Prokofy Neva

I personally think that Linden Lab has overstepped here because the moment they discovered that this theft -- a customer dispute about what you are owed after you are shafted -- is a result of *him giving you the password* then all bets are off -- it should instantly become "not a case" and "not for our adjudication." Anyone who gives their password to another person accepts the inherent risk involved. LL should not be pursuing any kind of disciplinary action when that happens. The boyfriend should suck up the fact that when he cheats on his RL girlfriend, and lies about it, his RL girlfriend will extract revenge in the forum of tier or money or whatever it was -- "credits" isn't clear to me. A tier paid? A land credit? Or Linden dollars? Yes, Lindens can pursue you via your IP address which is used to log on to their service, by forms of payment, by names, and even other things if they suspect you are evading their discipline. They hate that more than anything because they aren't interesting in analyzing whether their "justice" was fair, only in ensuring it is never overriden. Unless you want to risk masking your IP and getting other forms of payment and all the rest -- which is hard to maintain and also grounds for suspension when it fails, you should probably find a new world. A new boyfriend, too. You could try to get a lawyer involved but at $400/hour real money, that gets expensive quick and basically, this TOS has already been declared as "a contract of adhesion" by a court of law, but most rulings on games and worlds basically shrug and say "you signed the TOS, your funeral."

@Darrius Gothly as I mentioned, you won't/can't grasp the issue here, and are not worth answering given your prejudices. I assure you I "get out" quite a bit. I think you don't. @Amethyst Jetaime No, you're wrong on a number of counts here. 1. I read the Knowledge Base, hon. I always start with that. I referenced one of the KB's on the land menu (which has NONE of this and should!) and didn't happen to reference the one you did, but no matter, because my issue was not addressed there, or in your reply. Let me go over it again: the Lindens have allowed all kinds of people into the viewer we all use; they have not created a list of these people; we have no idea who they are or their reputations or their quality; we don't know if they are vetted; even the very nature of what their script is, is not explained there. And that's all wrong, and the KB is not enough to address that. 2. Experience IS a product. It's a product like anything else in this world. People may develop these scripts and sell them down the line, possibly in Project Sansar. Just because they are uploaded now for free doesn't mean anything. And even free, they are still a product in the sense that the provide reputational points and visibility for their scripters -- all mentioned by names -- which helps them sell their OTHER products in their store, a very old SL story. 3. The cocoa cup is only a "poor example" if you live on the forums and the alternative universe of SL sandboxing/Linden office hours/geek discussions/etc and not in the "real" world of actual experience-small-e on the grid. It's a very common one; possibly the most common. (After visiting your inworld office, I see the problem now.) Therefore it's a good place to start to grasp what this new PRODUCT and "feature" is about. It doesn't take rocket science to figure out that Experience is "a place where you can grant permission or not" -- although that really isn't a solid definition. It's a script uploaded into the viewer that offers this to the person who accesses SL through that viewer, first and foremost. You may have missed my many questions about this months ago, none of which were answered at the time, and I don't have time to fish it out of the tech forums now, but this was covered already. 4. Your conviction that premium members "can't" market this is misplaced. Of course they can -- and do. There are sims where these "Experiences" function, and whether or not they are literally/technically for sale doesn't matter; the sims are either selling other stuff; they are drawing traffic for other purposes (reputational enhancement to help sell other products) and at any time, these might become sellable given that they are "a thing" in "Second Life". BTW, I could point out that through testing with a tenant's help, I've discovered that you don't have to be a premium member to experience the Experience, only to make it and also add it to your land via the viewer. 5. Once again, as I said from the outset and indeed it was clear, derp I get it underp that you have to GIVE PERMISSION for this to "act upon" your avatar. BUT IT DOESN'T MATTER. Because the issue is that there are gadzillions of these, you don't know what you are giving permission to, you have no master list of them, you can be flying over land and be hit with them, and merely to get the screen out of your face you might click "yes". That's not the way to make a world. 6. Trying to explain away a problem by then shifting the burden to "makers who are too lazy" is common in SL but not acceptable. Nobody should have to stand and re-edit all their clothing or dress themselves with add instead of wear or whatever just because they want to grab some oars to take a boat ride. Gasp, imagine, this entire attachment/edit/mesh thing might be RETHOUGHT you know? Perish the thought, the horror. At this point I have a dock at my rentals with two offerings -- boats that take off mesh; boats that don't take off mesh. Ridiculous. Mesh could have just not been introduced into THIS world which is really not suitable for it and could have been added just to Sansar. Or it could have been put into this world with more care and forethought for THE CONSUMER instead of the geek/designer. Just a thought. At this point, most mesh items cannot be rezzed out on to most other mesh items -- desks, floors of houses, etc. Pretty frigging ridiculous. You have to rez an old-fashioned prim to put out your beloved mesh, you know? Then cam it into place where it goes in your post-card picture table -- which used to be a functionable table that you could put things on normally in SL. I realize the gulf of experience and understanding of the actualities of the consumer world in SL as it is now is so great with forums-dwellers, especially the helping geek class, that I don't know why I bother. However, there are Lindens that one can reach by talking over your heads. So to these Lindens I would say: 1. Update the KB article on the land parcels to explain Experiences -- you don't, and that's where people start in trying to fathom the vast rocket science of the land parcel. It's astounding how long and complex that article is already but it's a must. 2. Make a list of the people who provide Experiences to the unsuspecting public -- avatar names, name of script, and simple function of what it does. For extra credit, have those avatars have a real name and payment form on file. Let us know whether you exercise any quality control or whether you just hope "NO" and "REMOVE" will take care of it all for you. 3. If you refuse to do no. 2 because there are "too many," make a list at least of the top 100 and what they do. 4. Explain whether you anticipate these scripts/things to be marketable or sellable or not, because the reputational gain that these individuals get through free advertising in your viewer is tremendous. 5. Give some thought about how you can make both non-Experience interactions and Experience-interactions stop messing up mesh clothing and making people or parts disappear or look ugly. Are attachment points really the only way to handle these things?

I'm sure some scripter will be along any moment to cry FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about ANY concern with this feature, and some will also ridicule concerns, and I can't tell if that's what you're doing. (BTW, whenever any Disruptor cries "FUD" at me, I cry back "RDB," which means Regulate, Defund, Boycott. Consumers do not have to endlessly accept that their concerns are FUD and be treated like scared rabbits. The explanation might be "but of course your av doesn't become deformed when you use my Experience you just pull the sword from the stone." There is ever greater capacity for deforming avs now because of mesh. People now buy mesh heads, even (something I will never do). They buy outfits in mesh that rely on blanking out your system skin to appear, or requiring you to put a disappearing invisibility texture over yourself to be able to put on their outfit and not have your purchased skin from somewhere else poke out. So the ability to skin you and have you show up as invisible is greater now -- as I noted, this happens now *without* experience just from items that come at you. User feedback is important, and that hasn't been provided on this feature yet, because a select set of regulars at Linden office hours or geeks interested in testing new shinies are not really "user feedback" as they are not ordinary users.

@Darrius Gothly You always make a point of mis-reading or reading into or tendentiously interpreting anything I write so it's almost not worth answering you, but here goes: o no where in my post did I say that anything automatically installs -- that's not the point and it does not say that o I pointed out that you can opt NO to any experience and also not add it and also remove it *on your own property*. o The problem is that if OTHER people put it on THEIR property, yes, you will have the opportunity to say "no" the first time and hopefully that will 'stick" forever, not only for that log-on session but always without having to repeat. o But the issue is that when there are SO MANY of these things the possibility for harassment and annoyance increases, as it does now with no-show residents' banlines and over-active security orbs. You could be batting these things away constantly. o The other problem is that you *don't know what they are*. You don't know what you are adding, or who the people are, or whether they are trusted residents because there's no catalogue of them -- only a few of them are listed. If you think the problems I've outlined are taken care of by "an approval box" then you're describing the issue I've complained about here -- people who think that, starting with the Lindens and their friends. It's not about being *able* to say no; it's about *being harassed* by constant messages that force you to do that; it's about not knowing what is in the list in THE VIEWER which is given to the unsuspecting public. I realize all of this may fly over your head -- it doesn't matter. Hopefull the Lindens will grasp the relevance of explaining more about this and creating a catalogue of all such things put in their viewer explaining what they do, and merchants will also realize they have to explain more in one of their many stupid unnecessary box packages they inflict on us. Then there's this: do only Premium accounts get this? Will non-Premium avatars never see these messages and therefore fly obliviously through space without any of these annoyances? That may be a reason to move to premium.

