NationStates Jolt Archive

Old thread here:
http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=468850

1) This is an OOC thread. That was your first mistake


OOC: My style is your problem now? I always reply IC when possible. Why leave character when you don't have to?


2) If a thread dies after you post on it, it might be because no one cares about what you're saying. There could be many reasons for this - they don't care about the subject, they don't think there's any point debating with you, they think that you will completely miss the point, because they scurry off to a private off-site community where they see that everyone else already agrees with them or they have you on ignore because they're just sick of you.


Thank you for pointing out the sometimes my threads die because people don't want to listen to me. Threads also die because I several people attack me OOC when I post IC in a roleplay thread. Lay off.



Could be all of the above. Regardless, when you see threads die after you post on it, it's generally an indication that it isn't a subject you should continue on about because no one wants to discuss it - whatever their reason might be.


It also happens because people kill threads they don't like. I don't mind if you kill my thread because you don't like me. Other people suppot the same issues I do. They are repeatedly shouted down, their threads murdered etc.


3) Actually, the seperate thread idea ISN'T a bad thing. What's stopping you from making your own threads?


I don't make many threads on the UN forum :) It's not the most civil place.


4) There are rules about gravedigging



Contrast to what I've said earlier



The acceptable age on a forum such as this which is active is more or less a week to a month. Old drafts may be bumped by the author(s) at an infinite length of time and official threads (ala: ones that Hack makes regarding rules) generally have a few more immunities based upon "legitimate new material" that is pertinent to the discussion.


Then I suggest people stop putting year old threads in sigs, stopped linked to them, etc. I have not found any year old threads someone didn't lead me to. Why are people putting threads in sigs they don't want people to respond to?


5) Theory threads like this and TH's NatSov thread....they should stay down. They're linked in people's signatures because they are the defining thread of some principle beliefs. If you want to make a thread about YOUR principle beliefs, feel free. If you want to ask a question about why something works the way it works, make your own thread. Actually, it's even better that you make your own thread because to make a good question/argument, you'd need to go through a bit of the thought process so we aren't just giving it blank looks

6) The core of the rules is a concept of common sense. Unfortunately, you seem to lack that and have a completely different concept of what common sense is so arguing that is nothing but pointless. BTW, considering that 95% of the community disagrees with you on your concept of common sense, I'd say it is fair to claim you lack common sense.

Dude, who doesn't want to dicsuss their defining beliefs?

OOC: I will stop gravedigging :) I will only link to old threads.

IC: Common sense is a bloody illusion. It's called "common sense" because it can't be explained. Saying it's "common sense" is a weak argument, made when one can't explain something better.

OOC: Perhaps I do lack common sense :) I don't want the views of 95% of the people here, but I am happy to discuss their views. I can admit I may be a fool, my sig used to be wisefool. It's not hard to get me to change my behavior. You explain how a community works, if no one objects, I stop violating whatever rule I'm violating.

My problem is, I know my distinguished colleagues are gaming the system. The rules are being forced in particularly ways for particular reasons. Does anyone claim the mods are impartial?

I wouldn't feed him.

Loutish troll, why are you here?

This is the new thread.

I would hazard to guess that calling another poster a "loutish troll" is a breach of common sense, assuming for the moment that one is attempting to convince others of their views' benefits. If the goal is to stir up trouble, on the other hand, the comment serves its purpose, I suppose, though it then violates basic courtesy.

Really, it's fairly simple. Don't resurrect ancient threads. Ancient threads are those not under active discussion - where the posters to that thread may not be active at the present time, or where the posters involved aren't interested in sustaining the conversation. Hence the impetus to create a new thread.

While we're at it, try to not confuse IC and OOC. IC posts are typically signed with an ambassador's name or "The [Government Type] of [Nation Name]". OOC posts usually lack those features. If there's a question, *ask* for clarification. Some posters get tired of certain debates even though their (IC) nations would love nothing more than to hammer the debate into the ground, thrashing the dead horse until it was dust. In this case, the goal should be to not piss off the *player* by carefully delineating IC and OOC material.

Old thread here:
http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=468850

OOC: My style is your problem now?

I've got a lot of problems with the way you post. Your style is generally not one of them. You handling of IC and OOC features, however, is

I always reply IC when possible. Why leave character when you don't have to?

Because you're replying IC to OOC comments. Many members such as Gruenberg and Witchcliff have severely different OOC beliefs from their IC beliefs, so when they debate on an OOC debate, we're discussing on a much different level from the petty arguments our ambassadors will get into. IC, Jamie MacDougall and Lori Jiffjeff absolutely despise each other, have zero respect or tolerance for one another, and will not hesitate to toss insults and insinuations at each other. OOC, Forgottenlands and Gruenberg heavily respect one another and have enjoyable discussions about beliefs and the UN both here and on other forums.

Thank you for pointing out the sometimes my threads die because people don't want to listen to me. Threads also die because I several people attack me OOC when I post IC in a roleplay thread. Lay off.

Perhaps there is a reason why they attack you so viciously. Ever thought of that?

Seriously, how many regulars have actually defended you?

It also happens because people kill threads they don't like.

I think I said that

I don't mind if you kill my thread because you don't like me. Other people suppot the same issues I do. They are repeatedly shouted down, their threads murdered etc.

Welcome to the UN

I don't make many threads on the UN forum :) It's not the most civil place.

Yet you don't stop posting here. If you're going to be here, you might as well make your own threads. If you think it is too uncivil to participate on in full, maybe you shouldn't be looking at it. Your call, but just something to think about.

Then I suggest people stop putting year old threads in sigs, stopped linked to them, etc.

They're there so you can read them, not so you can respond. They don't want you to respond. They're trying to point to their encyclopedic entry of what they believe in, not something they wish to discuss about. Get a clue!

I have not found any year old threads someone didn't lead me to.

You see, this is a trap. There are thousands of year old threads that I'm sure you've never seen - but the ones you have seen you've been pointed to because you never did any original research. Try reading through the archive forum - maybe you'll find some more threads there.

Why are people putting threads in sigs they don't want people to respond to?

Because they are there for further reading, not for further debate. If you read an entry in the Britannica, do you go and phone them up for a 20 minute debate over the article? No! Why? Because you went and read it for background reading. Do you, however, go to your friend and start up a conversation about what you just read - if you liked it enough, sure. So start up a conversation rather than reviving a dead one.

Dude, who doesn't want to dicsuss their defining beliefs?

Those that have already discussed them to death.

OOC: I will stop gravedigging :) I will only link to old threads.

Thank you.

IC: Common sense is a bloody illusion. It's called "common sense" because it can't be explained. Saying it's "common sense" is a weak argument, made when one can't explain something better.

Unfortunately, this isn't the entire truth. Common sense is pretty much about 8000 pages of logic, ethics, morals, beliefs, values, etc all compacted into a concept of "common sense" that is supposed to be used to dictate your action. It's not so much a weak argument but an argument so bloody complex that to try and explain it would take waaaaay too long so it ends up looking like a weak argument.

OOC: Perhaps I do lack common sense :) I don't want the views of 95% of the people here, but I am happy to discuss their views. I can admit I may be a fool, my sig used to be wisefool. It's not hard to get me to change my behavior. You explain how a community works, if no one objects, I stop violating whatever rule I'm violating.

Honestly, I think the problem is you either love hearing yourself talk, or you have this dire need to respond to everything, or you think that your argument is too important to let it go. Either way, the problem is that you seem either incapable or unwilling to let an issue go. The problem is something with your psyche that, really, supercedes any real rules set.

My problem is, I know my distinguished colleagues are gaming the system. The rules are being forced in particularly ways for particular reasons. Does anyone claim the mods are impartial?

The mods are as impartial as a human can be. Are the rules impartial? No. They are based around the mods concept of what makes the game better or worse. This comes at odds with many people. You disagree with their decisions, so what? I disagree with some of their decisions. I know the UN community has gotten into several heated debates with particular mods over certain rule changes. However, its in the interest of making, what they hope, is a better game. I can't fault them for that. Can you?

Loutish troll, why are you here?

To give me a wakeup call. Under most circumstances, I'd agree with his wakeup call, but I think you are a special case. You have this rather interesting staying power - likely tied into the same inability to let things go that I mentioned earlier.

This is the new thread.

Good call.

I find myself wanting to applaud FL. I feel icky. I think I need a shower. :p

I would hazard to guess that calling another poster a "loutish troll" is a breach of common sense, assuming for the moment that one is attempting to convince others of their views' benefits. If the goal is to stir up trouble, on the other hand, the comment serves its purpose, I suppose, though it then violates basic courtesy.

Really, it's fairly simple. Don't resurrect ancient threads. Ancient threads are those not under active discussion - where the posters to that thread may not be active at the present time, or where the posters involved aren't interested in sustaining the conversation. Hence the impetus to create a new thread.

While we're at it, try to not confuse IC and OOC. IC posts are typically signed with an ambassador's name or "The [Government Type] of [Nation Name]". OOC posts usually lack those features. If there's a question, *ask* for clarification. Some posters get tired of certain debates even though their (IC) nations would love nothing more than to hammer the debate into the ground, thrashing the dead horse until it was dust. In this case, the goal should be to not piss off the *player* by carefully delineating IC and OOC material.

IC: I call him a loutish troll because he has regularly cursed at me, and he seems to be engaged in a misguided effort to directly confront me. (I'm not sure why I am in people's sigs :) ). Can anyone accuse me of not being civil? What level of abuse am I supposed to take from him without calling him on it?

OOC: I really don't think I'm confused about IC or OOC. All of my posts are in character, except marked otherwise. People often respond OOC to my IC posts, but I would love to never go OOC.


I've got a lot of problems with the way you post. Your style is generally not one of them. You handling of IC and OOC features, however, is


IC: That is a style complaint.


Because you're replying IC to OOC comments.


OOC: I don't come here to discuss anything OOC. When forced to, I do.


Many members such as Gruenberg and Witchcliff have severely different OOC beliefs from their IC beliefs, so when they debate on an OOC debate, we're discussing on a much different level from the petty arguments our ambassadors will get into.


OOC: As do I. I don't come here for OOC debates. There are better forums for such a purpose.


Perhaps there is a reason why they attack you so viciously. Ever thought of that?


IC: No. It never occured to me their actions might be based on, reasons. I assume all my opponents act completely at random. Why would I try to predict what they will do?


Seriously, how many regulars have actually defended you?


IC: We do not have detailed dossiers described how long each UN abassador has been participating in UN debates. We do know many have championed the same causes we do.

I do not ask that anyone defend anything I have said. I enjoy that job myself :) However we do humbly request aid on a variety of issues. The issues, friend, are why we are here.


Welcome to the UN


IC: You may be the first to have said that :)



Yet you don't stop posting here. If you're going to be here, you might as well make your own threads. If you think it is too uncivil to participate on in full, maybe you shouldn't be looking at it. Your call, but just something to think about.



IC: We are here to support specific issues, and to discuss the flaws in misguided UN resolutions. This is the fire. We realize we have made enemies already in our short time here. We are content with that fact. We do not seek enemies, but we do oppose many actions taken by this body.


They're there so you can read them, not so you can respond. They don't want you to respond. They're trying to point to their encyclopedic entry of what they believe in, not something they wish to discuss about. Get a clue!


OOC: Then they should request those threads be closed before putting them in their sigs.


You see, this is a trap. There are thousands of year old threads that I'm sure you've never seen - but the ones you have seen you've been pointed to because you never did any original research. Try reading through the archive forum - maybe you'll find some more threads there.


No thank you. We do not seek old threads.




Unfortunately, this isn't the entire truth. Common sense is pretty much about 8000 pages of logic, ethics, morals, beliefs, values, etc all compacted into a concept of "common sense" that is supposed to be used to dictate your action. It's not so much a weak argument but an argument so bloody complex that to try and explain it would take waaaaay too long so it ends up looking like a weak argument.



IC: How is it not a weak argument? Whatever complex argument one is trying to make can be made a variety of ways. It can be summarized, and as we all have access to the interweb, we can all provide quick access to a more detailed source making the same argument. Wikipedia for example.


Honestly, I think the problem is you either love hearing yourself talk, or you have this dire need to respond to everything, or you think that your argument is too important to let it go. Either way, the problem is that you seem either incapable or unwilling to let an issue go. The problem is something with your psyche that, really, supercedes any real rules set.


IC: I am here because of issues. There is 1 issue I won't let go until I have repealed a specific resolution. I'm sure you have goals here too. If you don't like how I go about preparing my repeal, I would love to here your advice.


The mods are as impartial as a human can be.


OOC: Bullshit. I'm not on a crusade against the mods, but how can you claim that with a straight face? Check what mods have said as they have closed threads I have participated in.




Are the rules impartial? No. They are based around the mods concept of what makes the game better or worse. This comes at odds with many people. You disagree with their decisions, so what? I disagree with some of their decisions. I know the UN community has gotten into several heated debates with particular mods over certain rule changes. However, its in the interest of making, what they hope, is a better game. I can't fault them for that. Can you?


OOC: I don't disagree with the Mods actions, as moderators. I don't like it when they participate on one side of a debate, and then act as moderator, using the same account, on the same thread. I don't mind any of the written rules. Stylistically I don't see a reason to close any threads, unless requested by the author. It seems undemocratic. However I'm aware of the some of the history of the NSUN and the current rules do make sense.


You have this rather interesting staying power - likely tied into the same inability to let things go that I mentioned earlier.

Good call.

IC: We are deathly opposed to much intervention in the free market. We are deathly opposed to interference by government in art. We are deathly opposed to interference with speach.

We also disagree with how many UN nations define property. If you can't touch it you can't own it.

These are unpopular positions. We won't be shouted down. If every UN regular starts cursing us out we will not leave. If removed bodily from this hall, we will continue campaigning elsewhere. If we can't speak in person, we will speak digitally, if our IP's are blocked... well our engineers are some of the best in the world. Our nation might not have much of a military, but our electronic warfare division has successfully shut down whole nations.

OOC: Look, I don't want to be ejected from this forum. I'm enjoying myself greatly :) Please, let me know when I am actually breaking the rules. I spent a month here trying to figure out the difference between what people said because they disagreed with my positions, my style, or when I was violating the rules of this website. I ask for 1 warning before I get banned :) This isn't a simple ecosystem here. I think I have found a place, but each time I do I found I have violated another rule I was unaware of.

IC: I call him a loutish troll because he has regularly cursed at me, and he seems to be engaged in a misguided effort to directly confront me. (I'm not sure why I am in people's sigs :) ). Can anyone accuse me of not being civil? What level of abuse am I supposed to take from him without calling him on it?

OOC: I really don't think I'm confused about IC or OOC. All of my posts are in character, except marked otherwise. People often respond OOC to my IC posts, but I would love to never go OOC.

OOC: You really have no clue about the OOC/IC distinction. :rolleyes:

OOC: You really have no clue about the OOC/IC distinction. :rolleyes:

OOC: I think I understand it. I just don't want to particpate OOC. When I can't reply IC I reply OOC. What else am I doing wrong?

OOC: I think I understand it. I just don't want to particpate OOC. When I can't reply IC I reply OOC. What else am I doing wrong?

I wouldn't say wrong, just different.

When any character from Mikitivity talks, I tend to avoid ping-poing posts. Plenty of active UN players gravitate toward that style of response ... but it is just a debate. In my mind, this is a UN hall. Ambassadors or other creditialed (sp?) representatives are given anywhere from 1 minute to say 10 minutes to make a speach.

One way to really make a IC post shine is to really pretend that Hack has just given you a few minutes to make a tiny speech. :)

-M

IC posts are typically signed with an ambassador's name or "The [Government Type] of [Nation Name]". OOC posts usually lack those features. If there's a question, *ask* for clarification.

OOC: My posts in this forum should be taken as IC unless I actually specify otherwise or unless the presence of RL references makes it clear that they should have been labelled 'OOC' but that I forgot to do so...

IC: I call him a loutish troll because he has regularly cursed at me, and he seems to be engaged in a misguided effort to directly confront me. (I'm not sure why I am in people's sigs :) ). Can anyone accuse me of not being civil?

Actually, you know what? I can. You've acted nothing short of an asshole and have shown absolutely no concept of understanding about your fellow players here. From the point where you plagiarized Compardia and Auss's proposal, you have shown yourself to be incapable of stopping yourself from being an asshole. It's not that you show disrespect to other players through what you say, it's the fact that you hijack so many threads and break so many unwritten rules that most people would generally expect others to have figured out. Fris said the reason no one explicitly laid out the list of criteria to declare plagiarism to cover your case was because no one thought someone would be so stupid as to do something like that. Even now, they still haven't added that rules to the official rules because we STILL think no one else is going to be that stupid. You continually play the victim, you continually claim that we never told you so how were you supposed to know (though more than once, we've dumped a few rules in front of you that were copy and pasted from the actual rules set) and you act like it's our fault. False. Everyone from Zeldon and St Edmund to long standing UNOG admins Enn and TH to our mods Fris and Hack to Generalites Fass and Jacobia have been able to figure it all out. When 500 people don't seem to be having a problem with a rule and one person does, it isn't our fault.

What level of abuse am I supposed to take from him without calling him on it?

Call him on it, sure, but that post was hardly one you needed to call.

[QUIOTE]OOC: I really don't think I'm confused about IC or OOC. All of my posts are in character, except marked otherwise. People often respond OOC to my IC posts, but I would love to never go OOC.[/QUOTE]

This entire debate REALLY can't be done OOC. Jamie MacDougall can't talk about forum posts. That's metagaming beyond belief. Forgottenlands can. Jamie MacDougall stands up in a large chamber and yaps for half an hour doesn't really have the same effect. I would actually hazard to say that having ANY IC comments on this thread would be irrelevant to the topic at hand.

IC: That is a style complaint.

That's an OOC argument. Dear god you need to figure out the difference. You can't understand the concept of IC and OOC when you're IC. The OOC realm doesn't exist from the perspective of the IC ambassador. As such, a style complaint about IC vs OOC CAN'T be responded to in an IC fashion. Use your goddamn head.

And I said that I generally don't have a problem with your style but that I do have a problem with this aspect of your style. I, perhaps, could've been more clear, but I would've thought that you could understand (or at least assume) the but to mean all that.

OOC: I don't come here to discuss anything OOC. When forced to, I do.

OOC: As do I. I don't come here for OOC debates. There are better forums for such a purpose.

That's pretty stupid. There are much better forums for OOC debates about politics - I agree. One of them happens to be general. However, that's not what we're talking about. OOC debates about rules, style, concepts, etc REALLY should remain OOC. Why? Because OOC discussion on these things removes the bias of our ambassadors and puts honest thought into those debates. Whether we agree with these concepts IC or OOC is irrelevant to whether we understand them, how we understand them, and how they should be developed. I tend to find that dragging such a thread into the IC realm undermines the entire purpose of the debate.

IC: No. It never occured to me their actions might be based on, reasons. I assume all my opponents act completely at random. Why would I try to predict what they will do?

Fuck - that's one of the most idiotic things I've ever heard. We build the base concept of our nations randomly, but then we start applying logic, history, psychology and philosophy and generally, through that, we develop what our characters are and how they act. Hell, Gruen and I have made posts for the very purpose of egging the other on because we understand the psychology that drives our characters and thus can predict the response - often to rather entertaining results. There is no randomness to IC methods and OOC responses are based upon our personal beliefs - COMPLETELY not random.

IC: We do not have detailed dossiers described how long each UN abassador has been participating in UN debates. We do know many have championed the same causes we do.

I do not ask that anyone defend anything I have said. I enjoy that job myself :) However we do humbly request aid on a variety of issues. The issues, friend, are why we are here.

Agreed with your position, perhaps. How many have actually defended what you said. If no one agrees with your arguments, then it might be your arguments that are crap. That is not to say that they don't agree with your position, because there are lots of reasons to be on either side of any debate. The test is in the arguments, not the vote.

As far as arguments go, my information says very few if anyone.

IC: You may be the first to have said that :)

Isn't it humorous, then, that the context would translate it to "this is how the UN is, live with it". Of course, I'm speaking with Discoveralism, why should I expect him to be able to infer meaning?

IC: We are here to support specific issues, and to discuss the flaws in misguided UN resolutions. This is the fire. We realize we have made enemies already in our short time here. We are content with that fact. We do not seek enemies, but we do oppose many actions taken by this body.

Yet you openly plagiarize a resolution and then defend your action when public outcry reaches a boiling point, refusing to stand down until the moderators tell you that your proposal will be shot on site and yourself removed from these halls.

<sarcasm>Oh no, you don't seek enemies, you just have this nasty habit of making them</sarcasm>

OOC: Then they should request those threads be closed before putting them in their sigs.

Why? The moderators are human beings who often complain about being overworked and underpaid - both of which are more than reasonable. The UNOG has 50 members monitored by 4 admins and 2 mods. Aberdeen has 200 accounts monitored by 3 admins (and I still complain about workload). NationStates has 100,000 members with hundreds signing up every day with a dozen moderators and 3 admins overlooking it all donating their time. Why should we close threads when common courtesy and a few rules say they shouldn't be posted on?

Let's put it this way - if it's in their sigs, DON'T POST ON IT!

No thank you. We do not seek old threads.

Then your claim is moot. Shut up about it.

IC: How is it not a weak argument? Whatever complex argument one is trying to make can be made a variety of ways. It can be summarized, and as we all have access to the interweb, we can all provide quick access to a more detailed source making the same argument. Wikipedia for example.

