never heard it....but the phrase 'same difference' throws me into a recursive thought-spiral that causes nose bleeds....

>> ^conan:

if you use youtube's vuvuzela feature on this one, it will create a recursive singularity that rips apart time space continuum and destroys the universe.


Too bad we can't do it with both YouTube's and http://www.vuvuzela-time.co.uk/videosift.com/ ... That would be sweet!

if you use youtube's vuvuzela feature on this one, it will create a recursive singularity that rips apart time space continuum and destroys the universe.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

I am lost in recursion there! Isn't a society just a group of citizens! Let's do direct replacement! "...behavior our group of citizens expects of its individual citizens" Whew, that feels better! Sometimes I get lost in ambiguity, I wonder if others do as well.
I would agree that is what democracy is, but I also see that like Socrates did, as groups stealing power away from individuals. In fact, that is what you see now, groups of people making grabs for power to take advantage of other groups and individuals. Group think is more powerful than individuals, so democracies tend to have this leaning towards the same type of tyranny as a monarchy. I don't know how to undo this evil and still have liberty. Perhaps it is as Jefferson put it with the blood of patriots. Perhaps that is what he was really talking about, entropy of any given system? The best that man can make lasts not against the ravages of time? Perhaps this is the sad reality we face, or perhaps we can take solace in the fact and start the rebirth of what has/is dying?


Yep, lost in recursion you are.

Who decides what individual rights are? You? Me? Something some guy wrote on stone tablets or parchment long ago? Maybe it should be up to the guy with the most money, or maybe just the most military power?

With about 5 minutes of self-reflection, you should realize that what you're struggling to come to grips with is that a) your view of morality isn't popular, and b) you think your morals should be popularly accepted as the only right and true ones, and c) realize that peaceful persuasion probably will never get you a lasting, permanent majority who agree with you so d) you start thinking revolution is the answer.

And through all this, you refuse to view your thoughts as being anything other than supporting liberty against tyranny when you have literally described how tyranny fights against liberty.

The beginning of understanding democracy is to admit that maybe the people who think differently from you have a legitimate point of view, and might even be tapped into a facet of the truth to which you might be oblivious.

It's a belief in the idea that if two heads are better than one, two hundred million heads are probably better than one, and that the only way to ever perfect anything -- including justice -- is through a perpetual debate over the issues in a forum where no ideology has an unassailable monopoly on our thinking.

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
Because democracy is all about controlling others whom don't share the same opinion.

Actually it's all about trying to work out which objective standards of behavior our society expects of its citizens, without having some king or set of stone tablets set those limits for us without recourse.


I am lost in recursion there! Isn't a society just a group of citizens! Let's do direct replacement! "...behavior our group of citizens expects of its individual citizens" Whew, that feels better! Sometimes I get lost in ambiguity, I wonder if others do as well.

I would agree that is what democracy is, but I also see that like Socrates did, as groups stealing power away from individuals. In fact, that is what you see now, groups of people making grabs for power to take advantage of other groups and individuals. Group think is more powerful than individuals, so democracies tend to have this leaning towards the same type of tyranny as a monarchy. I don't know how to undo this evil and still have liberty. Perhaps it is as Jefferson put it with the blood of patriots. Perhaps that is what he was really talking about, entropy of any given system? The best that man can make lasts not against the ravages of time? Perhaps this is the sad reality we face, or perhaps we can take solace in the fact and start the rebirth of what has/is dying?

> Yo dawg, I hear you like broccoli-infested
> post-apocalyptic cathedrals....

Hah! best Xhibit recursive hinting ever

>> ^Kevlar:

Aw, man, I thought I read you saying you hate seeing people like me saying Apple hates people of a certain handedness. I was going to make some kind of sweet Hate Recursion commentary, but then I realized I just can't read.

Yeah I probably could have used more punctuation...

Like logix said, if this turns out to be a really big issue, I bet Apple will give out bumpers, or at least drastically reduce the price of them. $30 is a little ridiculous. I saw packs of 2 ipod touch cases at Best Buy for $10. And they were from a real brand (Belkin), and came with a screen protector....

>> ^EmptyFriend:

>> ^Kevlar:
Engadget reports that the new antenna designed to improve signal strength is located in the left corner of the device and contact to that area - again, with the antenna meant to improve call quality - is what's causing the dropped calls.
Not exactly, there are 2 antennas in that metal band, 1 on the left edge, and the other one wraps the other 3 sides. The lower left corner is where the gap between them is, and people are bridging the gap with the conductivity of their skin. Definitely a huge design flaw, and probably why Apple was ready with those "bumper" cases. "Oh, we've got a fix for that.... that'll be $30. You're welcome, sucker."
Also, I keep seeing people say like you did in the video description that apple hates left handed people. I'd say if anything this means they hate right handed. As a right handed person I usually hold the phone in my left hand since I had just used my right hand to dial. Plus this leaves my right hand open to write something down or use the computer.


