>> ^shuac:

>> ^JiggaJonson:
Danarys is not supposed to get the unsullied until the third book... -_-
Part of why I've liked the series so far is the fact that they followed the books so closely. I'm gonna be disappointed if they stray from that formula.

Christ, there's only been one season so far. How could you get used to that aspect so quickly? Especially since it isn't true: toward the end of season 1, they dip into book 2 a little bit (Arya and Gendry joining Yoren for their trip to the wall)...so I'm just gonna call a little bullshit on you. Just a tinsy bit, mind you.
Besides...all the books after book 1 do not have enough going on to warrant their own 10 episode arc. Not like book 1 had. So in short: they are absolutely picking & choosing the best story elements of book 2 and 3 for season 2. Live with it. Or don't.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ SPOILER ALERT @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
I trust the show runners to understand that to have, for example, the red wedding in season 2 would be too early. That's probably a season 3 storyline. But as far as Daenerys goes: what does she actually do for all of book 2? Not that much: she travels the desert, goes to Qarth, and walks through that magic room maze thing. Yaaaawn.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ SPOILER ALERT @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
My big concern is getting HBO to see the series through to the end without canceling it. That's the real cliffhanger.

I'm sorry, bullshit on what, exactly? That they didn't stick to the story line of the book in the first season?


The only glaring example of that, I can think of in the first season, is when Caitlyn visits Jamie Lanister at the camp and gets him to admit pushing Brann out of the window. That and I guess the part you mentioned. But, to be fair, Arya's last chapter in Game of Thrones ends with him cutting off her hair and telling her to go with him; the show shows her being called to the cart right after that happened. That insignificant difference is far cry from introducing an entirely new set of characters/plot element from a different book a whole season too soon.

Find me more glaring examples of not closely following the plot and we'll have something to discuss, until then...

*throws bullshit back @shuac*

>> ^JiggaJonson:

Danarys is not supposed to get the unsullied until the third book... -_-
Part of why I've liked the series so far is the fact that they followed the books so closely. I'm gonna be disappointed if they stray from that formula.


Christ, there's only been one season so far. How could you get used to that aspect so quickly? Especially since it isn't true: toward the end of season 1, they dip into book 2 a little bit (Arya and Gendry joining Yoren for their trip to the wall)...so I'm just gonna call a little bullshit on you. Just a tinsy bit, mind you.

Besides...all the books after book 1 do not have enough going on to warrant their own 10 episode arc. Not like book 1 had. So in short: they are absolutely picking & choosing the best story elements of book 2 and 3 for season 2. Live with it. Or don't.

*@*@*@*@*@*@*@*@*@*SPOILER ALERT*@*@*@*@*@*@*@*@*@*

I trust the show runners to understand that to have, for example, the red wedding in season 2 would be too early. That's probably a season 3 storyline. But as far as Daenerys goes: what does she actually do for all of book 2? Not that much: she travels the desert, goes to Qarth, and walks through that magic room maze thing. Yaaaawn.

*@*@*@*@*@*@*@*@*@*SPOILER ALERT*@*@*@*@*@*@*@*@*@*

My big concern is getting HBO to see the series through to the end without canceling it. That's the real cliffhanger.

you vote on the video not the comments.
In reply to this comment by Maze:
Great video, although I'm mostly up voting for MilkmanDan's informative post.

Speaking for myself, Paul could change my mind if he a) admitted fault, and b) gave some sort of speech about why racism is morally wrong.

>>> For the long speech you'll have to wait. As for the apology,

"When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publically taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name."

--Ron Paul, Business Wire

A poster on the site "The Daily Paul" summed it up nicely:

What if you rent your home out, and the people use the house. to molest children. Should you be required to accept responsibility? Your name is still on the mortgage, so are you accountable for every action of the renters?

All you could tell people is that you had no knowledge, but admit you should have kept a better watch on your property, and accept 'moral responsibility' (versus actual responsibility, since you did not molest anyone and don't advocate that action).

Instead he's denying any fault, and castigating people for asking him to say anything at all about it, as if he thinks that kind of racist rhetoric isn't something people should be upset about.

>>> Due to the above statement I disagree that Dr. Paul is denying any fault. Based on what I've read, he has taken receipt of this newsletter flap. That he hasn't worded an apology precisely that is satisfactory to you is out of his (or my) control. I could be 100% wrong, but I do not believe you harbor a change of heart that will be triggered by a Paul apology. You are no under no obligation to support or believe him. Can we agree you're not a libertarian frustrated only by the doubt created by the Ron Paul newsletters?

Ultimately that's what you yourself said with your response -- that all charges of racism are bogus. Why you think that, I can't fathom.

>>> Please allow me to clarify my original statement: the problem with LIBERALS labeling anyone a racist is that in 2012 it's crying wolf. It's so overused as to be meaningless.