Because no one bothers summarizing it. Hell, I don't think anyone's ever written a report on it. Why? Well.......it's hard to write a single report on every nook about philosophy, ethics, morality, etc, etc, etc. It really was supposed to develope as you grew up but I guess that part failed.

IC: I am here because of issues. There is 1 issue I won't let go until I have repealed a specific resolution. I'm sure you have goals here too. If you don't like how I go about preparing my repeal, I would love to here your advice.

I don't care about how you go about preparing your repeal. However, bumping very old threads and rehashing old concepts isn't the method you need to use. The individuals that read this forum don't give a shit. We've already discussed the issues, we've already been polarized on these issues and we've already written you off as irrelevant and not having a clue about copyright. Draft all you want, but stop harassing the rest of the community while you're at it.

OOC: Bullshit. I'm not on a crusade against the mods, but how can you claim that with a straight face? Check what mods have said as they have closed threads I have participated in.

*blink, blink*

Linkme. Give me one link that proves they're biased against you for reasons that can be controlled?

OOC: I don't disagree with the Mods actions, as moderators. I don't like it when they participate on one side of a debate, and then act as moderator, using the same account, on the same thread. I don't mind any of the written rules. Stylistically I don't see a reason to close any threads, unless requested by the author. It seems undemocratic. However I'm aware of the some of the history of the NSUN and the current rules do make sense.

The login feature for Jolt's appearently pretty fucked up right now. Most people are having troubles logging into their puppets from the reports I've heard.

Regardless, Hack does an excellent job distinguishing from his moderator comments and his IC arguments. I actually like seeing his comments in debates and while perhaps there is argument for him using his Man of Astroman account, I think he has equal right to participate in debates and we can tell the difference between his moderator posts and his non-moderator posts so there's no real point to him changing. Deal with it.

IC: We are deathly opposed to much intervention in the free market. We are deathly opposed to interference by government in art. We are deathly opposed to interference with speach.

We also disagree with how many UN nations define property. If you can't touch it you can't own it.

These are unpopular positions. We won't be shouted down. If every UN regular starts cursing us out we will not leave. If removed bodily from this hall, we will continue campaigning elsewhere. If we can't speak in person, we will speak digitally, if our IP's are blocked... well our engineers are some of the best in the world. Our nation might not have much of a military, but our electronic warfare division has successfully shut down whole nations.

That's great. Again, IC comments on a thread like this really don't actually.....fit

OOC: Look, I don't want to be ejected from this forum. I'm enjoying myself greatly :) Please, let me know when I am actually breaking the rules. I spent a month here trying to figure out the difference between what people said because they disagreed with my positions, my style, or when I was violating the rules of this website. I ask for 1 warning before I get banned :) This isn't a simple ecosystem here. I think I have found a place, but each time I do I found I have violated another rule I was unaware of.

All rules stem from one almighty rule: don't be an ass. When you consider the UN rules, they add on "don't try to affect the way the game is physically played". Every time you run into a wall, it's because you violated that rule. I'm not saying you can't toss the odd insult to add more liveliness to the conversation, but remember that those are IC issues, not OOC. When you steal proposals and bump old threads, you're being an ass in an OOC sense.

I would just like to point out that I take great pains to make sure it's clear when I'm speaking as a player and when I'm speaking as a Mod. While I may post general advice without a "mod sig" (such as, "Dial it back, Cluich"), that's not really much different than what any player can do (and oftentime will do). It's not a formal warning, just friendly advice. When my posts end with:
- The Most Glorious Hack
NationStates Game ModeratorI'm being serious and no longer giving advice; those are orders.

Likewise, I try to be very clear about when I, the player, am speaking, and when one of my characters (usually, the good doctor) is speaking. I rely on character signatures because I don't like IC/OOC flagging. I feel they detract. Sometimes I'll put one in the title box, up there, if my character is being especially abusive.

Furthermore, if you have Jolt's signatures visible, you'll notice that when I'm in character, or when I'm giving a moddy ruling, my Switchblade Symphony lyrics aren't visible. That signature (and the Aristotle quote) are OOC things; I love that song, and I really like that quote. They are irrelevent when posting as a Mod, and they don't fit when posting IC.

Granted, I'm about the only person who does that, but still...

At any rate, this is how I've done things for over three years now. I would like to think that there's no real confusion about which is which; especially not now that I've taken the time to explain it.

Yes, I could use Man or Astroman, or The Caloris Basin (or Glaaki, or The Evil Smurfs, or Griefer Slayers, or Drop of Honey, or any number of... ah... "lesser known" accounts...), but switching accounts is something of a pain in the ass. And, I would use The UN Gnomes more, but it is almost impossible to connect with them now. They've never been able to log in directly from Jolt, and with the bridge not working right, well, going in from the nation is pretty hit or miss.

I would just like to point out that I take great pains to make sure it's clear when I'm speaking as a player and when I'm speaking as a Mod. While I may post general advice without a "mod sig" (such as, "Dial it back, Cluich"), that's not really much different than what any player can do (and oftentime will do). It's not a formal warning, just friendly advice.

*snip*

Sure...single me out... :p

I would just like to point out that I take great pains to make sure it's clear when I'm speaking as a player and when I'm speaking as a Mod. While I may post general advice without a "mod sig" (such as, "Dial it back, Cluich"), that's not really much different than what any player can do (and oftentime will do). It's not a formal warning, just friendly advice. When my posts end with:
I'm being serious and no longer giving advice; those are orders.

Likewise, I try to be very clear about when I, the player, am speaking, and when one of my characters (usually, the good doctor) is speaking. I rely on character signatures because I don't like IC/OOC flagging. I feel they detract. Sometimes I'll put one in the title box, up there, if my character is being especially abusive.

Furthermore, if you have Jolt's signatures visible, you'll notice that when I'm in character, or when I'm giving a moddy ruling, my Switchblade Symphony lyrics aren't visible. That signature (and the Aristotle quote) are OOC things; I love that song, and I really like that quote. They are irrelevent when posting as a Mod, and they don't fit when posting IC.

Granted, I'm about the only person who does that, but still...

At any rate, this is how I've done things for over three years now. I would like to think that there's no real confusion about which is which; especially not now that I've taken the time to explain it.

Yes, I could use Man or Astroman, or The Caloris Basin (or Glaaki, or The Evil Smurfs, or Griefer Slayers, or Drop of Honey, or any number of... ah... "lesser known" accounts...), but switching accounts is something of a pain in the ass. And, I would use The UN Gnomes more, but it is almost impossible to connect with them now. They've never been able to log in directly from Jolt, and with the bridge not working right, well, going in from the nation is pretty hit or miss.

OOC: It is clear to me now Hack, but it sure wasn't clear to me when I was new here. I'd never even been warned by a moderator before... on any forum, so it came as something of a shock to me. I don't really mind anymore, it may not have achived it's desired affect, but it convinced me to turn Disco U into a firebrand, raging against the system, and all that rot.

Switching accounts is a pain in the ass... but I'm doing it myself these days :) I created my first evil puppet. I manage it by using Firefox, Opera and IExplorer, each logged in as another persona.

A lot of people are sheep. They will go out of their to curry favor with whoever has power. If a moderator posts as a player, and as a mod, their words as a player will hold disproportinate power.

Clearly the system here works well enough. However it is utterly unlike any other web forum I have ever participated on. I think the result is quite polarizing :)

Actually, you know what? I can. You've acted nothing short of an asshole and have shown absolutely no concept of understanding about your fellow players here.
[/QUOTE]

IC: I don't deny being an asshole, but I have striven very hard to be a civil asshole.


From the point where you plagiarized Compardia and Auss's proposal, you have shown yourself to be incapable of stopping yourself from being an asshole.


I don't deny using text from Ceorona and Aus's proposal. I had hope to amend it, make some small alterations, while still achieving their goals.

You should stop misusing the word plagiarism. I clearly cited my sources. Unlike Ceorona and Aus.... since their proposal was lifted from the public domain.


It's not that you show disrespect to other players through what you say, it's the fact that you hijack so many threads and break so many unwritten rules that most people would generally expect others to have figured out. Fris said the reason no one explicitly laid out the list of criteria to declare plagiarism to cover your case was because no one thought someone would be so stupid as to do something like that.


IC: There is NO mechanism for proposing amendments to the UN floor! Does that not bother you? I wasn't stealing anything, I was creatign a make shift solution for an obvious flaw.




Even now, they still haven't added that rules to the official rules because we STILL think no one else is going to be that stupid.


OOC: The tinfoil hat thread right now shows that some people thought some peopel actually were commiting plagiarism. Actual deception, theft. etc.


You continually play the victim, you continually claim that we never told you so how were you supposed to know (though more than once, we've dumped a few rules in front of you that were copy and pasted from the actual rules set) and you act like it's our fault. False. Everyone from Zeldon and St Edmund to long standing UNOG admins Enn and TH to our mods Fris and Hack to Generalites Fass and Jacobia have been able to figure it all out. When 500 people don't seem to be having a problem with a rule and one person does, it isn't our fault.


I am civil. I will follow the written rules, or actively campaign against them. I don't agree with many of the unwritten rules here. I ain't going to take shit for violating unwritten rules.



Call him on it, sure, but that post was hardly one you needed to call.

[QUIOTE]OOC: I really don't think I'm confused about IC or OOC. All of my posts are in character, except marked otherwise. People often respond OOC to my IC posts, but I would love to never go OOC.

This entire debate REALLY can't be done OOC. Jamie MacDougall can't talk about forum posts. That's metagaming beyond belief. Forgottenlands can. Jamie MacDougall stands up in a large chamber and yaps for half an hour doesn't really have the same effect. I would actually hazard to say that having ANY IC comments on this thread would be irrelevant to the topic at hand.
[/QUOTE]

OOC: As stated before, I will respond OOC, when absolutely required to. If you can't figure out a way to respond IC to an OOC post, I don't care.



That's an OOC argument. Dear god you need to figure out the difference. You can't understand the concept of IC and OOC when you're IC. The OOC realm doesn't exist from the perspective of the IC ambassador. As such, a style complaint about IC vs OOC CAN'T be responded to in an IC fashion. Use your goddamn head.



IC: the representaive from Forgottenlands seems unable to grasp the methods used by our delegation. Do you have a question or do you merely want to rant?



And I said that I generally don't have a problem with your style but that I do have a problem with this aspect of your style. I, perhaps, could've been more clear, but I would've thought that you could understand (or at least assume) the but to mean all that.

That's pretty stupid. There are much better forums for OOC debates about politics - I agree. One of them happens to be general. However, that's not what we're talking about. OOC debates about rules, style, concepts, etc REALLY should remain OOC. Why? Because OOC discussion on these things removes the bias of our ambassadors and puts honest thought into those debates. Whether we agree with these concepts IC or OOC is irrelevant to whether we understand them, how we understand them, and how they should be developed. I tend to find that dragging such a thread into the IC realm undermines the entire purpose of the debate.



OOC: I disagree. I feel only what absolutely must be done OOC should be. I have gone to great lengths to try to figure out IC responses that got my OOC message accross. Try it some time, it's good clean fun :)



Fuck - that's one of the most idiotic things I've ever heard. We build the base concept of our nations randomly, but then we start applying logic, history, psychology and philosophy and generally, through that, we develop what our characters are and how they act. Hell, Gruen and I have made posts for the very purpose of egging the other on because we understand the psychology that drives our characters and thus can predict the response - often to rather entertaining results. There is no randomness to IC methods and OOC responses are based upon our personal beliefs - COMPLETELY not random.


Agreed with your position, perhaps. How many have actually defended what you said. If no one agrees with your arguments, then it might be your arguments that are crap. That is not to say that they don't agree with your position, because there are lots of reasons to be on either side of any debate. The test is in the arguments, not the vote.



IC: I'm some of our arguments are crap. I'm also sure I have better understanding of economics then most UN reps. So when no one replies to my economic arguments with anything but to call my economic arguments dumb... I lose respect for this communities understanding of economics.



As far as arguments go, my information says very few if anyone.

Isn't it humorous, then, that the context would translate it to "this is how the UN is, live with it". Of course, I'm speaking with Discoveralism, why should I expect him to be able to infer meaning?

Yet you openly plagiarize a resolution and then defend your action when public outcry reaches a boiling point, refusing to stand down until the moderators tell you that your proposal will be shot on site and yourself removed from these halls.



IC: Were you asleep every other time this body has discussed plagiarism? Shall I rehash that argument for you? In short, if you cite your source, it's not plagiarism! At best it's a copyright violation... and UN resolutions are clearly in the public domain.

OOC: I got dinged for "cheating" for stealing "points" from Ceorona and Aus. I found that utterly ridiculous. I don't care if my name goes on my bloody resolutions, I'm here to support specific issues. People got hung up on the fact that this was a game... and forgot it's a POLITICAL game. It's a better political game if authors don't have veto power over amendments to their proposals. Politicians can't own the text of their legislation, it's one of the most ridiculous suggestiosn I've ever heard.



<sarcasm>Oh no, you don't seek enemies, you just have this nasty habit of making them</sarcasm>



IC: Our nation appears to be the only nation in the UN that had absolutely zero copyright law. We didn't exactly find a plethora of allies when we opposed the copyright legislation. We couldn't let ourselves be concerned with pissing the rest of the UN off, they already despised our free press.



Why? The moderators are human beings who often complain about being overworked and underpaid - both of which are more than reasonable. The UNOG has 50 members monitored by 4 admins and 2 mods. Aberdeen has 200 accounts monitored by 3 admins (and I still complain about workload). NationStates has 100,000 members with hundreds signing up every day with a dozen moderators and 3 admins overlooking it all donating their time. Why should we close threads when common courtesy and a few rules say they shouldn't be posted on?

Let's put it this way - if it's in their sigs, DON'T POST ON IT!




OOC: Bullshit. I put links in my sig because I'd love to take a discussion off this forum, and discuss issues in a more civil place. I'd like to encourage others to do likewise. I agreed not to post on olllllllllllllllllllllllllld threads. I'll try not to even bump them, no matter how good their content. It's a feature on other forums that good, old, threads resurface every once in awhile.




Then your claim is moot. Shut up about it.

Because no one bothers summarizing it. Hell, I don't think anyone's ever written a report on it. Why? Well.......it's hard to write a single report on every nook about philosophy, ethics, morality, etc, etc, etc. It really was supposed to develope as you grew up but I guess that part failed.


I don't care about how you go about preparing your repeal. However, bumping very old threads and rehashing old concepts isn't the method you need to use. The individuals that read this forum don't give a shit. We've already discussed the issues, we've already been polarized on these issues and we've already written you off as irrelevant and not having a clue about copyright. Draft all you want, but stop harassing the rest of the community while you're at it.



IC: If the UN representatives no longer give a shit about some of our best national soveriegnty treatisis.... then I was right about every claim I made against the NSO. I have repeatedly seen issues come before the UN, and pass, without anyone making the national sovereignty argument against the resolution. The NSO is not doing it's job. There is a national sovereignty argument against every UN action... because the UN's purview is disputed.



*blink, blink*

Linkme. Give me one link that proves they're biased against you for reasons that can be controlled?

The login feature for Jolt's appearently pretty fucked up right now. Most people are having troubles logging into their puppets from the reports I've heard.



OOC: and it's soooooooooooo hard to make new puppets. Jolt regulalry has problems, any of us can work aroudn it by making... more puppets for next time.



Regardless, Hack does an excellent job distinguishing from his moderator comments and his IC arguments. I actually like seeing his comments in debates and while perhaps there is argument for him using his Man of Astroman account, I think he has equal right to participate in debates and we can tell the difference between his moderator posts and his non-moderator posts so there's no real point to him changing. Deal with it.


That's great. Again, IC comments on a thread like this really don't actually.....fit

All rules stem from one almighty rule: don't be an ass.


IC: Since you have violated that rule repeatedly on this thread, deliberately misusing the word plagiarism for some unknown purpose... I'll assume the rule doesn't, in fact exists. Hell, I've seen a great many asses here pass UN legislation.



When you consider the UN rules, they add on "don't try to affect the way the game is physically played". Every time you run into a wall, it's because you violated that rule. I'm not saying you can't toss the odd insult to add more liveliness to the conversation, but remember that those are IC issues, not OOC. When you steal proposals and bump old threads, you're being an ass in an OOC sense.

Please, accuse me of stealing one more time. I'd love to completely derail this discussion into rehashing a debate I already won.

Fuck - that's one of the most idiotic things I've ever heard. We build the base concept of our nations randomly, but then we start applying logic, history, psychology and philosophy and generally, through that, we develop what our characters are and how they act. Hell, Gruen and I have made posts for the very purpose of egging the other on because we understand the psychology that drives our characters and thus can predict the response - often to rather entertaining results. There is no randomness to IC methods and OOC responses are based upon our personal beliefs - COMPLETELY not random.


IC: Hehe! Dude I was being sarcastic. I go to great lengths to get into my opponents head. Of course I don't think all human behavior is random. I did not predict you would take what I said seriously though. You kind of went off the deep end there.

OOC: I'm going to start by saying that this entire post is going to be done OOC simply because to be honest a discussion about posting styles on the forum is something that can't be done IC no matter what you may think Disco.
Switching accounts is a pain in the ass... but I'm doing it myself these days :) I created my first evil puppet. I manage it by using Firefox, Opera and IExplorer, each logged in as another persona.Which works fine as long as your puppets can log in to the forums.

I don't deny using text from Ceorona and Aus's proposal. I had hope to amend it, make some small alterations, while still achieving their goals.

You should stop misusing the word plagiarism. I clearly cited my sources. Unlike Ceorona and Aus.... since their proposal was lifted from the public domain.Bullshit you didn't plagiarize, copying someone else's proposal/resolution without their permission, is plagiarism pure and simple.

IC: There is NO mechanism for proposing amendments to the UN floor! Does that not bother you? I wasn't stealing anything, I was creatign a make shift solution for an obvious flaw.Does it bother me that we can't amend resolutions without repealing and replacing? No, hell back when I first started playing we didn't even have a repeal feature.

OOC: The tinfoil hat thread right now shows that some people thought some peopel actually were commiting plagiarism. Actual deception, theft. etc.No, what's in that thread is someone whose proposal was deleted earlier than they thought and jumped to the wrong conclusion.



I am civil. I will follow the written rules, or actively campaign against them. I don't agree with many of the unwritten rules here. I ain't going to take shit for violating unwritten rules.

OOC: As stated before, I will respond OOC, when absolutely required to. If you can't figure out a way to respond IC to an OOC post, I don't care.And as I said right off the bat, this entire thread is something that can't be discussed IC, simply because IC this isn't a forum, it's a 40 story (and countless tales;) ) building.

IC: Were you asleep every other time this body has discussed plagiarism? Shall I rehash that argument for you? In short, if you cite your source, it's not plagiarism! At best it's a copyright violation... and UN resolutions are clearly in the public domain.And as I said before, copying someone else's proposal/resolution without their permission is plagiarism. I;m beginnine to think that one of the mods needs to add that to the Rules for UN Proposals thread so you'll figure that out.

OOC: I got dinged for "cheating" for stealing "points" from Ceorona and Aus. I found that utterly ridiculous. I don't care if my name goes on my bloody resolutions, I'm here to support specific issues. People got hung up on the fact that this was a game... and forgot it's a POLITICAL game. It's a better political game if authors don't have veto power over amendments to their proposals. Politicians can't own the text of their legislation, it's one of the most ridiculous suggestiosn I've ever heard."Veto power over amendments?" First off, as you mentioned earlier, we can't do amendments as there's no mechanism in the game to do those. Secondly, while most authors post their proposals here on the forums for suggestion of things that need to be changed, they are under no obligation to make any of the suggested changes.

IC: If the UN representatives no longer give a shit about some of our best national soveriegnty treatisis.... then I was right about every claim I made against the NSO. I have repeatedly seen issues come before the UN, and pass, without anyone making the national sovereignty argument against the resolution. The NSO is not doing it's job. There is a national sovereignty argument against every UN action... because the UN's purview is disputed.I'll let someone from the NSO handle this.

IC: Since you have violated that rule repeatedly on this thread, deliberately misusing the word plagiarism for some unknown purpose... I'll assume the rule doesn't, in fact exists. Hell, I've seen a great many asses here pass UN legislation.Bullshit, Forgottenlands has not misused the word plagiarism once in this thread.

Please, accuse me of stealing one more time. I'd love to completely derail this discussion into rehashing a debate I already won.You won a debate, when was that?

Sure...single me out... :p

He still really wants that beer truck. :p

You really don't get it, do you? By responding IC to so many of my points there, you were INSULTING me. IC isn't the realm for serious discussion about how we act or how the rules are set up or anything like that. Your decision to reply IC to all those points reads as "This discussion is beneath me. I should not be required to waste my time on it." I actually can't tell whether you are taking this conversation anywhere close as seriously as half of the community is. I've been advised several times to stop simply because people don't believe you can understand it. However, I believe that someone's got to say "you have a problem and it isn't a specific instance of it" because you clearly don't see it.

IC: I don't deny being an asshole, but I have striven very hard to be a civil asshole.

No such thing.

I don't deny using text from Ceorona and Aus's proposal. I had hope to amend it, make some small alterations, while still achieving their goals.

