Madelaine McMasters

Hi Pink, If I'm understanding your question correctly, you want an avatar what will never allow its limbs to penetrate the body proper, as happens when I cross my arms and appear to be extracting my own heart like an aboriginal witch doctor. The SL avatar simply doesn't have "self collision" detection. You may be able to find animations that are more conservative with limb placement, but I've no idea where to start. And then there's the inevitable problem of other people's limbs and attachments entering your body. So there's no solution, unless... You do like me, and enjoy your ability to do internal medicine with no license, no intent, and best of all, no effort. Have fun!

Duplicate of... http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Everything-Else/All-my-landmarks-have-been-deleted/qaq-p/2599068/comment-id/11153

Hi River, It's quite likely you've NOT lost your landmarks. Now and then the local copy of your second life inventory (which includes all your landmarks) gets goofed up, perhaps because of a viewer crash or any number of imponderables. They're still on the SL servers and it's just a matter of getting them back on your computer again. Here's a wiki page describing the issue and ways to fix it. I recommend you try the first of the "Common Solutions"... https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Inventory_loss Good luck! ETA: And please don't repost questions. The forum software is a mess and doing so pushes other questions off the front page and prevents us from tracking any responses to your first question. The best way to continue a dialog is to add information to your original question by editing it. You can do so via "Options" over there on the right. ETA2: No worries about the double post, River. As I said, the forum software is a mess. It seems to have been designed to make asking and answering questions as difficult as possible.

Hi Darklaycan, Abandoned groups, like abandoned avatars, lose their names to the void. There is no way to get them back. I suggest you create a new group, perhaps DarcuLostAgain, or DarcuReallyLost (you get the idea) and have some fun with the errors that arise from behing human. Good luck, have fun!

Ceera, thanks for that update. I encounter this question often and haven't had any hard data to offer.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: With the Internet, everything has changed. Now, the cost of trailing you is zero. Actually, it's less than zero. Advertisers are willing to waste half their budgets (famously, they don't know which half) to track everybody, including those who've no interest in them. The cost of tracking is so low that it makes sense to track everyone in the hopes that you can identify even a tiny sliver of potential interest in the ocean of data. The cost of distributing the tracking data is... zero. In fact, the cost of not distributing the tracking data is fairly high, in the form of data security. And it doesn't work very well. Collecting data is very easy, even "free" now,. However, unanalyzed data is useless and analyzing it will always take time and effort - time especially, which is the one most precious thing in our corner of the universe because we'll never get any more of it. Computers can speed things up but even the fastest computer can't analyze data as fast as a few billions of humans can generate it and this is assuming it knows what it's even supposed to be analyzing. Let's use "Where's Waldo?" as an example. You can see Waldo instantly - his image will be burned onto your retina at the speed of light the instant you turn the page. Recognizing him among the other characters, though, will probably take a good deal longer, even though you know exactly what he looks like. Now let's say your first grade teacher says to you, "Great job finding Waldo! Your class thanks you.But I have bad news - we think he had an accomplice who's still on the loose. I need you to go back and find the character who appears in the most pictures other than Waldo." How long will that take you? Now imagine you live in a world where new "Where's Waldo" pictures will be generated every minute. Can you keep up? How about every ten seconds? Theresa, your example is of an intended consequence of amassing data to search, finding a specific target. Yes that can be quite difficult, as made clear by the dearth of NSA successes. But you've not addressed the unintended consequence, which is that that massive databases make targets available to exploit. Rather than looking for a specific target, you look for exploitable ones, and there are many. This is what advertisers do. Their algorithms can be simple yet cunning, and their ability to indentify targets quite interesting. They may not have a message that interests, but the nefarious don't need that. Your argument about keeping up doesn't work for me. When I started in the technology business, it took a computer about as long to analyze a heartbeat as it did for the heart to beat it out. And we were able to store no more than two days of heartbeats from at-home patients for analysis upon their return to the clinic. By the time I left the field 12 years later, we could analyze the heartbeat 1400 times faster than real time, and store a year of them. Now we could, if you'd allow, record and store every beat your heart takes from birth to the doorstep of your death, and analyze that lifetime before you take the first bite of your last Domino's pizza. The explosion of online information is the result of the technology being so far behind at the start. Yes, we'll continue to find more things to log, but the signal to noise ratio will get better, not worse. We have a finite capacity to produce useful information. The lowest signal-to-noise ratio data we produce probably comes from video. Once computers are able to understand what's going on in them well enough for an advertiser to pay money for the interpretations, the computers will have largely caught up. For most other metrics, the computers and databases are already ahead of us, waiting patiently to be told what to mine. I don't worry overmuch about my privacy, for precisely the reasons you cite, and because I can decouple myself from technology when I wish. But I am increasingly less able to do that without sacrificing utility. And I'm also aware that the technology I use is now coloring my world view. I have three user accounts on my Mac, one for RL personal business, one for work activities, and one for SL. A Google search for something will return different results to each of those three accounts. I'd also not be surprised if Google knows that all of those accounts are facets of the one and only Madelaine McMasters. It may be only a matter of time before a promo copy of Curve magazine show up in my RL mailbox. And finally, I think history will show that the Internet was an overall net positive for the world. It's throwing challenges at us, just as urbanization did, but we'll figure them out. ;-)

