Eh? How, exactly, is it easier to print big fonts on a screen than a piece of paper? I think the cost of paper varies less strongly with size than, say CRT and LCD technology.
There's a graphical trick an electronic screen can do called "scrolling". A single piece of equipment can show data in a series, not just one predetermined thing. One LCD screen, 640x400 pixels, can display 100s of candidates in succession- and in huge fonts (if the voter wishes).
To do that on paper would be expensive not just to print them all, but more importantly because it makes counting the votes that much harder. There's more paper to store, and collating from a stapled packet is much harder than just reading individual cards.
WTF? And computers are less buggy than paper?!?! Help me.
Ok. For data over a certain size, individual sheets of paper are more error-prone than computer files. As you saw in the Florida election, just having the votes in hand doesn't mean you know what the total is. For nations the size of the US, counting votes can be a monthlong procedure- and that's with a significant chance of error on each one (better form design can reduce it greatly- no butterfly+chad). The inabliity to count & recount quickly is itself a kind of buginess.
Many of the ways that a paper vote can be hacked are just allegations- but that's the problem. Because huge stacks of paper are so unwieldy to analyze, we can't be sure how many disputed votes might've really made a difference.
Another paper problem is its fragility- a single saboteur could destroy 10000s of paper votes by fire, but digital votes can be distributed to multiple remote sites immediately as they're cast. Historically, what happens if some ballots are "lost"? Do the authorities redo the whole election? Not on your life.
This, the last paragraph, is the only one worth reading, and interestingly it contradicts some of the earlier statements with which I took issue
The whole point of the article was to support electronic voting. It just laid out the typical objections first- but the subtitle of the page clearly telegraphed what the conclusion would be. How the last paragraph contradicts (or even addresses) much else in the article escapes me.
PS. I generally do not approve of this guy's reportage.
Are we supposed to take anything said by Simson Garfinkel seriously? Just look at this hilarious article he wrote 3 years ago. It predicted that Linux would be destroyed by viruses. Hasn't happened (even though Linux "anti-virus" software, his proposed solution, is a rarity)
Yah, yah, I know, "Look at the merits of the argument, not it's deliverer". I just thought it was funny to look back at the the old article in light of the Microsoft worms that rampaged over the last month.
Nothing sound stupid, except possible that analogy.
There's a difference between cars and computer software. One of them is firmly limited by physical laws as to what it can do. The other is bounded only by the design imagination of the author.
There is a good execuse why cars need maintenance. It is unavoidable. There is NO acceptable reason to sell insecure software. It's sold today because developers are too cheap and customers aren't discriminating enough.
(Someone might be tempted to respond: "You can't get perfect security in either case- a perfectly safe car would be expensive too". But that doesn't work- spending on software security is scalable. It's a fixed design cost. Automotive safety would be a per unit cost.)
Information in real life is organized in trees. It is obvious anywhere one can look.
Trollish. Sometimes by appealing to "obviousness", you can trick readers into not considering what you're saying.
Now the idea that Object-Orientation is useful is correct, but don't say that everything should be stored in trees. Look at the major OO languages- do they have strictly treelike class derivation, or is multiple-inheritance allowed?
From the organizational chart of a company to the chair that you are sitting on, everything is a tree;
No it's not. You could view everything as being in MULTIPLE trees, but not in one tree. The corporate organization is one tree for chain of command, another for geographical location, others for education/specialty/contract/gender...
Any attribute of objects which can answer a yes/no question is a way to assign it to a tree branch.
And a simple SQL-based RDBMS does not cut it.
That's why there are actually new projects going on. Nobody stated "Here's MySQL, go throw out your filesystem and try it instead"
The charisma thing isn't valid, by the way. Geddy Lee proved almost 30 years ago that you don't have to look good to sell records.:)
Charisma has nothing to do with looks. It's the ability to arouse loyalty and enthusiasm. The single most charismatic person I've ever heard of was Adolf Hitler.
