U.S. House of Representatives and Virtual Worlds

I only caught a few minutes toward the end, and two things struck me:

1 - I couldn't understand the agenda of the one congressman who started needling the IBM guy about business in SL. He seemed to be amused and even subtly mocking. Seemed odd to me, like he was having an informal disagreement about the applicability of SL to business.

2 - Phil kicked ass. His testimony was the best thing about that panel.

*wonders if a SIM called TERRORIST CITY would down well in SL*. Players could come with guns and shoot each other, make land mines that blew other avatars into orbit and other such niceties?

I guess their main concern is money laundering.

Edit: opps sorry, just realised that 50% of players in SL do the terrorist things anyways!

That's kind of a stretch. On the Economic Statistics page it lists the number of unique users with positive income as 54,474. However, I'm not sure I'd consider $10 USD as significant income. I'd place the bar somewhere around $100 month and up, meaning there are 2,357 unique users making significant income (give or take a few people who do most of their business off the SL books - ie large landowners who take rental payments via PayPal...)

If you want to break it down to people making a full-time living (let's call that $30k a year USD) that number drops to around 300 unique users.

Well sometimes when its your own company, you like to brag a bit.

Actually I probably come into the 'positive income' section, I spend about L$40 a month and my SLEX sales make around L$50 a month

Edit: but then again i wouldn't, that income stays in SLEX, never brought it back to SL yet

Wow. Did someone actually say that? How embarrassing for them. What a very weird comment.

can you really even drive accross Europe in 5 hours?

And does it really take more than 5 hours to cross Illinois?

Ive gone from Detroit to Madison before it was about 7. That crosses Illinois.

yes it's possible and probably just not across the shortest route.

Edit: that might be bullsh*t, you can drive across one country in Europe in 5 hours for certain

wow .. okay so it is like $10

Where does this 4000 making a living income come from?

$100 a month isn't a living Income in most of the world.

That would be not counting Russia as Europe?

I suppose many don't

1 av and his 3999 alts would make a lot

Nothing that comes out of the mouths of the Fools on the Hill amazes me any more.Sometimes I think we were better off without CSpan and the like. At least they acted like idiots in private.

Here's an interesting comparison. Keep in mind only Western Europe is shown.

http://goeurope.about.com/od/europeanmaps/l/bl-country-size-comparison-map.htm

well yeah but lol one country is just one country.

I think England, Scotland, Germany, France are bigger than the majority of States geographically.

And Russia is bigger than any state.

And the Population of Europe is a lot much bigger than that of the US.

If you get stuck in some bad traffic yeah....

Takes me about 5 hours to get from the San Francisco Bay Area in California to right smack dab in the middle of Oregon. (Little more than 5 sometimes, but close enough). So that's the distance I normally go by...

Obviously a heck of a lot bigger than Illinois (the lopsided state above the western part of Germany in that drawing)

LOL yeah but Im sure the traffic of Paris or Berlin compares to that of Chicago.

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It only seems like it takes forever to drive across Illinios because you have to stop every few minutes to pay another toll.

Berlin's problem is that the road infrastructure remains relatively bad compared to other German cities, hence its reputation for being bad for traffic.

Seriously, though, the Congressman who spoke about driving across Europe in five ours is way offbase. He should try driving south from Munich to Italy during Christmastime!

I don't think any traffic compares to that of Chicago. And bear in mind that I used to live in NYC.

This is why they have so many meetings! Next topic, next meeting please LOL

Teleconferencing, telemeetings, telecongressing on a wide scale is clearly a big motivation for business and media would be the primary motivation of governments wanting to support virtual worlds.

Anyone looking at SL and the state of the art, knows that it is still primitive and in development and that bandwidth is also a factor. The expense to cable/phone internet companies to upgrade from old technologies to the optical was/is very costly and is still in progress, for Phone, TV and internet. yet it is apparent that much more upgrading needs to be done, for there to be enough bandwidth to support even the current usage as well as to meet the projected future demands.

All the large phone, cable TV and media companies, in their planning for the future, depends on meeting the demands of future usage, so naturally congress has to be involved. SL and virtual worlds is just one little part of it, right now and a part they could theoretically replace alot of existing technology. Lobbying is involved on all sides.

It is a gross oversimplification to think that taxation is all that congress is thinking about that has to be dealt with. All the phone, TV and internet, VOIP, and media providers involved are selling competing services and all of them are telling congress what they want approved and done. In the meantime investment in already out of date technology has been huge and I'm sure congress pays attention when they hear the projections that unless "this and that," isn't done there will be a meltdown of the foundation of the communcation industry.

Bandwidth is a huge issue with all these competing companies.

My guess would be the combination of SL residents, outside contractor companies employees (Electric Sheep, et al) and LL employees. All could be said to be making their living from SL...

Don't forget the Muckraking "Journalists"

ROFL

Yeah okay.

I'll buy that.





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Prolly Ginko Nick and WSE Luke too .. least till the money runs out.