Qie Niangao

Monti Messmer wrote: SL is big enough to stroll around without invading others space - paid space !!! I know lots of people feel that way and we're expected to respect the sentiment -- probably much of virtual land ownership depends on it now. But really, a baby-step back from the immersion, it all sounds mighty similar to "how dare you load my webpage in your browser -- I pay for its hosting!" [ETA, it's great that we have the ability to enforce some level of privacy -- and considerably more than we had for years, thanks to the "parcel privacy" setting. I just think it's crazy and counterproductive that we seem to have adopted a default etiquette of "assume private until proven otherwise." It's just a very weird assumption, especially considering the enormous cost of making it possible for people to share all the virtual world.]

Ah, now I understand. I was going to say how hopelessly stupid those olde timey merchants must have been, but then I remembered that there's a very similar system operating still. I'd definitely get in trouble if I mentioned the name: they're pretty protective of their brand, and have many spies in the form of deluded merchants. Can't say, then, that this makes particularly compelling evidence that SL is dying. (There are many clues pointing to that same deduction, so the threshold is high.) And in this case, the same scam appears to be thriving, with only slightly better graphics.

Shroom Steinbeck wrote: But I'm curious about the history. How did it get this way? I think it is correct that there's been a subtle shift towards an emphasis on "privacy" and we could speculate about why that happened. Waves of griefers probably had some effect, but yeah, the default assumption now seems to be that one should have to obtain permission to explore a parcel, and that is a weird bit of role-play to drag in from RL. I've seen folks actually justify this with an analogy to wandering into RL houses uninvited. I suppose that's a reaction from "immersion" but it's hard to distinguish from paranoid delusions when applied to pixel property.

VoteboxRepairMan wrote: They want traffic. We provide it and get paid for bothering to spend 5 seconds in their sims. Really? Are you sure you're remembering this correctly? Or, if you do, were the votebox owners all duped by whoever ran this votebox scam? Going all the way back to Dwell, traffic was (supposed to be?) based on total time on sim, so if five second stays ever improved traffic by an amount worth counting, it must have been a bug in Traffic calculation. (That certainly could have been the case but I don't remember it, and there sure were a lot of systems based on total time in sim; remember "traffic cones" for example?)

gregthos wrote: Ok, so let's say I buy a Homestead from another player for $200. After I buy it will I then be making a monthly payment to LL and if so, how much? You can't do that, in fact. Homesteads can only be owned by estates that already have at least one full-primmed sim. LL would simply not make the transfer to you. Or, there is an even more confusing bit of language abuse: You can "buy" a parcel the full size of the Homestead from the estate owner. This means nothing other than granting you permission to pay rent to the estate, so it's at best misleading that this is called "buying" anything.

kiramanell wrote: So, giving content creators a freebie, as it were, whilst taxing the consumer heftily, that may not work out as favorably as he may think. No. Content creators do not consider a higher commission on their sales to be a "freebie" -- especially not compared to land costs, which is borne disproportionately by "residential" not "commercial" landowners. (In the past, that balance of land use was very different, with most land owned by stores and venues. Now in-world sales are much less important, even for the relatively few businesses that even bother to have in-world stores.)

JPG0809 wrote: The new platform doesn't even have a name yet. I'm much more interested about what that'll be instead. You're kidding, right? Cathy got it right. We may not know exactly how land will work in SL2 (or whatever it's called), but Ebbe has said that he intends for our current levels of "property tax" to be adjusted downward, replacing that revenue with other "taxes" including, yeah, higher sales commissions. I wouldn't expect more detail until they announce the exact date when that land will be available to buy -- assuming the project gets that far.

