Interesting problem, even if talk about an interplanetary internet has been around for years.
There is a major difference with earthbound networks in that you may need to include a good amount of dynamic knowledge about things like orbit, revolution, local time, and the region of space a node is operating in. If the Earth is on the other side of the sun you presumably need to have nodes at trojan points - or maybe just one at the north or south solar pole - to relay. That point will be subject to solar storms too - more if you want it to be closer to earth and a shorter light speed hop. Maybe the routers need to know system geometry then, and be able to calculate when a station will be facing its antenna towards it by the time the signal it send reaches it.
Perhaps Martin Lo's Genesis project would be useful for mapping slow paths for routers (all routers will be spacecraft in motion somewhere) which will require minimum power to keep them on a predictable course. Seeding his interplanetary superhighway (a major discovery that the solar system is filled with tube-like paths where gravity likes slow ships) with a sequence of router-equipped craft, might be the way we are going to roll out this network. The routers closest to earth will be more advanced and with the latest information about near-earth network and space activity, so perhaps the protocol should include the ability to be configured to weight favorably craft that are closer Earth for example.
Though Vint or somebody has said they could run IP over carpet static, the only thing I can see that might be carried over is the idea of a URL and a domain name. But even so, for a spaceship moving between two planets, you don't really want to force it to logically belong to a planet. More like having it belong to a virtual controller (like the router for a fleet of satellites) that itself gets passed to different stations' jurisdictions if the fleet moves. I guess the problem I have is that it sounds like they are starting with the idea of an Internet that works hierarchically or like mobile phone cells. But then you have to go "roaming" when you move. In space, everything moves! And time? How can we even tell time when the earth is dragging its frame around with it. Okay we can all standardize on the sun or a star or something. It is so complicated that the only thing for sure is when that machinery gets far away it will be a pain to mess with it. This all has to be completely reburnable, reconfigurable, and idiot proofed so we don't run the risk of bricking the network before we figure out how to get it to work. This might be a good time to start thinking of how to control communications with a solar orbit spanning radio telescope, or those nanosatellite fleets people were experimenting with recently.
Here's a question. If Linux was a single company's product like MS Windows is of Microsoft, couldn't legal measures be taken against the convicted monopoly arch-rival from this sort of action? That is, why can't the SCO/MS strategy of FUD without providing evidence be outlawed? Maybe we need a new law to outlaw FUD, especially when it comes from a convicted monopoly. Something to cut through the legal games.
Certainly the totally opaque Novell deal is not clear at all. That journalists and publications who publish such drivel are even respected is also bizarre to me.
It seems that as governments of individual jurisdictions switch more and more to Linux, they will get more tired of FUD and perhaps even lean toward outlawing or defanging such unfounded threats. If so that would mean Balmer's tactics amount to rushing to spread as much FUD as possible before this window closes.
To me, linux is already a key part of the U.S.' national infrastructure. Why can't it do anything to muzzle this crap? FUD is bad for the economy.
Then the high speed access or HDSPA if they have it will only work with iTunes... That is how it seems to be happening in Japan. Ultra high speed but all you want plans only work if you access through iMode (pay services) and high speed access is marketed as the way to get music and video. (well in addition to digital terrestrial broadcast, though from what I've seen it's not so impressive content-wise). If you want to access an arbitrary Internet site you are going to the poorhouse. I want to get an HDSPA card for a new mac laptop but it might just be too expensive.
A nice choice is the little PHS Willcom WinCE phone with real pushbuttons. Not as big a keyboard as other models in the line and the screen is tiny, but it has a GUI and apparently you can add arbitrary apps. PHS network is cheaper too.
Call me when the iPhone comes with an all you can eat IP connectivity plan at hdspa speeds and embed a limited range airport in it (say within 10 feet) and give me real pushbuttons, and I'm there!
Though not familiar with the project, I'm impressed that the project with by far the most errors (Cardinal), indicating I assume that the least work has been done on it, is still so close to YARV - only 2-4 times slower in a couple tests.
I can't tell if those fast tests are so trivial that they offer little chance of further speedup, or whether YARV, which has had speed as a goal, is not going to be so much faster than a Parrot-based implementation once it (Cardinal) gets into working on optimization.
Anyone interested in providing some information on where the YARV performance comes from and whether Cardinal is likely to approach it more closely and farther across the board in the tests?
Consider how much of gross planetary output - in natural resources, percentage of human lives, economically measurable quantities, and generated works - is spent on different activities - basic survival, culture, self realization, science, exploration, relaxation, education, religion, wasted time, playing of games like politics/war/finance - and with what percentage of success. We still make little use of plentiful solar energy and the global economic system is based on limited fossil fuels. Very little goes to science/exploration today. A small bit of that goes to seti/astronomy/rocketry. Very few human beings can build a radio telescope. => So it should be *very* easy to accelerate things and shorten the time it takes to view a planet up close, develop new propulsion, investigate our own planets, and even do an astronomical survey of an appreciable part of the sky. We are most likely wasting undiscovered Einsteins who have grown or failed to grow in terrible economic conditions. ==> Devise and execute individual or group plans that will even a little change the balance of assigned resources and boost physics, astronomy, exploration, etc. The fraction of planetary output assigned to these things is so small that even a little bit ought to help. It is a matter of a little change in priorities.
I've been wondering recently with people talking about race in games why the games can't be adjustable. Although I've most recently played games on the Wii that seem to let you create different race individuals, apparently many do not let you do that. It would seem useful to allow the user to adjust things to look like his or her community, or like a different community. It could be done by parents, or just for fun. When I was a kid we had Wizardry II (Apple ][) and IIRC you could select Dungeons and Dragons style races like dwarf, mage, etc. Ultima and the rest of the genre too. I didn't realize games created roles for kids to look up to, but certainly I was looking in the Wii selection for faces that I wanted to be. I had lots of fun doing it but actually they ought to provide more combinations, it took a while to find one I really enjoyed "being".
Thank you again for your very informative replies. Certainly a lot of information I did not know about rules for seeking statutory damages, what the phrase "nasty letter" means in legal circles, etc. (not that I'm an expert on nasty letters but I didn't know that).
Without trying the software myself I'd expect it would take the organization maybe $5K to build similar functionality that meets all their needs, it is actually not so easy to find exactly what you want.
I do admit a feeling that software designed to make work easier or that enables activities like blog PR does provide value continually when run that is separable from the content of the posts themselves. This may not be borne out by current law. It is my guess that a business model for private software developers to sell on the Internet source code is not greatly protected by the law, or if it is then most developers don't know how to take advantage of it. Being generally incensed at the RIAA and MPAA anyway I would find it poetic justice to see them bitten, and considering the number of page views it would somewhat parallel the way they already make money from performances of music/film.
