The Question of Land Cutting

Small parcels can be annoying yes but if I buy property I should have the right to do what I want to with it. No covenant means exactly that! No deed restrictions. We are already restricted as to whether the property is used for mature or PG content. I don't think it's fair to levy additional restrictions especially for those of us with large mainland holdings that could be severely affected by such a change. You continually ask if my experience here is improving. With changes like these...IT"S NOT!

United States v. Causby, U.S. 328 (1946).

Except that in sl ad coelum doctrine does exist thanks to no object entry and ban lines. I wish it didn't to some extent tho as it would be nice to be able to fly my planes around the mainland.

You're the first person to actually catch that reference. You win a free airplane (IM me in-world, and let me know if you want the Tiny or full sized version of Mehve).

As it turns out, the border crossing full-parcel and ban-lines problem is an acknowledged bug, and object entry doesn't apply to vehicles.

The libertarian defense. The only problem with that is that the libertarians never win, even when 99% of the people using Digg support them

To take you up on your challenge though, would you be ok with it then if I bought small strips of land next to each one of your parcels and placed griefer objects that made a ton of noise and repeatedly changed to a different neon color every second? Of course you wouldn't but by your logic that should be ok and LL shouldn't have any rule against it. Your logic is inherently hypocritical because unless you're not human then you'd never let the worse case scenario happen to you even if you think that it should be allowed up to the moment it happens to you.

On what do you base your apparent assumption that someone who objects to All being controlled, also objects to Some being controlled?

I don't speak for the person to whon you replied. But I do speak for someone (me) who believes that just because LL imposed some controls that improved Mainland--to wit, the prohibition on placing annoying content on high-priced parcels as a means of extorting payment---that doesn't mean that I think imposing MORE pervasive controls would improve Mainland.

I think the level of control that some have advocated would make the Mainland experience much less attractive to the majority of Residents.

Damn, and I so wanted to plant a line of ballistas on my lawn in case the Wright Brothers came along and infringed on my airspace.

Incidentally, you win the award I think for making every single user google a legal case all at once.

An interesting note btw for any Canadians, check out <b>Bernstein of Leigh v. Skyview & General</b> which is the Canadian case that essentially ended the same way. Amazing what you can find from Google.

I hate to break it to you but if you took a poll right now about 80% of the population would say that there's nothing LL could possibly do to make most of the mainland any less attractive than the cesspool it has already become. 15% would be the people who made it so unattractive (the land cutters, the ad farmers, etc...) and 5% would either tell you to bugger off or wouldn't bother to reply.

If you honestly think that there is no solution that needs solving here then you are dillusional. I think not doing anything is already off LL's table otherwise they wouldn't be having these conversations so the argument is really how much control is necessary and what costs if any can justify that since there is no perfect solution so for better or for worse there will have to be tradeoffs so the ends more or less justify the means.

Wrong. It was what you said. Your exact words were "You were once reported as a 16sqm corner-cutter", in post #750.

Now you try to wiggle out by saying in effect 'yeah, but I didn't say it was reported to LINDEN LAB!!!'

You stand revealed, once again, as a liar.

And yet again: in post 750 you said "there was a note in the description that they were available to the adjacent landowners for [and you used double-quotes here] "prevailing market value".

Now, you try to back away from the lie you posted---a lie that LL records will reveal in a stark light of truth--by saying



Pathetic.

Next, you pretend that I said that I never owned those lots:



Name the post in which I said I didn't own land in that sim. Go ahead: name it.

Then you continue to try to assert that cutting a 16m and not putting it up for sale is rightly termed 'corner cutting':

Quote [from me, after I describe, in post #816, how I make tier-level parcels when the dimensions are not the proper multiple]:
In this, where is 'corner cutting'?




Do you want to offer that definition to the Lindens, as what needs to be controlled by a new policy ? "cutting a 16sqm corner out of a rectangular plot"?


My goodness, what a sad little character you are.





Of course, it IS the Internet. As a wise man once said, 'the chuckleheads you will always have with you.'

When were you last there?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ponsonby Low
You know, you similarly misused this term yesterday. I didn't want to humiliate you, so I let it pass.

"Strawman" refers to having attributed a statement (call it X) to a person, when that person never said X.



*sigh*

You didn't look at that site, did you?

I accept that you don't care to know what "strawman" actually refers to, and you're going to go on misusing it.

*sigh*

Couple of days ago. I don't have reason to spend much time on the mainland anymore but I still visit it occasionally since there are some good parts and there are some great stores and builds on parts of it. So you don't get the wrong impression I do mean the REAL mainland btw, not the primped and blow-dried Linden Estate sims.

Parts of it have gotten better partially because of the ad-farm ban and partially because of people who are willing to sacrifice their money and risk legitimizing these people by buying up the extortionist's land and putting it to good use.

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That's interesting---thanks for posting it.

But you know---that's the founding philosophy. (Yeah, it's Daniel not Philip, but...if you had to bet, wouldn't you bet that Philip would have said pretty much the same thing?)

How likely is it that they'd abandon their libertarianish views, just because some people fret over empty land that shows as a checkerboard with Property Lines turned on?

