Thank You SL

I think the situation you describe is, in fact, one in which people -- not you -- brought money into SL by converting real money into L$, these L$ passed through several other people's accounts, including yours, over the next week or so in return for goods, services or as gifts, and ultimately, someone else again -- a landowner -- gave these L$ to Linden Labs in the form of tier.

Is that the situation you describe?

If it is, then, at the start of the day, to adapt your phrase, someone shared information with LL that you yourself are not prepared to give them, to buy the L$, and at the end of the day someone else who'd also been prepared to share this information with LL paid them over to LL as tier. During the course of the day you had, for a while, control of some of these L$.

So, per your reasoning, a friend shared information with the bank in order to secure a loan. Information you were unwilling to share with the bank. With that money your friend purchased an apartment building. You struck a deal with your friend to paint and decorate the entire building in return for use of a flat in the building. But because you never actually shared information or received or paid bank funds you never truly contributed to the economy even though without your efforts the other flats would never be rented.
I think you are working far too hard to argue that Debra has never contributed to SL. Debra had made many contributions to SL in the form of art and technology. Whether you want to agree or not, Debra's are just as valuable contributions as one opening their purse.

How can we miss you if you won't go away?

There are venues here that card EVERYONE when purchasing alcohol, be you 21 or 61 regardless of how old you look.Some such as clubs and bars do it at the door, others like arenas and stadiums do it at the purchase point. I've bought beer at a baseball game, been carded, returned to the very same vendor minutes later and have been carded again. Part of it is the litigiousness climate here, where the last place that served someone a drink often gets hauled into court over DUI's and they don't want a serving minors charge thrown in.

I'm sure if they didn't card everyone, the ACLU types would be secreaming "profiling".

Because they are private entities, they can.

*And yes, they are in bed with politicians.

"Businesses" may be honrable, but "corporations" generally are not. In my opinion.

No one in this thread has tried to argue about if or what Debra has contributed to SL. For all I know she contributed a lot, but that is not the issue here. So why referring to it?

I stumbled across this article yesterday...it sort of fits into this conversation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

No, I'm saying that, from the bank's point of view, I'm utterly irrelevant. All they are worried about is that my friend pays her mortgage on time. If the bank take a view on the matter, in fact, they'd probably rather she'd payed to have the place decorated and then rented out the flat I'm enjoying rent free, because that gives her a better income on the property and, thus, makes their investment a bit more secure.

Indeed, from the bank's point of view, it's not that important whether they lend the money to my friend to buy this building that's only a going concern if I contribute my skills as a painter and decorator; what they're interested in is lending out their customers' money to someone -- not my friend in particular, nor on the security of a particular building -- and getting it back and making a profit on the deal.

I don't seek to denigrate Debra's contribution to SL at all. All I'm saying is that her contribution as a content creator -- like mine -- to Linden Labs' finances is utterly marginal; our creations help make SL an attractive place into which people want to bring RL money, but what matters to Linden Labs is how much real money comes into the SL economy each month via people's credit cards and PayPal and gets taken out at the other end by Linden Labs in the way of tier. Unless you're saying that lots of people only came here (or stayed here) primarily because of a content creator's work, the creator's main financial interest to Linden Labs is how much tier she or he pays.

QFT. And in the OP's case that amount is clearly zero. Linden Lab doesn't make anything selling L$ to her because she doesn't buy any, and they don't make anything from her cashing out the L$ she's been paid by other people who have purchased L$ either, because she hasn't bothered to put any RL info on file where she can do this. In the eyes of the corporation therefore her contribution to their finances is zero.

The properties she's renting will still be there earning tier for Linden Lab even if she's not renting them. The L$ she's being paid by those who do have payment info on file can just as easily go to somebody else. It's all the same to Linden Lab.

So all she needs to do is get some information about herself on record enough to buy even one mere US dollar's worth of L$, and all the sudden she can go all kinds of places she couldn't go before.

Also it helps in the case of cyber-stalking, such as one I believe is in the link posted above, from Facebook. An issue which Emerald now has made quite easy with the radar they have built in to their client. Really lovely that they give their client's users a radar that scans 4096 meters in any direction, X Y or Z, and does not care if those scanned are in a different sim. Yeah, let's let people scan for every avatar in a 256 sim grid around them. Grand idea. Now let's also give them a button to teleport to the location of any avatars they do find, that'll be a hoot. Talk about a fantastic tool for somebody who wants to commit a lot of harassment. And people here in the forums think that it's a bad idea for a land-owner paying Linden Lab tier on their land, to preemptively ban every avatar from their property. As long as there are tools like this out there, coupled with really brilliant people such as the person indicted in the Facebook poking case, it's clearly an excellent idea.

