The last thing someone in power wants to do is allow the 99% easy weaponry.  You don't conquer a people by arming them.  You first take control of the most expensive military in the world, and then use it against anyone who disagrees with you.  It's hard to do that when those people who disagree have the ability to fight back.  It's hard to look like the good guy when you can't rush to someone's rescue, someone you've disarmed without them knowing you've disarmed them.  You don't give people weapons; otherwise, they might get the idea that they can defend themselves.  They might even collaborate against you, the guy in charge--madness!  What fool on top would allow this?  Divide and conquer: repeat after me.  Divide and conquer.

I'm considering dropping out of college, myself.  Not that I don't love to learn, but I have a theory on the proper way to educate people, and it isn't by keeping track of every class they take, when they show up to that class, and telling them whether or not their understanding of a particular subject is good enough, or if that one point means they don't actually understand anything.

Needless to say, I'm probably going to fail my US History class   I picked up a lot of stuff from it, but I'm not doing so hot, on account of me not being able to remember who did what and when.  The "why", I get.  It's the rest that I neither care about, nor feel I should care about.  I aced my federal government class, anyway.

What I don't get is why I couldn't learn this stuff on my own; if I have to read the textbook before I show up to class each day, why shouldn't I just stay at home and simply read the textbook?  Why am I paying a professor to tell me to study, when I can study on my own, tell myself to study (or get a friend to do it,) and get the same experience?  Why this dependency on an outside force (which just happens to be under the thumb of a higher power) when every resource is there?  If I were taught how to teach myself in my first 13 years of mandatory education, I'd be in a much better spot right now.  Seems modern day college is nothing more than a debt trap.

OP, I can confirm this.  I check this site way too much.  During the time when it was getting DDoS'd, I got a lot of shit done.  Now, I have to keep checking back here to make sure I'm not missing any important BTC related news.

Anyway, as others have suggested, the cure is to be determined to stay off the stuff for a while.  I, for one, have been putting off my work all day for this site, so I'm going to stay away from Bitcoin for at least a few days.

I have no idea what it is.

Whoop-de-doodle, we made it!

Time to party.

Very very interesting.  The largest country in the world taking an interest in FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY MORE FREEDOM

So any news on how India feels about Bitcoin?

Most are trained to believe they're free simply because they live in America.  Thanks to this brainwashing, you get people like Viceroy, who believe "freedom" can only be achieved through being an American citizen.

I'm not kidding, either.  This is seriously what people believe here.

Have you tried the various legit markets?

Unless Bitcoin's service of "being a currency" counts toward being a commodity, I think it's safe to say that it is, indeed, a currency.  I don't think "wearing out computers" counts as a service people want.

About another 1k votes and it'll hit the popular page.

You have some kind of odd obsession with this thing, despite the fact you seem to hate it; I believe this is a symptom of Asperger's, a purported form of autism.

I don't know if you've answered this already, but are you autistic?  If not, are you willing to get tested for it?  I know it makes little logical sense how it would apply in an argument such as this, but it makes a whole lot of sense to people who aren't autistic.

Why not?  It's all crypto-currency, and people wanna talk about it; besides, they're confined to a single board.  If you don't want to look at altcoins, stop looking at the altcoin board.

Judge smudge!  Fuck the government, I do what I want! 

But the thing is, kiddy porn is bad because there's a victim: the kid.  Anime kiddy porn has no victim.  It's a classic case of "Stop liking what I don't like."  Like the sodomy law: if two consenting adults want to do things to their butts in a sexual manner, what does the government care?  Yes, there are naturally born pedophiles in our societies.  There's nothing a law can do to change that; it only eases the minds of people who demand order and control, that they go to bed at night knowing people who aren't like them can't be happy.  It's tragic, in the case of the pedophile, for nobody really wants him to be happy that way, but at least let him have his cartoon lolitas.

