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Josh Susanto

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Everything posted by Josh Susanto

  1. Based on my own not entirely similar experience, I would expect such a product line, if presented under my own pricing scheme, to have paid all its own loading fees within 2 months at the latest. Then I guess it would just sit there accumulating money until someone files a DMCA notice or something. Which is quite possibly never. I suppose it if really burns you up, you can always buy one of the images and leave a bad review explaining where the image came from, but that does sort of make you complicit. Maybe you could take a screen shot of the listing and give that away as a free texture. Assuming that the listing is already a for a pirated image, the person listing it will have to prove he's the real copyright holder of the re-pirated content in order to pursue a claim against your screen shot, so...
  2. >My Mom says its called a pig-in-a-poke. Just to be sure I never get accused of that, I try to sell the poke and sneak the pig in for free.
  3. It's arguably a pretty small legal risk to load up even massive amounts of completely unaltered images for sale, as the burden upon the copyright holder is to prove not only that the merchant does not hold the copyright, but that the person filing the notice against them does hold the copyright. This does not necessarily make it morally right, or even a good long-term business idea to shameless pirate every imaginable commercially viable image. I'm only trying to point out that we need to maintain a realistic idea about what probably will happen and what probably will not happen to such merchants. Unless I am the real copyright holder, there's practically nothing I can do about a violation I see someone has made, so it's better just to forget about some of the more lame cheap-ass sh## that some other people might be doing and focus on my own plans. So far, though, I draw the line at the Lindens, themselves, who are supposed to be setting a standard for the rest of us. The Madstyle promotion was really a Mad Men promotion, and Boston Linden's profile was still showing a picture of Wall-E last time I checked. And yet, even though I went out of my way to alert the IP holders as to what was happening, there has been nothing done about either matter. If that's any indication, we should be extremely doubtful that someone who is just loading and selling a bunch of pictures from Google is headed for any kind of imminent legal disaster. OTOH, there's nothing to stop someone who only wants to cause you trouble from filing a notice against even your 100% original and fully documented products. The claim may end up going nowhere and it may make some trouble for the person who files it, but that's not an absolute deterrent . If there's a way to abuse something, someone will find it. If that's not good enough for you, sorry, but there's practically nothing that anybody is going to do about it except either take advantage of the situation or not take advantage of the situation, personally.
  4. >Something is definitely up with listing enhancements at the moment, conspiracy theory or not... Please allow me to apply Occam's Razor... When an expanding number of completely different types of accidents each consistently produce the same basic range and quality of effects, (rather than an essentially random distribution of effects) then the accidents are probably not accidents. So what are they? If it's the same people who keep benefiting from all the bizarre technical failures, even to a point where we can predict it, is there not some point at which it's reasonable to stop thinking it could be mere coincidence? When is that? When I have asked in the past if specific things would persuade people, they've usually said that it's pointless to discuss being persuaded by something that is never going to happen... ... and then it happens. ... and then I ask again. ... and again.... and again. So I guess the unstated response is essentially "never". How is such a position any less unreasonable than my own?
  5. >On the subject of having "more valid theories" .. that's just plain impossible. Theories that are different and exclusive of each other cannot all be valid. One and only one can be valid, with the remainder being at best plausible and at worst being flat out wrong. If only one theory can be valid, it's not a theory anymore, but a fact. Until that happens, though, many theories can be valid. They are called competing theories. Some will be more valid than others at any given time, depending upon what evidence can be observed, but theories don't get invalidated merely by the accumulation of evidence supporting a competing theory. Theories also stand to be refined, as does the one being discussed here. What I hypothesized as the basic mechanism, as inconsistent with what you observe, would seem to be more imprecise than incorrect. There are ways to further clean up this theory without necessarily making it any more complicated. Please try that and I'll be eager to read and consider. It might be better if theories here didn't have to be posed in such strong resemblance to beliefs, but it's more than somewhat encouraged by the official presentation of undeniable lies as unambiguous facts by both LL and by users I understand I am to assume are not directly affiliated with LL. Moreover, my work here clearly does less to produce new beliefs than to dispel existing beliefs, unstated and possibly unconscious as those may be. (I can live with that.) When mysterious lurkers stop popping in to shout down with ad hominem any criticism of LL and start instead popping in to provide simpler theories that are equally or more consistent with observable facts, my services might not be needed here so much, but don't hold your breath for that. One of the basic ad hominem devices I think we've both seen deployed is to focus on my reasons for saying things rather than on the evidentiary consistency of what I describe. Others reading this need to realize that using my egotism as a distraction is not going to work forever. My egotism is an immutible constant, while the number of profoundly suspicious things I describe so far only stands to continue to expand. At some point a threshold will inevitably be reached at which the weight of what I say is greater than the weight of why I might be saying it. In fact, I am to understand that this has already somewhat happened with a few people who used to very strongly disagree with me, and who have since come to support my activity in principle, even if they don't always agree with my interpretations. But I didn't change the mind of these newer critics. LL changed the minds of these people by doing what I said LL would do.