No, actually, you fully intended to undermine the very purpose of their entire proposal. (Sorry Ceo for confusing you and Compardia earlier). They REFUSED to accept your suggestions so you decided to steal their proposal and add on your additions then pass the new version.

You should stop misusing the word plagiarism. I clearly cited my sources. Unlike Ceorona and Aus.... since their proposal was lifted from the public domain.

pla·gia·rize ( P ) Pronunciation Key (plj-rz)
v. pla·gia·rized, pla·gia·riz·ing, pla·gia·riz·es
v. tr.
To use and pass off (the ideas or writings of another) as one's own.
To appropriate for use as one's own passages or ideas from (another).

v. intr.
To put forth as original to oneself the ideas or words of another.

It is a technical impossibility to cite Ceo and Auss's proposal within the text of your proposal due to the rules and regulations used by this community. If you credited your sources deep in the first draft on your University Thesis, you would be ejected from the University for plagiarism. Period. You MUST have it on your final copy therefore ANY copying is plagiarism by default. Deal with it. You can take an idea and wording and turn it into your own with permission by the original author, but until you get that, it is plagiarism. If you take the base idea and create a completely new proposal in terms of wording and workings, you're in the clear.

You simply cannot get around the plagiarism claim. My use of the word is not misused, your use of the term "citing sources" is.

IC: There is NO mechanism for proposing amendments to the UN floor! Does that not bother you? I wasn't stealing anything, I was creatign a make shift solution for an obvious flaw.

Actually, not at all. I worked hard on the two resolutions I've got my name attached to. I worked hard on many resolutions my name is not attached to. And in all cases, I've not worked nearly as hard as the person who actually submitted it. Considering this is a game, we should be able to look at our work with pride and know that no one is going to come along and defile it by turning it into something we don't want. That's (part of the reason) why this community was so furious at you when you stole their proposal.

I am civil. I will follow the written rules, or actively campaign against them. I don't agree with many of the unwritten rules here. I ain't going to take shit for violating unwritten rules.

You know.......I thought about it.......and actually what you can't seem to get around isn't the unwritten rules. We actually haven't badgered you on any violations of unwritten rules because.....technically they're all written down and we needed to stick them in your face for you to realize them (and you still fail to acknowledge them). It's actually the unwritten exceptions that you can't figure out. I showed you the line that said "you can't bump old threads" and yet you did it twice, the second time because you heard an unwritten "rule" (which was really an exception) that was more lax than the written rule. You've violated so many rules it's sick - you hijack, you bump, you steal ideas. All of these are written rules and you always seem to think you aren't in violation because you believe you've found a loophole. Moderator discretion IS "don't think you have a loophole in the rules". This isn't the Supreme Court of America, we don't analyze the rulesset so that we've found every single loophole the moderators left (well.......that isn't entirely true, but we don't do that to the OSRS), we go based upon reasonability.

OOC: As stated before, I will respond OOC, when absolutely required to. If you can't figure out a way to respond IC to an OOC post, I don't care.

It's not that I can't, it's that I won't. Why? Because it's INAPPROPRIATE. You can't seem to figure that one out.

There is a time and place for IC comments, and I agree that they're fun. I REALLY loved pitting MacDougall against Jiffjeff and if there's one thing I'm regretting from my backing off is I didn't end up pitting Tristan Angel against Jiffjeff - at least not yet, anyways. However, I don't do it in threads like these because I consider them important - too important to undermine with my characters rather than my thoughts.

OOC: I disagree. I feel only what absolutely must be done OOC should be. I have gone to great lengths to try to figure out IC responses that got my OOC message accross. Try it some time, it's good clean fun

It's insulting. It's disrespectful. If you find being an asshole fun, go somewhere else - general is just loaded with those people. Here, it's not welcome.

IC: I'm some of our arguments are crap. I'm also sure I have better understanding of economics then most UN reps. So when no one replies to my economic arguments with anything but to call my economic arguments dumb... I lose respect for this communities understanding of economics.

OOC: first of all, the people that say this say it from an OOC perspective in which they fully understand the economics of the situation. The people that don't know economics very well but have a fairly decent grasp can't understand your arguments, generally. People such as myself who know nothing about the economics of the matter don't get involved, but merely listen to people they've learned to respect and trust with this sort of knowledge to know what they're talking about.

BTW, there is a site called thedailyWTF.com. It's a site where they (normally) post bad code by people believing they are good programmers with plenty of experience. Amateurs can often see some of the stupidity of the code. Hell, my ex-gf who's taken a total of one course can see the stupidity of some of this code. I consider myself a decent programmer, but does that make me one? No. What makes me a good programmer is whether I can show my code to others, they can understand it and they think it is a reasonably good solution to the problem. What's my point? Just because you're experience or you think you're knowledgable of an area doesn't make it so. When I see 10 people claiming to be knowledgable in economics who I've seen have debates about different economic theories and they all disagree with a person and rant about how he knows NOTHING about how certain industries work, I don't care what he claims. I believe it even less when the summary of his OOC basis for his belief is "society shouldn't be operating the way it is on this topic", I REALLY stop believing that person.

IC: the representaive from Forgottenlands seems unable to grasp the methods used by our delegation. Do you have a question or do you merely want to rant?

Actually, I want you to think for a bit.

IC: Were you asleep every other time this body has discussed plagiarism? Shall I rehash that argument for you? In short, if you cite your source, it's not plagiarism! At best it's a copyright violation... and UN resolutions are clearly in the public domain.

OOC: I got dinged for "cheating" for stealing "points" from Ceorona and Aus. I found that utterly ridiculous. I don't care if my name goes on my bloody resolutions, I'm here to support specific issues. People got hung up on the fact that this was a game... and forgot it's a POLITICAL game. It's a better political game if authors don't have veto power over amendments to their proposals. Politicians can't own the text of their legislation, it's one of the most ridiculous suggestiosn I've ever heard.

Actually.....that's false. Politicians often do have veto power over the text of their legislation. They may not have written it and instead it would've been written by their staff, but that's beside the point. They are the ones that decide what goes in and what doesn't. They may make agreements with other politicians to add or subtract certain elements for various favors ("remove that line, I'll support it, and I'll give your schools an extra percent in the upcoming child support act"), but that isn't the same as whether they have veto power or not. Perhaps after the bill has failed they might not have that power, but I'm not sure. They don't have power over ammendments, the way we do, but that's in part because the bills are so complex that it doesn't really matter and the things that can be done are much freer than the automated system we have. They were saying how Lebanon was trying to get an extra condition attached to the UN proposal by France and America recently - but it was ultimately the decision of the authors on whether they would add it or not. So actually, your statement is false. Deal with it.

OOC: Bullshit. I put links in my sig because I'd love to take a discussion off this forum, and discuss issues in a more civil place. I'd like to encourage others to do likewise. I agreed not to post on olllllllllllllllllllllllllld threads. I'll try not to even bump them, no matter how good their content. It's a feature on other forums that good, old, threads resurface every once in awhile.

That isn't one here. Deal with it.

IC: If the UN representatives no longer give a shit about some of our best national soveriegnty treatisis.... then I was right about every claim I made against the NSO. I have repeatedly seen issues come before the UN, and pass, without anyone making the national sovereignty argument against the resolution. The NSO is not doing it's job. There is a national sovereignty argument against every UN action... because the UN's purview is disputed.


You're talking with the person who popularized the concept of International Federalism (though the essence of it predated me by a looooong time). I'm not a member of the NSO nor do I care about your complaints about them.

OOC: and it's soooooooooooo hard to make new puppets. Jolt regulalry has problems, any of us can work aroudn it by making... more puppets for next time.

God damn it. You think Hack has that luxury? He HAS to use his mod account. He's a fucking moderator. Witchcliff chose to use her puppet instead of her main account for the UN so you're right that people could opt to stay with their puppets. Hack has to stay Hack.

IC: Since you have violated that rule repeatedly on this thread, deliberately misusing the word plagiarism for some unknown purpose... I'll assume the rule doesn't, in fact exists. Hell, I've seen a great many asses here pass UN legislation.

There are exceptions, but you can't seem to figure out what is and isn't an exception so I'm not going to complicate things by explaining further.

IC: If the UN representatives no longer give a shit about some of our best national soveriegnty treatisis.... then I was right about every claim I made against the NSO. I have repeatedly seen issues come before the UN, and pass, without anyone making the national sovereignty argument against the resolution. The NSO is not doing it's job. There is a national sovereignty argument against every UN action... because the UN's purview is disputed.
So you're still laboring under the impression that there's a NatSov arguement for everything, huh? Fine, remember how some time back I gave you a list of resolutions and asked you what the NatSov arguement for repealing them was? Well since you never answered me, I'm going to ask again.

1. Abortion Legality Convention (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=10737905&postcount=148)

2. The Microcredit Bazaar (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=9439182&postcount=118)

3. United Nations Security Act
(http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=9384832&postcount=111)

4. Nuclear Armaments (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=9384768&postcount=110)

5. UN Taxation Ban (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=7029575&postcount=5)

And they're even clickable so if you need to remind yourself what they do, all you have to do is click on them. I await your reply

Don't forget: Representation in Taxation (www.nationstates.net/page=UN_past_resolutions/start=127)

Dear Gods. This entire thread is a non-roleplaying thread, which is, by nearly everybody's definition, out-of-character. See, the distinction is, I'm speaking as the player who registered on NationStates as "Krioval" (and "Neo Tyros" and "SilverSerph", for that matter). If it were in-character, one would be speaking as a roleplay character.

So:

OOC -> player
IC -> RP character

When a bunch of players are discussing the overall feel of the forum, that's another indication that we're OOC. This holds especially true for those players who have nations with opposite ideological views than their own. As an example, the Republic of Krioval has just elected a center-right coalition that isn't much for international interventions, but I (the player) am far more liberal and far less isolationist. So "Krioval" might say that the NSUN is irrelevant or fluffy or unnecessary in-character, but I think that the NSUN is a fun aspect of roleplay (though it can definitely be fluffy).

It's the same mechanism that allows Ambassador Telovar to subtly insult another ambassador's intelligence, or Chief Paladin Serph to directly insult another ambassador without me, personally, thinking that the other player's RP style is bad. Go figure.

Just my 2 cents: I also prefer to speak IC, but a thread like this is so clearly OOC that I don't even bother specifying it. Razat's UN Ambassador doesn't give a *bleep* about forum posting styles. Actually, Razat's UN Ambassador doesn't care much about international politics either, but since Razat's leadership thinks being in the UN enhances its regional standing, it's Sam Linden's job to try to keep the UN from damaging Razat too much (a very tough job).

The player behind Razat does care about the IC/OOC distinction, and if an OOC answer is appropriate, that's what I'll give.

OOC: It appears people will be personally demeaned some how if I respond IC, at all, on this thread. So I guess I'll stay OOC on it.

OOC: I'm going to start by saying that this entire post is going to be done OOC simply because to be honest a discussion about posting styles on the forum is something that can't be done IC no matter what you may think Disco.
Which works fine as long as your puppets can log in to the forums.


So what you are saying is there is some glitch occuring such that only moderators can login in to the forums, only on their moderator account? In that case there is no rush to post anythign but moderator actions, right?



Bullshit you didn't plagiarize, copying someone else's proposal/resolution without their permission, is plagiarism pure and simple.


How is it that no one else looked up the word plagiarism before they told me I was wrong in my definition?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism

If my character was completely open, honest, and explicit in his actions... it's not plagiarism! Plagiairism has nothing to do with permission. If you believe I was deceiving people into believing I had Ceorona's support... well that would be a hard argument to make.



Does it bother me that we can't amend resolutions without repealing and replacing? No, hell back when I first started playing we didn't even have a repeal feature.


Things used to suck, so they should still suck, even though they can easily be fixed?


No, what's in that thread is someone whose proposal was deleted earlier than they thought and jumped to the wrong conclusion.


That is what really happened, but what they thought happened was plagiarism.



And as I said right off the bat, this entire thread is something that can't be discussed IC, simply because IC this isn't a forum, it's a 40 story (and countless tales;) ) building.


I enjoy finding a way to speak IC such that everyone can guess how it applies OOC.


And as I said before, copying someone else's proposal/resolution without their permission is plagiarism. I;m beginnine to think that one of the mods needs to add that to the Rules for UN Proposals thread so you'll figure that out.


And as you have forced me to repeat, ad nauseum, you are misusing the word plagiarism. Find a dictionary, read an ecyclopedia, and we may continue the discussion. These resources all exist online.



"Veto power over amendments?" First off, as you mentioned earlier, we can't do amendments as there's no mechanism in the game to do those. Secondly, while most authors post their proposals here on the forums for suggestion of things that need to be changed, they are under no obligation to make any of the suggested changes.



Yes that is what I was saying. I suggested a mechanism, you called that mechanism plagiarism. It's really not that hard to create a solution which allows amendments.



I'll let someone from the NSO handle this.

Bullshit, Forgottenlands has not misused the word plagiarism once in this thread.

You won a debate, when was that?

I will again suggest we all become better familiar with the word plagiarism.


You really don't get it, do you? By responding IC to so many of my points there, you were INSULTING me. IC isn't the realm for serious discussion about how we act or how the rules are set up or anything like that. Your decision to reply IC to all those points reads as "This discussion is beneath me. I should not be required to waste my time on it." I actually can't tell whether you are taking this conversation anywhere close as seriously as half of the community is. I've been advised several times to stop simply because people don't believe you can understand it. However, I believe that someone's got to say "you have a problem and it isn't a specific instance of it" because you clearly don't see it.


I am tempted to try and derail this discussion talking about how even OOC, no one is themself on the internet, etc.. How the lack of accountability changes our behavior, and all that rot. How silly it is for you to be insulted by what someone tells you on the internet. However I'm going to stop trying to make so many different points at once. I'm not sure what would qualify as on topic on this thread, but I will try not to take everywhere at once :)




No, actually, you fully intended to undermine the very purpose of their entire proposal. (Sorry Ceo for confusing you and Compardia earlier). They REFUSED to accept your suggestions so you decided to steal their proposal and add on your additions then pass the new version.



Ceorona and Aus were deprived of nothing, and no deception was involved. If you continue to misuse the word steal, we're gonna have a problem.

Admittedly, in some ways my proposal was a blocker. It also was an attempt to standardize international copyright, amongst those nations that support copyright.

I would have settled for changing 1 detail of their resolution, the duration of the copyright.



It is a technical impossibility to cite Ceo and Auss's proposal within the text of your proposal due to the rules and regulations used by this community. If you credited your sources deep in the first draft on your University Thesis, you would be ejected from the University for plagiarism. Period. You MUST have it on your final copy therefore ANY copying is plagiarism by default. Deal with it. You can take an idea and wording and turn it into your own with permission by the original author, but until you get that, it is plagiarism. If you take the base idea and create a completely new proposal in terms of wording and workings, you're in the clear.



You see impossibility, I see quite the opposite. I never submitted anything anywhere, except on a forum thread. In that thread I clearly labeled where everythign was coming from. Dang it, it's very tempting to go out of character here. Through my characters crusade for copyright reform I have carefully provided links to every thread, so anyone who chooses can easily figure out exactly what happened. And periodically, I summed it all up for everyone. If you can find deception in that, good luck.




You simply cannot get around the plagiarism claim. My use of the word is not misused, your use of the term "citing sources" is.



I referred, to my sources, and in fact provided a direct url to them. You cannot get around the meaning of plagiarism :)



Actually, not at all. I worked hard on the two resolutions I've got my name attached to. I worked hard on many resolutions my name is not attached to. And in all cases, I've not worked nearly as hard as the person who actually submitted it. Considering this is a game, we should be able to look at our work with pride and know that no one is going to come along and defile it by turning it into something we don't want. That's (part of the reason) why this community was so furious at you when you stole their proposal.



If we want this game to be at all similar to politics, then the author's of legislation have to realize that once the submit a bill.... it leaves their hands. It enters the great machine we call politics.

Any artist that gets insulted by others reusing their art for other means, does not understand the highest form of flattery :) They are not acting like adults.



You know.......I thought about it.......and actually what you can't seem to get around isn't the unwritten rules. We actually haven't badgered you on any violations of unwritten rules because.....technically they're all written down and we needed to stick them in your face for you to realize them (and you still fail to acknowledge them). It's actually the unwritten exceptions that you can't figure out. I showed you the line that said "you can't bump old threads" and yet you did it twice, the second time because you heard an unwritten "rule" (which was really an exception) that was more lax than the written rule. You've violated so many rules it's sick - you hijack, you bump, you steal ideas. All of these are written rules and you always seem to think you aren't in violation because you believe you've found a loophole. Moderator discretion IS "don't think you have a loophole in the rules". This isn't the Supreme Court of America, we don't analyze the rulesset so that we've found every single loophole the moderators left (well.......that isn't entirely true, but we don't do that to the OSRS), we go based upon reasonability.



You make a good point here. I'll come back to it, and post the exact text of each rule you think I violated.



It's not that I can't, it's that I won't. Why? Because it's INAPPROPRIATE. You can't seem to figure that one out.


You consider it inappropriate. Good for you. Maybe 30 other people on this forum do to. I find it bizarre that my actions have upset people so much. I am increasingly realizing that this little internet community is unlike any I have encountered before :)


There is a time and place for IC comments, and I agree that they're fun. I REALLY loved pitting MacDougall against Jiffjeff and if there's one thing I'm regretting from my backing off is I didn't end up pitting Tristan Angel against Jiffjeff - at least not yet, anyways. However, I don't do it in threads like these because I consider them important - too important to undermine with my characters rather than my thoughts.



I think you are overestimating the importance of what we do here :)



It's insulting. It's disrespectful. If you find being an asshole fun, go somewhere else - general is just loaded with those people. Here, it's not welcome.



Bullshit it's not welcome here.



OOC: first of all, the people that say this say it from an OOC perspective in which they fully understand the economics of the situation. The people that don't know economics very well but have a fairly decent grasp can't understand your arguments, generally. People such as myself who know nothing about the economics of the matter don't get involved, but merely listen to people they've learned to respect and trust with this sort of knowledge to know what they're talking about.



I don't really follow what you just said. I think I will star another thread specifically to discuss the economic ramifications of recent UN proposals.



BTW, there is a site called thedailyWTF.com. It's a site where they (normally) post bad code by people believing they are good programmers with plenty of experience. Amateurs can often see some of the stupidity of the code. Hell, my ex-gf who's taken a total of one course can see the stupidity of some of this code. I consider myself a decent programmer, but does that make me one? No. What makes me a good programmer is whether I can show my code to others, they can understand it and they think it is a reasonably good solution to the problem. What's my point? Just because you're experience or you think you're knowledgable of an area doesn't make it so. When I see 10 people claiming to be knowledgable in economics who I've seen have debates about different economic theories and they all disagree with a person and rant about how he knows NOTHING about how certain industries work, I don't care what he claims. I believe it even less when the summary of his OOC basis for his belief is "society shouldn't be operating the way it is on this topic", I REALLY stop believing that person.



I'm pretty good at explaining anything I say, if people care to ask. People tend to give me a hard time for going into too much detail, rather then too little.


Actually, I want you to think for a bit.



No, I refuse to ever exercise conscious thought. I am capable of holding my own here on this forum without doing so, why should I start now? Besides, my opponents actions here are random anyway ;)



Actually.....that's false. Politicians often do have veto power over the text of their legislation. They may not have written it and instead it would've been written by their staff, but that's beside the point. They are the ones that decide what goes in and what doesn't. They may make agreements with other politicians to add or subtract certain elements for various favors ("remove that line, I'll support it, and I'll give your schools an extra percent in the upcoming child support act"), but that isn't the same as whether they have veto power or not. Perhaps after the bill has failed they might not have that power, but I'm not sure. They don't have power over ammendments, the way we do, but that's in part because the bills are so complex that it doesn't really matter and the things that can be done are much freer than the automated system we have. They were saying how Lebanon was trying to get an extra condition attached to the UN proposal by France and America recently - but it was ultimately the decision of the authors on whether they would add it or not. So actually, your statement is false. Deal with it.



At certain points in certain political processes, authors have total control over their drafts. That virtually always ends once a proposal has been proposed to the general assembly. Even before that point, most proposals go through a variety of committees. It's all wonderfully complicated :) However amendments are a fact of life in politics.



That isn't one here. Deal with it.



I have attempted to deal with it by proposing ways to enact a mechanic, without having to alter any code.



You're talking with the person who popularized the concept of International Federalism (though the essence of it predated me by a looooong time). I'm not a member of the NSO nor do I care about your complaints about them.



If you don't care, don't reply to those points. I had hoped that NSO members would respond to my posts on the 2 national sovereignty threads I have posted on.



God damn it. You think Hack has that luxury? He HAS to use his mod account. He's a fucking moderator. Witchcliff chose to use her puppet instead of her main account for the UN so you're right that people could opt to stay with their puppets. Hack has to stay Hack.



Um, you are arguing that moderators are unable to ever use other accounts?



There are exceptions, but you can't seem to figure out what is and isn't an exception so I'm not going to complicate things by explaining further.

I am sure there are things I could have figured out by just reading the rules stickies a fourth and a fifth time. I am still trying to figure out how the mods decide who to blame for taking a thread off topic, or taking an IC thread OOC.

OOC:

Early on in the discussion of the discussion of the "plagiarism" issue, I stated that you were quite correct. In my opinion, what you did was not plagiarism within the proper meaning of the term. So what was it?

