According to operators of Zorkmid and similar gambling systems, Linden Lab has backtracked and re-banned these devices. This move was not entirely unexpected, as it was unusual for Linden Lab to “approve” a gambling system in the first place.
| Jason Giglio (Gigs Taggart) is an open source hacker and virtual world programmer. His work with Second Life began in 2006 when it was still a proprietary platform, and has followed Second Life in its transformation from walled garden to Internet standard. |
| Rob Linden (Rob Lanphier) is the open source busybody at Linden Lab. With a strong background in open source and public participation, Rob excels at managing the issues surrounding a large open source project. |
| Adam Zaius (Adam Frisby) is a developer/technologist involved in the development of the OpenSim platform and the OGP Specifications. He’s also a partner in DeepThink which owns and operates the Azure & Nova Islands. |
| CG Linden is release manager at Linden Lab. His interests include development processes, release process automation, and code architecture. |
| Baba Yamamoto (James Neal) is head of R&D at Pleiades Consulting and is the President and co-founder of the Open Metaverse Foundation (OMF). |
| Zha Erwy (David Levine) is a researcher with IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center and a 23 year employee of IBM Research. David’s current work is focused on Virtual Worlds technology, and the long term implications of broadly deployed social collaboration tools. He works with Linden Lab’s Architecture Working Group, and IBM’s OpenSim team. |
| Tess Linden currently leads a talented globally distributed development team at Linden Lab that focuses on architectural changes supporting Second Life’s growing infrastructure. |
| IntLibber Brautigan (Michael Lorrey) is the CEO of estate and development company BNT Holdings, and chairman of the Ancapistan Capital Exchange. |
We now have independent confirmation, gambling is once again allowed in SL.
[07:32] Kaylee Linden: aargyle’s machines have been checked by our legal team and are not against tos
So as long as you have a braindead easy “game of skill” to cash out your casino’s chips, gambling is back.
I have to apologize to both Aargyle and SLNN. I had criticized SLNN for glowing coverage, thinking they had jumped the gun, and I called Aargyle a liar (indirectly), when expressing my disbelief that Linden Lab actually “approved” his game system.
Zara Linden unilaterally approves SL gambling scheme?
This came up on my playlist, I think it’s appropriate:
Don't need no fast buck lame duck profits for fun
Quick trick plans, take the money and run
We need long term, slow burn, getting it done
And some straight talking, hard working son of a gun.
Whatcha doin tonight, I got faith in our generation
Lets stick together and futurize our attitudes
I ain't lookin' to fight, but I know with determination
We can challenge the schemers who cheat all the rules
I just tried out this system. I paid 500 L$ and got 500 Z$. I played a few hands of blackjack on a fairly well written machine, betting 100 Z$ per hand. I got my balance up to 600 Z$ and decided to quit while I was ahead.
I went to the cash out game, it’s a matching game like concentration.
You pay 1 L$ to play, and you get a free Z$ for trying. You have 2 minutes to complete a 4×4 game of concentration. You’d have to be really really slow or bad at it to lose. If you lose the match game, you don’t lose and Z$. So you can play as many times as you need to until you cash out successfully. There is nothing at-risk in the game of skill.
(Image Credit: Jeff Kubina)
Here is the tentative schedule and speaker list for the open source track at SLCC:
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“It won’t be any permissions scheme, but rather fear, that will keep the grid masters lawful and in line. - Desmond Shang”
Not just fear, but the fact that the majority of people are honest.
A grocery store has no “technical protections” to prevent you from walking out without paying.
Sure, they could lock you in an airlock while they scan every item in your cart… but they don’t, because people are honest on the whole, and will pay for what they take off the shelves.
The old way was to have a clerk fetch everything from behind the counter. Sure it worked, but it didn’t scale.
Now that we are moving to an “open store” paradigm, we just have to get over the fact that people will shoplift a little, and that our remedy is going to be pretty much limited to bring legal action against the most egregious offenders.
I have my own taggy-cloudy-thingy-url on massively:
Why haven’t you registered yet? These people did!
I will be presenting an Open Source mini-track, sponsored by Pleiades Consulting. Hope to see you there.
We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids.
A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The ORDER is in the GRID. That is the Aneristic Principle.
My reply to her:
One may wonder why this would make all open source devs felons, even if they don’t infringe on anyone’s copyright. It has to do with the way the DMCA is written. Distributing a “device” that “primarily exists” to bypass the “effective copy protection” is a felony. This goes beyond merely using the device to actually infringe, distributing the tool is also a crime.
(Image: Klaus with K, from wikicommons)