The music I prefer is that done for love of MUSIC, not love of money.
The majority of consumers, however, do enjoy professionally produced music. Much of the effort to creating those songs was contributed by people with no interest in it beyond their salary. Even those performers with a love for the creative process would've been able to devote less time if they'd also held down a day job.
The question of how to give "artists" compensation is a rational concern for people who wish to continue the availability of music in the style they've become accustomed to.
I can easily throw an mp3 onto a disc and then have it to play any time, but the number of people I run into weekly who don't know about this or can't be bothered to do this is astounding.
That argument, if valid at all, is for a short-term only. Technology and user-interfaces WILL improve to the point where getting a digital audio file onto all his playback devices is easy for even the greatest of ignoramuses. (In fact, someday soon a 100% electronic format will be more convenient than any physical medium)
I suppose that 10 years ago, you were capable of trading digital files (if you wished) over FTP or IRC, even though most people couldn't. Then Napster came out, and it was everywhere. Never use the temporary inconvenience of a technology as proof that it won't spread to ubiquity.
The second is that bands aren't just selling a tune, they're also selling an act.
They aren't selling the "act", except as a way to promote other moneymaking opportunities. Those opportunities are sales of recorded music (which the aforementioned pattern may destroy) and tickets to live performances.
It is somewhat valid to claim that musicians could survive if all recorded music was freely traded and considered advertising for their live shows. This viewpoint however cuts off the sizable number of muscians who, for technical, stylistic, or charismatic reasons, are unable to play before an audience.
The end result was that they got music that didn't sound quite as good as the real thing and they didn't pay a dime for it. Just like mp3 downloaders are doing now. All it took was a little bit of work (less than it generally does now for mp3s IMO). The artists didn't starve, everyone was fine.
You poked 2 holes in your own point. It used to take MORE work to make the copies, and the quality was LESS. (The average modern listener cannot detect anything wrong with a 128K MP3, and faster networks will soon handle less-compressed data easily)
A legal way to get singles is to hook a good quality FM tuner up to your audio in jack and record away.
You've made a typographic error; there should be an "il" previous to "legal" in that sentence.
The reason such activities weren't persecuted in the past is because the infringer invests a lot of effort for a low quality product. Kazaa makes it easy, but is legally equivalent to taping off the radio.
If there's ANY exploitable buffer overrun, your computer is basically owned.
It really matters what the privs of the exploitable process are. A buffer overrun will segfault if it tries to write onto another process, so the only code that can be subverted is the one with the error.
Buffer overruns in non-root programs cannot take over the whole computer.
But they don't even chastise Israeli pilots for killing dozens of Americans.
Israel gets a free pass from the US.
Re:Adjust your tinfoil hat, guy.
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The "Voice of Reason" often sounds suspiciously like the "Voice of Naive Optimism".
Look up the Federal laws: if it is illegal for a Federal agency to do $foo, then it is also illegal for a Federal agency to have a third party do $foo on their behalf.
Yes, it sounds simple and logical. But there's many examples of the US government breaking straightforward prohibitions. Just look at how many times EO 12333.2 was violated in the past 2 administrations! (And the medals considered for doing so...)
Regarding the Feds hiring something to perform acts which are illegal for them, this most commonly occurs with the recruitment of "bounty hunters". Bounty Hunters are licensed by the government to aid in law enforcement, but they're not bound by the 4th or 5th amendments of the Bill of Rights.
They don't need a warrant, they don't need to Mirandize you or allow a call to a lawyer, they can just go with the flow. They can commit B&E, kidnapping, assault, and murder. As long as they're acting in a good-faith belief that you're the perpetrator, a bounty-hunter can treat you as he likes.
Why can't someone's hard work just be simply respected? It isn't that hard.
I worked *HARD* digging a 6-meter hole in my backyard with only a toothbrush! Now I want you to respect my work, and pay me for the effort.
What? You say I needed a sensible business plan first? Why would I need that, if you respect my work?