But of course, much of this is a gut feeling and of course that is why there are lawyers, to separate that from the reality of a legal code. Not withstanding the maxim of not to get legal advice on slashdot, I appreciate your clarity and taking the time to respond in depth. I'm not going to beat a dead horse anymore, but I do hope the author has a lawyer and is able to get paid for his work.
Sorry. I contracted them both to MAFIAA and then just said MPAA for some silly reason. Perhaps RIAA would make better sense here but same goes for both I believe. Customers get to judge the artistic strength of an author, not the legal system, so it should not matter if you write software, a novel, or a song. It is my impression that the two organizations do similar things to similar people.
P.S. Personally I think there is a major problem with the existence of an industry association like the MPAA and it being able to generate limitless lawsuits against customers on behalf of its members. I say Sony or Toshiba EMI ought to be required to do the suing, and see if they really have the stomach to do it and get caught out.
As it is now, the MPAA appears to exist for the sake of making lawsuits; its profit is based on the success of the lawsuits, and it is presumably paid by its members the startup cash needed to hire all those lawyers, to generate enough income to eventually make the lawsuit engine self-sustaining. Sounds like Microsoft/Baystar and SCO doesn't it? Or a recent RAM patent company?
When Sony embeds a rootkit they get clobbered with bad PR, and when EMI's copy protection sucks they get clobbered. Conversely, when EMI considers removing all copy protection they get even more, positive, PR. But when the MPAA sues soccer moms, the record companies seem to be wearing some kind of armor. All the bad PR sticks to their stalking horse, the MPAA. (Which like JASRAC in Japan has been the number one impediment to online distribution.)
I say the MPAA is a menace to the public and serves no purpose other than to make frivolous lawsuits on the behalf of big record companies while insulating them from the media. It does not exist to protect authors at all, but rather seeks to cause enough mayhem to scare people from trying other distribution mechanisms, by grabbing "rights" that never previously existed for music before the digital age. This is remembered well by anyone who grew up with cassettes or 8 track tapes.
I posted elsewhere in this thread that the MPAA's logic should be used against them to generate a huge award for the theft and performance of the Forest Blog software for a potentially huge number of page views. This model, in which a software author is granted the same rights as a music author, turns software downloading and web page views into something much more insidious than trite torrent sharing, in a legal sense. So I think now is a good time not only to make a legal case against the MPAA, but in fact to start aiming at them with big cannons like RICO and public opinion. Let the record labels do their own dirty work and pay for it individually when their customers get mad.
One respondent to TFA suggested using the MPAA's own logic against them in court. Another suggested suing them in small claims court which is apparently much easier.
I submit that a software author is the same as a music CD author on an artistic level, perhaps more so since he does not have all the studio people to massage his work into something palatable.
If this artist is left on his own, he could make some cash in small claims court, or at least his 150 pound license fee if he is not the litigous sort perhaps.
However I think this is also a very good opportunity for a big guns lawyers supplied perhaps by the EFF to find the paper where the MPAA writes down its killer legal strategies, and tear it up into tiny pieces, much as IBM is doing to SCO.
Equate software to music. Equate running softare or viewing a webpage as a "performance" in the legal sense. Use MPAA rules. Since the license costs about $100, calculate based on a 300% markup over a $35 average MPAA cd price. The sum will be punitive damages for theft, plus the 300% of what the MPAA sues for a song, plus the price of a "performance" multiplied by the number of visits to any of the blog's pages, based on the evidence of the MPAA's server logs which is must produce in court. Although this sounds over the top, it is simply using the same non-common-sensical strategy the MPAA is using in court, and I think a judge and jury might just see justice in that, or at least a reason not to throw the case out.
I think this ought to net a nice award for the author.
When you think about it, SCO has lasted this long because it is like a pathogen that bends the organism that is the legal system to its intent, far beyond the realm of common sense: If they don't show the infringing code it is common sense that they ought not be able to argue beyond that. The MPAA also also exhibits pathogenic qualities; it sues its own customers for such outrageous sums that it is not only beyond common sense, you have to wonder if their worth is based more on legal games than actually what their members sell. Unless we take advantage of such amazing incidents as this one and use their own weapons against them, it will just continue. We now have a chance to stir up some talk about whether the MPAA is also over the top, and what to do about it.
Unless more more than one photo is used with computer vision algorithms to actually build a perspective (two or more eye view) this thing is only going to produce approximate measurements.. not good enough for anything worth using it for.
99.5% is also no good unless you don't really want to measure things accurately.
The example shown in the link shows a garage that is farther from you than the windows, and the windows are not directly in line of sight but actually off to the side a little.
I think it would really only be useful if you have a very high resolution digital camera and stand quite far from the building. But for closeup work you might as well have a ruler.
It would be useful for things you can't reach though, if you can get directly in line with it.
Unless more more than one photo is used with computer vision algorithms to actually build a perspective (two or more eye view) this thing is only going to produce approximate measurements.. not good enough for anything worth using it for.
99.5% is also no good unless you don't really want to measure things accurately.
The example shown in the link shows a garage that is farther from you than the windows, and the windows are not directly in line of sight but actually off to the side a little.
I think it would really only be useful if you have a very high resolution digital camera and stand quite far from the building. But for closeup work you might as well have a ruler.
It would be useful for things you can't reach though, if you can get directly in line with it.
I see, thank you for the details which are quite interesting. Certainly if the OS is completely unaware that sound is being generated by a given application then it won't know to temporarily disable voice recognition at that instant. But something tells me that we will see more of Vista branching out to monitor semi-external devices for rights monitoring. Also if OS commands are used to play the sound then it would know something is being played.
At any rate I think IE is the most dangerous vector due to ActiveX and automatically playing website sounds. It seems to me that if the PC is already owned the game is off, and it is too valuable as a zombie to visibly damage. Most people use their eyes most to deal with computers and audible response is mainly for entertainment and some GUI feedback, and I think this (and the overwhelming number of vulnerabilities in this area) is why MS failed to examine sound I/O as an attack vector. Though I would if I had 6 years and billions of dollars to do it...
No, that's not what I am saying at all. I didn't say it should mute anything.I am saying Vista should disable voice recognition when specified dangerous applications are outputting sound.
IE would be one such app. It would be more secure to do so when Skype is outputting sound too but that's up to you maybe. Heck someone could hijack your FM band and tell the entire office's Vista computers to delete their files I suppose (assuming each person is listening only to their computer and not to a centralized radio).
All I'm saying is that the voice recognition program should just reset itself when the OS is making other sounds, with the ability to specify only certain apps to ignore. As for the tuner, it still might trigger the recognition if it is playing from the same machine but that's up to you.