I recall asking a lot of questions about "Experiences" and who would get to make them and whether they would be accessible to others, for free or for sale, and how they would be vetted. Basically, what the Lindens have done has allowed a whole bunch of them into the viewer, and you have one option: add or remove, allow or block if you don't like some of them. They may feel that's enough; I don't. None of this has really been presented to the public properly -- and note to fanboyz who can't take any criticism of "their game": going to a Linden office hour or knowing Lindens or hearing about it somewhere doesn't count as "the public". Basically, you find out about how this works in the marketplace, by trial and error. You buy a product that the maker in fact hasn't even told you is experience enabled in some cases; in some cases, they've provided a helpful notecard that tells you that your item is "experience enabled" and that you must select "AvSitter," an "experience" created by someone named "Colin" to make that cup of cocoa work. "Experience" sounds like some big vaunted thing (like Jimi Hendrix, "Are You Experienced") but in fact it's just some little thing, like being able to get a cup of cocoa in your hand without first having to accept it into inventory, then fish it out of inventory, then drag it on yourself. You can see what has driven more rapid adaption of Experience at least for AvSitter: accepting an item can now often remove your mesh outfit and leave you blank or naked. So people will stop using things that do that as it's a chore to put your clothes back on. So all of this is nice and everything except...this is the third time in history that the Lindens have taken a radical new step to allow "their own" to get into the viewer and it has some consumer issues. The first time was when the Lindens allowed residents to make things for the library, mainly avatars but a few textures. This was a very mixed bag I've discussed elsewhere and goes on being a decidedly mixed bag. The second time was when the Lindens unwisely open-sourced their viewer, which had already been hacked anyway, and allowed all kinds of copybotters and griefers to make viewers to harass the unsuspecting public, but then finally they regularized that, although of course not fully as no rogue viewer can be fully blocked for all the obvious technical reasons. Even so *a policy* against such viewers is a help, with the willingness to ban those who misuse them. Now comes Experiences. You can't see the list of them anywhere; who the people are; or what thing they've made for your delight. No, this tiny list doesn't cut it -- it has a tiny fraction of what is in fact in the list on the viewer on your about land menu and gives a completely different impression of what this product is. Nothing about this is explained here on the Land Menu COPIOUS explanations. Instead, by literally just typing in random letters of the alphabet, you find some of these people. For example, somebody named Tweetie Bird who has made...a something, I have no idea what...who says on her profile "Lalalalalalal I don't care." Ok, that sounds like one that you should block, but what is it, anyway? Maybe it's an experience that enables you to pull a sword from a stone. The Lindens really should create a list of these people; who they are; and what they've made. Because they've put it in THEIR free viewer to the unsuspecting public, not as a marketplace option. If their reply is "we can't possibly do that because it's open to anyone who wants to upload it after passing a cursory test" then we have to say, well, let's hope some consumer group gets involved in this -- and can EVERYBODY really make an experience and upload it or only your select friends? I'm going to bat away the usual objections to criticism of anything LL or its friends does here by noting: there is no official LL Forums post about these things showing up into the viewer. If an office hour, club meeting, speech by Ebbe, whatever has it, that's great but it doesn't count as notification to the public. If your respons is oh, but the Lindens already notified you of this in June, you missed it, no, of course I didn't miss it because I asked questions about it at the time. Their notice makes it seem like if you have a Premium account, and you are a skilled coder, you can code these things for use on YOUR land and invite people to experience it. That post says NOTHING about that land being available to show up ANYWHERE in Second Life that someone pulls it down on a menu from the viewer. Presumably if you are a premium member, and you pull it down on your parcel, non-premium members will be able to enjoy it, right? Or not? Only other premium members? None of this explained, least of all the process for GETTING INTO THE VIEWER and how the consumer can see what the offerings are and make rational choices about them. And for all the Helpful Hannahs who want to object, oh, but the Lindens gave you a list right here of resident-created Experiences. Yes, I saw that, and even went to some of the things. But that is NOT what I am talking about! That's a list of a half dozen things on somebody else's sims that are destinations I can choose to go to. They are NOT things that download into MY parcel or my neighbour's parcel possibly to cause my havoc each time I fly over his parcel now. Seriously, it doesn't say who Tweetie Bird is with her Lalalalalal. If you can't grasp the difference between letting some scripters being able to enabler something on their OWN land and venue that is explained as a game or lifestyle thing or whatever, and your opting to go there or not, and letting it wild into the viewer to be put on ANY little 512 on any Mainland sim anywhere, I don't know where to start. The entire reason some of the less giddy devs put "block" and "remove" on this thing is because some people noted its very vast capacity for griefing. I could add its very vast capacity for making Mainland life, already tough, an absolute misery. But no matter, the main thing is to batter the public into submission to flee to Sansar, right?

Autumn cottages, cabins and trailers are open now in Hector for autumn camping on this pretty pond in the atoll continent. Just $50/50 for each parcel, and the management prims do not count; if you prefer, you can ask to reset the box to $100/100 and remove the cabin or trailer and place your own and have use of those prims. Bazar has out a new little trailer for the "California" theme which as displayed at 6 Republic -- it really is quite well done. It has great camera angles and nice "props" inside and workable shower and other anims. Travel to Hector Pond   If you prefer, you can ask to have this little trailer rezzed at some other location, i.e. at Grote Pond where there's a $50/50 trailer rental currently or wherever you like, check the latest listings.

Trying to explain McLuhan's theory by the second thing that comes up on Google is as inaccurate as explaining it with the first thing that comes up on Google, but that first thing (at least on my Google) does explain the most pertinent thing about it: First, McLuhan was not concerned with providing consistent, linear meanings of the terms “hot” versus “cool” media. For him, it was the effect the medium had that he was trying to get at. McLuhan indicates this in chapter 2 ofUnderstanding Media where he writes: The new electric structuring and configuring of life more and more encounters the old lineal and fragmentary procedures and tools of analysis from the mechanical age. More and more we turn from the content of messages to study total effect. . . . Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the total situation, and not a singe level of information movement. (26) [all emphases in original] I can back that interpretation up with my experience as I was a student of McLuhan's at the University of Toronto in 1976. At that time there was a presidential election in the US between Carter and Ford. McLuhan divided up the class in half, half of us listened to Ford speak on the radio, and the other half watched Carter on TV. On the radio, Ford sounded more experienced and cerebral; on the TV, Carter, especially in his down-home commercials of the time showing him on a rocker on a porch, came across as popular and friendly. So each side could think their candidate had "won" in that media -- or not. Then they were switched. Carter won, of course, as TV trumped radio by then, as it had by the time of the JFK election when Nixon appeared on TV in a white shirt and stubble which made him look like a dirty criminal -- you have to wear blue on TV to make it come out white and not yellow. What does all this have to do with Second Life? Nothing, because SL is by definition cool medium in that it is like TV, and hot medium only in that it has some "radio" like features but note that in McLuhan's list, voice can be "cool" too. It's not about "senses" as media doesn't have touch, taste, or smell. One could make various arguments about SL being more hot and emotional than WoW which is cool and detached or something but it's quite subjective. Darrius and others are wailing and weeping because they think the new Sansar will be a soulless place with only the most skilled tekkies and designers delivering content from outside the platform and the rest of us turned into gawkers and rubes at the carnival. The esthetics for some will be low-brow as no one will be able to be creative freely at any end, high or low. But it's silly to make your own cultural critique of it from a place that is only a minority opinion even within your cohorts (the talented and skilled won't see it that way as it will be their playground) as an explanation then for its failure, and moan that they "didn't listen" to you as you had it all doped out and they are stupid. The reality is, the Lindens run a real business, with real revenue and real costs in a real environment in ways that all but the tiniest minority of very high-end merchants can understand -- and not even then, as they don't have payroll tax, insurance, mortages, and even their own living wages to pay in their businesses. Making a model human city with a diverse inworld economy -- what a lot of us wish we had in SL -- is not a business, but a university project or a hobby. There are three kinds of people in these worlds: those who play war, those who play house, and those who play store. Even if you charge and earn real money and even if you live off that money to some extent, there is still a very high element of "play" and "hobby" to it becaues you don't have RL costs or for that matter benefits. Those of us who like playing store get mad at all the way the Lindens mess up our game but they can't care as they have their own business to run. In their world, they imagine that the masses being awed with the graphics cards and engines of war games like WoW are the bar they must meet and feel bad if they haven't; they feel to be "mass," they have to reach the "look good level" and stop trying to cross sim seams that will never be crossed. Most people don't need to build or design in a virtual world, even to be creative, as decorating with others' content is creativity enough or participating in an experience like live music. People vote with their feet and likely they will want less laggy, prettier, less bothersome, cheaper content and hassle-free entertainment rather than suffer in Second Life. They aren't crass mass-taste Babbits and Wal-mart shoppers; among them might be neurosurgeons who just want time off, entertainment, distraction, and that's their right. And maybe they will get this desired product and maybe the Lindens will succeed. Of course if they have a chance they will end the costly and troublesome server farm of 25,000 sims with old and not very good software and its collections of problems, including cranks on the forums. No other company would buy such a thing "as is" and they will be forced to wind it down if it doesn't pay for itself or is too costly in terms of staff, costs, reputational loss, whatever to keep going. One hopes they will then wind down this world-product with care and compassion and transfer their customers to their new shiny. But they may not and no one will care. You hope they will develop things like a formula to transfer sim "owners" and content "owners" but they may not. The things that people value in the old Sansara (SL's first continent had that name, oddly enough) in terms of geographical contiguity, interactivity, inworld creativity and editability and community may not "transfer" into Sansar with its "not always on" sims and likely land barons that will become even more of a factor in virtual life; instead of the serendipity of hundreds of creators, among them morons with giant grass boards they stick on pretty ponds, making a "Mainland," you will have one mind designing a playground maybe many sims large in the same decor, who might give you a square to put out your content in exchange for a one-time or ongoing fee. Many won't notice any difference and will be happy to have one good caretaker of their view instead of 100 bad ones. Of course, it imight be that the inability to stick your virtual plow in the earth or mix it up with 100 mixed neighbours will be such a shock and such a loss that people will make the new world fail by not flocking to it but I hardly think so. Facebook didn't fail because Diaspora arrived and then one of the lead coders of Diaspora committed suicide. And so on. Silicon Valley is a brutal place and people are increasingly dependent on it. People dont usually mention the Lindens' other failed projects in these discussions, but there's that to think of -- when Minecraft became wildly popular, Lindens made a kind of knock-off sort of like it that never took off; they made another thing that was kind of an Etch-a-Sketch; yet another thing that was a story-telling template/platform that was particularly niche-geeky -- none of these caught on. They may not have been meant to catch on. There's this, too: the more Sansar becomes a place of controlled but popular beauty and fun, the more old Sansara may be riddled with the griefers, copybotters and annoyances that won't be able to get a toehold in Sansar for whatever reason of cost, better mananagement, whatever. Then the Badlands of the Mainland may be come worse. I have a hunch there's a plan for Zindra that explains why there are certain land barons who have cornered the market there that may involve shunting people off to Zindra if they don't fit in Sansar. The reason Blue Mars failed for a lot of us was because there was nothing to do but go and stare at what Desmond Shang or some other developer found fund to do with extra-world tools and sims -- it was a Disney view-master or a postcard that served as a background to your chat. But if that's where your friends are, if that's where the newest clothes will be, if that is less laggy and griefy and most of all, less expensive, it will be compelling. If SL as it exists now has only 900,000 monthly uniques, with concurrency of only 70,000 let's say on a good night, it has no rationale to keep the old SL open if most of those people go to the new world -- the people who pay its bills are not small and medium business but big business. It's unlikely that even collectively, those smaller businesses will have the resources even to offer to buy this troubled world.

