Wesley

I am going to be on a bunch Saturday morning into early afternoon probably. (EST time) I am currently working full time, finishing up a degree, and looking for a house so I don't have the most time in the world for games so I think I just logged on to try to add Robin to my friends list again. I also think that that really stinks that it is totally different. Even if we can swap regions and play (which I know how to do) I wont be able to have my collection (or vice-versa) and may not make for the most satisfying games. It might have to be a situation where we play in a couple months or something when we are able to build up at least a free-to-play deck that could make it to legendary or something, but even then it would be a single deck which is meh. So yea, to say the least I am not very happy about this news.

However, most of the people who are against people using cocain have no rational or empirical reason for doing it, just the knowledge that it is bad. Analogizing it to something they are familiar with and have seen in small use situations, party situations, and addictive or unhealthy situations can be very valuable to these people as far as making it not seem like a far-off and evil thing but something that they actually need to reason through and look at some data in order to decide if it is good or bad. I am interested Think Free, what is your relationship with illegal and/or legal drugs? How have they impacted your life?

Why are you asking this question? I kind of feel like this is an arbitrary abstraction devoid of details. Of course it could, theoretically, be possible, but often the real world provides many of the complications as to why it might be more difficult to achieve.

That is my point, thanks.

Well for one, getting the required dose is a bit of a difficulty and often it is easier to get it with cocaine. Second, why do people make moonshine even though alcohol is readily available? Third, I am sure there are some differneces (I do not know as I have never done cocaine and do caffiene in very small doses approximately once a month) and that very similar doesn't necessarily mean identical.

I think you are missing some of the point. Coca-Cola used to have small amounts of cocaine in it and could be bought at the local drug store by children. At some point it was banned and caffiene was chosen as a replacement because it causes nearly identical reactions of being an upper and addictive tendencies that cocaine does. It could easily have been done in reverse where caffiene was originally in Cafi-Cola and was banned and so they replaced it with cocaine. I am not sure if you have ever seen someone snort caffiene or take a concentrated caffiene pill meant to get someone high, but the effects are very similar to someone having done cocaine. Also, my mother was very much a Diet Coke addict and has several time tried to quit by going to caffiene free Diet Coke. She finally was able to do it after several years and many, many attempts at trying. Thus, I would not be able to necessarily compare caffiene to all other drugs in the same way that it would be hard to compare someone on PCP to someone smoking weed or someone on alcohol to someone doing cocaine. However, the comparison between caffiene and cocaine is very, very strong and it was intentionally chosen as a legal replacement because of the banning of something it was similar to.

In the bottom right of posts, there is a Quote button and a MultiQuote button (for multiple users). I never said that it was only humans or only things that can feel pain. I said that it must have physical origins and then emerge from things that can be proven to exist. There is no abstract "consciousness energy" that exists outside of physicality into a supernatural realm.

Transhumanism in most ways as described by the original transhumanists is already here. It is hard to say in many ways that modern humans would not be considered gods if their bodies (augmented with a variety of technologies that allow them to communicate with anyone in the whole world instantly, know any fact that has ever been discovered, or fly) were transported back a few decades, let alone hundreds of years and compared to what we thought of then as humans. This still doesn't mean that consciousness can transcend physical form. Even in theoretical artifical intelligence theories, that consciousness still has a physical form, it iss just able to achieve more and be more amazing than was previously thought possible.

Well I am not sure it could be described as a "thing" as it wouldn't exist. However there are many inventions, memes, and ideas that occur ow develop from multiple people interacting that no one person could come up with. This emergent property would still have the original human and physical form of seveeral bodies and computers that comprise it and would not be autonomous in any sense, and thus would still be an emergent property of physical things and people.

Do you understand the idea of emergent properties? Aka, I have a processor, graphics card, hard drive, etc which none of them make a usable computer. However, I take them and put them together and gain an emergent property of physical and real things that is a computer. This analogy/theory explains how consciousness could arise as an emergent property out of a human physical form, but that if I removed the blood or brain or heart then it would no longer function. I think you have the burden of proof to prove that consciousness is something that is supernatural, not the other way around.

Wow, not as bad as I thought. I probably have that available on my storage drive, especially since I was considering getting NAS sometime soon anyway. I could probably be a seed for at least a couple days once someone got the torrent up.

This is why the best players in the world only make 0-2 mistakes per game and still lose like 40% of the games played. I do understand what you mean though. With any game like this it is not perfeect strategy. THey have to throw in a bit of luck (at minimum the order you draw cards off the top of the deck) to make it interesting.

What they think they are doing: What they are actually doing:

What imbalances do you think there are? The part that I find somewhat annoying is that the meta changes so fast so that the dominant decks can migrate from day to day so I can't use the same deck and learn it well in order to consitantly win. However, they are starting to release adventure modes and will come out with expansions and will most likely start to deal with game imbalances by releasing new cards that counter cards that they might think are too strong, plus providing new single player challenges. If you add me and I see you on sometime, then maybe we can play.

Ah, there is another thread about this. How much money in donations would be needed for this to happen? Also, I was wondering how valuable the entire video database would be and whether (as a backup) we might want to do somewhat lower quality in order for the torrent to be able to proliferate further and not be prohibitive for a seed to participate.

