land scanners part the fourth

That's the best proof it wouldn't be griefing. If it was gfriefing, being a griefers' best friend that should delight you

This is what bugs me about the lb2 drones. Since I have been in SL, I have never as a landowner had to justify why i dont want something/someone on my land. Joe Avatar could rez a plain cube that does nothing and utilizes next to nothing in server resources, and if I dont want it on my land, I can get rid of it with no explanation necessary.

But in this case, I have to make a case for removing the objects (since the land tools are inadequate to deal with this type of persistent object), and the owner of the objects doesn't have to justify putting them there. grrrr!

Why in the hell do I have to make a case to LL to remove something that persists above my land? I dont care what it does, why it does it, or how much resources it uses, I should have the ability to remove any persistent objects from my land.

I should never feel like I'm a hostage to someone else's project. I should never feel like my rights are less important than another residents. And yet, thats what the case is here. My right as a landowner are subordinate to someone else's rights to run a grid-wide project. The precedent this sets is disturbing.

I know LL wants to come up with a technical solution to this, but I think a policy that requires any grid-wide system to have an opt-out feature is entirely reasonable and something that can be implemented and enforced now. It allows residents to experiment with grid-wide networks, but doesn't override the rights of landowners.

Oh, and Eltee is my official spokesperson for this thread. If my post has been unclear in any way, please see Eltee's excellent posts for clarification

I disagree. I would like to see land-owners have the right to decide what is in their air space or not, especially after this.

Not only is it a right I believe land-owners should have, I believe it would further the growth of the economic and business culture that is growing in SL. It would provide the need for Airports, allowed airspace, and air traffic controller would be at the leading edge of jobs for SLers who need one. Ah, well this is another issue and maybe far fetched, but it does not negate my belief that land-owners should be given the above stated right.

fen-

That's the crying shame here. Linden stonewalling on this because they can't think of a way to ban aggressive system-wide worms without also banning "airplanes" is leading to calls by residents to restrict aircraft.

I would prefer a world where "land rights" extend only 20m, and "air rights" are community rights. *PROVIDING* community rights didn't give anyone a right to PERSIST (or repeatedly re-rez) over your land, especially if they don't even own land in the sim.

I like your rules, eltee.

It doesn't do any good to have rules that say X is allowed when EVERYTHING is already allowed. We need a clear pronouncement on what you CAN'T do in order for rules like this to makes sense as a way to create an exception.

Son: "Can I have the car tonight Dad?"

Dad: "I only have two rules:

"Rule 1: You can always have the car whenever you want no matter what.

"Rule 2: You can have the car tonight if you drive carefully and come home by 11."

Why have rule 2?

Buster

Please let me know when this is gonna occur. I'll stand at the welcome area w/ an anti Pete sign. In fact, I could probably contribute a photo of Pete so you guys can Photoshop the signs.

From Kat:

This is an example of the confusion that results from the mismatch of a land owner's rights within the column above their land that I was talking about earlier. I think this mismatch causes the set of possibilities to significantly overlap with the set of things that landowners want to have control over.

I think there is a big difference between a temp-on-rez house at 20 meters and a quiet army of invisible drones at 400 meters. One is a visible afront, while the other is easy to ignore and doen't heavily stress the system (please ignore the looming tragedy of the commons -- we're going to fix that). I think the line between what is possible and what is not should be drawn somewhere between the two.

My mind is searching for ways to clip the possibility space of SL to minimize the aforementioned overlap. One way to clip it is to make more TOS/CS rules and clarifications about what is allowed and what is not. However, I think that is blunt (requres intrepretation of legaleaz) and non-scalable (requires constant manual intervention by an army of police) and I wonder if there is a more durable solution -- a modification of the fundamental laws of the SL simulator engine.

Way back in the beginning of development of SL we wanted to keep the sky's open. Which is one of the reasons why we had the height tax in the pre 1.2 era . This also the main reason for the 20 meter ceiling of the "no outside scripts" option. In other words, the fact that land owners don't have absolute control over the column above their land is by design. The removal of the height tax opened up the possibility of very high builds (broke the design), and landowner's now claim rights to those heights which used to be effectively out of their reach.

How to fix the design?

Granting land owners absolute control over their column is one solution. It is easy to implement but it eliminates the open sky.

Here is another solution that maintains some of the open sky. It is a half-baked idea but here it is. Suppose...

