenies" today.
This is not just a case of some whiny, incompetent AOLers complaining about things they do not understand. AOL 5 does ask for permission before making itself the DEFAUL internet connection, but it then goes ahead to make itself the ONLY internet connection by mucking up the TCP/IP configuration and deleting other DUNs.
I agree that AOL provides a fertile ground for uninformed class-action lawsuits. I simply disagree that this is what we are seeing.
#2 "I am going to become your ONLY internet connection" is what is happening. A freind of mine wanted to switch from AOL 5 to FreeI, and required my help to do so. He was able to dial up to freei, but after the modem connection was established, NO TCP/IP connections would work.
It turns out (according to the network control panel applet) that AOL installed their own "AOL Dial up adapter" network driver and that TCP/IP was bound to this driver. We were unable to connect TCP/IP via another ISP until this AOL crap wa ripped out of the network settings and the TCP/IP bindings were reset to the "Normal" Dial-up adapter driver.
I definitely agree with the standard answers of Heinlein, Herbert, Asimov, Niven, Stephenson, Gibson, etcetera. One book I really enjoyed recently was The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter.
This book claims to be a sequel to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, and has a similar feel.
Baxter's books tend to take on a cosmic scale which may be overwhelming to some readers. He also likes to use a LOT of science in his SF - if you find yourself leaning towards SF with multiple timelines, quantum mechanics, nanotechnology, evolution, dyson spheres, and quotes from Godel, this might be something you would want to check out.
This is a point that I wish Kuniavsky had gone into more detail about.
The simple truth is the we don't care about UI design much. There are some obvious reasons for this:
- Draw a UI
- Attatch a little functionality
These entire process leaves us feeling sick to our somachs and guilt-ridden.Yes, open-source UIs tend to be lean and mean. I am sure I am not alone in saying that I like it that way.
Perl is a good language for text processing and for quick one-time hacks. Unfortunately, perl's negative points are so severe (and many) that I have stopped using perl entirely in this past year.
Perl is not completely garbage, but it is seriously flawed. I have been much happier since I swore it off.
Did anybody else catch the offhand comment about the TM3120 machine that it "has USB support - you can plug a keyoard in if you want."
Is it possible that Transmeta has better linux usb code in their "mobile enhancements"?
Yes, today. Check out Transmeta's website.
There will be a webcast anouncement this morning at 9 (PST) and a website update at Noon
If he continues to ignore us, some of us may become inspired enough to do "slashdot" the right way.
Some people already have worked on rebuilding a Slashdot-like engine from scratch. Take a good look at squishdot. Squishdot is not implemented in Perl (good for quick hacks, ideal for small text processing jobs, unweildy for much else) or Java (bondage and discipline language far too platform dependant ("write once run anywhere" - on a few select platforms)) but instead in Python (not very fast at run-time, but development is fast and code is readable).
This kind of grammatical nitpicking, along with all the millenium/millennium 2000/2001 crap we've had recently, has convinced me that slashdot needs a (-1, Pedantic) moderation category.
The original message linked to on deja states:
The UDP, if effectively implemented, cuts off all users of that domain from being heard by the rest of usenet.
As an @home customer who sometimes uses usenet (and has complained about spam before) I am going to go write a letter to customer service now...
P>Granted, of course.
Ever since Toy Story and Toy Story II, ehenever I hearr the phraze "Linux zealots" I visualize a crowd of three-eyed penguins saying thins like "The Mystic Kernel. OOOOOOOOOOH."
To my mind a "Visual Basic Weenie" is somebody who knows VB, does not know any other languages, is not interested in learning any other languages, and believes, based solely on his own ignorance and the propoganda that he has digested from his own peers, that VB is the best language ever.
Feel free to substitute other languages (perl, tcl, c, lisp, java, javascript, even by beloved python) into this definition as appropriate.
This is a REALLY cool idea that deserves more discussion. Show up with a duffle bag full of floppies with the DeCSS source code.
Be prepared for some VERY pissed off lawyers.
Unfortunately, I am nowhere near California. Otherwise, I would be cranking out floppies right now.
If you're dumb enough to photocopy a whole book then go for it.
If you're dumb emough to photocopy a whole DVD movie then go for it.
I have *already* seen at least 2 movies on the net pirated with this program.
Wow! At least 2 movies! An epidemic of piracy, indeed.
/. needs a (-1: Pedantic) moderation option
Remember this comment from the holloween document?
I'm not paranoid. I do not think it likely that MS is directly behind the CCS mess as an attack against Open Source projects. On the other hand, I doubt MS is unhappy to see our struggling with DVD.
I would have bought a DVD drive a while ago, but I refuse to let windows touch my hard drive again.
ASCII text that has been corrupted/miscreated by windows programs often have "smart quotes", a MS extension to the standard character set. On non-windows systems, these render as question marks.
A simple example of embrace and extend
Your post relies on the assumption that sales tax of some form is needed to keep governments from being "mired in debt."
Many states and nations do quite well today without sales tax of any form. In fact, meny people are completely opposed to the idea of sales tax because it is "too regressive."
I suspect that in 100 years, governments will still be able to tax property and income. Even if they are unable to tax you for spending your money, they will be able to tax you for earning your money and for having your money!