kiramanell wrote: Qie Niangao wrote: I'm not saying this will or should happen, but one doesn't have to ignore anything Ebbe has said about the changes to conclude that a vast majority of SL content could be transparently available in SL2 without constraining that new platform to real backwards compatibility. Much as I'd love to see my many homes ported to SL2, at this point, it's hard to imagine even mesh, let alone prims, will come out looking unscathed 'on the other side.' And if the new scripting language would require just a few tweaks to the old LSL to make stuff work again, then why even bother with an entirely new language at all?! A new language for SL2 would be desirable for the same reasons there are multiple languages at all, even when they all compile down to the same machine code. I mean, LSL is really primitive just as a language, to say nothing of the library of functions in the API that it gets to use. Even within SL1, it would be completely possible to improve the language binding to that API -- and indeed that was the plan for a long time while Babbage was still at the lab. I'm actually saying something more radical than that, however, which is that even if the future API is not a proper superset of the current library's functionality, enough of it will necessarily be present in one form or another that a very large share of real currently running scripts could be automatically recompiled in an environment that would make them work almost all the time. As for built objects (as opposed to scripts or animations), it really is analogous to the "compile down to the same machine code". The requirement is to automatically produce something in the new representation that looks the same in the viewer as did the item in SL1. It doesn't have to use all the new features, and even if the representation is not very efficient it could still be practically useful. (That's a contentious claim -- but I never heard anybody argue that Mesh Studio should be blacklisted, so I'm not sure why suddenly the demand for such geometric purity.) And in fact I am trying to explore the technical feasibility of making pretty much everything in one's SL1 inventory available on the new platform, with a one-time import on demand, without constraining technology choices for that new platform. And I'm allowing that it probably won't happen, but only for business reasons.

Mony Lindman wrote: [...] So what will you do with your SL avatar after you magically teleport to SL2 with your whole inventory as you say it should be possible? You would be a cloud (at best) , your lsl scripted AO will not work , starting animations by hand wont work either and whatever you will try to rez or wear from inventory will just NOT WORK. So why telport at all under these circumstances ? I think you're probably right, but I also think that's largely a business decision, not a technical one, even granting that SL2 won't maintain backwards compatibility in all the ways Ebbe has mentioned. Incompatible changes can be made without making it impossible to import old content with reasonable success. The business decision is about how much value that has, compared to the cost of developing importers. One example is LSL scripts. Now, SL2 will (almost certainly) run scripts in a Mono engine. Yeah, they could adopt something else, but I don't think it's likely; rather, I think it will just be one or more non-LSL languages compiling to Mono. There's no guarantee that the same functions will be exposed in SL2's API (for example, llGetMass() may simply have no counterpart in SL2), but probably 99% of actual scripts use only function calls that will have equivalents. So it's not rocket science to have those run on the new grid, with at most a recompile. Similar sleight-of-hand could convert SL1 animations to SL2, as already discussed. And every prim or sculpt is already a textured mesh, however inefficient. I'm not saying this will or should happen, but one doesn't have to ignore anything Ebbe has said about the changes to conclude that a vast majority of SL content could be transparently available in SL2 without constraining that new platform to real backwards compatibility.

Okay, I'm confused. "Wonderland" had something to do with sexual age-play, right? So... are you finding that everywhere with a beach turns into a hangout for sexual age-play? Surely not; I've been to lots of beaches and never once encountered sexual ageplay at any of them. So maybe you're complaining that every beach tries to support itself with an ugly stripmall. Now that I have seen. It's certainly silly, but... you know, if ugly stripmalls bothered me, I'd just not go to those beaches.

Is there some reason you don't just try it for yourself and find out? Also, I don't think I understand the hypothetical case you're proposing; it's not possible to llAttachToAvatar anything owned by somebody else. That's possible with llAttachToAvatarTemp, but it seems it's specifically the former function that's the subject here. So... before the -Temp version of the function, it was common to keep an intended attachment rezzed in-world, then attached to the intended wearer when they bought it as original (not a copy, so not going into their inventory first). I'm not sure if that's the scenario you have in mind, but once attached, such objects are in the recipient's inventory and stay there after detachment, too.

Medhue Simoni wrote: By demanding that SL content work in the new world, you are diminishing it's value in the REAL SL. As if anyworld will do, just give me my content. Every bit of talk that goes on and on about porting stuff over, is really a discussion about abandoning the REAL SL. I guess I need to again state that I'm not at all arguing that the new platform should be held back technologically in order to port over SL Classic content. Introducing an incompatible upgrade in platform cannot be cost effective more than once a decade at most, so it must not be a half-way measure. But if they don't leverage SL's user-generated content, I just don't see why we should expect LL to have much advantage over anybody else thinking of making a virtual world -- and there have been scores of those over the years, all kicked to the curb. Other than all that user-generated content, what objective reason would we have to think something new from Linden Lab would fare any better? (Especially not now, when cheap hardware is making "VR experts" of every ex-COBOL programmer on the subcontinent.) There's plenty of video-game envy in SL, and there always has been, so a new platform that leaves everything behind for yet another glorified sandbox game might appeal to many currently in SL and plenty of others. That still may be a good market, and maybe LL can succeed in it, but personally I'd put long odds on that.