  6. I'm not asking people to believe stuff, per se. That's not really how theories are supposed to work. The way a theory works is that if there is some specific thing which would disprove it but which has not yet happened, it is a valid theory. There can be multiple valid theories at one time, even if they contradict each other, provided that they are all subject to disproof and not yet disproved. In fact, the more valid theories you have, the more stand to be disproved and the further away you can eventually get from being completely wrong. When you have only one theory, though, it tends to function a lot like a belief. In the absence of my theories, for example, there is usually only the default theory that everyone at LL is immune to corruption. I believe that most users subscribe to this theory because it just seems easier to them, not because it makes any statistical sense or because it provides them any advantage in terms of making their own decisions about how to interact with LL. A major procedural problem on this forum is that we usually have only 2 theories; mine and something like the opposite. Not you, specifically, Darrius, but more generally, it seems like people around here are a lot better at shooting down theories that challenge the default theory than they are at providing some other viable explanation for what is happening. In answer to the question of not seeing who is buying listing enhancements, I understand that I need to clarify: 1) If someone buys a listing enhancement and gets what they paid for, I may see that. 2) If someone buys a listing enhancement and does not get what they pay for, I will not see that. Thus, it is currently impossible for me to do a mathematical breakdown of how the listings differ between those of people getting screwed and those of people not getting screwed, which would be an easy way to hurt my theory. But there are other ways, and I hope they will be tried. A lot of listings show links to in-world stores, so it probably would be hard to disfavor all and only those of us whose listings do not, and there are probably some other pretty important potential confounding variables. OTOH, as you (all) have probably made a point of forgetting, I did show that merchants with very large stores were being favored disproportionately in rankings during the Mad Men promotion. So there at least either is or has been a mechanism that favors major in-world merchants, at least in terms of the amount of land they are using. If it could function in the Mad Men promotion then there's no reason for me to think that it could not also be functioning in other parts of the search system.
  7. >Obviously it happens because we're all here aren't we? Not to accuse you of making an intentionally weak point, but this sounds like sort of a Jim Jones/Marshall Applewhite kind of argument which exploits a basic cognitive bias regarding the perception of a small concensus as representing either a broader consensus or one that "would exist if more people could think as clearly as we do". Moreover, we who are still here represent an ever-dwindling pool of people still somehow haven't yet come to find participation in SL to be utterly pointless... and even we seem to be constantly complaining about things. If LL can't even preach to the choir anymore, then to whom can they preach?
  8. It's a little sluggish, but not as bad as it has been a few times in the past. What should be more troubling to you, though, is the existing function of your store. Log in with an alt and see if everything works the way you were led to expect it would by viewing it with your primary account. It doesn't, and the difference may be costing you money. That is, you, me, and others.
  9. >or they are granting special display priority to specific individuals It's unfortunate that I can't see who is buying enhancements and who is not. Otherwise maybe I'd be able to break myself of the perception that listing enhancements only work properly if you also link and in-world store on your listings.
  10. >I think that because they are "gamers" they will be more likely to purchase Linden Dollars to have a better Avatar, and that, at the end of the day will be good for the community. It will be good up until they realize that having a better avatar is pointless without any appreciable context in which to present it. And then when they've all blogged about how badly LL has wasted their time and money, then what? Does a tiny shot of extra capital for a few days really justify a permanent abundance of intensely negative commentary all over the internet?