You took Ceorana's proposal -- the result of long, hard work -- changed a few words, and put it forward as a proposal of your authorship. You did so in a blatant and scurrilous attempt to torpedo his effort. By including the "based on" line at the end with his name and mine, you avoided plagiarism. Of course, that also could have created the impression in the minds of voters that we supported your proposal.

What you did was not technically plagiarism. You simply took the product of members' hard work and attempted to use it in a way that you knew full well they would find completely objectionable. What you did was not plagiarism. But it was sleazy, underhanded and contemptible. Continuing to defend that action simply throws a spotlight on your incredible arrogance and complete lack of respect for others.

So what you are saying is there is some glitch occuring such that only moderators can login in to the forums, only on their moderator account? In that case there is no rush to post anythign but moderator actions, right?No, what I'm saying is that quite a few people have been having problems logging their nations into the forums. Try reading the Tech forums once in a while there's a four page long thread (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=492394) stuck in there

How is it that no one else looked up the word plagiarism before they told me I was wrong in my definition?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism

If my character was completely open, honest, and explicit in his actions... it's not plagiarism! Plagiairism has nothing to do with permission. If you believe I was deceiving people into believing I had Ceorona's support... well that would be a hard argument to make.I don't need to look up the definition of plagiarism, I know what the definition of plagiarism is, and more importantly, I know that the mods consider to be plagiarism, which is what you did.

Things used to suck, so they should still suck, even though they can easily be fixed?If you think that it's so easy to add amendments to the game fine, go to the Tech forum and suggest that the admins add them to the game.

That is what really happened, but what they thought happened was plagiarism.No, what they thought happened is the first person thought that the second person had altered the aguement of their repeal.

And as you have forced me to repeat, ad nauseum, you are misusing the word plagiarism. Find a dictionary, read an ecyclopedia, and we may continue the discussion. These resources all exist online.And as I said before, I know what the definition is, and more importantly, I know what the mods consider plagiarism to be.

Yes that is what I was saying. I suggested a mechanism, you called that mechanism plagiarism. It's really not that hard to create a solution which allows amendments.Again, if you think that amendments aren't that ahrd to code into the game, go to the Tech forum and suggest that they be added.

I will again suggest we all become better familiar with the word plagiarism.And I suggest that you become more familiar with the mods definition.

OOC: It appears people will be personally demeaned some how if I respond IC, at all, on this thread. So I guess I'll stay OOC on it.

Thank you

So what you are saying is there is some glitch occuring such that only moderators can login in to the forums, only on their moderator account? In that case there is no rush to post anythign but moderator actions, right?

Why? The moderators are players who just so happen to have volunteered their time and effort to help moderate the game. Why shouldn't they be allowed to play the game with us - such as debating UN proposals that will affect their nations (accounts) just as it would affect ours. I remember when Euroslavia submitted as Euroslavia (since that was his UN account) a repeal to resolution #18. He couldn't put that under a puppet because this was his UN account - it likely had responsibilities attached to it from the region (possibly delegate, I don't know, but we'll just say he did so we're aware of the difficulty of simply dropping everything and changing accounts), and he had equal reason to be concerned with UNR #18 as the rest of us did, because it really is a shite resolution. We had already agreed, as a community, that UNR #18 was problematic for exactly the same reason as Euro's proposal stated.

Are you saying he can't play this game that he loves so much that he volunteered to help run? What a ridiculous statement.

How is it that no one else looked up the word plagiarism before they told me I was wrong in my definition?

Check my post. I did look up the definition and posted it for you

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism

Dude, even Wikipedia says it isn't the ultimate resource. I posted an actual dictionary definition from a site that uses exact definitions from dictionaries. If it says that the situation is plagiarism, then it doesn't matter what Wikipedia says.

Also, a term doesn't have to fall under a particular definition, so long as it falls under a definition.

If my character was completely open, honest, and explicit in his actions... it's not plagiarism! Plagiairism has nothing to do with permission. If you believe I was deceiving people into believing I had Ceorona's support... well that would be a hard argument to make.

Where did I suggest plagiarism had anything to do with deceit. Try theft. YOU STOLE HIS WORK.

If you are in University (or, really, any college) and you copy WORD FOR WORD someone else's work without putting direct quotes to indicate it is exactly copied from the other person's published work and adding substantial amount of your own work including, perhaps, analysis of what was said, it doesn't matter whether you cited the source and said "I copied my entire essay from www.essaysthatpassed.com" and were perfectly open and honest about the fact, you'd get a zero and possibly get expelled. Why? PLAGIARISM!

You stole his work.

Things used to suck, so they should still suck, even though they can easily be fixed?[/QUOTE]

Easily be fixed? You think moderator and player alike haven't visited the concept of ammendments hundreds of times and tried to find a method that was reasonable in terms of effort, time and complexity to figure out an ammendment system? There's hundreds of reasons why we don't have ammendments - and many of them stem from the same problem. [B]THIS IS A FREE GAME. Most ammendment systems we can think of would require a lot more moderator and/or admin time to be invest into it - the same moderators and admins that I previously noted as being overworked and underpaid.

That is what really happened, but what they thought happened was plagiarism.

Still plagiarism. Go ask a University prof.

I enjoy finding a way to speak IC such that everyone can guess how it applies OOC.

Yes, well, let's put it this way. We're criticizing you on how you act, so you go and start speaking through your ambassador. What does it say? It says to us that you don't think our comments are worth listening to. If that were the case, you should've just put us on ignore and continued not paying attention to what we had to say.

And as you have forced me to repeat, ad nauseum, you are misusing the word plagiarism. Find a dictionary, read an ecyclopedia, and we may continue the discussion. These resources all exist online.

And I used one of them which you never noticed or commented on.

Yes that is what I was saying. I suggested a mechanism, you called that mechanism plagiarism. It's really not that hard to create a solution which allows amendments.

Really? Aside from proposal stealing as has been so clearly believed to be not worth consideration as a potential solution, what other idea did you have?

I will again suggest we all become better familiar with the word plagiarism.

I will, again, suggest you read the definition I posted.

I am tempted to try and derail this discussion talking about how even OOC, no one is themself on the internet, etc.. How the lack of accountability changes our behavior, and all that rot. How silly it is for you to be insulted by what someone tells you on the internet. However I'm going to stop trying to make so many different points at once. I'm not sure what would qualify as on topic on this thread, but I will try not to take everywhere at once :)

How silly it is for me to be insulted? You're saying that if someone suggests that what I have to say isn't worth their time, I shouldn't be insulted? Unconcerned, perhaps, afterall, I distinguish between "friends" and "Internet friends" and categorize them completely different in my mind to begin with, but that is not the same as being insulted. I can be insulted by an enemy, but whether I should be concerned that this enemy was insulting me is a completely different story. I would be concerned if I felt that Gruenberg the player was insulting me and I'd be looking at information as to why. Why? Because I value his opinion and think it worth consideration so I'll see why he said and acted like he did. You insulting me on this thread is only a concern because I'm trying to explain to you what you're doing wrong and why your approach to this forum isn't acceptable by these community standards, and your treatment of it thus far not been what I had hoped. While there is a bit of "why is it this way" - a response I consider more than welcome to such a discussion, your response has also had an essence of "you guys' opinions aren't worth my time", "you're the problem, I'm perfect", and "try reading" (an issue that, ironically, we've had with you fairly regularly) but lacks a lot of "I can see why this would be a problem" or "ok, perhaps I am being an idiot". Most often, the failure to do those is generally an indication of trollish behavior. You've spent more time trying to correct the term plagiarism than trying to understand why we were so furious with your actions to begin with - something you REALLY need to spend a bit more time thinking about

Ceorona and Aus were deprived of nothing, and no deception was involved. If you continue to misuse the word steal, we're gonna have a problem.

If you had usurped them by submitting it (because only one of the two proposals could be passed), they would've been deprived of ALL of their hard work.

Admittedly, in some ways my proposal was a blocker. It also was an attempt to standardize international copyright, amongst those nations that support copyright.

It was an attempt to cry NatSov and foul over a ridiculous spat.

Actually, I really don't know why you're in the UN. Why are you a member? You clearly are a believer in absolute sovereignty, else you wouldn't be opposing all the NatSov friendly resolutions, so why are you here?

I would have settled for changing 1 detail of their resolution, the duration of the copyright.

And they decided they didn't like your 1 detail

You see impossibility, I see quite the opposite. I never submitted anything anywhere, except on a forum thread. In that thread I clearly labeled where everythign was coming from. Dang it, it's very tempting to go out of character here. Through my characters crusade for copyright reform I have carefully provided links to every thread, so anyone who chooses can easily figure out exactly what happened. And periodically, I summed it all up for everyone. If you can find deception in that, good luck.

You had a clear intent of submission. All forms of submission would've usurped Ceo and Auss and would've been unable to give full and due credit to the pair of them. Deception, whether you wished to avoid it or not, would've been a simple requirement of the very nature of the UN. Deal with it.

I referred, to my sources, and in fact provided a direct url to them. You cannot get around the meaning of plagiarism :)

I don't care about the meaning, I care about the definition. I care about the rules. I care about the reality. Actually, that's false - I do care about the meaning and all of these combines still mean you committed plagiarism. Look at the definition I posted above. Look at my two university examples. They would've each expelled you for plagiarism even though by your claims, you didn't plagiarize. Plagiarism is an act of theft, not an act of theft without giving proper credit. You steal a few lines and stick them in to SUPPORT your argument and credit the individual, that's fine. You steal a few lines and make them a core of your argument, you're stealing their argument, whether they've been credited or not.

If we want this game to be at all similar to politics,

It's not

then the author's of legislation have to realize that once the submit a bill.... it leaves their hands. It enters the great machine we call politics.

False. The owner still has authority over it until it has been passed.

Any artist that gets insulted by others reusing their art for other means, does not understand the highest form of flattery :) They are not acting like adults.

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

YOU, not, them stood to benefit from the stealing of their proposal and modifying it to suit their means. YOU, not them, stood to get the credit for the proposal, whether your contribution was 5 lines or every last letter. YOU, not them, would have devised a copyright system as it was invisioned in YOUR mind. An artist should have every right to decide whether they want their material to be used by an individual. While we can debate whether the artist should be able to profit from it, would you like a painting you made to be used by the KKK or Al Queda to help support their cause? I think not. It might be flattering to be asked, but you may find that you are appalled at what it was being used for. In this case, Ausserland and Ceorana saw their work being used in such a manner that it undermined the entire POINT of their proposal.

You make a good point here. I'll come back to it, and post the exact text of each rule you think I violated.

I await your response

You consider it inappropriate. Good for you. Maybe 30 other people on this forum do to. I find it bizarre that my actions have upset people so much. I am increasingly realizing that this little internet community is unlike any I have encountered before :)

Dude, I have yet to see a single regular member say they don't think your actions inappropriate - on or off of Jolt. Get a clue

I think you are overestimating the importance of what we do here :)

I think you underestimate the value that the regulars place on what we do here. It isn't about what's important in the grand picture of society, what is important is what happens in the grand picture of our community, of our game. Think about it.

Bullshit it's not welcome here.

1) I wasn't bullshitting
2) I bullshit all the time, no one complains, just smacks me around the few times I'm caught.

I don't really follow what you just said. I think I will star another thread specifically to discuss the economic ramifications of recent UN proposals.

What?

I'm pretty good at explaining anything I say, if people care to ask. People tend to give me a hard time for going into too much detail, rather then too little.

I have heard otherwise, but I can't give an opinion on the matter.

No, I refuse to ever exercise conscious thought. I am capable of holding my own here on this forum without doing so, why should I start now? Besides, my opponents actions here are random anyway ;)

I was being serious. I ask that you please be serious. I do not consider this thread a laughing matter

At certain points in certain political processes, authors have total control over their drafts. That virtually always ends once a proposal has been proposed to the general assembly. Even before that point, most proposals go through a variety of committees. It's all wonderfully complicated :)

Actually, proposals generally lose at being under full control from the proposers when it is passed, not before. Mik might contradict me, but most changes come about from agreements made with the proposer.

However amendments are a fact of life in politics.

Yes, well, they're not feasable in this game. Deal with it

I have attempted to deal with it by proposing ways to enact a mechanic, without having to alter any code.

By deal with it.....I meant "learn to live with it. It's a fact of life, it's not going to change, we've been over this ground many, many, many, many,many,many,many times with many different individuals and the conclusion is still we will not be adding amendments". Deal with it.

If you don't care, don't reply to those points. I had hoped that NSO members would respond to my posts on the 2 national sovereignty threads I have posted on.

You said that in response to me.

The NSO, I know, was absolutely livid at you when you chose to join their forums to lambast them over how they acted. Your similar arrogance on GTT, I hear, earned you a quick lifetime ban. Why would they respond to you when you have shown absolutely no respect. That said, you still have yet to respond to longstanding NSO member Flibs's post which would be made for the second time that I've noticed (if not more). You've shown no understanding for how the NSO operates, what it has achieved, and how its operating policy is. The mere fact that sovereignty is even a point of discussion now is in itself a victory for the NSO. Your disrespect for them is nothing short of sickening.

Um, you are arguing that moderators are unable to ever use other accounts?

Not unable, but the concept of running IE, Opera and Firefox simultaneously seems rather mundane for the purpose of just pleasing the handful of people who care whether they're posting with their moderator account or not.

I am sure there are things I could have figured out by just reading the rules stickies a fourth and a fifth time. I am still trying to figure out how the mods decide who to blame for taking a thread off topic, or taking an IC thread OOC.

The person that was a bigger asshole. Case solved.

The NSO, I know, was absolutely livid at you when you chose to join their forums to lambast them over how they acted.Actually FL, Disco has the dubious distinction of being, so far, the only person whose membership was rejected by the NSO.

Actually FL, Disco has the dubious distinction of being, so far, the only person whose membership was rejected by the NSO.


Really? We've only rejected one person? Wow. The NSO lets anyone in, huh? I guess my membership is evidence of that. ;)

I would just like to point out, as a university student, that if I used Discoverialism's definition of plagiarism then I wouldn't be at university anymore.

Really? We've only rejected one person? Wow. The NSO lets anyone in, huh? I guess my membership is evidence of that. ;)
They even took me for a while. Fortunately I soon came to my senses.

OOC: It appears people will be personally demeaned some how if I respond IC, at all, on this thread. So I guess I'll stay OOC on it.It's more a matter that discussing forum mores is ridiculous (it's not even funny) from an In Character perspective. It would be like the characters on $popular_television_drama talking about NBC's current Neilson rankings.

So what you are saying is there is some glitch occuring such that only moderators can login in to the forums, only on their moderator account? In that case there is no rush to post anythign but moderator actions, right?Here's an exercise for you: read my post where I explicitly state that I cannot connect to the forums with my IC UN persona.

It's really not that hard to create a solution which allows amendments.And I say that amendments are not possible with the current coding structure and rule structure.

Now, which one of us spent a year going over the UN system to change it and make it better?

Which one of us wrote the current rule set?

I am still trying to figure out how the mods decide who to blame for taking a thread off topic, or taking an IC thread OOC.We use our judgement. That thing that was the reason Max asked us to do the job in the first place.

It's more a matter that discussing forum mores is ridiculous (it's not even funny) from an In Character perspective. It would be like the characters on $popular_television_drama talking about NBC's current Neilson rankings.


Oh I don't mind being ridiculous. This http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Principia%20Discordia is our nation's holy book. Our nation is pretty silly.


Here's an exercise for you: read my post where I explicitly state that I cannot connect to the forums with my IC UN persona.


Right so, couldn't you just create another? Spell the name the littlest bit different? Maybe make it a region within the same country, etc.? I have multiple accounts at any site where I couldn't login, but thougth I might be able to create a new account.

As I stated before, I can now tell the difference between moderator actions as moderators, and moderator actions as IC posts, and OOC actions by moderators, not as moderators. However I'm sure it can still be hard on new comers.



And I say that amendments are not possible with the current coding structure and rule structure.

Now, which one of us spent a year going over the UN system to change it and make it better?

Which one of us wrote the current rule set?

We use our judgement. That thing that was the reason Max asked us to do the job in the first place.

Well there you go. I have QA'd software for years. No one who has worked on a project for a year is at all impartial in discussing it's bugs :) It's fantastically difficult to explain to someone who designed a feature set... how it can be improved.

What you want to do is... poll new users. Assuming you want to attract new users. If that isn't a goal of the rules... well then they can be pretty much what whoever makes the rules decides :)

I would just like to point out, as a university student, that if I used Discoverialism's definition of plagiarism then I wouldn't be at university anymore.

You may have noticed that words have different meanings, in different contexts. Conspiracy has a different definition in a legal context then it does in a political context, etc.

Plagiarism has a very specific definition in an academic context. However it would also be ludicrous in an academic setting to suggest people cannot cite your publishes papers. In academia the goal is to advance a science, art, discpline etc. and to increase the reputation of the author.

The meaning of Plagiarism, in the general context, can easily be found in any web dictionary, or encyclopedia. If you don't like mine, check a few others. Heck you can even cherry pick a definition you prefer.

Perhaps this UN body has defined plagiarism in some strange way in some resolution, and I missed it? I had planned on writing a "Rights of the Author" resolution just to clearly separate the plagiarism and copyright issues (some people have confused copyright law for plagiarism protection).

They even took me for a while. Fortunately I soon came to my senses.

I'm curious whatcha meant by that? Not in favor of national sovereignty the NSO, or am I totally misreading?

Actually FL, Disco has the dubious distinction of being, so far, the only person whose membership was rejected by the NSO.

Would you mind if I took that quote and put it in my sig?

Just my 2 cents: I also prefer to speak IC, but a thread like this is so clearly OOC that I don't even bother specifying it. Razat's UN Ambassador doesn't give a *bleep* about forum posting styles. Actually, Razat's UN Ambassador doesn't care much about international politics either, but since Razat's leadership thinks being in the UN enhances its regional standing, it's Sam Linden's job to try to keep the UN from damaging Razat too much (a very tough job).

The player behind Razat does care about the IC/OOC distinction, and if an OOC answer is appropriate, that's what I'll give.

A very reasonable position, all in all. Disco U would have taken a similar position, back when he was young, innocent, and new to international politics. The idea was that our nation only got involved in the UN to oppose a startling piece of legislation they saw.

I the human player, (I tend to go by MathiasTCK online), have been looking for a place to discuss intellectual property discussions for some time. I got most of political debating need sated over on the IMDB forum for an inconvenient truth. However that got stale when I realized those opposed to the film were just popping in posting then never returning to the forum.

Some of you might be sick of intellectual property discussions. As such I haven't been doing more then hitting about them on now IP threads. People kept responding to those hints though. Now I know enough not to respond to their responses, but to suggest any OT issues be discussed elsewhere.

OOC:

Early on in the discussion of the discussion of the "plagiarism" issue, I stated that you were quite correct. In my opinion, what you did was not plagiarism within the proper meaning of the term. So what was it?

You took Ceorana's proposal -- the result of long, hard work -- changed a few words, and put it forward as a proposal of your authorship. You did so in a blatant and scurrilous attempt to torpedo his effort. By including the "based on" line at the end with his name and mine, you avoided plagiarism. Of course, that also could have created the impression in the minds of voters that we supported your proposal.

What you did was not technically plagiarism. You simply took the product of members' hard work and attempted to use it in a way that you knew full well they would find completely objectionable. What you did was not plagiarism. But it was sleazy, underhanded and contemptible. Continuing to defend that action simply throws a spotlight on your incredible arrogance and complete lack of respect for others.

Thank you Ausserland. Disco U despises the actions of your government, but you have usualy been a courteous debater :)

I had no idea how to propose a draft in that time. I grabbed what few I could find. It seemed like some of the words were key terms, so I have to admit I used your legislation as a crutch. I had also seen peope complaining about ever mentioning any other nations by name in a proposal. It was clear a brief line at the end was acceptable, so I kept myself to that.

I kind of expected both you and Ceorona to comment on it. So it's not like it was remotely possible I could have fooled anyone if I wanted, which instead I deliberately tried to avoid.

I really did hope to reach some sort of compromise. I would have been happy if the exact text of your proposal passed with only the durations reduced.

I believe at that time, the resolution wasn't up for vote yet? Even then I was reasonably sure that your proposal would pass. Few people have thought long and hard about the various impacts of copyright law. Why shouldn't an author control his art his entire life?

(I'm trying to describe what happened, not discuss exactly why not :))

My efforts were blatant :) That is how I find it odd anyone could accuse me of deception. If I had been trying to create "the impression in the minds of voters that we supported your proposal." I could have been a lot more clever. I wanted the proponents of your resolution to discuss exactly why the changes I had made were unacceptable.

Instead the opposite happened :) My changes weren't discussed at all, what I didn't change become the subject of debate instead.

I have never seen anyone called blatant, and underhanded, in the same argument :) You get a cookie.

No, what I'm saying is that quite a few people have been having problems logging their nations into the forums. Try reading the Tech forums once in a while there's a four page long thread (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=492394) stuck in there

I don't need to look up the definition of plagiarism, I know what the definition of plagiarism is, and more importantly, I know that the mods consider to be plagiarism, which is what you did.


Um, ok. If you are immune to being corrected by the dictionary, I'm going to stop trying to correct your misunderstandings.


If you think that it's so easy to add amendments to the game fine, go to the Tech forum and suggest that the admins add them to the game.


