Lu Xun
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Posts posted by Lu Xun
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Look, as much as I dislike Kastor, and I do, I dislike people who call for him to be driven from the game.
While his antics are juvenile and his shenanigans are evil, at least he's doing something to spice up his gameplay. While the rest of the game seems content to sit around playing tiddlywinks, he at least does something when he's bored.
And !@#$ you guys for making me stand up for Kastor.
That's actually pretty bad for the game, you know? The idea is that the game by itself is so boring that you'd deliberately cultivate and maintain annoying and unbearable players because they increase clicks and increase user satisfaction. While I think that Kastor, if he's willing to play by the unstated rules of the game, should be allowed to stay, I also think that Kastor knew what he was doing (well, not really, if he leaves, I can give you an assessment of his psychology) and this is the natural consequences of his actions. Both he and us deserve that.
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Regulated capitalism is the most efficient economic system for humans right now, but why should humans be allowed to get off planet? That's what I'm afraid of, when it comes to humans getting off planet under a capitalist system, the likely outcome will be the despoiling of native ecosystems, the enslavement or annihilation of less-advanced aliens, or picking stupid fights with more advanced aliens that will likely come and wipe us out.
Better to fix our problems at home, and replace humans with robots, cyborgs, AI, and other post-human life forms, before Terran civilization gets off-world. They, hopefully, will have better instincts and better judgments. -
The end date is tomorrow. But time is cyclical.
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The other thing that Sheepy can do is to just immediately reset the game, with considerations and compensation for new players. He can announce out that using anything that resembles the infinite resources exploit can be grounds for deletion, suspension, or banning, and that players should try not to push the boundaries until the exploit has been discovered and patched. Meanwhile, that would give Sheepy time to get into contact with Pol Pot and figure out what went wrong, and if he refuses to cooperate, Sheepy could put out an open bounty for the exploit so the game can be patched and the game can be put back to normal operation.
That's what I'd do, but it's Sheepy's game.
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And this justifies exploiting the !@#$ out of the game?
Wow everyone here owes an apology to Abbas
Define an exploit. I would actually categorize the infinite money glitch as essentially game breaking, but at the same time tons of run-of-the-mill tactics could be considered exploits. If I were running things I would, first, put out a policy that if you're the first to discover an exploit, you should report it to us. If it's considered degenerate, we will give you credits for it, if it's not considered degenerate, you'll get an approval for using it. Next, I'd go shake down Pol Pot and threaten him with banning unless he explains what his trick was.
If you run a business, you cannot spend most of your time blaming the consumer; one of the first things they teach you in business school is that the Customer Is King. Half the users here playing the game are customers, meaning that they pay Sheepy money to keep the server running and to help finance costs of running PnW. The other half are product, meaning they keep the customers happy and keep the customers entertained. If either side is unhappy the customers will stop paying.
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Sounds fair, but people sent out money, and others converted their funds to infrastructure, and others received money instead of sending it out. The end result may be that a few people have tons of negative money, but tons of resources as well, a few others might have tons of resources / infrastructure for no money, and some people might have tons of negative money and little to show for it.
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If the game gets rolled back. It will do no major damage other than buying some stuff back and also #BanPolPot2015
If your code sucks it's not the fault of the users for finding out that the code sucks. And as I've said before, exploits many times occupy a grey area between creativity and degeneracy; it's the players' job to find optimal strategies and if the optimal strategy is gamebreaking, why punish them for that?
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Sleepy could easily roll the game back 4 days and then give people 4 days worth of "turns" in income or whatever as it were. This might help mitigate the damage for new players.
Also, this creates some serious issues for credit buyers since the rollback coincides with the month end and the change in credit redemption rules. If you purchased and sold credits in April, do you get those credit purchases refunded in light of the rule change? Or does he roll back the rule change for May? Both options seem very tedious.
The credit database can be reverted to April 30th, with bonuses reverted to April status. Payments made can be tracked individually and then applied to users after the reversion.
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And if all of our players quit, not wanting to re-do the tedious first days?
It's good that you've brought this to others' attention, but this can be handled by giving new players either a pre-set nation or a large starting bonus as compensation for the costs of rollback.
