AnthonyJoanne

LL are wise to leave that alone. Because if they touch that ... then they are going to have to deal with of the myriad of groups and sims which operated on the principal that 'men are inferior', and 'non-black are inferior'. Both of those, shall we call them 'themes', are by far the most common of the ones which are borderline.

Let's consider secret societies. Years ago I was indulging in some sim-hopping. You know the kind of thing ... plug a random word into the Places search and pick one of the returns and just go there to see what there is to see. One particular hop, I arrived in a sim which had some very edgy role playing going on. I stayed in the welcome area for about 10 minutes reading the comprehensive notecards explaining exactly what was happening in the sim, clarifying a LOT of points about what was going on, and making clear what was NOT going on. The notecards were SO extensive that I found myself intrigued. I went out into the sim and was further intrigued ... it was clearly the result of a LOT of work, and it was all very well done. I was wearing a titler which basically said "I'm just exploring. Please let me know if that's a problem" and was approached by someone who checked very closely to confirm that I had read and understood the notecards and was fully aware that this was role play. I guess I passed as they welcomed me to look around, asking that I not intrude on the active RP that was going on, etc. Now let me be ENTIRELY clear. I have read countless TOS and EULA because, as an IT professional, it's often been my job to keep idiot users from bringing in software that is licensed only for PERSONAL use. So I am quite aware of the rules pertaining to SL. I can state that what was going on in that sim was NOT against the TOS in my opinion. But a few months later that sim was suddenly empty and available for rent ... courtesy of complaints about what was going on there. I had some items from the sim, and was therefore able to get the name of the creator who I reached out to. He was very cautious but admitted that their group had given up trying to have a specific location to indulge in their role play. In that I wasn't part of the group, he wasn't willing to share any more than that and I understood and wished him and his group well. Now for what I have inferred. I know that many of those avatars are still active. Some of them have updated their profiles and have clearly moved on. But many others have NOT changed their profiles in the slightest since that sim was shut down. Clearly they have found something to do, but choose not to show what it is on their profiles. I suspect that they are still doing their RP ... they are just doing it underground so that they can be left in peace to enjoy their fetish(es). Perhaps that counts as a secret society?

Others have discussed the bot/fake account issue and twitter, so I won't bother. Rather than talk about SL itself I'll talk about a particular region in SL, without naming it. I'm going to be as generic as humanly possible and I will refuse to confirm or deny what region I'm talking about if anyone asks, even in private messages. I first encountered this particular region many years ago ... before this alt was created. It was a very popular location and, not to put too fine a point on it, it sold sex. I had no interest in buying sex, but I popped in for a few minutes every couple of months just to look around and people watch. The region was always thriving, no matter what time I went there, and although there were some bots it was obvious that they served a particular purpose ... bartender, that sort of thing. But there were always many 'customers' and 'staff' and they were all clearly 'real people'. The owner was always on 24/7, and was always present in the main location. Obviously the owner was AFK for significant periods. The region, btw, was made up of more than one sim. I won't say how many. At this point we're talking about a region which had been active for at least 4 years. One day I popped in and noticed that there were fewer people around than normal. Less customers and less staff. After a while I moved on, wondering if I'd turned up at a quiet time. So I popped in there later that day and it was much busier, although still not really at the levels I was used to seeing there. I kept visiting every couple of months, but instead of just clicking on the LM, I took to looking at the map and evaluating the number of avatars in the region. Here's the thing ... when looking at the map there was ALWAYS lots of avatars. But when I arrived the main location was generally quiet. Eventually I tumbled that the owner was faking by putting bots all over the region in out of the way places. Finally it got to the point that all the customers and the staff were bots. There was the owner, sitting on their throne as always, but no longer surrounded by real people ... just bots. It was incredibly sad. I stopped going. Then one day, about a year later, I thought of that region and I looked at the map and it was no longer multiple sims ... just one. Some time after that ... it was gone altogether. My personal belief is that the owner had tapped into the zeitgeist at exactly the right time in exactly the right way and had become incredibly successful. But as time moved on, and the way people used SL changed, the owner had attempted to keep things going believing that it was just a temporary slump. Sadly it wasn't. Now to a parallel. There's an online game I play. Again ... no names. The company who runs the game has been annoying the players a great deal for the past few years. Changes to gameplay which have been incredibly unpopular. Monetisation strategies which have been ... shall we say on the shady side. Blatantly lying to the players, and getting caught out, then making abject apologies to then continue doing the same thing. Lots of other stuff that I can't be generic about. People are leaving: Formerly large and active guilds/clans are showing 90% of their players as not having participated in months. The number of people posting on the forums has dropped a great deal. Same with the sub-reddit for that game ... the number of posts has decreased markedly. The popularity of streams showing that game have decreased significantly on TWITCH, and youtube videos about it no longer get anywhere near as many views as they did. It's OBVIOUS that the number of players in that game are dropping. The game in question has peaked and the changes that the company have made to try to extend their growth have been counter-productive and instead have caused players to leave. But somehow ... against all the clear evidence that the numbers are dropping, the game continues to report almost the same numbers as it did during it's heyday. Why? I genuinely don't know. It could be that the company thinks that it's a temporary slump and that keeping the numbers up will attract new players (like the owner of that region in SL I spoke about). The point? The use of bots, of fake users, reporting fake 'likes', etc ... is never going to be viable in the long term. Eventually the reality is going to surface.