@Bobbie thanks for that tutorial it's helpful, but it doesn't change the basics here that emerge even from your post and Innula's pictures: THESE NEWS ONES are gruesome TOO. They look like the Children of the Damned. There are certain angles where their eyes look ghoulish. They are indeed hard to work with and here's the icing on the cake: they crash your browser. Several people tipped me off to the fact that these new mesh avatars may be what's constantly crashing my browser when I haven't had that kind of plague in years. It is not on my side as I've checked everything and have a clean install of SL. Finally, I took off "Dylan". From that moment on, I haven't crashed. Yes, I know, "Works On My Machine," is your answer -- but didn't on mine and some others. And they are hideous and I abandoned using them -- which, BTW, I had only started to do because of another clothing problem persisting still which Lindens have tried to fix in my inventory. It's always instructive to see the inability of people to tolerate the slightest criticism on the forums. Trigger alert! "then another hair base and..." I'm chuckling because you still don't get it. Mix and match means mix and match WITHIN the set of that avatars, if you are new, and don't have $3000 for a new hair or skin. Not put on a new expensive hair you buy outside of the system. So let me try to break it down ONCE AGAIN: If you take off Dylan's hat, his hair goes away with it! And you don't have OTHER hair from another avatar IN THAT SERIES or somewhere else that fits. Surely you'll be able to see your own pictures here also illustrate how creepy they all are.

@Darrius Gothly None of this has any remote relationship to any reality so I'm not going to even bother it with a full answer. The previous post that said "Pam, I've got this one" lets us know all we need to know about your imaginary role as lord of the forums. Have fun on your roost and I hope it helps sell your products. As it happens, I haven't had "a few bad experiences" or "only bought a few things" because in fact in the last 6 months, I've literally bought thousands of items, box by box, spending hundreds of US dollars, for various reasons of studying the economy and the market but also upgrading some of my properties to mesh items. I've seen an enormous amount of shops, yard sales, etc. etc. I don't need to go to some small or medium gadget shop selling the same things that hundreds of others sell to understand the market or the shopping experience. There's some key things that always happen, and involuntary landmark and notecard giving is a big, big problem, not only at the store lot but after you've unpacked the boxes. There's an enormous infliction many merchants have put on people that developed as a function of the increasing number of "landless" in SL, and that is packages that can be dragged on you to open, that also ask to animate your avatar so it looks like you're opening a package, then barrages you with messages like "do you want to wear this or ad to inventory" even though you're not going to want to wear a house," etc. etc. On the road to coping with the inheret problems of boxes on newbies' head and the struggles with searching inventory, merchants have actually only added new inflictions. The box doesn't ad to my inventory and then go away; it adds and keeps its copy and I don't dare delete the inworld version because inventory gets lost and I can't be sure it's still there. Etc. There are a LOT of packaging and usage problems now, more than ever before. The addition of HUDS as managers to handle mesh we can't edit is also vexing. Again, this isn't me discovering these problems as a newbie somehow coming off my sim of 10 years age like Rip Van Rinkle as I've always gotten sculpty and mesh things and followed the issue. This is different, it's about a concerted shopping spree to study the world and its problems and upgrade my sims. I suppose it would shock you to discover that I have a client-server notecard system that is updated in one prim in my office, and then through the magic of scripting, updates every where else it has been deployed. It's much easier to concoct notions of clueless ineptitude and foaming-mouth frenzy LOL. I don't wish to have my business data captured by the one or two vendors that capture this business data in SL, and I like to customize notecards in some settings and provide flexibility to customers that mass web-driven rentals don't have. The rest of your screed has no basis in reality and is just indulgence in various pet peeves and habits. I know plenty about customer service and that's why I have customers LOL. There's also a very basic and fundamental and glaring factual mistake in your diatribe here: the notion that boxes are "necessary" for "technical" reasons. They aren't. The VMM now enables you to put a gatcha of 5 prims, say, such as a se of pots and pans, that is not in a box, into a folder inworld and have it show up as an item to purchase on the MP, and no box ever touches human hands. The VMM *is* the box. This is the zen of boxness.

@ChinRey It doesn't matter, because instead of saying "I do this, but I recognize my fellow merchants don't and yes, it's a problem," she continues to maintain that because she does it, anybody else criticizing other pernicious practices must be wrong. Furthermore, I made an extremely salient point: boxes are not needed as much as they imagine, and don't even really serve a purpose in the age of mesh, and yet there is a clinging to them mainly to overpackage and over advertise. Re: your other post: 1. Have you looked at Zindra or most store sims? There are way more bots that you may imagine. 2. Your alts are real people and spend money because you do as a legal person. We don't know how many alts there are in SL but 450,000 is not a big number. More importantly, the numbers for people who might wish to get into, say, the island renting business are even far smaller -- the number of people willing to spend $25 US inworld is tens of thousands, so you can see the problem with the oversaturated land market. 3. It doesn't matter if you can put together outfits by scavenging freebies. That's not relevant. A LOT of people don't do that. I don't know what kind of customers you see. But I can tell you that just as in real life you can see well-dressed poor people with cell phones because those are their priorities, so in SL you can see very poor people from third-world countries dressed to the nines in the latest mesh. 4. You need to distinguish between your need to rectify what your imagine are my "wrong" points and the larger picture here, which is *using these numbers to judge the economy*. You could plan for a business that might get the $25 US market when you know how big that market is. Now you don't, full stop. 5. I'll say for the gadzillionth time that the "16 meter size" is merely an artifact of the geek mind and the server partition. There is absolutely no reason in hell this can't have a wrapper around it of a different size. 6. There aren't good mesh freebies, there are only $25 gatchas, and the mesh freebie as an artifact for newbie furniture has yet to really appear in the world. But scouring gatcha sales and looking for bargains is a good way to furnish a home. 7. The problem isn't THAT the Lindens have bulk discounts, which any company of any size with any diverse customer base has. The problem is that it is NOT transparent and is part of politics rather than an open market. When I go to a blogging platform, I know that if I pay $9.99 a month I get X size and storage but if I buy multiple blogs for $14.95 I get X server space. LL should print on their website what you get off if you buy 10 or 50 or 100 sims and not make it a negotiated secret without clear-cut criteria. 8. You're absolutely wrong about Linden Homes. Fly out to them and look all over them. Look at the map. Plenty of green dots. Sure, empties, too, but more green dots per sim than most island rentals or mainland rentals. 9. When Ebbe says his Moles make content not for the world but to load test his software, he really isn't kidding. The plummet isn't about the people who do the Moles job; it's about LL having decided that content and world building is Not For Us and just using it as a load testing. Seriously, pay attention. Other than a few Linden realm games there isn't much new Mole content and they are laid off. 10: "It's sad because at the end of the day the large continuous landscape is the only thing that really makes SL different from all the other virtual realities of all kinds. And it's sad because it goes against everything I believe Second Life was meant to be." Well, yeah. That's the problem. And this is all now going to be not only defunct but disparaged. It would be one thing if LL still saw a value in it and got out of its way if not promoted it. It doesn't, and is in danger of total deprecation. The prizes in the gatchas are in fact not garbage at all. And the collection impulse that humans have hard-wired in them is very much tapped here and is a driver for some to make fantastic sums. I think you should look at it more and visit the many events they have like Arcade or Shabby Shiny or 6 Republic or Lost & Found. All of these things have replaced large telehub malls and post-telehub giant stores.

