1

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Religious Freedom!

« on: February 28, 2014, 08:18:39 AM »

Most of those examples are irrelevant.  A female should always be present for pelvic exams and baby deliveries . Men showering together is fine unless a homosexual is present and then it's a sin.  Showering with the opposite sex is a sin as it invites lust.  Looking upon the naked form of the opposite sex is a sin that invites lust.  Nudity is evil and should be eradicated outside of private areas such as same sex locker rooms (as long as there are no gays) and other such areas where one could not arouse lust in another.

Where are these arbitrary rules coming from? There's no mention of locker rooms in the Bible, so the only conclusion I can draw is that it is you, not God, coming up with these arbitrary conditions under which actions are considered sinful.

2

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: The Brain of Theseus

« on: February 28, 2014, 08:12:54 AM »

What if parts of your brain were replaced gradually, and then somehow the original pieces were put back together. Would there then be two of you? And which one would be the real person?

3

Philosophy, Religion & Society / The Brain of Theseus

« on: February 24, 2014, 07:27:31 AM »

One of the aspects of transhumanism regarding the preservation of the brain is the ability to "upload" a brain into a computer, thus ridding oneself of the body and all the baggage that comes with it.

However, how does consciousness fit into this? In order to discuss this, I thought it'd be helpful to consider another philosophical problem, the ship of Theseus. You probably already know it, but for those who don't, the question is if you replace parts of a ship over time until none of the original ship is left, is the end product still the same ship?

It's an interesting problem. However, what if we apply it to the brain? Suppose we could create artificial neurons and replace neurons in the brain as they went bad. Eventually the brain would be completely artificial, so is it still the same brain? Is it still "you," whatever that means?

The difference between this question and the ship of Theseus is that the brain seemingly has a continuous string of consciousness. If the end product is not the same brain, then at some point it would stand to reason that consciousness was interrupted. That would certainly be the case if we were to simply upload the brain into a premade computer and then destroy the original, but both situations have the same end result.

The problem is we are unable to determine whether or not the consciousness we observe is the same as before externally. The new brain would have the same memories and experiences as the first, so to an outsider would be the same person.

Moreover, this happens naturally all the time. Certain neurons are replaced if damaged, and even for the ones that aren't, atoms and molecules and subatomic particles move all the time. Your brain is not the same brain of even a decade ago, so how is it that consciousness can be seemingly continuous if the brain is not the same as it was?

The point of this discussion is to explore the nature of consciousness, namely what it means in connection to the biological components of the brain and how the identity of self relates to the physical parts of the brain.

4

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: The GOP has gone insane

« on: October 07, 2013, 10:59:26 AM »

A child on the west coast wants his parents to let him go on a 2 week long school trip to Washington DC. Mom says yes, and dad says yes. Initially, it seems like a good educational experience. But over time, as the trip nears, the full details come out and when it's time to pay the bill, $3500 for plane trip, hotel, plus expenses, Dad comes to his senses and puts his foot down. The amount too burdensome for his family to pay in their financial situation.

Why is it wrong for Dad to do this?

A family isn't a democracy, and "Dad" is not a branch of government.

5

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: The GOP has gone insane

« on: October 07, 2013, 10:58:23 AM »

The GOP controls the house. The house holds the purse strings. These republicans were fairly voted in to these positions and given the power to do this. It is neither ransom or an abuse of power. They were given the power to vote on the federal budget and didn't like the part where Obama was giving away hundreds of billions of dollars to people who did not earn it.

The continuing resolution and the budget is not supposed to be used to nullify legislation. And if this succeeds, it creates a precedent where a majority in the house, or heck, a minority in the Senate, could grind the federal government to a halt whenever there is legislation they'd rather not have.

6

Philosophy, Religion & Society / The GOP has gone insane

« on: October 07, 2013, 10:35:12 AM »

They have. Here's why.

The Affordable Care Act has literally gone through all three branches of the US Government. It went through the House and passed. Then it went to the Senate and passed. Then it went to the President, who signed it. Then it went to the Supreme Court, and it was upheld. It has been quite literally been done by the book, and it's situations like these that were foreseen by the people who wrote the Constitution, which is why they wrote in three branches of government.

But the GOP in the House, for some reason, think they know better than the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, as well as the founding fathers and the Constitution, and have decided to take matters into their own hands and nullify legislation they think shouldn't be law.

What in the world.

7

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Grand Theft Auto V

« on: September 22, 2013, 07:34:08 PM »

There's a difference between being a bad person and being a bad character.  Characters like Michael's wife and Franklin's aunt aren't necessarily immoral, but they're presented unsympathetically in relation to the protagonists.  They're there to complain, nag, and yell at the men, and without any real perspective as to where they're coming from, they just come across as annoying and unlikable.  (That's so far, anyway.  I haven't beaten the game yet.)

