Since when is a person superior simply because they are percieved to have accomplished more? The world is full of CEO's who are complete idiots with a purchased education.
"Education shows a capacity for real achievement and a PhD is proof"
Incorrect. Education shows a recognition of the value of playing the system. If you have an IQ of 150 or above you are certainly intelligent enough to recognize that anyone with an IQ of 120 or above can find and learn at a rate that greatly exceeds that achieved in a classroom. A PhD may be proof of perseverence but it is only proof of hard work if the person who attained it had an IQ under 120.
20 years ago a degree was a measure of study. Today with resources like the web, networked library systems, and online chats where even a farmboy has the opportunity to quiz experienced professionals; if someone only knows what is taught in their degree program they have to lack brainpower.
IQ is not a measure of drive and determination. It is not a measure of desire to accomplish. It is a rough measure of intelligence. An intelligent but lazy person manipulating a group of the common cattle successfully is clearly superior to an idiot who had a daddy buy him an A school education.
"Your B-school educated manager, or PhD-awarded engineer or researcher, is going to give you respect for a job well done. But if you think that translates into access to a new tier of status and esteem, think again."
Sure but you have it backwards. Just because you have listed a class that believes themselves above others does not make them above others. The problem is that most people who have wasted money on an expensive school or excessive schooling (By the time you have a bachlors you have garnered everything worthwhile your going to get from the formal education system and then some) feel that they are entitled to something for it. IQ is a better of measure to use for class than education any day of the week.
Your position at work, education, or physical prowess does not define superiority; your intellect does. The managers who can even begin to rate intellectually compared with techs, programmers, or engineers are VERY rare indeed. Business is the well known avenue for those with virtually no intellectual prowess.
Honestly I am not entirely sure. I had that same impression but then I heard of numerous cases where people have not been allowed to take laptops with encrypted hard drives through customs.
"Authenticating the passport is far more important than encrypting all the data, but not encrypting the data is foolish."
I would disagree. I tend to think that the security of my identity takes precidence over anyone being able to ascertain it. If passports cannot be secured it would be better to abolish them and leave travelers unidentified to leave an unsecured system in place.
Am I the only one who sees freedom as being more important than stopping terrorism? If being free means there is a possibility of someone crashing a plane into a building tomorrow, so be it. A few died in the towers but MILLIONS have died to secure the rights we are yielding like protection money.
Keeping people from stealing your identity is important. The governments of the world being able to track you and being able to verify your identity is not as important as your right to not be tracked or identified.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to not want people to be able to identify you. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to circumvent the system as well.
At what point did the unwilling martyrs at the twin towers win the balance against the millions of lives willing sacrificed so that we could taste freedom? It wouldn't matter if planes were crashed into building every day, it is no reason to take away freedom.
This happens in all of the above scerios as well. I would argue that this adds anonymity in the sense that it dilutes the strength of web logs as an indicator you saw the content whatsoever.
For instance the FBI demands the web logs from wethepeople.com. Previously your IP in the logs would mean you viewed the content of the site (although it does not prove it was intentionally) and that probably gets you on an FBI list somewhere as a potential terrorist. Now they can not even establish whether you viewed the content from the logs.
"And those policies are written to an "agreed-upon value," not the fair market value. You said that what collectors pay for things sets the value -- and that's blatantly wrong, as I showed with the aforementioned insurance/Ford Pinto example. The fair market value of something is not the highest amount that anyone would, or ever did, pay for one of them."
The "fair market value" is just what some organization that has become recognized as authoritive has set the value at. Those organizations do so in response to WHAT PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO PAY. Antiques, Rare Art, and Jewelry are all examples of things that need to be insured by an agreed upon value. Collectables are insured at agreed-upon values because of a lack of any central recognized authority publishing stable official figures. Determining a "fair market value" is using the best system you can come up with to guess what one could sell an item for, no more or less.
"You're mixing apples and oranges: If you claim that an imaginary sword has a real-world value of $800, then you should be paying real-world taxes on $800 if you win/steal/earn such a sword in game play."
If you recognize an imaginary sword as being currency valued at $800 and tax it, then those taxes could be paid in that same currency. You can't have it count as currency for calculating what is due but not count as currency for paying that due. Either it is tender or it is not. Whether online gains and losses are taxable/deductable is a question of jurisdiction more than anything. If I make profits (that happened to be paid in Euros) in France the US taxing authority really has no claim to it.
"So, from that, I can conclude that people who buy and sell imaginary gold are idiots. And, by the way, it's scary that you know that much about the subject. Perhaps you should turn off your computer and venture forth into the real world."
