Thanks to all for your replies- lots of food for thought here.

my solar batteries are about dead - looking forward to picking up this conversation tomorrow.

(I am just trying to foment conversation here - toss ideas and thoughts around)

What about using something like Bitcoins"?

From my own experience - people give more when they are anonymous. Yes- it is simple to re-direct to a web page, but with a charitable donation it is more "work" for someone to give to a cause. I specifically remember the "boobiethon" in Winterfell (SL) where there were challenges ongoing during the...

For many years I was active in the RFL (Relay For Life) kiosks in SL - hosting them and being members of groups which helped to raise funds for cancer research. These were, and still are, an impressive use of virtual worlds to raise funds for cancer research and my inability to continue to participa...

Why is the sun in every virtual world I have explored been in the southern part of the sky? Is this a bias amongst programmers that all virtual worlds are located in the northern hemisphere of whatever planet on which they might be located? Is it possible to change a setting somewhere for this? I do...

Note that the instructions here: http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Using_L3DT will create the terrain elevation problem that this fix addresses.

Problem solved! This morning I had a lovely conversation with Minthere Always, and from some of her suggestions I stumbled on a really simple solution to the problem of sub-zero elevations. I discovered that, working in http://www.simonastick.com I could, from the opensim console, fill the terrain o...

Thank you, Ilan.
It works ok - just gets very dark down there