Ad hominem tu quoque -- which I like to think of as the "I know you are but what am I?" fallacy.

My point about "all of us" being racist is, if we're all covered in poop, no one can accuse anyone else of stinking.

Easy, (Paul) says people have an inalienable right to refuse to serve or hire minorities if they like, but that minorities have no inalienable right to be treated as free and equal citizens when they participate in our society and economy.

>>> I have no easy answer for you, not because Dr. Paul is wrong but because the details of how a libertarian society deals with racism are complex (yet probably less complex than the maze of government coercion now).

A private citizen has a right to refuse to associate with others s/he dislikes, but does the government have the power to create an underclass of citizens? The answer is NO.

Some good comments here on this topic. Not gospel, just snacks for thought.

Totally agree. It would be interesting to see what brought the AM to the entrance to begin with. He should have let them in, the customers are pushing too hard but it is totally ridiculous these guys did not get in there. The time is posted and they should have compensated for a huge last minute rush. I think what may have happened is the rush was so intense and they were understaffed. That is mismanagement. Let them in.

I hate, hate, hate all big box stores, if I had to go in that piece of shit maze of animals I would know exactly what I wanted and GTFO; woulda taken ten minutes.



>> ^BoneRemake:

I would stop shopping there and write a nasty letter to their boss'.
I would not be so audacious to make a big fluff like that at the door, but I feel that Walmart manager is wrong, one hundred percent in the wrong, advertised hours are such an hour to such an hour, you do not deny customers entry so you can start wrapping up your till's and clearing the store early.

I do not think the guy should be fired or whatnot, maybe demoted as he obviously has no sense of customer service. Walmart is wrong-oh !

>> ^SpeveO:

Here is video of the first path finding run. Not quite as impressive.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuGe_DFHpbc&


Wow, I found that video more impressive, at least from a programming and AI point of view.

Those movements were extremely precise even when learning, and when it traveled through a path a second time it had already calculated a much faster method.

Even the slow run is very impressive. There was only one time I say it checking a spot that wasn't logical to check (assuming it knew the center of the maze was the goal). And when it was backtracking it was fast! I know I couldn't make it, and I've never seen one like it. That qualifies as very impressive no matter how you cut it.

Congratulations! Your comment has just received enough votes from the community to earn you 1 Power Point. Thank you for your quality contribution to VideoSift.

this is still impressive as hell i think, that thing MOVES out through that maze

Yeah, as part of the competition it is allowed a slower run to solve the maze. This is the second, speed run part where it attempts to reach the centre using the known route as fast as possible.

It's still amazing purely due to the sheer speed and accuracy of the movement.>> ^charliem:

If the first run was allowed to learn the entire maze, then this isnt really that amazing a feat. If however the first run was just an attempt to find the end, but not learn the entire maze...then thats rediculous. Id love to see their algorithm.

Thanks again me man

In reply to this comment by ponceleon:
*quality

If the first run was allowed to learn the entire maze, then this isnt really that amazing a feat. If however the first run was just an attempt to find the end, but not learn the entire maze...then thats rediculous. Id love to see their algorithm.

>> ^Maze:

WTF does this have to do with Skyrim??


theres a lot of running involved ? maybe.

also. I take away from this that there's no need to bother training to run long distances unless you have very long legs. I don't, therefore i default back to eating pizza - something i have a chance at being good at.

Man, I feel better now. It's true, this whole "sports" thing does make you feel good.

>> ^Fade:

Nothing in the laws of physics...except that you can't physically travel through time, yes.
Time is only this moment. There is no future or past to travel to.


Not according to some elements of General Relativity. Meaning, some would have it that the past, future and present have all already happened and just exist in a different dimension, call it the Z' axis. When Kurt Gödel wasn't destroying the foundations of logical positivism, he devised a time travel tabulation called the Gödel metric which allowed for curves in space time that one might be able to use some variant of what we all know as time travel. It is all theory, of course, and most of the theoretical methods for invoking time travel require a device of infinite size, or arranging matter in such a way as to destroy your time travel machine as it becomes a singularity...oops. Time is hardly understood really. We don't really know what it is when we talk about time, and by we, I mean everyone! Is time a particle, is it a matter or energy of sorts, is it conserved, how is it created if it is a substance of a sort? Is the apparent nature of moments of time in our minds indicative to "it's" nature, or just an arrangements of information in our mind...could some other mind have a very different idea of time? If so, how real is our notion of time, as it would appear that forward moving time would not be objectively real in that case. The debate on time travel, as far as I can see, isn't over...but mostly because we don't even know what time actually is! </rant of one of my favorite subjects!>

Time to go eat...

