Removal Of Xploders

Exactly. You can walk around the Casino with A Million in chips, you can leave the casno with them, take them home, Uncle Sam won't care. Until you go to the window and cash them out, then it's paper signing time.

The depiction of a human having sex with an animal isn't illegal as far as I know.[/QUOTE]
ya but i dont concider furries having sex beastiality but oh ok i find beastiality messed up and im furrie most of us just dont see it like that

just a point

Are there people making hundreds of dollars in gambling winnings annually here in SL? Thats when governments start getting their grubby little paws involved. Xploder winnings drawing the feds attention? Pffffft. Its the Anshes that they are interested in. People making real type incomes that should be paying taxes on them. Making 15 cents on a fake slot machine? They dont get excited over that. But the Lindens sure get excited about things. "OMG! SOME GOVERNMENT IS LOOKING AT THE STUFF WE DO AROUND HERE. WE BETTER STOP DOING 'this or that' ACTIVITY BEFORE THEY DO SOMETHING TO US." I had a cousin who was always paranoid about everything. Turns out he just smoked alot of crack. HEY LINDENS, GET OFF THE PIPE!

ROFLMAO!!

My sentiments exactly.

I have yet to hear of anyone making millions of $$$ from SL playing in Casinos.

At most, gambling was just "something to waste some $L on".

Yeah, lets go with your advice ignore the government till they turn up with a court order to shut the servers down we can just freeze, eject, ban the cops when they try and enforce it .......

Looked at from the point of view of a person who gambled occasionally, yeh, you are right.

But the owners of casino's in SL? The only "place" where they could run completely unregulated gambling in the U.S.?

You build a casino in Nevada, or Louisiana, you've not only got one HELL of a lot of politicians to bribe to get your licensing, you've also got a lot of regulations to follow to just stay in business. Rules about how much you have to pay out, what the odds are on every game and machine, etc. In the U.S. we allow some gambling, but we also make sure the owners of the casino's aren't COMPLETELY ripping people off.

In SL... not so much, eh? Casino owners in SL, in an unknown percentage, are no better than any other type of scammer or con artist.

And to them, oh, I assure you, the loss of this source of free money is causing them a lot of pain and anguish, much of which you'll see on these forums in the form of "solutions for gambling" threads and rants against either LL or the U.S. itself.

Yeah, making a bunch of money from PLAYING at casinos didn't happen much. But making a bunch of money by OWNING these scam operations? Oh, yeah, you betcha.

Im sure the feds are eagerly eyeing the big Secondlife casino operations. And six years from now when they finally get through all the red tape to get their cease and desist orders written up, Im sure they will do something about it. Hell, lets just shut the whole thing down now and get it over with. Their just gonna nickel and dime us to death anyway.

Hey - all you sploder coders, you need to invent a new game that isn't anything like gambling but has a similar effect on people & also delivers revenues to the owner like Sploders do. How about this: "Auctioneer" - rules/principles are:

o Its an auction, not gambling & there are zero random elements. However, it IS competitive - as anyone who has ever made last minute bids on eBay can attest!

o You are bidding for a percentage of the sum of everyone's bids - the pot;

o Every bid must be higher than the previous one by some amount: say L$5 - & each time you bid, you pay that amount of money & it goes into the pot (so slightly different to a regular auction);

o It needs someone motivated to start things running - so the first bidder (regardless of amount bid - minium L$10 to make the maths easy) receives 20% of the final pot at the end of the auction. The "Auctioneer" owner gets a 10% 'administration' fee. The winning bidder gets the remaining 70%;

o The auction keeps running until there have been no bids for some specific time period (say 1 minute) - i.e a bit like playing poker - slowly everyone 'folds' as the bids get higher & higher, or they go home to bed!

o I suggest the auction has an initial period for everyone to start bidding - say 5 minutes. However, if anyone bids within the final minute, then the auction is extended by one more minute - ad infinitum, until more than a minute elapses - at which point the last (& highest) bidder wins & the auction closes.

So, in practice it might look like this:

AV1: Bid L$10 (Pot=L$10, Potential winnings=L$7 plus his L$2 for being the opening bidder) - 5 minute timer starts

No-one bids until the final minute. Then:

AV2: Bid 15 (Pot=25, potential winnings=18 - rounded-up, the round-down delta is taken from the owner payment, not the first bidder or winner payments);

AV3: Bid 20 (Pot=45, potential winnings=32)

AV4: Bid 25 (Pot=70, potential winnings=49)

AV5: Bid 30 (Pot=100, potential winnings=70)

AV1 (original bidder): Bid 100 to try to force people out (Pot=200, potential winnings=140 plus, if he wins, a further 20% as he was the first bidder = 40. Total for him=180 for a bid cost of 110)

AV2: Bid 105 (Pot=305, potential winnings=214)

etc.

It keeps going until people drop out, go home whatever & the last man standing, after 1 minute of no-bids, wins.

Not gambling I think! But fun & potentially lucrative for those with the best winning strategies plus an earner for the club owners.