Medhue Simoni wrote:

Medhue Simoni wrote: LaskyaClaren wrote: But I agree completely with Qie that anyone who is selling content that could be ported over to the new VW and isn't informing their customers that they don't plan to permit that happening is, at the very least, being deeply unethical. Consumers (and this includes other creators buying components for their own creations) deserve full transparency on this issue; anything else would represent underhanded behaviour on the part of the seller, to put it mildly. Excuse me! Unethical! Are creators in SL somehow slaves to the public? We have no say in the matter? Or we are Unethical? Maybe, just maybe, we are the only 1's actually thinking here. We don't even know what will be compatible, for sure. Just because LL creates a new world, creators are now obligated to sell there? Again, or we are Unethical? We know almost nothing about this new world, yet creators are being expected to take a stand 1 way or the other. It's nonsense. Despite the fact that SL is going nowhere, irrational people are going to try and make creators feel guilty if they don't waste their time in a new world. The creators no longer have any choices now? We are all now slaves to the public, because we made the mistake of trying to create good products in the original SL? I think people thinking this way might want to check their own ethics before they go demonizing others. The point I was trying to make was a bit more subtle than that. It was all about a particular subclass of creators who, by virtue of geographic accident, might be able to renege on their original TOS commitments and deny customers use of what they bought, whereas all other creators would still be bound by the licenses they granted by agreeing to the ToS. Somewhere in one of these many threads, I mentioned that I actually see how some creators might reasonably want to replace content in SL2, taking advantage of the new platform's technical advantages (and preserving their reputations, competitive standing, etc). So I'm not sure that all creators content should be forcibly ported to the new platform. I am quite sure, however, that creators from certain particular nations should not get a special exemption from terms to which they agreed and under which their content was licensed to customers.

Madelaine McMasters wrote: LaskyaClaren wrote: I have some sympathy with this idea, although I don't of course think it would ever be considered. I'd be curious to know, however, how many SL creators, including those who might support this kind of direct input into LL's decision-making process, would be willing to apply the same "democratic" principles to their own customers? I have little sympathy for this idea. Imagine what second life would have been had Philip Rosedale solicited input from potential customers, rather than followed his dream. The best work I've seen in my professional life came from people who "just don't listen". But they do watch. Left to public opinion, the iPhone would be a BlackBerry painted white. About Microsoft and XP: you better believe they asked customers -- for years. They stretched that out way, way beyond the planned end-of-life for the product, based on demand of enterprise customers. But then, finally, Microsoft set a public date for ending support -- and you know what? In the year following that announcement, XP was retired at a faster rate than any other operating system in history. To be fair, the huge numbers being replaced were because there were still so very many using XP at the time of announcement -- numbers so huge that even now, as vulnerable as it is, XP constitutes a stil significant share of PCs on the net. It's a lot less, though, than it would have been had they not set that date and thus given that "push" to get folks to act.

KILLAKEBAB wrote: All things run their course. Perhaps SL has run its. You have had the good times, now it's maybe time to let go. It's a little more precarious than that. If SL1 goes away before SL2 succeeds, there could be a very long "winter" of virtual worlds. Some share of SL's population would find its way to some OpenSim based worlds for a while, but without LL's marketing (such as it is) to keep feeding it, that would dwindle away to irrelevance soon enough. Then there's whatever The Social Rift ends up being (if anything), and the long wait for Philip to make of High Fidelity something other than Distributed Davos with bllinkers. The disappointing thing is that we can and must "let go" of this generation of virtual world technology. We'd not be so sanguine about "letting go" of the Internet, would we?

