Humodour

Not at all. Anybody talking about the mind needs to understand that it is a result of the operation of neural networks. If they don't understand this and talk about the mind, they're at best well-meaning but ignorant, and at worst an intellectually lazy quack. The human mind is nothing mystical. It is the emergent behaviour of a collection of neural networks. It's that simple (I'm looking at you, too, Orogun01). If you're going to debate the nature of atheism, religion, and science, you must do so from a factual framework, else there is no point in the debate aside from pseudo-scientific and pseudo-philosophical intellectual wankery. Philosophy has a core place in science - indeed it established science. But pseudo-philosophical garbage like "humans are operated by a mindless unguided process that is inferior to the accuracy of computers and therefore anything they do is suspect" has no place in a rational philosophical debate (and seems very reminiscent of the nonsense arguments in favour of intelligent design). Not only is the premise scientifically false, but the implication is false too - anybody who has done work in optimisation systems (which both evolution and neural networks are) or deeply understands the concept of peer-review should be able to tell you that. I say should because this nincompoop should be adept at both and yet comes out with ignorant statements like this. I do realise the slight irony in what I've said - since the guy I am quoting (through Hurlshot) is basically claiming (due to his lack of understanding of the science of the mind) that we can't debate atheism and religion from a rational framework. The problem is that the logic he uses to arrive at that conclusion about atheism and religion is itself both based in a rational framework, and itself logically flawed within that rational framework. It's a curious argument he makes, because it's hard (impossible) to prove wrong without using a rational (scientific) framework - he's essentially stating that he believes the mind contains a non-scientific spiritual component which guides it, and that he can't fathom how it could be possible for the mind to be correct if it is operated solely by an optimisation process like neural networks. Again, highly reminiscent of those ridiculous religious arguments in favour of intelligent design instead of evolution. So I'd say it is not me who has missed the point, but that rather intelligent yet philosophically barren and scientifically illiterate mathematics professor. EDIT: Essentially, he's saying that some mystical force is what allows his mind to produce rational scientific outcomes. Yet rational science says there is no such mystical force. Who is right - the mathematics professor trying to explain science via religion and in the process contradicting himself, or the cognitive scientists who work within a consistent and non-contradictory scientific framework and who make no ideological claims as to what their results SHOULD be?

What a rambling load of bollocks. Anybody who hasn't studied how neural networks operate is not qualified to talk about how the mind operates. He can talk, certainly, but he is talking out his arse. These "mindless minds" (less stupidly known as neural networks - distributed collections of nodes and linkages) are so efficient at what they do that we now widely replicate them in computers to solve computationally hard problems that traditional computing methods are bad at, such as image recognition and voice recognition, to name a few. Neural networks are used to solve problems ranging from optical character recognition in PDFs to battery sorting at recycling centres to face recognition to language translation. Google is especially fond of them. It can in fact be mathematically proven that neural networks are Turing complete - that they can complete any task which von Neumann machines and modified Harvard architectures (i.e. traditional computers) can complete, with identical results. This alone should be sufficient to debunk the junk science this fool is pushing.

You're a sexist pig. "Most women are cold and self-serving"? You read like something out of a bloody textbook!

German multiculturalism: Dead. British multiculturalism: Dead. French multiculturalism: Dead. You were saying? Looks like a bunch of social conservative leaders (Merkel, Cameron, Sarkozy) declaring multiculturalism dead. Did you have a point? That's like quoting a bunch of social conservative leaders claiming that global warming isn't real. Sure, you could do that, but it would only weaken your point by highlighting how small-minded people react to change.

Well, a rogue, bard or thief having an attractive and well taken care of body, makes sense. Though that doesn't mean they are perfect. A warrior would also make sense to have a healthy looking body, especially if they train and fight regularly and have to run around with a semi-heavy armour on. Though again not equaling perfect proportions Just my .02 Female runners often have problems with breast size. I.e. it's really difficult to be a runner when you have big ****. It does not make sense for female warriors to be big-breasted. It's not realistic. I notice that you are conflating "big-breasted" with "healthy-looking", as well. Was this intentional? It's a completely illogical and nonsense conflation. In fact, often the opposite is true, as the fatter you are, the bigger your breasts are, both for men and women.

https://www.eviscera...some-revelation

And also a rather poor source of information on one's legal system. O.o

Rubbish. Go back and read the thread and learn something.

