734563
Still, what do you think? Also, my answer is totally A.

734564
E! He totally meant E.

734564
Wait, you actually expect someone to answer that question?

734636
Well, I don't expect anyone to go into excruciating detail, but... yeah.

734637
I'm rolling my eyes at you so severely right now.

734563
Remember, when you're asinine, you make an ass out of "I" and the number "9".

733582
You people are so frickin' circumscribed! There is a big, beautiful world out there, and less than a tenth of a hundredth of a percent of it involves made-up fancy stories about candy-colored equines! There's Bruce Springsteen! And... and Beowulf! And polar bears! What about polar bears, huh?

734724

Do they do intricately choreographed dance numbers, and burst out in song?

735178

Polar Bears? That's like all they do. Oh, and eat seals and walruses.

735182

You're confusing Bruce Springsteen and polar bears, again.

735183

Am I? Well, I never took any classes on arctic zoology, so sue me. Also, I know for a fact that you haven't either, so I don't think you've got any room to be correcting me on the behavior and traits of large arctic land mammals and / or pop superstars.

735183 735184

Hey, you two, keep it civil. This discussion is supposed to be about pony sexs.

735185

What do pony sexs have to do with Bruce Springsteen and polar bears?

I just want to state that I'm highly in favor of pony sexs.

That is all.

735185 735190
Yes, what do Bruce Springsteen and polar bears have to do with pony sexs?

735194 735190
Look, I'm not sure what the rating for this group is, so all I'm going to say is: If you don't know, I'm certainly not going to be the one to explain it to you.

735196
pffft. Cop out.

735193
Oh me too! It's that SR Foxley character that's a prude. Probably doesn't even really think Miss Harshwhinny is best pony.

735198
Well, you're obviously a troll. Welcome to my ignore list.

735193
Unfortunately, A has already been claimed on the poll, but if you want you can still pick 2, which is the next closest option. (In fact, it's directly adjacent.)

735196
I'm not sure what the rating on this group is either. You should make a poll so we can figure that out. Just make sure to have lots and lots of options so more than five people can vote.

735743
Was I the only one who noticed Skywriter himself say that his poll options could be picked by more than one person? It was right here: 733536

735758
Textual interpretation is a synthetic process of perception and author intention. It is not always accurate to say that an author's interpretation of the piece is the most correct one. When do words gain meaning? They gain meaning when they are viewed and interpreted. In this sense, the original poster is just one more interpreter, whose opinion is no better or worse than anyone else's.

735760
I interpret what you just said to be dry-cleaning instructions.

Why are you spamming this group with dry-cleaning instructions?

735199
I tried to ignore that Skywriter bastard but my entire screen went blank.

735760

That's an interesting way of looking at it. Looking closely at the original poll, it's quite clear that there was meant to be another option, as follows, though it never seems to have actually been written out by the author. Namely:

F) Highly in favor of mare on mare sexy times, preferably multiple times in a row, possibly accompanied by the music of Burt Bacharach.

I'll choose option F, given this interpretation...

735906
[youtube=a28kY1-s-Vc]

735822
Ooooh! So that's what happened. Man, that seems like a really significant bug. Someone should report it to Knighty. You'd think he would have tested the anti-trolling features of the site more thoroughly than that. Also, I totally agree with your decision to abdicate the moderator role of the group to Skywriter, and then to block Skywriter entirely. That one can't be trusted.

735758
I think he was just trolling about that. (See previous comments about how this group is riddled with trolls, and there's apparently a huge bug in the site code which prevents us from doing much about it.) I mean, it doesn't make sense anyway: Isn't there some fundamental law of the universe that says that a thing can only be in one place at a time?

Or by saying that more than one person could choose the same polling option at the same time, do you suppose he was implying said options are similar in nature to fundamental particles/waves, and that a correct interpretation of this poll in light of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is that one can know what option was picked, or when it was picked, but never both at the same time?

If that's the case, and if you've already picked option A, then maybe it's possible that I can also pick option A-- but I won't be able to tell you exactly when I picked it.

I hope I do it before the poll is over, though. After all, I want my vote to count for something!

735906
But... that's what I wanted to pick! You know, it's really not nice to "interpret" a new polling option for the group, and then to hoard it for yourself. Shame on you.

736122
Well, if we're going with a particle/wave model of poll duality, then Heisenberg's theory says that the process of measuring a respondent's position requires interfering with their momentum, and the process of measuring a respondent's momentum requires interfering with their position. So: the more accurately we know people's responses here, the less we know about whether Skywriter will ban them or not.

... On that grounds, I would like to abstain from the poll.

735906
Using this strategy I was able to find another option, which suits me better:

H) Highly in favor of sexy times between two human women who bear tangential resemblances to mares from the show, preferably multiple times in a row, always accompanied by the music of Rick Springfield.

736403
Humans?!

736407
DON'T KINKSHAME ME!

736407>>736408
TK's right, TK. It's not right to mock people for whatever sick fetishes they may have.

736415
Thanks.

...HEY!

736122

Well,unlike some of the other members of this group, I'm perfectly willing to share my poll option. Just quote my post in your reply, and say that you want to share option F on the poll with me. Sharing's in the spirit of the show, after all...