Like I said earlier, I proposed a way of doing it without altering code.

Frankly, I'm not afraid of the tech forum. I've done plenty of web programming. There might be limits on what the jolt forum can do, but we could easily host amendments on another forum.


No, what they thought happened is the first person thought that the second person had altered the aguement of their repeal.


What they thought happened actually fit the definition of plagiarism, claiming another's work as one's own.


And as I said before, I know what the definition is, and more importantly, I know what the mods consider plagiarism to be.

Again, if you think that amendments aren't that ahrd to code into the game, go to the Tech forum and suggest that they be added.

And I suggest that you become more familiar with the mods definition.

Please, anyone, correct me if I am mis stating the mods position. Perhaps they clarified it better on mod thread (back then it did not occur to me to visit the moderation forum. However, as I understand it, I was told by moderators that my offense was not treating this as a game? That my actions were ruining some important aspect of gameplay?

VOOOC (Very Obviously OOC): LOL, Did I miss a lynching? These are some of the longest posts I've ever seen.

Thank you

Why? The moderators are players who just so happen to have volunteered their time and effort to help moderate the game. Why shouldn't they be allowed to play the game with us - such as debating UN proposals that will affect their nations (accounts) just as it would affect ours. I remember when Euroslavia submitted as Euroslavia (since that was his UN account) a repeal to resolution #18. He couldn't put that under a puppet because this was his UN account - it likely had responsibilities attached to it from the region (possibly delegate, I don't know, but we'll just say he did so we're aware of the difficulty of simply dropping everything and changing accounts), and he had equal reason to be concerned with UNR #18 as the rest of us did, because it really is a shite resolution. We had already agreed, as a community, that UNR #18 was problematic for exactly the same reason as Euro's proposal stated.



Mods are using their moderator account as their UN account?

Look, multiple accounts just isn't that hard to do. Why do you belabor this point?

Thank you

Are you saying he can't play this game that he loves so much that he volunteered to help run? What a ridiculous statement.

Check my post. I did look up the definition and posted it for you

Dude, even Wikipedia says it isn't the ultimate resource. I posted an actual dictionary definition from a site that uses exact definitions from dictionaries. If it says that the situation is plagiarism, then it doesn't matter what Wikipedia says.

Also, a term doesn't have to fall under a particular definition, so long as it falls under a definition.

Where did I suggest plagiarism had anything to do with deceit. Try theft. YOU STOLE HIS WORK.

If you are in University (or, really, any college) and you copy WORD FOR WORD someone else's work without putting direct quotes to indicate it is exactly copied from the other person's published work and adding substantial amount of your own work including, perhaps, analysis of what was said, it doesn't matter whether you cited the source and said "I copied my entire essay from www.essaysthatpassed.com" and were perfectly open and honest about the fact, you'd get a zero and possibly get expelled. Why? PLAGIARISM!

You stole his work.



His work was in the public domain.

Thank you

Things used to suck, so they should still suck, even though they can easily be fixed?

Easily be fixed? You think moderator and player alike haven't visited the concept of ammendments hundreds of times and tried to find a method that was reasonable in terms of effort, time and complexity to figure out an ammendment system? There's hundreds of reasons why we don't have ammendments - and many of them stem from the same problem. THIS IS A FREE GAME. Most ammendment systems we can think of would require a lot more moderator and/or admin time to be invest into it - the same moderators and admins that I previously noted as being overworked and underpaid.

Still plagiarism. Go ask a University prof.

[/QUOTE]

The definiton used in a universty context is very different from the meaning outside of academia. Plagiarism is also a legal term. In a court of law it has a whole nother meaning. etc. In a general context we use.... the general meaning.

Thank you

Yes, well, let's put it this way. We're criticizing you on how you act, so you go and start speaking through your ambassador. What does it say? It says to us that you don't think our comments are worth listening to. If that were the case, you should've just put us on ignore and continued not paying attention to what we had to say.



If you somehow choose to be insulted by the fact that people are posting IC (I'm not talking about the content of what they have said, just the fact that they said it in character),then you are the sort of person who is likely insulted quite often by the internet.

Thank you

And I used one of them which you never noticed or commented on.

Really? Aside from proposal stealing as has been so clearly believed to be not worth consideration as a potential solution, what other idea did you have?

I will, again, suggest you read the definition I posted.

How silly it is for me to be insulted? You're saying that if someone suggests that what I have to say isn't worth their time, I shouldn't be insulted? Unconcerned, perhaps, afterall, I distinguish between "friends" and "Internet friends" and categorize them completely different in my mind to begin with, but that is not the same as being insulted. I can be insulted by an enemy, but whether I should be concerned that this enemy was insulting me is a completely different story. I would be concerned if I felt that Gruenberg the player was insulting me and I'd be looking at information as to why. Why? Because I value his opinion and think it worth consideration so I'll see why he said and acted like he did. You insulting me on this thread is only a concern because I'm trying to explain to you what you're doing wrong and why your approach to this forum isn't acceptable by these community standards, and your treatment of it thus far not been what I had hoped. While there is a bit of "why is it this way" - a response I consider more than welcome to such a discussion, your response has also had an essence of "you guys' opinions aren't worth my time", "you're the problem, I'm perfect", and "try reading" (an issue that, ironically, we've had with you fairly regularly) but lacks a lot of "I can see why this would be a problem" or "ok, perhaps I am being an idiot". Most often, the failure to do those is generally an indication of trollish behavior.


I'm not suprised to be called a troll here. If I had been attempting deliberate breaching experiments, then you'd be right.

Most of my offenses are things any new users might do. People are very quick to complain in this forum. I have found it hard to discern whining from rules violations.

There are also easy ways to prevent each problem. One I've understood that the will of the community is "it's fine the way it is" I have no problem going along. However, I do feel a vocal minority, not counting the mods, has a great impact on the written and unwritten rules here.

Thank you

You've spent more time trying to correct the term plagiarism than trying to understand why we were so furious with your actions to begin with - something you REALLY need to spend a bit more time thinking about

If you had usurped them by submitting it (because only one of the two proposals could be passed), they would've been deprived of ALL of their hard work.

It was an attempt to cry NatSov and foul over a ridiculous spat.

Actually, I really don't know why you're in the UN. Why are you a member? You clearly are a believer in absolute sovereignty, else you wouldn't be opposing all the NatSov friendly resolutions, so why are you here?

And they decided they didn't like your 1 detail

You had a clear intent of submission. All forms of submission would've usurped Ceo and Auss and would've been unable to give full and due credit to the pair of them. Deception, whether you wished to avoid it or not, would've been a simple requirement of the very nature of the UN. Deal with it.

I don't care about the meaning, I care about the definition. I care about the rules. I care about the reality. Actually, that's false - I do care about the meaning and all of these combines still mean you committed plagiarism. Look at the definition I posted above. Look at my two university examples.



As I've already stated, the definition used in a university context wouldn't be applicable here. If you are trying to say "Discoraversalism violated academic plagiarism rules" you would at least be making sense.

However I can also honestly reply "I did not commit plagiarism" because I'm gong by the defintion appropriate in this context.

Thank you

They would've each expelled you for plagiarism even though by your claims, you didn't plagiarize. Plagiarism is an act of theft, not an act of theft without giving proper credit. You steal a few lines and stick them in to SUPPORT your argument and credit the individual, that's fine. You steal a few lines and make them a core of your argument, you're stealing their argument, whether they've been credited or not.

It's not

False. The owner still has authority over it until it has been passed.

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

[B]YOU, not, them stood to benefit from the stealing of their proposal and modifying it to suit their means. YOU, not them, stood to get the credit for the proposal, whether your contribution was 5 lines or every last letter.



Well there you go. You feel I would have benefited, even if their words were virtualy unchanged. As it turns out now, if any compromise version had passed you would be right. However at that time their work wasn't submitted yet. (IIRC, right?)

My goal here really is just to discuss the issues. This is a great venue for IC discussions of real life issues.

The fact of the matter is, my "stolen" resolution could never have passed. I COULDNT EVEN SUBMIT IT, I didn't have 2 endorsements. It was the FIRST DRAFT. The proposal I was accused of stealing was itself based on someone else's text.

I was trying to put forward a more compromised position. All this hysteria about a "stolen resolution" distracted from my actual effort. I had hoped that seeing a more moderate proposal supporters of the Ceorona's current draft might suggest a reduced copyright duration, etc.

Thank you

YOU, not them, would have devised a copyright system as it was invisioned in YOUR mind. An artist should have every right to decide whether they want their material to be used by an individual. While we can debate whether the artist should be able to profit from it, would you like a painting you made to be used by the KKK or Al Queda to help support their cause? I think not. It might be flattering to be asked, but you may find that you are appalled at what it was being used for. In this case, Ausserland and Ceorana saw their work being used in such a manner that it undermined the entire POINT of their proposal.

I await your response



Sorry, I try to respond to every post that is directed at me, even if I can only give a partial response. I believe last time I gave insufficient large responses. I will get to it :) If not quickly, then I'll post the link on my blog to remind me.

Thank you

Dude, I have yet to see a single regular member say they don't think your actions inappropriate - on or off of Jolt. Get a clue



Some did find it humours though :) Remember, my proposed amedment was an attempt to protect my nation from intrusive copyright law... and the result was I got accused of an intellectual property violation :) Accused of using an authors words against them. You really don't find that at all ironic? I didn't really try to play up the irony, I played it very straight. Still some people commented on it :)

Thank you

I think you underestimate the value that the regulars place on what we do here. It isn't about what's important in the grand picture of society, what is important is what happens in the grand picture of our community, of our game. Think about it.


No, I can tell the regulars take it all very seriously. The phenomenon is known as the "curse of greyface"

Thank you

1) I wasn't bullshitting
2) I bullshit all the time, no one complains, just smacks me around the few times I'm caught.

What?

I have heard otherwise, but I can't give an opinion on the matter.

I was being serious. I ask that you please be serious. I do not consider this thread a laughing matter



No :) :PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

Thank you


Actually, proposals generally lose at being under full control from the proposers when it is passed, not before. Mik might contradict me, but most changes come about from agreements made with the proposer.

Yes, well, they're not feasable in this game. Deal with it


You have chosen to define my proposed amendment system as plagiarism. A similar system could easily be enacted, except more clearly defined so that there is no doubt what parts of the text are new, and what parts are changed. It would be easy to make single edits and still be able to track the change.

You like the system now. Fine. I'm betting you count yourself a regular, fine. You take this all very seriuosly. Fine.

There comes a time when many communties become inflexbile, and uninviting to new members. I don't think we are at that point here. So I will encourage new members howerver I can. If I see a problem, I will propose a solution. I have QA in my blood still :)

Thank you


By deal with it.....I meant "learn to live with it. It's a fact of life, it's not going to change, we've been over this ground many, many, many, many,many,many,many times with many different individuals and the conclusion is still we will not be adding amendments". Deal with it.



Well then I'll take a long view. I've already seen active members in the UN... apparently dissapear. I've also seen new comers.

Unless these are just the same 4 people switching which nation they are using. I've only been able to keep track of nation names. If any mods have been posting with non mod accoutns, well I wouldn't know :)

Thank you

You said that in response to me.

The NSO, I know, was absolutely livid at you when you chose to join their forums to lambast them over how they acted. Your similar arrogance on GTT, I hear, earned you a quick lifetime ban.



Hehe, yeah. That was quick! Mind you, Disco U's environmental beliefs are wildly different from mine. I was at An Inconvenient Truth on opening night, and have been campaigning on it's IMDB forum since.

Thank you

Why would they respond to you when you have shown absolutely no respect. That said, you still have yet to respond to longstanding NSO member Flibs's post which would be made for the second time that I've noticed (if not more). You've shown no understanding for how the NSO operates, what it has achieved, and how its operating policy is. The mere fact that sovereignty is even a point of discussion now is in itself a victory for the NSO. Your disrespect for them is nothing short of sickening.


Um, Disco U's disrespect of the NSO, (I tried to keep my NSO hating statements IC, perhaps I overlooked some), was well earned. NSO nations repeatedly tried to stifle Nat Sov arguments by pre emptively stating, "Don't even try to make a Nat Sov argument to me! I'm in the NSO!"

I was quite suprised that that didn't bother anyone else, in character or out.

Thank you

Not unable, but the concept of running IE, Opera and Firefox simultaneously seems rather mundane for the purpose of just pleasing the handful of people who care whether they're posting with their moderator account or not.



Oh I hardly expect anyone to do anything on this forum just to please me. I gave that idea up a longggggggggg time ago. I still hope sometimes my arguments may have an impact, but really, I don't come to this specific forum looking for allies. If I find people supporting the same issues, I will try to carefully help them out, without instead drawing fire to their proposal :)

Anyway, what I suggested above makes it realllly easy to post as 3 different nations. What I do is attach each nation to a different email account. Then open each webmail account in a different browser. That way you will always be responding with same account that got replied to.

Thank you

The person that was a bigger asshole. Case solved.

Well there you go. Asshole, could not be a more subjective term. It should have no bearing on enforcing the rules.

The Wolf Guardians']VOOOC (Very Obviously OOC): LOL, Did I miss a lynching? These are some of the longest posts I've ever seen.

Oh, these were long because I've previously been told specifically to do this sort of thing in one very long post, not by replying to each person seperately.

Mods are using their moderator account as their UN account?
Some mods do. Enodia was known for it, and considered it his responsibility as the then foremost UN mod.
Other mods don't, for a variety of reasons. RP is one of them. Clarity in distinguishing between mod actions and player actions is another.

Look, multiple accounts just isn't that hard to do. Why do you belabor this point?

Have you done any RP, seriously? People spend months and in some cases years building up reputations and personas with specific nations. Changing to a different account can easily confuse the issue, as most people will think that it is an entirely new person talking.

And for that matter, at the moment it is hard to do. Have you even bothered to look at Technical? The reason why I'm posting with this account is because my new nation is entirely unable to access the forums. I want to post with that nation, but can't. And yes, I want to do it for IC purposes. IC, Enn doesn't exist. OOC, it does exist as a way of allowing the Remnants of Enn to post.


The definiton used in a universty context is very different from the meaning outside of academia. Plagiarism is also a legal term. In a court of law it has a whole nother meaning. etc. In a general context we use.... the general meaning.

You know what? We're not actually using a 'general' definition. We;re using an NS definition, which while being based on the dictionary definition has been altered to fit within NS's rules. The same as has been done for spam, troll, flame and countless other words and phrases. We've even come up with a few neologisms, like Klamathing, to cover concepts not considered in a general definition.

I also like it how you ignore the comments about the impossibility of coding ammendments into the game.


If you somehow choose to be insulted by the fact that people are posting IC (I'm not talking about the content of what they have said, just the fact that they said it in character),then you are the sort of person who is likely insulted quite often by the internet.
Perhaps it wasn't made quite clear. Your repeated incorrect use of IC has been insulting to the many people who have attempted to tell you how we've been working here for years. At least it seems insulting to me, and I've only just joined this thread.

~~~
And another thing:
Right so, couldn't you just create another? Spell the name the littlest bit different? Maybe make it a region within the same country, etc.? I have multiple accounts at any site where I couldn't login, but thougth I might be able to create a new account.
For Chrissake, just think would you? Two things, that's all I ask, two things.

1) Impersonating a moderator is grounds for deletion. If someone turned up here with a nation The UN_Gnomes, most regulars would instantly suspect that it was someone impersonating Hack's account The UN Gnomes. Even if it turned out that Hack was behind the new account, it would require checking an headaches for the mods. And the mods already have enough headaches, due to number 2 below.

2) Hack can't get onto the forums with his UN account for the same reason I can't get on with my real account, which for your information was started this afternoon. AFAIK, every new nation and a heck of a lot of old ones are completely unable to access Jolt. Which you would know, had you even bothered to read the thread in Technical you have been pointed to time and time again.

So yes, creating a new nation is definitely possible. But it won't do a single thing. All it does is create yet more chaos with Jolt, and that is the last thing we need right now.

The Wolf Guardians']VOOOC (Very Obviously OOC): LOL, Did I miss a lynching? These are some of the longest posts I've ever seen.

FL MFLPs - (Forgottenlord's motherf***ing long posts). When I get deep into extensive debates, you can often find quite a few. However, I don't think I've maintained such lengthy exchanges since DLE left over a year ago.....

I'm going to run out of time loooooong before I finish this post so I'll finish my commentary here at some later point

Oh I don't mind being ridiculous. This http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Principia%20Discordia is our nation's holy book. Our nation is pretty silly.

There's a difference between your IC persona being ridiculous and you, the player, treating situations in a ridiculous way (or, being ridiculous OOC). Deciding whether to do IC or OOC responses is an OOC decision. This is not to be confused with being humorous.

Right so, couldn't you just create another? Spell the name the littlest bit different? Maybe make it a region within the same country, etc.? I have multiple accounts at any site where I couldn't login, but thougth I might be able to create a new account.

As Enn pointed out below, it's the login scripts between the game and the forums. The interface is broken. It's not like he's lost a password or anything, it's just that jolt is broken.

Again

As I stated before, I can now tell the difference between moderator actions as moderators, and moderator actions as IC posts, and OOC actions by moderators, not as moderators. However I'm sure it can still be hard on new comers.

I'm sure. But Hack doesn't get into the nitty-gritty all the time so I'm not particularly bothered if they take him a bit too seriously.

Well there you go. I have QA'd software for years. No one who has worked on a project for a year is at all impartial in discussing it's bugs :) It's fantastically difficult to explain to someone who designed a feature set... how it can be improved.

Dude. I spent 6 months independantly of the mods and other regulars going over possible methods of doing it, suggesting one or two and each getting responses that I thought (as a programmer) were entirely reasonable problems. I gave up because someone pointed out the problem of strengthening or weakening a resolution.

Listen, there are three admins that do all the coding for free, and quite frankly, they're more interested in getting NS2 up and running which will actually bring in some money.

Heck, I think the community is more interested in seeing NS2 get up and running. I'm talking about the longstanding community, y'know, the ones that would be interested in actually investing time into NS2 and therefore are worth money to the admins.

I'm not saying they're doing nothing for NationStates, but we don't have a dedicated dev team working 40hrs/wk, 50 wks/yr. Spitting into the dark, I'd say they might do somewhere around 10hrs/wk. This is how much time they have to devote to bug fixes, minor improvements to make it nicer for people, and moderator oversight for those odd instances when there's an issue requiring administrator oversight. Add on that the percentage of the game that care about the UN and its lack of ammendments is extremely low. We have, at most, 50 regulars expanding upon the concept of the UN. Heck, there's only 3 of a dozen moderators that pay attention to the UN. We are a very small aspect of the community (in comparison to, say, the roleplaying community or the "I <3 my regional government" community). In fact, the vast majority of the UN community participates in other areas and so they can please us by improving other areas so that we can enjoy those areas more even if we haven't had as much improvement to the UN.

Yes, they still do things for the UN community. The repeal function is a good example, but there've also been several category additions and tweaks for us to work with. However, to ask them to do such a major recode as any ammendment feature would require just by the sheer complexity of the problem would be extremely unfair. The roleplayers can't get their war feature, we can't get our ammendments feature. Fair's fair.

What you want to do is... poll new users. Assuming you want to attract new users. If that isn't a goal of the rules... well then they can be pretty much what whoever makes the rules decides :)

Actually no, they don't. Yes, it is quite possible but when you've started investigating the complexity of the problem, you realize there isn't a simple solution, and new users such as yourself don't seem to respect the sheer complexity of the issue from a coding issue.

You may have noticed that words have different meanings, in different contexts. Conspiracy has a different definition in a legal context then it does in a political context, etc.

Plagiarism has a very specific definition in an academic context. However it would also be ludicrous in an academic setting to suggest people cannot cite your publishes papers. In academia the goal is to advance a science, art, discpline etc. and to increase the reputation of the author.

Wait, you admit right here that different terms have different meanings, yet when half the UN community tells you you're plagiarizing (yes, I know, Auss is an exception), you say that your definition of plagiarism is superior and assume that all of us are wrong? Is it completely impossible for you to imagine that maybe we have been using the "NationStates" version of plagiarism?

The meaning of Plagiarism, in the general context, can easily be found in any web dictionary, or encyclopedia. If you don't like mine, check a few others. Heck you can even cherry pick a definition you prefer.

Perhaps this UN body has defined plagiarism in some strange way in some resolution, and I missed it? I had planned on writing a "Rights of the Author" resolution just to clearly separate the plagiarism and copyright issues (some people have confused copyright law for plagiarism protection).

Which would be illegal for metagaming violation

# Proposal Stealing

If it can be proven that you've simply copy and pasted somebody else's Proposal and submitted it as your own, it'll be deleted, and you may be ejected from the UN as well.

The official term is Proposal Stealing. It was declared by Fris that you did that so don't weasle out by using the wording against them. You broke the rules, you committed an act that is unacceptable and grossly offensive by this community. Whether you accept the term plagiarism or not, you still show absolutely no understanding that you did anything wrong.

I'm curious whatcha meant by that? Not in favor of national sovereignty the NSO, or am I totally misreading?



Would you mind if I took that quote and put it in my sig?



A very reasonable position, all in all. Disco U would have taken a similar position, back when he was young, innocent, and new to international politics. The idea was that our nation only got involved in the UN to oppose a startling piece of legislation they saw.

I the human player, (I tend to go by MathiasTCK online), have been looking for a place to discuss intellectual property discussions for some time. I got most of political debating need sated over on the IMDB forum for an inconvenient truth. However that got stale when I realized those opposed to the film were just popping in posting then never returning to the forum.

Some of you might be sick of intellectual property discussions. As such I haven't been doing more then hitting about them on now IP threads. People kept responding to those hints though. Now I know enough not to respond to their responses, but to suggest any OT issues be discussed elsewhere.



Thank you Ausserland. Disco U despises the actions of your government, but you have usualy been a courteous debater :)

I had no idea how to propose a draft in that time. I grabbed what few I could find. It seemed like some of the words were key terms, so I have to admit I used your legislation as a crutch. I had also seen peope complaining about ever mentioning any other nations by name in a proposal. It was clear a brief line at the end was acceptable, so I kept myself to that.

I kind of expected both you and Ceorona to comment on it. So it's not like it was remotely possible I could have fooled anyone if I wanted, which instead I deliberately tried to avoid.

I really did hope to reach some sort of compromise. I would have been happy if the exact text of your proposal passed with only the durations reduced.

I believe at that time, the resolution wasn't up for vote yet? Even then I was reasonably sure that your proposal would pass. Few people have thought long and hard about the various impacts of copyright law. Why shouldn't an author control his art his entire life?

(I'm trying to describe what happened, not discuss exactly why not :))

My efforts were blatant :) That is how I find it odd anyone could accuse me of deception. If I had been trying to create "the impression in the minds of voters that we supported your proposal." I could have been a lot more clever. I wanted the proponents of your resolution to discuss exactly why the changes I had made were unacceptable.

Instead the opposite happened :) My changes weren't discussed at all, what I didn't change become the subject of debate instead.

I have never seen anyone called blatant, and underhanded, in the same argument :) You get a cookie.



Um, ok. If you are immune to being corrected by the dictionary, I'm going to stop trying to correct your misunderstandings.



Like I said earlier, I proposed a way of doing it without altering code.

Frankly, I'm not afraid of the tech forum. I've done plenty of web programming. There might be limits on what the jolt forum can do, but we could easily host amendments on another forum.



What they thought happened actually fit the definition of plagiarism, claiming another's work as one's own.



Please, anyone, correct me if I am mis stating the mods position. Perhaps they clarified it better on mod thread (back then it did not occur to me to visit the moderation forum. However, as I understand it, I was told by moderators that my offense was not treating this as a game? That my actions were ruining some important aspect of gameplay?

Really? We've only rejected one person? Wow. The NSO lets anyone in, huh? I guess my membership is evidence of that. ;)

I seem to recall that there might have been one earlier reject, unless they withdrew their application before we finished voting on them...
(Unless it was DEFCON that that nation was rejected by, instead? I can't remember for sure...)

I seem to recall that there might have been one earlier reject, unless they withdrew their application before we finished voting on them...
(Unless it was DEFCON that that nation was rejected by, instead? I can't remember for sure...)

I don't recall denying anyone membership in DEFCON (although I'm half in the bag right now and could be wrong). Hell, we even let that fluffy bastard Jey in. :p

There has been one membership revoked, though, and lo and behold! It was Disco! Really, who registers on a site about defense/security issues and immediately starts babbling about copyright? :rolleyes:

Some mods do. Enodia was known for it, and considered it his responsibility as the then foremost UN mod.
Other mods don't, for a variety of reasons. RP is one of them. Clarity in distinguishing between mod actions and player actions is another.

Have you done any RP, seriously? People spend months and in some cases years building up reputations and personas with specific nations. Changing to a different account can easily confuse the issue, as most people will think that it is an entirely new person talking.


I have been playing role playing games since I was half this age. I have not participated much in threads on jolt outside of this one. I have tried to participate on every invision board I could find.



And for that matter, at the moment it is hard to do. Have you even bothered to look at Technical? The reason why I'm posting with this account is because my new nation is entirely unable to access the forums. I want to post with that nation, but can't. And yes, I want to do it for IC purposes. IC, Enn doesn't exist. OOC, it does exist as a way of allowing the Remnants of Enn to post.



Like I said, I have created several accounts. If an account I wanted to use didn't work I created a very similar account instead.




You know what? We're not actually using a 'general' definition. We;re using an NS definition, which while being based on the dictionary definition has been altered to fit within NS's rules. The same as has been done for spam, troll, flame and countless other words and phrases. We've even come up with a few neologisms, like Klamathing, to cover concepts not considered in a general definition.



And the NS definition is defined how, by who?




I also like it how you ignore the comments about the impossibility of coding ammendments into the game.



Um, it's far from impossible. Also, I have been responding a great deal, it is hard to respond to everything.

You're talking to a programmer. When you tell me a solution is impossible, you sound pretty silly.



Perhaps it wasn't made quite clear. Your repeated incorrect use of IC has been insulting to the many people who have attempted to tell you how we've been working here for years. At least it seems insulting to me, and I've only just joined this thread.



You can trace this discussion all the way back to me being given a hard time for this series of events. I say something IC on a RP thread. Someone else replys OOC. I try to reply IC as much as possible, but it was hard to respond to that exact OOC post talking about US law IC. I get dinged for taking an RP thread OOC.

My simple solution for avoiding that problem was to from then on post OOC, only when absolutely necessary. In the situation described, I could have ignored the OOC post, or just pretended he was referencing a fictional Uniform Statues of Armsica country and replied IC.

I sincerely believe OOC posts are only required for moderator actions. I will continue to find anyone silly that gets insulted by my trying to stay IC more then others.




