Some internation lawyer of economics should take a legal action in this case because this is simply criminal.

All the “community leaders” of SL preach on and on about how LL needs to step up, lead, make firm non-hypocritical decisions….

well, now Philip is gonna just pay someone to do that. He’s hiring a figure-head… a “virtual worlds social-action engineer”

Stick a guy in as the voice of the people, lead him be the figurehead… and Philip and co continue to do what they do.

Phil stepping down from the title of “CEO” means nothing…. its just something to put on a business card

The whole thing needs a redesign where you have a situation with distributed processing that allows the power to flow to any point where you have a hotspot of activity… though I have to wonder if that can even be done without scrapping a lot of what is already there.

Such approaches are being developed however, Sun’s Project Darkstar being a prominent one to mention.

Either way it will be interesting to see where SL is headed.

I agree with most of what you said but the following:

1)bank bans have little to do with anything. LL was right to ban them, they served no legitimate purpose in Second Life

2)The two people banned for age playing were rightfully banned. Whether they are underage or not has little to do with anything. In come countries that behavior is illegal whether they be real images of real children or fake pictures of pixel children.

LL has to abide by those laws or risk losing much more users in those countries as those governments would crack down.

3)I myself have an unverified account, yet I am a content creator and I do make a reasonable amt of money. I would verify unquestioningly but the problem is that LL knows my RL identity and being that I am one of the most well knowns (ex)griefers that SL has ever seen I would be found and banned even though I am no longer breaking the TOS.
I disagree that banning unverified is a solution to anything.

We have seen a huge decline in griefing and the free accounts are a good marketing strategy. People get to try before they buy and many people do eventually go from basic to having premium accounts.

4) Your complaints about VAT are also absurd, LL has to abide by law in those respective countries. No amount of pleading will change that situation. Paying tax sucks, I agree but there is nothing anyone can do about it and LL is not going to tax Americans until the government tells them too. Thinking that Americans should have to pay taxes just because Europeans do is very unreasonable.

All that aside I think that
1) reducing tier
2) Bringing back 1st land
3) working on making SL more user friendly
and stabilizing it

are all going to cause the economy to improve drastically.

Expect to see my own Op/Ed at the Herald where I write in the near future.

Its time this company grew up and too stock of themselves and took the path they’ve started and the client’s much more seriously. The lack of growth in the user base is because their needs no longer matched Phillip’s vision. Its time that the Tao team realize that, yes this isn’t the Secondlife ya’ll dreamed of. It what your audience has dreamed of. If you can’t stand behind them and support them, then you need to step aside and let the story unfold. Its much like a writer who releases his child, the book, out to the general reading audience. Can he control how people interpret his story? Everyone will see something shade different in his words than the next person. The story and its meaning take on a life of its own, open to new and scewed interpretations, based on everyone’s background, culture and motivations. Accept that … please … and lets get back to work on making the new evolution of the 2d web … the 3D Portal. Its time has come and it has the power to truly change each and everyone’s lives and possibly even be a solution to some of our world’s greatest problems.

How so? How about getting the governments of the world to hand out a mandate to corporations to send 10 to 20% of their support workforce home to work, to report to their virtual office. Parents could work flex hours and be there for their kids when the come home from school. They not be driving daily, saving gas and lower pollution by unprecedented levels. Work would be more productive cause there are less distractions when you work from home, IF trained right. The purchase of high powered computers would put a huge surge of money into the economy. Companies could downsize their real estate investment without downsizing their staff. AND O-M-G!!! WE COULD ALL FINALLY HAVE RELA TIME LIVE HUMAN BEINGS TO PROVIDE US WITH IMMEDIATE AND RESPONSIVE CUSTOMER SERVICE VIA EVERY COMPANY’S 3D WEB PORTAL!

Open up the broadband market by ceasing to promote protected territories for huge companies like Time Warner and AT&T and you’ve got the speed you need to compete with Europe. Allow all the market to compete to offer cost effective high level broadband available to the masses. Want you dollar to bounce back? Wake up! This is one part of the equation.

Listen … Dream … Act on those DREAMS! This is the time to make this happen. The 3D Web is a living breathing techo-organism. Feed it and watch the world change grow and heal.

Coupled with the earlier departure of CTO Cory Ondrejka it most certainly will signal a change in corporate culture within Linden Labs. Perhaps the end of the previously touted “Tao of Linden” will come about as Linden Labs attempts to get a handle on their growth.

As the competition increasingly looks to oust Second Life from it’s current ‘king of the hill’ position this will certainly be a story to follow.

(1) Credit card information is flawed. There are kids wandering around with credit cards in their name - or in the name of their parents.

ID Verification: Same problem.

(2) Life the ban on banks? Please, put the crack pipe down. That is a big, glaring legal issue.

(3) If you want a Utopian world where you can do what you want, it isn’t Second Life or any other virtual world (even in your imagination) - unless, of course, you’re willing to risk international law issues. And international law issues set precedents. I don’t think you want to be the precedent when SEC decides to make an example of someone. This would mean going to jail, more than likely.

There is a reality here that cannot be ignored. It is the real world. If you want to own your creations, guess what? Real world copyright. That is law. An economy, even a barter currency, attributes value - and value is not something easily explained away in a court - especially when that currency of value is used to buy something that comes with its own law: Copyright.

I’d go on, but there are just too many holes. I’ll let your points sink now.