736553
I think we've already established that it's physically impossible to share the poll options as described. Doing so would render the laws of physics null and void, and possibly bring about the end of existence as we know it.

But you know, it might be possible to bisect that polling option if we can come up with a particle accelerator which can muster sufficient energy. If we're successful in this would you prefer:

|. Mare on mare sexy times
-. Multiple times in a row
_. Accompanied by the music of Burt Bacharach.

Oh crap, it became three options! (guess I should have expected that, given the shape of the letter "F") So... um... now I'm at a loss as to how to subdivide this polling option fairly between two people.

736602
Find a third person to split it with. I'll take _.

736647
Are you sure? I think splitting the option like this renders the cumulative value of our three sub-options equal to only one vote in the poll. And I was willing to do that if arcum42 because he seems like a nice enough person, and also offered to share the spirit of the show with me. But I didn't want to speak for anyone else here.

Anyway, if _ is what you really want, I guess I'll go for -. "F" really is best poll option, isn't it?

736602
I'll take |.

736722
You again? Um, I don't want to be rude, but there are only three sub-options, and as this was arcum42's poll response to begin with, you taking |. that doesn't leave anything for him. And that's both unfair and a little rude, don't you think?

736729
So much for spirit of the show, eh? Fine. Whatever. I guess I'll choose 2 then, just to spite you. | was only worth 1/3 of a vote anyway.

736602

Hmmm...

Well, I think I do see another way to manage this and allow enough options for us all. Instead of F being a poll option, I'll reinterpret it as a set of poll options, which I'll label F-1 through F-infinity, for convenience. Each of them will be an option as follows:

F-x) Highly in favor of mare on mare sexy times, possibly accompanied by the music of Burt Bacharach. (Where x is a number between 1 and infinity).

Each of you can take several of these poll options, limited to 1024 or less to avoid infighting.

Some of you may be getting ideas involving creating more subsets and supersets including F. I advise against this. Going this far should be fine, as I own books by Douglas Hofstadter and Roger Penrose, and have an idea of where the limitations are. Fiddling with this too much could easily break the formal logic system of the poll, and could also cause concepts in this thread that could be destructive to any ai's that happen to be reading. And I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for Celestia breaking down...

737729
Thank you for this. I only wish that you hadn't made Bacharach mandatory. Can any modders out there create a patch for 737729 's fix that doesn't requrie Bacharach?

740823

No problem. And Bacharach isn't mandatory, as it uses the word "possibly". You just simply have to unselect "accompanied by the music of Burt Bacharach" when choosing the poll option.

741117
Oh, cool, so it's all GUI, huh? Neat! Okay, maybe I will vote after all!

How about adding option G?

(G) I don't care, so long as Ms. Harshwhinny does (and you can take that any way you choose to).

737729
Great idea! I'm going to vote then. But I need to explain which choices I'm taking here. Bear with me; I'll make it quick.

Let's say I want to pick both F-1 and F-2. I can group those choices together and call that a "set". Now I have a collection of options: {F-1, F-2}, and I can give that a name (let's say S-1).

The idea of a set is simply that it's a collection of things. The set doesn't actually have to contain anything to be meaningful. I can say that I want S-2 = { } and that still makes sense. S-2 is an "empty set". It's a collection with no contents. Someone who picks S-2 has made a choice of zero poll options.

Now the interesting thing is: once we know what S-1 means, it's just another thing, and that means I can choose that as a member of a collection! If I say that I want to pick S-3 = {S-1, F-4}, then we can substitute in, {{F-1, F-2}, F-4} and we know which ones I want. Easy enough, right?

So, I claim a set of poll options defined as follows:

Let the Horizon Set, HS, be defined as the set of all poll-option sets which do not contain themselves as members.

742277
dammit russell stop being greedy

you're not leaving any sets for us

742287
Actually I do see horizon's point. (You're probably "Russell's" friend but please don't use real names here, let people interact with us using the name they chose).

If I wanted to pick S-4 = { S-4, F-23 } then that would not be one of the ones Horizon chose. All you have to do to vote is claim a set that contains itself! Easy!

742301
but wouldn't expanding S-4 by recursively substituting it into its own definition give you an infinite number of votes for F-23

and therefore your votes would count infinitely more than everyone else

742287
I think you have me confused with someone else. I'm Horizon, not Russell.

742301 742526
That's actually a feature! See, 737729's original proposal had problems with some people being able to vote more than others. If Alice voted for F-1, F-2 and F-3 and Bob voted for F-4, then Alice gets three times as many votes. But since everyone now HAS to vote for a set with an infinite number of choices, it's a level playing field.

By definition, the sets are constructed from a group with a finite number of source elements (note that this also works for { F-x | x ∈ N }); thus, a one-to-one mapping exists between them no matter how many choices are in the infinite set, or how many infinite expansions are chosen. (I've got a marvelous proof of this, which the margin is too small to contain.)

In other words, the cardinality of all selectable choices is aleph-null, so everyone will get precisely aleph-null votes. Even myself, since it can be shown that set HS contains at least one infinite set* and thus has the same cardinality.

--
* This is left as an exercise to the reader.