I think the trouble is that we assign value of any kind to swearing, whether negative or positive.
If you teach your kid to say "barnacles" instead of "fuck" when his emotions are screaming "fuck!" then what have you really taught him? It's OK to swear as long as you swear in code? It's still assigning the "when I'm angry there's a special word that I use" value to the emotion, and eventually he'll find out that "fuck" is the "real" swear word and will start using it instead.
What we as a society really need to do is to acknowledge that people experience negativity, and that it's OK to use a word to express that negativity, whether that word is "shoot" or "shit." We really have to get over this idea that certain words are harmful. If you say "shit," it's not going to effect me in the least. So naturally, I don't give a damn if you say it. And I expect the same courtesy from you.
That said, in deference to the sensibilities of others who were raised to think of such words as offensive, I refrain from saying them when in mixed company or in the presence of children. That's part of living in a society.
That's where the "reasonably prudent" test comes into effect.
A reasonably prudent individual is going to know that making free copies of something that someone else created and is selling is wrong, just as a reasonably prudent person doesn't need to have the intricacies of the criminal code explained to them in order to know they shouldn't peer into the neighbor girl's window with binoculars.
That said, the malicious prosecutions by RIAA/MPAA have gone far over the top, and the underhanded and, frankly, illegal investigation tactics they employ should get most of these cases tossed out of court.
What I find more entertaining is how the MafiAA - who've been slapped back and forth for filing false testimony (perjury), filing mountains of paperwork trying to bury defendants (barratry), caught in price-fixing collusion (conspiracy), falsifying evidence (forgery), providing "evidence" that was the result of deliberate computer crime on the part of their own "investigators", using "investigators" that they knew were not licensed for the investigations, and repeatedly filing SLAPP lawsuits against groups like the EFF - have the temerity to still be pushing this garbage.
Yes, and yet the girl is "vexatious" for demanding that her legal right to a fair trial be upheld.
The fact that today's music largely sucks is far from the only reason I haven't bought music in years. (And no, I don't download it illegally either).
That's just not going to happen. You can get a Segway for a few grand. My dad was in power wheelchairs for the last 12 years of his life. His last two cost $25,000. Each. These exoskeletons will be a lot more. No one is going to buy them just because "They're cool." Insurance companies are going to buy them for people who actually need them.
What implied conclusions? I answered a question about whether or not allowing people to go 90 would require more rigorous inspections. Since inspections only deal with the mechanical components of a car, that was the scope of my answer. Any assumptions made about my thinking that because a car can do 90, the driver should do 90, were yours, not mine.
I stand by what I said. If the car is mechanically safe at 70, it is mechanically safe at 90. That extra 20mph is not going to implode the windshield or make the wheels fall off.
As for tires, the only commonly-used car tire which has a speed rating below 90mph today is an M-rated temporary spare tire. Modern passenger car tires start at 112mph and go up from there. All of mine are rated at 149, btw, so all of my cars would be just fine at 90 from a tire perspective.
My argument was addressing hedwards' which claimed that speed limits are what they are today because the roads can't support higher speeds. I was refuting that, because they absolutely can.
As far as what you said, I agree entirely with you.
The simple solution to drunk drivers is to take away their license forever on the first offense. And if they drive again with no license and have any alcohol in their system, you book them on attempted murder charges.
If you want to be lenient, do what Germany does. Get caught drunk driving and to get your license back you have to pass an array of medical and psychological tests ostensibly to prove you're not an alcoholic (but really to force you to pay north of 10 grand as a financially-based lesson not to do it again).
I'll agree with you that we have entirely too many drunks on the roads. And the reason is because there are states where people have racked up more than 20 (that is not a typo) DWIs and are still legally driving around. That has to stop.
BTW, I consider drunk drivers to be crappy drivers. You knew when you went out drinking that you were going out drinking. If you didn't make arrangements to get home before you had the first beer, then you're a crappy driver.
