The 'goods' that are sold within SL have no value in real life, which makes the SL a closed system, which sustains itself only due to the new users who are constantly joining as you yourself stated. It is a pyramid scheme.
You're assuming an untenable boundary between the "real" and the "virtual" here. If people are paying real money to obtain those goods, they certainly have a real value.
There are plenty of business models that rely on more money coming in constantly for an indefinite amount of time. For example, the food industry. What's missing from this argument is a condition that's critical for something to be a pyramid: it must rely on an unsustainable continuous inflow of new money. There is no reason in principle that forbids that from happening in the Second Life case; if the demand for Second Life goods can be sustained indefinitely, then it's no different than any other commodity.
If you read TFA and think about it, you'll notice that the "pyramid" claim is the least precise and careful claim made in it. The real smoking gun, to my mind, is the claim that Second Life currency is controlled by a cartel that accepts real money in exchange for virtual money, and then puts in a price structure designed to do two things: (a) keep the said virtual money from being converted back to real money, and (b) prevent other people with big pockets to come in and compete with them. They certainly earn short-term interest on the real money that people trade into their pockets; TFA notes that the penalties they were looking at for big trades closely matched short-term interest rates, which supports the hypothesis that these penalties are, essentially, the cartel's way of charging you for the interest they projected to earn on the real money they're trade you back.
You are correct in at least one respect: if you ask anyone why they accept dollars as payment, they answer is always: "because other people will take it as payment". But isn't this fundamentally a house of cards?
No more so than the expectation that all English speakers around you will continue to take the word "dog" to mean canis familiaris. In other words: what you're dealing with here is a complex social situation, and a breakdown is well within the realm of possibility. Ultimately, value is not a property of an object, but rather, a relation between people and objects; and people are social beings.
Stock markets finance companies that have the potential of providing goods and services that were not available before; in a growing economy, the stock market produces long-term gains in the aggregate, because the companies that it finances create wealth.
Pyramid schemes, on the other hand, don't create any wealth; they just redistribute existing wealth.
I bet you would have invested in the railroads in the mid 19th century, and aviation and electronics in the mid-20th. And lost money, like most everybody else who did.
It doesn't matter if something's going to be the next hot technology if the stocks are overvalued. If you want to cash in into such sectors, you need to get into the act at a point well before the companies go IPO.
Please explain in 500 words or less how the hell one establishes causation, and then I'll stop thinking what I'm thinking of you now: that you're just one more fool who conveniently trots out the good old "correlation does not imply causation" line when s/he doesn't like some specific research results, but conveniently forgets it for those s/he does like.
You're asking the wrong question. Why? Because here we're talking about laws that put restrictions on speech that is both political and commercial. Commercial speech, as I sure hope you already know, is not protected by the First Amendment in the USA. So the real question is whether we should restrict commercially produced political speech.
In both the case of PACs and the case of this proposed law, the idea is that such speech is restricted in a particular way: such speech is allowed, but it must disclose its commercial nature, i.e., the fact that somebody is paying to produce it. Why? In order to hold actors in the political field honest, and to enable the public to better judge political information that it receives.
Where the submission writeup says "previously reported by Slashdot," it should say "previously misreported by Slashdot." And presupposing that the way Slashdot "reported" it is right, as it happens, is a major piece of spin in this context. Because it's used to set up the rest of the blurb as an insinuation that Democrats were endorsing a bill that restricts freedom of political speech for bloggers (when in fact it's a bill that restricts commercial speech by people paid specifically to pretend they are unpaid advocates.)
Re:Because you'll end up at Lisp.
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Lisp lacks visual conventions: you have to read everything. Other languages may be ugly compared to Lisp, but that ugliness helps you "see" it better. They have landmarks, like the crusty bearded drunk on the street corner that tells you to turn right one block down.
I program in Scheme and Java almost every day, and I say: bullshit. All that your rant amounts to is a bad rationalization of the fact you're used to reading code in languages like Java, but not in languages like Lisp.
There is no principled definition of "life," just like there is no principled definition of "planet." These are terms that we inherite from traditions that cut up the world into categories that, knowing what we do today, we can most certainly tell that the world does not respect.