What you're describing is what Open Sim and similar programs already have with the base of LL's software or similar software. Hi-Fidelity has this, too. The market for virtual worlds in general is small, not everyone wants to avatarize or immerse in versimilitude that is open-ended without structure or organized games. Then it's an even more smaller niche that wants sandboxing and trading. The other things we know about Sansar: o no geographical contiguity...because o no always-on sims; sims on demand o larger sims with more prims that may connect to others o content creation will only be for the highly skilled and outside the platform o content from this world will not port to Sansar without 3rd party programs that most users will find too complicated or cumbersome to use o no 1:1 deal on currently owned sims

@KarenMichelle Lane -- LL may encrypt chat in this basic form you indicate so that it is not available to casual snooping but that does NOT mean that they permit STRONG even INVINCIBLE encryption by the user base that they themselves cannot get into via a "back door" -- because they're the ones doing the encrypting of it! Instead of the user base. That's the issue. And I don't believe that LL should tolerate strong encryption in the user base because there is a long history of this being misused for crime and I don't want SL to become any more criminalized than it is. As for this sort of thing: "Please send me all your private bank account details and CC me in all your private email, you have nothing to hide, you've already started such" from another poster, this is tiresome, and the usual snotty answer from extremists and crypto-anarchists who can't differentiate between the various goods of society.Banks encrypt your data so that you are not robbed. But that doesn't mean that by the same analogy your communications should also be wrapped up like a bank vault that police even with a warrant cannot break into, even if you are a terrorist attacking Paris. Gosh, we're able to distinguish in a liberal democratic society the various means and methods and rationales for encryption in some places and not in others, and the need to hide some things and not others without an extreme, all-or-nothing binary take on this problem. The scorn for the "nothing to hide" advocates and invocation of the need to steal their bank accounts by having them reveal them only lets us know how criminally-minded this group is. A rational and reasonable approach recognizes that some things need strong encryption and others don't or shouldn't for other reasons of the good in society. Phoenix was not allowed to be a third-party browser precisely because they advocated encryption that LL couldn't access which they would need to do to run this platform. And that's a good thing.

Now 6 Republic is over but if you missed it, you can still see some of the great sky boxes, furniture and gatcha items created for this even which featured the themes of Chicago and California. These are all spacious, with great, innovative textures and features 1. {theosophy} St Asaph Skybox $150/150 prims, sky home in Juanita - Unfurnished. Visit our showroom and ask to add furnishings if you like. 2. Xin & Toro Republic garage - this is great! $650 - prim count varies here depending on whether you take just the parcel $650/500), the parcel with this garage ($650/460), the parcel plus the garage and furnishings from the gatcha and related MadPea gatcha ($650/400).  3. Atellier The Gallery Apartment - Sky Home in Juanita. $100/100 - Furnished. Or ask to reset to $150/150 unfurnished if you like. Floors and walls can be changed; a kitchen is included and I've added breakfast.  4. Windy City Skybox by Stockholm & Lima - rainy or snowy windows and different city scapes Ravenglass Rentals Bed & Breakfast No. 5 in Grote - Furnished. $50/50 -- great bargain! You get private room with a Mexican theme below in spacious house you can use with breakfast nook; then your own personal locked skybox above as well. Roam the grounds and neighbouring sims for lots of activities.   5. Chelsea Loft by DaD - multiple rooms, great balcony, walls can be tinted. Ravenglass B&B in Grote. $150/150 prims - unfurnished.  

@Pamela Galli It doesn't take rocket science to follow your business when you are so vocal on the forums. It's great if YOU put things on mod but the default of many is NOT to and its vexsome. HUDs that connext to websites are among the most complicated things in Second Life. I have tenants that avidly follow breedables that have HUDs and websites, or various appliers or other trees with HUDs and websites, and they get very confused, very frustrated, even spending hours adapting to them, constantly learning new things. I can think of certain products that simply faltered and lost their customers when they started website interaction with inworld links. It's great of you pay your assistant a living wage. But you don't HAVE to do that and can't complain about the difficulties of your class of people in SL when you could spend 10% of that and both provide jobs in the economy and help your customers. This isn't a real society where people's jobs are tied to their food and shelter. It's an entertainment economy where jobs are offsets to make people cash to pursue their own enjoyment. Of course, merchants often live in a completely different world than the rest of us inworlders and in fact function as real-world businesses/designers/merchants with real wages in the thousands of US dollars and that's precisely why they are so insensitive, impervious to fresh information, and in denial of the facts of people in the tiny micro-economy called "Mainland" or "inworld" on the islands. There's room for a variety of kinds of merchants of course but what's always been a chronic failure of Second Life is the inability of Linden and its chosen partners in the high-end merchant class to understand the rest of the world they've created and its dynamics -- even though their livelihood depends on it, too. Gosh, I grasped your point about Turboquid but Mon Dieux I *disagreed* with it. Services like Turbosquid or say image services like Colour Box which I use don't have any interactions or at least, you don't need them if you can read a page half the size of your hand. They aren't selling 3D complext interactive items that break down; they're selling flat, inert models or textures. That's why it's an inept comparison. A buyer at Turbosquid doesn't have to figure out how to place a prefab house on rocky, unterraformable land with Linden land on autoreturn around him. A buyer at Turbosquid buys a 3-D model of a cat but doesn't have to figure out how to have it eat and breed. And so on. There's always a drive by those who make "their real-life livings" in SL to diminish it as "a platform" and "not a world" or to claim it's no different than other online businesses whether Etsy or Amazon. That's not true. I don't buy a used book on Amazon because the person is my neighbour on a sim or we are sharing a rock concert together.

Darrius Gothly You couldn't be more wrong. I don't have a different class of people as customers; I have many of the same, and they overlap. I have very brand-new people who haven't even heard what a prim is; I have oldbies that have been here for 10 years but haven't been out much. It's not true that people who rent from me are more experienced seasoned people, midbies and oldbies. I specialize in cheap Mainland rentals with starter communities and therefore I get people literally off the boat some days -- they land and see an ad for $1/prim land and they come. They may come after 30 days or 60 days when they get their feet wet. But they aren't the customer class you imagine out of ignorance of my business which is an open book. Just because your notion of a rental business is limited to "no boxes" and only right clicking on rental boxes or doesn't mean it's valid. My business involves selling content, commissioning and reselling content, helping customers of the merchants of stores on my land who have content in boxes, and just generally answering questions to the clueless. There is no objective reason why a product needs ALWAYS to be put in a box, and the gadzillions numbers of gatcha sales by new and old, clueless and savy, with no box should speedily put the lie to all that. Mesh has made the box be questioned if not on the way to obsolesence. Boxes existed because of the need to house linked prims that often took up too much space on a sim; rez faux diminished that need and now mesh, with less prims, diminishes it even more. Gatcha makers deliberately out of some perverse sense of control and delusion usually put their boxes on "no copy" and "no mod" so that you can never put an item back in a box So that rapidly you not only lets you know their attitude toward their customers, but lets you know you can dispense with them and their boxes, too. Many people in fact browsing vast gatcha markets want to see things out of the box because they are end-users and not flippers; other want proof of the pristine and authentic status of the item in the form of a box. But it's really half and half or really more in fact out of the box by the time you get into months after an event and people are letting stuff go at bargain bin rates. I think you probably haven't been shopping in the gatcha market and that's why you don't grasp this. Boxes exist primarily for merchants -- they want to push a landmark on you, a notecard, maybe an ad of some kind, whatever. Lots of this is unnecessary. You've already been pushed a landmark against your will landing at a store as they seldom make this voluntary. I know of some particular merchants including some scourges of the forums who have a REALLY ANNOYING custom of forcing a landmark to emerge out of every box you open, or push a landmark on you after every purchase in a store (where you already got one) or event (where you didn't but you don't care). I stop buying from merchants that inflict a landmark automatically on me each time I open their box again. Sure, notecards are nice with instruction manual but most people don't read them, as I know from very vast experience with rental notecards of which I have dozens of forms which you can't possibly imagine. I find that to repeat information that is vital for people -- like joining a group to set prims -- you need triadic repetition of the narrative, as in all human societies from time immemorial which is why fairy tales have triadic repetition of the narrative. So you tell them on the rental box; in a notecard giver on site; on the box itself; in a FAQs you push on them; and in a separate manual message if you still don't see them -- see, five times because three is not enough. It's precisely because the inability of most people to absorb information that they didn't get from a line-by-line personal, live interactive real-time contact with you that I double and quadruple it because maybe something will stick. The notion that my "solutions work for people with skill and experience" is so hilariously laughable that I don't even know where to begin, and it's so emblematic of how out of touch opinionated people on the forums are about the world (and the Lindens behind the forums) because they don't have on-the-ground experience. Thousands of customers pass through my groups, rentals, malls, stores, games, gatcha sales, etc. etc. This is a tiny operation but it still generates many customers because they are small $35 stalls, $50 short-term rentals; $1 sales; etc. etc. So I see what new people do -- and believe me, I find people who don't even know how to search in Google or even right click as distinct from left click. Language issues are also often a problem and I readily translate into languages using online services or ask them to. I had a relative new person stand in exasperation after a nearly hour-long tutorial about prims, meters, groups, teleporters, right-clicking, animations loading, etc. etc. "Why do I need a Ph.D. in physics to use this world?!" Indeed. She's not the problem and my "ignorance" or my "failure to have unskilled customers" you imagine are not the problem. What is the problem is the persistent nastiness of geeks and designers in failing to realize that they need to change, they need to adapt to customers, and they need to stop inflicting idiocy on us. I am really tired of all of these merchants tied to one big vendor who blast me with landmarks over and over again; force boxes on me I can't re-open and notecards I can't even see because they forgot to put permissions on them; and excess junk. It's not uncommon these days to find a merchant who has boxed a prefab in a box; inside that box which is kind of a big ad is another box; inside THAT box is a rez faux. Or there's a rez-faux, and other things like furniture. Excess packaging is part of excess advertising and that's the issue. As for you second post with the ignorant statements about Philip Rosedale, he isn't a geek-turned-manager. He's an engineer with a degree in physics and interest in neural networks. For a time he applied his scientific knowledge to business with mixed results. Now he is back *engineering* a complex virtual world and managing a team of engineers. What needs to change here is the persistent delusion of some in the merchant and coding class that they are right and the rest of the world is wrong. They need to learn what geeks and designers in real companies in the real world like Microsoft or IBM have to learn: the meaning of customer requirements and customer service.

