Porky Gorky

Sonja Smedley wrote: I guess you know that answer anyway don´t you? Not at all, that's why I am asking. According to Google it could be anything from Gods revenge on the gays, to being engineered by Obama to win an election to fulfilling a prophecy that Aliens gave to Whitley Strieber years ago to being punishment on America for dividing Israel. I was just wondering which camp you were pitching your tent in?

I think SL is an ideal place to run fundraiser events such as charity auctions or shows to help raise awareness for needy causes, when such events take place it makes sense to take donations in L$ whilst people are attending the events, whilst they are still in the "charitable giving" frame of mind. I also think kiosks are a good idea too. If I am walking down the street in RL and I see some old blind fella sat outside Tesco's with his guide dog and his charity bucket then I will probably put a couple of pound in the bucket. If I had not seen that blind man outside Tescos I would never have supported his charity that day. Same is true for SL. When people see charity kiosks in SL it helps raise awareness for the charitable cause and also may inspire some people to donate a few L$, people who would never have donated otherwise if they had not accidentally come across the kiosk.

I completely agree with you, camping gave new residents a few L$ in their pocket, which helped get them more involved with the world, which helped immerse them more. People used camping to game the traffic figures to improve their ranking in inworld search. In 2009, when it was banned this was just one of half a dozen ways of gaming search to boost a ranking. It was completely pointless banning just one avenue of gaming and leaving the rest open for exploitation. It did absolutely nothing to stop us gaming search, it just meant we had to adapt our strategy slightly. All it did was cut off a steady source of income for a sizable percentage of the SL population I think they should have just banned the bots and allowed actual players to keep camping.

Sonja Smedley wrote: To each his own opinion...I am still convinced that HAARP was in play! Assuming you are right, what benefit would there be causing the damage that was caused? How would the perpetrator benefit from this action?

Thismade me think of the mice from Hitchhikers Guide. :matte-motes-big-grin:

Canoro Philipp wrote: if we take this system away, what do you suggest would be a great way for a person who cant buy lindens and is not very skilled with computers to start earning lindens? maybe your suggestions can help gothtier make lindens. Bots and avatars camping on parcels set to show in search was banned 3 and half years ago, so there is no system to take away. It's should already be long gone. Anyone today who is using a system to pay avatars to boost their traffic on a parcel set to show in search is in violation of the TOS.

Sonja Smedley wrote: "Mother nature is beast we can't contend with." ...well my opinion is that this was a planned storm created by HAARP! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnRPZOUVhJ4 Whilst it is highly convenient that it happened right on the eve of the election, HAARP was not to blame. http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4122%3C

Melita Magic wrote: Porky Gorky wrote: As far as I know there is nothing in the TOS that bans camping or sale of camping related products. However traffic gaming i.e. paying for traffic is against the rules. Isn't paying someone to stay on land a form of paying for traffic? It is. However it is only in violation of the TOS if the land is then set to show in search.

As far as I know there is nothing in the TOS that bans camping or sale of camping related products. However traffic gaming i.e. paying for traffic is against the rules.

aaaah the old " head stuck up your own arse" bug. Have not seen that for years. It used to be a common problem about 5 or 6 years ago. Here is an old Jira detailing a similar bug. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-248

Pamela Galli wrote: My experience with LL removing content has been dismal also. Repeated DMCAs have had little effect on the ones reselling my content; certainly their accounts were never banned. I see why some creators just stop bothering. Linden Lab are definitely not supporting the DMCA process as they once did. It would seem during 2012 that the only way of properly dealing with serious incidents of content theft in SL is to get a legal representative to write to LInden Labs and threaten legal action against them if they continue to ignore the DMCA process and continue to host stolen content. It can be a costly exercise but is very effective at getting stolen content taken down. Does not necessarily result in the thieves getting banned though

Looks a tad windy.

This dude sums up the story very well through the medium of song (a couple of mins into the vid) :matte-motes-big-grin:

Your money would be better served supporting the victims of Hurricane Sandy in Haiti, One of the poorest nations on earth, Haiti has lost 70% of its crops and has been in the mist of a serious cholera outbreak over the past 2 years, a situation that is likely to worsen rapidly due to the unsanitary conditions spread by the flooding, putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of people at risk. 7500 poeple have already died from cholera in the last 2 years. So yeah, you could support the US, one of the richest and most capable nations on the planet. Or you could support a nation that actually really needs your help. Support the relief efforts in Haiti please.

Support is one of the things that has consistently worked for me in SL. Is one of the primary reasons I have had premium accounts for the past 8 years.

