I want sense organs that can process and transmit in radio frequencies. Also a dedicated brain region for doing proper math, like we have for graphics/language/projectile throwing.
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Show posts MenuQuote from: Cain on October 22, 2013, 08:32:47 PM
I know that feeling - my old work laptop required admin access to install Adobe PDF reader.
Quote from: Alexis
"Every single relative on my dad's side of the family has been to jail. I was going to be the first -- now I'm not."
Quote from: Not Your Nigel on October 18, 2013, 05:08:05 AM
Sounds more like personality compartmentalization than DID. It probably seems really exotic to you, but I've heard it all a hundred times if I've heard it once. Trauma and PTSD can certainly feed into it, and so can youth, and personality disorders. Ultimately, though, it's just another anecdote by a layperson observer.
Quote from: Not Your Nigel on October 17, 2013, 05:03:38 AM
Ohhh there is a lot of contention over this. One bone is whether, if people are aware of their other personalities, it can even properly be classified "Dissociative" identity disorder at all, or if it then falls under the umbrella of delusion and is more properly classified as a schizotypal disorder.
Quote from: Dirty Old Uncle Roger on October 16, 2013, 07:51:29 PMQuote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on October 16, 2013, 07:50:11 PMQuote from: hylierandom, A.D.D. on October 16, 2013, 07:48:28 PM
News in head...
Apparently the lady running the show is named Katharine...
Katharine has decided we are going to integrate.
I'm apparently not being allowed to be alarmed about it, so other people in my head are feeling alarmed for me.
In short, I expect to be batshit for a while, and not in a really cool Hirley0 way...In a very messy, moodswingy sort of way, and thus off the board.
Y'all be cool, ok?
*salutes, heads off to support forums.*
It's your life, but maybe you should talk to someone about that?
Yeah, another victim of MPP. The strange sort of MPP that never seems to hit the medical journals. The ones where the personalities talk about shit with each other.
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on October 11, 2013, 12:44:02 PMQuote from: Demolition Squid on October 10, 2013, 10:09:40 PM
Here's where it breaks down...
A significant proportion of people who would define themselves as religious do not sheepishly follow their church. Protestantism was largely founded on the idea that a personal relationship with God can be infinitely more fulfilling. The reason there are so many sects within religions boils down to disagreement, which you wouldn't have if people blindly submitted to authority. Some people might. Most people don't; they self-edit, they pick and choose which bits they want to believe in, and which they don't. That's why you'll never beat a fundamentalist with bible quotes. They are fundamentally committed to the pieces they like. The pieces they don't, they are happy to ignore.
Loudmouths with extremist views get a lot of attention, because loudmouths with extremist views get a lot of attention in any group. Faith is a personal thing, and even within the same church, let alone the same religion, you'll find people who have varying beliefs.
Religion doesn't make sense to you... and that's fine. I get that you've had bad experiences with it. But projecting the bad experiences you've had and assuming that it is the same for everyone else is patronizing. I would expect that most of the people on this board who have faith, have examined that faith and thought extensively about it. I doubt anyone likely to read your posts here will have uncritically absorbed religious beliefs. I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who have, but again, that's not something which is a necessity with the entirety of all religious experience.
Spirituality can be damaging, but it can also be profoundly helpful. Particularly when dealing with death and loss, but also as a gateway into all sorts of deeper ethical dilemmas. Quite aside from that, holy books can often be moving and beautiful. Just saying 'go with your gut' is fine, but there's a lot of times my gut doesn't know what to think, and then I tend to fall back on the philosophy and theology I've read to come up with an answer. I don't even consider myself to be religious or spiritual, but I've found uses in my day to day life for the ideas I've picked up from them along the way.
The Chao Te Ching is a great example of what religion can provide in modern life, IMO. Complicated ideas illustrated in brief through metaphor.
Like Roger keeps saying, there is no way to know whether there's a God or not until we find out the hard way. Continuing to use these tooth fairy/sky daddy strawmen is just... wrongheaded. It can not make sense to you and make sense to other people and both attitudes are equally valid. The difference between calling someone a 'faithfool' and calling someone a 'teabagger' is that the teabagger's positions can be taken apart through rational argument and discourse. You won't know if you're right or the religious individual is until you are dead. You might have strong beliefs on the subject, but hey, so do they. That's the nature of belief.
Thanks for completely conflating faith and spirituality, after I'd gone to great pains to draw the distinction I'm making between the two terms for the purposes of this discussion. Fair enough, disagree on my usage of the ambiguous as hell terms. You choose option b - ignore that and tell me why I'm wrong.
Note: this a discussion about whether or not it is good form to take the piss out of people who believe in invisible sky gnomes. There is no right and wrong.
Quote from: Cain on October 06, 2013, 12:55:42 PMQuote from: Golden Applesauce on October 05, 2013, 07:29:46 PM
The NSA doesn't particularly care about drug crimes except for use as blackmail to get drug networks to share what they know about the links between that drug network and terrorism / foreign intelligence. Not saying that the NSA hadn't tracked down the Silk Road guy beforehand, but if they did there's some senior NSA officials very pissed at the FBI for arresting one of their best placed informants and turning off the servers they were using to track terrorists with drug habits.
Actually, the NSA mandate specifically states they are to combat the flow of drugs into America. As a DoD agency, they often perform in conjunction with military anti-drug programs like Plan Colombia and Plan Medina (though on whose side is open to interpretation, given "ex"-NSA assistance to certain cartel leaders).
