Second Life and Virtual Worlds
I got an in-world IM from Vivienne Daguerre about free copies of Hexagon 2.5, Bryce 7.0, and Daz Studio 4 Pro. The free copies will be available for the month of February. Vivienne did an evaluation of the software and offer.
See her article here: Hexagon 2.5, Bryce 7.0, and Daz Studio 4 Pro–Free!
I’ve downloaded the programs but haven’t taken the time to start playing with them.
You have probably heard enough about these laws. But, the depth of the deceit in these laws is escaping many of those writing about SOPA, PIPA, and OA. Some creators and merchants in SL actually support SOPA, PIPA, and/or OA, which I see as shooting their own foot.
It is reasonable to want to protect one’s intellectual property and ownership rights. It is a basic tenet of freedom to protect private property. Without such protection things devolve into anarchy and poverty. It’s a basic lesson of history.
One should research the facts and make up their mind if they are to support SOPA, PIPA, and OA or not. The best analysis and explanation of the proposed laws I’ve seen is Gwyneth Llewelyn’s article: SOPA/PIPA revisited. Please read the article. Gwyn has taken the intellectual step to reason beyond the surface of the issue and look at how the proposed laws can be misused.
SOPA and PIPA are not gone. We didn’t win. We were impressive. But, the politicians and the commercial interests involved have just stepped aside and allowed the wave of protest to pass. They are expecting us to go back to sleep.
Alec Rawls writes on Watt’s Up With That about Cass Sunstein, an Obama czar, wanting to use copyright laws to stop rumors and conspiracies, in other words to stifle free speech. The copyright laws in the US have the idea of fair use. That idea is to be modified so that you can’t write about ideas I espouse on this site. That would stop discussion of those rumors and ideas.
Harry Reid, the chairman of the US Senate, is rewriting PIPA to try and get it through the Senate and to the House. The bill is about getting the government to enforce copyright law for Hollywood. The most heinous aspect is the efforts to dispose of due process. The change is to make one guilty until they can prove their innocence. That’s an over simplification but…
ReadWriteWeb has an article on recent developments in the SOPA, Protect-IP, and OPEN bills. The Obama administration is saying they will not sign any bill that would allow censorship or changes in the domain naming system. Personally, I think that is smoke to quite the resistance these proposed laws are drawing from around the world.
[vimeo 31100268]
I will point out that this is the same administration that issued a ‘legal opinion’ telling government agencies they may ‘legally’ lie to avoid complying with Freedom of Information requests. See the LA Times editorial: Obama’s secrets
Additionally this is the administration that signed an executive order that relives the government from following due process when American citizens are accused of sexual misconduct on campuses. Guilt is to be determined by the college or university administration. Failure to do so is cause to cut off funds to the institution. See this article by a Buddhist Obama supporter. (It links to the WSJ)
I suggest that any time a politician tells you what he is going to do, you better watch them. The result you get is often very different than the politician’s words.
Keep writing letters to Congress. See: SOPA is Still a Problem for detailed information.
I came across this article and the robot is too cute not to pass along. The purpose of the robot is to get information from people. It is a novel approach.
An article about it and the video can be found here: Robot Video Journalist
While the bot is cute you only get the full affect when you hear its voice. Check it out.
I thought it interesting that some people would abuse the robot. They did not provide stats on the number of helpful verses abusive. But, it is probably hard to know. They determined abuse by acceleration sensors in the bot. The video shows one deliberate kick. But, how many of the events were deliberate or accidental is not addressed. Poor little bot…
If you are one of the people using Google’s Chrome browser, you may have noticed a problem when downloading files. Those of us that save downloads to specific folders, depending on type of download, are seeing the file name as unconfirmed#####.crdownload. When attempting to download a Second Life viewer latest version it becomes an annoying problem. I had a hard time tracking down the problem and finding the solution, thus this article.
The latest-links for Second Life viewers do not provide a readable file name in Chrome 17. Version numbering is part of the file name and how one tells which version is in the latest queue. There are no other hints to the version number. Fortunately the correct file replaces the crdownload name after the download. The annoyance is in having to download a file to find out it is a file previously downloaded.