@Darrius Gothly, yes, long before you were born, I wrote about the Linden technocommunist hatred of land as a commodity. Philip Linden wanted it all to sell for $5/meter as a uniform, inbuilt function. I explained what is at root here in my long response above in which I said that the impulse since the dawn of the Internet of techies has been to disguise their own labor and materials cost by making other people's content free. That's why the "miracle of a free newspaper" -- a California newspaper at the time like the San Francisco Herald" that someone could download and print on their modem dial-up computer and printer was the first salvo in a destructive war of engineers against writers, artists, and publishers. What should have happened is that we paid $10 for the service of having paid programmers digitalize and upload and disseminate content. But they wanted to hide and pass on that cost to others to gin up the Internet. We are still trying to recover from the massive destruction of American business and economy from Silicon Valley, including from their political support of Obama, but the good news is that Amazon, ebay, Etsy, Facebook are all things that turn against that tide of "fee for me and free for thee" that Silicon Valley so loves. The Lindens had their early scribe, Hamlet, aggressively lobby against land as a model. The hilarios thing is that Philip opposed it. One of the reasons I'm in the land business is that my very first day as a newbie, actually coming back on a new account after failing to get SL to work on my old computer 6 months before in 2004, was to hear a town hall addressed by Philip in which he said he was making more islands and mainland and wanted to see where "real estate dealers named Buzz swoop in on a helicopter and take newbies to look at real estate." I wanted to be that Buzz. Philip meant Buzz to be merely his engine to drive his island sales, however, not really the creation of a class in its own right. It doesn't matter if you are a geek or if some other geek (and I have them as tenants) grasps that devaluing land and destroying the land merchant class is part of his own destruction because it means less customers and even his own store being cheaper than a direct purchase from Linden. The reality is the overwhelming majority of Silicon Valley executives and the coding class hate land and HATE HATE HATE the idea that the "land" of the Internet should be tilled by anyone else except themselves. That's why Instagram doesn't allow its customers an option to click "buy my picture and pay me" but instead calls customer content its own. That's why there is no commerce interface in Facebook where I can say "pay me to translate your post decently instead of like garbage in Google translate". And so on. It's not "imaginary" mud but a real, documentable phenomenon that you apparently can't grasp because you haven't looked beyond Second Life to see the content businesses of real life and their related busineses, i.e. book stores and newspapers and cafes, and even video shops. We wouldn't have to care about one class being pitted against another for their own ideological or culture reasons -- that's normal life -- if it weren't for the platform providers being part of that perniciousness and fueling it. Ebbe Linden, like all before him, took a tiny handful of his favourite friends and let them see the alpha of Sansara and build their business responses to it before anyone else, giving them a huge advantage in the marketplace. He will mainly designers and scripters to gain serious advantage to the new platform by making them eminently portable as distinct from land dealers except all but the very privileged few bulk buyers. So it's not about us being "all in this together". We're not "all in this together" and it's silly to claim it. Some are going to get very harshly screwed. The very highly-paid scripting class -- and you're not in it -- which makes the top animations, gestures, vehicles and gears to the working of everything else (rez boxes, vendors, etc. etc.) don't have any love for land or land barons in the slightest, except to the extent that some of them can sell more vendors by its existence (and I wish they'd be more conscious of this). ALL of these people are eminently portable to a world with large sims, no geography, no sims on demand, no resale of land, and no portability of content from this world. You aren't and I'm not. Learn the difference. You're also not telling the truth about Second Life and its history, possibly because you don't know it. The biggest campaigners against the re-sale of island parcels as "land sales" and not rent, something Linden introduced into the client, was the top gestures and animations maker. Go figure. The biggest campaigners against land costing anything, or having any value or being a sector of the economy and being reduced to mere cheap toilet paper to be rolled out mechanically were some of the top geeks of the early-adaption of SL and today's FIC. Start with the crew that handled this last "interface" with the Lab talks with Ebbe and point to one of them who has championed land barons, land, etc. versus content as a driver of the economy or even as a legitimate participant in the economy. I rest my case.

@Pamela Galli Re: I teach people how to open a box, how to rez a coalesced group, how to manage inventory and find things in inventory (a good percentage are not aware of the search function), how Windlight affects how things look, how to unlink a prim, how to tint things, how to reset scripts, where to find transactions, and thousands of other things. Turbosquid sellers are done when they upload their products. Here's a thought: don't make products that require all that heavy user education. Not just you, but the whole merchant class. Stop putting things on "no mod" so people can tint and reset scripts, it's not rocket science. Sell multiple well-tinted items with in the sales box itself, hey, imagine that as a concept. Don't sell things in boxes at all -- gosh, it's hard to imagine and yet the massive re-sale market of gatcha used items let us know that the box is a concept that maybe could be retired. Imagine if you sold only the rez-faux and no box!!! Imagine a world in which this is possible!!!! Don't make things that require Windlight to look nice (!!! are there really people who fiddle with Windlight other than a handful of fashion bloggers???) Finally, put linked prims in rez faux. Everybody, even the newest newbie on my rentals, seems to figure out how to click a box that sprouts their prefab. You're exaggerating all these things, really, because some of them can be fixed by short, informative notecards and signs at the store. Oh, except you no longer have stores in the merchant class, you're all on the MP.... Finally, here's another gasping thought: hire people at SL wages. Not everyone needs a real-life wage if they are a store clerk who just gets free clothes or $500 in Lindens a day or even week so she can buy clothes. Lots of people would be happy to help others on that basis and it helps the problem of entry-level jobs for newbies.