I'm afraid that's not correct. From here on the SL wiki: Although that's no longer quite true ... they are now just yellow lines rather than the really hideous NO ENTRY of yore.

Great minds! Hmmm ... I should check to see if I need to update the dosage of my modesty meds! :)

I agree it's a start. And in fact it brings up another point: Flight in SL is nothing like RL. In SL it's more like driving ... jump in your vehicle, fire it up, and go. In RL you need a flight plan. You need to take into account prohibited zones (e.g. the air above the White House), tightly controlled airspaces (e.g. airports), etc. If our SL pilots wanted a more realistic experience they could collaborate on a 'registry' of 'problem parcels' ... places where the airspace was obstructed with skyboxes, security orbs, etc. Then they could sit down with a map and figure out their flight plan fairly secure in the knowledge that they are able to get from point A to point B and probably not encounter any obstacles. Obviously parcels can change fairly quickly, but if people insist on drawing RL analogies ...

It would be great if that was actually an option, but for the flyers it's not: From the advert: Being above the ban line doesn't mean you're safe ... it means that you MAY be safe unless you encounter a security orb.

Announcer voice: "Good question GG! Let's recap!" "The OP kicked off ..." [Snip 20 minute highlights] " ... and that brings us to where we are now, a no score draw and the referee appears to be asleep!" "Back to you GG!"

Enough. Seriously ... enough. LL did NOT promise you the right to enter other people's property. Stop misrepresenting LL's promise as meaning you are entitled to what you want. And while we're at it these are your words: I was going to let this go, but you just don't seem to get it. The people who want privacy ARE paying for it. They paid for it when the bought the land and the keep paying for it by retaining their premium membership. Ban lines ... remember. Part of the deal when those people BOUGHT the land. The right to stop people entering their property if they so choose. And worse ... you think it's justifiable to force people off the Mainland. What will you do if they don't want to move ... herd them into camps? Because that's exactly what you sound like. You keep harping on about the community experience ... does it not occur to you that what YOU want is not what the MAJORITY of the community on the Mainland wants? That you are, in fact, in the minority. Want evidence? I offer you your own words again: Everyone around you wants privacy. You do not. It certainly appears that you are the minority. So instead of making other people move ... perhaps YOU should move? Convince LL to make a continent for those of you who want unimpeded access and off you go. "At whatever affordable price LL would offer". Either way - I'm done with you. Bit bucket time.

Hang on - got to figure out how to do multi quote lol. Can't figure it out, so I'll have to quote it manually. What I was responding to was this from Codex Alpha: Specifically the bolded section ... but I quoted a lot around it to avoid appearing to take it out of context.

You honestly think that LL would lift every parcel that had banlines and shift them from the Mainland to some new 'servers for those who want privacy'? Because every one of the parcels they shifted would then become abandoned land ... which they would still have to provide servers to support ... as well as providing new servers to run those parcels they force to move. And you think that the people who were forced off the mainland wouldn't object. Vigorously?

Several people have offered the rationale: "It's my land and I don't want anyone I didn't invite on it". You clearly don't think that's valid. Obviously others DO think it's valid. And that's where it ends. As Rolig said: No - there's no point. There is no chance that LL would force everyone who doesn't want their parcel to be open onto private-infrastructure ... the cost would be prohibitive and the backlash would be heavy.

