The description is actually quite spot on. Most commercial fractal software would have died a painful death at around the 1:00 mark from lack of enough precision. Double precision can represent incredibly large/small numbers, but only have 16 significant digits. You need heavy duty math that can go way beyond this. Another issue is with incredibly deep zooms, there are more iterations needed to "see" what is down that far, and this takes even more computer time.

If the final zoom is really in the realm of 1 x 10^-214 I have no doubt even a modern computer would take a very long time to render each frame, as there would likely be billions of iterations to see that far down.

Like some other commenters here, the iPad isn't designed for my needs, but I'm glad they made it. It advances the technology, and maybe I'll have use for some product down the line that benefits from this iteration.

Also, it further hooks society on great high tech products

Another Great Deception

Loose translation:

Imbecile monkey robot humans once again surrender their power to the whore, Babylon.
Front row seats to yet another iteration of, A minority fist-fucking the majority...

No more land to conquer, enslave the planet and keep a few breeders....Give them bread and circuses, just enough to eat, monopolize any substance which would have anything to do with expanding their minds, tell them what and how to think with our own programming, continually re-write history, keep them exhausted with endless toil while deluding those who would think with worthless trivia, and those who would not think with more ignorance....Don't forget to add a dash of mortality and fear of death, with a pinch of hope for a world where everyone may one day be privy to hidden knowledge or the secrets of the universe....And you've got yourself a fine planet where power, sublimation, and control is the gold standard of social evolution.


Fuck, where's a goddamn time machine when you need one!?

Jesus, look at the hu-man we are creating!! In less than two more generations EVERYONE could be nothing more than worthless lumps of fleshy goo, no-life, zomboid rejects, attached permanently to gaming systems....

WHEN will the next iteration of music coming from folks with African heritage in the U.S. get back to roots and murder all the cheesy gangster fucking rap stars and take R&B to the next level??

WHEN will Life as Art transform society from a lump that can be seen from space of do-nothing wage slaves and robots into humans being?

Please legalize all scheduled drugs and homicide.....pleeaaase?

The channels CAN use tweaking constantly xxovercast-I have imagined another iteration of the site as well. Redefining/refining, all part of the art of those who manage the channels or leave them to evolve...Perhaps a way for users wanting to breathe more life into already established channels and their vids assignments would be to make the channels now mismanaged or abandoned altogether, tweakable by all users with a view to giving the channels here and to come, more vibrancy and character....after all, that's what they all started out as...passion-the passion of the creator, and the energy given to it as the site has evolved.

Some of the folks who have created channels and have disappeared???...Their channels stay as a tribute to their memories...Like fucking tombstones in some forgotten civil war graveyard near a strip center, we have to suffer them and tread lightly-After all...."Theys' dead motherfuckers sleeping underneath us all."

>> ^NetRunner:
^ The topic under discussion was the bill that would strip ACORN of all Federal funding, because it's supposedly corrupt.
Now, pay attention when they talk about why bills of attainder are wrong. To paraphrase, it's to keep Congress from taking on issues that should be the purview of the judicial branch -- namely determining the guilt or innocence of the accused, and meting out punishments for the guilty.
The move to strip ACORN of Federal dollars is entirely about trying to use the legislature to pass judgment on alleged criminal activity, and dispense a punishment.
It's set up so that perhaps there's a way to narrowly define "punishment" so it doesn't count, but any rational person knows that's the entire point of the bill.


Wouldn't this apply to the amendment that Franken passed that dished out a punishment for KBR/Halliburton? Would that be considered a Bill of Attainder?

I'm just playing devil's advocate here and trying to discern the difference.

Also, I'd like to interpret Winstonfield_Pennypacker's post to what I saw it as:

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
Now if only he could start practicing what he preaches and stop his party from stiff-arming the constitution(Attack aimed at the Democratic Party). Here is the conversion simplified.
Mr. Grayson: "Are bills of attainder bad?"
Mr. Brown: "This isn't a bill of attainder."
Mr. Grayson: "I asked you if bills of attainder were bad."
Mr. Brown: "This isn't a bill of attainder."
Mr. Grayson: "Answer my question. Aren't bills of attainder bad?"
Mr. Brown: "Sure - but this isn't a bill of attainder."(but it IS a Bill of Attainder)
I assume Mr. Grayson believes that if enough people hear him call something that isn't a bill of attainder a bill of attainder enough then someone may start believing it(He quoted and interpreted the constitution in a way that even I was able to interpret this bill as a Bill of Retainder, and I'm not a politician). Politicians have a pretty long history of using technicalities, buearucrat-speak, legalese, and other textual skullduggery to get around the Constitution to accomplish political objectives (this applies to both sides)(this also applies to your posts as well). Mr. Grayson is a pot calling a kettle black in that regard. Congress has been violating constitutional law for decades, and he's getting all testy now? (Personal attack on Grayson, expletive deleted). I guess that's what politicians do best though. Blame others for their own faults.