The OS can know *when* it outputs sound and *what* application is doing it (in collusion with the sound server on linux I suppose). Differentiation between voices is possible especially in terms of positioning sound sources but this may get expensive or require a cpu core just for that.
Voice recognition I think really has limited use but in particular it can be vital to handicapped users. They are not going to be running an FM tuner on their computer or a nearby radio if it interferes with their commands.
Now I don't know how voice recognition works on Vista, though I've tried it on OSX. I find it is quite difficult to actually get the round recognition window to disappear and that was quite annoying and should be fixed, but you can indeed pick whether you want an app to be recognized (it shows a dictionary per app IIRC). If Vista does not such thing and in fact allows any website to hijack a running voice recognition session that is indeed a major vulnerability and if Microsoft continues to blow it off, they will be contributing to the danger with potential liability.
Detection of whether a given sound is what was just emitted from the speaker may be very difficult, but it is relatively easy in terms of timing. So long as the system knows how much lag time is present in the system, it should be possible to disable detection of all sound that is being played at the same time (i.e. basically turn off the mic then). Nobody expects voice recognition to work when music or other sounds are playing, and the system, whether Vista or OS X, ought to be able to disable voice recognition instantaneously when sound output is generated.
The problem of course is that the computer next to you might suffer from the exploit since it doesn't know what sound your computer is generating, though this might be diminished by subtracting other sound to some extent via sidepointing mics or even better by just refusing to do dangerous commands like format or delete via voice recognition in the first place. There are gray areas that probably make total safety impossible but some common sense things including disabling all recognition during sound generation from explorer and wmp sound like a good place to start.
I read somewhere a study that said if enough wind power generators were installed in the U.S. to be significant in terms of percentage of power generation for the country, it would in fact likely have a measurable impact on climate. (some data modeling was done). I'd like to suggest that if the generators are also used to dry the air this factor might increase dramatically. If someone knows more about it or is involved in that project I'd like to hear about it. Maybe these new systems would reduce moisture but not reduce windspeed by as much as they would otherwise.
In the U.S. however you will be forced to pay more when you can get it and you will not be able to time shift. Or was he talking about some other network?
I just played with a Vista laptop for the first time (outside the front door of Bic Camera at Yurakucho Station, Tokyo). A woman with a mic was explaining Aero which looked nice. The ribbon in Word looked nice too and I was intrigued by the new folder explorer. Perhaps there is a lot more new in it but to tell you the truth, from what I could see I can do just fine without it and the DRM built into the OS is a very strong reason for me to stay far from it. I think my biggest impressions in the 2-3 minutes I played with it are:
- Translucent dialog boxes are pretty but harder to read - Word ribbon might be faster, but the time it takes for a dialog box to "fade-in" is very annoying - Half of the persistently visible widget boxes in the translucent vertical bar on the right side of the desktop said "service not available". I expect this kind of message will persist throughout the Vista user experience until you are numbed to it. - I played the three large demo videos. A pan across a seascape with much detail in the water currents was extremely noisy and horrible to look at.. I was wondering if it was DRM, processing time used up by Aero, over-compression, and/or a general lack of concern on the part of Microsoft for the end-user experience. - Interface is too much in your face. While Aero is intriguing I might be happy with just adding more features to XP. - Considering Mac OS X will have Jaguar imminently, I decided to get that instead. I could use a Vista desktop at work if necessary, and I might be forced to do so for compatibility and vulnerability updates at some time in the future, but it was not a jaw-dropping experience and not what I would I think enjoy for home use.
An interesting problem. I used to work in a major commercial photo licensing company. You would have a signed receipt with price based on usage, i.e. media, circulation, etc. Even so you would have trouble once in a while concerning conflicts (e.g. use by two companies in the same industry, unpaid use of photo in a corporate or internal presentation, or other claims). The photographer also might want to license photos directly, or a client wants to buy exclusive use, and confirmation has to be made. So imagine a slightly different photo being Creative Commons and then people pick up the mistake, and change the license. Now I am not an expert on CC but if it is like GPL of course if you can prove the timing of your copy then you may be safe in one sense but this does not mean you may not have people angry at you or even trying to stop you from using the photo in some other way. So if you are doing serious work I'd say you should confirm use with the author by email and save and print a copy of it.
On the other hand, the technical problem of proving when you copied something digital regardless of the liscense (GPL, CC, etc.) is a separate, interesting issue. It could be solved by establishing a trusted entity that provides a time-based computational service, returning an encrypted file that can be decrypted to display its metadata. The source text would include a GMT time stamp, the full text of the email and its headers, and a snapshot of the web page offering the media or perhaps a copy of the media with the license embedded in its metadata, plus a hash of the entire file thus created.
This information could be shared with other certifying authorities who could likewise take a snapshot of the relevant web page at the same time and perhaps just store a minimal amount of data such as the hash of the entire file that the first authority is storing. If possible the service ought to be free but it could offer a paid corporate service that provides reports proving clear licensing of all works used in a project.
This type of service would not necessarily solve all your problems, as there is a human element involved as noted above, but in particular if used in combination with a copy of a confirmation email from the content owner, should have a positive effect in establishing online offers of CC and other open licensed media.
It also might be used to prove that you are the owner of freely obtained media on CD/DVD at some time in the past, or even that you have legally copied content for fair use. For example if someone chose to rip his or her cassette tape or purchased CD/DVD collection to his computer, it might be very useful to have a free client application that can very quickly hash up the headers of all the files (not the entirety of the media, that would take too long) and you could upload the thus created digital documentation to a similar service as suggested above, which could either store the fact for you online or give you an encrypted token to prove when you did these rips and why. Personally it is a bit ugly to me that you would have to do this for your own media, but considering the attempts of some organizations to spy on your systems to determine license infractions, it might be a nice way to insulate yourself while also maintaining a private collection for the use of your friends and family. Such an application would be a way to proactively assert your rights and establish digital libraries (in the sense of the old fashioned library that would let you view film strips, videos and yes books). Perhaps it would even help realize legislation asserting the right to creating libraries of digital content.
Thanks for your careful replies. I read the Clay Shirky article, the comments to it, and your own article Something Awful. From someone who has never been to one of those sex clubs in SL you mention I can say that Harry Potter video is pretty gross!
Anyway, I understand a little better the accusations of collusion by the media, soft or outright bent figures from SL, and what Clay and you are saying.
I would like to concede/reply to your comments from the thread.
Tech is terrible - perhaps though if it started 3 years ago, lets you build/program your own world, and has a real ecommerce system I'd say you need to compare it to another system that has that. Graphically, sure it sucks compared to more advanced games (I don't have much experience on giant rpg sites lately though so will take your word for it). By web client I meant that it would be useful to have a way for people to see a facet of SL without a full client, i.e. sit in on an SL discussion or post messages/update objects easily. Actually I only really see SL in the long term as being an ecommerce and scripted objects platform that other worlds and the web can plug into. One problem is that Lindens are not IIRC tied to a real world currency, so I wouldn't necessarily want to get paid in Lindens instead of by PayPal right now. If they don't fix that I think they are in major trouble.
