1) I can see in preferences that SL can be localized to other languages. Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Portugese, German, French, etc. I can see languages that just require utf8 fine. But I can't see Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic or Russian. I've installed the language packs for windows and I can see the text in pretty much any text field, except SL chat. Russian and Arabic aren't language options, but the other 3 are, what do I have to do to get the character sets to work in SL, or can they? Actually I thought Russian didn't require a special character set either, but the Cyrilic alphabet doesn't seem to work in SL, even though it does in everything else. I found that using a translator to make http requests I can get these 5 languages into chat, but it shows up as starred out. If I cut and paste the stars into an external document, the characters show up correctly so SL is preserving the character codes, it's just not displaying the characters themselves in chat.
2) I've seen several Island chains selling void sims. I've seen some people living in void sims. After having done a little testing they seem to work much better than void sims once did, but how many avatars, scripts, prims can they handle without slowing down to a noticeable degree?