~~~
And another thing:

For Chrissake, just think would you? Two things, that's all I ask, two things.

1) Impersonating a moderator is grounds for deletion. If someone turned up here with a nation The UN_Gnomes, most regulars would instantly suspect that it was someone impersonating Hack's account The UN Gnomes. Even if it turned out that Hack was behind the new account, it would require checking an headaches for the mods. And the mods already have enough headaches, due to number 2 below.



You really don't appear solution oriented. If you choose to view everthing as impossible it will be hard to convince you it is possible to improve this forum in any way shape or form.




2) Hack can't get onto the forums with his UN account for the same reason I can't get on with my real account, which for your information was started this afternoon. AFAIK, every new nation and a heck of a lot of old ones are completely unable to access Jolt. Which you would know, had you even bothered to read the thread in Technical you have been pointed to time and time again.

So yes, creating a new nation is definitely possible. But it won't do a single thing. All it does is create yet more chaos with Jolt, and that is the last thing we need right now.

What's likely happenign is that every account that can't login has property X, for example, they are all stored on certain set of servers.

If being able to login is that crucial to anyone, I would suggest over a period of time they.... create many accounts! Find accounts that won't appear to be impersonating a mod, but are in some way related in whatever way to whatever accounts you fear losign access to. So rather then appear to be impersonating The UN Gnomes one could create the account Emergency Backup Gnomes. Etc. In their profile they could make it clear what's going on. It's not that hard a problem.

I don't recall denying anyone membership in DEFCON
I've just sent you a TG with the name of the other nation that I thought had been rejected.

There has been one membership revoked, though, and lo and behold! It was Disco! Really, who registers on a site about defense/security issues and immediately starts babbling about copyright? :rolleyes:

True, although (to try and be fair) one or another of our longer-standing members had already -- despite the fact that it wasn't really a defence/security-related matter -- opened a thread for discussion Ceorana's 'Copyright' resolution there...

I've just sent you a TG with the name of the other nation that I thought had been rejected.

True, although (to try and be fair) one or another of our longer-standing members had already -- despite the fact that it wasn't really a defence/security-related matter -- opened a thread for discussion Ceorana's 'Copyright' resolution there...

Woah. I appreciate the fairness :) Admittedly some people have been playing fair. I haven't been forced to repeat here evvvvvvvvvery discussion I've ever had on this forum.

I'm going to run out of time loooooong before I finish this post so I'll finish my commentary here at some later point


I know the feeling.


There's a difference between your IC persona being ridiculous and you, the player, treating situations in a ridiculous way (or, being ridiculous OOC). Deciding whether to do IC or OOC responses is an OOC decision. This is not to be confused with being humorous.



Ok well I don't mind me, my actions, my nation, or my nation's representatives being called ridiculous.



As Enn pointed out below, it's the login scripts between the game and the forums. The interface is broken. It's not like he's lost a password or anything, it's just that jolt is broken.


Yeah, I really got that, a longgggggggggg time ago. Thanks for explaining it again though.



Again

I'm sure. But Hack doesn't get into the nitty-gritty all the time so I'm not particularly bothered if they take him a bit too seriously.


Look, go ahead, piss me off. Take actions for that sole purpose. I don't fight for change for my own benefit.

I would like it if this forum was friendly to newcomers. Moderators participating loudly in debates, then taking moderator actions on the same account... can easily scare people away.



Dude. I spent 6 months independantly of the mods and other regulars going over possible methods of doing it, suggesting one or two and each getting responses that I thought (as a programmer) were entirely reasonable problems. I gave up because someone pointed out the problem of strengthening or weakening a resolution.

Listen, there are three admins that do all the coding for free, and quite frankly, they're more interested in getting NS2 up and running which will actually bring in some money.

Heck, I think the community is more interested in seeing NS2 get up and running. I'm talking about the longstanding community, y'know, the ones that would be interested in actually investing time into NS2 and therefore are worth money to the admins.



I hope I don't offend anyone, but NS2 looks like a lot like Duke Nukem Forever.




I'm not saying they're doing nothing for NationStates, but we don't have a dedicated dev team working 40hrs/wk, 50 wks/yr. Spitting into the dark, I'd say they might do somewhere around 10hrs/wk. This is how much time they have to devote to bug fixes, minor improvements to make it nicer for people, and moderator oversight for those odd instances when there's an issue requiring administrator oversight. Add on that the percentage of the game that care about the UN and its lack of ammendments is extremely low. We have, at most, 50 regulars expanding upon the concept of the UN. Heck, there's only 3 of a dozen moderators that pay attention to the UN. We are a very small aspect of the community (in comparison to, say, the roleplaying community or the "I <3 my regional government" community). In fact, the vast majority of the UN community participates in other areas and so they can please us by improving other areas so that we can enjoy those areas more even if we haven't had as much improvement to the UN.



For their being so few moderators, they seem quite active. This community polices itself more thoroughly then any online community I have ever seen.




Yes, they still do things for the UN community. The repeal function is a good example, but there've also been several category additions and tweaks for us to work with. However, to ask them to do such a major recode as any ammendment feature would require just by the sheer complexity of the problem would be extremely unfair. The roleplayers can't get their war feature, we can't get our ammendments feature. Fair's fair.

Actually no, they don't. Yes, it is quite possible but when you've started investigating the complexity of the problem, you realize there isn't a simple solution, and new users such as yourself don't seem to respect the sheer complexity of the issue from a coding issue.


Um, isn't what I'm doing right here "investigating the complexity of the problem?"

I respect the complexity. But I respect encouraging make shift solutions more.



Wait, you admit right here that different terms have different meanings, yet when half the UN community tells you you're plagiarizing (yes, I know, Auss is an exception), you say that your definition of plagiarism is superior and assume that all of us are wrong? Is it completely impossible for you to imagine that maybe we have been using the "NationStates" version of plagiarism?



Um, Aus was one of the 2 guys I was accusef of plagiarizing. He kind of has more say then 6 or so people that think it was plagiarism. It wouldn't surprise me if some of those 6 haven't bothered to read the thread where it occured.

If there was anything approaching UN consesnus the correct thing to do would have been.... correct the UN rules. I do believe what I did pissed everyone off, and they all came to the conclusion it should have been explicitly illegal. If anyone tries what I tried again the conversation would be much simpler after that.

The community chose to view a makeshift amendment solution... as plagiarism.

They then declared a makeshift amendment solution impossible, and the consensus does now seem to be that plagiarism rules should be strengtheened.




Which would be illegal for metagaming violation




Wait hold on. Seriously? I've been very patient in my attempts to repeal copyright law. I'd been sculpting this plan for awhile. Why would a "Rights of the Author" resolution that added increased protection against plagiarism be a metagame violation? Perhaps I mistated what I was trying to do. I'm not trying to write a proposal to change what people are allowed to do in the UN forum.



The official term is Proposal Stealing. It was declared by Fris that you did that so don't weasle out by using the wording against them. You broke the rules, you committed an act that is unacceptable and grossly offensive by this community. Whether you accept the term plagiarism or not, you still show absolutely no understanding that you did anything wrong.

I read the rules on proposal stealing and do not believe what I did qualifies. First of all to "steal" I must be depriving someone of something. Duplication can never be theft. However, one can steal credit. That did not occur.

The definionts of stealing, plagiarism, etc. are very important in intellectual property discussion. My basic premise is that it is a mistake to take ideas and treat them like property, to begin with. Property is a concept that had always been applied to physical things. Intellectual property laws began when kings would give their favorite artist (we'll call that person Arty) exclusive permission to do action X. It did encourage Arty to do X, and discouraged everyone else within the kings purview.

Patent law was largely used to prevent the US colonies from getting inventions crucial to the industrial revolution. It didn't work (the colonies violated the British patent law). The result was of this intellectual property violation was... greater prosperity the world over as a crucial invention effectively made it's way into the public domain.

Most people consider things like cancer drug patents more important then who owns a song. Therefore patent laws typically have a shorter duration then copyright law.

I believe art is crucially important. It is one of the primary means whereby a society communicates with itself. It is one of the ways a nation handles a tragedy, etc. Art is much like the internal thought processes of a society.

Copyright is intellectual protectionism. Perhaps it is a necessary evil. However if so it is only that. You might not consider Disney being able to sue people for making a cinderalla movie important. I consider Cinderella to be an important fable within our culture. Our artists must be free to interact with that fable.

Anyway, to tie this all back together, you must be very careful how you use the word "steal" in an intellectual property discussion. Steal is a loaded word. A buzz word if you will. It typically involes either depriving someone of something, or deception. Can you explain to me what definition of steal you are operating under whereby it includes copying someone else's proposal, and giving them credit for their work?

Those in favor of intellectual protectionism have controlled the terms of the debate. Those against artificially created government monopolies have invented a variety of terms to help shift the debate away from confusign rules related to physical objects, with rules related to ideas.

The holy book of the Discoraversalists, the Principia Discordia, introduced the term copyleft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

I may appear alone in my crusade here. However fortunately I am not alone in the rest of the world. That is why it is so easy for me to provide links backing my arguments up :)

You may want to read

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copynorm

"
As used by copyright theorists, the term copynorm (or more frequently copynorms) is used to refer to a normalized social-standard regarding the ethical issue of duplicating copyrighted material. Questions about the ethics of copying came to public attention as a result of peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing systems, such as Napster, Gnutella, KaZaA, BitTorrent and Direct Connect . Survey research indicates that most users of filesharing systems do not believe that it is wrong to download MP3 files of copyrighted music, even though such downloading may be unlawful. These questions are important to legal theory, because the ability of copyright law to control the copying of digital material may depend more on voluntary compliance than on hypothetical criminal or civil actions against individuals."

You're talking to a programmer. When you tell me a solution is impossible, you sound pretty silly.

I'm also a programmer. Not even knowing the system code and going only from what I've seen from the outside the idea of an amendment system is practically impossible. It would require a complete redesign of the UN model.

Keep in mind that most if not all of a UN Resolution code wise is text fluf that the code couldn't care less about. Almost everything we debate on in a resolution is blatently ignored by the code. All the code cares about is the resolution's header information. If a resolution passes the code adjusts the stats based on the resolution's header information. Repeals are lesser inverse resolutions that also allow a display code that allows for strikeout text in the history file.

The ability to amend would imply an ability to partially strikeout, and I can't see how you can easily implement it from a header only perspective. It has to be all or nothing code wise using only the header information of the resolution.

A proper roberts rules of order resolution system would be bastly complex and very fascinating, but you are not going to see it on a system that is stable and most importantly free. So I reccomend you lay the programing idea on the table for now. I also make a point of order that a quorum is not present.

:p

By the way, shouldn't gripes about a moderator using the same account for role play and moderation action be in Moderation and not in the UN forum?

I read the rules on proposal stealing and do not believe what I did qualifies. First of all to "steal" I must be depriving someone of something. Duplication can never be theft.

OOC: The rules of the game prohibit large-scale duplication in resolutions. If you had managed to get your "amended" version of Ceorana's resolution passed before their original version got through the UN, as you tried, then that would have deprived them of the chance to try passing their version.

Can we just stop fueling this twerp already?

IGNORE cannons at the ready, captain!

http://img258.imageshack.us/img258/6720/ignoreax4.jpg

Mods are using their moderator account as their UN account?Yes there are mods who use their mod account as their UN account, take a look.
http://www.nationstates.net/Euroslavia
http://www.nationstates.net/sirocco
http://www.nationstates.net/Katganistan
http://www.nationstates.net/Cogitation

Look, multiple accounts just isn't that hard to do. Why do you belabor this point?
And yet, you keep ignoreing the fact that the NS/Jolt interface is not working correctly right now and since the problem is on the Jolt side, our admins can't do a damn thing about it except complain to the Jolt people and wait for them to fix it. Which since we're not paying them to host the forums, doesn't exactly put us high on their priority list.

Like I said, I have created several accounts. If an account I wanted to use didn't work I created a very similar account instead.


Have you tried that recently? I don't think ANY of my recent accounts have Jolt access. If my Razat account lost access, I'd probably be screwed, since any new accounts probably wouldn't have access either. I still have quite a few accounts that do, but none of them have any logical connection to Razat and I wouldn't want to use them to speak for Razat.

Have you tried that recently? I don't think ANY of my recent accounts have Jolt access. If my Razat account lost access, I'd probably be screwed, since any new accounts probably wouldn't have access either. I still have quite a few accounts that do, but none of them have any logical connection to Razat and I wouldn't want to use them to speak for Razat.

I don't think they do. I've been trying to log one of my puppets in for days.

I know the feeling.

Yeah....shame you jumped the gun and responded, but I'll have to deal with those later.



*sighs* You don't get it, do you? Ridiculous was gentler than saying "stupid". It's really not appropriate for these forums.

[QUOTE]Yeah, I really got that, a longgggggggggg time ago. Thanks for explaining it again though.

So why do you keep belaboring the point?

Look, go ahead, piss me off. Take actions for that sole purpose. I don't fight for change for my own benefit.

Neither do I. However, I do know when I've gone too far or when the change I've asked for is unreasonable (I might still make the request because I want it considered, but I tend to acknowledge the request is unreasonable as I'm making it or in hindsight after I've thought it through). Even after several carefully laid out analysis of various points, you still stand by your theory that the major inconvenience for Hack (who, I'm sure, would prefer the luxury of being able to make both mod and player posts while viewing the same thread since he often does run across things he has to make rulings on as he's trying to post as a player) is better than the minor misconcept for a new player or that the major coding change required to put in amendments is a reasonable request for the volunteer admins.

I would like it if this forum was friendly to newcomers. Moderators participating loudly in debates, then taking moderator actions on the same account... can easily scare people away.

I think people like Kenny, Gruen and myself who can be extremely brutal in our speed and efficiency of our attacks would be much more problematic than any moderator-as-player issues, especially when the moderators are relatively tame compared to most of the regulars.

I hope I don't offend anyone, but NS2 looks like a lot like Duke Nukem Forever.

Haven't looked. Can't say. I wasn't aware they even had screenshots or released anything but thoughts. Actually, how can a strategy game look like Duke Nukem?

For their being so few moderators, they seem quite active. This community polices itself more thoroughly then any online community I have ever seen.

They are decently active. Fris and Hack give a disproportionate amount of time to the UN forums. Indeed, Fris was a member of the UNOG before his promotion. Doesn't change that they're overworked. Do you travel to General much?

Um, isn't what I'm doing right here "investigating the complexity of the problem?"

I respect the complexity. But I respect encouraging make shift solutions more.

Alright, what do you think is probably the number one problem with doing ad-hoc amendments (as opposed to repeal+replace or coding changes or the method you picked)? Think carefully.

Um, Aus was one of the 2 guys I was accusef of plagiarizing. He kind of has more say then 6 or so people that think it was plagiarism. It wouldn't surprise me if some of those 6 haven't bothered to read the thread where it occured.

:rolleyes:

Auss objected to your action. He refused you rights to use his wording. After that, the decision of what constitutes plagiarism, etc, is entirely the purview of the moderators. Auss's word is no greater than that.

If there was anything approaching UN consesnus the correct thing to do would have been.... correct the UN rules. I do believe what I did pissed everyone off, and they all came to the conclusion it should have been explicitly illegal. If anyone tries what I tried again the conversation would be much simpler after that.

Fine. I agree. Hack might want to stick an addendum to his proposal stealing rule at some point but if he doesn't, oh well. We have a case study to discuss during future violations, we know the basis of the ruling and we know any decisions that are made fromt he point of that ruling. Failure by the mods to put explicit explaination of every problem is irrelevant to whether you broke the rules or not. I still think you violated the rules as they were stated. I think the source of your violation is your notion that copyright laws should be different than they really are in the real world and you convinced yourself so greatly of that that you are incapable of comprehending the possibility that we actually use more stringent concepts of copyright and such. It isn't even about the rules or copyright or intellectual property. It's about respect, and despite your claim that such use is an ultimate form of flattery, to violate the very concept of what Ausserland and Ceorana wanted or believed in by doing so, you failed to respect what they wanted their proposal to be. THIS is why you're constantly in hot water. You fail to realize when you aren't respecting people. The fact that you still, clearly, don't understand why we objected to your IC comments (even though you've accepted this fact - though I see you violated it again in the NatSov thread) the way you did are yet another example of where we felt you were showing respect to fellow players and you didn't understand

The community chose to view a makeshift amendment solution... as plagiarism.

