Susie Boffin, there’s a great definition at RSStocracy.com:

RSS is a format for storing online information in a way that makes that information readable by lots of different kinds of software…. Web sites that update their information regularly (like blogs and news sites) increasingly offer RSS and/or Atom versions of their content as a way of making life easier for their readers…. A feed is a constantly updated RSS version of one (or more) web pages, which you can subscribe to using a “newsreader” or “news aggregator”. If you use a newsreader to subscribe to RSS feeds from your favourite web sites, you can spend twenty minutes reading all your favourite news sources in one place, instead of thirty minutes flipping from one site to the next.

I tend to disagree with the notion that KKK et al have any “right” to “freedom” of expression, or should be “tolerated”. Such elements forfeit any such rights, in my opinion, when they seek to deny them to others.

But I have also seen elsewhere the kind of points Stonecutter and others make above…it would seem there does need to be stricter enforcement. I’ve been griefed several times now, and I’ve only been here a couple of days!

I tend to disagree with the notion that KKK et al have any “right” to “freedom” of expression, or should be “tolerated”. Such elements forfeit any such rights, in my opinion, when they seek to deny them to others.

Democracy does not mean a few idiots have a “right” to “vote” to be racist pigs! The larger society has a right, and a responsibility to refuse to tolerate, indeed, to supress such tendencies. If they resist militarily, they should be suppressed militarily, and destroyed!

They are not an “oppressed minority”! They are an elitist minority seeking to oppress everyone else…nobody should have a “right” to do that!

Hammering out a genuinely democratic society would definitely be a lot more expensive for the residents, in terms of time, effort, and other resources required to establish and maintain it.

Many people are not going to want to go to all that trouble. They just want to shop (or sell), and get laid, it would seem, or merely fight and grief others, judging from the vast proponderence of such content.

But I’m not convinced that’s all most people want out of SL…Maybe a lot, or at least some, are looking for something really different, beyond just a twisted hyped-up reflection of RL…

Maybe a special area needs to be set aside for development of an experimental community, for starters. How about calling it Ecotopia?! It might have to be at least of Estate size and powers, to maintain it’s autonomy.

As a total nooB to VR and SL, I wouldn’t be surprised if some such experiments have already sprung up, somewhere?…refs anyone?…probly mostly private enclaves of similarly minded people…going “public” really opens up a can of worms…

I totally agree that some bottom line standards would need to be established, and enforced, by coercion if necessary (such as banning…it might even require a military, to defend from attack!). The big question is how, and by whom the standards are set and enforced. If it’s by an elite group, it will not be democratic.

Consensus, or at least a consensus-seeking supermajority decision-making process, would seem to be the way to go.

Representation may be necessary for a large number of people, but it would have to be subject to viable democratic controls, including easy recall…and there would also have to be some kind of tribunal process, to resolve disputes, subject to democratic participation, and approval.

And there would have to be sufficiently clear incentives, and tangible benefits, to justify participation by a sufficient percentage of residents to keep it viable. If, say, at least 75% of the residents aren’t directly participating, at least by voting, it seems to me that it would definitely tend to devolve.

The price of freedom is responsibility–Thomas Jefferson

Look, I am limping along on a laptop with an incompatible graphics card and I STILL think SL is the most amazing creative outlet I have seen in my life. I am astounded by the kvetching I hear. At the same time, the fact that people take it all so seriously could indicate how deeply SL has penetrated their RL psyche.

I am thrilled about the RSS feed because for me switching between SL and internet is impossible, it’s either one or the other. (-:

“If the residents have no teeth, then why all the complaints about - ohh, just off the top of my head, say… 1) greifing 2) banning 3) closed access parcels 4) religious cults old and new, 5) rip-offs…”

Because the residents have no teeth. There is no *mechanism* by which any other kind of governance can form, because Linden Labs hasn’t made any mechanism by which individuals can realistically apply sanctions against anyone…. or even protect themselves effectively… except by ripping SL apart into hundreds of isolated, insular communities and hiding inside these invitation-only private clubs.

Think about it. Closing access to a parcel is the absolutely strongest sanction any individual or group can impose, and it’s almost toothless for anyone who owns less than an estate… the problems it causes are not problems for the griefers and con artists who are the source of the problems, they’re problems for innocent third parties… like the folks who happen to run into them in their flying machines and are hurled off the grid just as effectively as if they were “de-orbited” by “razor”. The bad guys just move a few meters away and drop particle bombs, or return in alternate accounts and repeat the same actions under the cover of the anonymity Linden Labs provides.

The wealthy can retreat to estates. The rest of us have to put up with it… that’s frontier justice at work, boys, it’s justice for those who can pay for it… and ONLY those who can pay for it.

This has nothing to do with “community standards”. There’s some things that simply can’t be accepted. Harassment can’t be countered by harassment, it has to be met with *stronger* force, not weaker, and that means Linden Labs. Confidence games, and outright theft have to be dealt with by people who can actually do something about the humans behind the masks.

And just as Usenet had to do, LL has to distinguish between abuse *on* the grid and abuse *of* the grid. Or else SL will drown in con games just as Usenet nearly drowned in spam before the Usenet backbone GREW a backbone and enforced functional standards.

Since you want us to talk about technical problems here, not on the Linden Answers forum, you have a responsbility to post about them so we at least know what’s going on!