Whether they are idiots or not is completely beside the point. I make it a point to find out something about a subject before I comment on it. Perhaps your statements would be harder to dispute if you sought knowledge rather than simply collecting that which incidently comes your way.
"If the labor contributes nothing to society, then that's the value of the labor. If you choose to spend your every waking moment playing solitaire, I don't think that the virtual "currency" you win should have any value. Any 41 year old man who invests 1.75 years of his life (or over $800) to get an imaginary sword needs pschiatric help -- thus explaining why they were willing to kill someone over the "theft" of said imaginary item."
The labor contributes nothing to you. The labor contributes as much to society as creating a piece of art, writing a poem, writing a fictional story, or making a movie.
"If the labor contributes nothing to society, then that's the value of the labor. If you choose to spend your every waking moment playing solitaire, I don't think that the virtual "currency" you win should have any value. Any 41 year old man who invests 1.75 years of his life (or over $800) to get an imaginary sword needs pschiatric help -- thus explaining why they were willing to kill someone over the "theft" of said imaginary item."
Perhaps, perhaps not. There are literally millions of people doing essentially the same thing he did. Personally I tend to think that investing any time in the worship of a mythical magic man in the sky is crazy. But people dedicate their entire lives and spend billions engaged in and convincing other to engage in the worship of figments of imagination that do not even exist in a virtual world let alone the real one.
In commercial development, a lot of the maintainers and coders are just "hacks" or college grads, who know how to write a resume and interview well, contributing bits and pieces of less broad knowledge over a smaller project team, not real experienced software engineers doing what they want to do and who have the brains or inclination to really think through the consequences of all design decisions.
"and it can really cause problems when so many people are moving from professional browsers to more amateur ones that test out these features in what they THINK is a mainly geek-oriented audience."
Precisely what browsers are you referring to? Perhaps you would care to let us know which browsers your highness believes to be "Professional" and which he believes are "more amateur". In general, I would contend the latter are actually superior browsers and that is why people move to them. Every browser I know of goes through a development, alpha, and beta stage to test features before final release. Also, google is implementing this, not a browser.
"I could see why someone at Google might think this is a good idea, but I'd expect that a company with the means to do the necessary research wouldn't go about implementing this kind of hackish "feature set" until it had thought things through a little better."
Perhaps they do not use rel=next attributes and believe they have a bit more data at their fingertips than you do. Maybe, just maybe, you are the one who has not performed any research and google has in fact examined a great deal of data. Maybe that data even tells them that the number of people who continue to the top search results is staggering.
"Though I think it could be argued that the "men are dogs" comments are a retaliation to the social attitudes toward women, where as the sexist comments are simply enjoyment at someone's expense."
I fail to see sexually related humor as sexist in the first place. I also fail to see how it is at anyones expense. When a male makes a comment like the one that started this thread, he is actually putting men down, not women.
Also, the male comments about female sexuality are generally compliments regarding the increased desirability of the female gender. The female insults regarding men are just that, blatant insults. And further, from my experience the women actually believe the horrible things they say about men.
"For it to be a viable currency, the medium has to be generally accepted as having value. It's generally accepted as having value to those playing the game, outside of that context, it's worth nothing."
I never said it was viable. However the medium does NOT have to be generally accepted. It simply has to be accepted by a large body of people and readily changable into property or other forms of currency. Wal-mart gift certificates are currency as well but you probably wouldn't accept them in your store (unless your store is Wal-mart). That does not mean they are not a legitimate currency with a legitimate value.
"It's generally accepted as having value to those playing the game, outside of that context, it's worth nothing."
Not true. For quite awhile I made a tidy profit on virtual currency exchanges. But I never played any of the games.
Honestly, outside of China Yuan are not generally accepted either. If your store is not in China I would be willing to wager you wouldn't accept Yuan anymore than you would a dragon sabre.;)
I suspect that most non-gamers do not really understand the size of the market we are talking about. Do a search on google or ebay for wow gold, eq gold or wow/eq account. You will see that the gold/plat can be readily exchanged for other currencies.
"There are people who collect Ford Pintos and pay a premium for ones in very good condition. But that does not mean that your insurance company will pay you as much for the car as a collector would. That's because the insurance company realizes that only a small percentage of people who own Ford Pintos are going to find a sucker, I mean "collector", who will pay them more than a couple of hundred dollars for a Ford Pinto."
Most insurance companies do insure collectables. I realize this is Slashdot but in the future I would prefer you not respond to my posts with random assertations you have no basis for making.