As for sinister figures, I concede whatever you and Shirky are saying however personally I was only looking at 20,000 concurrent users, which seemed a lot to me, and not the quoted 1 million+ which seemed pretty iffy. I would really like to see what the figures are with gambling and explicit content filtered out.
There are perhaps two things to consider, which is that this could conceivably be like the often quoted porn driving vhs sales thing, since it seems that industry has a lot of money and is always trying new technology. By this I mean that if SL has only 20,000 concurrent users and most are either customers or developers of "vice" content, SL has a very limited time to build on that and the press to get itself straightened out. If AOL people really are coming to SL that could save them, conceivably (though it is too hard I think to use right now). Personally I'm more interested in what some schools and manufacturers (IBM? Car manufacturers?) are thinking of doing in SL or elsewhere. I don't particularly care for SL over any other world, but think even 20,000 people, and the works that people have abandoned in SL, might be critical mass. Don't know. I often see small groups of people when I look at places, but it doesn't seem like a lot. I'm personally more interested in how big a market there might be for something I could build and sell in SL, and maybe there isn't one really. The statistics Linden Labs shows about ongoing transactions suggests that somebody is making money, I wonder what that is all about. Mainly SL seems really empty so maybe it is waiting for some other company to come along and do it better. There are some things I find interesting in it, like the way the surf relaxes me, but the difficulty of actually finding people or worthwhile content is so hard I think most people must quit. I found a couple of inscrutable games, and had a couple of nice conversations with people, but I expect most people like me don't want to spend money on SL and so are limited to wandering, wandering , wandering. Not much of a second life eh?
I see, thanks for the data. To me this all means... 1. 1/6 staying is bad. It indicates a big barrier to entry that needs to be lowered (say by providing a web client instead of requiring a big install, or by making it easier to get around and find people/interesting things which isn't easy yet). On the other hand, it also means there is a ton of room to grow. 2. Many new entries is a positive sign, unless there is some sinister data I don't know about that would normally be called effective PR or a growth curve. 3. You can say it's a newbie rush but the term "newbie" is slanted and you could just as well say they have made a breakthrough and now have to roll out more services quickly and help get people to add commercial content faster. Wasn't there a post about AOL joining? 4. As for the overall context of this thread, this does not mean it is a pyramid scheme at all, simply that SL is enjoying lots of new entries at the moment, and has a lot of work to do. 5. In addition I wouldn't say it depends on newbies but rather that the temporary statistic is that most people have joined in the past 4 months. And at what point do they stop being newbies? Isn't 4 months online not a newbie anymore for a community like this? 6. I say temporary because obviously an exponential trend in new members is unsustainable. Either most people will no longer be newbies, and a stable membership will exist at some point due to improved content and services, or for some reason the current 2.9 million users will dry up and Linden won't be able to pay their bills. I'd need to see more info on what's happened to the 1 million people who logged in over the past 2 months. I see 20,000 people online now at about 9pm EST on Thursday which doesn't sound too great.. and I wonder where they all are. I think they need more transparency about that. Is that 20,000 developers building great stuff or 20,000 newbies bumbling around?
I see claims in this thread that SL is a closed system depending on new members joining and therefore a pyramid scheme.
Perhaps the company running SL needs new members to buy land but SL as an environment I think fits none of the above claims.
The goods in SL can connect to the Internet outside of the game. For example you can stream music from your own web server to a radio in the game.
I am currently designing a product to sell in-game that has real value to people not just entertainment and I know there are people who want it.
I won't say anything else since I want to be first with this specific product but believe there will be more and more of this.. which should make SL superior to other communities despite what I hear about inferior clients for now.
Funny though, when I signed up I was supposed to get free Lindens (money) but the signup broke (hit the back button doh) and lost the money. Haven't bought any land or anything else yet though have spent over $50 in paying Internet cafes to use their machines to access (which I want to break that habit, it's silly). I think it is more about my not liking credit cards, since if the cafe I am in right now said I could buy some nice land for $50 I would plop the money down.
So I directly refute your FUD claim that goods sold in SL have no value, and that SL is a closed system. I also believe that it could be greatly improved. They are adding mono (open source.Net) to it now too, and you will begin to see I think more interesting connections to technologies not currently in-game. I just saw an alpha of something that uses Google sketchup. If it becomes easy to import 3D models then you will see a lot more advertising and links to the outside world. Not necessarily good but we'll see.
I have no idea about how the company that runs SL makes money but it is naive to imagine that people are constantly quitting and that most users are newbies. I find that is not true either.
As for pyramid scheme, let's not be dumb. The idea for something like SL goes back a long time (think snowcrash, etc.) and has little to do with a pyramid scheme. Also there are things that look like some kind of scheme but are not. Take OSS for example. Do you get more out of it than you put in?
There is only one real problem with SL so far that I have seen. It is overwhelmingly full of nasty (okay let's say mature) content. I couldn't recommend a kid to use it because of that, though maybe the open source client will quickly be changed to allow a lock on that. If you search for places or events it is mostly casinos, sex this and that, make money quick, etc. I also see no policing, for example I experimented with one to see if I could make money on a questionnaire thing to buy some land and not actually use my own cash. After answering oodles and oodles of questions I discovered it requires you to actually buy things.
Another problem perhaps is that I am a bit worried about privacy. On the other hand now that the client is open source, perhaps it will become possible to create encrypted channels.
Anyway it will get better and some people will lose money. For example I saw a new mall and talked to the owner about getting space. I think $300/week for a small space is just crazy.
But if it turns out to really become relevant to the world (and not just experimentally as it is now) you will have to eat your words. Incidentally I just saw two requests for commercial bids from NASA for programming simulations of current projects. I think you ought to study SL a bit before putting it down as a scam. It certainly is not a closed system, and while it has room for improvement, it has enough options now with open clients that it can grow. Big companies are interested in it so it has a certain critical mass. I have not spent a ton of time in SL and find its scripting documentation to suck, but I do not see a reason to call it a pyramid scheme.
I think one other problem though is that land is too expensive,
Yes but I happen to know one very well respected surgeon at least (my father) played classical music and opera in the operating room. The operations required people to stand up for many hours under high concentration. Presumably the music helped as none of the cancer patients ever died on the table. I doubt a doctor of the future would play music on a mission critical imaging device but who knows.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting problem, even if talk about an interplanetary internet has been around for years.