Don't misunderstand me - I'm not in favor of this "daily speeding pass" crap. What that would do (at best) is increase the speed differential so that you'd have those with money to burn doing 45mph faster than everyone else, which would be extremely unsafe.
Of course, it would also prove, were it to become law, which it won't even if this fool gets elected, that speed laws are there not for safety (because something doesn't suddenly become safe if you pay a fee), but for revenue generation. And since the government isn't supposed to be in the business of revenue generation, it would be fun to see how long it would take someone to file a lawsuit against speed limits in general once the government essentially admitted that 90mph is an acceptable speed.;)
Well, once you start talking about people not knowing how to perform basic functions of driving like merging, you get into the second part of my argument which is "the cars and roads can support higher speeds, why the hell can't the drivers?"
The answer, of course, is that USA driver training is utter crap. For my driver ed, we tooled around in a parking lot at 20mph max, and then had "on the road" training consisting of meandering around sleepy neighborhoods in a small town at no more than 30mph.
Then for my test I had to do the above plus parallel park. They never taught us or expected us to know skid avoidance, high speed panic maneuvers (swerving to avoid the kid who just popped out from behind a tree), spin recovery - - none of that. And we wonder why most people can't drive worth a damn.
Of course, to really effect the necessary change, we'd have to require people to actually put some effort into driving, and most people don't want to do that and would therefore vote out any politician who proposed it.
You know, the idea that the danger from speeding is exponential simply doesn't play out in real life. If speed alone were the killer, then the Autobahn would be a slaughterhouse. But as has been pointed out all over this thread, the autobahn, despite having no speed limits in many areas, is not a bloodbath because the people driving on the autobahn have to be damned good drivers, and they have to prove it before they're allowed behind the wheel.
What actually kills is speed differential. You could go 100mph all day long and if you didn't hit anything you wouldn't get killed. (yeah, I know, that's very obvious. Bear with me.) But when the poke doing 45 suddenly veers into your lane, the wreck will be catastrophic. Whereas if you were only doing 55 when the idiot cut in front of you, the wreck wouldn't be nearly as bad.
But both scenarios are caused by a bad driver doing something stupid. You'll never be able to eliminate that variable entirely from the driving equation, but we could limit it a lot more than we do.
After all, if speed kills, and we care about the more than 40,000 people per year who are dying on the roads (apparently from speed, if you believe the hype), then we should lower the speed limits further.
After all, if the speed limit on the interstate was 20, we'd have a lot fewer deaths right? Because. . Speed kills.
I say again - Speed does not kill. Speed is a factor in mortality only when other causative factors get involved - and generally the main causative factor in wrecks, both fatal and otherwise, is bad driving.
In general, if your car can safely go 70mph, the speed limit in many states, it can go 90mph just as safely from a mechanical perspective (assuming, of course, its powerful enough to reach 90). If its so poorly maintained that it can't safely go 90, then it's too poorly-maintained to be on the road in the first place.
Seconded. Statements complaining about roads requiring the full attention of the driver are generally statements made by people who should never be allowed behind the wheel.
And roads are over-engineered. A road with a speed limit of 65 is not designed to fail or to become undriveable at 70.
Your argument also breaks down when you realize that interstates originally had speed limits at or above 70mph - limits which were then lowered to 55 and have only relatively recently been creeping back up.
The plain fact is that vehicles and roads can both safely support higher speed limits. The "speed kills" BS is there because it's more politically expedient to blame driving problems on an arbitrary number than it is to put the blame where it belongs - in the hands of the crappy driver that caused the wreck.
You talk about me having the last word, but you wander in an entire week after my last reply to blather on about how Final Cut editors are normal computer users. Up until your last sentence, I thought I was talking to someone who was simply misinformed. Now I realize that you're vapidly clueless.
You keep claiming that people who set up a multimedia editing suite are normal computer users. No one's going to buy your peculiar little brand of idiocy no matter how many veiled insults you add to the mix.