We really are driving blind here trying to analyze the economy without any real statistics or information. We used to have a LOT more available when Lindens told us a) how many premium accounts there were b) how many people spent more than a dollar inworld each month. Those figures used to be about 90,000 and 450,000 when they last publicized them which I believe was 3 years ago. They stopped publicizing them only because they showed bad news - premium numbers crashed at that time, and I don't know that the slashes in rates or improved advertising brought them up. The 450,000 is HALF of the claimed 30-day monthly uniques, let's say, which were at a million and now 900,000. Yes, it is possible for half the population to log in and not spend any money because they don't need to, especially if they are bots : ) I suggest that the 450,000 figure reveals more to us, howeve, and that is the huge number of traffic/whore/greeter/group bots in world, plus alts. Only real people spend money. Even very poor people at least get a dollar from a money tree or a game and buy a shirt with it. The figure of $65 million in what the Lindens get in tier is interesting because that figure used to be $75 million. So that may be what is driving their new world-creation. But the figure of "3% of the resident content sales which is also $65 million" doesn't track as that would be $216 million, and the claims in the press have been that this world generates $450 million or more in *resident* revenue. That's an extraordinary thing and why I cherish Second Life; Facebook, which controls one-sixth of the world's population with their billion members, unlikely ENABLES that much to be made from the USERS of their platform as distinct from themselves. It's a very democratic and open system that I think needs more replication in platforms like Instagram that churlishly guard your content as their content instead of enabling you to make a buck from it. Why the big discrepancy in claims? I think it may be that the Lindens calculate the $216 million number as such because a good chunck of revenue from land and content businesses has to go to tier! So those are sunk costs for the business and also a revenue stream the Lindens can't tax AGAIN obviously. So they have fees for currency exchange and MP sales and that's not enough. Of course they want to grab more. They realize if they grab too much, they'll kill off not only customers who hate taxes but creators who resent being tax vehicles losing customers. People hate Internet taxes and they're right to as they kill business. Of course irahepti is right that they could do other things like slash tier costs to increase volume sales and especially get rid of other things like the jump in tier on the "step ladder" of prices that has never been justified in my view. In fact, I think it exists only because of the arcane geek factor of server space multipliers -- the reason land is divided into 512 or 4096 and not round numbers is because server math is expressed in these terms. Maybe they "have" to do this and therefore live with the more-than-doublers that occur, but we need to ask why. I am definitely opposed for making rent of land a feature of the land tools. Once you allow LL to do this, you allow them to stick their hand in and take tax for rentals as they essentially do for land (through currency fees) and as they openly do for content (MP fees). So please, be wary of providing new ways for Linden to put their hand in my pocket and take even more of my meager profits. There is no reason to do this to "stimulate the economy". I use open-source rental scripts that are in theory cost free (although I've paid coders real money to improve their performance and fix their bugs over the years). There is the leading rental device and other competitors so plenty of choice and ease in the market to putting out rental boxes. By putting land rental in the viewer you are also destroying all those businesses of people who make and sell rental devices especially those hooked up to their websites. Again, the idea that you need to destroy entire swatches of the economy for the sake of the purported "ease of use" to stimulate in the economy just doesn't work out. BUYING land is now so complicated because of the multiple dummy-stopper menus that you should first look to where you could streamline THAT. We also don't know WHAT the discount is that the big land barons get. If we knew that, we could figure how much they cost the economy, or cost Linden, or are a privileged group who can be ported easily to Sansar with a new blandishment. My guess is that they get 50% and they are easily ported, but that leaves many of us in the dust. @Perrie Juran I hear you about Linden Homes. The Lindens really shouldn't compete with their own business class. But remember, they hate land economy and land barons, they view them as an alien force unlike their beloved designers and coders who fit better into their California Ideology and they want to get rid of them because they view them as the enemy. The reason their former scribe Hamlet Linden constantly lobbies against land as a model is that the dream of coders is always to make an Internet that disguises their own costs as programmers with expenses like server farms by freeing up, devaluing and rent-seeking on everybody else's value. It's a miracle the Internet has succeeded given this essentially pernicious ideology at its root. Linden Homes are a success for Lindens because they create real green dots, not traffic or whore bots, who buy things for their homes which they heavily advertise on the MP. They are a controlled population who can't commerce or whore or grief given their limitations. So what's not to like? They're also this: a very easily mooved Hooverville that can be ported to Sansar. THEY can get whatever 1:1 LL dreams up for them or hands off to a large land baron to "adopt". The only thing I can say in their favour is that in theory, they add stability and value to our Mainland as a whole by creating more middle-class citizens who get out of the largely young-male griefing, war games and sandboxes categories and settle down and buy content and marry and have children, so to speak. So they add some tissue to our distressed world as any of them can leave their reservation to come to our business, or in theory, be groomed for land ownership of their own or even island or Mainland rentals in the future. I'd love to see those statistics, because the way the Lindens sold the "Assisted Living" program as Cocoanut Koala dubbed Linden Homes was that people would only start there, then we could pick them up to sell them 2048s with more prims and content down the line. I doubt it has worked that way... There's more I want to say about the problem of the analysis of telehubs based on fallacious information and the problem of the Lindens' view of their own content production (the Moles and others) -- they don't view this as world glue or helpful for community; as I learned from Ebbe when I met him more than a year ago, he views it merely as a load test for his software. This is as devastating a blow to worldness as Ginsu Linden's explanation that SL is only a product, not a world. But you have to remember that when the Lindens say that Second Life is a world "envisioned and designed by its residents," they aren't kidding. That's all they want. They want nothing to do with governance which is why you can't tell customer service about a griefing problem but only add to a ridiculous queue of abuse reports that go nowhere. @ChinRey you are right to put all kinds of correctives on to these magic figures of $65 million and the even more magic figure of $475 which you can find online. None of them calculate wage costs for designers or land barons, all of whom work on sweat equity if not sweatshop terms. It's not true that people can't be paid outside the platform, however, as some land barons take PayPal payments directly (I do this on a tiny level) and some content makers accept PayPal directly as well for things like a build of a sim with all kinds of landscaping and content (I've paid such fees to builders) or some kind of experience, like a live concert or design of a clothing sales event -- all of these can happen outside the platform. I don't believe it's that huge a piece of the economy, however, as most transactions occur within the platform and are heavily taxed and devalued. Don'to forget that years ago, when we had an independent, free currency platform outside of Linden Lab, we cashed out at $4.00 for every 1000 Lindens, not $3.70 or less as we do now. That matters. Supply Linden prints and sells money to keep the rate even and cheap for end-users, now devaluating the wages of those cashing out their revenue. If I were in the content making class, I'd demand that the Lindens float the ruble, er I mean the Linden and let it rise to its true value rather than making it like scrip in the Soviet Union, in exchange for taxation. The problem with that is that soon, you won't be able to feel like a king by spending under five dollars and getting enough to buy at least a cheap skin and car for $1000 Lindens. You will start to feel as if you are paying "real money" for things and in the Club Med/carnival concept of SL as entertainment, that will start to burn and lose customers. The Internet will grow beyong this when people stop seeing virtual worlds as a toy or a game or a prototyper or an educator and realize that much of real life does take place on them and through them and they need to be made more robust and real themselves. If 500,000 people log on to a platform for four hours a night and spend $5 or more US each log-on session for their principle form of social, sexual and even artistic enjoyment, it's time to stop ridiculing that and lambasting it as "having no life" and realize it is a modern phenomenon no different than buying digital music instead of vinyl records or a subscription to the digital New York Times instead of the hard-copy tree-killer paper. I can't believe that 30% would be added to content sales as there would be mass rebellion and destruction of the market. 15% I could believe. I think Ebbe must mean Maitreya. But it doesn't matter. There is only a tiny niche for people to benefit from the MP. The entire reason the world is gripped in gatcha madness now of epic proportions is that the MP doesn't work for people in multiple ways; gatcha is their rebellion. To be sure, some rares are sold on MP and it partakes in the madness that way again, but the entire industry of hunts, sales, events, gatchas, gatcha resales, the rares flipping market, etc. is a dysfunctional reaction to an abnormal economy. Linden has driven people to the MP by keeping high tiers and another nasty thing: not doing much about copybotting or griefing, so that people feel they are safer from abuse on the MP. That's pretty pernicious of them but it's Silicon Valley and it's how they are. In my view, by driving many people to the MP, the Lindens have also crippled the economy and hurt their own island sales. That's because only a tiny few can get VISIBILITY on the marketplace because of the ability to spend hundreds of real dollars on ads or because there are built-in rewards to the flawed search program for them. The inworld search, also always a problem, and the virtual absence of effective inworld advertising except big ugly spinning boxes on physics (!), depresses the economy and kills the world. The Lindens don't care as their formula is -- put it all on MP so we can get our cut. If they were more nuanced and sophisticated in dealing with this problem -- and they can't be as there is no time or money for this -- they'd realize they need to make a better ecosystem of inworld advertising, tier incentives, promotion not destruction of the land sector, etc. etc. Philip Rosedale, for all his down sides, actually had a better intuitive grasp of these balances, along with some of his more "grown-up" (now dead or gone) Lindens like Joe Linden and Robin Linden than the current crew. It's sad. But I don't know how to get across these nuances to Ebbe Linden and the new crew who are a complete black box to me in time to get them to stop destroying the Mainland on the way to creating Sansara. What's amazing is how the human spirit cannot be corraled. The merchant class, especially those not at the very highest end of it, responded by making malls come back in a new form: events. They put an end to freebies and non-transferable objects that people moved to out of fear of copybotting and created the gatcha game. It really is quite ingenious and testimony to the fact of how human beings will create markets and buy and sell no matter what tyrant tries to get in their way and squeeze their profits. I have a lot more to say about the gatcha thing but I wonder if you agree that it is a sign of MP and world dysfunction. Ultimately, the Lindens want to solve their problems -- and even ours -- with Sansara. They will be able to grab entire ready-made populations out of this world into the next -- all high-end merchants, designers, creators and scripters; all Linden Homes users; all large land barons with 100 plus or more sims; and much of the average user population that will be happier to go to a less laggy, bigger, prettier, and cheaper carnival. I guess soon we will see what that leaves behind...