To the founders of astronomy and biology, it seemed that there was a clear and uncontrovertible difference of kind between, for the former, stars (which moved in circles, to put it roughly) and planets (which had a more irregular trajectory in the sky), and for the latter, living creatures and inanimate objects. When it comes to the latter, also, the idea that facts about living creatures could be wholly explained in terms of facts about inanimate objects was a hard one to swallow.
We, today, on the other hand, know of all sorts of celestial objects of all sorts of compositions and moving in all sorts of trajectories; we know about viruses; we know about molecular biology; we have the theory of evolution; we have speculative theories of abiogenesis; and so on. These are things that show that the traditional concepts we have received are based on flawed assumptions.
It completely eliminates the need for people writing up the nutritional information to make judgement calls as to when they should and should not issue the warning. Otherwise, you would end up with the labellers making bad judgement calls like, for example, that there is not need to warn of the presence of peanuts in a box of nougat, because "everybody knows nougat has nuts."
Also, the nutritional information and warning text is probably required by law.
Why should the simple act of closing a window (e.g. because I'm done working with the thing in that window for that moment) present me with a choice that risks me losing my work?
There's no reason that holds water here. The technical ones that will probably come to your mind first (e.g., "because the computer needs to know whether you want to keep that document") are just bad--they demand that the user adopt to limitations that the computer ought not to have in the first place.
If the user opens up a window and starts typing into it and then closes it, the window ought to disappear silently from the screen without any nagging, and the user should be able to get back to what they were writing later on. The work that the user did should never be deleted unless the user explicitly asks for it to be so. The computer should have a very visible indicator somewhere of how much of its storage capacity is free, and gradual indication as the danger of filling up that space comes closer. There should be a powerful system for finding and organizing and deleting documents on the basis of their content; for more advanced users, this system should also provide versioning for documents.
Everyone uses Google's search box as an example, but the fact is that that box is the front end of a task that is very easy to describe - "show me a list of documents that more or less relate to these words".
I once had a part-time job evaluating the relevance of search results for various queries in Google, and I can tell you that you overestimate many, many users' degree of understanding of what the Google search box does. They type questions into it. (And that's why the idea behind Ask Jeeves is a great idea, whatever the execution.)
The idea in a movie is to make the action appear realistic to the majority of the audience.
Hell no. The idea is to do whatever the film's director decides is the goal. Doing this within the constaints imposed by the medium (e.g. keeping viewer interest, costs, etc.) may well require large deviations from realism that everybody in the audience can spot. The director expects the audience to suspend disbelief; the audience expects the movie to be good enough that suspension of disbelief is effortless.
Case in point: think of the countless shots of the face of a character using a computer in a really dark room, where they project really bright, fast moving text on the character's face. Completely unrealistic, yes, but this cinematic device is very effective:
It keeps the camera on the character's face, which is the place where 9 out of 10 persons who are not autists will agree the camera should be. (The tenth guy reads Slashdot, and is posting an outraged comment to this story as we speak.)
It conveys the fact that the character is operating a computer.
It often conveys the fact that the character is an advanced computer user, doing stuff most other characters wouldn't be able to do.
Art is never "realistic" in some naïve sense; when it involves any representation of reality at all, it involves a stylized projection of aspects of reality into a medium that imposes constraints of its own.
This is what's going on in that Microsoft statement:
Microsoft has an Entertainment and Devices division, which contains, among others, an XBox business. I.e., this is how they break down their numbers for the relevant parts of the company.
Microsoft sets and evaluates their profit goals at the level of the divisions, not at the level of the businesses. It's OK for the XBox business to operate at a loss if it helps other businesses bring in higher profits than they otherwise would. I.e., the XBox business is in the red because it's a loss leader, and success will be judged by the division's profits, not by XBox losses.
Remember: plans are useless, but planning is essential...
Apparently, you also don't seem to be able to understand that you need to out-compete the piracy industry by offering a quality product at a reasonable price and in a manner that is easy for people to pay for.
