Guilty until proven wealthy, I thought.

For further context, Santa Claus is a mythological character associated with a holiday.

"Remember that sometimes he gets his point across by using hyperbole and comedy. You have to listen to several shows and learn his method before you judge him."

OK, I'm listening. Please tell me how to interpret this into some kind of point or something.

It's just not playing fair when you have reality on your side. Ringers like that just aren't sportsmanlike.

Clearly the ice has a liberal agenda.

Maybe I am being dense, but surely there is some way to optimise it. Better machine-specific interpretors, the kind of pre-execution optimisation that compilers do, anything....

Convince me that there's a fundamental difference between the way we exist and the way abstract concepts do.

Is it not? Convince me :-)

Well, you can look at existence as being domain-specific, so that different local systems don't exist with respect to each other... but this is just jargonisation. And, besides, that way lies a weird kind of solipsism.

As to the structural requirements of the MWI, well, I'd favour a Kolgmorogov complexity approach -- something is only as complex as the simplest way it can be described/produced. I don't think the universe becomes any more existentially burdensome just because it's bigger, or because its nature is best expressed as a small, incidental, corner of something larger and simpler. Size is not everything.

And as to numbers, in a kind of Platonistic way, I'd say they do exist. Everything is Ideal and everything is a shadow. There's no true base level of reality, just ways of getting from one place to another.

What makes more sense: that 4712784365435.36354231641801...32132132 is the only number that *really* exists, or that it exists as part of the Real numbers - a bigger, more inclusive but definitely much simpler entity?

Anything complex looks unlikely, arbitrary and absurd just by itself. Some people think the MWI is unjustified because it requires all these extra universes, but to me you still only have the one universe; it's just bigger, simpler, and makes much more sense.

With reality, I suspect the same principle applies. Everything that can exist does so, as it has no reason not to. Nothing makes sense without everything else, and any single thing *implies* everything else.

Does that make us here by chance, or by necessity? Both, I'd say. We are a roll of the dice that had to happen somewhere.

Ah, but was the purpose on purpose, or by chance?

So: in the other guy's office, people who have had personal experience of iPhones have decided they want Androids instead; in your office, management have decided to replace Blackberrys with iPhones. This is a kind of apples and oranges thing here, you know?

I don't think it was his fault the technology wouldn't be ready for another 25 years...

Ah, but are they _rounded_ white rectangles?

"only red Dwarf fans seemed more manic"

You've clearly never encountered the Homestuck fandom.