Phil Deakins

Ahem. Don't count on it

I am in the running for being the most widely discriminated against. You should see the number of women who say "No" to me. I must be up there with the best of the discriminated-against types in SL.

You see? You never know what might come up in the lists

You never know, they might put Countant in the list, and you could be Anna Countant Or maybe Noyance The last names lists alwyas included many that are not genuine surnames. One was mentiond in this thread - Sideways. I have alts with the following last names:- Moonwall, Stillwater, Darkrose, Broadfoot, Melodie, Songlark, Littleboots, Sixpence, Sunburn, and more. You might easily find one of the new last names that you like a lot.

V2? You mean V3, surely. There should be no remnants of the V2 viewer left anywhere.

You could always come and visit me and I'll put in a good word for you

From what I've heard, yes they are going back to the old way of doing it; i.e. at any given time, there is a list of last names to choose from, which, like before, will probably change from time to time. I even heard that they are open to suggestions for names to put in the lists.

You can't do that. You will only be able to pick a last name from a list, and the chances of Twentythreefiftyeight being in the list are not very high

You can do it on Sundays but you're not allowed to enjoy it.

Our voting age was reduced from 18 to 16 very recently - because whichever party was in government and did it thought the school-children supported them, so they'd get more votes and stay in government. Very cynical. Should such people be allowed anywhere near government?

I suppose they all tend to come up with things like that just to give themselves something to take time researching - to keep some of them in jobs. It's all a bit idiotic. I'm reminded of the U.S's stupidity in that a person is old enough to go to war and die for his/her country, but not old enough to drink alcohol.

Answering my own question in the previous post:- The UNCRC defines children, for the purposes of the Convention, as persons under the age 18, unless domestic legislation provides otherwise. In that spirit, this timeline includes as children all those below the UK age of majority, which was 21 until 1970 when it was reduced to 18. So using the age of majority for a sex matter seems a bit silly to me when our age of consent to sex is 16.

It's not the age of majority, is it? (I only read the first paragraph on the page you linked to). It should be the age of consent, which is 16 in the UK, so a provisional driving license should be fine. ETA: What is the age of majority in the UK these days, anyway? It used to be 21, then it came down to 18, and now people can vote at 16. The age of consent hasn't changed in all that time though. Not as far as I know, anyway.

But it can be done

I really can't imagine why the words "on a commercial basis" is in there. I thought fines? license? but nothing fit. Anyone can be fined, not just those conducting business, and nobody should have license to spread porn to non-adults. I even thought 'April the 1st' but not on a government website. I'm completely perplexed.

I don't think it would have anything to with LL. If the UK government decides to block porn to non-adults, then they'll have certain websites, and possibly systems such as SL, blocked until they (the government) are happy that the user is an adult. LL shouldn't be involved in any way. The only affect it may have for LL is that some users can no longer use SL. ETA: I just started to read the .gov page that Skell linked to. In the very first paragraph is says:- Age verification will mean anyone who makes pornography available online on a commercial basis must ensure under 18s in the UK cannot access it. This is part of the Government’s continuing work to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online. So this UK government is thinking of blocking the accessing of porn by non-adults, BUT it's not going to lift a finger to implement it. It's going to tell website owners to do it for them. Words completely fail me.

I very much doubt that the way that the last names work will be different to how they used to work; i.e. people will be able to have the same last name. Letting people choose their own last name, which I am not against the idea of, won't eliminate multiple users having the same last name.

I had another thought this morning. What's the betting that, after LL has put all these extra charges in place, and is taking in significantly more money, they'll turn around and say that costs have gone up so reducing land prices isn't possble after all?

I like that name. I'm sure that someone will have got 'Usually Offcourse' too. It wasn't all that easy to come up with good names like that. The best that I got were 3toed Frog and 4times Nitely, to which one girl commented, "In your dreams" A thought occured to me this morning. It is to be hoped that those with a 'Resident' name will be given the opportunity to change it once to a proper last name - absolutely free of charge. To my mind, allowing them to freely shake off that stupid last name, which was all down to LL's stupidty, is very important . If that doesn't happen, then there will be a load of new users with proper last names, a load of old users with proper last names, and a load of users in the middle, who just happened to arrive at the wrong time and so are stuck with that stupid 'Resident' name, unless they buy their way out of it. That would be grossly unfair, imo. I'm still assuming that changing from 'Resident' to another last name will be a part of the new account sign-up process and not charged for, but that assumption may be way off.

Naturally

Even now, SuperTom is probably in a meeting with the LL powers that be, pitching this idea as a money-earner by charging merchants to have their own personal thread, into which only the advertiser can post

I'm not against your suggestion, Syn. I'm neutral on it.

From the article:- Last Names – Further Information New users joining Second Life will still be given the automatic “last name” of “Resident”, but have the option of changing if they wish. The fee for name changes has not been announced, however, at this point the indication is that the fee will be in fiat currency (i.e. US dollars) not Linden Dollars. I'm assuming that the new resident's option of changing the last name will be part of the sign-up process and won't be charged for. That's fine, but not if it's charged for, imo. So a name-change is to be paid for in US$. That puts a different light on it. It looks more like LL doing something to take in more real money. I'm not against that if all the measures add up to the aimed-for lower land prices. Depending on the charge for a change, it could certainly do away with much or most of the flippant name-changing that I'd envisaged. It's looking a bit better to me now, although I still prefer it to not happen at all, except to allow <name> Resident users to get a proper name.

I could be wrong but my impression is that the mods only deal with the forum as a part of their LL jobs - amonst the LL employees they drew the short straws - and that they are not full-time mods here. If being a mod here is all they do, then LL is chucking money away, because the forum only needs one such mod, and almost certainly nowhere near even that. Dakota Linden, for example, has the mod ability to issue warnings and suspensions from the forum AND the ability to issue both of those for SL itself. I know that from personal experience, and I assume all the mods and admins have the same abilites, simply because they are Lindens. If people were hired as moderators, full-time or part-time, I don't believe that LL would give them the ability to warn and suspend users from SL. They never did before when they used 3rd party forum moderation. I'm not even sure that the 3rd party mods had the ability to suspend users from the forum. I rather fancy that they had to report the user to LL and any suspensions would come from there.

I'm not against the idea as long as it's confined, in which case, it's not exactly advertising to the passers-by We can already advertise to the passers-by in this forum - in signatures. The more you post, the more impressions of the ad you get. There's nothing to prevent signatures being frequently changed to promote various products.