sl

For as long as I can remember many people have disliked the appearance of the huge red flashing Ban lines that appeared when a neighbor set the land to no entry. That's why most estates I know have always had a "no banlines" clause in the covenant, and one of the many small reasons people prefer estates. I understand the need for privacy to some people. I didn't really understand the need for the ugly walls. Well that's soon to be a thing of the past. In an upcoming viewer, LL has decided to ad a feature that has the ability to turn off the visibility of ban lines. If you like the ugly red lines, well you will still be able to see them, but for the rest of us they will soon be seeing the off button. Personally I love this feature. Like others, I've talked about it at past office hours. I'm happy that they have listened to residents on the issue and took action.
So long flashing red text walls!

I've always disliked the in-world Vampire game known as Bloodlines, and have been pretty vocal with my reasons for that. My main issue was that they sat around my freebie area and preyed on new players who didn't know better in order to get more "bites" under their name on the Bloodlines website. I've resorted to using a "BuffyBot", and have had long periods with scripts turned off in my shop to disable their huds to help the problem. I always hated doing that because doing so also meant I was disabling language translators and cutting off communication for a lot of players who aren't English speakers.

So today I was really happy to learn that the new huds they have released are starting to address these issues. The new update I'm particularly fond of is that they are no longer able to bite other players that are under 14 days old. I think this new rule may have been made in order to prevent their own players from creating alts to get in more bites. Whatever the reason, I'm happy with it and hope it helps. I'm going to turn my scripts back on and see if this new change has stopped my problem, or least made it much less noticeable.

We've seen the bans and the policies changes from Linden Lab, the
widespread financial scandals and all the many issues every stock
market has faced.

Right now, the financial sector is in a situation where every stock
exchange will stand up once every while presenting its achievements and
successes to the general public, a situation where we can still find
businesses willing to go public and launch their IPO, a situation where
some people will give a try at reviving public shells, or giving a
continuity to endangered companies.

We could go on like this for an undefined amount of time; months,
years. By operating in Second Life we're bound to Linden Labs and their
policies changes. At this point one could bring up other synthetic
worlds, but this won't be the main topic of this open letter.

Following up with the many issues we've had to deal with and using
our foresight, the VSTEX has been growing strong as a SRO
(Self-Regulatory Organization), with an extensive set of rules and
policies modeled after "real life" stock market rules, policies and
laws. That was a due answer to issues, but far away from being a
complete solution for the whole SL financial sector. { Read more }