Not now ... it's far too late. I'm not sure what all of the mainland looks like but from my skybox, if I turn up my draw distance to max, the sky is absolutely littered with builds. I'd say that you'd be hard pressed to find any flight level that wasn't cluttered at this point. So if LL declared X meters as a flight level that needed to be unobscured ... people would have to move their builds. And LL would have to deal with a HUGE onslaught of tickets because people screwed up doing so, and as a result lost their items etc. And LL would HAVE to deal with them because they were the ones who said that people had to move their stuff. It would get VERY messy.

To be quite honest I'd have to say "I'm not sure if it's changed". It's been some years since I used that trick at ground level ... so I tried it out. At ground level, you are correct - it no longer works. Once you are higher than 50m above the ground mesh - it works fine as a method to enter a parcel.

Ok - that's where I think the problem is: Mainland is not public area. Mainland is made up of two different types of areas: 1. Linden controlled. Roads. The large swathes of land which LL 'own'. Water ways. That sort of thing. 2. Privately controlled. This is area which is 'owned' by people other than LL. Currently LL let the residents access the mainland that they control. Which is nice of them and makes sense because otherwise SL would just be a series of disconnected and unrelated scenes ... like Sansar. The rest is private property. Mainland was clearly designed and implemented with that basic concept in mind: That land you 'buy' is private property. Private property is, by definition, the opposite of 'public area'. Some people choose to have their private property open to the public. Other people do not. The reality is that no part of the basic concept of mainland is that you be able to move across the entire space unhindered because mainland is NOT public area. Hopefully that will clarify things. No - ban lines are not effective. From the wiki Arguably this 50m limit is one of the reasons why security orbs exist. The other reason is that you can penetrate ban lines easily by finding a seat/bed/whatever on the other side of the line and sitting on it. If banlines extended to the max height, AND prevented you from interacting with anything on the other side of the ban line, I suspect security orbs wouldn't need to exist on the mainland.

A perspective: I have a chunk of mainland. Said chunk is completely parcel-locked and quite a distance from any public space (i.e linden road, water, etc). When I purchased that chunk my neighbours were all private residences. It was peaceful and quiet. We had no ban lines or security orb. Then one quite large parcel right next to me was sold and the new owner proceeded to put in a stack of skyboxes for rent. No big deal ... except apparently the rent was quite low so there were frequently toons in their skyboxes. Again ... no big deal, IF they had stayed in their skyboxes. The 'visits' to my chunk suddenly spiked. And they coincided with the times when my family and I were in our chunk. We weren't just being intruded upon occasionally ... we were being spammed with 'visitors'. So I turned on the ban lines. But of course ... ban lines don't cover sky boxes so we were still being 'visited'. So ... security orb. Set to 30 seconds. The only problem with that ... 30 seconds is more than enough time for an intruder to completely derail the mood when you're in the middle of an intimate moment with someone and suddenly you're joined by someone who thinks that the height of SL-chic is a used-tampon avatar. Who, after having been ejected and banned then arranges four more visits from different accounts in the same avatar. Alts or just five idiots ... don't know, don't care. And no - I am NOT joking about the avatar. Security orb set to 0 seconds for a couple of days and then we opted for 20 seconds as the new default. Then that parcel went up for sale ... the sky boxes all went away and we thought we'd weathered the storm. Until it was bought and turned into an AFK sex region. I don't know how much money the owner of the region was making, but I suspect that it wasn't much given that all his customers seemed to have had a burning desire to suddenly appear in my home. The orb was set to 5 seconds. During the height of those visits while the orb was set to 5 seconds, btw, I got a notecard from someone who had tried to fly through my parcel. It was quite vitriolic. So much so that person is now banned. I have little to no tolerance for the entitled. After a while that AFK sex region went quiet and the intrusions stopped ... so now the orb is set to 15 seconds. So as you can see ... the settings on the security orb have been reactive to the amount of 'visitors' who chose to violate my family's privacy. When we were being hammered ... the time went down, when people aren't bothering us ... the number went up. Because I understand that people want to fly around. But your ability to fly around is a DISTANT second to my ability to spend time with my family without being harassed. So when we're being harassed ... you don't get to fly through my region. When we aren't being bothered, then I ease the restrictions to give you a chance to get through the region before you are ejected. But I've seen several mentions of 'reasonable'. Here's the problem with that: You do not control what is reasonable on my parcel. I DO. Just as I don't control what is reasonable on your parcel ... you do. Don't like it? All you have to do to avoid it ... is stay off my parcel. And if I don't like what you consider reasonable, I'll stay off your parcel. The fact that some of you think that LL should change the rules so that you can travel through a place you have no right to be ... remember what I said about little to no tolerance for the entitled? BTW the RL analogies are completely bogus because if someone in RL was able to overfly my house, and then abuse reality to be instantly sitting next to my partner and I while we're busy in bed, you can be damn sure that I'd have ground to air missiles to shoot any encroaching aircraft down. What people should take away from this is that LL need to make ban lines that actually work, and that don't screw up people who fly/drive/whatever into them. And we all know that is not going to happen.