Well, that is a stereotype. GTA didn’t invent it. I could just as easily point out the stereotypical right-wingers in the game, or the stereotypical black people in the ghetto. Why are women special in having to rise above stereotypes when no other character does so?

8

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Grand Theft Auto V

« on: September 22, 2013, 03:07:30 PM »

Everyone except the main character and friends are pretty terrible, and that's only sometimes. Roman and Niko and their buddies were all pretty horrible too. The whole point of GTA is to build on stereotypes. Why the heck would you have a strong, independent female lead in games like that? I don't get it.

9

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Grand Theft Auto V

« on: September 22, 2013, 02:41:57 PM »

What about Aunt Denise and her buddies that do spirit walking or whatever?

10

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Grand Theft Auto V

« on: September 22, 2013, 10:52:48 AM »

Why would a video game have a strong female lead if the target demographic is 18–30-year-old males? The demographics of video game players is reaching equilibrium, but the fact of the matter is there aren't a lot of women video game players who are going to be interested in playing GTA V.

11

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Grand Theft Auto V

« on: September 20, 2013, 01:43:40 PM »

At best, you're illiterate, at worst, you're grasping for straws.

Only if by “now” you mean “for the past twelve years.” GTA IV for PC came out five years ago and was a shitty PC port.

12

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Grand Theft Auto V

« on: September 20, 2013, 10:46:19 AM »

I'll just be playing Kingdom Hearts 1.5 until GTA V comes out for PC (legitimately). It's funny the first GTA games ever made were PC first, console later, and now GTA treats PC gamers like red-headed step children.

This isn't true, or is at least misleading.

GTA IV: Console: 29 April 2008
PC: 2 December 2008 (+7 mo 3 days)

GTA III: San Andreas: Console: 26 October 2004
PC: 7 June 2005 (+7 mo 12 days)

GTA III: Vice City: Console: 27 October 2002
PC: 12 May 2003 (+6 mo 15 days)

GTA III: Console: 22 October 2001
PC: 20 May 2002 (+ 6 mo 28 days)

The only ones that came out on PC first were the 2D ones. None of the 3D versions made by Rockstar have ever come out on PC within 6 months of a console release.

13

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Grand Theft Auto V

« on: September 19, 2013, 01:03:25 PM »

I played IV on PC, so I never really interacted with it with a controller.

14

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Grand Theft Auto V

« on: September 19, 2013, 12:27:58 PM »

I just ordered it and it’ll be here Friday, but from what I’ve heard, while in the car at least, aiming and shooting are bound to the same button.

Wut. Why.

15

Arts & Entertainment / Re: SPOILER: Breaking Bad predictions/discussion

« on: September 18, 2013, 02:59:29 PM »

Poor Hank. He was the only character in the show I cared much for.

Yes, his death was distressing. Why did he refer to himself as "Asac" Shrader? ASAC? A. Sack? Is that a DEA title? Also, do you not also sympathize with Jesse?

Assistant special agent in charge.

Can a real police officer (Saddam) confirm?

He was teaching this word to Holly in “Dead Freight.” “Can you say ASAC Schraeder?”

16

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Obama Doesn't Have Time for Us

« on: June 26, 2013, 11:57:45 AM »

Obama had tough words for those who would deny that climate change is a problem. "I am willing to work with anybody…to combat this threat on behalf of our kids," he said. "But I don't have much patience for anybody who argues the problem is not real. We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat-Earth Society."

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/06/obama-climate-speech-georgetown

17

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Star Trek: Into Darkness

« on: May 21, 2013, 07:18:40 PM »

They're capable action movies, not Star Trek movies (even though there's been a lot of shitty Star Trek action movies).

i.e. all the TNG films, except maybe Generations, but it sucked anyway.

18

Arts & Entertainment / Star Trek: Into Darkness

« on: May 21, 2013, 02:49:09 PM »

This isn't Star Trek. What is this? Why does it have "Star Trek" in the title?

19

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Free Will

« on: May 14, 2013, 04:49:03 PM »

If pi were converted into language it would be able to predict every action that is ever going to be done, free will doesn't exist.  We are just doing what pi tells us to.

It would also predict everything that wouldn’t happen. Finite choices taken from infinite possibilities seems pretty free to me.