Yes, we did, but for issues entirely unrelated to amendments.

They then declared a makeshift amendment solution impossible,

For issues entirely unrelated to your proposal. We don't consider your attempt to be an ammendment. We see your an attempt as an attempt to undermine Auss and Ceo's efforts.

and the consensus does now seem to be that plagiarism rules should be strengtheened.

No, the wording should be. The rules are strengthened - they were by Fris's ruling.

Wait hold on. Seriously? I've been very patient in my attempts to repeal copyright law. I'd been sculpting this plan for awhile. Why would a "Rights of the Author" resolution that added increased protection against plagiarism be a metagame violation? Perhaps I mistated what I was trying to do. I'm not trying to write a proposal to change what people are allowed to do in the UN forum.

"Rights of the author" deals with the OOC environment of who's writing the proposal. Yes, there might be an IC equivelent persona, but that doesn't change the matter because the OOC environment would still be affected. The text of a resolution is an IC aspect of the game. Therefore, an IC aspect is trying to affect an OOC environment which is a metagaming violation.

I read the rules on proposal stealing and do not believe what I did qualifies. First of all to "steal" I must be depriving someone of something. Duplication can never be theft. However, one can steal credit. That did not occur.

The definionts of stealing, plagiarism, etc. are very important in intellectual property discussion.

Can you explain to me what definition of steal you are operating under whereby it includes copying someone else's proposal, and giving them credit for their work?


The reason you were not removed from the UN or these forums was because you did not proceed with submitting your proposal. Fine, I'll change my term to "INTENT to steal". Whatever. The fact of the matter is that if you had submitted the proposal, you would've deprived Ausserland and Ceorana the right to pass the resolution themselves, the one that they wrote and had full control over in this body. You would've (unintentionally) deceived the populace in suggesting that this was your proposal and that Ausserland and Ceorana assisted you. In essence, you fit BOTH definitions of stealing and it does qualify.

My basic premise is that it is a mistake to take ideas and treat them like property, to begin with. Property is a concept that had always been applied to physical things. Intellectual property laws began when kings would give their favorite artist (we'll call that person Arty) exclusive permission to do action X. It did encourage Arty to do X, and discouraged everyone else within the kings purview.

Patent law was largely used to prevent the US colonies from getting inventions crucial to the industrial revolution. It didn't work (the colonies violated the British patent law). The result was of this intellectual property violation was... greater prosperity the world over as a crucial invention effectively made it's way into the public domain.

Most people consider things like cancer drug patents more important then who owns a song. Therefore patent laws typically have a shorter duration then copyright law.

I believe art is crucially important. It is one of the primary means whereby a society communicates with itself. It is one of the ways a nation handles a tragedy, etc. Art is much like the internal thought processes of a society.

Copyright is intellectual protectionism. Perhaps it is a necessary evil. However if so it is only that. You might not consider Disney being able to sue people for making a cinderalla movie important. I consider Cinderella to be an important fable within our culture. Our artists must be free to interact with that fable.

Anyway, to tie this all back together, you must be very careful how you use the word "steal" in an intellectual property discussion. Steal is a loaded word. A buzz word if you will. It typically involes either depriving someone of something, or deception. Can you explain to me what definition of steal you are operating under whereby it includes copying someone else's proposal, and giving them credit for their work?

Those in favor of intellectual protectionism have controlled the terms of the debate. Those against artificially created government monopolies have invented a variety of terms to help shift the debate away from confusign rules related to physical objects, with rules related to ideas.

The holy book of the Discoraversalists, the Principia Discordia, introduced the term copyleft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

I may appear alone in my crusade here. However fortunately I am not alone in the rest of the world. That is why it is so easy for me to provide links backing my arguments up :)

You may want to read

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copynorm

"
As used by copyright theorists, the term copynorm (or more frequently copynorms) is used to refer to a normalized social-standard regarding the ethical issue of duplicating copyrighted material. Questions about the ethics of copying came to public attention as a result of peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing systems, such as Napster, Gnutella, KaZaA, BitTorrent and Direct Connect . Survey research indicates that most users of filesharing systems do not believe that it is wrong to download MP3 files of copyrighted music, even though such downloading may be unlawful. These questions are important to legal theory, because the ability of copyright law to control the copying of digital material may depend more on voluntary compliance than on hypothetical criminal or civil actions against individuals."

*yawn*

I read it all, I understood most of it, I did not further my research on the matter. Why? Because your opinions on copyright are irrelevant to the discussion at hand. You openly displayed your willingness to steal someone else's proposal, modify it to suit your needs and submit it under your name. If someone else wants to debate, at length, whether or not the concept should or shouldn't be used by the UN, they can - I'll likely ignore it. However, the fact of the matter is that the rules that this community has adopted under the laws of Enodia and Hack, you violated. To this day, you have not apologized or even implied that your actions were wrong. In most cases, you care more about the wording used to describe your actions than whether or not you committed an offense. Even after convicted by the judge and jury (the mods and community - the former not required to listen to the latter), you continually state that you did nothing wrong. You've showed absolutely no understanding of why we have the rules we have or why we would care. Every single person that has posted on here has either tried to lighten the mood or criticize you. Not one has risen to your defense in terms of opinions and perspective (though there've been a few fact checks). In my entire time within the UN, I've never met ANYONE who's received this sort of treatment. Consider that - there are a LOT of reasons for this.

Can we just stop fueling this twerp already?

I understand the temptation in this, but no.

He has not violated any rules severly enough to even take an official warning. As such, as much as he may annoy us and at times bear an annoying resemblence to a troll who can't stop being polite, he is a long-term fixture to this community. If we can possibly teach him how to be a better member in this community, I think it to be worth the investment and might save headaches down the road. I'm not asking you to participate, but at least allow my idealism to run its course before we decide to abandon hope of ever redeeming Disco. If nothing else, I think he has the potential to be an excellent member and if we keep deciding he's not worth our time, we'll just end up with a player who annoys us incessently.

Damn......I just made the first compliment on this entire thread.

He has not violated any rules severly enough to even take an official warning.

You need to look up more often. :p

You need to look up more often. :p

Yeah......I found that out about half an hour after I posted.....

Damn......I just made the first compliment on this entire thread.
We all make mistakes.:p
BUt I think saying someone is a potential good member is somewhat left-handed. It implys that they aren't a good member now.

Haven't looked. Can't say. I wasn't aware they even had screenshots or released anything but thoughts. Actually, how can a strategy game look like Duke Nukem?
Actually I believe that Disco's point there was that both NS2 and Duke Nukem Forever have both been in the works for years with no visable progress.

I'm curious whatcha meant by that? Not in favor of national sovereignty the NSO, or am I totally misreading?

I believe it's what one might call a joke

Would you mind if I took that quote and put it in my sig?

Um...you'd want to have this in your signature?

A very reasonable position, all in all. Disco U would have taken a similar position, back when he was young, innocent, and new to international politics. The idea was that our nation only got involved in the UN to oppose a startling piece of legislation they saw.

I the human player, (I tend to go by MathiasTCK online), have been looking for a place to discuss intellectual property discussions for some time. I got most of political debating need sated over on the IMDB forum for an inconvenient truth. However that got stale when I realized those opposed to the film were just popping in posting then never returning to the forum.

Ah, the relatively unmoderated and spam/trolling/flame happy forums that are IMDB.com. You seriously tried to have a debate there? I decided to go and make my thoughts into livejournal posts and just link anytime someone restarted the same argument in the same spot yet again. That isn't a place for debate, that's a place for talking points

Some of you might be sick of intellectual property discussions. As such I haven't been doing more then hitting about them on now IP threads. People kept responding to those hints though. Now I know enough not to respond to their responses, but to suggest any OT issues be discussed elsewhere.

Listen, if you want to talk about Intellectual property and fully discuss it on a serious level, I'm sure you can dig up a good debate over on General. However, what you're doing is harassing us on one area the UN discussed and derailing a lot of our discussion on other matters. If you want to contribute to the UN, do so. If you're looking for an IP battle, there's other places to visit that are better suited for such a purpose. Once the issue is passed, it is mostly dead to us.

Thank you Ausserland. Disco U despises the actions of your government, but you have usualy been a courteous debater :)

I had no idea how to propose a draft in that time. I grabbed what few I could find. It seemed like some of the words were key terms, so I have to admit I used your legislation as a crutch. I had also seen peope complaining about ever mentioning any other nations by name in a proposal. It was clear a brief line at the end was acceptable, so I kept myself to that.

And they should be only used with their permission. You forgot that part.

I kind of expected both you and Ceorona to comment on it. So it's not like it was remotely possible I could have fooled anyone if I wanted, which instead I deliberately tried to avoid.

I really did hope to reach some sort of compromise. I would have been happy if the exact text of your proposal passed with only the durations reduced.

I believe at that time, the resolution wasn't up for vote yet? Even then I was reasonably sure that your proposal would pass. Few people have thought long and hard about the various impacts of copyright law. Why shouldn't an author control his art his entire life?

(I'm trying to describe what happened, not discuss exactly why not)

My efforts were blatant. That is how I find it odd anyone could accuse me of deception. If I had been trying to create "the impression in the minds of voters that we supported your proposal." I could have been a lot more clever.

We are well aware that part of the concept was unintentional, but the vast majority of voters don't follow the UN forums. However, it is much easier to go "oh, Ausserland coauthored this brilliant resolution along with this one which were both well argued so I trust his judgement since I don't understand this".

I wanted the proponents of your resolution to discuss exactly why the changes I had made were unacceptable.

Instead the opposite happened :) My changes weren't discussed at all, what I didn't change become the subject of debate instead.

I have never seen anyone called blatant, and underhanded, in the same argument :) You get a cookie.

How can someone get called blatant or underhanded?

Um, ok. If you are immune to being corrected by the dictionary, I'm going to stop trying to correct your misunderstandings.

As I said earlier, the concept of plagiarism is irrelevant to the dictionary. You really need to stop worrying about the definition and start worrying about why it pissed us off.

Like I said earlier, I proposed a way of doing it without altering code.

A method which was illegal.

Frankly, I'm not afraid of the tech forum. I've done plenty of web programming. There might be limits on what the jolt forum can do, but we could easily host amendments on another forum.

The technical forum is for TECHNICAL ISSUES such as upgrades to the game code. It's not where they start going geek mode (well, most of the time it isn't). Amendments would be a THREAD on the tech forum.

What they thought happened actually fit the definition of plagiarism, claiming another's work as one's own.

Which you would've been unable to avoid had you submitted your proposal.

Please, anyone, correct me if I am mis stating the mods position. Perhaps they clarified it better on mod thread (back then it did not occur to me to visit the moderation forum. However, as I understand it, I was told by moderators that my offense was not treating this as a game? That my actions were ruining some important aspect of gameplay?

The plagiarism issue? Not exactly. You and the community had become embattled on whether or not the authors (Auss and Ceo) should have the sole right to the text that you copied. Fris's comment about it being a game was a method of saying "whether the real world does this or not, this is a game and we want to give our players such freedom" I know, lame way of putting it. Basically, Fris's point was that by stealing those lines, you were ruining the game for Auss and Ceo. That's why proposal stealing is illegal. We invest a lot of time into our proposals and while you might think it is flattery, we find it offensive that people would so idly take our work and change it to suit their ends putting in only a fraction of the effort we've invested. Auss and Ceo spent a lot of time on that proposal and you were willing to steal half of it to make modifications to suit your needs. That was unacceptable.

Mods are using their moderator account as their UN account?

Addressed

Look, multiple accounts just isn't that hard to do. Why do you belabor this point?

Did you read what Hack said? He said multiple accounts was hard to do because of the interface problems. I'm aware that you're running 3 browsers at once but I'd actually kill something if I were required to be running Opera, Firefox and IE simultaneously just to enjoy a particular site.

His work was in the public domain.

Dude, if someone posts an article online and you have that in to your University prof - it doesn't matter whether he's left it in the public domain or not, you still get a zero and a meeting with the Dean. What a fucking insult of an argument.

The definiton used in a universty context is very different from the meaning outside of academia. Plagiarism is also a legal term. In a court of law it has a whole nother meaning. etc. In a general context we use.... the general meaning.

And in the NSUN context, we use the NSUN meaning which you seem to feel you know more about than me (or any other member) despite your signup date alone is much later than the vast majority and your notable time as part of this community is a few months. I think your arrogance on the matter is probably the most appalling thing you've said.

If you somehow choose to be insulted by the fact that people are posting IC (I'm not talking about the content of what they have said, just the fact that they said it in character),then you are the sort of person who is likely insulted quite often by the internet.

If you post IC as a response to a serious OOC comment, you're saying "this post is unworthy of being treated seriously". There is a much lower value to the seriousness of IC posts.

No, I'm not one that gets offended by much on the Internet. I do, however, get offended when I'm trying to have a serious conversation with someone and they treat it as a joke - which is what I see in an IC response to an OOC comment.

I'm not suprised to be called a troll here. If I had been attempting deliberate breaching experiments, then you'd be right.

Trolling is illegal, or did you not read the rules?

Most of my offenses are things any new users might do. People are very quick to complain in this forum. I have found it hard to discern whining from rules violations.

Actually, no. If you didn't notice in your official warning, Fris has stated that no one has quite done what you've done. Your copying of Auss and Ceo's proposal was an all-time first for these forums and even better was the fact that you debated it. Your spammalicious hijacking to the topic of IP I've never experienced in my entire time (and not because it was IP, but because it was such a singular topic). Your continual failure to meet the written rules is far from what a normal newbie would do - heck, even a non-chaos causing newbie would commit the vast majority of the offenses here. Most newbies worth keeping commit one or two offenses, get their butt whooped and start acting like normal community members. You've gotten multiple unofficial and now an official warning. No, this is not typical newbie behavior. This is an "almightier-than-thou" behaviour

There are also easy ways to prevent each problem. One I've understood that the will of the community is "it's fine the way it is" I have no problem going along. However, I do feel a vocal minority, not counting the mods, has a great impact on the written and unwritten rules here.

Yeah, well, guess what - the total impact you've had on the rules is zero. In fact, the only thing mods are likely ever going to do is persecute people who take similar paths to do you even more harshly. I've been a vocal minority standing up for newbie rights and newbie friendliness before - but I did it while maintaining a level of respect with the community I was doing it with. They disagreed with me, but they knew what I was doing, they knew I was very good at what I did, and they knew what I said was worth listening to. Go ask the guys at FaitH about the newbie trainer, Forgottenlord. Guess what, I got a fair bit done. By the time I left, there were numerous projects in place that I had been suggesting and often was given a lead role in developing.

The vocal minority can be powerful, but only if they maintain a level of respect. You have lost all respect, you have no power.

As I've already stated, the definition used in a university context wouldn't be applicable here. If you are trying to say "Discoraversalism violated academic plagiarism rules" you would at least be making sense.

However I can also honestly reply "I did not commit plagiarism" because I'm gong by the defintion appropriate in this context.

NO YOU ARE NOT!

And you still entirely missed my point. Stop worrying about the fucking definition and worry about the reason we're saying it - because that is really the issue that's at stake. That's where you failed to be a member of the community.

Well there you go. You feel I would have benefited, even if their words were virtualy unchanged. As it turns out now, if any compromise version had passed you would be right. However at that time their work wasn't submitted yet. (IIRC, right?)

My goal here really is just to discuss the issues. This is a great venue for IC discussions of real life issues.

The fact of the matter is, my "stolen" resolution could never have passed. I COULDNT EVEN SUBMIT IT, I didn't have 2 endorsements. It was the FIRST DRAFT. The proposal I was accused of stealing was itself based on someone else's text.

I was trying to put forward a more compromised position. All this hysteria about a "stolen resolution" distracted from my actual effort. I had hoped that seeing a more moderate proposal supporters of the Ceorona's current draft might suggest a reduced copyright duration, etc.

You see, it has been weeks since you did it and this is the first time I've heard this mentioned. You make your purpose clear, you would've been free of the problem. Considering that people will make proposals while holding zero endorsements......and not even a UN membership......your claim is entirely irrelevant. Unless you specify otherwise or it is clearly a joke, the assumption is your proposal is going to proceed to submission.

Sorry, I try to respond to every post that is directed at me, even if I can only give a partial response. I believe last time I gave insufficient large responses. I will get to it :) If not quickly, then I'll post the link on my blog to remind me.

Ok

Some did find it humours though :) Remember, my proposed amedment was an attempt to protect my nation from intrusive copyright law... and the result was I got accused of an intellectual property violation :) Accused of using an authors words against them. You really don't find that at all ironic? I didn't really try to play up the irony, I played it very straight. Still some people commented on it :)

Humored by it is not the same as believing it appropriate. We were all well aware of the irony, but irony unacknowledge is often a sign of stupidity. Irony, unintentionally committed, is often a failure to understand the concept.

No, I can tell the regulars take it all very seriously. The phenomenon is known as the "curse of greyface"

No PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

*sighs*

Seriously, this is no time for jokes

You have chosen to define my proposed amendment system as plagiarism. A similar system could easily be enacted, except more clearly defined so that there is no doubt what parts of the text are new, and what parts are changed. It would be easy to make single edits and still be able to track the change.

You're confusing joint projects with amendments. Amendments are not feasable, joint projects (or piggy-back, as the case was with yours) we can discuss at a different time - or here, if someone feels like diving deeper into it.

You like the system now. Fine. I'm betting you count yourself a regular, fine. You take this all very seriuosly. Fine.

There comes a time when many communties become inflexbile, and uninviting to new members. I don't think we are at that point here. So I will encourage new members howerver I can. If I see a problem, I will propose a solution. I have QA in my blood still :)

That's Mik's job. Your opinion has already lost all value in this community.

Well then I'll take a long view. I've already seen active members in the UN... apparently dissapear. I've also seen new comers.

WTF? What does that have to do with how many times we've gone over why amendments won't work?

Unless these are just the same 4 people switching which nation they are using. I've only been able to keep track of nation names. If any mods have been posting with non mod accoutns, well I wouldn't know :)

There's been at least two puppets activated in the past month that I know of. I know Gruen has a nasty habit of dropping random puppets in the UN at random intervals with completely different belief systems and no one knows about it. I've caught him once without a major slipup or intentional surrendering of the information on his part, a few others have been a bit more apt about it.

Hehe, yeah. That was quick! Mind you, Disco U's environmental beliefs are wildly different from mine. I was at An Inconvenient Truth on opening night, and have been campaigning on it's IMDB forum since.

Dude, you came onto a forum and said "I don't give a damn about your topic". What'd you expect?

Um, Disco U's disrespect of the NSO, (I tried to keep my NSO hating statements IC, perhaps I overlooked some), was well earned. NSO nations repeatedly tried to stifle Nat Sov arguments by pre emptively stating, "Don't even try to make a Nat Sov argument to me! I'm in the NSO!"

Generally speaking, the NSO get pissed when you go NatSov on them because they're well aware of the NatSov considerations and have gone through the intricacies of where their personal beliefs and reasons for those beliefs lie as to wear National Sovereignty stops and where International concern begins. They're saying "I know the NatSov debates, but I don't believe it's relevant to this one"

I was quite suprised that that didn't bother anyone else, in character or out.

The NSO is THE thinktank about National Sovereignty. You preach to them as if you understand the concept better than them.

Oh I hardly expect anyone to do anything on this forum just to please me. I gave that idea up a longggggggggg time ago. I still hope sometimes my arguments may have an impact, but really, I don't come to this specific forum looking for allies. If I find people supporting the same issues, I will try to carefully help them out, without instead drawing fire to their proposal :)

Perhaps, but you are alienating EVERYONE.

Anyway, what I suggested above makes it realllly easy to post as 3 different nations. What I do is attach each nation to a different email account. Then open each webmail account in a different browser. That way you will always be responding with same account that got replied to.

You'll find I'm not technically illiterate. I'm well aware of the advantages and disadvantages of this set up. You don't need to preach

Well there you go. Asshole, could not be a more subjective term. It should have no bearing on enforcing the rules.

The guy who disrupts the community more and frustrates it to a greater extent is the guy who is causing the community the most harm. As such, if he's removed, it will do the most good for the community. That's what I mean by asshole.

In reality, I don't know if there is a general way to do it. You have to do it on a case by case basis. If there are multiple attempts to keep a topic headed away from what it's about, then the culprit is clear. If a particular person is hijacking to the same issue that he's had problems hijacking to on previous threads, then he's likely the problem. There's so many other ways to tell and to give you a single answer would be a failure to do justice to the process.

I'm not even going to bother replying to most of what you've said, Disco, because much of it has already been covered in greater detail by others, including the mods. However, one thing needs addressing.

And the NS definition is defined how, by who?
The rules for NS and the forums are ultimately under the control of Max Barry, who set up the game, wrote the initial coding and organised for Jolt to host it. The entire game was set up as a publicity stunt for his then new book Jennifer Government. He who pays the piper names the tune. It's entirely fair that he does so.

