" ... issued a press release warning the IRS to not tax participants in on-line games." Odds on they will anyway - wars against abstract nouns have to be funded somehow, after all. Via the S

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"Note that the politicians aren't talking about virtual items in the game that have been converted to real dollars or other assets [...] Instead, they're looking at actually taxing the items with

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"Venter says that efforts to synthesise his minimal genome from scratch are still in progress, but once it is ready, the transplant method should allow the first bacterium with a synthetic genome

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Huge TechReview article on Second Life and its competitors. May require a login (use BugMeNot), but well worth it.

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"The Korean National Tax Service has announced they will be tacking on value added tax (VAT) to real-money transactions (RMT) in virtual worlds beginning 1 July." Yeah, good luck policing th

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"When paired with the strong electrical conductivity of carbon nanotubes, this ability to endure wear and tear, or fatigue, suggests the materials could be used to create structures that mimic ar

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"We recently had the chance to talk to Cindy Jiang, head of marketing at HiPiHi, to understand a bit more what HiPiHi is about and how it aims to attract users."

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"... the company is considering ways in which avatars might travel between virtual worlds while keeping their essential appearance and possessions intact."

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"...the company that makes Eve ... says it will tackle the problem the way a democracy would. In what appears to be a first, the company plans to hold elections so that players can select member

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"...the discovery that a single protein can inhibit aging holds implications for human longevity and for treatment of some of the world's most feared diseases."

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"There's a new wrinkle in the argument over patenting life: can you patent synthetic life?"

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the question has always been open, at least to some ‘resident’s, as to whether owning Second Life means that the residents are thus the only ones with any right to govern it.

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"A short, loaded phrase with enough shades of layered meaning to engender pleasure, satisfaction, worry and disgust. The phrase itself means a whole lot of different things, depending on context

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"If I am knowledgeable about biology and have the tools to create new organisms from scratch, then it would be entirely plausible I could certainly construct something that poses a threat to all

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"Multiverse, the open virtual-world building platform complete with universal browser being developed by some early Netscape employees, has just won $4.175 million in funding..." Blimey.

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"Hipsters will install living tattoo colonies of algae under their skin. Punk rockers can get a shocking dog-collar effect by grafting on a spiky necklace of extra fingers with colored nails.&quo

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"...the new market would allow Second Life residents to invest their Linden dollars in Entropia, and vice versa. The new market will also include other virtual worlds such as IMVU." It's sta

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"Governments should apply real-world laws and regulations to virtual currencies in online worlds like Second Life to prevent potential money laundering, fraud and tax evasion, a report from a Bri

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"Also, it turns out the locals don’t like it when I demand that they eat the brains of their kills to take their strength." Warren Ellis on fine form in the metaverse.

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"Why is the Cyberman staring at me?" Warren Ellis's metaversal fear and loathing continues

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Pointed out by Captain Gibson himself, this article doesn't quite get the point - though the development is still interesting, IMHO. Virtual worlds are going to get real ubiquitous, real fast.

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"Before now, I’ve had to draw a weapon and blow people off my land to discontinue attacks. Look at that sentence again. It makes me sound like I’m living on frontier land, or, perhaps, like I’ve

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"...it is a step toward a virtual world, solar system, galaxy or universe free from centralized corporate control, one that looks more like the World Wide Web of individually controlled sites...&

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"I stand atop one of the island’s lovingly-designed bombed-out modern buildings, watching a giant fox bound down the street clutching a sci-fi weapon the size of a dinner table." Intrepid me

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"The embassy would not provide passports or visas but would instruct visitors how to obtain such documents in the real world and act as a link to web-based information about the Scandinavian coun

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"It's not a con game. It's a village-sized market. In fact it's a tourist attraction-type village: the big numbers of the people you see are one-time visitors[...] But it's not thick; it's tiny.

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"The real and virtual controllers are “entangled together through a Python web server” so that turning a knob on the physical controller affects the same knob on the virtual one." The membra

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"The premise is of course the (by now) old chestnut in the VW community of buying in-game currency, transacting it a bit, then cashing it out." This could mean some big shake-ups.

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