moocha's comments

Perhaps my phrasing was somewhat unclear. What I meant is "when a network is something we're taking for granted and which is as uninteresting as the water supply" - and that's just in developed countries. As long as networks are even vaguely interesting to everyday people, there will always be a lot of reluctance in using them.

When networks become as reliable a partof the infrastructure as the water supply. Of course, the water supply generally comes first.

Sure it can. both trade deficit and expectations of inflation play very important roles.

You can also create inflation by any number of different means. One very good way is to encourage consumer spending (not investment!) when most of what consumers are buying is manufactured in other countries then imported.

Indirectly, yes, since they didn't have to pay the social security contributions affixed to salaried positions - and since those contributions are considerable (depending on the job function, to the order of 30% up to 80% of the pre-tax wage) it was easier to do this than to avoid paying them at all (also a common practice since tax collection, alas, moves incredibly slow...)

However, people are people.

The level of taxation is not important per se, the only important thing is how the collected taxes are distributed and what they're used for.

Low taxes have helped somewhat (mostly by indirectly expanding the tax base) but the current economic situation (not very much affected by the global financial crisis) is a somewhat coincidental effect of the still large disconnect between the Romanian economy and the global markets.

What I'm arguing is that such a loophole will only create inflation by directing the indirect tax cuts to spending.

This will positively not work.

I live in Romania. Starting 1999 (IIRC) and ending 2006, there has been some very similar legislation in effect. The only result was a tremendous drop in income tax (which, admittedly, had been very high) since everybody and their grandma opened a small business, quit their job, and immediately came back to the same position as a consultant paid by their own company. Many employers applied gentle pressure in that direction since it got them cost cuts as well.

The clinch is that all these new small businesses contributed absolutely nothing new to the overall economy - the result was a net loss in taxes without economic growth to offset it - which is why the corresponding legislation was abolished in favor of a flat tax on income, profit, and so on (which, in turn, was quite successful at jumpstarting the economy.)

> The free solutions are getting much better and can compete with VMWare. Furthermore, I would say the money is not in desktop virtualization, but rather in server virtualization. For this, does VMWare even have a product?

Huh? They are extremely strong in data center virtualization - in fact that's where their main revenue comes from: http://www.vmware.com/products/server_virtualization.html

Mr. Harold is missing the point here. Protocol buffers are not meant to replace XML as a "public" API transport, they are meant to replace it on backend solutions, where one entity controls both endpoints.