Aw, man, I thought I read you saying you hate seeing people like me saying Apple hates people of a certain handedness. I was going to make some kind of sweet Hate Recursion commentary, but then I realized I just can't read.

Now here is a real problem to try and solve. Is their a chess board configuration that makes it so that your chess pieces can never move out of the way. Like a continual recursion where one piece has to move to make way for one peice that has to make way for another piece which displaces the former 2...ad infinitum

>> ^KnivesOut:

Watching this video made my dog howl.


Watching it made me howl too. *brief

I also just watched this a few nights ago, it's currently in the Comcast On Demand free movies section (at least where I live). I personally found it difficult to follow, insofar as how the causality paradoxes where presented. I've always thought that if such paradoxes where possible they would either be infinitely recursive or cause the splitting off of a new parallel universe. The way it's treated in the movie doesn't make much sense to me.

>> ^KnivesOut:
God this is fucking horrible. Autoplay sucks enough as it is, but this page is loading itself recursively, and ends up playing three+ songs at once.


Sounds like a personal problem....

God this is fucking horrible. Autoplay sucks enough as it is, but this page is loading itself recursively, and ends up playing three+ songs at once.

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/03/caf_in_ps.html
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/10/video_new_from_adobe_labs_content-aware_fill.html

They've been showing this off for a while. If it's bullshit, it's Adobe's bullshit.

Also, I bet the programming isn't especially voluminous, but the algorithms are probably insanely advanced. The code itself would probably be highly recursive, so you wouldn't need a lot of lines.

Alrighy then. I'm sober and moderately coherent, so let's carry on.

We have a very different view of science. Science can't possibly work by ruling out things, because there the universe is infinite, or, as infinite as we are able to measure at this time. The experiment that produces a result never comes alone. It's always there to support a hypothesis, and to prove it, if successful.

There will always be things we can't perceive ourselves, and we will always work towards finding new ways to view the universe. If we would ever discover everything there is to know, the world would be rather dull, in my opinion.

This, however, does not grant anybody a license to invent facts, to make claims with no substantiating evidence and to basically invent a new universe and ask the rest of us to live in it.

Proving something by disproving every other possibility only works when there is a finite number of possible possibilities (I love that phrase, by the way). There is no finite group of Gods. Every person is free to come up with a new God every day. If someone were to ask 1000 Christians to describe their God, and then compile their replies into a profile, I'd be surprised if he wouldn't end up with at least 4-5 separate deities.

My problem with all religions, isn't about the nature of the faith, or of the God itself, but rather with the claim that they know something which they can't possibly know. Teaching Intelligent Design in a school and putting it on the same level as the science of Evolution, simply because a book tells you the world is 6000 years old, is ludicrous to me.

--------------------

I think we sort of diverged from the original point, and I don't have an actual argument to make anymore. Have a happy new year

In reply to this comment by Lodurr:
Let me phrase it differently: science defines which laws exist by ruling out alternatives. So an experiment that yields a certain predicted outcome doesn't itself prove a law. I brought that up because while we can rule out our old theistic theories on how the world operates, we can't yet rule out other aspects of their beliefs. We just have our five senses, and with those senses we can create tools that have other senses, but there is always more that we can't detect. Prior to the microscope, we had no idea germs existed. Prior to the discovery of radio waves, we had no reason to think they existed either. Similarly, we can't rule out the possibilities of extra dimensions that intersect ours, or new forms of energy and matter. That is why science only works in negatives and probabilities. It means more than "nothing at all."

When it comes to my personal beliefs on existence (which aren't Christian), my own reasoning is that my consciousness existing just once is more improbable than my consciousness existing more than once, given that time is infinite or recursive. A once-off universe doesn't make sense to me. Also, the idea that the force of my awareness is the result of atomic matter alone is implausible. My awareness is as of yet undetectable and unmeasurable, and even finding the consciousness switch in our brains wouldn't make it any more measurable. It'd be like theorizing that your light switch generates the electricity in your light bulb. Regarding the idea of god, I don't see any reason to seperate out another being to be the cause of all existence. I much prefer the idea of the Tao, the singularity with infinite regressions, in which everything is relative rather than absolute.

I don't think atheists are bad people--I am one, after all--but I find that we don't have the same easy access to community-based support groups that our theistic neighbors do. Of course there are secular alternatives to everything religion does, they just don't come as easily or automatically.

Any kind of forceful movement creates an unhelpful backlash. The Taoist way is to let change happen naturally. Education and rising standards of living made more atheists than Dawkins and Bill Maher ever will.