1. Land owners could only build static objects up to some hieght that is lower than the current 768 meters... say 300 meters. Only dynamic objects could venture higher. This effectively makes the high skies the domain of moving objects. Objects higher than 300 would not be counted against a parcel limit and would be subject to pruning by the system if their owners were not nearby and they were not temp-on-rez.

2. The "no outside scripts" rule would be a buffer up to 20 meters around the static content and the heightfield of a parcel. This feature might actually be possible in the Havok-2 era. So if you built a 100 meter tall building then the no-outside-scripts would extend out 20 meters from its top and sides too if you owned the land out that far, as well as 20 meters above all the terrain you own.

3. Owners would have the option to declare "no-temp-on-rez" objects within their "zone of control" as described in item 2. Temp-on-rez objects that wander into such a antagonistic zone would be deleted on contact.

4. Temp-on-rez objects could not rez other scripted objects below 320 meters. Above 320 meters they could do as they pleased, but their total number and total per owner count, would be capped... say 1000 prims total, and 100 per owner. Also, the script resources for such objects would come from the common pool of script execution cycles.

Edit -- fixed minor typo

I like it.

I would even lower that height limit, or introduce a rule that things that extend above Xm must be "connected" to things below, extending down with some kind of toehold in the groundspace.

Skyscrapers are fine. But do we need all this crap just hanging up in the sky?

Buster

Hm, well skyboxes at 500 m or so are a popular thang in SL that "float" and aren't necessarily connected to something below... same with variations on that theme, like people who are avian in nature and enjoy living in cloud-houses or appreciate the heights because of less lag (draw distance and all that). I suppose if a connection rule became mandatory, they could be tethered by alpha phantom prims, but that'd be a hassle.

I'd like to see more skyscrapers in SL... like Trump Tower.

I'm all for an open sky, to that extent actually there is no need to make any change, the sky is ALREADY open, other than people able to build over X meters, but buildings don't deny anyone's right of passage, you just need to fly around them.
Denying the possibility of building over a certain height would be kinda pointless, not to mention extremely limiting and THAT would close the doors to a lot of legitimate and even decorative uses.
I'm all against it (moreover it kina closes doors to sky buildings that as of now are the ONLY way to have a lil of much needed privacy in SL)

Moreover your solution simply seems to me a way to tell: hey guys! wanna script your own home built virus? You can do whatever you wabnt over 300 meters! Do it!
You might as well advertise it on the SL homepage, so we'll sure get a lot of new players between the wannabe virus scripters.

Thirdly your solution seems to kinda shift the balance between the rights of scripters and builders all in favor of scripters. SO builders can build only on their land and are limited even further in altitude, but scripters can have their scripts on their own land AND send send them wherever they want as long as they are over a certain height? No matter hiow viral in nature their scripts are? Please, let's be real. That would cause a riot, and the ones rioting would have EVERY reason of this world to be angry.

WE need to FIGHT such viral objects, not to encurage them limiting the rights of land owners even further. Hey, dunno if you noticed, but we pay you MANY US dollars a month for our land (while a scripter doesn't need to pay a single dollar to do his things, and i AM a scripter more than a builder).


Again there is an ENORMOUS difference between a LBv2 model virus and a plane, or a satellite that passes overhead once in a while and scans land. Any new policy for an open sky should stress on this difference, not in limiting land owner's already extremely limited rights even further.

Viruses and worms (LBv2 included) are already policied by the TOS, you just need to enforce your own TOS.

I agree with the anti-viral/worm object sentiment.

Andrew is almost as hard to figure out as Prokofy Neva sometimes. "Tragedy of the commons"? What the hell does that mean?

I disagree with you, Shiryu, that "land rights" should be unlimited vertically. I have opinions about what I like and don't like, and I don't mean to impose my opinion on other people (unless, of course, I can get away with it ). But "land rights" in SL should be limited, just like they are in RL. In RL if you buy a real house, you have nothing to say about real airplanes and real satellites flying over it. So should it be in SL. What should the height limit be? I think lower is better, but not too low, that's just me.

I worry that widely replicating objects could be misused to wreak havvoc, and that Linden seems to think that they can "tweak their program" to prevent any problems. Very scary, because that was Microsoft's attitude for a long time and many of us have paid dearly for that. SO LET'S GET RID OF THE GODDAMN UBIQUITOUS VIRUS / WORM REPLICATING DOO-DADS, THEY'RE A DANGEROUS PRECEDENT. (Didn't somebody say that earlier?)