Take away your blatant lies and personal attacks and you're just re-iterating what was in the video without bringing any new information into light. NetRunner at least explains his comments and tries to inform the sift public what the hell the video is about. I'd like to ignore your comments, but it's amusing to watch you employ tactics to try and prove a point.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

This has absoulutely nothing to do with your politics- but I find the idea that you would jump to this conclusion delicious. Are you claiming aggrieved minority status?

I think Bt is a black dude. I think you were deliberately baiting him with the spook thing. I think if I was black, I wouldn't like this. I think if you stretched your empathetic feelings you would understand this and maybe feel regret. In lieu of the golden rule working- I've taken some mild action.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
In reply to this comment by dag:
Your incessant teasing of Bt over the "spook" issue has gone too far. Your one week hobblement begins now.

Check the Sift Lounge logs. There was a time when BT and I had a brief confrontation about the word "spooky"... I maintain it's not racist except when used as such - he thinks all iterations are racist. You're setting precedent that it is. I also understand you disagree with my politics, so maybe this ban is motivated.

BT is overly sensitive. He's overly emotional. He's complained about the use of the word "spooky" in every sense of the word claiming it to be absolutely racist, and you've just validated that with this hobble. Congratulations. He's PMed me with direct and antagonizing messages, and I've been an adult and just ignored them. As we should all. But, I'm sure, BT is loving this self-serving arbitration.

I'm libertarian. I speak openly against racism always. If you think my use of the word "spooky" in any way vulgar or inappropriate then you're grossly mistaken. I think this hobble is egregious, and I protest it loudly!

In reply to this comment by dag:
Your incessant teasing of Bt over the "spook" issue has gone too far. Your one week hobblement begins now.

Check the Sift Lounge logs. There was a time when BT and I had a brief confrontation about the word "spooky"... I maintain it's not racist except when used as such - he thinks all iterations are racist. You're setting precedent that it is. I also understand you disagree with my politics, so maybe this ban is motivated.

BT is overly sensitive. He's overly emotional. He's complained about the use of the word "spooky" in every sense of the word claiming it to be absolutely racist, and you've just validated that with this hobble. Congratulations. He's PMed me with direct and antagonizing messages, and I've been an adult and just ignored them. As we should all. But, I'm sure, BT is loving this self-serving arbitration.

I'm libertarian. I speak openly against racism always. If you think my use of the word "spooky" in any way vulgar or inappropriate then you're grossly mistaken. I think this hobble is egregious, and I protest it loudly!

This has already been said before but part of what made The Matrix so good was that it took place almost entirely within "our" world. We only saw snippets of what the real world was like, outside of the Matrix. Reloaded tried to incorporate more of the real world while balancing out scenes within the Matrix, but by Revolutions, it almost entirely took place in the real world. Add to that the heavy philosophical allegories, the fact that it took Trinity a full 10 minutes to die after being impaled on 35 pieces of rebar, and any other number of problems that plagued the last 2 movies.

I still think the way that Reloaded should have happened was Neo somehow "reboots" (Reloads) the Matrix causing everyone to wake up for a moment inside the real world. Then, after they fall back into the Matrix, they begin to talk with one another about the "dream" everyone had, with Neo acting as a Messiah-like figurehead. Revolutions would have shown the world-wide fight within the Matrix against the agents/Matrix/whatever, with humanity eventually winning and waking up for good. This sillyness of computer programs, Trainmen in the Limbo world and iterations of Neo splitting off and re-absorbing back into the system was just that....silly.

Amazingly, NASA took the famous deep field photo and passed it through a signal analyzer consisting of 200,000 quad-core CPU's in a Beowulf cluster running a stripped down version of Redhat's RHEL. For roughly 10^29 iterations, these processors ran an optimized fast Fourier transform on the collected data until a pure signal was collected. That signal, a complex series of interlocking sign waves, was then passed through the cluster again, the researchers were totally shocked by the result. A single, simple message, broadcast by the universe its self, to the human race:

"Sarah Palin's a cunt."