If you want something that will display content you want...
and somebody is selling one for just $50, then buy it from him. If he'd forgotten that it could play content from other sources than his triple-markup source at Nickleodeon, it's not your problem.
Born yesterday, huh? Or just independently wealthy? The file format issue is the only reason I've seen someone upgrade MS Office. What other motivation could they have?
Most are unaware of the file format issue anyway.
In every major corp office, the pattern is the same. People become aware of file formats every time they click on a DOC/PPT/XLS attached to an email and can't read it properly (or at all).
That happens about every 3-4 years. The IT department resists for a while, and gives users boilerplate responses they can use to instruct the sender to save in a non-default format. But as time goes on, a bigger and bigger percentage of attachments have the problem. And of course, the older Office version is no longer available for installation on new PCs.
Since it's usually the top executives who get a new laptop every 10 months, it's really tough to send a memo back to your CEO asking for an RTF version. IT can't force him to modify his behavior, and they certainly can't take his laptop away. So the pressure builds to upgrade Office on the employees desktops. (Often they still don't upgrade Office- they need new PCs to run it, after all, so it just comes along when the desktops get replaced. But running the newer Office is one reason to get new PCs at all)
It has everything to do with the ability of 3rd party authors to create software which reads/writes PDFs. (And if they can't do that, then the format isn't 100% open)
Adobe is using a form of PDF "security" by essentially adding a "secure bit" into the files (which are otherwise trivial to decrypt). For this to protect anything, software which reads PDFs must honor that bit (and not allow you to re-save the file as an unprotected PDF).
3rd party authors must cripple potentially useful features of their code to avoid being labelled as DMCA-violators ("trafficing in circumvention devices").
An open-source author places himself at even more risk: even if his program obeys the security guidelines, a user might recompile it with the security-checking turned off. The author could be accused of trafficing just because he distributed powerful code that was comprehensible enough to easily modify.
An additional factor is that 1 movie ticket equals 1 viewer, but a single game sale may be played by several people. Children recieving game discs are expected to share with siblings.
This moves games back up and more towards balance with film in total audience size.
Engineers and scientists aren't going to be using Windows (unless their employers are idiots), they're going be using Linux or some commercial Unix.
Sadly, it appears that many employers are what you call "idiots". The majority of engineers and scientists do sit behind Microsoft(tm) Windows(r). In fact, specialized engineering software (like recent CAD programs) that is only available for Windows(r) is often cited as one more reason "Linux is not ready for the desktop".
(Side note, amoung engineers who do operate Unix, they're often doing so from a WinNT desktop)
There was absolutely NO economic benefit of going faster than the speed of sound.
The economic benefits of supersonic travel are (and were) self-evident. Faster planes = a dominant military = extort concessions from every other nation on earth.
There's no correspondingly obvious explanation for how getting to Mars will have a practical benefit.
Furthermore, each incremental improvement to airplane speed was a measurable advantage in air superiority. But flying to Mars is all or nothing- if you travel it 20% of the way or 80%, you're still just lost in space.
I'll note that roads did in fact exist before there were state-sponsored expenditures for them;
Have any examples? State-sponsorship of roads goes back 2300 or more years (the Appian); prior to that, there was little distinction between wealthy individuals (nobility) and "the state".
You're assuming that the amount of money in the world is finite.
It's not like that. Money is just an abstraction for the ability to exchange work. "Running out of money" means losing the freedom to exchange work. This could happen under an authoritarian government that criminalizes non-state bartering.
The AC's contention is that corporatism will accelerate to the point where an oligarchy of companies becomes a new fascist power. The probablity of this occuring is a matter of opinion- he seems to think it likely.
You're one of those people who doesn't understand why the Beer and Ice Cream Diet isn't working for them, aren't you?