Live in a 6 Republic House! The 6 Republic event has only one more day left, hurry and see it because it has a lot of really innovative and unique buildings in the old 1940s Chicago and 1950s California themes (with some more modern elements). Teleport to 6 Republic I've purchased some of them so now you can rent them, or just swing on by and see how they look "in the wild". Teleport to Flamingo Court Sky Homes This one is $100/wk with 100 prims you can use of your own, or ask to remove my decorations and rent it for $150/150 prims. Very nice details for this modern loft by Sanyo Bilavio called Atalier. It comes with low prim (143) or high prim (currently whopping 343) on account of track lighting and curtains. She may be able to reduce the curtains, I pointed out to her they were LI hogs. But A+ for thinking to put curtains in a skybox, very necessary, few do it. I've decorated the bedroom and living room a bit -- space for lots more -- very spacious and nice textures. There's a HUD to change the textures. Unlike a lot of modern designer lofts, she also included a kitchen. I added stools and coffee and newspaper. More homes in this and other sims from 6 Republic to come soon, watch this space!   

The Russians don't use the T-72s as much, well maybe in Syria. In Ukraine they have the modified T-72A or the T-72BM with the kontakt or reactive armour on the sides and other upgrades:  BTW I'm only finding the Russian T-90s for sale on the MP, but the Russians only use that in Syria and not the Donbass. I need to find a T-72 and preferably with upgrades for my Ukraine war installation.

@Deltango Ray Yes, I realize. But it's better than a stick in your eye. @ChinRey, your math is absolutely correct. The only way you could nudge that up is by other things - content or service sales, live music, perhaps renting some high-end merchant stalls along with house rentals etc. Not a great way to make a living. The return of your initial "investment" (I prefer to call it "sunk cost of doing business" like purchase of a lathe or a license) takes more than 6 months; it could be a year without a full house. Any sim under 80% occupancy will fail then unless you run around like a gerbil on a wheel. WHEN you finally return that price, that's great, but you don't get better, as to stay ahead, you have to keep buying fresh land and doing fresh things (at least, that's the conveyor belt many get stuck on). As for the figure Ebbe gave, that's a different figure than "sign-ups". He's talking about 30-day uniques. Yes, I knew that figure was close to a million and likely dropped. It's more like 70,000 tops concurrent log-ons on a Saturday or Sunday night when there is high occupancy. And I believe that figure although there are a lot of people who don't log on among them. What I'm talking about are sign-ups -- new people who buy the premium each month or even you could calculate the number of people who come in and buy $1000 of Lindens to buy a suit and a car. THAT numbers of newbies has dwindled. That's why the 30-day uniques has reduced. As for Bay City or Nautilus, I look at these areas with a really jaundiced eye. They are overpriced and therefore the land goes fallow when they could be far more livelier communities. The Lindens try to create value with their builds ,but then their fan base grab that land and hold. They don't even actually sell it. They hold. We see this in Zindra too with some land barons. Buy and hold to keep the ridiculous price way up. People are paying fantastic prices just for easements -- a little bit of tree and land between them and their neighbour. Linden could put that out with a cookie-cutter across thousands of more sims and make life more tolerable and less griefy and blighty for the population. They prefer not to, or drive them into the Assisted Living of Linden Homes. There's also the problem of the power users/buyers at Bay City and Nautilus who grab land and hold it like dogs in the manager and also use all kinds of techniques to keep others out, thereby making them empty after awhile like all authoritarian systems. The Lindens could break this crazy they themselves created by rolling out 10 more area like this so that the price comes down and the dogs in the manger stop pretending to eat hay. They prefer not to.

@Chin Rey I tend to agree. I believe that the $195 grandfathered tier islands and $95 homestead islands are a minority of the product. There are enormous numbers of $295 sims. These don't rent out as well as people imagine -- look at the map! To get that $295 out of the ground from their 16 white, flat pancakes, owners have to offer ridiculous prices and incentives. They no longer "sell" parcels first -- they give away one month free. They put initial rents at below their own tier price. It's ridiculous. Read the ads, people and you will see this is not the profit center it once was. Yes, they get discounts off that $295 price. But it isn't so much as to make them profit centers as many are leaving the business. Let's say a 100-bulk owner got a slash from $295 to $245 or even $195. He will still have a hell of time moving those parcels. I know because I have them myself at my tiny level and I travel around and see how they are doing and I see they are in trouble. This is not cause for rejoicing, believe me. "Land barons" as I said are single moms and retired folks and injured war veterans; those few who are actual prosperous real-life businessmen are far and few between. No sane person would get into a business with this slim margins with this risk and this hassle unless they liked the world itself, had friends there, or enjoyed a severe challenge as a kind of hobby. Where do you get the figure of 900,000 unique signups each month??? That can't be true, guys. The last figures for WHEN the Lindens published this information years ago was far less. What's more important is to look at retention given 1 out of 9 fallout rates. At one time, there was something like 90,000 premium accounts; this fell to 50,000 and the Lindens stopped reporting it. They've tried upping it by slashing the cost to half for some campaigns. I do see new people coming in but it is not 900,000 not retaining and leaving 100,000, it's considerably less. Ask any worker at any newbie help station and they will tell you this, i.e. Oxford or New Citizens. Instant bankruptcy is right. What we have now is a combination of happy exiting landlords cashing out with a somewhat flatter Linden than 5 years ago, reliefed; some holding and very exposed and worried; some clueless about the axe to fall on their head.

No, I refuse to advocate the demise of the 10% discount. There is a concerted class of insider geeks and high-end merchants that have lobbied against this modest privilege for the nearly powerless Mainland rentals class, but it's entirely political and about power holding not real economics. Few really use this to any advantage, look at the map. We need the surveys of the Mainland we used to get from an avid watcher but basically, the few large land rental agencies (I'm a small one) have grouped their land to get the 10%, and some end-users make alts and group their land, but mainland rentals are a tiny percentage of land in SL, and end-users tend not to group their land. So the fantasy that this "perk" is meaningful and should be "traded" for something else is folly. Instead, it should be left alone and even encouraged as it helps people get a little more prim land, and that helps the vast abandoned land problem. You mention the idea of "no more tradeable land". Where did you get the idea that it was growing in the first place? The Lindens long ago stopped printing mainland sims and growing SL at its green tip, along the outer edges of the existing continents. In fact, some continents are even unfinished, as they stopped new printing and fresh land auction sales ages ago. Why would you want to save such remnants of a free market that exists in this world that provide jobs and incentives outside the creator/scripter class. Why? Why do you and so many Lindens hate land commodity so much? Is it a threat to your power as a geek or power user or designer? In real life, it doesn't work that way; why should it online? Hamlet Au is the lead crusader in agitating the Lindens to end land as a commodity and kill the land market out of a ruthless hatred of any class of ownership outside the geek squad. But it's short-sighted in a normal and balanced world where you need multiple types of entries to an economy and multiple types of revenue streams. The Lindens only auction used abandoned land now (aside from their very dilatory and mismanaged abandoned land sales program). As for the land market itself, perhaps this fact my concentrate your mind a bit: last night instead of abandoning my land and forcing someone to try to get the Lindens to sell it to them for $1/meter, months later, when the Lindens might feel like it, I set it to sale for 0.5/meter, knowing that land bots often will get it at that place, then somebody can hold it and flip it for $2, let's say. No land bots came. I set it to $50 for 1056 meters finally, which shows it as "0" on the system, and still no bots came. That tells you what bots eat these days. I then woke up this morning to see finally it had manually sold. Good! Now somebody who pays $5 in tier to LL can have it. I'm no big student of the land market these days, but from anecdotal experience, I would have to say that all but a tiny few of dealers make enough money to justify the frustration and costs. Most people just flip it and make pennies that erode away in tier anyway. So there is no need to freeze this trade, either, quite frankly, as it is not significant and not a solution. It would be preposterous to add more Linden Homes sims. Again, look at the map. This is a map in which the green dots are actually real people, as commerce is not allowed there and therefore there are no traffic bots, and adult public sex isn't allowed, either, so there are no whore bots. That means real live people. The good news is that there are at least a sprinkling on them, indicating that they get use. The bad news is that it is like Dutch Elm disease, spots among many empty areas. It's not fully used. It is not sold out. It is not growing. Grandfather tiers on islands should remain because the rise in tier was never justified, the investment people made in them for the first five years of SL substantial, and again, it doesn't help as they are a minority of products. People like you are always willing to aggressively, savagely go after the tiny incentives that very hard-working and hard-suffering people have achieved in this totalitarian economy, for the sake of some ideological chimera -- it's always OTHER people you want to punish with the "disruption" that Silicon Valley so loves. Knock it off. You have no idea what you are proposing, and you can't be blamed, because none of us have even the most basic facts we used to have from the Lindens: o number of people who have spent more than $1 Linden each month (used to be 450,000). o number of people who have spent the equivalent of $25 US each month (used to be under 50,000 I believe) o number of islands (we do not have this from official sources o number of mainland sims in Lindens' hands o number of auctioned parcels o and who buys those parcels -- all information once transparent, now gone. I'm all for leaving educational sims, and I note that while you're happy to do so, for people who have HUGE sources of revenue from the RIDICULOUSLY HIGH tuition bills paid by American parents, you won't do it for your fellow citizens in tiny businesses selling clothing or rentals or gadgets on the Mainland. So again, think before you advocate suffering for others. Your notion that evil running dogs of capitalism AKA island barons are somehow in the gravy is also all completely wrong. You have no idea. These people as a class have decimated enormously. All the major rentals groups from Anshe Chung to Adam Zaius on down have slashed their holdings; some long-time owners like the fruit sim people have hastily exited only barely picked up by others; you just have no idea, again, what you are talking about. The reason there are 25,000 sims, and not 32,000 or 40,000 as I believe there were at their heyday is because *these people* cannot sustain their businesses, and that's a BAD thing. Island barons in Second Life are not George Soros or the Koch Brothers, which is how people imagine them. They are black single mothers in Michigan and white male retired postal workers in Ohio, and injured war vets in Colorado. They are not the rich moneybags you imagine; they are ordinary people, even people more poor than most in real life. They work hours for which they are not paid enabling many people to enjoy SL for far less than they would have to pay to Lindens. The solution to save the Mainland (the old Sansara and other continents) and the private islands around them is NOT to do any of the things you propose or any other vicious and radical moves. It's to leave them alone and not get in their way anymore, or even encourage them. Fortunatley, Linden is not as vicious as its user base, and has slashed prices on islands significantly. They know that killing off these people that you and others love to hate and wish to punish out of some wild ideological zeal and hatred in fact is sawing off the limb that they are sitting in. There are many many other things the Lindens could be doing. I'm tired of listing them. My goal is just to have the Lindens stop devaluing land and undermining those of use who make businesses with it. It took us four long years to get them to act on the ruinous IMPEACH BUSH and 16-m micro baron empires that despoiled, devalued and depressed land for years, enabling the enrichment of a few geek friends of the Lindens. I could tell 10 more stories of things we lobbied for and they changed (griefing third-party viewers, VAT tax, etc.) but it's lost on most people. Second Life is a product, not a world. The Lindens do not want to become world-managers. So they are making a new world because the first world they made ran aground because they did not want to maintain the rule of law. Their next world will be less free and less creative for all but a tiny segment of high-end creators as a result.