"Wrong. If it's "currency" for labor, that's called "income" and it's taxable. Maybe the IRS needs to have a look at your virtual goods that you've "earned" by playing some game. Then they can tax you for $800+ income for an imaginary sword. Would that be okay with you? Why do I bet that you'd be howling about how it's just imaginary and not a "thing" that you own?"
What you would bet really does not concern me. This IRS red herring is interesting but it is a red herring and nothing more. The issue is whether the gold is currency, not whether it is taxable. Game income being or not being taxable has no impact on whether or not it is income. If the IRS chooses to recognize virtual currency income I would be happy to deduct my game loses and pay any leftover tax in gold.
You also seem to have the odd impression that it is some rare quack who purchases a game item or gold. Please do a google search for "wow gold" or "eq gold". You will see dozens of companies who outsource jobs to asian nations doing nothing but farming gold and items on these games and selling them. Do an ebay search for gold or accounts for these games and you will find a plethora of listings.
It takes about 8hrs of solid game time in world of warcraft about level 45 to earn 8-10gold. It takes hundreds of hours of work to get to lvl45 in the first place. That gold will sell in lots of 100 for about $0.22/gold. That means after a two or three hundred hour investment; if you cut out all the middlemen; both farming and selling gold yourself; you can make a whopping $1.76-$2.20/day.
That means this guy stole the equivelent of 494 8hr days (about 1 3/4yrs with weekends off of repetative work about like a factory). Perhaps you think currency representative of that much labor should have no value. Personally, I do not. Some people want the rewards without that kind of significant investment (regardless of their reasons for wanting it) and those people are willing to pay that $0.22/hr for someone else to do it for them.
"I was talking to the point that perhaps a mechanism limiting such value might help future problems of this nature. I guess the title of the response was misleading. Thanks for the input, however."
What I was getting at is that saying this is a problem is like saying we should get rid of money. The problem is that people are willing to kill people who take things of value from them. Trying to eliminate the value of everything that might ever be taken is a rather hopeless cause.
"I've heard this fallacious line of "reasoning" way too many times. If your car gets stolen, do you think that the insurance company will give you $100,000 for it just because you find some rich lunatic that says he would have paid you that much for it? Of course not. Value is based on what a reasonable person would pay, not what some deranged mental midget would pay."
Of course you can not choose an arbitrary value for the object. The value is set by the market and is not what a reasonable person would pay, but rather what you could reasonably expect to be able to sell or exchange the object for. A reasonable person may not be willing to pay anything more for a Mickey Mouse watch over a casio, but that does not mean I couldn't reasonably expect to be able to sell it to a collector for $100.
"No one possessed anything here. It was an imaginary item in a fantasy game. What's next? Trying to get someone convicted of murdering your imaginary friend?"
Wrong, it was currency which represented labor and has an exchange rate that can be derived from an examination of the market on which that currency is exchanged. Whether the currency was electrons or bits of paper and ink makes no difference, the property was the value the currency represented.
If someone burns your stack of hundred dollar bills they should only have to pay you back the fraction of the penny the stack of paper was worth in and of itself right?
"In-game items ARE sold for tangible value (money). This flat-out proves that tangible value is associated with ephemeral goods."
Clearly. But when value is assigned to something that is recognized to have none inherently (like a datafile, or pieces of paper with ink on them) it needs to be looked upon as currency and not property. This seems like a small distinction but it solves a great many of the questions floating around about virtual currency.
For instance, it is perfectly plausable for someone else to own currency while another possesses it as a representation of the value THEY own. The actual bits that comprise the gold or item are owned by the game company, but that gold/item is currency and the value is owned by the player possessing it.
There currently is not solid legal ground here to be certain but clearly there should be and that is the larger issue. After all, technically all legal currency in the United States belongs to the Federal Government but they do not own the value the currency represents. The items and gold/plat/whatever in these games are currency of a sort, they represent real labor and even have exchanged rates to other currencies like US dollars that could be tracked set by a mostly free market.
People just look at this backwards. Everyone wants to think in terms of property, but anything virtual is not property. It must be looked at as currency, since that is what we call a virtual representation of real property/value.
They may not be listed on the international exchange, but clearly virtual items/gold are a form of currency and clearly the property is not the currency itself (which is simply data owned by the game company like a 100 dollar bill is less than a pennies worth of paper and ink owned by the federal government) but rather the value represented by it (the 100 dollars of goods and services that half cent of paper represents).