I play Hearthstone as my most played computer game nowadays. I am a hobby board gamer and had never played a CCG before and am really enjoying the game which I have been in since the middle of closed beta. If you want to add me, I am Snipes777#1449 (I am pretty sure, let me know if it doesn't work). I always enjoy throwing together decks that aren't the most viable but look fun and try and see how it does. I also would be open to a more intense "tournament style" scrimmage though I am not amazing at the game, so the games usually have a decent variance depending on how many mistakes I make throughout the course of the game.

Ok, the question still stands.

Sorry, what?

http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/04/25/1-13-schoolkids-takes-psych-meds/

I have heard that Mike is interested in getting something organized this year along the lines of the old barbeques, but I am not sure if progress is being made along those lines. I am in the Rochester, NY area and would be happy to help out with some planning and logistics for a weekend over the summer or something and I have been getting together a few people in the area for FDR meetups so I might be able to get some of them to help out too if the plan was to do it here or something. Of course, this is just the occasional on-the-ground stuff that would be relevant for this kind of event. There is a lot that can be done remotely and with the help of more people, especially if you have experience planning an event like this, then things will go much more smoothly. While Mike could be involved in the project and managing Stef's schedule and operations and stuff, I think it will be much more guaranteed to happen if we can pool community resources and time in order to get everything together almost to the point where Stef and Mike just need to show up at a cool event. Kevin's post helped to illustrate how people can go out and do the things that they want to see changed instead of asking others to do it in their place, especially when they know how spread thin Stef and Mike can already be. I would love to see the community become much more active in creating content and getting cool stuff done and reseach topics for presentations rather than the seeming perpetual whining and demanding that I occasionally find on the boards. (This is not directed at anyone in this thread, I am just expressing some general frustrations I occasionally have with people who say they want things and then don't act to make it happen.) If you want something to happen, then work to make it happen!

I am a hobby board gamer and own several games (Dominion and several expansions, Summoner Wars, Power Grid, Carcassonne, etc), I also play Hearthstone though that is the first CCG I have ever been into. I used to be into chess, but since I have gotten into these other games, it often is meh and boring in its abstraction. I might play a bit of chess if I get really bored, but I would rather play Dominion with you if there is a way to do that online.

The other stuff I had read before. I really do wish that if you are going to criticize bitcoin you at least somewhat understand what it is and why it is important. Criticizing things because they do not fit abstractions when you don't even know how it works to know what extent it fits it or not is at best a silly exercise of mental masturbation. Your basic argument is that bitcoin is not physical and therefore cannot be sound money (as evidenced by the silver analogy you posted). If you define something as needing to be physical, then bitcoin will not fit that definition. I do not think this is the essence of what makes a good money or the point of the monetary theorists of the past. What I do think is that they were attempting to discover what made a money and what did not without claiming a moralistic argument (like money being forced to be used by leaders). When money is forced to be used, then it obviously is not at its true value to some extent and a market-chosen money (which classically tended to be commodities) was superior in a variety of ways as it had some low-end to the value that it couldn't drop below and checks for inflation, but mainly that it was market-chosen and arose out of people's actual choices in money as opposed to forced ones. These were also linked to paper money certificates that were chosen as it was common for less-than-honest bankers to print a few extra dollars in order to pocket the profits or provide a deal for their customers on storage costs (or even pay them for storing their money at their bank). What I also know is the idea of a money that could not be replicated or increased and had a fixed supply could not be imagined by the theorists of a few years ago, let alone several decades. The idea that money can be an idea and still not require trust in a bank or corporation was a seemingly impossible feat. Also, if you understood what bitcoin was you would understand that it is an amazing attempt to achieving this dream and may require small updates and modifications to the theories of old. For the first time, it may be possible that an idea cannot be increased in supply, printed or created at whim, or require trust in the solvency of a bank or country. It is a very interesting proposition and at least deserves enough attention to understand the implications and how bitcoin fits into theories that were invented before the internet. Maybe it will not work and bitcoin still has some issues, (in fact I think there are some issues with bitcion that need to be addressed in order to improve it's use as money) but I would like them to come from someone who at least knows what bitcoin is, what its goals were, and what innovations it is bringing to the table.

I would not. I do not disobey them now. I just often get irritated and think they are doing a poor job and think that traffic lights on private roads (if they would exist at all) would have to be much more intelligent. If they were not, I would drive on less annoying roads.

The main advantage is there is less data there. This means that I can download more with the same internet or data charges and I can store more on my device for times when I want to just play several of them in a row without finding them. 32 GB on a mobile device goes much further with podcasts than with videos. Some other things include that currently not all podcasts are on YT and that podcasts allow things like faster or slower listening speeds for improved comprehension or more content in a shorter time and can be listened to without actively downloading and streaming on the drive to work for instance which may go through patchy areas of service.

I have gotten super annoyed by the "intelligence" of traffic lights. I will sit at a light for 2 minutes and no one is anywhere in sight. Then, someone starts coming along in the cross direction and needs to stop suddenly for the light as it changes right then (when at that point it might as well stay green for 3 more seconds). There also is a lot of evidence that traffic lights cause more accidents and when all markings, lights, and signs are removed on the road people tend to be much better drivers as they need to be inherently cautious and negotiate their way around the road rather than blind obedience and trying to break arbitrary and stupid rules that leads to accidents.