Buster

I appreciate Andrew sharing design goals and his thoughts in coming to a solution for this problem.

I think what has perhaps been forgotten is that the "lb v2" objects are trying to obtain information, most of *how* they do it is an artifact of getting the information. That is, being at 400m, moving around, being temp-on-rez to skirt auto-return, etc. are not essential aspects of the scanners.

Asumming that the "lb v2" objects are using "World" functions like llGetLandOwnerAt(pos) or llGetGround(pos) require neither movement nor self replication. Given that the "lb v2" objects appear to remain at altitude, they are likely not using sensors or listens as there isn't much to sense or hear at 400m +/- 96 m. All the visible behavior of these object exists simply because their creator did not want to buy or rent or borrow a space to host their scanner in each sim.

I had hosted at one time Chromal's(?) Sim FPS loggers. All he needed to do was ask and explain. It took one prim, and once a minute would make a couple API calls and export the data. If Pete had merely asked people to host these, they could have done exactly what they are doing without all the attendant hulabaloo. But he didn't, for reasons one can only guess at.

Most importantly, either static sim FPS loggers or a "hurry buy public land I sensed here" scanners are obtaining world information through the most accesible but least efficient mechanism possible. That is, there must be lighter weight means of getting world information. The advent of the "public land web page and RSS feed" shows clearly that there are more efficient ways of getting data out of the world. It seems that this issue and all the attendant debate about "air rights" etc. could be obviated by better out-of-game tools. Google provides an API to their mongo computing grid, LL could as well. It's just a simple matter of programming

Land rights are already more than limited vertically (almost all land commands are limited vertically), but the right of BUILDING shouldn't be limited. There are skyscrapers in real life, and i don't see why someone shouldn't build an 1Km tall tower if he has the prims to do so. Building horizontally shouldn't have more dignity or endorsement than building vertically. it's just and totally a matter of tastes.

Satellites, planes and the like shouldn't be limited from going on someone's land (other than be returned, if they are abandoned there for one reason or another) but virus/worm like items should and have to be limited to go over ANYONE's land.
This is the only difference and line to be drawn. I don't see any need to limit people's ability to build nor people's ability to fly over built land.

considering the number of times i've had flyby griefers and air squatters... i'm of two minds about this.

i like the blimps and balloon and planes the go through, and a closed sky would stop these.

but i've had enough greif come at me from the sky that i would be willing to trade away planes for the power to exclude them.

but i would like the power to allow them through some land control

1) i often build at over 300 meters
2) temp on rez isn't temp on rez if the object crosses the sim border

i have been bombed from griefers flying above the 20 meter limit. you'd need a mechanism to prevent objects/scripts from crossing the height boundary.

would this no-temp-on-rez apply to the owner also?

i could probably get around this by applying a bit of self-replication.

seems to me that the problem you're trying to solve is how to maintain a commons given that there is private ownership of sim land.

in private islands, is there an expectation of a commons?
if yes, what is that expectation? especially given that a sim owner can close off a sim entirely.
if no, then why should mainland land owners be forced into this commons? and why are there two classes of land ownership in this regard (force commons and not forced commons)?

the tragedy of the commons can be framed this way, "if everyone did this, would the commons survive?"

allowing pete fats and people like him to continue using the commons for private satellite systems means that commons is unsustainable in the long term.

if that's the case, why should the commons be continued?
and why am i required to contribute to the commons?

note: i happen to like having a commons and i'm willing to contribute to it, but i would wish to withdraw my contribution if it is being used dispropotionately or unsustainably.