Theresa Tennyson wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Somewhere else in this thread, you said "If you REALLY want to hide, the best place isn't behind a tree in the middle of a moor; it's in a crowded football stadium." Take a look at the first image in Wikipedia's entry for... Surveillance. ... darts off to have sex with a hottie, behind a tree in the middle of a moor. Those security cameras at a football stadium will be looking at tens of thousands of faces mooshing together in a pixelated pile. But you're welcome to do whatever you like. However, when a shepherd looking for a lost lamb sees you and your beau, with your middle-aged behind glowing in the moonlight, and memorizes every detail because it's the most interesting thing that's happened in his wooly little life and goes on to tell the tale to generations of children, who eventually tell it to the folklorist writing "Legends of the Moors," don't come crying to me. Those security cameras are already identifying individuals, and the technology will only improve. The fallible, malleable and ephemeral memory of the modern day shepherd is no more advanced than it was 10,000 years ago. If he didn't know who I was, he's unlikely to figure it out. And I'd hardly come crying to anyone if I became the stuff of legend because I was the most interesting thing that happened to someone. That's been my goal for 43 years. I'm far more likely to come crying to you because my beau found me amongst the least interesting things in his life and never told a soul. I'm getting weepy just thinking about it.

KarenMichelle Lane wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Are you trying to become my muse? Oh My, I was totally unaware that the job was open! Nor was I aware I needed one!

Welcome to Second Life, Lenniana! Years from now, you'll look back to your first days in SL and say "Oh, to be a noob again." It's not easy to make good money here, though it can be done. Most of us are here for the fun of it, and that needn't cost a dime. The SL Marketplace is full of freebie items to wear, and many of us live the nomad lifestyle, requiring no land on which to rez our stuff. But if you really want a job, you'll need some skills. You could make and sell things here, but that requires at least some familiarity with external image editing tools and the pecularities of building in SL. SL's learning curve is pretty steep, so don't expect to make money as a creator anytime soon. If you've got good social skills, you might find employment as a greeter, hostess, or entertainer at a club, but club owners are not likely to hire someone who's still learning to move about, and hasn't yet acquired an attractive and varied wardrobe. So even here, you've got some work ahead of you. For the vast majority of us, SL is a pleasant and low cost diversion from real life, which is were the real money is to be made.

Are you trying to become my muse?

