"Remember that extracting wealth from the markets and transferring it from one account to another is not the same thing as 'profit', because it reduces the wealth available to actual productive investment - the corporate processes which do not and cannot change any faster than the time it takes to gear-up a factory or harvest a crop."

Nonsense. Say the price of oil changes; then all of a sudden all sorts of companies make or lose enormous amounts of money. Same thing with interest rates, the weather, natural disasters, international politics, etc. Here's an exercise for you: go buy stock in a pharmaceutical company that's waiting to get approval of a new drug. On principal, refuse to trade it even after the announcement comes out and the price spikes or plunges. Afterwards, you can give us all a nice lecture on how little you care for market liquidity.

For that matter, how do you determine a fair price to pay for your investments? Do you bring up a spreadsheet, model the company's discounted future earnings, and derive the price you're willing to buy and sell at? Of course not. You rely on the market to let you know what a fair price is. Without a liquid market, you might as well be buying stock from some guy who calls you up on the phone.

Of course, I'm going to guess that you or someone else is going to say, "But I just take the high road -- I invest in indexed mutual funds and don't try to beat the market." But what do you think the fund's traders are doing? Just sitting around all day and not trading? All you're doing is paying someone else to execute those same trades for you.

And you didn't even notice that it begins "For all intensive purposes..."

Au contraire. True, you can't walk up to a total stranger on the street and say "I'm going to kill you." This is, however, a normal and completely acceptable way to speak to your ex- (or current!) boyfriend, or really anyone you're on a first-name basis with. Nobody would bat an eye if they heard someone say such a thing in public. It appears, however, that school administrators are all send through some kind of indoctrination progress where they're taught that the internet automatically makes everything more sinister.

Not so. The point of standardized libraries isn't that they're better than third-party ones, but that there aren't competitors. That way all development goes into the same library which everyone is familiar with and there's no bizarre fragmentation to deal with.

The point is that, assuming we've got a guy following around Verizon trucks and pretending to be a tech, he's probably gone to the trouble of printing up some random ID card and laminating it. Since you don't even know what a Verizon ID card looks like it wouldn't even take any research on his part -- it'd just be a card with a downloaded Verizon logo on it, a photograph of him, and a fake name, that had been run through a laminating machine.

So you posit that only one ass at a time can occupy a particular location? If this is true, the implications for physics are asstounding!

The client hired the contractor to do some work for him. They had a real-world contract stating that he was to be paid with real money and was to retain full rights to his creations. From a legal standpoint this is no different from doing graphic design for a website, writing a book and selling limited rights to a publisher, etc. If you hire me to make a baseball bat for you and our contract states that I retain copyright to the design, and then you start selling knockoffs of it, you are not going to be successful in a lawsuit by stating that the official baseball rulebook says nothing about copyright. In other words, the rules of a virtual world do not somehow override the rules of the real world.

It wasn't Second Life that contracted him to do the work, it was someone with a Second Life account. I don't know anything about Second Life, but context seems to imply that there's no straightforward way to do a local backup of these things, i.e. apparently they can only reside on the Second Life servers. As such, the client did not have the right to delete them, because the creator had some rights to them.

A roughly analogous situation would involve your building a duplex (in real life) and selling half of it to me, and my setting the whole thing on fire one day.

Also, you seem to be confusing "imaginary property" with "intellectual property."

Intellectual property = literature, music, code, etc. Protected by copyright law for centuries in a reasonably well-defined system.

Imaginary property = "I have a property right to the record in the game's database that says that my character has 100,000 gold coins and 75 experience points, and if someone in any way indirectly causes and SQL UPDATE statement that affects that record, it's theft."

... to see how this thread will go. Soon it'll be flooded with debates about virtual property, whatever that means, and whether you should be able to prosecute someone for murdering your Elf Lord or whatever. The fact is that this guy was commissioned for an artistic project, retained full rights, and then had his property deleted. Take an entirely analogous situation: suppose that Ray Charles -- whose contract stated that he owned the original masters of all his recordings -- goes into a studio to record an album, and the studio subsequently throws said recordings away. Ray would have a pretty solid case, and so does this guy. This case has nothing to do with the MMO aspects of the incident; however, I can solidly say that at least half the population of Slashdot will *make* it about that, somehow.

When a stranger calls you up and tells you to do something on their authority, and you do it, you're not doing it because you trust him. After all, you don't even know him. You're doing it because you've been taught to take orders from anyone who speaks in complete sentences and has a manager he can put on the phone. These pranks don't erode my trust in other people any more than the thousands of Nigerian scam emails I get each day. They might, however, give me a little more courage to speak up when something doesn't make sense.

Precisely. If this guy is able to pull off this kind of crap without any ulterior motive other than his own amusement, imagine what someone actually *trying* to cause serious harm might be able to get away with. Remember, these "stupid" people are the ones who keep society running at a very fundamental level. If they can be convinced to drink strangers' pee and smash their own windows, is it really all *that* hard to imagine that hotel staff might be convinced to hand your room keys to burglars, or that fast food workers might be convinced into inadvertently poisoning their food?

Let's be clear: this has nothing at all to do with trust; it has to do with authority. The pranksters didn't call up and ask for a personal favor; each time they called up and pulled rank, relying on an appearance of professionalism to manipulate people lower in the hierarchy. If it only costs a few thousand dollars of damage here and there to erode the do-what-you're-told-and-don't-think-about-it culture that modern businesses encourage, it will be a bargain.

Unfortunately, these incidents will probably just lead to more training regarding the org chart rather than to an environment in which employees are not actively discouraged from questioning their managers' instructions.

Actually, Samuel Johnson, widely regarded as one of the greatest contributors to the English language, is famously quoted as saying "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

It seems to me that the first and heaviest place to go is medical research. Healthcare costs in the United States are so high that international health insurance plans generally just cover every country that isn't America. A huge part of the problem is the extreme expense associated with the opaque nature of the pharmaceutical industry. When it's actually profitable to run extremely long primetime commercials advertising certain medicines, it's blatantly obvious that there's something horrendously wrong with the system -- clearly the proper medication shouldn't depend on what you saw on TV last night.

Worse, a lot of drug research is publicly funded, but then the results wind up privatized. I'm guessing that if we got healthcare costs down on the supply end we wouldn't have so many problems with health insurance in this country.

I'm pretty sure that the reason that nobody on Slashdot agrees with you has more than a little to do with the fact that you're a "Married with Children" fan.

Admittedly, "The Beast with a Thousand Backs" or whatever it was called did more to creep me out than to amuse me. That being said, as a literary critic I can't agree with the assertion that a single second of any episode of "Family Guy" could be classified as "meh." For thousands of years comedy has not developed past Aristophanes -- indeed, fewer than a hundred years ago the great cultural historian Edith Hamilton compared the popular entertainment of the previous generation to his oeuvre. The cutaway scenes in Family Guy represent the first departure from classical comedy I've ever been aware of. In my (professional) estimation Seth McFarlane is the single most important writer in the English language since the time Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Blake.

So there's that.