  11. Observable malfunctions in basic marketplace utilities have nothing to do with fewer people using the SLM. OTOH, I've now got money coming in without any new orders being fulfilled (and, again, WTF). I suppose if it turns out to be enough to keep loading 1 or 2 new items every day, I may as well put up with it for a a while yet. I really came to SL initially just to make stuff, anyway.
  12. And now I just used my alt to buy a 1L item from my main account. It was charged and delivered, and the order even shows, but my balance didn't increase. I know I've said a few times before that I'm on the edge of just giving up on this thing, but at this point there isn't even any money coming in, so it's hard for me to make any kind of case for bothering to continue. I mean - eventually I would inevitably run out of money anyway, right? - so why not just cash out and forget about eveything?
  13. OK, NOW I see... Using my alt, the search functions on my store only work for Relevance and for Best Selling (which is completely wrong anyway). The other search means default to Relevance. Of course this doesn't happen when I view my own store with my main account, since that would be way too easy to notice, huh.
  14. >Due to the kindness of a sister merchant I placed copies of my Magic Boxes on another parcel That also makes sense for now. I just hope you don't have any boxes on box rental sims, though. When The Malefactor finally gets down to the business of messing with those, their malfunction actually will disrupt the behavior of your other boxes (as it did a year ago).
  15. >Big shock for me was getting a notice today that a marketplace JIRA started in 2010 finally got reviewed, and Sunday I put in a MP support ticket, and got a response and resolution in an hour, for a non critical issue. More hints that the individual identifying as CTL may be going or gone to wherever it was she went before. Even so, you can expect 1 October to be a total storm of sh## hitting the fan, with someone other than CTL left conveniently holding the spatula.
  16. I used to get 100 orders a day or more. Does anybody know what's really happening here?
  17. Yep. Right before CTL was temporaily replaced by LindenLab. Hmm.
  18. >Interestingly, I'm getting in world sales during this time and I rarely had in world sales as compared to the MP in the past. If you have no magic boxes on the same land, there would be every reason to assure that nothing goes wrong for you. Does that happen to be the case?
  19. >My Marketplace sales are up a great deal since many of you reported sales dropping precipitously If you're using DD, that's what I would expect. LL needs to not mess with you so much for a while in order to again try to convince everyone that the boxes are a problem.
  20. My sales have been in very slow, gradual decline through August. At first I thought it was probably due to the Olympics and the Mars landing. But it has continued. What I do know is that there have also been various problems with internet connectivity more largely, which I have noted in the past as corresponding to sales slumps. Intermittence of access to Google Chrome, especially, seems to correlate. But getting repeatedly kicked out of SL and/or the SLM every few minutes in recent days can't be helping, either.
  21. We have seen this before. Anybody happen to remember when, and what else was happening?
  22. A while back, a few of us noticed bug in which items were losing permissions when moved to inventory. Fortunately, if it's your own item you should be able to change the permissions after it has moved to your inventory and before you put it into a magic box or into DD.
  23. As a rule, if it exports, it sells.
  24. >I think Steam will be much better at attracting new users to SL then all the negative post and comments here in the forums. It's true that honey catches more flies than vinegar. But why bother with honey when you can just use bovine excrement? I'm not interested in attracting new users by instilling them with false expectations.
  25. Sim function has to be manipulated in order to again convince people that the magic boxes are a problem, so that they can finally be shut off on 1 October. Why? Because, if the magic boxes are working OK when they get shut off, too much user focus will be put on the fact that DD still will not support a very large number of items. But LL wouldn't really shut off the boxes while DD is incomplete, would they? YES, they WOULD and the WILL. Just in time to mess up your whole 4th quarter marketing plan. But, again, why? So that they can say "we're sorry that you have to pay more for land in order to sell your items in-world instead of on the SLM, but those boxes are just not working anymore for some reason. Getting them shut off has become a more pressing matter than getting DD to support your product." The real reason for the "box failure" being, of course, that sim function has been tampered with, specifically for this purpose. But doesn't tampered sim function also stand to disrupt in-world sales, at least in the short term? Yes. So what's the justification there? The justification is: "F### you".
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