No, there are several fundamental flaws to that diet. Some are too obvious for me to bother mentioning, but the best one centers on the definition of "calorie". For the benefit of those who don't know this factoid:
There are two different definitions of "calorie". A physical calorie is the energy to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree kelvin. A dietary Calorie can heat a kilogram of water 1 degree. That jokey diet page freely switches between the two definitions to exaggerate facts and reach bizarre conclusions. It creates the illusion that changing the temperature of a foodstuff will outweight the actual calories it contains.
The article is too brief to have space to discuss inflation, which is something of a minor detail from the abstract position it is written from. It does not attempt to address concerns from the foreseeably near future.
The assumption going in is that someday robots will eliminate almost all human jobs. By implication, this means that scarcity of basic survival needs will also be eliminated. Without that scarcity, it's fine to assume that meaningful inflation will not happen.
The numbers used on money for exotic luxuries may fluxuate, but the stipend's power to purchase staple necessities is taken to be constant.
That's a moderately long comment. Allow me to summarize for other readers: "Machines haven't replaced humans yet, so they never will".
Interesting that in almost every case, the robotics work WITH and ENHANCE the capabilities of the humans that operate them.
Of the things you listed, only 1 features something approaching the definiton of robot. And in the case of the car factory, 300 human jobs have been replaced by robots with 6 supervisors.
Oh, and all these robots-take-over-the-world philosophers always seem to forget:
All the indomintable-force-of-the-human-spirit philosophers seem to forget the relentlessly accelerating pace of computer speed improvements.
Take a survey of those best informed to predict the future abliities of robots- professional computer/software engineers (with or without starry-eyed academics, according to your preference). Ask them how long they expect it'll take for computer software to become smarter than 50% of humans. Almost all of them will agree it will happen, in 300 years at the outside. 75 or even just 50 years is a more typical response, though.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd really like to see your source
It was all over the news at the time.
Eh? How, exactly, is it easier to print big fonts on a screen than a piece of paper? I think the cost of paper varies less strongly with size than, say CRT and LCD technology.
There's a graphical trick an electronic screen can do called "scrolling". A single piece of equipment can show data in a series, not just one predetermined thing. One LCD screen, 640x400 pixels, can display 100s of candidates in succession- and in huge fonts (if the voter wishes).
To do that on paper would be expensive not just to print them all, but more importantly because it makes counting the votes that much harder. There's more paper to store, and collating from a stapled packet is much harder than just reading individual cards.
WTF? And computers are less buggy than paper?!?! Help me.
Ok. For data over a certain size, individual sheets of paper are more error-prone than computer files. As you saw in the Florida election, just having the votes in hand doesn't mean you know what the total is. For nations the size of the US, counting votes can be a monthlong procedure- and that's with a significant chance of error on each one (better form design can reduce it greatly- no butterfly+chad). The inabliity to count & recount quickly is itself a kind of buginess.
Many of the ways that a paper vote can be hacked are just allegations- but that's the problem. Because huge stacks of paper are so unwieldy to analyze, we can't be sure how many disputed votes might've really made a difference.
Another paper problem is its fragility- a single saboteur could destroy 10000s of paper votes by fire, but digital votes can be distributed to multiple remote sites immediately as they're cast. Historically, what happens if some ballots are "lost"? Do the authorities redo the whole election? Not on your life.
This, the last paragraph, is the only one worth reading, and interestingly it contradicts some of the earlier statements with which I took issue
The whole point of the article was to support electronic voting. It just laid out the typical objections first- but the subtitle of the page clearly telegraphed what the conclusion would be. How the last paragraph contradicts (or even addresses) much else in the article escapes me.
PS. I generally do not approve of this guy's reportage.
Are we supposed to take anything said by Simson Garfinkel seriously? Just look at this hilarious article he wrote 3 years ago. It predicted that Linux would be destroyed by viruses. Hasn't happened (even though Linux "anti-virus" software, his proposed solution, is a rarity)
Yah, yah, I know, "Look at the merits of the argument, not it's deliverer". I just thought it was funny to look back at the the old article in light of the Microsoft worms that rampaged over the last month.
