The War on Free Speech Escalating

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This week I think the war on free speech is escalating. I read Drudge Report each morning. It tells me what mainstream media will be talking about tomorrow or the next day. Today it leads with 7 articles about attacks on free speech.

For those unfamiliar with the Drudge Report, it is a ‘news aggregator’. Very seldom does Mr. Drudge actually include any of his writing in the Report. So, it is like Feedly, Newsify, gReader, and other aggregators.

Image – Drudge Report is popular. The stats are approaching 1 billion page views per month.

Today it points to articles from; CNN, NYT, WaPo, The Sun (UK), Mirror (UK), Whimn (AU), The Hill, CBS Sacramento, Rolling Stone, Reuters, Yahoo News, Bloomberg, NBC, Daily Star (UK), Space.com, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Zero Hedge (considered a conspiracy site), AP News, Axios, Politico, FNC, SF Gate, and that is just a partial list from today.

Drudge Page Hits – 8/7/2018

A number of sources proclaim Drudge Report as extreme right-wing. If you read the list above, you’ll wonder how that is possible. Blue is Left and Red is Right. Uncolored text is center or unknown. My list is taken from today’s Report and I took them as I found them. I skipped some like The Smoking Gun because I don’t recall ever seeing them in the Report and didn’t consider them representative. Those I listed I see almost every day.

The Report’s stories are pointed to without comment. Other than a modified headline which leaves little, if any, room for spin. So, Drudge Report bias, if it exists, can only come from their selection of articles. The significant majority of articles are from Left and Center-Left sources. So, it is the Left claiming one pointing to their words is extreme right-wing? Really!?!  Continue reading →

Lakefront Property on Mars?

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If you listen to the news media you may be planning a purchase of lake front property on Mars. However, NASA and others involved in the search for water on Mars are WAY more reserved in what they are saying.

Mars

Mars

Long wave radar has found what may be… moisture… a mile or two below the surface. Whether it is a body of water or mud or something else has yet to be determined. The problem with knowing is from our testing on Earth. The radar returns on Mars look similar to those we find when looking at salty water deep in the Earth. But, we also know other materials return similar signals. More study will sort out what is down there. Study has narrowed the possibilities of what may be there with the probability high it is water in some amount and form.

Much of the NASA press release information is targeted at keeping Americans enthusiastic about space exploration. It is a funding thing. I think we should be funding NASA and space exploration. But, I also acknowledge the spin NASA puts in their press releases and what the media does with the news.

No one will be buying Martian lake front property, water skies, or lawn sprinklers in the foreseeable future.

Second Life News 2018 #31

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Not much news. No Server-Scripting UG meeting today.

Look#64

Look#64

No roll to the main channel. Servers having run for 2 weeks without a restart were restarted today.

Blue Steel will get a new package, version   #18.07.20.518086. Internal fixes…

Le Tigre and Magnum will get version #18.07.20.518082. Changes for animesh problems and logging tweaks. Continue reading →

Second Life – Third-Party Dev Meeting 2018 w30

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Short meeting. Linden engineers were in meetings and not moving a lot of code the last couple of weeks. There has only been 4 working days since the last Dev meeting 2 weeks ago.

The Bugspat Viewer is out in RC. The Lindens are testing a new crash reporting system.

The maintenance Viewer got a couple of more fixes.

The push is to get an Animesh Viewer out in RC form is on.

Estate Management Changes – Still getting a couple of parts completed.

LOTD 382 ☼ Safari

No problems associated with the Firestorm 5.1.7 update. Yay!

BUG-225157 – [RC Blue Steel 18.07.17.517953] Adjusting specular horizontal offset also adjusts specular vertical offset on Blue Steel regions only – The fix is in QA.

EEP is in progress. However, it is held up, as is BoM, by an inventory update. Those inventory fixes move slowly. Once those changes are done the EPP and BoM changes can be made.

The Group Notices for offline catching is updating and still being worked on. The next server-side update is in QA.

That is about it.

Firestorm Viewer Update 5.1.7.55786

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This version released after my Second Life News was written. I had been expecting a release for weeks and decided they were waiting on Animesh to promote from Project to Release Candidate. But, with a couple of problems being found in Animesh on the server side, that release is delayed. So… surprise we have Firestorm.

The previous update was in late January 2018.

Firestorm Viewer Testing July 2018

The new release announcement is here. Detailed coverage by Inara is here. She works with the FS Team and uses their testing versions. So, she sees the viewer for a considerable time before I do. So, the detailed review I’ll leave up to her.

I’ll get into what interests me. I am coming from version 5.0.11, the previous release. This morning I retested the viewer performance of 5.0.11. Doing my usual tests;

Porch w/Sun-Shadow-Projector @ 256m DD – 52 FPS
Skybox Green Room 1500m Elv – 120± FPS
Neisonia Safe Hub w/33 Avatars – 22± FPS

The Firestorm website recommends a basic install for this version. If you have problems then do a clean install. This version, 64-bit SL, is 111MB download, the largest FS viewer I’ve seen. An OpenSim version and 32-bit versions are also available. Continue reading →

Second Life News 2018 w30

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Servers

There is no Server-Scripting UG meeting this week. Seems the SL Summit meeting preempts it. Nor is there a deploys post this week.

However, my in-world monitor says my main channel region was restarted today. That region is running version 18.06.14.516450. This is the same version it ran last week. So, no roll out just a restart.

::Beached::

::Beached::

From last week’s Beta Server UG meeting we know there are no new versions expected to roll out to the RC channels.

Viewers

Second Life Bugsplat Viewer version 5.1.7.518003 – This is a new RC viewer version. The release notes describe the viewer version as;

This viewer should be functionally identical to the current release viewer, save that if it crashes, the crash report is sent to BugSplat rather than to Linden’s crash reporting system. Continue reading →

Second Life News 2018 w29

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Servers

There is no roll on the main channel. It will continue to run #18.06.14.516450.

There is no info on the RC channels. We are not going to hear until tomorrow.

wall-e please . {mystical fae forest} .

wall-e please . {mystical fae forest} .

Today we found out they ran into problems with the Animesh rollout. There was something going on with the physics shape of mesh, not animesh, mesh. So, they are working on that. Continue reading →

Over Dose of CUTE

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There are neat places in SL. A few are cute or have cuddly animals. But, I stumbled on D-Lab searching for helicopters and they are over the top cute. They have an adorable little 2-seater helicopter that I saw near an airport. I tracked down the creator and found D-Lab’s Skyshop.

D-Lab’s Skyshop

Most of the stuff in the image they have for sale. Much of the really cute stuff is only visible inside the chop. They sorta have two showrooms. The fun stuff is in the shop shown above, the Skyshop.  Continue reading →