12th Archivist
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Any comments?

____________________________
It was going well until it exploded.
~Scott Manley

Check out the DROD Wikia project here!

12th Archivist
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I found this right after I saw that minimike98 was currently online and active. Perhaps, at this moment, he's making his first post since September.

____________________________
It was going well until it exploded.
~Scott Manley

Check out the DROD Wikia project here!

12th Archivist
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Triple post!

Pixels. It's about pixels.

____________________________
It was going well until it exploded.
~Scott Manley

Check out the DROD Wikia project here!

eb0ny
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A self-referential quiz.

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Briareos
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The History of the Typewriter recited by Michael Winslow

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"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
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Tim
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I just watched this incredible movie about a fine watch.

(Why does this text sounds like an advertisement?)

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The best way to lose customers is to let little kids running loose on a forum with too many mod points.

12th Archivist
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Ladies and gentlemen... Citizens and delvers...

I imagine you all have faced many events throughout your course in history. Ranging from sad ones to weird ones to scary ones to happy ones. With all that experience, you may think yourself invulnerable! You may think yourself the master of all there is to know!

However... Despite all that experience... You are not prepared to face the wrath of:

GORD

Awesome stories of the dealings of Gord right here. Look upon his costumers and wonder at the worth of humanity in general.

____________________________
It was going well until it exploded.
~Scott Manley

Check out the DROD Wikia project here!

Tim
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A 2010 Academy Award winning film.

Logorama

(It is distributed by one of it's creators, so I believe it's legit.)

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The best way to lose customers is to let little kids running loose on a forum with too many mod points.

eb0ny
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Hand tapdance (for a lack of a better description).

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Tahnan
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eb0ny wrote:
Hand tapdance (for a lack of a better description).

Actually, hand Irish dancing, to judge from the pair's webpage. They've got a little more at http://www.youtube.com/upandoverit (including a few live performances).

Nillo
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Duke Nukem's voice actor reads the TextEdit menu tree.

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“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the 'Ellie May,' a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

Lamkin
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Developer Tons of Bits has unveiled their Indie Game advent calendar which unlocks a new platform level each day and promises exclusive digital download content from various indie developers for each level you complete.
http://www.mission-in-snowdriftland.com/

TripleM
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They could have made it clearer that the downloads (at least for the first couple of levels) are just wallpapers / pictures, rather than anything actually playable themselves.

12th Archivist
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A most interesting history lesson.

To explain, it is the complete history of the Soviet Union sung to the Tetris theme song. It might not be absolutely factual (unchecked), but a viewer will very likely enjoy the video anyway.

Understand that this video was made for comedic purposes and does not say, subliminally or otherwise, to specifically support any ideals the character states. Hopefully, this explanation was unnecessary and already obvious, but you never know.

____________________________
It was going well until it exploded.
~Scott Manley

Check out the DROD Wikia project here!

Maurog
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You might be surprised, but the video is indeed as factual as they get.

As in, the history is actual history, though delivered in a poetic form.
All the key events are there, take it from someone who grew up in the USSR.

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Slay the living! Raise the dead!
Paint the sky in crimson red!

Rat Man
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12th Archivist wrote:
A most interesting history lesson.

Actually, it's more than just a history lesson. It's a brilliant artistic illustration. In Tetris (a Russian game) blocks keep falling down faster and faster and every time you make a row, it just disappears. You can't win. In the USSR, you did your work and at the end of each day, your work just disappeared. And on top of that, how many times have you been playing Tetris and you made a mistake and it got higher, then you couldn't find the right piece, and it just got higher and higher and higher, and the higher it got, the harder it was to fix it until it was no longer possible to fix? That's what happened in Russia.

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I'M IN SPACE!

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[Last edited by Rat Man at 05-03-2017 10:19 PM]

12th Archivist
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Rat Man wrote:
Actually, it's more than just a history lesson. It's a brilliant artistic illustration. In Tetris (a Russian game) blocks keep falling down faster and faster and every time you make a row, it just disappears. You can't win. In the USSR, you did your work and at the end of each day, your work just disappeared. And on top of that, how many times have you been playing Tetris and you made a mistake and it got higher, then you couldn't find the right piece, and it just got higher and higher and higher, and the higher it got, the harder it was to fix it until it was no linger possible to fix? That's what happened in Russia.

In truth, the artistic illustration was not the reason why I posted a link to the video. The reason was because I thought it was a skillfully done and very enlightening history lesson detailing important events of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, you have a point about the deeper meaning of the video, one that I had admittedly never before considered.

____________________________
It was going well until it exploded.
~Scott Manley

Check out the DROD Wikia project here!

Rat Man
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Okay, I have a million links I want to show you but I'd better start with this one. I could have DIED laughing!

Monty Python -- Argument Clinic

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I'M IN SPACE!

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[Last edited by Rat Man at 06-16-2017 07:01 AM]

DiMono
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Do you write? Do you know someone else who writes? Do you or someone you know want to write? Are you or someone you know an English teacher? Then you're going to love the website I just launched. A pair of teachers created a program called Let Them Write, which was originally designed to be used in the classroom, but really, anyone can use it. It's for helping people become better writers. I highly recommend it.

Check it out!

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Deploy the... I think it's a yellow button... it's usually flashing... it makes the engines go... WHOOSH!