God I hope you're correct, because the alternative would be absolutely ****house.

14 levels is too damn long. Really, you plucked a number out of the air based simply on how many people donated to your game? That's a stupid design decision! I'm going to get sick of playing level after level of dungeon. You aren't making Diablo or Torchlight! Even Dragon's Eye was nowhere near 14 levels - and it managed to stay fun and fresh because of it. Please, please, do something to break up the monotony of such a concept! Maybe have the second half of the dungeon only accessible by the second half of the game or something - I don't know... do something to fix what seems a really silly decision! P.S. I will admit I liked the concept art for the megadungeon, so clearly you guys do plan to mix it up a bit, but I'm still highly sceptical. EDIT: To clarify: Obsidian makes deep, intellectual, thoughtful RPGs, often with great combat elements. They do not make hack and slash action RPG Diablo clones. We have great games for that already, such as Borderlands 2 and Torchlight 2.

This. There are few circumstance where anybody should have to suffer extradition to the USA. You just can't trust that country to protect someone's human rights.

Are you that gullible? On the one hand you've got clear evidence to go by that the Republican party really does cause your country immense damage - take a look at how the Bush administration raped your country and caused the GFC, and then take a look at how all the recent Democratic administrations have NOT done that. Seems pretty obvious that one of the parties is telling the truth and the other is lying. And the liars are the Republicans. You think bat**** crazy tea baggers are going to be any GOOD for your country?!

That is good. People make way too much about who is in office, these guys are very limited in what they can do. Which party wins the presidency dictates the entire course of political discourse for the next 4 years (and often waaaay beyond - e.g. Reagan and Bush all the damage they did domestically and worldwide). As well as controlling all the powers of the executive branch. Don't you tell me it doesn't matter. That's wishful thinking and highly ignorant. Mate, you KNOW that the executive has power - your bloody constitution even enshrines a large minority of those powers (the other majority being taken forcibly by the executive, such as Bush's illegal warrantless wiretapping).

Am I missing something? Who is Cleve?

Correct. I'm glad you were finally able to pick up on that. There is hope yet.

I'm at a loss for words. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/pennsylvania-fracking-law-opens-drilling-college-campuses Apologise for your country and its ways all you want, yanks. The man and the corporations who own him are ****ing you six ways to Sunday.

Sounds like you've never had the munchies.

As Tigranes pointed out, 'alcohol' is not synonymous with 'drugs'. Alcohol is but ONE hard drug. And it is a hard drug which, for whatever stupid reason, most of the world's societies have decided to treat differently to the others (for the record I am pro the legalisation and regulation of drugs, especially soft drugs). And yet, even with alcohol you should still note the huge per capita consumption rate gap for alcohol between Western and Asian countries (which, IMHO, is a good thing for Asia from a health perspective). It doesn't matter that a Japanese teen was the one arrested with possession of marijuana. Marijuana is still illegal in Japan, and the penalties for possession even in Japan are much more harsh than those of Western countries.

Hey guys, I just realised I never thanked you for the advice. Turns out smart TVs are actually really dumb anyway. I strongly recommend AGAINST anybody buying one. Instead, you should buy a dumb TV which has at least 1 USB port, 1 HDMI port, and 1 ethernet port (or has two USB ports and a wireless dongle). With this dumb TV, you can then treat it like a monitor and plug in an Android mini-computer worth around $100. Boom, instant smart TV capabilities (and good ones, rather than the stock rubbish smart TVs come with) as well as access to the Android store (the same one as your smart phone). Maybe one day Samsung will integrate Android into their TVs like they do their phones. At the moment the their smart TVs aren't Android, but a really ****ty custom UI and OS job. Don't bother - buy a mini-PC like the Cotton Candy and plug it in.

Well, in Australia (and Canada), multiculturalism is bound into law (has been since the 70's in both countries). So if it isn't bound into law in Norway yet, perhaps that's what she is proposing. Otherwise it just sounds to me like she's continuing the theme of "Breivik and what he stood for were evil - we need to keep pushing in the opposite direction to those evils and embrace others cultures as a society, rather than drifting towards intolerance and insularism". B-bu-buh-but regulation is the problem, not laissez-faire! *crayon scribbles over the portions of Adam Smith where he says government regulation and taxation of the rich are vital for capitalism to work* RON PAUL 2012! Lemme show you my sweet Friedrich Hayek tramp stamp, bro! I love you.