There is a major difference with earthbound networks in that you may need to include a good amount of dynamic knowledge about things like orbit, revolution, local time, and the region of space a node is operating in. If the Earth is on the other side of the sun you presumably need to have nodes at trojan points - or maybe just one at the north or south solar pole - to relay. That point will be subject to solar storms too - more if you want it to be closer to earth and a shorter light speed hop. Maybe the routers need to know system geometry then, and be able to calculate when a station will be facing its antenna towards it by the time the signal it send reaches it.
Perhaps Martin Lo's Genesis project would be useful for mapping slow paths for routers (all routers will be spacecraft in motion somewhere) which will require minimum power to keep them on a predictable course. Seeding his interplanetary superhighway (a major discovery that the solar system is filled with tube-like paths where gravity likes slow ships) with a sequence of router-equipped craft, might be the way we are going to roll out this network. The routers closest to earth will be more advanced and with the latest information about near-earth network and space activity, so perhaps the protocol should include the ability to be configured to weight favorably craft that are closer Earth for example.
Though Vint or somebody has said they could run IP over carpet static, the only thing I can see that might be carried over is the idea of a URL and a domain name. But even so, for a spaceship moving between two planets, you don't really want to force it to logically belong to a planet. More like having it belong to a virtual controller (like the router for a fleet of satellites) that itself gets passed to different stations' jurisdictions if the fleet moves. I guess the problem I have is that it sounds like they are starting with the idea of an Internet that works hierarchically or like mobile phone cells. But then you have to go "roaming" when you move. In space, everything moves! And time? How can we even tell time when the earth is dragging its frame around with it. Okay we can all standardize on the sun or a star or something. It is so complicated that the only thing for sure is when that machinery gets far away it will be a pain to mess with it. This all has to be completely reburnable, reconfigurable, and idiot proofed so we don't run the risk of bricking the network before we figure out how to get it to work. This might be a good time to start thinking of how to control communications with a solar orbit spanning radio telescope, or those nanosatellite fleets people were experimenting with recently.
Here's a question. If Linux was a single company's product like MS Windows is of Microsoft, couldn't legal measures be taken against the convicted monopoly arch-rival from this sort of action? That is, why can't the SCO/MS strategy of FUD without providing evidence be outlawed? Maybe we need a new law to outlaw FUD, especially when it comes from a convicted monopoly. Something to cut through the legal games.
Certainly the totally opaque Novell deal is not clear at all. That journalists and publications who publish such drivel are even respected is also bizarre to me.
It seems that as governments of individual jurisdictions switch more and more to Linux, they will get more tired of FUD and perhaps even lean toward outlawing or defanging such unfounded threats. If so that would mean Balmer's tactics amount to rushing to spread as much FUD as possible before this window closes.
To me, linux is already a key part of the U.S.' national infrastructure. Why can't it do anything to muzzle this crap? FUD is bad for the economy.
Then the high speed access or HDSPA if they have it will only work with iTunes...
That is how it seems to be happening in Japan. Ultra high speed but all you want plans only work if you access through iMode (pay services) and high speed access is marketed as the way to get music and video. (well in addition to digital terrestrial broadcast, though from what I've seen it's not so impressive content-wise).
If you want to access an arbitrary Internet site you are going to the poorhouse. I want to get an HDSPA card for a new mac laptop but it might just be too expensive.
A nice choice is the little PHS Willcom WinCE phone with real pushbuttons. Not as big a keyboard as other models in the line and the screen is tiny, but it has a GUI and apparently you can add arbitrary apps. PHS network is cheaper too.
Call me when the iPhone comes with an all you can eat IP connectivity plan at hdspa speeds and embed a limited range airport in it (say within 10 feet) and give me real pushbuttons, and I'm there!
Though not familiar with the project, I'm impressed that the project with by far the most errors (Cardinal), indicating I assume that the least work has been done on it, is still so close to YARV - only 2-4 times slower in a couple tests.
I can't tell if those fast tests are so trivial that they offer little chance of further speedup, or whether YARV, which has had speed as a goal, is not going to be so much faster than a Parrot-based implementation once it (Cardinal) gets into working on optimization.
Anyone interested in providing some information on where the YARV performance comes from and whether Cardinal is likely to approach it more closely and farther across the board in the tests?
Consider how much of gross planetary output
- in natural resources, percentage of human lives, economically measurable quantities, and generated works -
is spent on different activities
- basic survival, culture, self realization, science, exploration, relaxation, education, religion, wasted time, playing of games like politics/war/finance -
and with what percentage of success. We still make little use of plentiful solar energy and the global economic system is based on limited fossil fuels.
Very little goes to science/exploration today. A small bit of that goes to seti/astronomy/rocketry. Very few human beings can build a radio telescope.
=> So it should be *very* easy to accelerate things and shorten the time it takes to view a planet up close, develop new propulsion, investigate our own planets, and even do an astronomical survey of an appreciable part of the sky.
We are most likely wasting undiscovered Einsteins who have grown or failed to grow in terrible economic conditions.
==> Devise and execute individual or group plans that will even a little change the balance of assigned resources and boost physics, astronomy, exploration, etc. The fraction of planetary output assigned to these things is so small that even a little bit ought to help. It is a matter of a little change in priorities.
I've been wondering recently with people talking about race in games why the games can't be adjustable. Although I've most recently played games on the Wii that seem to let you create different race individuals, apparently many do not let you do that. It would seem useful to allow the user to adjust things to look like his or her community, or like a different community. It could be done by parents, or just for fun. When I was a kid we had Wizardry II (Apple ][) and IIRC you could select Dungeons and Dragons style races like dwarf, mage, etc. Ultima and the rest of the genre too. I didn't realize games created roles for kids to look up to, but certainly I was looking in the Wii selection for faces that I wanted to be. I had lots of fun doing it but actually they ought to provide more combinations, it took a while to find one I really enjoyed "being".
Thank you again for your very informative replies. Certainly a lot of information I did not know about rules for seeking statutory damages, what the phrase "nasty letter" means in legal circles, etc. (not that I'm an expert on nasty letters but I didn't know that).
Without trying the software myself I'd expect it would take the organization maybe $5K to build similar functionality that meets all their needs, it is actually not so easy to find exactly what you want.
I do admit a feeling that software designed to make work easier or that enables activities like blog PR does provide value continually when run that is separable from the content of the posts themselves. This may not be borne out by current law. It is my guess that a business model for private software developers to sell on the Internet source code is not greatly protected by the law, or if it is then most developers don't know how to take advantage of it. Being generally incensed at the RIAA and MPAA anyway I would find it poetic justice to see them bitten, and considering the number of page views it would somewhat parallel the way they already make money from performances of music/film.