This is bullshit. The reason we have copyright laws in the first place is because it has been judged impossible for content producers to out-compete pirates, because the pirates do not have to pay for the production of the content in the first place.
...that many, many of us are already old enough to be able to appeal to first-hand experience to explain to the young'uns why we refer to placing a phone call as "dialing," right?
If you have a giant set of data, and you set a computer on it for long enough, it should be able to come up with some rather solid paterns/corelations/etc.
Depends on what you mean by "solid." You may discern "patterns" in random data, but they won't provide information about anything at all.
(a) Commercial speech, at least in the USA, doesn't enjoy the same set of protections as in the USA. Forbidding Microsoft from labeling and advertising a certain product as being in some language doesn't breach free speech.
(b) You seized on the part where I mentioned the labeling, without giving due weight to the part where I mentioned the potential legal consequences of such a label. It's not just an issue of whether Microsoft can claim this product is in that language; it's also whether the government can or should side with Microsoft's claim.
I've been trying to make the same point as you throughout this discussion (with no success, of course). I'll just add one thing here: the actual article doesn't frame any of this in terms of intellectual property. It was the Slashdot submitter who did so, in the article summary.
The article doesn't say that they believe that nobody should be able to use their language without their permission. The article doesn't mention the term "intellectual property" at all, nor any related term. Those were additions made by Slashdot's article summary.
Given that even the article summary states that the work was done in conjunction with the Chilean Ministry of Education, I think you'll find that "support for all local languages" was simply a checkbox requirement the Chilean government placed on software.
And indeed, this is most likely what the case is about: the Mapuche will claim that the Chilean government excluded them from the process of producing this translation, and therefore skirted the responsibility to uphold the linguistic rights that the requirement was set up to protect. The claim against Microsoft will be that they looked the other way.
I largely agree with what you say, but I must point out that the "asking permission" thing is not at all present in the actual article, only in the Slashdot summary. I've seen no actual evidence that the plaintiffs believe that others should need permission to use Mapuzugun; the most charitable interpretation I can reach, based on data, is that they claim that the Chilean government and Microsoft jointly collaborated to produce something they label a Mapuzugun-language product, without consulting them at all. An action by means of which the Chilean government implicitly assumes that it has the right to decide what counts as a Mapuzugun-language product without consulting them.
Slashdot Mirror
The 'goods' that are sold within SL have no value in real life, which makes the SL a closed system, which sustains itself only due to the new users who are constantly joining as you yourself stated. It is a pyramid scheme.
You're assuming an untenable boundary between the "real" and the "virtual" here. If people are paying real money to obtain those goods, they certainly have a real value.
There are plenty of business models that rely on more money coming in constantly for an indefinite amount of time. For example, the food industry. What's missing from this argument is a condition that's critical for something to be a pyramid: it must rely on an unsustainable continuous inflow of new money. There is no reason in principle that forbids that from happening in the Second Life case; if the demand for Second Life goods can be sustained indefinitely, then it's no different than any other commodity.
If you read TFA and think about it, you'll notice that the "pyramid" claim is the least precise and careful claim made in it. The real smoking gun, to my mind, is the claim that Second Life currency is controlled by a cartel that accepts real money in exchange for virtual money, and then puts in a price structure designed to do two things: (a) keep the said virtual money from being converted back to real money, and (b) prevent other people with big pockets to come in and compete with them. They certainly earn short-term interest on the real money that people trade into their pockets; TFA notes that the penalties they were looking at for big trades closely matched short-term interest rates, which supports the hypothesis that these penalties are, essentially, the cartel's way of charging you for the interest they projected to earn on the real money they're trade you back.
You are correct in at least one respect: if you ask anyone why they accept dollars as payment, they answer is always: "because other people will take it as payment". But isn't this fundamentally a house of cards?
No more so than the expectation that all English speakers around you will continue to take the word "dog" to mean canis familiaris. In other words: what you're dealing with here is a complex social situation, and a breakdown is well within the realm of possibility. Ultimately, value is not a property of an object, but rather, a relation between people and objects; and people are social beings.