Theresa Tennyson wrote: LaskyaClaren wrote: Theresa Tennyson wrote: Yes, there was the Internet back then ( I remember Delphi.) However, the PI did most of his work on the telephone. And forty years ago someone could have gotten a world of information about you in seconds by grabbing your purse, which would have contained a wealth of completely unencoded information. In the Pando article where people found so much information about the writer, both fourteen years ago and today, the investigators had to do quite a bit of work both times - it wasn't a case of someone sitting down and clicking a few keys. I was particularly struck how there were so many wireless networks around the writer's home that the snoops had trouble even finding the right one, much less cracking it. I find this a very odd response, Theresa. It's not really very often that I agree with Celestiall, but in this case I honestly don't understand why you are arguing this point. The collection of personal information -- be it identity, behaviours, friends, etc. -- isn't just a common practice in this digital era, it's been developed to almost a science. The terms "data harvesting" and "data scraping" are so new that they don't even appear in the most up-to-date version of the OED. The privacy issue, whether we're talking about identity, behaviour, or something else, isn't really about hackers, or purse snatchers: it's about governments and corporations having astonishingly sophisticated tools that commodify and profit from our private information -- who we are, what we do, and who we do it with -- for their own purposes. The entire business model of Facebook is based on this. Sure, someone can tell an awful lot about me by looking at my face and clothing. And they might even be able to profit from it. But the automated collection of personal information online is a huge and vastly more sophisticated and lucrative business. Okay, let me sum up my position in a few short statements: 1) You don't have privacy. 2) You never had privacy. 3) Since nobody else has privacy, this isn't a big deal because you're not important enough for anyone to care about. 4) If you are important enough for someone to care about? You're boned. Have an awesome weekend! Theresa, the changes in the nature of our privacy over the past few centuries are far are too complex to be adequately handled by your bullet points. I'm sure I've got only a tenuous grasp on the subject myself. You speak of privacy as it it's an on/off switch. It's not. Two hundred years ago, if I were to have sex in a tee-pee with my brave beau, the next flap neighbors would know, provided they weren't similarly oblivious. But if I walked to a neighboring village the next day, it's unlikely I'd be winked at by anyone. If I walked three days, it's unlikely anyone would ever know. If I waited three years, it's unlikely anyone would remember. We are wired to forgive and forget, it's a successful evolutionary adaptation. And... the people in my village know me, they trust me, they protect me, and I know, trust and protect them. We're a tribe. Maybe I didn't have much privacy, and maybe I didn't need it. When we left our tribes and moved to the city, we obtained the double edged sword of anonymity. We were now surrounded by strangers almost everywhere we went and those strangers were strangers to each other. We could easily lead secret lives, multiple lives. We developed work faces and home faces as work and home drifted farther apart. We now had privacy, but not the protection of the tribe. As we became more mobie, even those of modest means could distribute their lives over vast distances. Yes, anyone with an interest in you could retrace your path and connect the dots, but the costs in time, money and energy for doing so were substantial. And the cost of widely distributing the sketch was also substantial, unless you were important enough to attract the attention of the press, or the law, who had the wherewithal. With the Internet, everything has changed. Now, the cost of trailing you is zero. Actually, it's less than zero. Advertisers are willing to waste half their budgets (famously, they don't know which half) to track everybody, including those who've no interest in them. The cost of tracking is so low that it makes sense to track everyone in the hopes that you can identify even a tiny sliver of potential interest in the ocean of data. The cost of distributing the tracking data is... zero. In fact, the cost of not distributing the tracking data is fairly high, in the form of data security. And it doesn't work very well. And the tracking data is never forgotten. Three years after eeping in the tee-pee, the exact details of that night are collectively forgotten. My new brave beau will know I once had another, but won't be bludgeoned with instant replays from the neighbors. But today, that sexy MP3 mixtape will live on forever, ready to be Googled by anyone who has the slightest interest in me, or no interest at all. And it's no longer about whether someone has an interest in you, is it? With the invention of banks, banks became the object of desire for thieves. It's no different with tracking data warehouses. When the thief robs the bank, he doesn't have you in mind, but it's your money in his bag when he drives away. Somewhere else in this thread, you said "If you REALLY want to hide, the best place isn't behind a tree in the middle of a moor; it's in a crowded football stadium." Take a look at the first image in Wikipedia's entry for... Surveillance. ... darts off to have sex with a hottie, behind a tree in the middle of a moor.

Hippie Bowman wrote: Good morning all! Ooooooowwwwwoooooo!!! Good evening, Kids!!!

Excuse me, aren't you the aspiring author?

Yeah, that should do it. Make that call on your reference vehicle and save the result as a constant (initialized variable). Then, on_rez, get the current mass and divide it by that to get your scale factor. Gravity will take care of itself, so no need to apply the scale factor there, if you're using gravity.

Hi Poltergeist, It's all about mass, and as you increase the size of the vehicle, it becomes more massive (and quickly so, x^^3! or x*y*z). Add a scale factor to all the motors that's the cube of the ratio of your vehicle size to the reference size. It's been ages since I've done a vehicle, but I think this is the least fiddly way. And you could make the scale factor adjust automatically by querying the size of one axis of the root prim if you preserve aspect ratio when scaling the thing or all three if you don't.

Hi bryanna, You may have a corrupted cached texture for a clothing item, which is a subset of the general collection of problems called "bake fail". Here's Firestorm's page dealing with that. It's applicable to most viewers... http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/fs_bake_fail Your computer may be having connection issues, which often cause bake fail. SL is very finicky about the quality (not so much the speed) of its internet connection. Nalates Urriah has put together a helpful tome... http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/ Some people have problems with HTTP textures, which are the default these days... http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/http_fetching_issues You said you did a re-install, but was it a clean one? Keep this link for future reference, sometimes a clean install fixes things a simple install breaks... http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/How-to-uninstall-and-reinstall-Second-Life/ta-p/1375231 Those links should keep you busy, and maybe they'll even help Good luck!

Hi LilPunk, Welcome to Second Life! A "bumper" is, as far as I can tell, something you wear that emits a sound or posts a message in public chat when another avatar bumps into you. It's an ingenious idea that I believe has the potential to transfer the annoyance you might feel when accidentally bumped or pushed by someone into an annoyance everybody around you will feel because you make obnoxious noises and spam the chat window. Now that's leverage! And I suspect such bumpers will make you attractive to griefers, who will revel in their ability to make you the focus of a sim's collective anger. Kinda makes you want to run right out and buy a few, don't it?

