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Considering the news from just the last week:

• WikiLeaks: Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head, U.N. says
• Wall Street Journal: Why Does Jeanne Whalen Have a Hardon for Julian Assange?
• The Guardian Leaks unredacted unpublished US diplomatic cables
• Former Wikileaks Spokesman Destroyed Documents
• New Your Times: The Nixonian henchmen of today:

I am not surprised at all that powerful organizations continue to attack them, cheered on by the usual propaganda fan club.

An Australian University named after Rupert Murdochs grandfather Walter is "developing algorithms to simulate 'free thinking' " - am I day dreaming???! If they train them on Murdochs Fox News and Wall St Journal - then it is a clear case of crap in - crap out.

To be fair to the University or at least some of it's lecturers, they are not at all pleased with the state of Newspaper "Journalism" either. Even going as far as wanting to renaming themselves to "Walter Murdoch Uni" to distance themselves from that black sheep of the family Rupert.

How might such a law affect video game assets in the face of taking gambles? If I buy, with real money, a bunch of in-game loot and then take a gamble on successfully defeating the other team, or open up a second-life gambling casino, what would the government tax me on? my video game fees? my profits from selling loot?

Wow, maybe your post is irony but there are plenty of horror stories about working at EA.
Game development has become stylish and lots of people think it's the greenest grass in the pasture. I beg to differ. It's highly competitive; lessers tend to get weeded out pretty quickly, especially since you product is in the public domain. It can be enormously stressful.. There are so many elements that need to converge to create the final deliverable product. Most internal business applications don't have sound, music, packaging, animations, art and story lines, and you really don't have as much creative license as you might think. Teams are so big, you are compartmentalized into a small portion of the bigger picture. You might spend months coding AI routines.

Of course, I only write games as a hobby (which is pretty fun), and all of the above is second hand here say, but computer game development should be taken seriously as pull your hair out, bleeding edge computer science.

Has second life ever made any profit, ever? Granted that the people who invested think that there is money to be made in 2nd life, but I see 12-year olds running virtual brothels ( http://www.alphavilleherald.com/archives/000049.ht ml ) as the game's only economic vehicle for making any sort of US currency. I suggest that if they want to blow money, I have a bridge in a MUD that I can sell them.

Before I RTFA'd, I thought that people like Evangeline might have some problems coming up.

We talked alot about the Sims and TS-Online in my philosophy class. We were having a discussion about human nature and virtual reality, and whether it would eventually lead us to a more enlightened era or if we would sink further into the dregs of humanity. I used The Sims to show that if there were no repercussions, people are generally going to do bad things - TSO is a haven for prostitution, crime and just all around deviance. Hence, we pretty much came to the conclusion that human nature is to do as much as you can get away with... So aside from spending hours on end playing the sims, you are also taking part in a really cool psychology and philosophy experiment. Check out the Second Life (formerly Alphaville) Herald for some more insight. http://www.alphavilleherald.com/