But of course, much of this is a gut feeling and of course that is why there are lawyers, to separate that from the reality of a legal code. Not withstanding the maxim of not to get legal advice on slashdot, I appreciate your clarity and taking the time to respond in depth. I'm not going to beat a dead horse anymore, but I do hope the author has a lawyer and is able to get paid for his work.
Thanks again,
Matt Rosin
Sorry. I contracted them both to MAFIAA and then just said MPAA for some silly reason. Perhaps RIAA would make better sense here but same goes for both I believe. Customers get to judge the artistic strength of an author, not the legal system, so it should not matter if you write software, a novel, or a song. It is my impression that the two organizations do similar things to similar people.
P.S. Personally I think there is a major problem with the existence of an industry association like the MPAA and it being able to generate limitless lawsuits against customers on behalf of its members. I say Sony or Toshiba EMI ought to be required to do the suing, and see if they really have the stomach to do it and get caught out.
As it is now, the MPAA appears to exist for the sake of making lawsuits; its profit is based on the success of the lawsuits, and it is presumably paid by its members the startup cash needed to hire all those lawyers, to generate enough income to eventually make the lawsuit engine self-sustaining. Sounds like Microsoft/Baystar and SCO doesn't it? Or a recent RAM patent company?
When Sony embeds a rootkit they get clobbered with bad PR, and when EMI's copy protection sucks they get clobbered. Conversely, when EMI considers removing all copy protection they get even more, positive, PR. But when the MPAA sues soccer moms, the record companies seem to be wearing some kind of armor. All the bad PR sticks to their stalking horse, the MPAA. (Which like JASRAC in Japan has been the number one impediment to online distribution.)
I say the MPAA is a menace to the public and serves no purpose other than to make frivolous lawsuits on the behalf of big record companies while insulating them from the media. It does not exist to protect authors at all, but rather seeks to cause enough mayhem to scare people from trying other distribution mechanisms, by grabbing "rights" that never previously existed for music before the digital age. This is remembered well by anyone who grew up with cassettes or 8 track tapes.
I posted elsewhere in this thread that the MPAA's logic should be used against them to generate a huge award for the theft and performance of the Forest Blog software for a potentially huge number of page views. This model, in which a software author is granted the same rights as a music author, turns software downloading and web page views into something much more insidious than trite torrent sharing, in a legal sense. So I think now is a good time not only to make a legal case against the MPAA, but in fact to start aiming at them with big cannons like RICO and public opinion. Let the record labels do their own dirty work and pay for it individually when their customers get mad.
One respondent to TFA suggested using the MPAA's own logic against them in court. Another suggested suing them in small claims court which is apparently much easier.
I submit that a software author is the same as a music CD author on an artistic level, perhaps more so since he does not have all the studio people to massage his work into something palatable.
If this artist is left on his own, he could make some cash in small claims court, or at least his 150 pound license fee if he is not the litigous sort perhaps.
However I think this is also a very good opportunity for a big guns lawyers supplied perhaps by the EFF to find the paper where the MPAA writes down its killer legal strategies, and tear it up into tiny pieces, much as IBM is doing to SCO.
Equate software to music. Equate running softare or viewing a webpage as a "performance" in the legal sense. Use MPAA rules. Since the license costs about $100, calculate based on a 300% markup over a $35 average MPAA cd price. The sum will be punitive damages for theft, plus the 300% of what the MPAA sues for a song, plus the price of a "performance" multiplied by the number of visits to any of the blog's pages, based on the evidence of the MPAA's server logs which is must produce in court. Although this sounds over the top, it is simply using the same non-common-sensical strategy the MPAA is using in court, and I think a judge and jury might just see justice in that, or at least a reason not to throw the case out.
I think this ought to net a nice award for the author.
When you think about it, SCO has lasted this long because it is like a pathogen that bends the organism that is the legal system to its intent, far beyond the realm of common sense: If they don't show the infringing code it is common sense that they ought not be able to argue beyond that. The MPAA also also exhibits pathogenic qualities; it sues its own customers for such outrageous sums that it is not only beyond common sense, you have to wonder if their worth is based more on legal games than actually what their members sell. Unless we take advantage of such amazing incidents as this one and use their own weapons against them, it will just continue. We now have a chance to stir up some talk about whether the MPAA is also over the top, and what to do about it.
That, or it is the power plant of an alien base hidden in the hollow shelf off the Vancouver coast. Or both.
Unless more more than one photo is used with computer vision algorithms to actually build a perspective (two or more eye view) this thing is only going to produce approximate measurements.. not good enough for anything worth using it for.
99.5% is also no good unless you don't really want to measure things accurately.
The example shown in the link shows a garage that is farther from you than the windows, and the windows are not directly in line of sight but actually off to the side a little.
I think it would really only be useful if you have a very high resolution digital camera and stand quite far from the building. But for closeup work you might as well have a ruler.
It would be useful for things you can't reach though, if you can get directly in line with it.
Unless more more than one photo is used with computer vision algorithms to actually build a perspective (two or more eye view) this thing is only going to produce approximate measurements.. not good enough for anything worth using it for.
99.5% is also no good unless you don't really want to measure things accurately.
The example shown in the link shows a garage that is farther from you than the windows, and the windows are not directly in line of sight but actually off to the side a little.
I think it would really only be useful if you have a very high resolution digital camera and stand quite far from the building. But for closeup work you might as well have a ruler.
It would be useful for things you can't reach though, if you can get directly in line with it.
I see, thank you for the details which are quite interesting. Certainly if the OS is completely unaware that sound is being generated by a given application then it won't know to temporarily disable voice recognition at that instant. But something tells me that we will see more of Vista branching out to monitor semi-external devices for rights monitoring. Also if OS commands are used to play the sound then it would know something is being played.
At any rate I think IE is the most dangerous vector due to ActiveX and automatically playing website sounds. It seems to me that if the PC is already owned the game is off, and it is too valuable as a zombie to visibly damage. Most people use their eyes most to deal with computers and audible response is mainly for entertainment and some GUI feedback, and I think this (and the overwhelming number of vulnerabilities in this area) is why MS failed to examine sound I/O as an attack vector. Though I would if I had 6 years and billions of dollars to do it...
No, that's not what I am saying at all. I didn't say it should mute anything.I am saying Vista should disable voice recognition when specified dangerous applications are outputting sound.
IE would be one such app. It would be more secure to do so when Skype is outputting sound too but that's up to you maybe. Heck someone could hijack your FM band and tell the entire office's Vista computers to delete their files I suppose (assuming each person is listening only to their computer and not to a centralized radio).
All I'm saying is that the voice recognition program should just reset itself when the OS is making other sounds, with the ability to specify only certain apps to ignore. As for the tuner, it still might trigger the recognition if it is playing from the same machine but that's up to you.
