Residents of Second Life can now become cash buyers for land and property in their virtual world.
By stepping up to the Ukash terminals located in the Bulido Money Service outlets in the phenomenally successful virtual world, the millions of Second Lifer residents can now use Ukash cash vouchers to get Linden Dollars, the official Second life currency.
Second Life residents will be able to buy items virtually with Linden Dollars -- the currency of the virtual world -- or they can connect directly from there to www.emporioarmani.com, his recently launched online store for non-virtual vestments.
"HBO purchased the North American television rights," Gayeton e-mails me. "They have decided to first submit it for an Oscar in the Animated Short Subject category." It'll soon be screened in a Los Angeles theater to meet the Academy's qualifications for nomination. "They are then hoping to premiere it at Sundance. It will probably screen next spring on HBO."
Tech-savvy Baltic state Estonia is to open an embassy in the Internet fantasy world Second Life, joining the likes of Sweden and the Maldives, the foreign ministry said Friday.
"The virtual embassy will be located in the Second Life website, that has nearly 10 million registered users and already hosts a virtual site of Sweden," Marten Kokk, deputy chancellor at the ministry, told AFP.
At this weekend's Second Life Community Convention, Philip Rosedale--founder of Second Life creator Linden Lab--ambitiously declared, as he often does, that "this is something that everybody on Earth is going to use" and that the virtual world will be "bigger than the Web."
It's that disconnect between enraptured mass-market idealism and a 'wait, don't overhype us!' cautiousness that makes the current state of Second Life somewhat difficult to grasp. If anything, the negative press about supposedly fruitless corporate marketing efforts and overhype in Second Life has energized enthusiasts, made them eager to focus on progress.
Purbick says that despite doing a lot of "reaching out" in Second Life, petitions and protests by in-worlders are still commonplace, owing to issues like changes in economic governance, losses by users when land efforts are terminated, the limits of technology, and even things like the addition of voice, which many Second Life residents didn't want.
"Linden Lab is a bottle-neck: we're trying to get out of the way. We're moving to let the users create the software as well as the content. We are moving towards a much more federated structure," Purbick says.
While Linden Lab does not offer an online gambling service, Linden Lab and Second Life Residents must comply with state and federal laws applicable to regulated online gambling, even when both operators and players of the games reside outside of the US. And, because there are a variety of conflicting gambling regulations around the world we have chosen to restrict gambling in Second Life as described in a revised policy which is posted in the Knowledge Base under “Policy Regarding Wagering in Second Life”.
A Pennsylvania judge has ruled that Linden Lab’s terms of service for Second Life residents are not legally binding, according to court papers filed on Wednesday.
“Linden presents the TOS on a take-it-or-leave-it basis,” he wrote. “In effect, the TOS provide Linden with a variety of one-sided remedies to resolve disputes, while forcing its customers to arbitrate any disputes with Linden.”
“The arbitration clause is not designed to provide Second Life participants an effective means of resolving disputes with Linden. Rather, it is a one-sided means which tilts unfairly, in almost all cases, in Linden’s favor,” Robreno added.
I'd been working with the object spawning directives in the scripting language. I'd also discovered that I could make an object very small (less than an inch in diameter), and very transparent (virtually invisible). It struck on me that I could make a weapon of mass destruction and do it very cheaply. It worked like this: a tiny invisible floating grenade that would explode into dozens of invisible tiny fragments flying outward spherically at maximum velocity and doing maximum damage and then immediately teleport itself to another random location in the simulator. It would be undetectable, unstoppable, and lethal: The perfect killing machine. It could only be stopped by me shouting the keyword: STOP!
Linden Lab, the creators of the popular virtual world Second Life, has announced the acquisition of technology from Windward Mark Interactive, a graphics technology firm founded in 2003 by five Harvard University students looking for “a better way to create real-time worlds.”
As part of the acquisition, Linden Lab adds that it will acquire the developer's atmospheric rendering technology WindLight, and Nimble, a realistic 3D cloud simulator, as well as associated intellectual property and interests. The company further notes that once the acquisition is complete, it plans to make available Windward Mark’s graphics technology through open source channels, and integrate it into the Second Life Viewer software, bringing added visual fidelity to the popular MMO.