20

Arts & Entertainment / Re: SimCity's GlassBox Engine Overly Simplistic

« on: March 13, 2013, 10:34:15 PM »

Bought this game. Would not do again. It is broke as shit and the servers keep crashing my game, forcing me to lose actual game data and city progress. The traffic is horrendous and the safety department is mentally retarded. Five fires in your city and you have five fire trucks? SEND THEM ALL TO ONE FIRE! And get this, the fire trucks can get stuck in traffic. No one pulls over for emergency vehicles because fuck that, I have to go shopping! They even stop at traffic lights. Yes, the ambulance racing to save someones life would not dare run a red light, but hell, I wouldn't either knowing no one else in the city gives a shit about emergency situations, they would probably just crash into the ambulance if it kept going.

If you have played Simcity 4 this game would be a massive downgrade in everything except the graphics department. Yeah, the game looks pretty, but that is all is has going for it. I think that is why they called it GlassBox. It looks pretty, but it breaks easily and is empty inside.


If you want more information just look to Amazon.com's or Metacritic's user reviews. This game is broken and bugged even by beta test standards, it's unbelievable.

Demand a refund, and if they won't give you one, do a chargeback on your credit card. Do not let EA take your money!

21

Arts & Entertainment / Re: SimCity's GlassBox Engine Overly Simplistic

« on: March 13, 2013, 03:33:19 PM »

I'm not even sure there's 500,000 character models. I suspect the city size limits are so small and the populations fudged to hide the fact that the traffic and pathfinding problems would be game killing if there really were 500,000 people all doing half-assed pathfinding.

They should've sacrificed this individual sim mess for accuracy. SimCity 4 didn't have individual sims, but at least it was realistic to a degree, and it did that by estimating. It didn't get clogged with braindead sims making their way simultaneously to one location.

22

Arts & Entertainment / Re: SimCity's GlassBox Engine Overly Simplistic

« on: March 13, 2013, 11:33:27 AM »

the simulations are too complex for our computers

This is complete rubbish. Did they say this or did you make it up?
A basic 2.5 GHz processor can do 4 flops per cycle. So this gives you 10 gigaflops. Are you telling me that the movement of these sims exceeds 10 billion calculations per second?

Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that [Sim City] “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers”, and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game” for single player.

Which a Maxis engineer has just leaked isn't true at all. The always online requirement is solely for DRM. You can traffic the network traffic coming into and out of your computer, and it's virtually nil for the game. What's more, the game will play for ten or twenty minutes offline before it kicks you out.

Trying to have 500,000 individual people on screen doing different things can yes, overwhelm a CPU.

Except that when you get to any meaningful size, 90% of the Sims are just numbers on a screen. So it isn't 500,000 sims, it's actually 50,000.

What's more, it now seems there's no desirability factor in cities. Sims will move in even if you have no commercial and industrial zones, and you will get huge populations.
This game is a fucking joke. I'm sticking with SimCity 4. I'm sort of hoping that Cities XL or some other company will make a great game and play off this failure that is not deserving of the SimCity name.

23

Arts & Entertainment / Re: SimCity's GlassBox Engine Overly Simplistic

« on: March 13, 2013, 09:59:26 AM »

tl;dr: The new SimCity produces a ghost population to pad it's numbers and routes sims to the nearest possible destination when they embark, causing traffic jams and other traffic problems. This is contrary to what EA and Maxis have been claiming, namely that all sims are simulated individuals and that the simulations are too complex for our computers, thus why they have to have always online DRM.

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Arts & Entertainment / SimCity's GlassBox Engine Overly Simplistic

« on: March 13, 2013, 01:33:54 AM »

The problem is that, just as power can sometimes take a ridiculously long time to fill the entire map (because the "power agents" just randomly move about with no sense) traffic and workers can do the same thing. Workers leave their homes as "people agents." These agents go to the nearest open job, not caring at all where they worked yesterday. They fill the job, and the next worker goes to the next building and fills that job, and so it goes until all the jobs are "filled." So, when you have all your "worker" sims leaving their houses for work in the morning, they all cluster together like some kind of "tourist pack" until they have all been sucked into "jobs." They don't seem to care if the job is Commercial or Industrial, only that it's a job.
 
"Scholars" are handled exactly the same way. As are school busses and mass-transit agents. This is why you see the "trains" of busses roaming through your city, and why entire sections of town may never see a school bus, despite having plenty of stops... Once all the busses are full, they return to school and stay there until school is done for the day.
 
Now, here is where it gets really good... In the evening, when work and school lets out, they all leave and proceed to the absolute closest "open" house. They don't "own" their houses. The "people" you see are actually just mindless agents (much like the utilities agents, as I said earlier) making the whole idea of "being able to follow a 'Sim' through their entire day" utterly POINTLESS!!"
 
