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smtucker

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The magic kernel 11 years ago

Very cool. I did something similar (but much less advanced) in math class where I generated something like a height map by "randomly" (I'd really just pick numbers that seemed good) assigning values to a grid and then subdividing the grid and linearly interpolating between points plus another "random" offset with a range that gets divided with each subdivision. It was a good way to pass time for someone who would rather have been playing dwarf fortress but only slightly understood the math behind perlin noise.

If your form of government, or I guess in anarchocommunisms case form of non-government, can't protect and perpetuate itself then it isn't a very good system at all. It seems like that you are saying that anarchocommunisms failures aren't legitimate because they were stopped with violence and treachery. To a lot of people it seems like the entire point of a government is to organize ourselves into some form of hierarchy to protect ourselves against violence and treachery so anarchocommunism having not being able to do this is its ultimate failure.

You "imagine" the effect is intensified but you don't actually have any evidence to support it. I've also worked at a restaurant as a waiter. Despite it being a very low end buffet where the food was cheap and wages low I identify completely with the article (except nobody had a stroke while I was working). The only real difference was that the author and his co-workers were much better at their jobs than me and my own co-workers.

Wealth is a big red herring in this story, but I guess its a story no one would be interested in without.

I'm not trying to make a value judgement, but isn't this sort of counter to how English is typically spoken? Adjectives usually come before the subject, for instance, one would say "look at that red car" and not... well I don't even really know how to organically word it any other way... "look at that car which is red" I guess. The latter sentence sounds very awkward to me.

Manslaughter?

To me it looked like from the point in time that the assailant brandished the hammer to when he was shot the female police officer was within inches of having her head bashed in.

If I were in any danger I would not like you to be the one keeping me safe.

On top of that in vanilla WoW people actually went through all the content in the game. People would complete most of the quests, go through the dungeons in your areas multiple times to get armor sets, and do PvP (open world and battlegrounds). It might take an hour or two to get together a group to do some of the less popular dungeons and Battlegrounds queue times could easily take upwards of 40 minutes. Open world PvP and ganking would almost always take a couple of hours as you had to sometimes infiltrate enemy territory to claim your victims.

Nowadays WoW feels more like a virtual lobby system for the dungeon finder/PvP queue rather than an actual MMORPG. No one really bothers to play the game as you would expect a traditional RPG to be played.

Why would one want IPv4 address space so badly?

Is it so you can communicate with servers or clients that don't facilitate any form of IPv6?

I don't think these two things can really be equated when you give them an honest look.

In one instance you are preventing others from profiting off their own culture. In the other you are piggybacking off of and profiting from another cultures success.

Both may be wrong but they are separate issues. Conflating them seems like a form of whataboutism.

You are right we should properly define our terms. And of course as you pointed out it is very hard. Maybe if we defined them in a sort of reverse order it would be easier.

Consider humans as biological automatons. Our brains are some sort of neural networked computer and the architecture of the neurons makes for, from a programmers point of view, some very advanced sort of "artificial" intelligence. From here there seems to be two possibilities: 1) That is it. Nothing else and their is no "being" experiencing what the brain processes or 2) something else, I think this idea is what we call...

Consciousness would be the idea that their is some sort of unifying sort of connectedness that allows the soul, ghost, being, etc to experience what is happening and in some people's viewpoints have an affect on what is happening (freewill in other words).

To me this definition seems terribly biased towards my point of view but I don't really know of any other way to define this.

I'm not sure "consciousness" really exists. A computer surely isn't aware of what it is computing and you don't need a global state of consciousness to describe its functionality. Why point to things like "consciousness" when our brains being biological automatons is a perfect explanation already?

It gets even sillier when you consider that the criteria for what things are considered conscious seems to be quite arbitrary. They say a human is conscious. Is a dog? I think most people would agree if a human is conscious a dog is. Is a squirrel? I think most people would agree. Is a lizard? Maybe. Is a spider? eh... Is a worm? well some might only have ~300 neurons... Is a plant? Well, no neurons, but they technically do react to stimuli...

How about a rock? Well it certainly doesn't have any neurons and doesn't react to stimuli but what is so special about neurons and reacting to stimuli anyway? The concept of a threshold for consciousness doesn't seem to hold any weight to it. It has nothing backing it up.

When two particles interact with each other is a barrier of consciousness formed? Are all systems conscious? Is the universe conscious? Are all possible systems made up of all the connections of all the constituent parts of the universe conscious?

Next comes one of the worst and one of the best parts of D&D’s character system. D&D’s Race system is, frankly, kind of gross. The idea that a person’s race tells you something about their character is a sign of the racist elements in the fantasy tradition before and around D&D.

...Really?

This type of thought coming from MIT makes me question my sanity.

Simple doesn't necessarily mean easy to understand, particularly when the thing doing the understanding is part of (and constrained by the rules of) the system being analysed. It is conceivable that there are simple aspects about our universe we will never understand because they are hidden behind some threshold of observation.

There is some distance from this to antenna design, electromagnetism, etc, but I think you have to be fluent in proofs to actually follow along on those. Math is a big subject; ymmv.

I'm only 20 years old and hopefully I have a long life ahead of me so I'm not too worried about how long it takes, I just want to get on the right track.

Thank you on the book recommendation, that looks like it is exactly the type of resource I was looking for!