See how stupid that sounds now?
Nothing sound stupid, except possible that analogy.
There's a difference between cars and computer software. One of them is firmly limited by physical laws as to what it can do. The other is bounded only by the design imagination of the author.
There is a good execuse why cars need maintenance. It is unavoidable. There is NO acceptable reason to sell insecure software. It's sold today because developers are too cheap and customers aren't discriminating enough.
(Someone might be tempted to respond: "You can't get perfect security in either case- a perfectly safe car would be expensive too". But that doesn't work- spending on software security is scalable. It's a fixed design cost. Automotive safety would be a per unit cost.)
Information in real life is organized in trees. It is obvious anywhere one can look.
Trollish. Sometimes by appealing to "obviousness", you can trick readers into not considering what you're saying.
Now the idea that Object-Orientation is useful is correct, but don't say that everything should be stored in trees. Look at the major OO languages- do they have strictly treelike class derivation, or is multiple-inheritance allowed?
From the organizational chart of a company to the chair that you are sitting on, everything is a tree;
No it's not. You could view everything as being in MULTIPLE trees, but not in one tree. The corporate organization is one tree for chain of command, another for geographical location, others for education/specialty/contract/gender...
Any attribute of objects which can answer a yes/no question is a way to assign it to a tree branch.
And a simple SQL-based RDBMS does not cut it.
That's why there are actually new projects going on. Nobody stated "Here's MySQL, go throw out your filesystem and try it instead"
The charisma thing isn't valid, by the way. Geddy Lee proved almost 30 years ago that you don't have to look good to sell records. :)
Charisma has nothing to do with looks. It's the ability to arouse loyalty and enthusiasm. The single most charismatic person I've ever heard of was Adolf Hitler.
The music I prefer is that done for love of MUSIC, not love of money.
The majority of consumers, however, do enjoy professionally produced music. Much of the effort to creating those songs was contributed by people with no interest in it beyond their salary. Even those performers with a love for the creative process would've been able to devote less time if they'd also held down a day job.
The question of how to give "artists" compensation is a rational concern for people who wish to continue the availability of music in the style they've become accustomed to.
I can easily throw an mp3 onto a disc and then have it to play any time, but the number of people I run into weekly who don't know about this or can't be bothered to do this is astounding.
That argument, if valid at all, is for a short-term only. Technology and user-interfaces WILL improve to the point where getting a digital audio file onto all his playback devices is easy for even the greatest of ignoramuses. (In fact, someday soon a 100% electronic format will be more convenient than any physical medium)
I suppose that 10 years ago, you were capable of trading digital files (if you wished) over FTP or IRC, even though most people couldn't. Then Napster came out, and it was everywhere. Never use the temporary inconvenience of a technology as proof that it won't spread to ubiquity.
The second is that bands aren't just selling a tune, they're also selling an act.
They aren't selling the "act", except as a way to promote other moneymaking opportunities. Those opportunities are sales of recorded music (which the aforementioned pattern may destroy) and tickets to live performances.
It is somewhat valid to claim that musicians could survive if all recorded music was freely traded and considered advertising for their live shows. This viewpoint however cuts off the sizable number of muscians who, for technical, stylistic, or charismatic reasons, are unable to play before an audience.
The end result was that they got music that didn't sound quite as good as the real thing and they didn't pay a dime for it. Just like mp3 downloaders are doing now. All it took was a little bit of work (less than it generally does now for mp3s IMO). The artists didn't starve, everyone was fine.
You poked 2 holes in your own point. It used to take MORE work to make the copies, and the quality was LESS. (The average modern listener cannot detect anything wrong with a 128K MP3, and faster networks will soon handle less-compressed data easily)
A legal way to get singles is to hook a good quality FM tuner up to your audio in jack and record away.
You've made a typographic error; there should be an "il" previous to "legal" in that sentence.
