It happened again tonight. This guy I know "jokingly" asked me if I knew of an exploit that "we" could use to take advantage of the gold-farming situation in Second Life. Seems he'd read a magazine article about how some "creative" folks were turning Linden dollars into real dollars, and he wanted a piece of the action somehow. I tried to discourage him by explaining the reality of the situation-- that his idea was completely unethical (read fraud), probably illegal and bound to attract the attention of the FBI and/or Secret Service.
Does he take the hint? No.
He keeps going on about how we'd give a third of it to charity (like this makes the unethical behaviour "okay" somehow?), split the other two thirds between us-- and it'd be so cool and edgy that we'd become urban legends, blah blah blah. The guy goes on for 10 minutes like this, trying to convince me I should see this his way. I finally turned my back on him and walked away.
He probably never realized he was being stupid and offensive.
Here's a lesson for the uninitiated:
1) There's a surprising number of asians who do NOT know martial arts.
2) There are black people who can't dance, rap or play basketball.
3) There are "hackers" who don't vandalize or break into web servers/computer systems.
Oh, yeah-- almost forgot:
4) If you want to make "mad cash," figure out how to hack the prevailing paradigm of the current business model instead of the technology (cf. Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail" and Seth Godin's "Free Prize Inside.")