NEWS: Sex, Laws, and Internet: When Second Life and Real Life Collide

Someone needs to get Jason Alexander a job already.

Or read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Actually, everyone should read Snow Crash whether they're intrested in this or not. Popularized the term "avatar," the Metaverse relates directly to such things as Second Life, and Google Earth bears a striking similarity to the Earth program.

Plus it has a katana weilding Cosa Nostra Pizza delivery guy/freelance hacker. How can you go wrong?

I read an article online a long time ago talking about property rights in online communities. Basically, it was looking at the way a lot of online games claim ownership of any content you insert into the game (say, for instance, the EULA of your favorite MMO probably says it owns all your characters). The conclusion it drew was that it was not some company being greedy, but was instead a way of protecting players of the game from suing one another. If the company owns all the content, then users have no claim against one another.

One of the big selling points of Second Life was that users retained ownership of their own created content, and it looks like that might finally be causing some problems.

I tried it.. just to see what the hoo-haa was about.

Absolutely HATED it. The 'game'play is fucking terrible.. Its choppy as hell, and everything takes ages to load..

And pretty much the whole thing is UGLY.