The reason such activities weren't persecuted in the past is because the infringer invests a lot of effort for a low quality product. Kazaa makes it easy, but is legally equivalent to taping off the radio.
All you had to do was find and move the security programs preference file to the trash and restart the computer.
And what was preventing you from overwriting the security file with a Powerpoint, text, or graphic saved from almost any other program?
If there's ANY exploitable buffer overrun, your computer is basically owned.
It really matters what the privs of the exploitable process are. A buffer overrun will segfault if it tries to write onto another process, so the only code that can be subverted is the one with the error.
Buffer overruns in non-root programs cannot take over the whole computer.
But they don't even chastise Israeli pilots for killing dozens of Americans.
Israel gets a free pass from the US.
The "Voice of Reason" often sounds suspiciously like the "Voice of Naive Optimism".
Look up the Federal laws: if it is illegal for a Federal agency to do $foo, then it is also illegal for a Federal agency to have a third party do $foo on their behalf.
Yes, it sounds simple and logical. But there's many examples of the US government breaking straightforward prohibitions. Just look at how many times EO 12333.2 was violated in the past 2 administrations! (And the medals considered for doing so...)
Regarding the Feds hiring something to perform acts which are illegal for them, this most commonly occurs with the recruitment of "bounty hunters". Bounty Hunters are licensed by the government to aid in law enforcement, but they're not bound by the 4th or 5th amendments of the Bill of Rights.
They don't need a warrant, they don't need to Mirandize you or allow a call to a lawyer, they can just go with the flow. They can commit B&E, kidnapping, assault, and murder. As long as they're acting in a good-faith belief that you're the perpetrator, a bounty-hunter can treat you as he likes.
Why can't someone's hard work just be simply respected? It isn't that hard.
I worked *HARD* digging a 6-meter hole in my backyard with only a toothbrush! Now I want you to respect my work, and pay me for the effort.
What? You say I needed a sensible business plan first? Why would I need that, if you respect my work?
If you want something that will display content you want...
and somebody is selling one for just $50, then buy it from him. If he'd forgotten that it could play content from other sources than his triple-markup source at Nickleodeon, it's not your problem.
In my experience, this has never, ever been true.
Born yesterday, huh? Or just independently wealthy? The file format issue is the only reason I've seen someone upgrade MS Office. What other motivation could they have?
Most are unaware of the file format issue anyway.
In every major corp office, the pattern is the same. People become aware of file formats every time they click on a DOC/PPT/XLS attached to an email and can't read it properly (or at all).
That happens about every 3-4 years. The IT department resists for a while, and gives users boilerplate responses they can use to instruct the sender to save in a non-default format. But as time goes on, a bigger and bigger percentage of attachments have the problem. And of course, the older Office version is no longer available for installation on new PCs.
Since it's usually the top executives who get a new laptop every 10 months, it's really tough to send a memo back to your CEO asking for an RTF version. IT can't force him to modify his behavior, and they certainly can't take his laptop away. So the pressure builds to upgrade Office on the employees desktops. (Often they still don't upgrade Office- they need new PCs to run it, after all, so it just comes along when the desktops get replaced. But running the newer Office is one reason to get new PCs at all)
It has everything to do with the ability of 3rd party authors to create software which reads/writes PDFs. (And if they can't do that, then the format isn't 100% open)
Adobe is using a form of PDF "security" by essentially adding a "secure bit" into the files (which are otherwise trivial to decrypt). For this to protect anything, software which reads PDFs must honor that bit (and not allow you to re-save the file as an unprotected PDF).
3rd party authors must cripple potentially useful features of their code to avoid being labelled as DMCA-violators ("trafficing in circumvention devices").
An open-source author places himself at even more risk: even if his program obeys the security guidelines, a user might recompile it with the security-checking turned off. The author could be accused of trafficing just because he distributed powerful code that was comprehensible enough to easily modify.
An additional factor is that 1 movie ticket equals 1 viewer, but a single game sale may be played by several people. Children recieving game discs are expected to share with siblings.