The OS can know *when* it outputs sound and *what* application is doing it (in collusion with the sound server on linux I suppose). Differentiation between voices is possible especially in terms of positioning sound sources but this may get expensive or require a cpu core just for that.
Voice recognition I think really has limited use but in particular it can be vital to handicapped users. They are not going to be running an FM tuner on their computer or a nearby radio if it interferes with their commands.
Now I don't know how voice recognition works on Vista, though I've tried it on OSX. I find it is quite difficult to actually get the round recognition window to disappear and that was quite annoying and should be fixed, but you can indeed pick whether you want an app to be recognized (it shows a dictionary per app IIRC). If Vista does not such thing and in fact allows any website to hijack a running voice recognition session that is indeed a major vulnerability and if Microsoft continues to blow it off, they will be contributing to the danger with potential liability.
Detection of whether a given sound is what was just emitted from the speaker may be very difficult, but it is relatively easy in terms of timing. So long as the system knows how much lag time is present in the system, it should be possible to disable detection of all sound that is being played at the same time (i.e. basically turn off the mic then). Nobody expects voice recognition to work when music or other sounds are playing, and the system, whether Vista or OS X, ought to be able to disable voice recognition instantaneously when sound output is generated.
The problem of course is that the computer next to you might suffer from the exploit since it doesn't know what sound your computer is generating, though this might be diminished by subtracting other sound to some extent via sidepointing mics or even better by just refusing to do dangerous commands like format or delete via voice recognition in the first place. There are gray areas that probably make total safety impossible but some common sense things including disabling all recognition during sound generation from explorer and wmp sound like a good place to start.
I read somewhere a study that said if enough wind power generators were installed in the U.S. to be significant in terms of percentage of power generation for the country, it would in fact likely have a measurable impact on climate. (some data modeling was done). I'd like to suggest that if the generators are also used to dry the air this factor might increase dramatically. If someone knows more about it or is involved in that project I'd like to hear about it. Maybe these new systems would reduce moisture but not reduce windspeed by as much as they would otherwise.
In the U.S. however you will be forced to pay more when you can get it and you will not be able to time shift. Or was he talking about some other network?
I just played with a Vista laptop for the first time (outside the front door of Bic Camera at Yurakucho Station, Tokyo). A woman with a mic was explaining Aero which looked nice. The ribbon in Word looked nice too and I was intrigued by the new folder explorer. Perhaps there is a lot more new in it but to tell you the truth, from what I could see I can do just fine without it and the DRM built into the OS is a very strong reason for me to stay far from it. I think my biggest impressions in the 2-3 minutes I played with it are:
- Translucent dialog boxes are pretty but harder to read
- Word ribbon might be faster, but the time it takes for a dialog box to "fade-in" is very annoying
- Half of the persistently visible widget boxes in the translucent vertical bar on the right side of the desktop said "service not available". I expect this kind of message will persist throughout the Vista user experience until you are numbed to it.
- I played the three large demo videos. A pan across a seascape with much detail in the water currents was extremely noisy and horrible to look at.. I was wondering if it was DRM, processing time used up by Aero, over-compression, and/or a general lack of concern on the part of Microsoft for the end-user experience.
- Interface is too much in your face. While Aero is intriguing I might be happy with just adding more features to XP.
- Considering Mac OS X will have Jaguar imminently, I decided to get that instead. I could use a Vista desktop at work if necessary, and I might be forced to do so for compatibility and vulnerability updates at some time in the future, but it was not a jaw-dropping experience and not what I would I think enjoy for home use.
It is the only both urgent and long-lasting thing they are likely to do.
An interesting problem. I used to work in a major commercial photo licensing company. You would have a signed receipt with price based on usage, i.e. media, circulation, etc. Even so you would have trouble once in a while concerning conflicts (e.g. use by two companies in the same industry, unpaid use of photo in a corporate or internal presentation, or other claims). The photographer also might want to license photos directly, or a client wants to buy exclusive use, and confirmation has to be made. So imagine a slightly different photo being Creative Commons and then people pick up the mistake, and change the license. Now I am not an expert on CC but if it is like GPL of course if you can prove the timing of your copy then you may be safe in one sense but this does not mean you may not have people angry at you or even trying to stop you from using the photo in some other way. So if you are doing serious work I'd say you should confirm use with the author by email and save and print a copy of it.
On the other hand, the technical problem of proving when you copied something digital regardless of the liscense (GPL, CC, etc.) is a separate, interesting issue. It could be solved by establishing a trusted entity that provides a time-based computational service, returning an encrypted file that can be decrypted to display its metadata. The source text would include a GMT time stamp, the full text of the email and its headers, and a snapshot of the web page offering the media or perhaps a copy of the media with the license embedded in its metadata, plus a hash of the entire file thus created.
This information could be shared with other certifying authorities who could likewise take a snapshot of the relevant web page at the same time and perhaps just store a minimal amount of data such as the hash of the entire file that the first authority is storing. If possible the service ought to be free but it could offer a paid corporate service that provides reports proving clear licensing of all works used in a project.
This type of service would not necessarily solve all your problems, as there is a human element involved as noted above, but in particular if used in combination with a copy of a confirmation email from the content owner, should have a positive effect in establishing online offers of CC and other open licensed media.
It also might be used to prove that you are the owner of freely obtained media on CD/DVD at some time in the past, or even that you have legally copied content for fair use. For example if someone chose to rip his or her cassette tape or purchased CD/DVD collection to his computer, it might be very useful to have a free client application that can very quickly hash up the headers of all the files (not the entirety of the media, that would take too long) and you could upload the thus created digital documentation to a similar service as suggested above, which could either store the fact for you online or give you an encrypted token to prove when you did these rips and why. Personally it is a bit ugly to me that you would have to do this for your own media, but considering the attempts of some organizations to spy on your systems to determine license infractions, it might be a nice way to insulate yourself while also maintaining a private collection for the use of your friends and family. Such an application would be a way to proactively assert your rights and establish digital libraries (in the sense of the old fashioned library that would let you view film strips, videos and yes books). Perhaps it would even help realize legislation asserting the right to creating libraries of digital content.
Dear Chris,
Thanks for your careful replies. I read the Clay Shirky article, the comments to it, and your own article Something Awful. From someone who has never been to one of those sex clubs in SL you mention I can say that Harry Potter video is pretty gross!
Anyway, I understand a little better the accusations of collusion by the media, soft or outright bent figures from SL, and what Clay and you are saying.
I would like to concede/reply to your comments from the thread.