You might have convinced a few people if you hadn't thrown a pro-grade non-linear video editor in there just to show that you know the names of a few media applications, but using that program pretty much sunk your argument beyond salvageability - not that it wasn't already approaching a solid wall of stupidity when you tried to convince us in a spectacularly disjointed argument that people are routinely shooting 1080HD video on cell phones and keeping a terabyte worth of the raw on their hard drives.
"Well look." You have no clue what you're talking about when it comes to video, video editing, or video storage, and you seem to think it is normal for people to whip out their cell phones, shoot the equivalent of 9 feature-length HD movies, and then store them on their pro-grade edit suites.
I'm done with this thread. The stupidity is approaching sufficient density to form a signularity. Get the "last word" in if you want - it won't change the fact that you're spectacularly wrong.
Less CD swapping, and the ability to run two programs that both required a CD at the same time.
So. . you think people were playing 7th Guest and Myst at the same time?
Because there is a market for it. If you are uber-rich, and find fast cars thrilling, what would be more thrilling than the fastest production car in the world? No, short of renting out a five-mile airstrip, or test track, you would never actually take the car to it's top speed. But the engineering required to allow that also bring benefits to the cars handling and stability at lower speeds, not to forget the obvious fun factor of having tons of torque.
The market argument is an attempt to make it look like you're educating me, when really you're saying exactly what I'm saying. The point that myself and Anon were making is that there is a market for useless things, and the fact that there is one, is stupid.
That you can't see the advantages of something does not mean that there are no advantages.
Alright. Educate me. What is the advantage to having a >5mp point and shoot camera?
What is the advantage to having a 120mp camera at all, considering that's sharper than the lens can focus to?
So you're seriously suggesting that someone who fills a terabyte hard drive with raw HD video is a normal computer user? Or that someone who uses a pro-grade NLE, and a graphic editor that costs $700 is a normal computer user?
If you seriously think that then you're the one who should be laughed at. A *normal* computer user surfs the web, sends email, tweets everything about his life, and plays Solitaire. I'll even be generous and lump hardcore gamers into the normal category. But someone sitting in an edit bay using over 2 grand worth of software is not a normal computer user.
Cell phone, no, unless they're making about 50 trips a day between whatever they're shooting and the computer. A terabyte is about 68.25 hours of DVCPRO video (which is higher rez than most people shoot with, but even being generous and assuming you're shooting 1080 at 60i/30p, you still have 17 hours of video). Anyone shooting that much video is not shooting it with a cell phone, and is not a normal computer user.
It's not like that's unique to the photography industry. They're pushing terabyte drives now. I defy the normal computer user (hint: if you're reading this, you are not a normal computer user) to fill a terabyte. Ain't gonna happen.
Back in the 486/pentium days several makers were shipping machines with 2 cd-rom drives. Why? I still don't know. But 2 is better than 1!
The Bugatti Veyron has 1000 horsepower, and can do 253mph while using over a gallon of fuel per minute. No one who buys that car will ever be able to get anywhere close to its performance envelope without getting arrested or killed, but they're still selling it.
CCD specs are the photographic version of penis measurement. More is better, even if it makes no difference to the outcome of the activity.
Just two short years ago, "the fundamentals of the economy" were "strong," the housing market was on the rise and, according to bankers, would never stop rising, and people actually had money to spend (even if it was borrowed from Visa). I'd be surprise if the 2 women you're talking about are still selling $4,000 worth of hair drawings per month.