Stock markets finance companies that have the potential of providing goods and services that were not available before; in a growing economy, the stock market produces long-term gains in the aggregate, because the companies that it finances create wealth.
Pyramid schemes, on the other hand, don't create any wealth; they just redistribute existing wealth.
I bet you would have invested in the railroads in the mid 19th century, and aviation and electronics in the mid-20th. And lost money, like most everybody else who did.
It doesn't matter if something's going to be the next hot technology if the stocks are overvalued. If you want to cash in into such sectors, you need to get into the act at a point well before the companies go IPO.
Please explain in 500 words or less how the hell one establishes causation, and then I'll stop thinking what I'm thinking of you now: that you're just one more fool who conveniently trots out the good old "correlation does not imply causation" line when s/he doesn't like some specific research results, but conveniently forgets it for those s/he does like.
Gold: Rare (because of limited supplies in nature)
Money: Rare (because of limited amount created)
That's actually a very big difference right there. Not as big as the GP probably believes, but still, big.
In other news, CowboyNeal has stopped beating his wife.
You're asking the wrong question. Why? Because here we're talking about laws that put restrictions on speech that is both political and commercial. Commercial speech, as I sure hope you already know, is not protected by the First Amendment in the USA. So the real question is whether we should restrict commercially produced political speech.
In both the case of PACs and the case of this proposed law, the idea is that such speech is restricted in a particular way: such speech is allowed, but it must disclose its commercial nature, i.e., the fact that somebody is paying to produce it. Why? In order to hold actors in the political field honest, and to enable the public to better judge political information that it receives.
Where the submission writeup says "previously reported by Slashdot," it should say "previously misreported by Slashdot." And presupposing that the way Slashdot "reported" it is right, as it happens, is a major piece of spin in this context. Because it's used to set up the rest of the blurb as an insinuation that Democrats were endorsing a bill that restricts freedom of political speech for bloggers (when in fact it's a bill that restricts commercial speech by people paid specifically to pretend they are unpaid advocates.)
Lisp lacks visual conventions: you have to read everything. Other languages may be ugly compared to Lisp, but that ugliness helps you "see" it better. They have landmarks, like the crusty bearded drunk on the street corner that tells you to turn right one block down.
I program in Scheme and Java almost every day, and I say: bullshit. All that your rant amounts to is a bad rationalization of the fact you're used to reading code in languages like Java, but not in languages like Lisp.
Gee, and here I was thinking that (write '(a b c)) and (setf a 'b) had side effects.
There is no principled definition of "life," just like there is no principled definition of "planet." These are terms that we inherite from traditions that cut up the world into categories that, knowing what we do today, we can most certainly tell that the world does not respect.
To the founders of astronomy and biology, it seemed that there was a clear and uncontrovertible difference of kind between, for the former, stars (which moved in circles, to put it roughly) and planets (which had a more irregular trajectory in the sky), and for the latter, living creatures and inanimate objects. When it comes to the latter, also, the idea that facts about living creatures could be wholly explained in terms of facts about inanimate objects was a hard one to swallow.
We, today, on the other hand, know of all sorts of celestial objects of all sorts of compositions and moving in all sorts of trajectories; we know about viruses; we know about molecular biology; we have the theory of evolution; we have speculative theories of abiogenesis; and so on. These are things that show that the traditional concepts we have received are based on flawed assumptions.
It completely eliminates the need for people writing up the nutritional information to make judgement calls as to when they should and should not issue the warning. Otherwise, you would end up with the labellers making bad judgement calls like, for example, that there is not need to warn of the presence of peanuts in a box of nougat, because "everybody knows nougat has nuts."
Also, the nutritional information and warning text is probably required by law.
Why should the simple act of closing a window (e.g. because I'm done working with the thing in that window for that moment) present me with a choice that risks me losing my work?
There's no reason that holds water here. The technical ones that will probably come to your mind first (e.g., "because the computer needs to know whether you want to keep that document") are just bad--they demand that the user adopt to limitations that the computer ought not to have in the first place.
