Teh Rules

Copyright and trademark stuff

All content in this weblog not otherwise tagged or marked is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

“Second Life®” and “Linden Lab®” and so on are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc. Other names and marks used in this weblog are trademarks of their respective owners. Use of these marks herein is for descriptive and narrative purposes only, and is not intended to claim ownership or contractual affiliation, or to cause any confusion in the minds of even the dimmest consumers. On the other hand, I believe myself to have an inalienable right to use them as whatever part of speech I darn well please, in ordinary noncommercial conversation.

Authorship and responsibility

All postings to this weblog (well, except for the comments that other people post, obviously) represent my own opinions (at most), and are not official or unofficial statements of anyone else, including for example and without restriction my employer, IBM, the United States Government, the International Red Cross, General Motors, General Electric, the International Bank of Credit and Commerce, Nabisco, Acme Pet Supplies, Mattel, AIG, the United States Postal Service, McDonald’s, Linden Research, the Supreme Council 33° of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, the United Nations Security Council, Wham-O, and Britney Spears. No one controls the timing or content of my posts here but me, entertaining conspiracy theories to the contrary notwithstanding.

Warning and disclaimer

I am a child of the century; irony was installed at birth. Nothing in this weblog, except for this very page which does mean everything it says (and this one too), should be taken at face value, and no warrantee of truth or correctness or clarity or exoteric meaning is expressed or implied. Think of it as a work of performance art rather than a series of truth claims. Much of the time I am saying true things, and I like to think that I am almost always well intentioned. But do not base any important actions on the truth (or falsehood) of anything you read here.

Trust, but verify.

For our treasured commentors

With the growth of our international fame, we’ve started to have a few (well, more than zero) people commenting in the comments who are at times less than ideally pleasant and sociable. So I thought I would post a few rules here, or perhaps “guidelines” or “expectations” or “standards” or “stuff that you ought to know if commenting here in this weblog”.

First, in legal terms, I reserve the right to do anything at all with anything posted here. I may prevent it from being posted in the first place, delete it after it’s posted, edit it to say something different, move it from place to place on the weblog, destroy it forever, or alternately save a copy forever. So if you post something here and I do something tortious (that’s a word!) with it, you can sue me for what I did, but you can’t additionally sue me for not warning you in advance that I might do it, because here I am warning you about it here right now.

With that out of the way, here are the ways that I currently intend to behave toward the postings that all you lovely people post here:

• Postings that seem to be spam will be deleted instantly and without comment as I notice them, if they somehow get past the spam filters (which seem to be quite good!).
• You may post with any name or no name, but I will feel free to delete any postings that are anonymous or posted under a pseudonym that doesn’t associate with any real or virtual or electronic identity, if they annoy me.
• You may post verbal attacks and insults and stuff directed at me if for some reason you want to, and I will not delete comments just for that. I will delete comments that in my judgement actually threaten harm, SL or RL, to me (or anyone else).
• I will also delete comments that contain verbal attacks or insults (even true ones!) directed at other posters; this weblog is not a platform for attacks on third parties.
• I will delete comments that are so large or so numerous as to be basically gumming up the works of the weblog and preventing anyone else from getting a word in edgewise, in the unlikely event that that happens.
• If anyone whose posting I have to delete doesn’t stop posting things that I have to delete after a warning, I will attempt to figure out how to ban that person from further posting, and/or turn on moderation for their postings. Similarly if any posting that I have to delete is sufficient egregious, I will attempt to figure out how to ban the poster from further posting at once.

How’s that? :) So far (14 May 2009; happy birthday, Dante Alighieri!) I haven’t had to delete any comments, or ban or moderate anyone. I expect that will continue to be true; I just like writing long pages full of rules and stuff.