I will admit that lacking an authority who tracks the market and sets a reference exchange rate/value for these currencies it could be difficult to establish how great a value to place on them, but in this case it should be easy. The exchange value was 7200 Yuan.
This should not be handled as theft, it should be handled in the same manner as me loaning you $5000 US dollars and you attempting to pay me back in EUROs (at some arbitrary exchange rate) and me not finding that currency to be suitable or recognizing it to be of equal value.
This is different than if I were to loan you a TV and you sold it and then tried to give me the money. Trading property for a currency is not the same as exchanging currencies. Either could be a beneficial exchange, but currency does not in itself have any value; a TV does have a value (although we could certainly debate how great that value is).
There currently is not solid legal ground here to be certain but clearly there should be and that is the larger issue. After all, technically all legal currency in the United States belongs to the Federal Government but they do not own the value the currency represents. The items and gold/plat/whatever in these games are currency of a sort, they represent real labor and even have exchanged rates to other currencies like US dollars that could be tracked set by a mostly free market.
People just look at this backwards. Everyone wants to think in terms of property, but anything virtual is not property. It must be looked at as currency, since that is what we call a virtual representation of real property/value.
They may not be listed on the international exchange, but clearly virtual items/gold are a form of currency and clearly the property is not the currency itself (which is simply data owned by the game company like a 100 dollar bill is less than a pennies worth of paper and ink owned by the federal government) but rather the value represented by it (the 100 dollars of goods and services that half cent of paper represents).
I will admit that lacking an authority who tracks the market and sets a reference exchange rate/value for these currencies it could be difficult to establish how great a value to place on them, but in this case it should be easy. The value was 7200 Yuan.
"So, a) the item had no value when it was first obtained and b) it was given away."
A. An item is always worth what one could sell it for, if someone is willing to pay you for something it has value whether you choose to sell it or not. If the friend sold it, Qiu could have sold it as well and therefore it always had value.
B. It was lent, not given away.
"Let's focus on the ownership part, ignoring the virtual worth of the item in question. Suppose you drop by my house with a lovely Katana sword. You then leave said sword in my posession. I turn around and sell it. Sure, I'm a turd, but you are pretty much 100% SOL."
Your wrong. Possession is NOT ownership. If I lent you my Katana sword and you sold it that IS theft. If I can prove it you WILL go to jail. The only reason one might be SOL in the scenerio you mentioned is not being able to prove that you sold the sword I lent you.
Again possession != ownership. Loaning something does not confer ownership morally OR legally.
"If FOSS is the Right Thing then it will eventually win."
Come now, this is the real world. In the real world the good guy not only doesn't always win; in the real world the good guy loses as a general rule.
If FOSS wins it will be because in the end having millions of programmers working to make the best software they can creates a force that can not be countered by throwing billions at individuals who work toward getting paid the most for the least effort. The only right involved is the right of might. If the FOSS movement is the strongest it will win out regardless of mert and the same for commercial development.
"# USA is the home of Microsoft and most of the other major players in Private Software industry. # As such, any individual or company that chooses to use something else is a loss of market share."
True. On the surface these software firms are successful US businesses and should be strengthening our economy. But if someone took a closer look they would see that these software corporations are funneling funds outside of our borders through outsourcing and creative accounting and in the end create a trade deficit.
More than that, since EVERY other business requires computers and software to function in the modern world; the overhead created by these software industry leeches weakens every other US industry. That is not even considering that using inferior software will make those other businesses less competative globally.
Here in the US that is extremely widespread. In fact it is standard practice for any unit that has a budget dictated by someone else.
Schools, Charities, and business divisions ALL make sure to spend every dime of their budget. Not all are hoping for an increase, usually they are just hoping to show they need what they have.
The people planning the budgets look at a department surplus as an indicator that department does not need so much money. In reality, expenses vary from quarter to quarter or year to year.
Actually I know people who do this with food stamps because the program is designed to reduce benefits if the recipient does not spend them in full.
No. $149 is the full OEM price, the full retail price is over $200. You need to revise your figures.
Also I gave an exact formula for calculating the number that only required filling in the blanks with REAL numbers from tax filings. Not rattling some random and ridiculously low number off the top of your head. Larger OEMS pay an unknown sum since the agreements are confidential. Unless you have some real numbers and statistics to even begin your debate with as opposed to numbers you are making up at random then please stop trying to clutter this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when is a person superior simply because they are percieved to have accomplished more? The world is full of CEO's who are complete idiots with a purchased education.