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Blaming the users for exploiting exploits is stupid; if there's no benefit to be had from discovering exploits people won't search for exploits at all, just kicking the can down the road for later, and not searching for exploits limits players' creativity; the game is meant to be played as it's coded, not as intended in a mouldering design document in a safe somewhere.
As far as VE goes, you have to commend them for announcing the exploit publicly instead of storing it in a safe somewhere for desperate times or as a way to surreptitiously generate funds. You also have to note that others have attempted to benefit from the exploit, so it's not only their problem.
I think two things should be done: administration should step in immediately to indicate that attempting to benefit from VE's infinite money exploit can be considered as grounds for rollback or reset, and VE should cooperate by disclosing a list of members that have participated in this particular exploit, so that players know not to interact with them in ways that can be considered exploiting VE's infinite money glitch.
Second, administration should make a reliable program to reward bug discovery and reportage. Many exploits aren't really "game-breaking", and many straddle the line of decency, so alliances have an incentive to hoard exploits / gimmicks for strategic and tactical use. Getting players in the habit of getting approval for their exploits and rewards if they're considered illegal keeps players looking for ways to break the game, sometimes in interesting and enjoyable ways, while reducing the odds of a labor-intensive reset, or god-forbid, the customer relations nightmare of a deletion or banning.
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Idc either, but I'm taking a break from these forums now.
@ Foxfire: you asked for it:
Great tits, no?
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å¾è¼©ã¯çŒ«ã§ã‚る。åå‰ã¯ã¾ã ç„¡ã„。
Wagahai wa neko de aru. Namae wa mada nai.
I am a cat. As yet, I have no name.
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Alataq: you'd be surprised at how much intel I've been able to extract based simply on good-will and reputation. You seriously would be surprised, Alataq.
I do admit I've been burning my political capital as of late, but that is deliberate and with intent. If you want to bring other politics into this, be my guest, if that's more burning of political capital that is also deliberate and with intent. -
This is called overreach; once a guy is hated too much contrarians show up and like him / advocate sympathetic measures simply because everyone hates his guts. This still won't change the fact that Kastor is terrible and either needs to change or get out, because eventually even the contrarians will get bored of Kastor.
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Nasa says EmDrive does work and it may have also created a Star Trek warp drive
By Mary-Ann Russon
April 30, 2015 11:16 BST
10,983
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Nasa has proven that the controversial space propulsion technology EmDrive works and also accidentally might have made a warp drive, as used by the Star Trek Enterprise to travel, possible(Paramount Pictures)
Nasa has been testing a highly controversial electromagnetic space propulsion technology called EmDrive and has found evidence that it may indeed work, and along the way, might even have made a sci-fi concept possible.
The EmDrive is a technology that could make it much cheaper to launch satellites into space and could be key to solving the energy crisis, if solar power could be harnessed off the satellites and sent back to Earth.
It was thought up and developed by a British scientist called Roger Shawyer, who spent years having his technology ridiculed by the international space community even though Boeing licensed it and the UK government was satisfied it worked.
Read More: Roger Shawyer's exclusive interview with IBTimes UK in response to news of Nasa's experiments with EmDrive
Nasa has been testing the technology for a while and it confirmed on 29 April that researchers at the Johnson Space Center have successfully tested an electromagnetic propulsion drive in a vacuum, and although it did not seem possible, the technology actually works.
"Thrust measurements of the EmDrive defy classical physics' expectations that such a closed [microwave] cavity should be unusable for space propulsion because of the law of conservation of momentum," Nasa's José Rodal, Jeremiah Mullikin and Noel Munson wrote in a Nasa Spaceflight blog.
What is EmDrive?
EmDrive is based on the theory of special relativity that it is possible to convert electrical energy into thrust without the need to expel any form of repellent.
Shawyer's critics say according to the law of conservation of momentum, his theory cannot work as in order for a thruster to be propelled forwards, something must be pushed out of the back of it in the opposite direction.
However, EmDrive does preserve the conservation of momentum and energy – to put it simply, electricity converts into microwaves within the cavity that push against the inside of the device, causing the thruster to accelerate in the opposite direction.