I've never heard of Xchange4LS. If I need to use a 3rd party site to cashout L$ then I use Virox. They have excellent customer support and are quick to process payments.

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: This video pretty much sums up what I think about this question. I will add that the universe is vast and varied. We think of life as carbon based and having to exist in a narrow band of conditions. Life based not on carbon, but on other elements that can exist in other conditions may very well exist for all we know. Up until recently we thought carbon based life had to have an environment within a certain range of light, heat, and pH to exist. Yet we have now discovered life in the deepest part of our ocean living in crevices spouting molten rock and super heated steam that never sees light in an extremely acidic environment. There is always the possibility that non carbon life could evolve in the universe, science has yet to learn enough to refute this. However from a chemical perspective carbon offers the best chance of life evolving out of the known natural elements because of it's bonding agents and it's flexibility with varying temperatures. Silicon may be a workable alternative on really hot planets orbiting close to a star, but a close solar orbit presents a whole additional group of dangerous challenge to long term evolution. In really cold environments we could see alternatives types of carbon life forms based on ammonia rather than water but such a combination would ultimately limit the evolutionary potential. Amethyst Jetaime wrote: It is also the height of arrogance to think that if there is a supreme being or intelligent designer that they would be limited in any way by ability or inclination to have created only life on earth. If there is no supreme being or intelligent designer it then means we arose out of chaos. Yet if that is so, you have only to look to nature to see a repeating of patterns and shapes of life all over the world over the entire span of its existence. So why wouldn't those patterns be repeated, perhaps with variations all over the universe too? I completely agree with this. Chaos theory has helped us to understand patterns in nature. It has been used to model biological systems, which are some of the most chaotic systems imaginable, and within that chaos has been found ordered structure and patterns. However "chaos" does exist in the universe, but I think that is by evolutionary design. The universe is both orderly (in the sense that its behaviour appears to be governed by orderly, analytic equations) and chaotic, which occurs as a distinct consequence of these orderly laws. So I guess it could be called controlled chaos. Amethyst Jetaime wrote: As for broadcasting out existence, here again this is arrogance. Life in other parts of the universe will be in thousands of levels of development. I suspect that life that is further advanced than us already knows about us but just has no reason to want to harm us or earth. Even if they did they probably see we are doing a good enough job of that as it is. Agree again. If there are advanced civilisations in our galaxy then they know about us. Just look how far our technology has come in the last 100 years. We can already see planets orbiting other stars with Kepler. Imagine what we will be able see in 50 years, or 100 or 10000 years. I think it is more likely we are of no interest to them. It would probably be a waste of time and resources for them to fly across interstellar space to interact with us. How much time effort and resources would we put in to flying to the other side of our planet to meet an inferior species such as an ant? We wouldn't bother. In fact we wouldn't even bother phoning the ant or even emailing it for free. If it accidentally gets in our way we would tread on it, but beyond that we would just ignore the ant.

Phil Deakins wrote: Incidentally, Porky, I'm halfway through that excellent 3 hour video you linked to. I'll finish it today. It provided the information that caused me to change my first post in this thread form "Christmas Island" to "Easter Island" (My old grey cells are renowned for their laziness in remembering some things.) I'll watch the other video you linked to too. The first 2 vids in the thread were/are very interesting and I'm sure the 3rd one (your 2nd one) will be just as interesting. There is another video by Dr Kaku that is very relevant to this discussion. In it he talks about type 1, 2 and 3 alien civilisations. It's really interesting. You should also check out http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/ this site collates and catagorises lots of free documentary's from the web.