If you want to run two versions of FS, one for SL and one for OS ... you can try running one instance of 64 bit and one instance of 32 bit. I found keeping them separate was doable without resorting to anything too ugly. I run SL in the 32 bit version and save the 64 bit for OS ... as quite frankly I'm spending much more time in OS these days.

I've found that, for me, Firestorm sucks the least. Of course they ALL suck massively if you want to run multiple versions the way I do. That having been said ... I've been able to get 3 versions of FS operational on the same PC and keep their caches etc separate, but it's a nightmare and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I also have the LL viewer, Singularity and Kokua installed ... but haven't fired them up in well over a year so they are hopelessly out of date. Frankly I'd ditch the lot if someone had enough nouse to develop a truly standalone/portable viewer.

Well now that you know you're actually wrong, I'm sure you feel even more so.

Surely you're not being so oppressive as to question my lived experience? How dreadfully unprogressive of you! What can I say? Apparently something in a post I made which was entirely factual and quite benign was deemed as unacceptable by the forum software, and it seems that the moderators concurred. I have absolutely no idea why. End result ... I'm typing things and then proof reading them and wondering if the forum software is going to get triggered. Not conducive to adult conversation. But then again, your response was the polar opposite of adult ... so no problem. :p edit - included my jocular :p a the end because cut and paste skipped it.

From wikipedia: The largest production model of the Saturn family of rockets, the Saturn V was designed under the direction of Wernher von Braun at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama; the lead contractors were Boeing, North American Aviation, Douglas Aircraft Company, and IBM. A total of 15 flight-capable vehicles were built, plus three for ground testing. Thirteen were launched from Kennedy Space Center with no loss of crew or payload. A total of 24 astronauts were launched to the Moon from December 1968 through December 1972. Given that we're talking about the space race, and not recent history ... I think you need to qualify your statement just a little.

I imagine that Elon Musk has heard of SL ... but I doubt if he's terribly interested in it. The question is, why would he be interested in SL/LL? I haven't addressed the farcical attempts of Zuckerberg et-al to make a Metaverse, but the two topics relate. Now is the WORST possible time to try to create a Metaverse for two reasons. Firstly - the technology isn't there yet. It's much closer than it was when SL was first launched, but it's still not ubiquitous: You need FAST data. VERY fast data to make it work properly. Yes ... data is available at the necessary sort of rates, but too many of us are still restricted to how much can be forced through the bottleneck of intercontinental cables. And even if you aren't constrained by that ... ISPs are all too happy to leverage their power by prioritising certain data. With hundreds of thousands of people accessing a Metaverse, eventually millions ... that kind of impediment couldn't be tolerated. VR headsets just aren't where they need to be either in cost or in usability to be the basis of a Metaverse that dominates the net. They are getting better, but they aren't good enough yet. Secondly - the sociopolitical landscape is the opposite of what is necessary for development and adoption of a Metaverse. I wrote a quite lengthy explanation of what I mean by this, but given that the forum has taken to censoring my posts I have no doubt that would have been enough to get me hidden as well. Suffice to say that the current political and social landscape is not one which permits freedom of speech or expression except where approved by a small percentage of the population who have used social media to amplify their voices through the use of bots and sock puppets. Don't believe me? Companies who believed those voices to be much larger than they actually are have experienced marked downturns in their profits ... have a look at Gillette and Disney for the evidence. There are other factors, but those are the two big ones. Musk clearly believes he can make Twitter profitable. He may well be right, only time will tell. But a Metaverse? Not yet. Not in the same climate where the people who have been abusing censorship for their own political ends are now screeching that Musk owning twitter is a threat to free speech. Besides ... Nothing LL or SL have are of any real value in creating a new Metaverse. Don't get me wrong ... I still enjoy SL a great deal, but let's face it we saw what LL created when they tried to take the next step, and Sansar was NOT what a Metaverse needs to be.