And as we now know, the NSA was specifically cited as the agency which passed on intelligence to the DEA's Special Operations Division, which then underwent "parallel construction" to conceal the source of said information.
Quote from: rong on October 06, 2013, 06:37:45 PMQuote from: Golden Applesauce on October 06, 2013, 06:29:58 PMQuote from: rong on October 06, 2013, 05:40:21 PM
V3X's post about dimensions has prompted me to share what I believe is an epiphany I had. I was thinking about dimensions and how to answer the question "Where is this?" you must add another dimension. i.e. Where is this point? It is on a line. Where is this line? it is in a plane. Where is this plane? etc. This train of thought has led me to believe that there are infinitely many dimensions. In many ways, I think of God as the "infinitieth" dimension.
The hidden assumption in that line of thought is that questions imply answers. "Where is X?" implying that there is a Y for X to be in. You might as well ask "What color are God's shoes?" and derive from question that not only the existence of a god but also that a god wears shoes that have a color. Or you could ask "What is not the answer to this question?" to prove that paradoxical entities are real, and paradoxical entities imply that all statements are true and all statements are false at the same time. If there is a statement that is true but not false, or false but not true, that implies that there is at least one question which does not have an answer.
As far as dimensions specifically, you can certainly construct arbitrarily many dimensions, but it's hard to argue that any of those dimensions "exist" in any real sense. The so-called "Real Numbers", for example, are constructed mathematically as groupings of countably infinite dimensional vectors of rational numbers. (Rational numbers are 2-dimensional vectors of integers: <numerator, denominator>). You can make a case that 2, pi, square root of 7, whatever are all real entities in our universe, or at least describe relationships between real entities. But then you have Real Numbers that are noncomputable, which is to say that no algorithm defined with a finite number of symbols could calculate them. I don't mean numbers like pi and square root of 2 - those are irrational and have have infinitely many non-repeating decimal points, but you can write simple algorithms that produce ever-closer approximations of them and then declare that finding the limit of those approximations is equivalent to calculating the number. There are countably-infinite such finite-symbol algorithms, and power-set of countably-infinite Real Numbers, so the definition of Real Numbers allows for numbers that can't come from any algorithm. Such a "noncomputable" number would have to contain infinitely many bits of information, so any real relationship that it described would have infinite physical potential energy. It's hard to make the case that noncomputable numbers are really existing thing in the same way that 1, 2, pi, sqrt(7) are.
you are correct and I concede that my questions presume answers. I think my assumption is that the universe is "somewhere" - but I'll have to think about it for awhile.
Quote from: rong on October 06, 2013, 05:40:21 PM
a) my friend told me he had an idea that there are many more dimensions in reality than the ones that we perceive. He thought maybe that certain processes in our brains happen in these dimensions that we don't perceive. He felt that would be a good explanation for why we humans can't seem to develop A.I. - we are only modelling the processes that we can perceive when, perhaps, there are many other processes going on that we just can't measure or perceive.
Quote from: rong on October 06, 2013, 05:40:21 PM
V3X's post about dimensions has prompted me to share what I believe is an epiphany I had. I was thinking about dimensions and how to answer the question "Where is this?" you must add another dimension. i.e. Where is this point? It is on a line. Where is this line? it is in a plane. Where is this plane? etc. This train of thought has led me to believe that there are infinitely many dimensions. In many ways, I think of God as the "infinitieth" dimension.
Quotethe information contained on the server seized by investigators indicates that Ulbricht/Dread Pirate Roberts routinely failed to heed his own advice to fellow Silk Road users: Prominent on the Silk Road site were links to tutorials DPR penned which laid out the technologies and techniques that users should adopt if they want to keep off the radar of federal investigators.
"This shows me that the head of the Silk Road wasn't using [encryption] for all his communications, because [the government] wouldn't have all of this information otherwise, unless of course he stored his encryption key on the server that was seized," Weaver said. "Either [the government] got his encryption key off of this server or another server that they were able to access, or he wasn't using encryption at all."
The complaint also suggests that in June 2013, Ulbricht accessed a server used to control the Silk Road site from an Internet cafe that was 500 feet from the hotel he was staying at in San Francisco.
"In other words, he wasn't even using Tor to administer the Silk Road," Weaver said. "Given that, it's amazing that he was able to keep this site running for three years."
Other rookie mistakes also contributed to DPR's identification as Ross William Ulbricht. In 2011, a person using the nickname "Altoid" posted a comment to the Bitcoin Talk forum trying to get users there to visit the Silk Road. Later in the year, Altoid posted again on the Bitcoin Talk forum, this time seeking an "IT pro" in the Bitcoin community to help with Silk Road administration. In that comment, he posted his Gmail address, the contents of which were later subpoenaed by federal investigators.
Finally, DPR tripped himself up when he ordered some fake IDs from an international Silk Road vendor and had them sent to his residence. The fraudulent IDs were intercepted at the border by customs agents working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which paid a visit to the address to which the documents were to be delivered. The agents noted that while Ulbricht refused to answer any questions about the alleged purchase, one of the identity documents was a California driver's license bearing Ulbricht's photo and true date of birth, but with a different name.
Quote from: Lord Cataplanga on October 05, 2013, 06:09:54 PM
The Silk Road case is very interesting. Let me see if I can find the document explaining how they caught the guy. If I remember correctly, he needed an ID document to rent some servers, so he ordered fake ones and someone opened the package in a random(?) search. The IDs had his picture.