If the user opens up a window and starts typing into it and then closes it, the window ought to disappear silently from the screen without any nagging, and the user should be able to get back to what they were writing later on. The work that the user did should never be deleted unless the user explicitly asks for it to be so. The computer should have a very visible indicator somewhere of how much of its storage capacity is free, and gradual indication as the danger of filling up that space comes closer. There should be a powerful system for finding and organizing and deleting documents on the basis of their content; for more advanced users, this system should also provide versioning for documents.
Everyone uses Google's search box as an example, but the fact is that that box is the front end of a task that is very easy to describe - "show me a list of documents that more or less relate to these words".
I once had a part-time job evaluating the relevance of search results for various queries in Google, and I can tell you that you overestimate many, many users' degree of understanding of what the Google search box does. They type questions into it. (And that's why the idea behind Ask Jeeves is a great idea, whatever the execution.)
The idea in a movie is to make the action appear realistic to the majority of the audience.
Hell no. The idea is to do whatever the film's director decides is the goal. Doing this within the constaints imposed by the medium (e.g. keeping viewer interest, costs, etc.) may well require large deviations from realism that everybody in the audience can spot. The director expects the audience to suspend disbelief; the audience expects the movie to be good enough that suspension of disbelief is effortless.
Case in point: think of the countless shots of the face of a character using a computer in a really dark room, where they project really bright, fast moving text on the character's face. Completely unrealistic, yes, but this cinematic device is very effective:
Art is never "realistic" in some naïve sense; when it involves any representation of reality at all, it involves a stylized projection of aspects of reality into a medium that imposes constraints of its own.
This is what's going on in that Microsoft statement:
Remember: plans are useless, but planning is essential...
Apparently, you also don't seem to be able to understand that you need to out-compete the piracy industry by offering a quality product at a reasonable price and in a manner that is easy for people to pay for.
This is bullshit. The reason we have copyright laws in the first place is because it has been judged impossible for content producers to out-compete pirates, because the pirates do not have to pay for the production of the content in the first place.
...that many, many of us are already old enough to be able to appeal to first-hand experience to explain to the young'uns why we refer to placing a phone call as "dialing," right?
If you have a giant set of data, and you set a computer on it for long enough, it should be able to come up with some rather solid paterns/corelations/etc.
Depends on what you mean by "solid." You may discern "patterns" in random data, but they won't provide information about anything at all.
(a) Commercial speech, at least in the USA, doesn't enjoy the same set of protections as in the USA. Forbidding Microsoft from labeling and advertising a certain product as being in some language doesn't breach free speech.
(b) You seized on the part where I mentioned the labeling, without giving due weight to the part where I mentioned the potential legal consequences of such a label. It's not just an issue of whether Microsoft can claim this product is in that language; it's also whether the government can or should side with Microsoft's claim.
I've been trying to make the same point as you throughout this discussion (with no success, of course). I'll just add one thing here: the actual article doesn't frame any of this in terms of intellectual property. It was the Slashdot submitter who did so, in the article summary.
The article doesn't say that they believe that nobody should be able to use their language without their permission. The article doesn't mention the term "intellectual property" at all, nor any related term. Those were additions made by Slashdot's article summary.
Given that even the article summary states that the work was done in conjunction with the Chilean Ministry of Education, I think you'll find that "support for all local languages" was simply a checkbox requirement the Chilean government placed on software.
And indeed, this is most likely what the case is about: the Mapuche will claim that the Chilean government excluded them from the process of producing this translation, and therefore skirted the responsibility to uphold the linguistic rights that the requirement was set up to protect. The claim against Microsoft will be that they looked the other way.
I largely agree with what you say, but I must point out that the "asking permission" thing is not at all present in the actual article, only in the Slashdot summary. I've seen no actual evidence that the plaintiffs believe that others should need permission to use Mapuzugun; the most charitable interpretation I can reach, based on data, is that they claim that the Chilean government and Microsoft jointly collaborated to produce something they label a Mapuzugun-language product, without consulting them at all. An action by means of which the Chilean government implicitly assumes that it has the right to decide what counts as a Mapuzugun-language product without consulting them.