How landcutters are still hurting the mainland

Well, actually, I did. Several times. Explicitly. In almost exactly those words.

For example, message 309:

Obviously, you didn't read the post.

"Not all spam is actionable." does not mean the same thing as "Not all spam SHOULD BE actionable.".

If you had said the latter, I would probably had less objection from the beginning.

Can you elaborate on the distinction between those two phrases as you see it? I don't want to say "OK, not all spam should be actionable" and discover that you mean something by it that I don't agree with.

I'm sorry to put you to this trouble but in the light of this conversation I'm a little wary of the way my words might be interpreted. I hope you can understand that.

Definitely, considering that they come off as ad hominem "when you didn't mean it".

OK. Fine.

I am substituting "homicide" for "spam" to illustrate a similar word where the natural, default, implied observation is that "homicide is bad".

"Not all homicide is actionable." -- means, to me anyway, that there are specific rules or technical obstructions to making it actionable. "We don't have the murder weapon; the suspect was not read his Miranda rights"

"Not all homicide should be actionable." -- means, to me anyway, that there are extenuating circumstances why it might be justifiable. "The suspect was defending his family; it was an accidental shooting."

The latter is closer. It may be an accidental spamming.

In the context of "de minimis non curat lex" I mean there is no point in taking action against spam where the volume is small, or a warning is adequate, or there is no likelihood of a repetition.

I don't mean "spam is justified", because if spam is justified then that justification will be abused by people for whom it is not appropriate. This means that you can only create that cut-out once, for one person, for a short period, and after that malicious people will "poison the well" and the original beneficiary will, in fact, find themselves shouted out by people pretending to be doing the same thing.

Spam is a problem because of the tragedy of the commons: if you create a mechanism by which people can flood a communication channel for a negligible cost, people will flood that communication channel. The only way to keep the channel open is to change the economics, by creating a high cost for spamming, or by reducing the value of spamming.

Small spams are still a problem, because more people will move in and start sending messages, until you have enough volume of messages that the result is the same as if one or only a few people were sending a much larger quantity.

This has been observed, again and again. Unless people opt-in to any kind of low-cost bulk or broadcast message service (either by requesting them explicitly or by establishing a relationship with the person sending the messages), the free-rider problem will end up destroying it. And once spam becomes established it takes much much greater effort to control it.

It's not a matter of "good" or "bad", it's a matter of "this is what happens".

Those are the current heights, as terraformed, like with llGround(), correct? That might indeed be useful, but I was actually obsessing about one thing that has always bugged me about buying Mainland: there's no way to be sure of the true *reverted* heights on which the terraforming limits apply. It hardly matters on predominantly flat terrain, nor on wildly pitched slopes, but for larger parcels on rolling hills (the really good stuff), it can be kind of a crap shoot.

I was going to gripe about the fact that, once one calculated the sculptmap and stuffed it into an uploadable format, one then has to actually upload it--but then I remembered you have all those bots that might have time in their busy schedules to blow L$10 on the occasional upload.

Probably 4m resolution ("every 16sqm" would be fine for practical use. I think terrain is shaped at 1m resolution by the editing tools, but that's surely overkill at 16 times as much data.

As I think about it, though, it may all be more work (and upload fees) than it's worth, practically. Most buyers aren't gonna be as terrain-obsessed as I am, and probably most parcels are either easy/boring flat stuff or steep beyond conventional building anyway.

I'm well aware of why "spam is bad", Argent. I've heard and made the same argument for years myself. "Homicide is bad". Yeah, I get it.

That still doesn't account for the fact that there exist valid, justifiable reasons to "spam", just as there are valid, justifiable reasons to commit homicide.

I don't think that you're going to get 1000 "copycats" to someone notifying his neighborhood that he has been burgled. If they lie, they are committing fraud, then their "spam" SHOULD BE actionable.

Likewise, someone doing something for the public good is justifiable. I'm not talking about someone CLAIMING to be doing something for the public good, by lying to instead get free advertising at the expense of the public. In that case, their "spam" SHOULD BE actionable.