He has delegated responsibility for the game to several people.

The Admins ([violet], Sal and Pythag), who are AFAIK serious coders (unlike Max himself) make sure the game itself is running. They oversee any changes to the game code.

The Game Mods keep the game chugging along. They deal with rulebreakers within the game (TG spammers, UN multis etc) and game matters that don't require major recoding (such as Daily Issues and the Proposal Queue).

The Forum Mods oversee the forums. They deal with any problems on the forum itself (spammers, hijackers, moving topics etc). All game mods are forum mods, but not all forum mods are game mods.

Rules, AFAIK, are decided on by consensus between the admins, game mods and (in the case of forum rules) forum mods. AFAIK, appeals of mod rulings first go to other mods, then finally to [violet] or Sal. The mods may ask players for input into rules, but that is the extent of player influence.

The UN rules we currently use are heavily based upon the Enodian Protocols, set by the former mod Enodia. He set them because at the time he was almost the only mod looking after the UN Proposal Queue.
After the introduction of the repeal function, the Protocols needed changing as they longer fully fit the game code. So, the mods (in particular The Most Glorious Hack) went over the rules with a fine-tooth comb, and worked out a new set. Now we use the Most Glorious (or Hacked) Protocols.

That's who sets the rules and definitions used in NationStates.

It may seem like I'm merely restating things you know. But seriously, Discoraversalism, if you knew this you wouldn't have even considered writing that question.

Oh I don't mind being ridiculous. This http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Principia%20Discordia is our nation's holy book. Our nation is pretty silly.Yes, yes. King Kong died for your sins. I carry a copy of it with me everywhere I go. However, I wasn't talking about your nation.

Right so, couldn't you just create another? Spell the name the littlest bit different?Sure. Of course, since newly created accounts aren't interfacing with the forums properly means I'd create another husk. I suppose I could keep making them, but all those names take up space on the servers. The name-release code isn't working, so all those permutations will be locked down indefinately. And, frankly, I have enough puppets to juggle as is.

Oh, and, there's the fact that I have a life outside of NationStates. I already dedicate too much of my free time here. I'd rather not spend hours playing "new account lottery". To say nothing of having a hideous screen name like "[NS::::::::]Tehhh UN Gnomezzzz"

However I'm sure it can still be hard on new comers.Most people pick up on it pretty quickly. These aren't the secrets of the universe here. No Ubbo-Sathla in sight.

It's fantastically difficult to explain to someone who designed a feature set... how it can be improved.Do you know a thing about how this game is coded? Any clue whatsoever? This is an ad hoc monstrosity. Putting in amemendments would require a complete redesign, from the ground up.

And let's not forget that it's fantastically easy for someone looking in to think they know the situation.

What you want to do is... poll new users.HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! No. That's the last thing we'd want to do.

Assuming you want to attract new users.Hmm?

v1.0 (13-Nov-02): Site goes live!
v1.1 (20-Nov-02): Nations created since opening: 280.
v1.2 (27-Nov-02): Nations created since opening: 3,200.
v1.3 (10-Dec-02): Nations created since opening: 7,500.
v1.4 (29-Apr-03): Nations created since opening: 285,000.
v1.5 (11-Jun-03): Nations created since opening: 335,000.
v1.6 (15-Jul-03): Nations created since opening: 367,907
v1.7 (9-Dec-03): Nations created since opening: 519,027
v1.8 (28-Jun-04): Nations created since opening: 804,903
v1.8.1 (16-Jan-06): Nations created since opening: 1,553,079
v1.9 (11-Apr-06): Nations created since opening: 1,658,073We seem to be doing just fine.

I the human player, (I tend to go by MathiasTCK online), have been looking for a place to discuss intellectual property discussions for some time.Try a coffee house. Such discussions online are remarkably pointless.

Like I said earlier, I proposed a way of doing it without altering code.The UN leans too heavily on the code to change anything without altering the code. That's why repeals were illegal for so long.

For their being so few moderators, they seem quite active. This community polices itself more thoroughly then any online community I have ever seen.That's because we care about this game. Also, must of us have a strong sense of duty. We also tend to have a low tolerance for crap.

The holy book of the Discoraversalists, the Principia Discordia, introduced the term copyleft.Sigh. While I'm sure Greg is laughing his ass off (in the afterlife of your choice) at this, you do realise that "copyleft" was a freaking joke, right? Not to mention the fact that he knew he was using vast amounts of copyrighted material and couldn't use a copyright if he wanted.


Shadows on the wall...

Damn......I just made the first compliment on this entire thread.

Shame on you. :p

Yes, yes. King Kong died for your sins. I carry a copy of it with me everywhere I go. However, I wasn't talking about your nation.

Sure. Of course, since newly created accounts aren't interfacing with the forums properly means I'd create another husk. I suppose I could keep making them, but all those names take up space on the servers. The name-release code isn't working, so all those permutations will be locked down indefinately. And, frankly, I have enough puppets to juggle as is.


During periods where only one's moderator accounts can go online, it makes sense to post only using that account. If it was me, I'd also create another account, decreasing the odds of it happening again in the future. If the same bug that always occurs is "only accounts of a certain age, or older can go online", that would be pretty tough to work around :)


Do you know a thing about how this game is coded? Any clue whatsoever? This is an ad hoc monstrosity. Putting in amemendments would require a complete redesign, from the ground up.



The UN leans too heavily on the code to change anything without altering the code. That's why repeals were illegal for so long.


It appears Amendment is a buzzword that provokes a whole lot of assumptions. I didn't need my proposed "amendment" to ever interact with game code. Everyone seems to have missed this so I will say it again. I put forward a first draft, that I could never have submitted because I was delegate from a region with 2 UN members. I could never get a 2nd endorsement from my members, so I could never submit my "amendment." That is why I posted my "amendment" then immedietely asked for help revising it. My goal was to discuss what a moderate copyright amendment would be.

I was brand spanking new here then. I had little faith in my skill at writing proposals, of any sort. So I didn't try to write a proposal. You'll notice it never got rewritten.

My goal, was to propose atlerations, to a proposal that seemed likely to pass, in a different thread. That way I couldn't get dinged for being off topic.



That's because we care about this game. Also, must of us have a strong sense of duty. We also tend to have a low tolerance for crap.

Sigh. While I'm sure Greg is laughing his ass off (in the afterlife of your choice) at this, you do realise that "copyleft" was a freaking joke, right? Not to mention the fact that he knew he was using vast amounts of copyrighted material and couldn't use a copyright if he wanted.

Shadows on the wall...

Of course it was a joke. It was all a variety of jokes leaning on each other. The point of the text was that being a joke has no bearing on it's validity. Many true things are jokes.

During periods where only one's moderator accounts can go online, it makes sense to post only using that account. If it was me, I'd also create another account, decreasing the odds of it happening again in the future. If the same bug that always occurs is "only accounts of a certain age, or older can go online", that would be pretty tough to work around :)

Still doesn't deal with the problem of auto-login scripts not working. He has several puppets that officially do have access to the forum, but would cause a lot of grief to login to.

It appears Amendment is a buzzword that provokes a whole lot of assumptions. I didn't need my proposed "amendment" to ever interact with game code. Everyone seems to have missed this so I will say it again. I put forward a first draft, that I could never have submitted because I was delegate from a region with 2 UN members. I could never get a 2nd endorsement from my members, so I could never submit my "amendment." That is why I posted my "amendment" then immedietely asked for help revising it. My goal was to discuss what a moderate copyright amendment would be.

I was brand spanking new here then. I had little faith in my skill at writing proposals, of any sort. So I didn't try to write a proposal. You'll notice it never got rewritten.

My goal, was to propose atlerations, to a proposal that seemed likely to pass, in a different thread. That way I couldn't get dinged for being off topic.

I finally figured out the problem with this buzzword - you're using it incorrectly. When we say amendment, the assumption is that you are changing something already passed. The reason this assumption exists is that it is generally seen as too complex to try and counter a proposal while it's in its final drafting stages - ALC is one of the few exceptions, and it certainly wasn't written by stealing the lines of the resolution it was blocking.

Also, stop using the "I didn't have the endorsements to propose the proposal" argument. We don't check your endorsements. The assumption is always "this will be submitted" unless it is made clear otherwise.

Of course it was a joke. It was all a variety of jokes leaning on each other. The point of the text was that being a joke has no bearing on it's validity. Many true things are jokes.

Still doesn't deal with the problem of auto-login scripts not working. He has several puppets that officially do have access to the forum, but would cause a lot of grief to login to.



I finally figured out the problem with this buzzword - you're using it incorrectly. When we say amendment, the assumption is that you are changing something already passed. The reason this assumption exists is that it is generally seen as too complex to try and counter a proposal while it's in its final drafting stages - ALC is one of the few exceptions, and it certainly wasn't written by stealing the lines of the resolution it was blocking.

Also, stop using the "I didn't have the endorsements to propose the proposal" argument. We don't check your endorsements. The assumption is always "this will be submitted" unless it is made clear otherwise.

Well that doesn't make any sense in the context of this discussion, because I was proposing an alteration to something that was not yet up to vote.

Like I said, on the thread where this all occurred... it was clear!

As to "Amending" things that have passed.

I don't favor repeals until I have seen a replacement I support. Most repeals are written with a replacement in mind. At the very least, someone has a blocker in mind.

So, to "Amend" the Copryight legislation I have been talking about, annoyingly, incessantly, since it started trying to garner endorsements, first I will post a replacement to this forum. I will make it clear, this replacement cannot be acted on until the current resolution has been repealed. I will endeavor to build some consensus about what a moderate Copyright resolutino would look like (remember, durations matter).

Then I will write the repeal.

I don't ask anyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyone to change the code related to NS. That is a heavy request, and by me it would be ignored. I'm in favor of non code work arounds.

With enough duct tape we can achieve any goal in the universe :)

Well that doesn't make any sense in the context of this discussion, because I was proposing an alteration to something that was not yet up to vote.

Like I said, on the thread where this all occurred... it was clear!

As to "Amending" things that have passed.

I don't favor repeals until I have seen a replacement I support. Most repeals are written with a replacement in mind. At the very least, someone has a blocker in mind.

So, to "Amend" the Copryight legislation I have been talking about, annoyingly, incessantly, since it started trying to garner endorsements, first I will post a replacement to this forum. I will make it clear, this replacement cannot be acted on until the current resolution has been repealed. I will endeavor to build some consensus about what a moderate Copyright resolutino would look like (remember, durations matter).

Then I will write the repeal.

I don't ask anyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyone to change the code related to NS. That is a heavy request, and by me it would be ignored. I'm in favor of non code work arounds.

With enough duct tape we can achieve any goal in the universe :)

Alright, what you wrote earlier was an amended version of Auss and Ceo's proposal, but that is not to be confused with an amendment. Within the NSUN, the noun amendment has been reserved for the specific instance of a proposal trying to amend an already passed resolution (not to be confused with proposed replacement which runs under the assumption of repeal). With that clarified, I'll reiterate that an amendment is impossible from the structure of this game.

Alright, what you wrote earlier was an amended version of Auss and Ceo's proposal, but that is not to be confused with an amendment. Within the NSUN, the noun amendment has been reserved for the specific instance of a proposal trying to amend an already passed resolution (not to be confused with proposed replacement which runs under the assumption of repeal). With that clarified, I'll reiterate that an amendment is impossible from the structure of this game.

But I just described how you can do it! Write your new version, achieve consensus, write a repeal, pass it, submit your new version!



v1.0 (13-Nov-02): Site goes live!
v1.1 (20-Nov-02): Nations created since opening: 280.
v1.2 (27-Nov-02): Nations created since opening: 3,200.
v1.3 (10-Dec-02): Nations created since opening: 7,500.
v1.4 (29-Apr-03): Nations created since opening: 285,000.
v1.5 (11-Jun-03): Nations created since opening: 335,000.
v1.6 (15-Jul-03): Nations created since opening: 367,907
v1.7 (9-Dec-03): Nations created since opening: 519,027
v1.8 (28-Jun-04): Nations created since opening: 804,903
v1.8.1 (16-Jan-06): Nations created since opening: 1,553,079
v1.9 (11-Apr-06): Nations created since opening: 1,658,073

We seem to be doing just fine.



You are. Nationstates is doing great. That is no reason not to try and do better.

I think the point being gotten at is a technicality. You cannot ammend an in-place resolution. You can follow the steps you describe, but you can't just ammend one in place.

But I just described how you can do it! Write your new version, achieve consensus, write a repeal, pass it, submit your new version!

You failed to read my entire statement and pull the implications from it

the noun amendment has been reserved for the specific instance of a proposal trying to amend an already passed resolution (not to be confused with proposed replacement which runs under the assumption of repeal)

The method you have stated is a repeal/replace process, runs entirely upon a repeal/replace process. The concept is called repeal/replace. It is not classified as an amendment. As I said, amendment is a reserved word.

The repeal/replace process has been used several times, most notably attempts on Legalise Euthanasia (though the replacement was declared illegal), National Systems of Tax, and Eliminate Bioweapons where both the repeal and replacement were written by the same individual (I think there's at least one more, but I can't, for the life of me, think of what it was). There've been others such as Abortion Rights where replacements were written well in advance in anticipation of a repeal.

You are. Nationstates is doing great. That is no reason not to try and do better.

Yes there is.

1) We're already overclocking jolt.
2) NS is doing better than Max could've ever dreamed of. Most of the problems with the game, the forums and NSWiki can be traced back to this point. Jolt has problems because we keep overloading them. 0 of 0 error we've had several times because we end up overloading our alloted server space and all of a sudden, the game isn't working. NS's biggest problem right now is it is too successful for a game that doesn't even use ads for income. Promoting our existence to others brings absolutely no benefit to mods or admins but can bring lots of headaches.

This is exactly what I feared. I kind of expected it to be explained in a more democratic light though.
What did you fear? What did you expect?

Max says right in the FAQ (which you are expected to have a working knowledge of before playing) that the game could be considered his very own 'Father Knows Best' state. He makes the rules.

If you didn't know this, you've managed to avoid the FAQ where it is spelt out clear as day. If you can't find the FAQ in the link from NS itself (and it's fairly obvious), I wonder how effective a programmer you can be.

Oh, and I'm sometimes a bit wary of democracy. It sometimes seems to only produce fairly repulsive and indistinguishable 'alternatives'. But that's just me.

You failed to read my entire statement and pull the implications from it

The method you have stated is a repeal/replace process, runs entirely upon a repeal/replace process. The concept is called repeal/replace. It is not classified as an amendment. As I said, amendment is a reserved word.


Sigh. I'm trying not to get hung up on what existing processes are in place. Words might mean unique, interesting and non intuitive things here.


The repeal/replace process has been used several times, most notably attempts on Legalise Euthanasia (though the replacement was declared illegal), National Systems of Tax, and Eliminate Bioweapons where both the repeal and replacement were written by the same individual (I think there's at least one more, but I can't, for the life of me, think of what it was). There've been others such as Abortion Rights where replacements were written well in advance in anticipation of a repeal.


Recently most repeals I have seen are followed by replacement drafts.



Yes there is.

1) We're already overclocking jolt.
2) NS is doing better than Max could've ever dreamed of. Most of the problems with the game, the forums and NSWiki can be traced back to this point. Jolt has problems because we keep overloading them. 0 of 0 error we've had several times because we end up overloading our alloted server space and all of a sudden, the game isn't working. NS's biggest problem right now is it is too successful for a game that doesn't even use ads for income. Promoting our existence to others brings absolutely no benefit to mods or admins but can bring lots of headaches.

Ah well. If success further success is undesired then this a very different place then I thought!

What did you fear? What did you expect?

Max says right in the FAQ (which you are expected to have a working knowledge of before playing) that the game could be considered his very own 'Father Knows Best' state. He makes the rules.

If you didn't know this, you've managed to avoid the FAQ where it is spelt out clear as day. If you can't find the FAQ in the link from NS itself (and it's fairly obvious), I wonder how effective a programmer you can be.

Oh, and I'm sometimes a bit wary of democracy. It sometimes seems to only produce fairly repulsive and indistinguishable 'alternatives'. But that's just me.

I feared the current system is exactly what it is, I expected a greater pretense toward democracy.

Democracy is farrrrrrrrrr from perfect. I've got an image on that, one sec.

http://www.ishkur.com/posters/capitalism.php

Well I guess the theme there is more capitalism then democracy, but a lot of people confuse the terms.

The goals of this community are very different from what I kind of assumed them to be. Now I'm not quite sure what they are, I'm a gonna go reread a faq or two.

Recently most repeals I have seen are followed by replacement drafts.

Yes, it isn't an uncommon practice. The ones I listed are those that were successfully passed

Ah well. If success further success is undesired then this a very different place then I thought!

The goals of this community are very different from what I kind of assumed them to be. Now I'm not quite sure what they are, I'm a gonna go reread a faq or two.

I'm starting to feel as if we've made a lot of progress here. Thank you.

Yes, it isn't an uncommon practice. The ones I listed are those that were successfully passed

I'm starting to feel as if we've made a lot of progress here. Thank you.

I had a lot to get off my chest :)

I'm really not a troll. Not even some light side troll. I'm a bit of an iconoclast, but a timid one at that.

I don't like having a whole community mad at me, I just try also not to let it affect my judgement. (I don't think I succeed but I try).

OK, I've got some resolutions to contrive national sovereignty arguments against now :)

You are. Nationstates is doing great. That is no reason not to try and do better.

The number of nations created is like the number of hamburgers sold my McDonald's. It doesn't represent the number of different human players, just the number of times that a NationStates nation has been created.

I've created three nations: Mikitivity, an IRCO puppet, and another puppet that has long ago vanished. 1 person = 3 nations.

A better "NS game health index" as to the "health" of the game might be the number of UN members. That number rose quickly and eventually leveled off -- which I actually do think is healthy. Posting activity might be good too.

A better "NS game health index" as to the "health" of the game might be the number of UN members. That number rose quickly and eventually leveled off -- which I actually do think is healthy. Posting activity might be good too.

The problem with using UN nations to judge the number of real people is that there are probably some active people who never join the UN. IIRC, I was on NS nearly a month before I joined.

The problem with using UN nations to judge the number of real people is that there are probably some active people who never join the UN. IIRC, I was on NS nearly a month before I joined.

True. But I'm willing to bet some nice ocean front property in Mikitivity that there is less error in using UN membership relative to simply the number of nations created to guess how many real life people are playing the game.

I think the issue that we are really interested in isn't the number of people, but the degree of activity and interest they take in the game. I'm going to argue that the people whom log in once a week and click on some daily issues and cast a single vote on the UN resolution that just happens to be queued up *are* in fact important. As a group they have considerable power over the game, as evidenced by a number of comparative polls asking UN forum nations if they support or oppose a UN resolution compared to the more liberal UN overall membership.

This isn't to say that I have a problem with either group, I'm just pointing out that we do have enough information via the UN membership counts, UN votes, and polls on this forum for almost a year to make some educated guesses.


p.s. please ignore the FACT that Mikitivity is landlocked. I would have bet some Kelssek ocean front property, but then I looked at a NationStates sea level rise report and thought it would also be considered an empty gesture. ;)

p.s. please ignore the FACT that Mikitivity is landlocked. I would have bet some Kelssek ocean front property, but then I looked at a NationStates sea level rise report and thought it would also be considered an empty gesture. ;)
Could be worse, Flibbleites is airlocked.

Could be worse, Flibbleites is airlocked.

Hmmm, this might suggest that NationStates sea level rise is of little concern to your people ... so in the future perhaps I can offer up ocean front property in Flibbleites. ;)

Hmmm, this might suggest that NationStates sea level rise is of little concern to your people ... so in the future perhaps I can offer up ocean front property in Flibbleites. ;)


OOC: Thanks. Now I have a country song stuck in my head. Would that property happen to be in a regoin of Mikitivity known as Arizona, or something similar?

OOC: Thanks. Now I have a country song stuck in my head. Would that property happen to be in a regoin of Mikitivity known as Arizona, or something similar?

Oh far cooler than that. I had Nickenstein in mind ... so I meant literally "cooler" as in COLD. ;) (Think Lichtenstein prior to the 20th century.) But I'd much rather hand out parts of Flibbleites instead.

Oh far cooler than that. I had Nickenstein in mind ... so I meant literally "cooler" as in COLD. ;) (Think Lichtenstein prior to the 20th century.) But I'd much rather hand out parts of Flibbleites instead.

Parts of Flibbleites? Like Bob Flibble's jackhammer?

Parts of Flibbleites? Like Bob Flibble's jackhammer?
IC: Could we leave my "genetic jackhammer" out of this?

Bob Flibble
UN Representative

You see, this is a trap. There are thousands of year old threads that I'm sure you've never seen - but the ones you have seen you've been pointed to because you never did any original research.

I never did any original research? What would original research count as here? Rereading old threads is original research? I've done a looooooooot of that. I lurked a lot before I ever posted, and I try to read everything I'm linked to.

I didn't mean to just rehash, I'm looking for the threads someone posted here, that aren't blockers, that I need to come up with a national sovereignty against. The ones I've seen that don't violate sovereignty are blockeres.

Maybe I need to look on the older thread? Let me try again.

I forgot, Flibbleites I think you wanted clarification? I'm asking you if I can put this in my sig:

"Flibbleites:Disco has the dubious distinction of being, so far, the only person whose membership was rejected by the NSO."