"Education shows a capacity for real achievement and a PhD is proof"
Incorrect. Education shows a recognition of the value of playing the system. If you have an IQ of 150 or above you are certainly intelligent enough to recognize that anyone with an IQ of 120 or above can find and learn at a rate that greatly exceeds that achieved in a classroom. A PhD may be proof of perseverence but it is only proof of hard work if the person who attained it had an IQ under 120.
20 years ago a degree was a measure of study. Today with resources like the web, networked library systems, and online chats where even a farmboy has the opportunity to quiz experienced professionals; if someone only knows what is taught in their degree program they have to lack brainpower.
IQ is not a measure of drive and determination. It is not a measure of desire to accomplish. It is a rough measure of intelligence. An intelligent but lazy person manipulating a group of the common cattle successfully is clearly superior to an idiot who had a daddy buy him an A school education.
If you think it is a degree that enables you to do any of those things, then it is you my friend who are an idiot.
"Your B-school educated manager, or PhD-awarded engineer or researcher, is going to give you respect for a job well done. But if you think that translates into access to a new tier of status and esteem, think again."
Sure but you have it backwards. Just because you have listed a class that believes themselves above others does not make them above others. The problem is that most people who have wasted money on an expensive school or excessive schooling (By the time you have a bachlors you have garnered everything worthwhile your going to get from the formal education system and then some) feel that they are entitled to something for it. IQ is a better of measure to use for class than education any day of the week.
Your position at work, education, or physical prowess does not define superiority; your intellect does. The managers who can even begin to rate intellectually compared with techs, programmers, or engineers are VERY rare indeed. Business is the well known avenue for those with virtually no intellectual prowess.
Honestly I am not entirely sure. I had that same impression but then I heard of numerous cases where people have not been allowed to take laptops with encrypted hard drives through customs.
"Authenticating the passport is far more important than encrypting all the data, but not encrypting the data is foolish."
I would disagree. I tend to think that the security of my identity takes precidence over anyone being able to ascertain it. If passports cannot be secured it would be better to abolish them and leave travelers unidentified to leave an unsecured system in place.
Am I the only one who sees freedom as being more important than stopping terrorism? If being free means there is a possibility of someone crashing a plane into a building tomorrow, so be it. A few died in the towers but MILLIONS have died to secure the rights we are yielding like protection money.
I am. I'm not aware of any worse deviants and tyrants more likely to use my information in a malicious manner than the government.
Keeping people from stealing your identity is important. The governments of the world being able to track you and being able to verify your identity is not as important as your right to not be tracked or identified.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to not want people to be able to identify you. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to circumvent the system as well.
At what point did the unwilling martyrs at the twin towers win the balance against the millions of lives willing sacrificed so that we could taste freedom? It wouldn't matter if planes were crashed into building every day, it is no reason to take away freedom.
Because it would be illegal to export encryption of that strength. It does not matter if the other nation already has the technology.
This happens in all of the above scerios as well. I would argue that this adds anonymity in the sense that it dilutes the strength of web logs as an indicator you saw the content whatsoever.
For instance the FBI demands the web logs from wethepeople.com. Previously your IP in the logs would mean you viewed the content of the site (although it does not prove it was intentionally) and that probably gets you on an FBI list somewhere as a potential terrorist. Now they can not even establish whether you viewed the content from the logs.
"And those policies are written to an "agreed-upon value," not the fair market value. You said that what collectors pay for things sets the value -- and that's blatantly wrong, as I showed with the aforementioned insurance/Ford Pinto example. The fair market value of something is not the highest amount that anyone would, or ever did, pay for one of them."
The "fair market value" is just what some organization that has become recognized as authoritive has set the value at. Those organizations do so in response to WHAT PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO PAY. Antiques, Rare Art, and Jewelry are all examples of things that need to be insured by an agreed upon value. Collectables are insured at agreed-upon values because of a lack of any central recognized authority publishing stable official figures. Determining a "fair market value" is using the best system you can come up with to guess what one could sell an item for, no more or less.
"You're mixing apples and oranges: If you claim that an imaginary sword has a real-world value of $800, then you should be paying real-world taxes on $800 if you win/steal/earn such a sword in game play."
If you recognize an imaginary sword as being currency valued at $800 and tax it, then those taxes could be paid in that same currency. You can't have it count as currency for calculating what is due but not count as currency for paying that due. Either it is tender or it is not. Whether online gains and losses are taxable/deductable is a question of jurisdiction more than anything. If I make profits (that happened to be paid in Euros) in France the US taxing authority really has no claim to it.