I mean, I know they have to deal with the squeaky wheels. But to make 'we will stop all _____', when the blank is something as amorphous as 'harassment'....it doesn't seem like a safe bet to make.

Yes, the ad-farm ban was HUGE. It has made a major difference in the pleasure I get from SL, minute by minute.

I'm not arguing that no more changes should ever be made. But I am concerned that in an effort to please a vocal few, some draconian changes might be made* that will cause (in Argent's words) collateral damage. Lots of it.


*I think the thing I'm most concerned about is that what they'll choose to do is change the Land Cutting tool, and say 'you must submit a ticket if you need to cut less than 512m'. You just know that they won't have enough personnel to deal with all the tickets that would be about perfectly legitimate smaller-than-512 cuts.

I really hope not, it's not like there aren't already enough people complaining about the land tools. I would say that I doubt LL would do something that stupid but at this point I wouldn't put it past Jack. I'm for a lot of changes (see my previous posts in this thread) that you'd probably find a bit harsh but I think most reasonable people and hopefully LL see how unworkable changing the cutting tool like that would be.

In honor of your delicate sensibilities, and the fact that you don't seem to understand that doing something through insinuation doesn't differ substantially from doing it directly, I'll substitute the term "wakalix". A "wakalix" here means "an argument, attributed to a person or multiple people, that they did not actually make". It's just like a "straw man" but you don't actually say "yes, I'm saying directly that Joe said Horrible Thing That He Didn't Really Say", you just dance around it so you can pretend you never actually made such a claim. What you were doing was creating a "wakalix". It's just as stupid and irrelevant and fallacious as a "straw man", but you don't get to muddy the waters by drawing people into a debate over whether it's really a "straw man" or it just smalls like one.

Better?

Given the last name of the person who started this thread, I'd say about 100%.

There is a small ray of hope in the last extract that I quoted
Daniel Linden: “As the person who’s doing governance in Second Life, I’m not going to decide what is and isn’t a good use of the platform. That’s mostly what I spend my time trying to avoid. And trying to get everyone else in Linden Lab to agree with me.”

It's potentially cheering that he said that he was *trying* to get everyone else to agree with him. His position os Governance supremo would have made it easy for him to indoctrinate new blood in the G-Team.
He's moved on.
Philip is still there, but presumably has to take more account of alternative views. It's classic that a growing organisation gets larted with new culture by incoming managers brought in to deal with the scaling up of the operation.

In the course of that workshop in 2007, Daniel said that it was OK to be an asshole in SL as long as it wasn't directed at an individual or group.
He might or might not agree that price-gouging is an asshole behaviour that is directed towards the immediately adjacent parcel owners and towards the group of landowners in the sim. If he would, then LL already has rules to deal with the situation.



The point of my highlighting that workshop was to illustrate, from the horse's mouth, the kind of strong cultural influences within SL in the past and even possibly today.
Those inflences would indicate a difficulty for LL to come out with a simple "Don't be an asshole rule" that would apply to anything other than classic griefing.
It would appear that they are thinking more along the lines of yet another iteration of the Ad-Farm / Network_Ads / We_Don't_Understand_Gaming pantomime.

In that case, it is very important that "all these crazy ideas" get teased out in the hope that whatever rules might get implemented are not completely half-assed.

It may be useful to note that Daniel *rather conspicuously* isn't a Linden anymore. How that came to be is speculation beyond this thread, and there were numerous damned good reasons to can his incompetent ass, so we can't necessarily attribute it to the radical paleo-Anarchism that was indeed rife at the Lab under Philip. But when Jack steps up and says LL is committed to acting as estate manager for the Mainland, I think we can conclude that, however the Battery Street Free-thinking Brigade may wish their pretend world worked, they recognize the bottom line depends on customers willing to buy their products. One such product is this Mainland stuff that's fallen on hard times, of which state we're constantly reminded by certain acquisitive estate imperialists who wish it ill, some in this very thread.

What i would like to see done as Jack is a paid employee of Linden Labs is to actually do his job effectively. If he believes that setting a 16 sqm parcel for sale at say 5 or 10k smacks as a form of extortion then he should act upon it.

- I don't believe there should be a minimum size for owning or selling land on Mainland
- i don't believe LL needs to hard code price caps on plots of lands below 512 sqm

I do believe Jack needs to blog his final version of what he & LL deems to be Extortion/ griefing/ harassment within the confines of Mainland. It needs to be "broad-brush" to encompass current known activities but also allowing room to take in future events or practices we have not yet seen. ( i presume some of these gamers will be hard at work looking for alternative loopholes in the Mainland policy)

To back that up, the LL Legal team needs to incorporate an additional paragraph into their current TOS to reinforce the change in Mainland policy.

To start the clean-up process, Jack needs to go after the main culprits that are supposedly responsible for 90% of this mess. Give them an ultimatum to review their pricings on individual plots...and operate a tough "3 strikes and you're out"
policy, ultimately leading to permaban of main accounts & alts from same Computer address.