Hi trixie, You can't get script errors on things that contain no scripts, so are you sure you get them on "anything"? Mesh rez failures throw up textless warning triangles that might look like script errors, but are not. If you are trying to wear a mesh object, try going without that and see if the errors stop. If they do, we'll have to wait for someone to come along to help diagnose a mesh loading problem. If you've got more to report, do so by editing your question via "Options" over there on the right. Good luck!

Hi Dakota, Look in your viewer's cache and observe the timestamps on files there. You can find the path to the cache by looking in "Preferences->Advanced" in the official viewer, or "Network & Cache" in some third party viewers. This probably isn't foolproof. I suppose someone could log in where you last were and the viewer would have all the required textures cached. You might also search your computer for "screen_last.bmp", which is updated upon logout. On a Mac, that file would be in "Library->Application Support->Second Life->YourAvatarName". Replace the viewer and avatar name as appropriate. Someone with PC expertise may come along to explain where to find the avatar folders on a PC.

Duplicate of... http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Technical/Youtube-missing-plug-in-appear-on-media-prims-not-on-extchrome/qaq-p/2592580 Cyber, if our original advice didn't help, edit your question (via "Options" over there on the right") to tell us what you tried and how it didn't work. Posting the same question again pushes other questions off the front page and makes it difficult to see what's already been recommended. ETA: No worries, Cyber. The forum software is crap, I'm surprised anyone comes here for help. It's gotta be a bit like banging your head against a wall.

There's a texture on the catsuit. The only way to texture something perfectly white (255,255,255) is by darkening it, so that explains the grey features. If one wanted to show reflective highlights on a white catsuit, you'd have to "dim" the fabric a little (make it grey) so the reflections could be brighter than the fabric. You see evidence of that on the shoulders and at the top of the breasts. So not only is that catsuit translucent (which can only serve to darken a white catsuit, nothing is brighter than white), but it's been darkened to allow highlights. Another potential solution might be to quickly create an all white outfit to wear under the catsuit. That will brighten it up a bit, and remove any tinting caused by the color of the underlying skin. It's all relative... I'm sure you've seen this illusion in which the A and B tiles are the same shade of white, or is that grey... or black?

Now you show me!

Tarina Sewell wrote: Here is the thing, I went through the sign up process you have to give a credit card for billing which I did I created an account then went to google play to download the app and its not supported on my ipad. So, no.. I will not be using it. Other wise yes, it is 9.95 mo unlimited. So, even if I wanted to, my old ipad isnt able to. Im not going to buy another pad because I am a desktop person... anyhow. Its not 2.00 an hour its 1.00 and hour. Actually, I am currently installing for my android phone so, I will let you know Well, the program is a bit of a mess on my phone, its beta apparently also, I cant log in and the keypad wont go away unless I go back to main menu and start over and now I have a completly black screen and can not stop the program.. I advise not to install it. (the little X button doesnt work) Tarina, no iPad, old or new, supports Android Apps from the Google Play store. Perhaps OnLive will release an iOS version of the app before they go out of business again.

kholek wrote: My hair was perfectly fine up until now... Once day all of a sudden a bunch of strands in my mesh hair are missing and my avatar has a bald spot! Also sometimes a bunch of yellow pyramids float above my avatar when she enters a region now. What happened? This only happens on my computer. I am using Singularity. Hi knolek, Those floaty triangles are unrezzed mesh part of your hair. They're either default placeholders for unrezzed mesh, or alert triangles. Now the question is, why isn't all of your hair loading? Before I toss out all the standard stuff, like checking your connection and clearing your cache, I think we should wait for someone who knows what the hell they're talking about to drop in and offer up some ideas. Summer Tison may have found a bizarre solution, but I think it's just as likely her problem vanished on its own. And just so you don't feel lonely... http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Mesh-Hair-Texture-Won-t-Fully-Load/m-p/2576102/highlight/true#M26605 ;-)

Perrie Juran wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Kelli May wrote: Syo Emerald wrote: ... In Second Life I noticed that many people treat me like a woman, even if they don't know my real gender. They do it automatically or just assume that I'm female. The interesting thing is, on the other hand, there are a few people who have an extreme fear to flirt with a man by acciedent and require at least a promise, or better, some sort of verification that I'm a real woman. ... This seems to come up a LOT. I can go a long time on SL thinking no-one cares about gender, until flirting, romance or teh sexxorz comes up. Suddenly the other party wants voice, documentation, genetic samples and a signature from three heads of state to proceed. The problem with getting those three signatures is that it requires having sex with them. That's the impression I got when they patted their laps as I entered the room. Where they SL heads of state, we'd be looking at a Catch-22. Maybe I should write-in Melissa Etheridge for president in 2016. How about Sinead O'connor or Annie Lenox? I'd vote for Annie in a heartbeat. Are we selecting write-in candidates on the basis of sexual orientation or baldness? Cuz if we're going for bald, I'll vote for the doll on the right...