You want to talk about the tragedy of the commons? OK. What if I take my turn on the "commons", and instead of grazing my herd of sheep, I instead spend it sowing seed, even though I took a little bit more time than I was allotted? "You ran over time! Off with your head!"

In actualization, it simply comes to this: If someone runs afoul of the "letter of the law", is there any attempt to determine if they actually ran afoul of the "spirit of the law", or is it always "Off with their heads!"? If no attempt is ever made to discern whether their spam should be actionable or not, then ALL "spam" (by the letter of the rules) is "bad", and people doing good things will be punished because of blind adherence to an intractable ruleset.

That's correct. Each person, group, company, whatever can decide what spam is for its own purposes.

Whether or not emails are spam has nothing to do with whether or not they a problem for the internet or for people. It's the nature of an email that makes it spam or not; i.e. its content and its recipient. E.g Talarus' hypothetical example is in no way spam, because the recipients would want, or be interested in, the information (content) - and neither is the ballpens example.

[added]
I'm sorry Argetnt, but it's obvious that you don't know what spam (email) really is. To you it's to do with causing problems for the internet, and that is done by sending them in huge numbers. But you are wrong. It has nothing to do with such problems.

If it got established that you could send out a bunch of spam that looked like "hey, someone's breaking into my house" then you'd get thousands of copycats trying *variations* on that.

Because your cutout isn't really "hey, I've been burgled", it's "hey, this is a public service announcement, something bad is going on". "Hey, I've been raped", "Hey, I think that's a crack house down there", "Hey, there's junkies on the corner". And "Hey, there's junkies on the corner." with a sigfile pointing to "car for sale".

And all these people really think they're doing it for the public good.

This isn't theory. We've watched it happen. It was happening in Usenet even before spamming took off. There were already JOKES about "yelling fire in the wrong newsgroup" before Canter and Seigel.

Now one person doing it, that's not establishing that it's OK. He only got robbed once. There's no second message from him. You don't have a bunch of people following on... most of the time.

But eventually it's going to happen again. You need to establish before that happens that the precedent isn't "it's OK to shout fire in the wrong newsgroup", but that the guy sending the "I was robbed" message was an exception. And if it happens a couple of times, you set up a mailing list or something else that people can opt into.

The homeowners association would be a good group to do that, because it already has a relationship with the homeowners. Which also means it's less likely to be ignored.
Um, that's why the assumption is that not all spam is actionable, which brings us back to my original point.

Not all spam should be acted on.

Not, however because "some spam isn't bad".

But "some spam just doesn't matter".

Or "the law doesn't care about trifles".

Sure it does. That's where the phenomenon got its name, from the Monty Python sketch, with the guys singing "spam spam spam spam" and drowning out the conversation. That's the whole point in having a term, "spam", for unrestricted bulk transmissions.

No it isn't. I'm sorry, but you just don't know what spam email is. It isn't to do with bulk, and it isn't to do with the problems that bulk emails can cause. It is everything to do with the nature of the email, together with the recipients, as I have explained.

Your group may have defined it the way you've described, but your group was wrong, except for itself.

Well, if someone else really did get raped, what's wrong with it?

The rest of those examples I would classify as "should be acted on", simply because they are hearsay or opinions, or worse, scams/schemes/frauds. It's easy enough to also say "ANY commercial reference (the "car for sale" in the sig) invalidates the exception".



That presumes there is such an online group in the first place. Not all Homeowner's Associations have such groups. Not all neighborhoods have Homeowner's Associations, for that matter. Less likely to be ignored? More like "less likely to ever be seen in the first place".



But the law DOES care about trifles, more often than not. Especially "laws" enforced through automated technical means, such as with "spam" detection algorithms and automated enforcement. That, or Linden Lab "letter of the rule" enforcement monkeys.

Not all spam should be actionable, but it is acted on anyway.

So the ISP would have to research whether someone really did get raped before acting on it?

It's impossible to police this, if you created such a cut-out it would be abused. In fact every time such a cutout has been defined it has been abused.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis

Technical measures may by accident, design, or necessity implement stricter restrictions than the law, common sense, or reason allows. This is a problem with depending on technical measures alone, and why things like "zero tolerance" laws are a bad thing, and why juries can set aside such laws. This is one reason DRM is a problem, because there's no way to build a DRM scheme that allows fair use. Tis is a huge issue, and far beyond the scope of "what is spam".