I do believe that part of a G-Team daily job spec should include scanning Land search and see what parcels are being sold at excessive prices. The data is there on their existing systems and shouldn't be too hard to act on.
They then should send the culprit a standard email saying "Parcel ABC on SIM D with co-ordinates (x,y & z) set for sale at e.g 4500 L on a 16 sqm land plot is deemed to be excessively priced under our current land trading policy. Please revise your "For sale" price in the next 48 hours or risk having your parcel being reclaimed under section X paragraph Z.1 of our TOS." Scanning the Land Sales section a couple times during each day (say @ North America peak times & European peak times), should make this pretty effective....if nothing else act as a deterrent.

The above process should also include plots of land that are "being dealt under the table" i.e the "contact me if you are interested in buying this land". The potential buyer should AR this sort of activity to the G-Team and include a copy
of the IM conversation on notecard as well as a photo of the About Land "General tab"

Although Mainland doesn't have a Covenant in the About Land tab, it could be used as a type of general notice for acceptable behaviour and to include some of the above....maybe the the new paragraph that would have been added to the TOS.

Whether the above is do-able, I don't know. It really depends on how much time LL want to invest in clearing up their mess.

Given that people who are currently selling griefing tools openly and bragging about it on JIRA don't get so much as a warning, I don't see this happening.

What is now...and what could happen in the future, are 2 different things, that's how progress is made!

Ofcourse second life needs some funding system..and so they made land for rent. One can create objects but cannt create surface (an entirely virtual limit).

But when reality pops in, then we see real world practices of land selling.
We're lucky that people dont need land as in real life, where people buy ground before politics plan a new tunnel and thus get high valeu in return.

Sadly however in SL there are other practices.
Since there is a SDK one can program a bot, wo travel automaticly, buy up cheap land and sells it expensive. Such Bots are active in SL and drive up the fictional landvaleu.
In a way they are lucrative money creating machines. But not that much different in their as linden lab since they originaly gave ground a price tag..


I do understand the need for money (servers do cost money).. but how about a different funding system, since XLStreet has been bought recently, the Lindens recieve a small % of every sell. There are lots of people buying there, and as SL grows also more items are made, by more and more builders. Then why not even for the inworld sales have a % of every sell and then ABANDON LAND PRIZES, and simply make land free.

And also when land becomes free, do some more support for the builders.
As it are the builders who make secondlife a nice place to view.
For example clearly allow prims upto 30x30 , add new shapes, besides the sculpties the normal shapes could be extended.

As when land becomes free
People would also have more room to place their bought stuff.

OKay its a raw idea, its a different viewpoint, and might require more fine tuning
But overall its not a bad idea, and potentialy can make SL grow Exponantional in their bussines size. Like a new bigbang after the WWW was invented.

As more land means a bigger company for them, they should think about new models like presented here, to become a larger company.

Really expensive products on SLExchange are L$3,000 to L$30,000. Most are L$0 to L$1,000 If you have an 8k parcel, I could see you spending maybe L$100k on stuff for it over a year or so. Out of that, Linden Labs would get, say, L$10,000.

Tier on 8k is US$40/month, or about L$10,000.

So instead of $40/month for that 8k, they'd get $40/year.

I don't think that's economically feasible.

Why not just restrict the sale of any Mainland parcel less than 512sm to 1-5L/per sm. (or any number that would be far far less than the current combined price that they paid for the uncut land)

This would eliminate the cut for profit on ad farms as the abuser would not be able to cut the land to make twice+ the profit on the same chunk of land.

This could also be combined with a new set minimum on cut land, instead of 16sm being the smallest parcel, raise the limit to one of the other suggestions, 128 or 256sm.

Any parcel owner who needs to cut the land for their own use would be able to do so without penalty or fear of penalty for cutting the land for a legitimate purpose (to place music or video servers, the placing of terminals, using landing points in stores, using rez points in stores for trying out or updating products, etc, that need object entry permissions on the cut land separate from the rest of the property)

Anyone could still be free to sell as much cut land as they want.. for 128 lindens each (etc. depending on the price set on the land and the size) which would be a severe loss of profit to them and would discourage ad farming since the land could not be sold for more.

This would also allow touchby residents (those who own land touching one of the smaller parcels) to be able to afford to buy the land up from the abuser if and when it was listed for sale.

All land over 512sm would and could still be sold at Market price, as long as the land is one solid chunk, not linked little parcels all over the region that make up 512sm+ of land.

Anyone with currently cut land would not be required to re-join the land unless it set the land to the new minimum parcel size, but any land that is currently set for sale at any price over the set price (1-5L/sm) would immediately be unlisted (no longer for sale) to allow the property owner the chance to either re-join the land to meet the new minimum size and any land that does not meet the new minimum would not be permitted to be sold.

If the land policy was changed to disallow any and all cutting of land, this could harm legitimate cutting practices more than the abusive ones and should not be an across the board policy.

The actual cutting of the land is not the issue, the usage and reason behind the land cutting can be a serious issue though, if it is done to inflate the resale value of the land as a spam/ad farm.


Setting a new minimum parcel size and restricting the price to a set L/SM would not eliminate ad placement or ad farms, but would greatly reduce the abuse that occurs "behind the scenes" ... that being chopping up perfectly good land for nefarious spamming reasons.