[sldev] Re: "It's Just Not Possible"

[Random Unsung]

JB, I'm glad you concede that SL is not a mere web browser, but your other statement about IP and lawyers is merely one ideological take, one common to programmers, and not even one all programmers, especially moderates, agree on.
 
Number one, just because you can break into a house or steal the silver from the knife drawer technically doesn't mean this is morally and legally allowed. It isn't. And it's this decoupling of coders from the moral and legal suasion of real life that makes them continually morally and legally suspect. Locksmiths, architects, and doormen don't constantly inform their customers that their work is all hackable and pointless; they work to close the gaps. Software programmers should restore their accountability in the spirit of those real life professions.
 
I don't think you can call yourself scientific, as in the science of computing, by claiming something "can never be done". By that logic, you would never stream a virtual world in 3-D across 20,000 servers because "it can't be done".

Most people do not say their theft of a silver spoon in someone else's drawer is legitimate merely because it is always a drawer-pull away, because, well it is. Civilization is based on such scruples. I would urge you to restore them to your own field.
 
The RIAA is not futile. It's not perfect; perhaps it is not the final say. But it works to secure many people's IP, despite the constant claims that it is futile by such as yourself.

The existing legal and moral structures of thousands of years are perfectly adequate in their bare essentials to address the issue of creativity and theft and property. It is only in modern times that the progress was made in fact to establish property rights in the face of the tribe, the leader, the king. No need to go backwards to pre-Enlightenment eras just because we're on the Internet.
 
No one who has a stake in SL can be directed to "quit talking about programming metaphors". The making of metaphors, and indeed the entire debate about programming the world of Second Life, is not the solve provence of coders.
       
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