Absolutely. Myself and the rest of my family in-world often get to watch bits and pieces of our various body parts floating for quite a long time before they end up where they are supposed to be. Even more problematic ... recently I got a demo dress. When I attached it I noticed the message telling me that it was a 5 minute timed demo. The dress floated next to my hand for the entire duration of the timer and never positioned properly. My partner and I agreed that I wouldn't buy the dress because while it looked like it might be a nice dress ... as a glove it really wasn't a win!

I always find it vastly amusing when these people drag out the "shouting fire in a theater" line and seem to think that they are making a telling point. When the reality is that they are actually destroying the premise that they are arguing for: People can't shout fire in a theater when there is no fire because ... it is against the law to do so. People can't call for violence on social media because ... it is against the rules to do so. Every social media platform has it built into their rules, TOS, etc. Which raises the question why many of those people who DO call for violence on Twitter don't seem to be penalised for it, if they have the proper political opinion. Here's a few that were sparked by a deceptively edited fake news story pushed extensively by the media. People may recall it ... the Covington School Boys who were harassed by a Native American activist and a bunch of black supremacists: I would put $1000 into a gofundme for someone to punch him right in the *****ing mouth. LOCK THE KIDS IN THE SCHOOL AND BURN THAT ***** TO THE GROUND. Giving a *****-eating grin to a Native American's face isn't legally violence. But he is smiling *about* the violence. He is saying, "my people hurt you, and you can't touch me even while I gloat about it." It is fascism. And you should punch fascists. I could list many more ... I won't bother. Most of the tweets were deleted when the low life scum whose initial response was to call for violence against school boys were confronted with the fact that those school boys were innocent. What's really interesting is that some of those tweets are still on twitter to this day. And most of the people who did call for violence against those boys ... STILL HAVE THEIR ACCOUNTS. Twitter has consistently failed to terminate accounts which have called for violence, because they chose to ignore their own rules. And NOW we have people wittering about how twitter will become a forum of hate because Musk is buying it? Hypocrites, one and all.

I've noticed people who I haven't blocked responding to claims that Musk's 'followers' have been on a crusade of hate. I find that particularly interesting and worth commenting on. Let us consider the concept of 'hate' on twitter. I found this, and I imagine it's accurate: Twitter states in its rules under "hateful conduct" that the company will permanently suspend any account that includes a "violent threat ... incites fears, or reduces someone to less than human," and under "glorification of violence," a user will be suspended for "specific threats of violence or wishing for serious physical harm, death, or disease to an individual or group of people." Ok ... let's find a few shall we? From Peter Fonda Fonda later deleted the tweet because of the amount of backlash he got. But according to twitter rules he should have been permanently banned. Again he deleted the tweet after backlash. Again - he should have been banned permanently. Fonda was never banned from twitter. Then there is Clementine Ford. You may never have heard of her ... she's Australian. She's also a feminist. She is also, by definition, a misandrist who uses every opportunity to spew hate at men. When she received backlash for her HATE ... she claimed it proved how "fragile men are". She deleted the tweet. She also deleted the tweet where she posted and Guess what ... Clementine Ford is still active on twitter. What happened to THAT permanent ban? Note that I'm skipping the THOUSANDS of tweets that contained threats or wished death on President Trump ... that's low hanging fruit. But what about Pete Forester who tweeted That's as clear an example of Hate Speech as you can get. Forester still has his twitter account. And his precious blue check mark. I selected each of those examples because they were sufficiently high profile that twitter would have received hundreds, if not thousands, of reports about those tweets. Twitter, according to it's own rules, was REQUIRED to permanently ban those people. Now for the really cool part: All of this took place under Vijaya Gadde's watch. But criticising her for that ... is regarded as hate speech. No. Just NO. Calling someone out for rampant bias and (at the very least) incompetence is NOT hate speech. And no amount of spin from the regressives is going to make it so.