The reason traffic problems cause so many other side-effects, is because EVERYTHING relies on those "people" who are stuck in herds trying to go to whatever closest "slot" they can fill. Casinos go bust because "tourists" are just "shopper agents" from out of town. You MUST put casinos RIGHT next to the entrance to your city if you want them to succeed. Placing street-car stops by the casinos can actually cause more harm than good! Why? Because the "shoppers" will board the streetcar stop (because it's the closest open slot) and be shuttled to a shopping district instead.

One single house, as already explained by anickle, has a pop. of 6: 4 workers, 2 shoppers and actually 2 kids that are never included in the population count. So it is safe to assume that from now on, provided sims don’t die, my workers count and my shoppers count will always be: “no. of houses x 4” (workers) or “no. of houses x 2” (shoppers).
I kept building more houses and recording the increase in the numbers of workers and shoppers. As expected, all the numbers were perfectly fine. For a while. User marcoyim believed the pop. count started to go wrong at 500, so I tested for that, and he is absolutely right.
This is the count of the population and the number of workers and shoppers so far:
1 house = 6 pop, 4w + 2s; 12 houses = 72 pop, 48w + 24s; 53 houses = 318 pop, 212w + 106s; 83 houses = 498 pop, 332w + 166s
And here it goes the odd part: as the next house was finished, the population count increased by 7, not by 6. As the next house was finished, the population count increased by 10, and at the next time it increased by 12.
BUT THE HOUSES CONTINUED WITH 6 PEOPLE (4W+2S).
So indeed, the game adds a phantom population in the count that doesn’t really exist, and I guess I figured out the general way in which it does that. I will put the numbers as they are easier to understand by themselves.
House 1, which would achive 500 or more in the pop count: 7 sims (6 real); House 2: 10; House 3: 12; House 4: 13; (...)
I kept counting this for 41 houses, always subtracting the former pop count on the new one to find how many sims the game added in the pop count, while the houses always actually had 6 sims. The real progression I found was this:
7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 14, 15, 15, 15, 16, 17, 18, 17, 18, 18, 18, 18, 18, 19, 18, 19, 19, 19, 20, 19, 20, 20, 21, 20, 20, 21, 21, 20, 21, 21, 21, 22, 21, 21, 22, 22, 22.
The final house count was at 121 and the population was at 1.294, but I had 507 workers and 254 shoppers. If you do the math, I should have a little less (and 1 worker died too). It was not at the “pop x 4” and “pop x 2” ratio I told you before because 24 workers and 12 shoppers were added to the real population trough this process of adding phantom people. So as you see, they increase both real and ghost sims in our cities.
I stopped counting there as I though I already had the general idea, and I am sure you get it too: The game adds an increasing number of sims per house to the population count, in an organized way, without ever adding these sims in your actual city.
This is alarming, at least. It means that the game is not what is advertised (intentionally or not), it means glassbox does not process every sim individually. One can argue that each sim is technically tracked individually when it exist in the map, but that is not so true as I will continue below.

Fuck EA, fuck Maxis, and fuck SimCity with a metal pole.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Republicans never ceases to amaze

« on: February 18, 2013, 10:00:16 PM »

Can I just say, wow.  That's a special kind of stupid.

It's not real. It's based off a radio call hoax from a while back.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Objectification of Women

« on: February 05, 2013, 09:13:10 PM »

Not fashion, but certainly the way they look. That's why they're dressed like that in the first place—to distinguish themselves from everyone else, and to fit in with their peers. Isn't that fashion, in a roundabout sort of way?

27

Arts & Entertainment / Re: The Big Bang Theory (the show [obviously])

« on: February 05, 2013, 02:00:04 PM »

It's not a laugh track, it's filmed in front of a live audience.

Which is essentially the same thing, since usually the audience is told when to laugh or is primed beforehand by a comedian. It's the 21st century. We know what's funny and what isn't without having to hear an audience laugh to clue us in. It's a trend that is dying, and most of the best sitcoms on the air today don't contain a laugh track.

28

Arts & Entertainment / Re: The Big Bang Theory (the show [obviously])

« on: February 05, 2013, 01:43:04 PM »

It isn't even funny from a humor standpoint. The main character, Leonard or something, isn't very funny. He's just whiny and bitches about the blonde-headed chick all the time. Either that or complaining about Sheldon's antics.

It's made by the same guy who did Two and a Half Men, so that should give you some clue. They treat their female characters the same way too. I don't think Penny even has a last name.

29

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Objectification of Women

« on: February 05, 2013, 08:57:57 AM »

I also don't think there would be any real decision about who to save going on in your mind. Rather, it would just be an protective instinct that took hold, making you want to save the prettier person more.

30

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Objectification of Women

« on: February 04, 2013, 10:52:36 PM »

If he looks mean, doesn't that make him not attractive? Attractive means by definition he attracts you.