Tech is terrible - perhaps though if it started 3 years ago, lets you build/program your own world, and has a real ecommerce system I'd say you need to compare it to another system that has that. Graphically, sure it sucks compared to more advanced games (I don't have much experience on giant rpg sites lately though so will take your word for it). By web client I meant that it would be useful to have a way for people to see a facet of SL without a full client, i.e. sit in on an SL discussion or post messages/update objects easily. Actually I only really see SL in the long term as being an ecommerce and scripted objects platform that other worlds and the web can plug into. One problem is that Lindens are not IIRC tied to a real world currency, so I wouldn't necessarily want to get paid in Lindens instead of by PayPal right now. If they don't fix that I think they are in major trouble.
As for sinister figures, I concede whatever you and Shirky are saying however personally I was only looking at 20,000 concurrent users, which seemed a lot to me, and not the quoted 1 million+ which seemed pretty iffy. I would really like to see what the figures are with gambling and explicit content filtered out.
There are perhaps two things to consider, which is that this could conceivably be like the often quoted porn driving vhs sales thing, since it seems that industry has a lot of money and is always trying new technology. By this I mean that if SL has only 20,000 concurrent users and most are either customers or developers of "vice" content, SL has a very limited time to build on that and the press to get itself straightened out. If AOL people really are coming to SL that could save them, conceivably (though it is too hard I think to use right now). Personally I'm more interested in what some schools and manufacturers (IBM? Car manufacturers?) are thinking of doing in SL or elsewhere. I don't particularly care for SL over any other world, but think even 20,000 people, and the works that people have abandoned in SL, might be critical mass. Don't know. I often see small groups of people when I look at places, but it doesn't seem like a lot. I'm personally more interested in how big a market there might be for something I could build and sell in SL, and maybe there isn't one really. The statistics Linden Labs shows about ongoing transactions suggests that somebody is making money, I wonder what that is all about. Mainly SL seems really empty so maybe it is waiting for some other company to come along and do it better. There are some things I find interesting in it, like the way the surf relaxes me, but the difficulty of actually finding people or worthwhile content is so hard I think most people must quit. I found a couple of inscrutable games, and had a couple of nice conversations with people, but I expect most people like me don't want to spend money on SL and so are limited to wandering, wandering , wandering. Not much of a second life eh?
I see, thanks for the data. To me this all means...
1. 1/6 staying is bad. It indicates a big barrier to entry that needs to be lowered (say by providing a web client instead of requiring a big install, or by making it easier to get around and find people/interesting things which isn't easy yet). On the other hand, it also means there is a ton of room to grow.
2. Many new entries is a positive sign, unless there is some sinister data I don't know about that would normally be called effective PR or a growth curve.
3. You can say it's a newbie rush but the term "newbie" is slanted and you could just as well say they have made a breakthrough and now have to roll out more services quickly and help get people to add commercial content faster. Wasn't there a post about AOL joining?
4. As for the overall context of this thread, this does not mean it is a pyramid scheme at all, simply that SL is enjoying lots of new entries at the moment, and has a lot of work to do.
5. In addition I wouldn't say it depends on newbies but rather that the temporary statistic is that most people have joined in the past 4 months. And at what point do they stop being newbies? Isn't 4 months online not a newbie anymore for a community like this?
6. I say temporary because obviously an exponential trend in new members is unsustainable. Either most people will no longer be newbies, and a stable membership will exist at some point due to improved content and services, or for some reason the current 2.9 million users will dry up and Linden won't be able to pay their bills. I'd need to see more info on what's happened to the 1 million people who logged in over the past 2 months. I see 20,000 people online now at about 9pm EST on Thursday which doesn't sound too great.. and I wonder where they all are. I think they need more transparency about that. Is that 20,000 developers building great stuff or 20,000 newbies bumbling around?
I see claims in this thread that SL is a closed system depending on new members joining and therefore a pyramid scheme.
.Net) to it now too, and you will begin to see I think more interesting connections to technologies not currently in-game.
Perhaps the company running SL needs new members to buy land but SL as an environment I think fits none of the above claims.
The goods in SL can connect to the Internet outside of the game. For example you can stream music from your own web server to a radio in the game.
I am currently designing a product to sell in-game that has real value to people not just entertainment and I know there are people who want it.
I won't say anything else since I want to be first with this specific product but believe there will be more and more of this.. which should make SL superior to other communities despite what I hear about inferior clients for now.
Funny though, when I signed up I was supposed to get free Lindens (money) but the signup broke (hit the back button doh) and lost the money. Haven't bought any land or anything else yet though have spent over $50 in paying Internet cafes to use their machines to access (which I want to break that habit, it's silly). I think it is more about my not liking credit cards, since if the cafe I am in right now said I could buy some nice land for $50 I would plop the money down.
So I directly refute your FUD claim that goods sold in SL have no value, and that SL is a closed system. I also believe that it could be greatly improved. They are adding mono (open source
I just saw an alpha of something that uses Google sketchup. If it becomes easy to import 3D models then you will see a lot more advertising and links to the outside world. Not necessarily good but we'll see.
I have no idea about how the company that runs SL makes money but it is naive to imagine that people are constantly quitting and that most users are newbies. I find that is not true either.
As for pyramid scheme, let's not be dumb. The idea for something like SL goes back a long time (think snowcrash, etc.) and has little to do with a pyramid scheme. Also there are things that look like some kind of scheme but are not. Take OSS for example. Do you get more out of it than you put in?
There is only one real problem with SL so far that I have seen. It is overwhelmingly full of nasty (okay let's say mature) content. I couldn't recommend a kid to use it because of that, though maybe the open source client will quickly be changed to allow a lock on that. If you search for places or events it is mostly casinos, sex this and that, make money quick, etc. I also see no policing, for example I experimented with one to see if I could make money on a questionnaire thing to buy some land and not actually use my own cash. After answering oodles and oodles of questions I discovered it requires you to actually buy things.
Another problem perhaps is that I am a bit worried about privacy. On the other hand now that the client is open source, perhaps it will become possible to create encrypted channels.
Anyway it will get better and some people will lose money. For example I saw a new mall and talked to the owner about getting space. I think $300/week for a small space is just crazy.
But if it turns out to really become relevant to the world (and not just experimentally as it is now) you will have to eat your words. Incidentally I just saw two requests for commercial bids from NASA for programming simulations of current projects. I think you ought to study SL a bit before putting it down as a scam. It certainly is not a closed system, and while it has room for improvement, it has enough options now with open clients that it can grow. Big companies are interested in it so it has a certain critical mass. I have not spent a ton of time in SL and find its scripting documentation to suck, but I do not see a reason to call it a pyramid scheme.
I think one other problem though is that land is too expensive,
Yes but I happen to know one very well respected surgeon at least (my father) played classical music and opera in the operating room. The operations required people to stand up for many hours under high concentration. Presumably the music helped as none of the cancer patients ever died on the table. I doubt a doctor of the future would play music on a mission critical imaging device but who knows.