Shawyer proved that if you had a 100kg spacecraft, the thrust would be in a clockwise direction and the spacecraft would then accelerate in an anti-clockwise direction.
Nasa says it works when tested in a vacuum
The EmDrive created by Shawyer's space company Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd(Roger Shawyer, Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd)
The researchers explain that the reason why Shawyer's EmDrive models and EmDrive experiments carried out by Chinese researchers had been criticised in the past was because none of the tests had been carried out in a vacuum.
Physics says particles in the quantum vacuum cannot be ionised, so therefore you cannot push against it, but Nasa says Shawyer's theory does indeed work.
"Nasa has successfully tested their EmDrive in a hard vacuum – the first time any organisation has reported such a successful test. To this end, Nasa Eagleworks has now nullified the prevailing hypothesis that thrust measurements were due to thermal convection," the researchers wrote.
Nasa says its researchers joined forces with a large community of enthusiasts, engineers, and scientists on several continents to discuss EmDrive theories on the NasaSpaceflight.com EmDrive forum, and "despite considerable effort within the NasaSpaceflight.com forum to dismiss the reported thrust as an artefact, the EmDrive results have yet to be falsified".
At least now Shawyer's work is being validated and he continues to work on a souped-up second generation version of the EmDrive that uses super conductors and an asymmetrical cavity to increase the thrust by up to five orders of magnitude.
In an interview with IBTimes UK in August 2014, Shawyer said: "There was an element of not wanting to disrupt the industry, but also a total ignorance in the laws of physics. They did make life difficult for me for a while.
""The space industry doesn't want to know about it as it's very disruptive. If the customer will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on launching a satellite, why would you want to make something that could do it cheaper?
"This technology is a quantum leap – it would enable vertical take-off and landing for airplanes, it's quiet and it uses liquid hydrogen as a fuel, so it's green too."
Star Trek warp drive might also now be possible
Apart from the excitement over EmDrive possibly being a real thing, internet users also noticed Nasa could possibly have accidentally invented the warp drive – a faster-than-light propulsion system that enables spacecraft to travel at speeds that are greatly faster than light in sci-fi movies such as Star Trek.
Nasa researchers posted on the Nasa Spaceflight forum that when lasers were fired into the EmDrive's resonance chamber, some of the laser beams had travelled faster than the speed of light, which would mean the EmDrive could have produced a warp bubble.
A post by another user analysing the EmDrive experiment said "the math behind the warp bubble apparently matches the interference pattern found in the EmDrive".I've always been terrified of the prospect of human spaceflight, simply because I don't think human beings are mature enough as a species to get off planet, and that it would be better for us to undergo the technological singularity before getting off world. There is simply no reason to replicate the patterns, as they now exist, on Earth, on other planets, because we will continue to kill each other, exploit each other, and make each other miserable among the stars. Better to transcend our limitations on Earth, first, than to become a type of interstellar locust.
Others may think differently, of course. -
So in other words from what I'm reading here, black people rioting is really the fault of whitey. They just couldn't help themselves!
Sure. If your dog attacks someone else, is it your responsibility? If you're talking about disenfranchised people who have minimal agency compared to the other classes of America, the fact that they have minimal agency means that it's more your fault than theirs because your level of agency outweighs theirs; you have the resources and time available to make positive changes, they don't.
Note that I am being condescending to what black people call the "n" word. They deserve it, but they also deserve compassion for their plight.
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If you're going to accept him, insist that he reroll and the moment anyone discovers he's Kastor he should be thrown out of the alliance. If he can't maintain the basic discipline of keeping quiet about his ID while he's on a EZI list, he's just going to create liabilities for you. But, while I'm an optimist, my expectations for Kastor have decreased tremendously since knowing him.
Kastor, someone wants to give you a chance. Consider this, have you ever considered trolling PnW by proving to the rest of the community that we were wrong about you and your capabilities? That's more fun than acting like a !@#$tard and getting rolled repeatedly. But, like I said, my expectations for you have decreased tremendously, so, I wouldn't count on it.
Quite likely, for you this is it; afterwards, either sit out for 2 years until people forget about you or find some other game to play. Prove me wrong about you.-
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That's totally NPKJI, you know?