Regarding what you make, that's great, but if the exchange rate is still roughly 4 bucks to $1,000 lindens, then you're making 8-12 bucks an hour. Decent for playing a video game, yes, but hardly a living wage, especially since I doubt the virtual clubs provide employee health insurance;)
At any rate, $360USD a quarter is nice for an individual who wants to buy a toy at Newegg, but from the government's perspective, they'd probably spend that just in employee wages if they went after people for it. There's a lot of tax violators out there who are violating to the tune of tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. It makes a lot more sense to go after the larger dollars than to waste time (and money) chasing chump change.
to expand on what I said above, I don't think that's going to happen. What is the point of going after taxes on purchases which most likely average a couple bucks or less? The government would spend much more tracking and prosecuting people "evading" taxes than they would take in.
As far as I know (disclaimer: I am not on second life) the tax is rolled into the currency exchange.
If you then buy stuff in game with it, you've already paid sales tax on it by buying the virtual currency, just as you don't have to pay some sort of value-acquisition tax when you get a new sword in WoW because that's part of the game that you paid (and were taxed) for with the monthly subscription fee.
My guess is that the few people making a profit off of selling things in second life (and I doubt there are very many at all, especially in this economy, and especially since if I recall, anything over $100 game dollars is considered crazy expensive, and the exchange rate is something like 1 real dollar to 1,000 game dollars) do owe taxes, and they probably haven't paid because the law is always very slow to adapt to new technology. That's why you can still buy stuff on the internet without paying taxes on it. You're supposed to, but the government hasn't implemented a system to track when you buy something online.
funny, but unlike a normal MMO, Second Life's virtual money is purchased with real money by design. And there have already been property-rights lawsuits over virtual land and items within second life.
I have difficulty believing that the entirety of the oceans was frozen over during snowball earth. There are hydrothermal vents pumping out heat at more than 700degF. It's not terribly hard to imagine that even if the rest of the ocean was a block of ice, there would be liquid water in the vicinity of these vents. The lucky sponge that happened to settle down in the neighborhood of a vent before the ocean froze over would have a shot at survival assuming the liquid area around the vent was big enough to support a small ecosystem - something I would think entirely plausible, especially since there's no reason to think that some of these vents wouldn't have been quite sizable 700 million years ago.
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I think the trouble is that we assign value of any kind to swearing, whether negative or positive.
If you teach your kid to say "barnacles" instead of "fuck" when his emotions are screaming "fuck!" then what have you really taught him? It's OK to swear as long as you swear in code? It's still assigning the "when I'm angry there's a special word that I use" value to the emotion, and eventually he'll find out that "fuck" is the "real" swear word and will start using it instead.
What we as a society really need to do is to acknowledge that people experience negativity, and that it's OK to use a word to express that negativity, whether that word is "shoot" or "shit." We really have to get over this idea that certain words are harmful. If you say "shit," it's not going to effect me in the least. So naturally, I don't give a damn if you say it. And I expect the same courtesy from you.
That said, in deference to the sensibilities of others who were raised to think of such words as offensive, I refrain from saying them when in mixed company or in the presence of children. That's part of living in a society.
That's where the "reasonably prudent" test comes into effect.
A reasonably prudent individual is going to know that making free copies of something that someone else created and is selling is wrong, just as a reasonably prudent person doesn't need to have the intricacies of the criminal code explained to them in order to know they shouldn't peer into the neighbor girl's window with binoculars.
That said, the malicious prosecutions by RIAA/MPAA have gone far over the top, and the underhanded and, frankly, illegal investigation tactics they employ should get most of these cases tossed out of court.
What I find more entertaining is how the MafiAA - who've been slapped back and forth for filing false testimony (perjury), filing mountains of paperwork trying to bury defendants (barratry), caught in price-fixing collusion (conspiracy), falsifying evidence (forgery), providing "evidence" that was the result of deliberate computer crime on the part of their own "investigators", using "investigators" that they knew were not licensed for the investigations, and repeatedly filing SLAPP lawsuits against groups like the EFF - have the temerity to still be pushing this garbage.
Yes, and yet the girl is "vexatious" for demanding that her legal right to a fair trial be upheld.
The fact that today's music largely sucks is far from the only reason I haven't bought music in years. (And no, I don't download it illegally either).