Gavin Hird wrote: You know what? You need to direct your anger at the right address; namely the service provider that has not pulled their act together and cleaned up these matters. Sulking over who may or may not exercise their legal rights is nothing but childishly selfish. The animation or texture that is so precious to you could be gone the next hour because of DMCA takedown. People are entitled to excercise the law when law is due. Deal with it! ;-) I have plenty of disappointment with the Lab for all sorts of reasons. I can't say that I'm particularly exercised over their handling of this ToS kerfuffle, and especially not how it may or may not apply in the provinces. That's all prefectly hypothetical anyway, inasmuch as the Lab hasn't actually done anything even plausibly contestable, however ugly their ToS may have become in theory. In this case, however, you're proposing somthing creators could do that would in fact harm other residents. Remember that those sellers are allowed to trade in SL only because they agreed to terms they'd now claim don't apply to them. That's false pretenses, no better than selling stolen content. (Also, I doubt a court would seriously consider a claim that a virtual world is a distinct service from... a virtual world, all from the same provider. It's not as if they merged with Stratasys and started 3D-printing everybody's avatars.)

Gavin Hird wrote: You have to explain the screw-over bit of the equation. So this all started (for me at least) when Ebbe said something like "the TOS will not be a problem" in the context of making existing SL1 content available in SL2. That's important to everybody because it would imply that, subject to technical constraints, folks may continue to purchase content in SL1 today with a reasonable expectation that they may be able to use it in SL2, if supported by the technology. If, however, a whole class of that content -- that from European creators who choose to exercise exemption from licensing to which they agreed in the ToS -- if that content cannot be used in SL2, the buyers of that content were screwed-over by the sellers. It's bad enough that sellers would do this retroactively, to content already sold before SL2 was ever discussed. It's really despicable now, where the very threat of it could halt sale of SL1 content and collapse the economy before SL2 is even developed. The logical conclusion would be that buyers should demand to know whether sellers are from a jurisdiction where they could pull that scam with impunity, so as to avoid them in the market.

Gavin Hird wrote: I don't think you understand this, do you? :-) I can't tell if the TOS has been illegal all of the time SL has existed. Possibly not since there has been development in the legislation during the 11 year period. OK? Secondliy, up till very recently the provisions about IP were largely there for LL to be able to render the creations in their current service to other users, to let other users use the creations and to trade the creation on the existing service. In addition it covered storage on their storage systems, backups, tnasmission over networks and such things for the service to be able to work at all. What happened then was new provisions where you essentially gave away your creations for LL to be able to use them - also for fiancial gains in new services without even telling the creator, let alone compensate the creator. THAT is where it starts to get hairy, and where the developer and distribution agreement should kick in. It should be at the sole discretion of the creator to decice if they want their creations used and/or traded in an new service. From the ring of it SLv2 is a new service. LL's potential problem is that the TOS are for a number of reasons not in compliance with EU legislation and therefor we have legally never accepted them. To bring the TOS up to the standard so they become legal is their responsibility alone. But this "new virtual world" is merely an upgrade and expansion of LL's existing service -- and a comparatively trivial expansion compared to how much the grid has grown and changed since the first creator sold content to other users. (It's not as if LL had to shutdown a sim every time they added one, or scrap everything when they updated versions.) Those who agreed to the original ToS have no grounds to resist their content appearing in the new virtual world -- it is clearly the same service from the same provider, not something new and different, as might be covered by the terms of the new ToS. No grounds, that is, except some sleight of hand with these ToS-invalidating laws that purport to protect consumer IP. I don't especially mind if LL revises its customer agreements to accomodate those laws however silly and counterproductive they may be, but I do object to them being used to grant certain creators special abilities to screw-over the rest of us and deny exercise of license we purchased in good faith.

Gavin Hird wrote: The law says that clauses in such TOS are null and void if they don't meet the minimum requirements of the law. Actually you cannot legally accept such TOS even if you did, simply because they are null and void and therefore does not exist from the law's standpoint in this event. And yet creators have been collecting money for content they've licensed since 2003 under terms that are identical in this regard. If they'll now renege on those terms because they're all null and void and stuff, they must first repay every dime they collected from their unwitting customers -- or accept the fact they're just ordinary swindlers.

