Scalar Tardis

Ah, I was looking at mainland pricing. So.... LL wants $600 to setup an island, and then ... $3600 a year to run an island that is cut off from the rest of the grid and no one else can use it, and the students can't leave it? Seriously? I could buy one heck of a beefed up server for $4200 to run OpenSim. Probably a small grid, with one simulator per core... Though, I don't think such a project would get funded, just as a private sim on SL is unlikely to get funded for our after school project. Okay, spare desktop PC running OpenSim it is then, I guess. :-P

I work for a small rural K-12 school district as the IT Director, and I would like to set up an after-school program to introduce elementary students to Second Life, and modeling and LSL programming / scripting. Is it absolutely necessary that our school buy a region all to ourselves before I can allow any of them to join? If so, then the very high cost of $2400 a year is going to kill this before I can even get it started. Aren't there other educational sims where our students could explore and use sandboxes, without us having to buy a sim ourselves up front? Would these students be locked into only using the sim / region we own or would they be able to visit other education sims? The much cheaper alternative is to grab a spare desktop computer and install OpenSim on it, but then I am left with an absolutely blank slate and an inability to allow our students to experience what other educators have developed in Second Life.

A couple years ago I had a CT scan of my brain, and I thought it'd be cool to make a 3D rendering of my head / brain in Second Life. I also figured this would have obvious educational value on Wikipedia, so I uploaded the images to the Wikimedia Commons. All has been fine for a long time, but someone is now disputing that the image content is "not free" for reuse. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CT_Scan_of_Dale_Mahalko%27s_brain_--_in_Second_Life.jpg

A couple years ago I had a CT scan of my brain, and I thought it'd be cool to make a 3D rendering of my head / brain in Second Life. I also figured this would have obvious educational value on Wikipedia, so I uploaded the images to the Wikimedia Commons. All has been fine for a long time, but someone is now disputing that the image content is "not free" for reuse. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CT_Scan_of_Dale_Mahalko%27s_brain_--_in_Second_Life.jpg