That's just not going to happen. You can get a Segway for a few grand. My dad was in power wheelchairs for the last 12 years of his life. His last two cost $25,000. Each. These exoskeletons will be a lot more. No one is going to buy them just because "They're cool." Insurance companies are going to buy them for people who actually need them.
What implied conclusions? I answered a question about whether or not allowing people to go 90 would require more rigorous inspections. Since inspections only deal with the mechanical components of a car, that was the scope of my answer. Any assumptions made about my thinking that because a car can do 90, the driver should do 90, were yours, not mine.
I stand by what I said. If the car is mechanically safe at 70, it is mechanically safe at 90. That extra 20mph is not going to implode the windshield or make the wheels fall off.
As for tires, the only commonly-used car tire which has a speed rating below 90mph today is an M-rated temporary spare tire. Modern passenger car tires start at 112mph and go up from there. All of mine are rated at 149, btw, so all of my cars would be just fine at 90 from a tire perspective.
My argument was addressing hedwards' which claimed that speed limits are what they are today because the roads can't support higher speeds. I was refuting that, because they absolutely can.
As far as what you said, I agree entirely with you.
The simple solution to drunk drivers is to take away their license forever on the first offense. And if they drive again with no license and have any alcohol in their system, you book them on attempted murder charges.
If you want to be lenient, do what Germany does. Get caught drunk driving and to get your license back you have to pass an array of medical and psychological tests ostensibly to prove you're not an alcoholic (but really to force you to pay north of 10 grand as a financially-based lesson not to do it again).
I'll agree with you that we have entirely too many drunks on the roads. And the reason is because there are states where people have racked up more than 20 (that is not a typo) DWIs and are still legally driving around. That has to stop.
BTW, I consider drunk drivers to be crappy drivers. You knew when you went out drinking that you were going out drinking. If you didn't make arrangements to get home before you had the first beer, then you're a crappy driver.
Don't misunderstand me - I'm not in favor of this "daily speeding pass" crap. What that would do (at best) is increase the speed differential so that you'd have those with money to burn doing 45mph faster than everyone else, which would be extremely unsafe.
Of course, it would also prove, were it to become law, which it won't even if this fool gets elected, that speed laws are there not for safety (because something doesn't suddenly become safe if you pay a fee), but for revenue generation. And since the government isn't supposed to be in the business of revenue generation, it would be fun to see how long it would take someone to file a lawsuit against speed limits in general once the government essentially admitted that 90mph is an acceptable speed. ;)
Well, once you start talking about people not knowing how to perform basic functions of driving like merging, you get into the second part of my argument which is "the cars and roads can support higher speeds, why the hell can't the drivers?"
The answer, of course, is that USA driver training is utter crap. For my driver ed, we tooled around in a parking lot at 20mph max, and then had "on the road" training consisting of meandering around sleepy neighborhoods in a small town at no more than 30mph.
Then for my test I had to do the above plus parallel park. They never taught us or expected us to know skid avoidance, high speed panic maneuvers (swerving to avoid the kid who just popped out from behind a tree), spin recovery - - none of that. And we wonder why most people can't drive worth a damn.
Of course, to really effect the necessary change, we'd have to require people to actually put some effort into driving, and most people don't want to do that and would therefore vote out any politician who proposed it.
You know, the idea that the danger from speeding is exponential simply doesn't play out in real life. If speed alone were the killer, then the Autobahn would be a slaughterhouse. But as has been pointed out all over this thread, the autobahn, despite having no speed limits in many areas, is not a bloodbath because the people driving on the autobahn have to be damned good drivers, and they have to prove it before they're allowed behind the wheel.
What actually kills is speed differential. You could go 100mph all day long and if you didn't hit anything you wouldn't get killed. (yeah, I know, that's very obvious. Bear with me.) But when the poke doing 45 suddenly veers into your lane, the wreck will be catastrophic. Whereas if you were only doing 55 when the idiot cut in front of you, the wreck wouldn't be nearly as bad.