"So, from that, I can conclude that people who buy and sell imaginary gold are idiots. And, by the way, it's scary that you know that much about the subject. Perhaps you should turn off your computer and venture forth into the real world."
Whether they are idiots or not is completely beside the point. I make it a point to find out something about a subject before I comment on it. Perhaps your statements would be harder to dispute if you sought knowledge rather than simply collecting that which incidently comes your way.
"If the labor contributes nothing to society, then that's the value of the labor. If you choose to spend your every waking moment playing solitaire, I don't think that the virtual "currency" you win should have any value. Any 41 year old man who invests 1.75 years of his life (or over $800) to get an imaginary sword needs pschiatric help -- thus explaining why they were willing to kill someone over the "theft" of said imaginary item."
The labor contributes nothing to you. The labor contributes as much to society as creating a piece of art, writing a poem, writing a fictional story, or making a movie.
"If the labor contributes nothing to society, then that's the value of the labor. If you choose to spend your every waking moment playing solitaire, I don't think that the virtual "currency" you win should have any value. Any 41 year old man who invests 1.75 years of his life (or over $800) to get an imaginary sword needs pschiatric help -- thus explaining why they were willing to kill someone over the "theft" of said imaginary item."
Perhaps, perhaps not. There are literally millions of people doing essentially the same thing he did. Personally I tend to think that investing any time in the worship of a mythical magic man in the sky is crazy. But people dedicate their entire lives and spend billions engaged in and convincing other to engage in the worship of figments of imagination that do not even exist in a virtual world let alone the real one.
In commercial development, a lot of the maintainers and coders are just "hacks" or college grads, who know how to write a resume and interview well, contributing bits and pieces of less broad knowledge over a smaller project team, not real experienced software engineers doing what they want to do and who have the brains or inclination to really think through the consequences of all design decisions.
"and it can really cause problems when so many people are moving from professional browsers to more amateur ones that test out these features in what they THINK is a mainly geek-oriented audience."
Precisely what browsers are you referring to? Perhaps you would care to let us know which browsers your highness believes to be "Professional" and which he believes are "more amateur". In general, I would contend the latter are actually superior browsers and that is why people move to them. Every browser I know of goes through a development, alpha, and beta stage to test features before final release. Also, google is implementing this, not a browser.
"I could see why someone at Google might think this is a good idea, but I'd expect that a company with the means to do the necessary research wouldn't go about implementing this kind of hackish "feature set" until it had thought things through a little better."
Perhaps they do not use rel=next attributes and believe they have a bit more data at their fingertips than you do. Maybe, just maybe, you are the one who has not performed any research and google has in fact examined a great deal of data. Maybe that data even tells them that the number of people who continue to the top search results is staggering.
"Though I think it could be argued that the "men are dogs" comments are a retaliation to the social attitudes toward women, where as the sexist comments are simply enjoyment at someone's expense."
I fail to see sexually related humor as sexist in the first place. I also fail to see how it is at anyones expense. When a male makes a comment like the one that started this thread, he is actually putting men down, not women.
Also, the male comments about female sexuality are generally compliments regarding the increased desirability of the female gender. The female insults regarding men are just that, blatant insults. And further, from my experience the women actually believe the horrible things they say about men.
"For it to be a viable currency, the medium has to be generally accepted as having value. It's generally accepted as having value to those playing the game, outside of that context, it's worth nothing."
;)
I never said it was viable. However the medium does NOT have to be generally accepted. It simply has to be accepted by a large body of people and readily changable into property or other forms of currency. Wal-mart gift certificates are currency as well but you probably wouldn't accept them in your store (unless your store is Wal-mart). That does not mean they are not a legitimate currency with a legitimate value.
"It's generally accepted as having value to those playing the game, outside of that context, it's worth nothing."
Not true. For quite awhile I made a tidy profit on virtual currency exchanges. But I never played any of the games.
Honestly, outside of China Yuan are not generally accepted either. If your store is not in China I would be willing to wager you wouldn't accept Yuan anymore than you would a dragon sabre.
I suspect that most non-gamers do not really understand the size of the market we are talking about. Do a search on google or ebay for wow gold, eq gold or wow/eq account. You will see that the gold/plat can be readily exchanged for other currencies.
"There are people who collect Ford Pintos and pay a premium for ones in very good condition. But that does not mean that your insurance company will pay you as much for the car as a collector would. That's because the insurance company realizes that only a small percentage of people who own Ford Pintos are going to find a sucker, I mean "collector", who will pay them more than a couple of hundred dollars for a Ford Pinto."
Most insurance companies do insure collectables. I realize this is Slashdot but in the future I would prefer you not respond to my posts with random assertations you have no basis for making.