Edit (wanted to add that some hold that rats memorize events in reverse! What I mean is when they go through a maze, they remember coming out of the maze first, and going in last! AMAZINGLY DIFFERENT WORLD! As such, a rat has a much, much different idea of the "flow" of time as a forward flow of moments, his time jumps from now, to the then that was near to the then that was far and back to the "now" which will become another then that was near, then a then that was far...a jambalaya that we would have no idea how to make since of lineally, but it works so well for rats that they are one of natures most sucessfull pests.)

The point is that his experience contradicts everything which is taught in this video. By all accounts he lived a normal life, with feelings and relationships and struggles, but did not have anything approximating the brain structure described in this video. Clearly you can see much that is being spouted here is just a materialists wet dream. The attempt to approximate all human experience into mechanistic terms.

No, Dandy-Walker does not contradict everything taught in the video. He has (and others like him have) most of the same brain structures (especially the ones related to consciousness). For the most part, they are missing their cerebellar vermis, which controls and analyzes spatial motion. The parts that have something to do with consciousness are still there, and they are even in pretty much the same place as they would be otherwise.

Even if the parts of their brain were jumbled up a bit, that doesn't mean they couldn't necessarily have consciousness. The body does some amazing things considering some of the biological errors that happen. People can be born with holes in their hearts, or on the wrong side of their body, and have perfectly functioning circulatory systems - that doesn't mean the circulation of their blood is transcendent from their circulatory system.

Let's put it this way..If you believe you're nothing more than material machinery then you don't have free will and you can't even trust your own rationality. You don't have free will because all of your choices are preceeded and caused by unconscious material processes.

This is a complete cop-out. I can say the same to you. If your god is omniscient, then he knows what you are going to do before you do it. Therefore you don't actually have free will because, no matter what, you are going to do what god always expected you to do.
>> ^shinyblurry:

Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.
If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?
Consciousness is consciousness, whether the brain is damaged or undamaged. The key part is having it, and It stems from the soul. The quality of the consciousness is effected by the relative performance of the medium, but if access to information is lost in the physical, it doesn't mean it is gone. It's purely your assumption that it can be destroyed in any way. The access may be lost in the physical, but it still exists in eternity. God knows everything, so He is the ultimate memory storage for our souls.
As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.
The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.
The point is that his experience contradicts everything which is taught in this video. By all accounts he lived a normal life, with feelings and relationships and struggles, but did not have anything approximating the brain structure described in this video. Clearly you can see much that is being spouted here is just a materialists wet dream. The attempt to approximate all human experience into mechanistic terms.
Let's put it this way..If you believe you're nothing more than material machinery then you don't have free will and you can't even trust your own rationality. You don't have free will because all of your choices are preceeded and caused by unconscious material processes. Here's a quote from Sam:
"For [many people], freedom of will is synonymous with the idea that, with respect to any specific thought or action, one could have thought or acted differently. But to say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought, “I could have done otherwise” after doing whatever I, in fact, did. Rather than indicate my freedom, this thought is just an epitaph erected to moments past. What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, inscrutable to me. To declare my “freedom” is tantamount to saying, “I don’t know why I did it, but it’s the sort of thing I tend to do, and I don’t mind doing it.”
And this is why the last objection is just another way of not facing up to the problem. To say that “my brain” has decided to think or act in a particular way, whether consciously or not, and my freedom consists in this, is to ignore the very reason why people believe in free will in the first place: the feeling of conscious agency. People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about."
You can't trust your own rationality because it is based upon on chemical reactions in the brain, a process which evolved from the lower animals and with guarantee of any truth. Here's what darwin said about it:
"With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"
So, if I am speaking to someone who can't make independent choices, with rationality that came from monkeys, why should I believe anything that you're saying?
>> ^Skeeve:
Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.

If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?
As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.
The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.
Next time you try to discredit science, point to something we don't know about instead of something that happens to 1 in 25000 live births.
@braindonut, you might find the following links interesting:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290610,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy%E2%80%93Walker_syndrome
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/dandywalker/dandywalker.htm
>> ^shinyblurry:
Consciousness is entirely transcendent of its wiring, and how an individual processes reality is categorically unique from everyone else. If you let them dice you up into stupid machinery, like some kind of advanced parameciam, it will just make you more automated, not less. You are more than the sum of your parts. Some of these things may be superficially true, on a superficial level, but the patterns of our lives go much, much deeper than this. We're not just rats in a maze, but rather we are spiritual beings that transcend the raw material.
There is a civil servant in Europe with a normal IQ who got a brain scan one day and found out that his brain is just a small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick. Clearly none of this "science" (and wild conjecture) applies to him. Ignore the psycho babble and discern your own individual nature. You are not your thoughts. That monologue in your head can be turned off, and there can be silence. Search out the patterns of your thinking, the automation of your being, and break the chain.