Rat Man
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COOL!!! I'm a writer but I get a very strange case of writer's block where I have all the ideas and inspiration I need but I sit down to write and I just can't. I hope this'll help me with that one.

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I'M IN SPACE!

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[Last edited by Rat Man at 04-30-2011 10:01 PM]

NiroZ
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How early reviews hurt indie games

Rat Man
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I'm sure many of you are already familiar with this, but check out Blender 3D modeling software! It's flexible, free and easy-to-learn! Anyone can learn how to use it. I'm already getting the hang of it. But a good tutorial series is essential.

The best tutorials I could find are here.

Additionally, if you want to get 29 great tutorial videos and a warm and fuzzy feeling for supporting Blender and keeping it free, check this out! The tuts aren't technically the point of this one, but they're whole reason I'm interested.

____________________________
I'M IN SPACE!

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[Last edited by Rat Man at 05-02-2011 11:25 PM]

12th Archivist
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Someone uses MSPaint to create the Mona Lisa.

'nuff said.

____________________________
It was going well until it exploded.
~Scott Manley

Check out the DROD Wikia project here!

west.logan
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That's pretty neat. The guy's got lots of talent.

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-Logan

12th Archivist
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A most interesting and thought-provoking page on alien psychology.

Setting aside the problems discussed, what do you think could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?

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It was going well until it exploded.
~Scott Manley

Check out the DROD Wikia project here!

west.logan
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Picking up those problems that had been set aside...
First, philosophically, it's based on a completely materialistic world-view, where mind and will are determined by physical structures. One interesting result of this belief is electronic "neural networks", which some speculate will perform or have consciousness just as an animal or human brain, if only the structure can be reproduced. That remains to be seen but I believe it to be impossible.

As to SQ+50, I wonder...does being faster at processing necessarily make one smarter? Computers today can process much faster than us, yet I would argue that they are still unintelligent (yes Watson is interesting but not sentient, nor able to adapt to other situations on its own). Also (going back to the physical link), are there not animals that have faster brains, and some that have more neurons? Maybe I'm just misunderstanding, but while there may be a correlation between quantity and speed of neurons, and intelligence, I don't think that it's a direct cause. Anyway, thought-provoking article, thanks for sharing!

____________________________
-Logan

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[Last edited by west.logan at 06-10-2011 08:22 PM]

NiroZ
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west.logan wrote:
As to SQ+50, I wonder...does being faster at processing necessarily make one smarter? Computers today can process much faster than us, yet I would argue that they are still unintelligent

Uhhhh, it is true that you need both good hardware and good software, however, I'm not sure how you can argue computers process faster than us.

Yes, in the very specialised field of number crunching, they're better than most (although, on a subconcious level, we're not too bad either. Think about it next time you catch a ball).

However, when in comes to things such as perception, attention, language, hell, even movement, neither the hardware or software in computers is adequate to even come close to us.

My problem with the paper (having skimmed it), it's assuming aliens would be one entity. It possible that they'd be a symbiosis of creatures, or creatures and machines.

west.logan
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NiroZ wrote:
Uhhhh, it is true that you need both good hardware and good software, however, I'm not sure how you can argue computers process faster than us.

I'd argue like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KxjVlaLBmk (Fast hand robot)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDKXT1ZhEgA (Ball-catching robot)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVR5wEYkEGk (Pencil-balancing robot, you try doing that sometime and see if you can process fast enough)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBCVprX0WnY (Big Dog packing robot, all-terrain)

All of which process their surroundings faster than we do though not to the same extent. Look at Watson, the computer who went on Jeopardy who was able to parse sentences and compare rather subtle wordplay. Now none of these examples show an integrated package as complete or flexible in capability as the human body and in that sense I agree, computers don't come close, but that wasn't my point. My point was processing speed.

I'm simply claiming computers process things faster than we do. I don't know how one can argue against that. At the same time, I do not believe computers are, or ever will be, more intelligent than humans, no matter their speed. Intelligence is more than speed.

And neural networks (which I referred to) are eventually supposed to be only hardware, in the form and function of human neurons that will then "write its own software". I'm an electrical engineer, I work in this field and have a vested interest in it.

____________________________
-Logan

Rheb
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I don't think Niro meant to argue that no computer can process a task faster than we can (well, it's proven they can). But that's not the way the brain works. If you were in fact able to optimize the brain to process one task and one task only I think it would be far better at it than any (human head size) computer we have ever built.

Think about it, just by keeping your eyes open you will continuously calculate the angel with which the light from every single object you see hit your eyeballs, and then draw a 3-dimensional map in your head. If there are more than one conversation going on around you you will instantly separate the sounds from each one and process them to make out what the conversations are about. Just by standing several muscle-groups need to work together to keep your balance. Doing all these three things at once causes no problem. That's plenty of information that we process fast.

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Voligner is my very own DROD-like game. Please check it out!

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[Last edited by Rheb at 06-15-2011 10:03 AM]

west.logan
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Right, which is why I said that it's not all in an integrated package, and why I repeated that I still don't think that however fast things get, they will be more intelligent than a human being. My original point in using this point was simply to show that speed != intelligence, as the article seemed to be claiming.

We don't process fast in comparison, but we process lots at the same time, this parallelism is one of the beauties of the human brain (or a mimicking neural network), but for each process we are at least an order of magnitude slower than the equivalent silicon processor. Despite this, we are more intelligent and I believe will always be.

____________________________
-Logan