But both scenarios are caused by a bad driver doing something stupid. You'll never be able to eliminate that variable entirely from the driving equation, but we could limit it a lot more than we do.
After all, if speed kills, and we care about the more than 40,000 people per year who are dying on the roads (apparently from speed, if you believe the hype), then we should lower the speed limits further.
After all, if the speed limit on the interstate was 20, we'd have a lot fewer deaths right? Because. . Speed kills.
I say again - Speed does not kill. Speed is a factor in mortality only when other causative factors get involved - and generally the main causative factor in wrecks, both fatal and otherwise, is bad driving.
In general, if your car can safely go 70mph, the speed limit in many states, it can go 90mph just as safely from a mechanical perspective (assuming, of course, its powerful enough to reach 90). If its so poorly maintained that it can't safely go 90, then it's too poorly-maintained to be on the road in the first place.
Seconded. Statements complaining about roads requiring the full attention of the driver are generally statements made by people who should never be allowed behind the wheel.
And roads are over-engineered. A road with a speed limit of 65 is not designed to fail or to become undriveable at 70.
Your argument also breaks down when you realize that interstates originally had speed limits at or above 70mph - limits which were then lowered to 55 and have only relatively recently been creeping back up.
The plain fact is that vehicles and roads can both safely support higher speed limits. The "speed kills" BS is there because it's more politically expedient to blame driving problems on an arbitrary number than it is to put the blame where it belongs - in the hands of the crappy driver that caused the wreck.
You talk about me having the last word, but you wander in an entire week after my last reply to blather on about how Final Cut editors are normal computer users. Up until your last sentence, I thought I was talking to someone who was simply misinformed. Now I realize that you're vapidly clueless.
You keep claiming that people who set up a multimedia editing suite are normal computer users. No one's going to buy your peculiar little brand of idiocy no matter how many veiled insults you add to the mix.
You might have convinced a few people if you hadn't thrown a pro-grade non-linear video editor in there just to show that you know the names of a few media applications, but using that program pretty much sunk your argument beyond salvageability - not that it wasn't already approaching a solid wall of stupidity when you tried to convince us in a spectacularly disjointed argument that people are routinely shooting 1080HD video on cell phones and keeping a terabyte worth of the raw on their hard drives.
"Well look." You have no clue what you're talking about when it comes to video, video editing, or video storage, and you seem to think it is normal for people to whip out their cell phones, shoot the equivalent of 9 feature-length HD movies, and then store them on their pro-grade edit suites.
I'm done with this thread. The stupidity is approaching sufficient density to form a signularity. Get the "last word" in if you want - it won't change the fact that you're spectacularly wrong.
Less CD swapping, and the ability to run two programs that both required a CD at the same time.
So. . you think people were playing 7th Guest and Myst at the same time?
Because there is a market for it. If you are uber-rich, and find fast cars thrilling, what would be more thrilling than the fastest production car in the world? No, short of renting out a five-mile airstrip, or test track, you would never actually take the car to it's top speed. But the engineering required to allow that also bring benefits to the cars handling and stability at lower speeds, not to forget the obvious fun factor of having tons of torque.
The market argument is an attempt to make it look like you're educating me, when really you're saying exactly what I'm saying. The point that myself and Anon were making is that there is a market for useless things, and the fact that there is one, is stupid.
That you can't see the advantages of something does not mean that there are no advantages.
Alright. Educate me. What is the advantage to having a >5mp point and shoot camera?
What is the advantage to having a 120mp camera at all, considering that's sharper than the lens can focus to?
So you're seriously suggesting that someone who fills a terabyte hard drive with raw HD video is a normal computer user? Or that someone who uses a pro-grade NLE, and a graphic editor that costs $700 is a normal computer user?
