When I do it crashes the whole SL Client, if I try to login from last location it screws up and crashes until I tell it to go to a PG area…

One respected Australian resident argued that Conroy was going after SL to make his regulatory proposals more acceptable to the senate. I searched the Senate Hansard and found zero, zip, nada mentions of SL in the debates. When I widened my search to the House of Representatives and parliamentary committees I did find a not very serious exchange some years ago in an estimates committee (a process for scrutinising the budget and the performance of government and semi-government agencies) where ABC Island came up and Conroy expressed some not very serious interest in the avatar name used by the ABC chief executive.

Estimates is a fairy brutal process where a minister can be before a committee for up to 12 hours at a stretch and they tend to get light-hearted very quickly when they get the chance. That is the totality of the parliament’s awareness of SL.

We are still a fairly small pond. We may even fit into Philip’s terrarium.

those who think , vr toys and virtual action figures and barbiedolls should be immune to debate or any thoughts beyond those of a few programmers in california, or their bankers are the true “insert insulting word”

forcing the reality of virtuality out into the light of day by democratic means is no problem.

it should be the norm, the fact its treated as abnormal, shows the true problems.

These are all the proper subject of government regulation in a liberal democratic civil society under the rule of law — which is the case for Australia.

I think it’s great that people can propose through the democratic, elected legislative process of representative government ideas for dealing with the huge number of challenges produced by the Internet, social media, and virtual worlds, given their huge capacity for destruction of economies, objective news, free speech, protection of minors, and morals.

These are all legitimate areas of democratic governments and have always been throughout time.

People who can make the case for the good uses of virtual worlds, or the extention of the protections of free speech affordable in democratic Australia ought to make those arguments through the liberal and democratic process of fact-based scientific peer-reviewed studies, parliamentary hearings, advocacy by interest groups, free media coverage, etc.

What they should not be advocating is that “Philip should get the electricity to Australia shut off unless they allow his hedonic nihilist game to play on their territory.”

That sort of thing opens up entire aveues of questioning about the true nature of virtual worlds and whether they are in fact sinister hijackers of legitimate and democratic sovereignty.

If, in the process of this democratic debate about something that only a proposal and a legislative draft about regulation of said virtual worlds, that the world of SL finds that it is banned from schools, let’s say, then those who found themselves in the minority, and felt that schools should be able to access BDSM clubs and other objectionable content inappropriate for age groups or mass audiences, will then have to concede that they “lost this one” and have to go back to lobbying for the right to everyone, including themselves, to be able to have the right to see, oh, I dunno, Joshua Nightshade swap spit with Pathfinder Linden. Or whatever it is they feel is edifying for the next generation.

We shouldn’t construe their loss in this particular democratic legislative battle to regulate virtual worlds to be “censorship” or “draconian control of the Internet” or the other things that hysterics have invoked, which only lets us know how discredited their cause is, as it has been false.

-ls/cm