If anyone is in any doubts about the taxability of SL's currency being related to potential taxation against earnings, read this [url=http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article2833957.ece

If LL was to decide to place servers all over the world... how would anyone know which part of the worlds laws they had to comply with when they simply TP'd to a destination? The internet is global, it doesn't matter how you reach a destination, you travel via your local exchange. Information is passed in both directions and therefore a mute point what activities you may do on some server, over the other side of the world may mean, in reality.
For now... no one (government or otherwise) has been brave enough to curtail/block access to the vast majority of the world when accessing the internet, to do so may effect their own economies as they weave a web of laws, but that may change.. who knows.

There may come a day when you can only use an 'official' browser client, approved by your government, to gain access, which would automatically block any servers in countries that are considered 'undesireable'. Script kiddies would have a feild day creating 'underground' hacked versions that allow unrestricted access. If you cannot see this happening, look no further than China, who already restricts its population with 'exposure' through the internet. IP activities are checked constantly for activities of its users, making sure they obey the rules/laws. That may provide the model of things to come.... I for one sincerely hope not.

Not that I care about gambling one way or the other never did it never intended to. But anyone fool enough to say I am glad to see them gone thinking that it will have the least bit impact on performance in anthing other than a few locations around the grid is fooling themselves.

All that was done was a version of entertainment is gone and there will be absolutly NO performance increase. They had no more impact on the general game than they did performance. Piss poor programming is the problem there not casino's and whether they are legal or not. Oh and by the way internet gambling is NOT illegal just betting with money is.

No I don't think I can do better but LL seems to be using the bottom of the barell when it comes to programmers who don't care how many bugs they write in just as long as they can say they did the job. Pride in your work is non existant at LL just blast it out fast as possible and damn what the customers think.

Oh and one more thing anyone that is glad to see anothers enjoyment gone for any reason what so ever when it harms no one is a complete git and should not ever be involved in any social gathering in real life or in a game. You are the problem. Both in game and with this country.

Ok, I enjoyed the occasional bet in Second Life, that aside, the Club that i frequent is now out of business, this club ( Extreme ) held an important place within SL for new players in that, A) it had frequent freeplays requiring the payment of 1L$ to win on average 40L$ back, this was a serious source of in-world money for a lot of players and B) it held games of demons(slingo) and Tringo to which the sim owner donated 100L$ (each game) and required no donation from the players, both sources of money for the players whilst having fun doing it. it also held a free raffle every 10 minutes to win either 40 or 100L$ - again requiring no monetary input from the public - great stuff i say - but all this was funded by the machines being played at other times by people who paid for the pleasure.

My point. I can see no actual law in the U.S. prohibiting online gambling at the rates of exchange that the Linden dollar has, if such law exists why were sim owners allowed to create casino's on the land in the first place and why were they allowed to continue with these casino's for so long ( oh, of course, they were paying tier to Lindens all this time. )

No my friends, I dont believe for one minute that U.S. law has anything to do with the banning of gambling in SL.

My belief - for what its worth is: The Lindens realised that SL was getting too big for the present servers that they have, given that they were about to launch voice into SL (requiring more server power) they had to cut back on some aspect of second life that was draining server time or buy more servers, I believe they made the wrong choice, OK the servers are not under as much strain as there are not as many money transaction calls and the machine scripts themselves are no longer taking up server power which therefore free's up that server time for voice, BUT, a lot of people are now leaving second life as the main source of income has now been banned and lots of sims are closing down because the sim owners cannot support the sims without income. For a company in a country that makes such a big deal of freedom of choice Linden Labs are doing a great job of showing the rest of us in the ACTUAL free world just how free the U.S. really is.


In conclusion, in a few weeks Windlight is going to be introduced to the main grid, what will we have to give up for that to be done, dancing? walking? or just maybe those scripted sex balls that you have in your house? mmmmm isnt there a law in the U.S. that prohibits online sex sites?????

You are not entirely correct in your analogy regarding 'strain on the servers' with voice.
The voice chat servers are 3rd party contractors. Spatual presence is already a factor of the base programming, that is used to determine which direction the 'sounds' should come from and go to, coupled with your actual presence in-game. The client directs and recieves information in a very small overhead stream directly from the 3rd party chat servers.
Running Skype alongside SL's client has a bigger impact.

What can you expect from a Company that uses that idiotic Tao, that states no one has to work on anything they don't want to. Wouldn't we all like to have one of those.

Aside from filling up parcels preventing residents access to their homes, I was ambivalent towards casinos in SL. I find Internet Gambling boring , even more so in SL. But a lot of people here did enjoy it. I think The Providers could have come up with SOME way to handle the situation if they put a little thought into it. But I guess no one out wanted to work on that issue. Barring that, if banning is the only viable alternative, just dropping it on everyone without some definitive warning, is inexcusable and totally insensitive to their customers. But customer sensitivity seems to be another area no one has to work on if they don't want to. Personally I think LL and their Tao are full of shit.

I agree with you that there are too many people both in SL and RL who take great joy in seeing other people's joy taken from them. They are full of shit as well. I better go have some coffee now.