This moves games back up and more towards balance with film in total audience size.
Engineers and scientists aren't going to be using Windows (unless their employers are idiots), they're going be using Linux or some commercial Unix.
Sadly, it appears that many employers are what you call "idiots". The majority of engineers and scientists do sit behind Microsoft(tm) Windows(r). In fact, specialized engineering software (like recent CAD programs) that is only available for Windows(r) is often cited as one more reason "Linux is not ready for the desktop".
(Side note, amoung engineers who do operate Unix, they're often doing so from a WinNT desktop)
There was absolutely NO economic benefit of going faster than the speed of sound.
The economic benefits of supersonic travel are (and were) self-evident.
Faster planes = a dominant military = extort concessions from every other nation on earth.
There's no correspondingly obvious explanation for how getting to Mars will have a practical benefit.
Furthermore, each incremental improvement to airplane speed was a measurable advantage in air superiority. But flying to Mars is all or nothing- if you travel it 20% of the way or 80%, you're still just lost in space.
I'll note that roads did in fact exist before there were state-sponsored expenditures for them;
Have any examples? State-sponsorship of roads goes back 2300 or more years (the Appian); prior to that, there was little distinction between wealthy individuals (nobility) and "the state".
You're assuming that the amount of money in the world is finite.
It's not like that. Money is just an abstraction for the ability to exchange work. "Running out of money" means losing the freedom to exchange work. This could happen under an authoritarian government that criminalizes non-state bartering.
The AC's contention is that corporatism will accelerate to the point where an oligarchy of companies becomes a new fascist power. The probablity of this occuring is a matter of opinion- he seems to think it likely.
You're one of those people who doesn't understand why the Beer and Ice Cream Diet isn't working for them, aren't you?
No, there are several fundamental flaws to that diet. Some are too obvious for me to bother mentioning, but the best one centers on the definition of "calorie". For the benefit of those who don't know this factoid:
There are two different definitions of "calorie". A physical calorie is the energy to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree kelvin. A dietary Calorie can heat a kilogram of water 1 degree. That jokey diet page freely switches between the two definitions to exaggerate facts and reach bizarre conclusions. It creates the illusion that changing the temperature of a foodstuff will outweight the actual calories it contains.
The article is too brief to have space to discuss inflation, which is something of a minor detail from the abstract position it is written from. It does not attempt to address concerns from the foreseeably near future.
The assumption going in is that someday robots will eliminate almost all human jobs. By implication, this means that scarcity of basic survival needs will also be eliminated. Without that scarcity, it's fine to assume that meaningful inflation will not happen.
The numbers used on money for exotic luxuries may fluxuate, but the stipend's power to purchase staple necessities is taken to be constant.
That's a moderately long comment. Allow me to summarize for other readers:
"Machines haven't replaced humans yet, so they never will".
Interesting that in almost every case, the robotics work WITH and ENHANCE the capabilities of the humans that operate them.
Of the things you listed, only 1 features something approaching the definiton of robot. And in the case of the car factory, 300 human jobs have been replaced by robots with 6 supervisors.
Oh, and all these robots-take-over-the-world philosophers always seem to forget:
All the indomintable-force-of-the-human-spirit philosophers seem to forget the relentlessly accelerating pace of computer speed improvements.
Take a survey of those best informed to predict the future abliities of robots- professional computer/software engineers (with or without starry-eyed academics, according to your preference). Ask them how long they expect it'll take for computer software to become smarter than 50% of humans. Almost all of them will agree it will happen, in 300 years at the outside. 75 or even just 50 years is a more typical response, though.
If the government were to seize money and then redistribute it, that's called.. oh I dunno..
ANY GOVERNMENT AT ALL.
As you noted, a government has no money of its own. The only way a gov can do ANYTHING is to seize and redistribute from the citizens.
The only government which never redistributes wealth does NOTHING; they call that anarchy.