If you seriously think that then you're the one who should be laughed at. A *normal* computer user surfs the web, sends email, tweets everything about his life, and plays Solitaire. I'll even be generous and lump hardcore gamers into the normal category. But someone sitting in an edit bay using over 2 grand worth of software is not a normal computer user.
How the hell is that flamebait? Obvious mod abuse.
Cell phone, no, unless they're making about 50 trips a day between whatever they're shooting and the computer. A terabyte is about 68.25 hours of DVCPRO video (which is higher rez than most people shoot with, but even being generous and assuming you're shooting 1080 at 60i/30p, you still have 17 hours of video). Anyone shooting that much video is not shooting it with a cell phone, and is not a normal computer user.
It's not like that's unique to the photography industry. They're pushing terabyte drives now. I defy the normal computer user (hint: if you're reading this, you are not a normal computer user) to fill a terabyte. Ain't gonna happen.
Back in the 486/pentium days several makers were shipping machines with 2 cd-rom drives. Why? I still don't know. But 2 is better than 1!
The Bugatti Veyron has 1000 horsepower, and can do 253mph while using over a gallon of fuel per minute. No one who buys that car will ever be able to get anywhere close to its performance envelope without getting arrested or killed, but they're still selling it.
CCD specs are the photographic version of penis measurement. More is better, even if it makes no difference to the outcome of the activity.
Just two short years ago, "the fundamentals of the economy" were "strong," the housing market was on the rise and, according to bankers, would never stop rising, and people actually had money to spend (even if it was borrowed from Visa). I'd be surprise if the 2 women you're talking about are still selling $4,000 worth of hair drawings per month.
That was a typo - I meant $1,000 lindens.
Regarding what you make, that's great, but if the exchange rate is still roughly 4 bucks to $1,000 lindens, then you're making 8-12 bucks an hour. Decent for playing a video game, yes, but hardly a living wage, especially since I doubt the virtual clubs provide employee health insurance ;)
At any rate, $360USD a quarter is nice for an individual who wants to buy a toy at Newegg, but from the government's perspective, they'd probably spend that just in employee wages if they went after people for it. There's a lot of tax violators out there who are violating to the tune of tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. It makes a lot more sense to go after the larger dollars than to waste time (and money) chasing chump change.
to expand on what I said above, I don't think that's going to happen. What is the point of going after taxes on purchases which most likely average a couple bucks or less? The government would spend much more tracking and prosecuting people "evading" taxes than they would take in.
As far as I know (disclaimer: I am not on second life) the tax is rolled into the currency exchange.
If you then buy stuff in game with it, you've already paid sales tax on it by buying the virtual currency, just as you don't have to pay some sort of value-acquisition tax when you get a new sword in WoW because that's part of the game that you paid (and were taxed) for with the monthly subscription fee.
My guess is that the few people making a profit off of selling things in second life (and I doubt there are very many at all, especially in this economy, and especially since if I recall, anything over $100 game dollars is considered crazy expensive, and the exchange rate is something like 1 real dollar to 1,000 game dollars) do owe taxes, and they probably haven't paid because the law is always very slow to adapt to new technology. That's why you can still buy stuff on the internet without paying taxes on it. You're supposed to, but the government hasn't implemented a system to track when you buy something online.
funny, but unlike a normal MMO, Second Life's virtual money is purchased with real money by design. And there have already been property-rights lawsuits over virtual land and items within second life.
I have difficulty believing that the entirety of the oceans was frozen over during snowball earth. There are hydrothermal vents pumping out heat at more than 700degF. It's not terribly hard to imagine that even if the rest of the ocean was a block of ice, there would be liquid water in the vicinity of these vents. The lucky sponge that happened to settle down in the neighborhood of a vent before the ocean froze over would have a shot at survival assuming the liquid area around the vent was big enough to support a small ecosystem - something I would think entirely plausible, especially since there's no reason to think that some of these vents wouldn't have been quite sizable 700 million years ago.