If there's anything England needs right now, it's a nice, healthy distrust of law enforcement.
I disagree. What we need right now is a nice, healthy distrust of our government, and the laws it makes and policies it sets.
The law enforcement people, whether it's police or any other agency, are just the guys with the unfortunate job of enforcing those policies. A lot of them are decent people - I've dealt with the police on a handful of occasions (never on the wrong side of the law) and generally found them individually to be pleasant, professional and well-meaning.
The problem is, as always, the exceptions who are not so inclined, just as most of our society are good people but we still have criminals. Combine laws that are open to abuse with law enforcement people who are willing to abuse them, and that is when problems happen.
Sorry, typo: that should obviously have read "such a system could never work without Big Brother-scale surveillance of any use of copyright materials".
The difference is that real property is naturally scarce, or more technically it is rivalrous, and thus inherently "protectable" since there is only one instance to keep track of, either you have it or you don't.
Sure, but I think you're looking with a very narrow view here. Most laws have little to do with property or scarcity of resources at all, but they all operate on the same basic principle: society is improved if everyone follows a particular law. (I'm glossing over the precondition that laws are made well, which obviously isn't universally true.)
However, it is both many orders of magnitude more difficult to enforce the rules for information than it is for real property, and it is in conflict with human nature (the natural urge to share knowledge that is probably a key, if not the key to the development of civilization). So, its much harder to enforce and because it conflicts with human nature, people naturally violate it many more times than they do similar rules for real property
Agreed again, but the fact that a law is easy to violate and this is widely abused does not mean that the law is not in the interest of society, nor that we should not try to enforce it and to punish those who do not obey it.
Take an extreme case: someone who is truly determined to kill another human at any cost will often be able to commit the murder, and we know that people do get murdered. We cannot make people invulnerable, nor provide sufficient resources to protect every individual all the time. Should we therefore accept that the law against murder is flawed, because it cannot be perfectly enforced? I hope we'd agree that such an argument would be inappropriate.
Something that is perhaps closer is speeding: speed limits in many countries are widely broken by drivers, and speeding is often portrayed as a "victimless crime". Moreover, in many cases, this is justified: the fact that a particular speed is above the specified limit does not automatically imply that it is an inappropriate speed for the driving conditions at a given time, and a skilled and experienced driver may well be in a better position to judge this than a road planner working to a rule book several years previously.
Now, here's where the parallel really cuts in: in an ideal world, we might do away with arbitrary speed limits, in favour of enforcing dangerous/inconsiderate driving laws rigorously. Where speeding is dangerous, it would still be an offence, but where it is reasonable but for the law, it would cease to be illegal. However, it would be much more difficult for our legal systems to act against those who are driving in a dangerous or inconsiderate fashion under this scheme. Thus speed limits are, if you like, a concession to pragmatism.
A parallel view exists for things like copyright: clearly not all infringements of copyright violate the principles the laws are supposed to protect, though they may violate the letter of the laws intended to represent those principles in more concrete terms. For example, we have no way of telling that Joe Public really does only rip MP3s of new tracks to see whether they're any good, and honestly buys the music for anything he downloads that he wants to keep. I'm sure some people do do this, and I'm equally sure that many more do not. However, the economic impact of the abuses may be significantly damaging to society.
Again, in a better world, we would perhaps have some mechanism by which a consumer could sample copyright works for long enough to identify their value to that consumer, and then opt to pay the asking price or not. Having paid, they would then receive a secured version that allows them to use the material fairly without limitation, but completely prevents sharing it in unfair ways to the detriment of the people whose hard work went into producing it. Of course, such a system could never work with Big Brother-scale surveillance of any use of copyright materials, which
All property is protected artificially. The natural state of affairs is that if I am stronger than you, or have a more powerful weapon, then I can take anything you have.
Intellectual property is not the same as physical property in terms of its... uh, properties... but it does have a very similar role to play: society as a whole recognises the economic concept, as a means of facilitating interactions between its members, and that recognition works just fine as long as everyone plays by the same rules. People who act selfishly can get ahead temporarily, but they do so at the implicit expense at others, and thus society frowns on them.
What an odd perspective. The President of the United States seems to go pretty much everywhere inside a huge buffer of security provided by, essentially, his own private army. As far as I'm aware, no other country in the world feels the need to provide anything close to the level of the US Secret Service, presidential motorcade, etc. for their leaders. It's quite telling that you consider it perfectly reasonable for someone who is supposed to be a servant of the people to wreck thousands or millions of citizens' days everywhere they go.
FYI I do 3D graphics programming so I do have a clue about this
I could have guessed that: your focus throughout this discussion has been on speed rather than accuracy. That's fair enough in your line of work, but not really relevant to this debate, where "serious" maths appears to be the order of the day.