I personally think all avatars should have real life information on file with Linden Lab, no more providing some to some outside third-party agency even if it is "anonymous" (which in the case of the particular service they've chosen to work with, I find such a claim doubtful). Eliminate the cap on how many avatars an individual can have, they've already made that a joke with the ease of creating more e-mail addresses and creating more alts. Tie them all together under one common umbrella too. If your RL name is John Doe from Anytown, Pennsylvania, tie every last one of your alts to that account at the internal Lindens-eyes-only level. Now you've got it all, and any of your avatars can go anywhere and buy or sell L$ at will, nice and easy. Anybody who wants to start harassing people can be very simply and easily dealt with. As Second Life has been getting more mainstreamed and less an exclusive hobbyist world, such things become increasingly important to address.

We need Linden Lab to know who's using this thing, sooner, not later.

You wrote that using SL has cost you nothing - that you haven't put any real money in and you haven't taken any money out. You said that you'd made your way financially by making SL money in SL. Marcel was entirely correct - you're using SL for free, and have done all along, so you have nothing to complain about.

You may or may not be right, but she said "businesses" and the inference was "business in general". She was wrong, that's all.

There is no way you could have OWNED land without giving LL some sort of payment info. You can rent mainland and rent-pretend-to-own estate land, but that is simply paying someone else to use what they are paying LL for.

You cannot pay tier with L$ and you said you had never cashed out any L$, so how did you pay LL?

She could have converted L$ to US$ in her acount and paid with that, without taking any out. It doesn't make any difference though - she's been using SL for free all along, so she doesn't have anything to complain about now that she can't access every part.

I see there's a pile-up on Debra. I hate that.

Work = time = money.

She has not been using SL 'free.' Just like there are really no 'freebies' in SL, someone has put time and money into them.

Surely she pays for uploads of materials at some point as well as paying tier to LL. She also sounds like she contributes goods/services, which are also not free, since she spends time from her life towards providing them.

She hasn't put any RL money into SL and so she's been using it for free. Time does not equal money.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with using SL for free - maybe most people do it. The point being made is that those who don't pay anything into the system can have no justifiable complaints when the owner (LL) imposes restrictions. The restrictions are nothing to do with whether or not people pay in, but free users still don't have grounds for complaint.

Exactly what does your remark have to do with *anything* I have said? Yes, I enjoy my freedom of speech. I enjoy my freedom to tell you to piss off if you don't have anything relevant to add to this topic and only desire to troll.

My take on it is rather different. To my mind, I, my tenants and any of their or my friends whom we choose to invite to my sims, have grounds for complaint that they can't access them as freely as they did this time last year, when nothing about the content of those sims has changed.

However, we've -- some of us -- been rehearsing those complaints, loudly and at no small length, to Linden Labs since back in April, and it's got nowhere. So we've had to bow to force majeure and verify our accounts in some way or stop visiting adult areas. Simple as that.

As has been pointed out several times, it's not a big deal to verify your account one way or the other, at least from the point of view of privacy if you use PayPal. You don't, as far as I can see, actually tell Linden Labs anything much they don't already know. Provided, of course, you gave them truthful details in the first place.

Debra said she'd tried signing up for a PayPal account but ran into difficulties. I had problems with them when first I signed up, too; their systems and Linden Labs' don't always seem to play well together, and it certainly didn't help that -- at least at the time -- UK PayPal's site was not that easy or intuitive to navigate, or I didn't find it so, and I had to phone PayPal customer support a couple of times to ask them where on earth I could find certain details Linden Labs had told me I needed to adjust. But it didn't take that long to fix the problem.

If someone chooses not to do that, on a point of principle, then fair enough. But don't then complain, "I'm taking a stand on a point of principle and find it very inconvenient." Lots of people found it very inconvenient and expensive to move their businesses to Zindra, but we had to.

Exactly right Melita. Debra has contributed far more to SL than many who have simply reached into their purses.

This partcular bit of the discussion has nothing to do with contributing to SL. It was siad that (paraphrasing) someone who uses a system without paying to use it has no justifiable complaint if the system owners choose to limit what the person can do in the system. That's all. Debra has been using the system for free so she has no justifiable complaint about any restriction that the owners apply.

You and they have grounds for being miffed, but not justifiable grounds for complaint against LL if you and they are using the system for free.

I agree. That's what I'm saying. Debra refuses to comply with the system owners requirements for using some parts of the system. She has no grounds for complaint because she's not a paying customer.

I don't see it makes any odds, Phil. I pay LL plenty of money each month via PayPal, as do a lot of other people similarly miffed by the Adult content changes, and not a blind bit of notice did LL take of any of us.

In that case, why discuss it? Unless you mean that it doesn't make any different whether or not a person actually pays into the system. If that's what you mean, it certainly does make a difference. People who use the system for free can never have any justifiable grounds for complaint when the owners restrict what they can do.

MAYBE so, but we can still have opinions and express them.