Looking for something to do with that money you aren’t spending?
Here is a Special 50 hour music event to help raise awareness and research into childhood cancers.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sacred%20Mountain/85/116/23

Fighting Cancer is always something good to do. Why wait?

While on the subject of childhood cancer keep in mind those kids undergoing chemo and losing their hair could use some self esteem boost since the spirit inside is important for fighting cancer. So if you have long hair maybe give a thought to a donation to Locks of Love? http://www.locksoflove.org/
After all your hair is a renewable resource.

VWR-13868 has been fixed with the mandatory viewer update.

Release Notes for Second Life 1.23(5) Release Candidate – October 15, 2009
Changes

* VWR-13868[c]: Sculpted prims in complex linked sets vanish – Raised ‘RENDERMAXNODESIZE’ from 4096 to 8192

VWR-13868 is the defect report for when you go to zoom in on something half the prims vanish. This also apparently was happening to some builds in world whether zoomed or not.

We will still need to include notecards explaining how to fix the invisible prims thing for a while since not everyone will be using the new viewer. However it is nice that designers making complex art in SL are no longer facing extinction.

Content Theft. What to do about it. What can we do about it? Will LL ever modify their TOS to disallow accessing SL with unauthorized viewers that can steal content? I wish they would. Then LL could let the cops deal with the problem.

In the meantime here is some things you can do:

Cryoban v1.2 Distribution Package
Cryoban – Device to detect and deal with avatars running an obsolete viewer called Cryolife that is no longer useful for any purpose other than content theft.
Cryoban is free and full permissions.
Cryoban can be picked up at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kali%20Isle/224/203/24

Cryoban is available on xstreet:
https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1798294

A bot version written by the Emerald team is at https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1738925

So get involved and get busy taking direct action against thieves and copyfail activists. Out them. Make them know they are unwelcome. Make sure LL knows you are serious about this and that LL needs to begin dealing with the people creating and/or distributing these theft tools in ways that convince them to stop. I mean if I had a billion dollar business and I knew there was an organization with the published purpose to destroy my business I would pull out all the stops and do whatever is necessary to stop them in permanent ways. Heck I’d hire whatever company Blackwater turned into to go bang on their doors. But I am mean like that. Phillip is a nice guy. He needs to hire him a Ballmer type to deal with the negative stuff.

What will not have any effect at all is a bunch of people sitting around in a copyfail activist infiltrated group hoping to “educate” people about the problem. Such groups will fail because they will be taken over by copyfail activists that will dilute the efforts and pretty much make a laughing stock of the people that went along. Sorry but the sunday school knitting circle approach is laughable. You have to be willing to fight dirty. People that steal are criminals period. People that think criminals can be rehabilitated are sadly ignorant of reality. “Education” is going to have no effect whatsoever except to cause more people to look for theft tools. The only way to fight this problem is silent direct action backed up with an unmovable hard line stance demanding LL build mechanisms to minimize the issue while prosecuting thieves for unauthorized network access.

There was once an effort by some big names in SL to “educate” people about content theft. It had no positive effect whatsoever despite the noble nature of the attempt. “Education” is pointless. Try educating the people from countries where copyright laws of other countries is not respected and is laughed at. Did you know one country granted the Converse trademark to a local shoemaker and it took Converse years to get it sorted out and in the meantime a flood of fake Converse shoes was “legally” sold in that country? Those people don’t care about your copyright. It is not illegal for them to steal your content. They simply have no concept of other people’s intellectual property rights. The only solution for that issue is twofold with one angle being something the US State Department would have to deal with and they don’t care much while the other is for LL to deal with the issue however they legally can without totally alienating the people in such countries.

Brazil has an interesting formalized approach to counterfeiting sporting goods. They simply embargo all US sporting goods making it impossible to sell products there thus the US companies are not allowed to register a trademark there. What an interesting concept. Would virtual sporting goods be subject to Brazil’s embargo? Should brazilians be allowed to purchase any virtual sporting goods in Second Life at all? See: Unfair Foreign Trade Practices: Sporting Goods

Tomorrow and every September 19th is International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Need a Pirate costume?
Women’s Pirate Costumes on xstreet
Men’s Pirate Costumes on xstreet
(Note: I have no Pirate costumes for sale but I am likely to buy one of the outfits in those search results I gave links to)

So who else has new and really great Pirate costumes releasing to take advantage of this opportunity?

Photo credit: DOL.gov

You want to make a difference? Be an educated consumer. Stop supporting these actual real life slavers by not giving them or companies that use slave labor resources your money.

Summary Article: http://humantrafficking.change.org/blog/view/department_of_labor_releases_list_of_slave-made_goods

Source Document: The Department of Labor’s list of goods produced by child labor or forced labor (PDF)