"Wrong. If it's "currency" for labor, that's called "income" and it's taxable. Maybe the IRS needs to have a look at your virtual goods that you've "earned" by playing some game. Then they can tax you for $800+ income for an imaginary sword. Would that be okay with you? Why do I bet that you'd be howling about how it's just imaginary and not a "thing" that you own?"
What you would bet really does not concern me. This IRS red herring is interesting but it is a red herring and nothing more. The issue is whether the gold is currency, not whether it is taxable. Game income being or not being taxable has no impact on whether or not it is income. If the IRS chooses to recognize virtual currency income I would be happy to deduct my game loses and pay any leftover tax in gold.
You also seem to have the odd impression that it is some rare quack who purchases a game item or gold. Please do a google search for "wow gold" or "eq gold". You will see dozens of companies who outsource jobs to asian nations doing nothing but farming gold and items on these games and selling them. Do an ebay search for gold or accounts for these games and you will find a plethora of listings.
It takes about 8hrs of solid game time in world of warcraft about level 45 to earn 8-10gold. It takes hundreds of hours of work to get to lvl45 in the first place. That gold will sell in lots of 100 for about $0.22/gold. That means after a two or three hundred hour investment; if you cut out all the middlemen; both farming and selling gold yourself; you can make a whopping $1.76-$2.20/day.
That means this guy stole the equivelent of 494 8hr days (about 1 3/4yrs with weekends off of repetative work about like a factory). Perhaps you think currency representative of that much labor should have no value. Personally, I do not. Some people want the rewards without that kind of significant investment (regardless of their reasons for wanting it) and those people are willing to pay that $0.22/hr for someone else to do it for them.
"I was talking to the point that perhaps a mechanism limiting such value might help future problems of this nature. I guess the title of the response was misleading. Thanks for the input, however."
What I was getting at is that saying this is a problem is like saying we should get rid of money. The problem is that people are willing to kill people who take things of value from them. Trying to eliminate the value of everything that might ever be taken is a rather hopeless cause.
I do not know which is more sad. That I took the time to answer the parent, or that someone wasted a mod point to mod me down.
"I've heard this fallacious line of "reasoning" way too many times. If your car gets stolen, do you think that the insurance company will give you $100,000 for it just because you find some rich lunatic that says he would have paid you that much for it? Of course not. Value is based on what a reasonable person would pay, not what some deranged mental midget would pay."
Of course you can not choose an arbitrary value for the object. The value is set by the market and is not what a reasonable person would pay, but rather what you could reasonably expect to be able to sell or exchange the object for. A reasonable person may not be willing to pay anything more for a Mickey Mouse watch over a casio, but that does not mean I couldn't reasonably expect to be able to sell it to a collector for $100.
"No one possessed anything here. It was an imaginary item in a fantasy game. What's next? Trying to get someone convicted of murdering your imaginary friend?"
Wrong, it was currency which represented labor and has an exchange rate that can be derived from an examination of the market on which that currency is exchanged. Whether the currency was electrons or bits of paper and ink makes no difference, the property was the value the currency represented.
If someone burns your stack of hundred dollar bills they should only have to pay you back the fraction of the penny the stack of paper was worth in and of itself right?
"In-game items ARE sold for tangible value (money). This flat-out proves that tangible value is associated with ephemeral goods."
Clearly. But when value is assigned to something that is recognized to have none inherently (like a datafile, or pieces of paper with ink on them) it needs to be looked upon as currency and not property. This seems like a small distinction but it solves a great many of the questions floating around about virtual currency.
For instance, it is perfectly plausable for someone else to own currency while another possesses it as a representation of the value THEY own. The actual bits that comprise the gold or item are owned by the game company, but that gold/item is currency and the value is owned by the player possessing it.
There currently is not solid legal ground here to be certain but clearly there should be and that is the larger issue. After all, technically all legal currency in the United States belongs to the Federal Government but they do not own the value the currency represents. The items and gold/plat/whatever in these games are currency of a sort, they represent real labor and even have exchanged rates to other currencies like US dollars that could be tracked set by a mostly free market.
People just look at this backwards. Everyone wants to think in terms of property, but anything virtual is not property. It must be looked at as currency, since that is what we call a virtual representation of real property/value.
They may not be listed on the international exchange, but clearly virtual items/gold are a form of currency and clearly the property is not the currency itself (which is simply data owned by the game company like a 100 dollar bill is less than a pennies worth of paper and ink owned by the federal government) but rather the value represented by it (the 100 dollars of goods and services that half cent of paper represents).
