" ... 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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"Last month, what some are describing as "the largest political protest gathering in a virtual world game ever" occurred within the Chinese MMORPG, Fantasy Westward Journey (FWJ)."

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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 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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"The appeal of Surface (etc.) for computing tasks, however, will be limited in many commonplace arenas ... the real market for multi-touch is in the world of the Metaverse, especially in the Aug

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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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"This gloomy message apparently sat ill with American writer Garrett Serviss, who in the following year penned an unauthorised sequel titled 'Edison’s Conquest of Mars'..." Bookmark this blo

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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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"...they’re taking the old argument over virtual worlds - centralized versus distributed - and done what I believe to be the logical thing and created a hybrid; note that Linden Lab’s virtual wor

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"Sparter is a new entry in the real money trading industry that uses an eBay-like “peer-to-peer” approach for the buying and selling of game gold for World of Warcraft and other MMORPG online gam

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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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"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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"...Bryan Camp warned residents of virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft that demands for more specific ownership rights might have the unintended consequence of summoning the

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"Corpse graffiti, a form of emergence, is created by building a character with a clever name, i.e. "Mailbox" and dropping dead in a contextually-appropriate location, i.e. a mailbox in

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"11-year old Arfa Karim Randhawa, the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP)." You go, girl. Reckon she'll rebel and embrace open source in her teens?

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"...the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator apparently allows developers a fuller range of simulated object creation ... For example, I read somewhere that one could create AI whales swimming off t

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"In the last decades, we have seen the content business have to adapt to a frightening new reality: The cost to create a minute of content has risen exponentially, but the fair market value of a

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"It looks like Appliance maker Whirlpool has become the first big company to upload 3D models of its products to the 3D Warehouse of objects for use in SketchUp, which can in turn be imported int

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