Look around you, it’s creeping up on you.  It’s the kill switch.  It’s in your computer, it’s in your car’s computer, it’s in your phone, it’s in your iPod, it’s in Second Life, and it is closing in fast.  Worse, there is probably nothing you can do about it.  It is the cost of modern living.  Just like society has it’s cost.  We give up some freedoms to have a civil society.  The trick is finding the middle ground between anarchy and dictatorship.  Finding that middle ground is called politics.  We humans enjoy that sport, it’s our probably our third favorite pastime.

The upside to the kill switch is more… things.  Things like Second Life, music, cars, planes, and entertainment.  We do less work and get more for what work we do actually do.

Second Life is a good example of the kill switch.  Permissions on objects.  No copy, no transfer, no modify.  We all hate it.  But if you make anything, you love it.  Funny how that works.

So, I lost an object last night in Second Life.  It was no copy, so it’s a goner.  It was semi-expensive.  I think it cost me about $L1500 in total.  Sort of depressing.  Perversely a computer does two things very well, basic math and copying data.  The Second Life Digital Rights Management (DRM) kept me from doing what my computer does best, make a copy.  It’s a goner now.  Tiessa has a guide on how to recover things, but I felt it was not worth the hassle in this case.

What to do…  Second Life has had a long history of asset disasters.  Minor ones probably occur on a daily basis we never hear about.  It really is unconscionable that Linden Labs has allowed this problem first to occur and to continue.  Computer systems have been designed from the very beginning to not to loose things.  It’s pure laziness or incompetence on the Linden’s part that the asset system looses things.  I’d love to hear the excuse(s), I need some good humor.

What is going to be more interesting is the sim interoperability announcement.  My expectations of this are… low, okay, non-existent.  You’re asking a company that can and does regularly looses things to be responsible not to loose things for more other companies?  Oh and let’s not talk about grid or asset server stability issues.  How can Linden Labs support more grids as the asset server of them all?

I do realize that with sufficient thrust pigs will fly pretty good, except most of the money that would go into the Saturn V rocket to get this pig called Second Life into orbit is going back to the venture capitalists who started the whole thing.

-Veyron