People are dragon all sorts of stuff into the thread, and it's getting otter and otter.

The use of the term "spam" for email originated as an indirect result of the Canter and Seigel "Green Card Lottery" spam. This original spam run happened on usenet, and spread to email as spammers switched to email when cancelbots on Usenet started to become effective. It was some time before it even became routine to refer to email spam as "spam", because there were a number of groups insistent that "spam" only referred to Usenet. It was from the very start used the way I'm using it. You came along, years later, and decided that it should be used some other way? Pardon me?

On the subject of creating sculpties of ground textures...

I talked to Uchi, and what he did was create a HUD object that rendered the land height as greyscale by setting the color of each prim in a grid based on the ground height, then snapshotted it and used it as a color channel in photoshop, with the other two color channels set to gradients to define the underlying X-Y plane. This is either amazingly sophisticated or amazingly crude... but I'm not sure it's something you could really use effectively... at least not in mass production.

So, how else do you suggest they implement your statement "Not all spam should be actionable"?

Do you agree that the system is imperfect, by a large degree?

As it is, all spam, actionable or not, is acted on. Period. It's always "guilty until proven innocent", except that there is no chance to prove innocence. You're guilty. Die already.

With email, what we have is an inane crutch supporting a stupid, moronic messaging system, wielded as a crude club against the masses, no matter what the the situation is.

At least, in SL, we have ways of controlling IM spam (ignore lists, hello?) which are effective. We also have a "global management team" who can be effective at stopping REAL abuse, and has the resources to investigate whether something is actionable or not BEFORE acting on it.



That's what I mean when I am saying "the law". Since the "technical means" implement what is effectively "the law of the internet" (Blackhole list vigilanteism, ISP AUPs), the law DOES care about trifles, and ALL spam is acted upon, whether it should be or not.

By applying human judgement.
All systems are.
If that was the case "Bloodlines" would not exist, since its operation is based on affiliate spam.

Where, in most spam mitigation systems in use at ISPs and RBLs, is human judgment applied liberally enough to be effective?



Some moreso than others, even to a gross extent.



Bloodlines certainly is odious, but I wasn't aware it sent out messages.

ISPs get nearly as many false spam complaints (from people who think "spam" means "anything I want it to mean" as real ones, so they HAVE to apply human judgment. I would be surprised to find many ISPs sanctioning the person in the hypothetical case you presented me with, on the grounds that the spam run was small (only 1000 messages) and that it was unlikely to be repeated. Even with Spamhaus, which is known as having very little common sense, if you let them know the circumstances (without raving at them... raving at people tends to cause common sense to evaporate) it's unlikely that they would keep the mailserver used in the situation you described in the RBL.
"Ima Vampire wants to animate your avatar..."

I am under the impression that most ISPs use "spam detection and blocking" systems on their outbound mailservers to detect when someone is sending above a certain threshold, and they have their accounts sanctioned (and, often, their actual send cut short) via an automated process. I've seen scripts and modules which do precisely that. If it is automated, no human is in the loop.



I think that is stretching your definition a little bit. That message isn't sent by the "vampire", the user has to be present to initiate it, SL already has limits on the number of requests it will send for any particular target, and the target can ignore it and any further attempts.

I think the Bloodlines thing is stupid and dumb.. please don't force me to defend it. k?

Some ISPs use that kind of technical code as well, though they generally have pretty damn high limits, and the sanction involves blocking mail until the customer complains and explains. There are also similar throttles in place for people using P2P software (like bittorrent). I'm talking about the situation where customers can really get sanctioned... such as getting accounts locked completely... as a result of complaints.
There are affiliate spamming schemes in email that are really quite comparable, where the mail is not sent directly by the user by via a web form, they allegedly throttle connections... and users are able to "opt out" of the spam. They still regularly get taken down by ISPs if they don't have a pink contract.

[ pops in ]

Yep, still talking about spam.

[ pops out ]

I tried to eat the Spam a couple pages back, but more appeared. Spam is like that.