Science is truly, truly amazing.

Looks pretty generic and uninteresting to me. ID have been fairly pore at inovating FPS since doom but at least back then they were a engine innovator, now it seems not only are they incapable of producing good games design there latest tek dosent look that much better than other competitors are doing and its likely it wont run as well if ID,s last iterations of doom 3 engine are anything to go by.

Which computer games? All of these games are console games (except Tetris, I guess, but that's best known for its NES/Gameboy iteration).

I love Infinity Ward. I can't believe millions of gamers bought into the cheap knock-off crap that was Treyarch's World at War because of how great IW's 4th iteration of the franchise was.

He gives a pretty accurate description. I've played all 3 iterations of the game so far, and they're all essentially the same. They're fun... until they're not, and that transition doesn't take very long. There's just not much to it at all, and really nothing to aspire to.

Excellently informative post. Thank you.

Sometimes we're vulnerable to accepting one side of a debate unquestioningly without hearing the other side, which is how many people seem to be approaching Reza Aslan's argument.

In reply to this comment by burdturgler:
Was good until around 4:20 but after that Reza is full of shit on many counts.

- It is complete speculation on his part that there is no nuclear weapon ambition or program in Iran. He mentions the IAEA in 2003 but in 2003 the IAEA said the following:

"it is clear that Iran has failed in a number of instances over an extended period of time to meet its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement with respect to the reporting of nuclear material and its processing and use, as well as the declaration of facilities where such material has been processed and stored." (PDF)

Meaning the nuclear material could be stored anywhere and processed for anything. They don't know.

- Saying that the U.S. has taken all military options off the table regarding Iran is complete bullshit. Never happened.

- The C.I.A. has never said that Iran is "many many many years away" from having a nuclear weapon. Regardless, how did the CIA discover that India had nukes? Anyone? They caught them when they were just a year away right? No, the CIA and the rest of Earth found out because India detonated one. Making the argument that Iran isn't pursuing nukes based on the fact that they say so is foolish.

-Israel has nukes. They have had them for decades. To say they are threatening Iran with them is ridiculous. Israel has made no demands from Iran other than to recognize that it is a sovereign nation. The weapons are a deterrent against Iran and the other nations in the region which have said in no uncertain terms that Israel, as a nation state, should not exist.

- Just because some person ("Benny Morris" who is a hero of the Palestinians) wrote an article for the NY Times, does not make it the policy that Israel will launch a nuclear first strike against Iran. That person does not speak for the government of Israel. He doesn't determine the foreign policy of any nation. He does not control or affect in any way Israel's nuclear launch capability. In other words, it's bullshit.

-It has never been the policy of Israel to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike upon anyone unless they were themselves threatened by nukes. That is U.S. policy also. That doesn't mean you can't have a scenario where you strike first. Some people just refuse to understand this. They can not have an enemy on their doorstep that has vowed their destruction to obtain the weapons and strategy needed to carry that threat out. It's just that simple. We didn't allow the missiles in Cuba for the very same reason. Iran needs to dial back it's rhetoric and hate speech and get more in line with the international cooperation and dialog that it's people wants. The type of dialog we all need. Open handed Vs. clenched fist. But that isn't happening and now we see that elections there to make it happen have no meaning.

The hard line psychos in charge of Iran, not the people in general, view Israel as an abomination. They "should be wiped off the face of the map". I've seen this translated as "vanish from time" and several other iterations but however you want to play out the semantics of the translation of that quote from Ahmadinejad the end result is the same. He is echoing and fomenting the sentiment of his supporters .. Israel as a state should not exist. These are the same people who say the Holocaust never happened. Now I've seen some bad comments here, including someone wishing all Christians would die, but I hope most rational people can see this isn't just a religious point of view, it's a wish for genocide. They teach their children that Israeli's are less than human. They are pigs and it is good to slaughter them.

With that ugliness behind me, I will say, it is fun to watch Chris when he has a guest who isn't intimidated, but I don't see where he was "schooled" here. Reza is being naive at best. Iran knows what it's doing. It can't let itself be perceived as the weaker nation. Acquiescing to mandates and sanctions. They want to be a super power. They want to be at the table like India and Pakistan. They know they are close and have decades of work behind them (not in front of them) and will never give up until they have the same strength that is possessed by their perceived aggressors.

There won't be any dialog to stem the tide of a nuclear Iran with the current regime in power.

Does anyone honestly think a nuclear armed Iran is a viable option for world stability and peace?