What's the difference between hentai of an underage anime girl and a dwarf?  All you gotta do is include a disclaimer that all the characters in your anime are over the age of 18 and some are suffering from Benjamin Button syndrome

I could've sworn we've been over this.  As more people mine, the cost to mine jumps, and the less profits you make (until you're working at a deficit.)  As more altcoins exist, less businesses are guaranteed to take them (we don't even have most businesses on board with Bitcoin right now.)  Considering that robots will be doing all the work, without pay, you're better off issuing paper tokens for people to take to government-owned shops where you can get the food and other stuff you need.  It's a lot more efficient than mining; mining needs to stay specialized, limited to people who are willing to shell out the cash for the best hardware, otherwise it's a waste of energy.  It's CPU Mining Vs. ASIC, and there's only a handful of ASIC owners in the world right now.  If everyone had an ASIC, and everyone was mining, they would not be earning any profits, and even still, there would be a select few to accept them; the machines are working for free, after all, and when all jobs are taken by machine, there will be nothing to use all those coins on.

This system is not sustainable.  You may see short term highs while people slowly hop on board (meaning people will be mining at a profit), but the more popular your system gets, the worse it gets for the miners (which is everyone) until nobody can make a living mining, then we're back where we started.  I could probably write "IOU" on a piece of paper and get the same effect; it took a few seconds and some energy to write the slip, after all.  I may as well lob off chunks of my hair and use that as currency, since it takes a lot of time and energy to keep me alive to create that, too.  Since it's extremely common for people to have hair (like it would be, in this system, to have coins), it's the same effect.  I can't make a natural living through simply existing; there is no living organism which can do this, and we're no different.

Seems to be the normal reaction when another altcoin is released

Another interesting aspect of art creation (and I'm going to be making assumptions based on my own talents in artistry,) is that art can be highly logical and very literal.  For example, realism: to accomplish realism, you must draw/paint in a very specific way which lines up with how we view objects in the world.  It requires a lot of technical ability, and you can get away with it without any creativity whatsoever (otherwise, we could make the assumption that every photograph is a piece of art, including the photographs of me speeding past a red light once being used against me in court.)  To create a perfect reproduction of life through a pencil requires only technical ability; computers do this already, and much more efficiently.

Taking into consideration the idea of monkeys and Shakespeare, can we then define art with the requirement of creative input?  Though a set of monkeys could eventually pound out Shakespeare, because they do not understand what they're doing, we cannot assume they understand a thing they're writing about, outside of being a random assortment of key presses.  Thus, although the two copies of Shakespeare, one written by the man, and the other written by monkeys, are identical copies, we can assume one is art and the other isn't.

At what point in time would a computer be able to create art, then?  When it has motivation?  At which point, it would need to have a reason to create, not because it is programmed to, but because it wanted to.  It would have to first experience pain.  We would have to reverse-engineer the human being.  Considering that our entire lives are interpreted through a series of electrical impulses in our minds, it could be possible, if we recreate the human mind with resources outside the normal flesh and blood, to invent an artist.  I imagine it would be incredibly difficult, but I tend to believe nothing's impossible.


Imagine if you could purchase an artificial family member and never tell the difference.  Anyway, in relation to the thread, I believe there's an odd connection between an artificial person and a real one; in one aspect, you know they're machine, but in another, you know they feel.

I said something negative on his video a while back and then he banned me from commenting on them   What a swell fella.

Yes; a computer can be programmed to display a random array of colored pixels and a person can interpret it as art.  However, if you ask the machine to reproduce the Mona Lisa in a John Kricfalusi style, you're SoL; only a person (presumably John Kricfalusi) can do that.

By extension, however, since the computer had to be programmed by a human being (or by a computer programmed by a computer programmed by a human being), a computer can never create its own art, only the art a person has programmed it to create.  Therefor, we can determine that all art is created only by human beings; even if a computer could take requests and spit out something like this, it would be because a human being programmed it to do so.

So can A.I. create art?  Or do people owe their talents to a higher being, if not God, but nature itself?

So now I'm curious: can empathy be taught, or must someone be equipped with it from day one?  Is it an emotion, or a principle?  Must we choose to be empathetic, or do we not have a choice but to be empathetic/unempathetic?