Charolotte Caxton wrote: You are right, ultimately it is just an opinion. So too is the idea that something intelligent created the experiment called life. The universe is not perfect, far from it. Ask anyone with an uncureable disease, ask anyone who lost a child at birth, ask anyone who has been struck by lightning or a meteor. There is no intelligent design. There is just a nice place to live and if we are lucky, we can benefit from being a sentient being, or if not, we suffer because we are a sentient being. Intelligent design is definitely just an opinion. It's not even an opinion I enjoy debating simply because it is so ridiculously far fetched. How can we even begin to fathom the origins of the intelligence that possibly created the universe? We can't. However I find it hard to believe that our specific universe just appeared out of nowhere without any intervention and then proceeded along a random and chaotic path that resulted in sentient life. Both hypothesis are ludicrous once you start pulling them apart. Intelligent design just makes more sense to me if I don't think about it too hard. Regarding the examples you listed of human pain and suffering, I don't think you can see the perfection because you are applying human compassion to the thought process in this scenario. From a universal perspective those people will live, have a chance to reproduce and evolve, then die returning their atoms to the universe so they can be reused. That is perfect from a universal perspective, That is what they are supposed to do. Pain and suffering are irrelevant to nature, Take the evolution of our planet for example. Millions of species have evolved over billions of years. Throughout that period food chains evolved. Billions upon billions of creatures were slaughtered, tortured, poisoned and eaten alive in order to sustain other creatures. As a result of this evolutionary process Humanoids evolved into predators and started to eat raw meat a couple of million years ago. This boost in calories freed up energy that could be used to grow our brains, as a result of this we became slightly more intelligent, then we learnt how to cook meat with fire, as a result of this we became a hell of a lot more intelligent. We had discovered a way to consume higher calorie foods, using less energy i.e.. Not chewing raw meat all day. This freed up even more of our body's energy to fuel the brain. So my point is, billions of years worth of death and butchery in the food chain largely contributed to the evolution of human intelligence. From natures universal perspective this has worked perfectly. Death and destruction has fueled evolution and it will continue to do so long after Hunams are gone. When you look at it with human compassion then it seems far from perfect, it seems brutal and savage. Yet without such a perfect system of evolution you and I would not be here today discussing the issue.

Charolotte Caxton wrote: No, that is incorrect. Weeds grow in gardens because it just so happens that the conditions of a garden make it optimal for them to do so. It is not by design. A weed is only a weed because we have labeled it a weed. In nature there are no weeds. Nature makes no distinction between a weed and a rosebush. If you design a garden to support the growth of a rosebush then by default you are designing it to support the growth of a weed. I may be wrong though, I suck at analogies. Charolotte Caxton wrote: Life exists because conditions in the universe make it possible, not because the universe was designed to support life. That's obviously an opinion that cannot be proved or disproved. I would argue that the conditions that exist in the universe that facilitate the development of life are there by intelligent design. The universe is too perfect for it to be random, mathematics has proved that time and time again. I'm not saying that an intelligence set out to specifically create human beings or to interact with the universe in any way. I think the universe is an experiment, bound by a certain set of laws. The goal is to create stars, trillions and trillions of stars with the sole purpose of seeing what comes out in the nuclear fallout.

Charolotte Caxton wrote: Isn't that like saying that the purpose of a garden is to grow weeds? Weeds grow in gardens, and the conditions are optimal for them to do so, therefore it must be because the garden was designed to support weed growth. If a weed grows in a garden then the garden must have been designed/created to support the growth of weeds. If it wasn't then the weeds would not grow there.

Nyll Bergbahn wrote: Define life. If you mean intelligent life, you are into the realms of the Fermi Paradox. "Where is everybody?" Thanks for your post, I enjoyed reading your insights :matte-motes-big-grin: Regarding the Fermi Paradox, I really have a hard time even considering it. I find it narrow minded and restricted by our own human limitations. My favorite TV theoretical physicist Michio Kaku puts forward some really strong arguments for why the Fermi Paradox is flawed in this vid, you should check it out if you haven;t seen it.

I think Phil Deakins wrote: Porky Gorky wrote: There’s estimated to be up to 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone Our galaxy is an ever-changing one. Back in the 80s it contained an estimated 100 million stars. More recently, I've seen that it contains an estimated 200 million stars, and now it contains an estimated 400 billion stars. I wish it settle down a bit I think the number is increasing in line with the improvements of our telescopes and the increased computer power available to scan the images that the telescopes capture. They are now finding allot more White Dwarf stars, White Dwarfs are stars who have exhausted all of their fuel and reach the end of their evolutionary journey as they were not powerful enough to become neutron stars. They are allot smaller and denser than our sun and also allot dimmer, thus making them harder to see, which is why the estimates on the number of stars in the galaxy has risen significantly in recent years. It's now estimated that over 95% of the stars in the galaxy are White Dwarfs and none of these stars can support life, they are effectively just the burning cinders of dead stars and will fade away completely after a couple of billion years. It is the fate our own sun faces. In about 5 billion years time our sun will expand 200 times larger and turn into a Red Giant, after it has shed it's mass it will condense down to white dwarf about 7 billion years from now. Eventually all the white dwarfs will cool to a point that they will emit no light or heat and they will become Black Dwarfs. However as a white dwarf cannot be older than the universe itself it is thought that black dwarfs do not exist yet as even the very oldest white dwarf stars in the universe are still emitting a measurable amount of energy.