Modern Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle simply states that for complementary quantities such as position and momentum (or say polarisation states of a photon), you can't know lots of information about both quantities at once. This is a fundamental mathematical property of quantum mechanics - it has nothing to do with your measuring device, how you measure, or anything you do to the system. So Modern Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle allows you to interact with a particle without influencing its future state, if the interaction with the particle is sufficiently weak (i.e. if you're careful enough). This is definitely a violation of Heisenberg's original formulation of the Uncertainty Principle, but that's because the original Uncertainty Principle was wrong. It was too restrictive because it posited that the measuring device and the act of measurement is what prevents you from knowing lots of information about complementary quantities. This old HUP posited that by measuring the particle, you were influencing it (think 'nudging' it and thus changing the system slightly, and this was responsible for the inability to know lots of information about complementary quantities. This is wrong. It is the core maths of quantum mechanics that prevent us being able to know this level of information, and thus it is physically possible to measure a system without influencing it (or at least, you can measure a system and know precisely how you influenced it and thus eliminate your influence in your calculations - the same thing for our purposes). I haven't read enough about the work of these guys to know if what they did is related to weak measurement, but it seems like it might be. More about weak measurement here (as a start): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_measurement

Anybody want to see some good old MUSLIM RAGE? http://gawker.com/5943828/13-powerful-images-of-muslim-rage

Wow, you are really spinning things. What you actually said (and what I was quite clearly responding to since this is the third time I've quoted you on it) was this: On a thread about Turkey being mortared by entities in Syria, killing 5 innocent women, you stated that the rebels should attack Turkey from Syria so as to scare it into attacking the Assad regime. That sounds like a ringing endorsement of terrorism to me. 2 women and 3 girls were killed in the village the mortar landed on, and the Syrians fired yet another shell after that one a few days later. So, are those 5 women just "some dirt"? Oh, and those "occupied targets" Turkey has been firing on? They're occupied Assad regime military person. They're not civilians, they're seasoned, loyal members of a murderous regime that has slaughtered over 20,000 people in the past 1.5 years. Turkey has been putting up with mortars, gunfire, planes being shot down, citizens being killed, and a refugee influx of 100,000 thousand Syrians (projected to be 200,000 to 300,000 by the end of the year) for one and a half years now. I should think that if Turkey were looking for any excuse to go to war with Syria, they would have done so by now. By committing acts of terror? You responded: I am not going to take the bait of your personal attack Gfted, although it would be nice if you were above that as a moderator. As has already been established in this thread numerous times, the first mortar to fall on Turkey (specifically Akçakale) in this latest round - the mortar which spawned this thread, this conversation, your post advocating that the rebels use terrorism, and which motivated the Turkish parliament to authorise military action against aggressor neighbours - well, that mortar killed a mother and her 3 daughters (aged between 8 and 14) as well as killing another woman. Another 13 people were injured - 3 lightly, 8 moderately, and 2 severely injured. And you notably did not respond to my questions about your advocacy of terrorism. Specifically, you restated your belief that the Syrian rebels should attack a country uninvolved in their civil war so as to provoke it into a war with another country. My question, again, was: do you really support this course of action considering that what you are suggesting is terrorism?

It's 6 weeks here. But the bat**** crazy leader (Tony Abbott) of our conservative party (which historically has been centre-right, but under his auspices has become extreme far-right) has such an image problem with women that he's been throwing around claims that he'll extend it to 6 months if people would just vote for him. His colleagues hate the idea, and he didn't pass it by them first. So it won't actually get implemented even if he does get in power, but you know, conservatives will pretend they'll implement any socially progressive policy if it gets them into power.

Most of the stuff from Obamacare hasn't actually been enacted yet. Shhh! Don't let facts get in the way of a good blame and shame session! And now, for something completely different: here is a Republican member of the House science committee stating that evolution is a godless lie from the pit of hell meant to turn us away from being saved by Jeeeebus: http://bostonherald....om__pit_of_hell