Gavin Hird wrote: Qie Niangao wrote: Seems borderline fraudulent to agree to a ToS that's personally unenforceable, then exploit that special exemption to swindle everybody by selling content one can later just pull away: Ha-ha, suckers! What is borderline fraudulent is to sneak in new provisions in the TOS where you effectively waiver all your control of how your creations are used, distributed and sold by the service provider ;-) Oh, the new ToS is a fustercluck, no doubt about it. But there's been a license grant in the ToS since the beginning of SL, and all this time creators have been merrily agreeing to that ToS so that LL can provide a service that includes content licensed from those creators -- but now there's hint of a possible software upgrade, and some of those creators have found a geographically convenient excuse that might invalidate those licenses.If they exercise that loophole, those creators would have been selling under false pretenses, bordering on fraud.

Suspiria Finucane wrote: Qie Niangao wrote: Other than invalidating all existing content for which no such agreement could be practically obtained (creators gone missing, etc.), this all seems an utter waste of time. It may be the cost of doing business globally, but that doesn't make it less silly. Interesting point and you should include avatars gone missing. How could anyone expect LL to bring in all the inventories of every sign up in SL history to the new platform? I know people who have left SL for years and returned. How will inventories be deemed "worthy" of adding to the new platform? Will there be a request form of some sorts? I know you can't answer these but you sparked the sine wave. Several things here. First, I wasn't particularly advocating that all that ever existed in SL Classic should be imported to BetterWorld, and that goes for accounts, too. Someday, however, SL will be shut down, and if there's still some functioning virtual world, I'd like to think some folks whose RL passed might still have their SL identity persist in some form. (Some form of persistence, that is, more veridical than early archives of these forums have been.) Maybe that's maudlin, or history-obsessed. As it happens, even the default access to legacy content is, uh, contentious, and I'm of two minds about it: On the one hand, I can see the point of current creators wanting to update their back catalog of content to fit the technologies of the new platform before it appears there, rather than suffer a (possibly lossy) automated migration. On the other hand, from a more legalistic perspective, those creators shouldn't necessarily have any say in the matter. Indeed, the line of commentary to which I was responding was about how Europeans can screw the rest of us by sprinkling TOS-disabling fairy dust. (Seems borderline fraudulent to agree to a ToS that's personally unenforceable, then exploit that special exemption to swindle everybody by selling content one can later just pull away: Ha-ha, suckers!) Finally, I'd just point out that as technology consumers we're quick to accept the idea that systems should be swapped out, rebuilt from the ground up. I think it was Mies van der Rohe who said that it is not necessary to invent a new architecture every Monday morning. Earlier I speculated about some reasons to start from scratch besides basic engineering failure, but someday it will seem unimaginably primitive (and immoral?) to introduce a whole new virtual word rather than augment what already exists. It's only that we have not yet evolved an aversion to capital punishment of our virtual worlds.

They'd be in good company if the Lab only offered a subset of services to Europe. The worst part is that every other nation on the planet also must wait while Google (for example) tries to figure out what they can offer where, without triggering Tuetonic wrath. (Then there's the crazy Canadian judge who demands removal of certain search results everywhere. Even NAFTA can't protect trade from the long, spastic arm of international law.)

Gavin Hird wrote: The way to fix this without having to negotiate with millions of consumers is through a separate developer and distribtuion agreement that regulates this in a proper way. This is exactly what organizations like Apple organize this for distribution of creations in the app store. Other than invalidating all existing content for which no such agreement could be practically obtained (creators gone missing, etc.), this all seems an utter waste of time. It may be the cost of doing business globally, but that doesn't make it less silly.

Parrish Ashbourne wrote: Ebbe Linden wrote: Racheal Rexen wrote: Hello Ebbe, thanks for taking the time to answer ours questions, My question is if the Adult Community will have a place in the new Virtual world? We have no plans to disallow anything that's going on in SL and is legal. We're proud of the freedom we offer. in the TPV meeting it was said that that SL2 would be closed source at fist, with out TPV's there's no RLV. To give you an idea of the impact of having no RLV, the open collar group has over 90,000 members, and that's down from where it use to be. Any chance of RLV in the official viewer, if not we need the TPVs. Two things here. First, by no means do all OpenCollar users enable RLV, so that's not really a very useful statistic. Second, I'm pretty sure that the RLV developers themselves would admit that RLV is a hideous hack -- almost as kludgy as the Firestorm LSL bridge -- and a new platform could easily extend the concept of Experience Permissions to have a viewer component, making it possible to implement RLV-like functionality cleanly. I hope they do that because it has many uses besides BDSM, so it would be better if it were more respectable in both reputation and implementation.