I will admit that lacking an authority who tracks the market and sets a reference exchange rate/value for these currencies it could be difficult to establish how great a value to place on them, but in this case it should be easy. The exchange value was 7200 Yuan.
This should not be handled as theft, it should be handled in the same manner as me loaning you $5000 US dollars and you attempting to pay me back in EUROs (at some arbitrary exchange rate) and me not finding that currency to be suitable or recognizing it to be of equal value.
This is different than if I were to loan you a TV and you sold it and then tried to give me the money. Trading property for a currency is not the same as exchanging currencies. Either could be a beneficial exchange, but currency does not in itself have any value; a TV does have a value (although we could certainly debate how great that value is).
There currently is not solid legal ground here to be certain but clearly there should be and that is the larger issue. After all, technically all legal currency in the United States belongs to the Federal Government but they do not own the value the currency represents. The items and gold/plat/whatever in these games are currency of a sort, they represent real labor and even have exchanged rates to other currencies like US dollars that could be tracked set by a mostly free market.
People just look at this backwards. Everyone wants to think in terms of property, but anything virtual is not property. It must be looked at as currency, since that is what we call a virtual representation of real property/value.
They may not be listed on the international exchange, but clearly virtual items/gold are a form of currency and clearly the property is not the currency itself (which is simply data owned by the game company like a 100 dollar bill is less than a pennies worth of paper and ink owned by the federal government) but rather the value represented by it (the 100 dollars of goods and services that half cent of paper represents).
I will admit that lacking an authority who tracks the market and sets a reference exchange rate/value for these currencies it could be difficult to establish how great a value to place on them, but in this case it should be easy. The value was 7200 Yuan.
"So, a) the item had no value when it was first obtained and b) it was given away."
A. An item is always worth what one could sell it for, if someone is willing to pay you for something it has value whether you choose to sell it or not. If the friend sold it, Qiu could have sold it as well and therefore it always had value.
B. It was lent, not given away.
"Let's focus on the ownership part, ignoring the virtual worth of the item in question. Suppose you drop by my house with a lovely Katana sword. You then leave said sword in my posession. I turn around and sell it. Sure, I'm a turd, but you are pretty much 100% SOL."
Your wrong. Possession is NOT ownership. If I lent you my Katana sword and you sold it that IS theft. If I can prove it you WILL go to jail. The only reason one might be SOL in the scenerio you mentioned is not being able to prove that you sold the sword I lent you.
Again possession != ownership. Loaning something does not confer ownership morally OR legally.
Sure, she only gets nutrition through the feeding tube. She gets hydrated through an IV.
"If FOSS is the Right Thing then it will eventually win."
Come now, this is the real world. In the real world the good guy not only doesn't always win; in the real world the good guy loses as a general rule.
If FOSS wins it will be because in the end having millions of programmers working to make the best software they can creates a force that can not be countered by throwing billions at individuals who work toward getting paid the most for the least effort. The only right involved is the right of might. If the FOSS movement is the strongest it will win out regardless of mert and the same for commercial development.
"# USA is the home of Microsoft and most of the other major players in Private Software industry.
# As such, any individual or company that chooses to use something else is a loss of market share."
True. On the surface these software firms are successful US businesses and should be strengthening our economy. But if someone took a closer look they would see that these software corporations are funneling funds outside of our borders through outsourcing and creative accounting and in the end create a trade deficit.
More than that, since EVERY other business requires computers and software to function in the modern world; the overhead created by these software industry leeches weakens every other US industry. That is not even considering that using inferior software will make those other businesses less competative globally.
Here in the US that is extremely widespread. In fact it is standard practice for any unit that has a budget dictated by someone else.
Schools, Charities, and business divisions ALL make sure to spend every dime of their budget. Not all are hoping for an increase, usually they are just hoping to show they need what they have.
The people planning the budgets look at a department surplus as an indicator that department does not need so much money. In reality, expenses vary from quarter to quarter or year to year.
Actually I know people who do this with food stamps because the program is designed to reduce benefits if the recipient does not spend them in full.
No. $149 is the full OEM price, the full retail price is over $200. You need to revise your figures.
Also I gave an exact formula for calculating the number that only required filling in the blanks with REAL numbers from tax filings. Not rattling some random and ridiculously low number off the top of your head. Larger OEMS pay an unknown sum since the agreements are confidential. Unless you have some real numbers and statistics to even begin your debate with as opposed to numbers you are making up at random then please stop trying to clutter this thread.