You guys DO realise this thread is going in circles, yes?

while (TRUE)
{
llPost2Forums("rant";
}

cool andrew this is an interesting line of reasoning but with several problems specifically in reference to current builds... thre are a vast number of builds now in SL that easily exceed 300m in height, from towering edifices to hovering sky cities... specifically lowering that 768 cieling to 300 would pose a rather significant problem for many of these builders as their builds would be essentially invalidated..


what i had suggested might be to extend the cieling up, to say 1000m... i understand there are certain floating point issues above 768 which would make permanent building there akward or problematic... but for these zoom across the grid kind of objects... that honestly shouldn't pose much of a barrier, after all what do they care if they loose a bit of height precision?

let the existing builds, and builders of SL have free reign over what they do now, don't worry about bounding boxes with havok2, let noscript run up to the 768 cieling on plots...

at the same time, above 768 let things act as you mentioned in your prior posts, in fact you may want to even add in a function for scripted movement like 'llGotoScriptZone()' or something that would instantly move an object to its existing x/y but to say 800m or some value where it can then be free to zoom about the world un obsctructed.. another good choice might be 'llMoveSim() where you could feed it 0-3 being north, east, south, and west... this would free up networks like this from having nearly so active timers, or movement loops.. as they could simply hop, a sim at a time, around... but only if they were within that upper area not-affected by, or affecting builds etc etc

obviously you understand the SL backend and code far far better than any of us poor users.. and i like the sort of direction you are going... giving land owners more power over parts of their land they have now, but also declaring a zone there where its essentially 'international waters' as it were, belonging to no body and usable by everyone.. lit would be especially good with some form of task priority to ensure that stuff above that level would not interfere with the sims performance to its land-holders. mebbe even give it a seperate timeslice entirely for sim stats so that people can see exactly how much, or how little, the 'skyway' is using the sim, as a whole... hmm.. skyway.. i kinda like that hehe


anyway...

i know you are probably already EXTREMELY busy with 1.6 and fancier notions andrew, so i thank ya for takin some time outta the day to talk with us about this and hopefully we can reach that sorta ideal goal over this where landowners get their rights and security, and at the same time SL can become an even better place where interesing projects like these can be developed, without the need to become viral or hidden just to have a chance of 'succeeding'

Apparently your definition of griefing includes expressing freedom of speech in a civil way, and excludes viruses all over the grid.


1. 300m... I don't like this because it doesn't allow for:
- Superhigh skyscrapers (which Avalon proves are just so cool looking)
- Space stations
- High altitude airports / bungee pads / parachuting pads / etc
- It's just plain restrictive on landowners' rights.

Given that scripts start to act wonky at 512m... it doesn't leave us much choices, though. I agree there should be some public airspace, but ... I don't think a hard limit will solve this. At least one this low... perhaps something 2-3km+ is more reasonable...

2. I like this idea. I think 20m is good for X/Y, but Z should be more like... 50? 20m is barely a tap of the keyboard.

3. I don't like this, because it's too easy to workaroud. People could put up additional phantom invisible prims to extend their control area, and I don't think this is productive or necessary. Besides, this leaves us gun designers having to deal with our bullets disappearing where they shouldn't...

4. I think the idea of capping temp on rez objects in a sim is a great idea. 1000 seems reasonable for now. (1024 instead? heheh)

The counter-question I pose is: How is priority given? As the Metave... SL expands, there's bound to always be growth above any cap's ability. And, unlike Moore's law, where computing power is doubled every 18 months, Internet growth has been shown to be more exponential ... so I doubt this is a really scalable solution.

My personal prediction is once outside commercial sites catch on to SL and move in, we're gonna see a lot of data mining and a LOT of attempts to have spy satellites / data collectors. Maybe the solution to this will require something really innovative... like moving upper airspace even higher...

What about dividing airspace onto new servers? Quite literally, make ground level sims, and then airspace sims.... the airspace can be shared on seperate server than regular sims, and servers could host multiple airspace sims, like the current "filler" sims are, and then this way the whole process of limiting use and landowner rights become clear and simpler. I realize this adds a whole 3rd dimension to the "what sim is XYZ in" algorithm, but for one variable change, it could consolodate a whole bunch of others.

To get back to the current topic - Satellites would not be operating on someone's sim, and they could drop probes down if they needed to collect data - and at that, it could be limited how often they would be allowed to. Then processing of whether they are allowed below can be done on the airpsace server, rather than the landowners' server.

In fact, I like this idea. I'm going to post it in feature suggestions

/13/2a/39038/1.html#post419456

here's the feature post

ooo i like this idea

do {
llPost2Forums(llList2String(SuggestionList, i++));
} while VIRUSES_AND_WORMS_ARE_LEGAL;

OMG.....shhhhh....don't feed them this idea. Next we know we will see air rights being auctioned off for beaucoup dollars and anshe will own the skies.

Shopping malls everywhere overhead....24 hour tringo above our rooves....YIKES

NO!!!!!