@Bobbie Faulds Why all the fandom? I've stated an obvious truth and I'm not an entitlement freak, I've weathered SL now for 11 long years. Have you? I don't need to be told to be grateful I don't have just Ruth, that's ridiculous because we've always had more than that, and we had a lot more customization capacity in fact in the old days, as odd as that may seem. First, you fail to realize that if I write "new system avatars," I'm talking about, er, new systems avatars. The ones just announced. Not any other ones. These are far more inflexible than past ones as the Lindens pummel the public for the reality of Project Sansar, where we will have less flexibility (unless we have a lot more money). Pull on the outfit and shut up. I wouldn't even be trying to take a hat off unless it was a ridiculous hat that is like no real hate that any real Indian or wannabee hipster even wears in real life, much less in SL where people have all kinds of outlandish fashions. SL designers and and the fan base are a lot more supine about designs inflicted on them than is reasonable. Whatever possessed the women of Second Life to accept the ugly, crippling convection that their inner thighs have enough space between them to drive a truck through, with convex hips unlike any human form in history, more like the forms of insects? It's astoundingly bad taste and form and there isn't any element of it that is event "arty" but I see women in these tortured get-ups all over. It's sad. Just because I haven't posted on the forums while busy in RL doesn't mean I am somehow "out of date" in SL. Do you realize I have a rentals business where I log on every day and see customers in the latest fashion? Once again, these avatars are plug ugly, even scary, and not versatile. That's an important thing for Linden to realize if they want to retain newbies and keep even oldbies interested. They were doing a lot better several iterizations ago when I saw many many people opt for the business attire avatars or even the Vampire avatars simply because they were more normal looking and easy to use. I'm also hearing rumours that these new mesh avatars make you crash -- and here I had put them on in the first place thinking if they were system and LL-designed I wouldn't crash. So I have now gone back to The Boy Next Door for several sets ago (!) and crashing is far less. Go figure. @Dresden It's hardly a conspiracy to point out the obvious that you're proving resistant to, and there aren't any facts that have been refuted here. Several seem to have "suddenly" realized I mean the new mesh avatars and couldn't grasp that was what the conversation was about to start with. Several admit that you can't pry apart the hat and hair and other things and *themselves* have said you can't mix and match as much, and yet "I'm the problem." So facts be damned, indeed. @Keli May you've put up an avatar that you evidently believe is "gorgeous". But it's not. It looks too photorealistic for Second Life. The eyes are spaced too far apart, and are out of proportion to the other elements of the face. I think a major problem for some people is that they've spent their time too long with their nose in the highest fashion blogs and highest fashion events and have failed to realize just how ugly they've gotten, not Second Life, and not Real Life, but the Twilight Zone. Once again, if you've mixed and matched that's fine, but not everything does and other people in this thread have made the same point. You fanz should make up your mind. You're saying they "shouldn't" be mix and match because they are merely starter or you're "proving" that they are so versatile with mixing and matching one should never shop again. Which is it? And none of these points are my point, which is that these avatars are ugly, they're not versatile, and they are an insult to the population at large. And newbies are not stupid and not children, they're real people. @Innula Zenovka I don't know how many times I have to repeat this and listen to lectures such as you are giving. I AM TALKING ABOUT THE NEW MESH AVATARS JUST POSTED ON THE FORUMS. Discussions about past avatars are irrelevant. The new ones are INDEED MESH. @Theresa Tennyson funny that you claim it is SOP when in fact I have various outfits that in fact don't conform to this rule. And it sounds like it is a *mesh* rule and once again there is reluctant to admit anything bad about mesh or anything about its realities: ugly, hard to use, hard to modify, reducing the freedoms of Second Life. @Pixplumb Flanagan you do realize that if I titled my post the new SYSTEM avatars it means just these brand-new Linden-made avatars, right? I never even mentioned older avatars! It's just that the "itch to set people straight" is so rampant and wild on these forums that some people never get unstuck from that mode. I only dislike mesh in general, despite buying many mesh items including clothing, because it is ugly in many instances regardless of the "right settings" and because it is hard to edit. You can't adjust a jacket or boot; you have to disappear yourself in order to put something on, and look at yourself -- and other people as you land at infohubs and crowded events -- as bodyless people or headless people until they rez. It's the Valley of the Damned. @SirLeighBastard I find it hilarious that I as a RL female with a male avatar have to endure a nasty crack like that when half the people in this thread are male tekkies dressed as female avatars, exempt from your offensive remarks. Since I've been dressing in male avatars since 2004, I think I do know something about the subject and you know where you can take it. And I'll remind you that if someone doesn't tell you their real-life gender on their Second Life profile, it is not fair game to out it, harass them about it, make vicious cracks about on the forums. I'm an exception to the general transgender rule of SL in that I'm happy to publish my RL name and gender, unlike any of you in this thread. So give it up. It's a lame and vicious form of intolerance to discredit people's ideas and it has no place in the modern world.

No, dear, I'm fine, I don't need "explanations" which are packages of pre-set geek ideology devoid of common sense and practical business. You're also barking at the wrong tree. I'm not the one that said LL COULD NOT have encryption, I'm the one who said they SHOULD NOT. The previous poster said they SHOULD. Sure they COULD and they choose not to, and I support that because I don't want to live a pixel life filled with pixel terrorists like real life now filled with real terrorists spawned by Edward Snowden's Excellent Adventure, no thank you. Nothing naive about concerns about terrorism. I like my legs attached to my body. People in Boston and Paris now know what it's like not to have that blessing. Of course governments should have the right to invade privacy for reasons of pursuit of criminals and terrorists. That you thikn they shouldn't have this is part of your EXTREME sectarian tekkie view and isn't part of real life in the real world. Unfortunately, your notion that "law-abiders" should somehow be exempt of metadata scans -- Snowden's premise -- is without merit because it is no different than seeing an open telephone book of the old school with everyone's telephone numbers in it. On their way to scanning for criminals, the NSA has to machine-scan your junk. It does not expose that data; it does not harm you with that mechanical scan. That's why all the Snowden thing is so fake. Call me when there's a real COINTELPRO case like the 1960s where the FBI ruined lives when scanning. Snowden -- and you -- don't have such cases now. So the government in the interests of public safety needs to scan at the airport and scan email headers and act accordingly on suspicious patterns. Ebbe, at his microcosm, understands perfectly well that he has to run this love boat with some built-in capacity for scanning on demand so that he can prevent child pornography and other criminal activity that will get his overall platform suspended. And all that's a good thing and this hysteria about clear text and encryption is a contrived hysteria with an ulterior agenda inconsistent with a liberal democratic society.