Employ minimum 'return object' time.

You can stick your "bigger picture" where the sun don't shine, sonny.

My "bigger picture" doesn' include you, your petty, self-centered, whiney desires, or your arrogant responses.

My bigger picture does include: land owner rights, the right of a paying customer to control that which he/she has paid for in full and in advance, and the right to dismiss your shortshighted ideas as the fecal matter that they are.

As for escaping, that is what I come to SL for.. and who the F are you to try to evaluate my intellectual capacity? You can barely hide your immature attittude - wait, gave you too much credit there.. your "me me me" attitude shows through no mater what rose colored glasses I wear while reading your crap.

My bigger picture includes you never visiting my land. Welcome to my ban list.

Honestly, I can see both sides of the coin on this one. On the one hand, collecting data on a grid-wide scale has great potential, and uber geek appeal. In this regard, setting up a network of data collectors seems like an awesome project. On the other hand, as most things in SL, more than one person will be working on a project that requires a network of tiny little objects. My concern is that if a lot of these projects kick off (as we all know things in SL are repeated countless times as new users join up and aren't aware of the history) we may have a large number of these objects per sim. Ideally, instead of having to sneak a network of collectors out into the world, wouldn't it be nice to be able to poll sim stats via LSL, without having to be in a given sim. If LL would implement functions that would allow us all access to various sim data on a grid-wide scale, then finding ways to deploy these networks wouldn't be necessary. Again, I think the grid-wide analysis is of great importance for many reasons, but I worry that the number of projects doing this will escalate, and there will be a real problem with lag, prim usage, etc. Maybe the real problem isn't the auto return time, but a lack of data availability from within LSL. *shrug* Just some thoughts on the situation as a whole.

McW

edit: Fixed typos in message (I should really proof read before submitting, not after.)

This is a fascinating thread, and I've been intrigued by both the technical ambition and the social concerns expressed here.

I consider myself neither senior enough as a citizen/landowner nor adept enough as an LSL scripter to have much in the way of helpful input; however, I'd like to float a $0.02 theoretical approach, just for discussion's sake.

Since this is a game (in the best since of the word), it seems to me that the most profitable goal is to cleverly (and evenly) distribute advantages among independent parties, rather than deliberately crippling them.

Aside from addressing the "what does one minute really mean?" issue/bug in the land management tool suite, it might be fun for the Lindens to introduce a world-encompassing "ionosphere" through which objects could move, but in which no building could take place. The sky objects would have available a suite of sensor functions to tell them all about the specific land over which they were passing, but perhaps some enforced restrictions as well, just to make it interesting? (say, a mandatory orbital decay/burn cycle, a very limited scanning cone, whatever...) On the landowner's side: the sensor function suite could be enhanced to detect information as satellites passed overhead, such as satellite owner, whether scanned, information which was returned to the satellite at the time, etc.)...kind of a balance-of-intrigue.

I suppose it would open a whole can of worms as to whether physical objects could actually be rezzed and deployed downward, a la railguns. My thought would be no; that this "ionosphere" would be signal-only. (It would please me greatly to see a lower, separate, fly-only zone, however...I am sick to death of crashing Cubey's toys into 200m-high lovenests, just trying to cross the map without a tp.)

The idea, after all, is to evolve the game with new options, and to keep things lively. When bright folks such as yourselves disagree so vehemently...why, pass around the goodies and watch the fireworks, that's what I say

- yoshi

Ed: "Cubey" not "Cuba." Duh.

I log on to see this ancient thread bumped to find two insanely -good- ideas at the end of it? Wow. I like those both. A minimum return time would still be a decent idea, what, with the chance of making decent ALife, but so would those, too.

That said, the 'necessity' of making a minimum auto-return time was reduced when LL fixed the bug with the timers. I've managed to cover ~30% of the grid so far, and am just working out the backend kinks before expanding to the whole thing. Though I've got to find out why De Haro and one other sim ALWAYS return two datasets.

Perhaps each of those ideas deserves their own thread?