[geeks] Ubuntu partition on Bootcamp Mac?

[Doug McLaren]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 09:35:53AM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
| On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 07:47:40AM -0500, Doug McLaren wrote:
| > | Sure, I'll pay REAL money to own VIRTUAL property!  Not.
| > So sunhelp.org (the domain name) is free?  Or is somebody else paying
| > for it?  Or do you think it's not `virtual' ?
| > Enquiring minds want to know! :)
| 
| I pay money every year for a domain name.  I don't pretend that a bunch
| of bits is a house in the middle of a field, or something. 8-)

My point is that your domain name is virtual, it's property, and yet
you pay real money for it.  There's not even any `real' property
behind it, like one would have if one bought stock.

But yeah, I wouldn't pay dollars for a house in SL.  Perhaps I might
though if I played the game, and thought that having the house would
make it more fun.

| And along the lines of a prior discussion - what happens when Linden
| starts charging property taxes?  WHAT THEN?

I thought they already did?  I thought that if you owned land in SL,
you had to pay a certain amount in tax for it each month.  In Linden
dollars, of course.

In any event, I don't see why people would debate taxing things in
things like SL.  The answer is obvious, and already done -- as long as
the money stays virtual, there is no tax.  The moment you exchange
virtual assets for real assets, that's a taxable event.  When your
real world stocks go up, you don't pay taxes on them, do you?  You pay
taxes when you realize the profit, not when you recognize it.

Now, at least in the US, people do pay property taxes, but it's
usually only for things like land or buildings.  You don't pay
property taxes on your computer or plasma TV.

(Now, business do pay property taxes on more of their property.)

I guess they could try to expand that to `virtual' land, but that
would just be ... weird.  What state/county is my virtual land in?  If
I'm paying property taxes to Texas (or whatever state Linden or their
server is in), why can't I find my property on a legal map?

Hopefully common sense will prevail and they'll leave things as-is.
Considering how `vague' the idea of taxing land in a game like SL is,
they'll probably never be able to work out how to do it, and so common
sense will prevail -- by accident, but hey, we take what we can get.

-- 
Doug McLaren, dougmc at frenzied.us
You can tune a piano, but you can't tuna fish.
You can tune a filesystem, but you can't tuna fish.
-- from the tunefs(8) man page