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The Economist I believe has a fairly good article on the subject of police brutality in the United States. The problem is that if policing were done "rationally" in the United States, they would be more like social workers, and the people who actually staff the police would revolt because they didn't come into the job to solve nice local problems, they came there to be on the winning side of the beatdown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyXk3n5FCkw
As to the subject itself, African-Americans have been screwed since the Civil War and the handling of ex-slaves and their descendents has been abominable since that period. The Civil War could have been suitably averted if the federal government had nationalized slavery with a gradual phase out program, but neither the Abolitionists nor southern slaveowners were far-sighted enough to compromise (despite the wealth of the north, there were no serious attempts at acquisition-manumission in the run-up to the Civil War), and subsequently the federal government lost interest in an equitable reconstruction for American blacks.
As to blacks themselves, I'm on the side of Booker T Washington over W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Civil Rights movement should never have been handled that way. At the end of the process, what happened was that you had African Americans being legally equal to white Americans, but not socially or economically equal. That is what you are seeing here; there is a vast Black lumpenproletariat that is consistently disenfranchised, and not only that, they are also victims of Ressentiment, in that they rarely have the values necessary for success in America.
You can see that with African Africans who emigrate to the United States, while they face racism similar to their African American counterparts, their mode of response and their cultural values are significantly different, so that you end up with three classes of black people in the United States, black elites, blacks who have been able to obtain the education and wealth to live respectably in this society, recent African immigrants, who, if impoverished, don't have the same cultural habits as the descendents of slaves, and if not, are reasonably comparable to black elites, and the black lumpenproletariat, which wallows in a mixture of poverty and ignorance.
The problem for black people is, aside from a universal but mild level of racism in American society, is the existence and perpetuation of the black lumpenproletariat. While a lumpenproletariat must exist in any society, a racial bottom-tier causes unnecessary problems to the first and second categories, and, to put it bluntly, black trash at least deserves to be treated the same way as white trash. -
Someone irrelevant.
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Totally drunk, but I seriously made an account in game and forums just for you.
Three things:First, you totally got trolled by that witch into committing game suicide. Congratulations. *golfclap*
Second, you're essentially done here, you've rolled your reputation into the ground and you're better off rerolling. You probably have friends or people who at least sympathize for you, and if you're serious about playing this game you're better off rerolling, then finding shelter with them, and seeing what they can do for your career development.
Third, as I mentioned before and elsewhere, don't be discouraged. You've obviously made a lot of mistakes, you've played things the wrong way. When Estelle says, you're better off not being leadership, she's right, but only for the short term. Take a break, find some mentors, analyze your faults, and make improvements. I think you have some potential and if you choose to play this game seriously, you should be capable of learning and fixing your faults. But that means that first, you have to acknowledge your limitations, and then actively work towards fixing them. It's hard to do, and it's not for everyone. As we mentioned on IRC, it might be better for you just to try something else.Since I decided to make this post, I see that Guardian has given you a protectorship, half for lulz, and half to screw with BoC. I was then told that it was fake, then I was told it was real. In the latter case, there are three possible outcomes.
The first is that Guardian finds out that you are too much of a liability even to achieve laughs at BoC's expense. That is, what I think many people here would consider probable, but I am an optimist.The second is that you hover around the game in mediocrity and irrelevance, or you end up merging into Guardian. That's not a particularly good outcome, but it's preferable to the first.
The third is that you take this last opportunity that has been granted to you and you make something out of yourself, but as mentioned above, you need to make many changes in your leadership style in order to achieve that.I still strongly suggest that you find a mentor who's willing to take you in, and reroll. That, I think, has the best expected return, and can deliver the best average outcomes for you, but as I said in IRC, I commend you for trying to do things the hard way, by keeping your user identity. If you absolutely must insist on retrying an alliance, you are, in my view, not objectively qualified to lead an alliance and you must seriously look for advice and guidance and you must be willing to learn how to do things right.
I wish you the best of luck, but whatever happens next is your own responsibility. That is, I think, the wonderful thing about life, and you should embrace it.
5/3/2015 - Issues with Generated Money
in Announcements & Updates
Posted
Inb4 swimsuit catalogues can only be sold to people over 21.