We'll obviously have to agree to disagree on this one, so I leave you with one final thought: if you're not missing anything and I'm the one who doesn't understand, then why does Numerical Recipies in C++ use a function called pythag that implements the method I'm talking about (complete with checking relative sizes of the inputs and taking absolute values, as a real implementation must), and why do languages as diverse as Java and Tcl provide hypot functions in their libraries, with documentation explicitly noting that they avoid risks of intermediate underflow/overflow?
The point isn't whether division is more accurate than multiplication under normal circumstances, it's the vulnerability to destructive overflow/underflow. If that happens, doing things the naive way will be very much less accurate than a proper implementation based on the alternative approach I gave.
Really, this is elementary stuff. The fact that you keep missing the point doesn't mean there isn't a point, it just means you're not sufficiently familiar with the field to understand the danger. Please go and skim the first couple of chapters of a good numerical analysis textbook.
Pythagoras is accurate. A naive numerical implementation is not.
You know, this whole discussion is exactly what I was talking about when in my original post I wrote:
However, be aware that programming serious maths using C++ is a skill in itself. A guy with general C++ experience and general maths experience is not nearly the same thing as a guy who has experience writing mathematical code in C++. [...] Even something as simple as calculating the length of a vector using Pythagoras's Theorem in a naive way can cause horrible bugs.
Really, if you're interested in what you're missing here, go check out an introductory numerical analysis textbook. They usually start by explaining the way floating point numbers are represented within a modern computer, and the kinds of errors that can creep into floating point calculations as a result. Getting things like Pythagoras and quadratics right (or rather, not unnecessarily wrong) are typical "case studies".
This sort of thing is one of the big differences between coding maths in a low-level programming language and coding maths with a dedicated tool like Matlab: with the dedicated tool, it's probably going out of its way behind the scenes to choose the most accurate algorithms for you, while if you choose to code things up low level, you have to do that sort of thing for yourself. It can be done, but it requires a much greater understanding of how computers do maths (which is not the same as how mathematicians do it).
Speed isn't the point; accuracy is. I'm afraid I don't have time right now to explain the details, but please refer to a good textbook such as Numerical Recipes and you'll find all the background there.
That's exactly not the way to do it: consider what happens if one of x and y is much greater than the other, as for example if you have a vector very slightly misaligned with the x- or y-axis.
To avoid this problem, you can rearrange as x*sqrt(1+(y/x)*(y/x)), or the same but pulling y out, depending on which is bigger. (In practice you'd calculate y/x only once, of course.)
I for one enjoyed Andromeda (I know many will sniker at me for that).
I have a bit of a soft spot for Andromeda too. It's hardly highbrow TV - it sets out unashamedly to be an "action hour" - but it does that well. And it actually has a few things that most "good" sci-fi shows don't, not least some semblance of real tactics and concessions to physics during space combat.
(Incidentally, since you use the British "series" instead of the American "season", this leads me to believe you're posting from the UK, where the second season is being released as a single box set this August. It is also being released in this format in Australia.)
I'd be interested if they made a new B5 series that has another 5 season arch, and they were sold straight to DVD for $45-$60 a season. I'd like someone to try it. I think B5 could prove the concept workable.
They did; it was called Crusade, and was set in the same universe as Babylon 5 but a little after the end of the original five-year arc. Unfortunately, despite having a promising beginning, it was canned halfway through series one. In true JMS style, it later transpired that he was planning a huge plot twist at the end of that series, basically wrapping up what everyone expected to be the whole five-season arc within just the first season and then developing from there.
Alas, if the TV execs won't trust JMS to make such a concept work even after the success of B5, it's hard to see anyone else doing it, at least in the near future. Apparently sci-fi regular audience viewing figures aren't high enough to justify the kind of magic you can get in an extended storyline, and the pressure to make every episode accessible to the casual viewer seems to be too dominant today. [See also: Firefly.]
I think I must be the only person left on this planet who thinks that BSG is massively overrated.
You're not. I agree that it's a good show, certainly one of the best sci-fi offerings of recent years, but I don't buy all the "whole new level" stuff.
I think because sci-fi was very tame, good-guys-always-winning fare for so long, some of the recent, more realistic shows like BSG have carried more weight with the viewer. This is partly because the plots are more credible and the characters can present a wider range of emotions, of course, but I reckon it's also -- in part -- simple novelty value. Of course, BSG wasn't the first to do this; indeed, Babylon 5 itself might have a fair claim on that honour.
In any case, playing with Gritty Realism(TM) is not automatically the same as acting well, and other series have had gritty characters, too. Sure, not every sci-fi actor is waiting for their Oscar, but I would put many of those in B5 up against any of the cast of the new BSG when it comes to portraying a character of substance and interest. G'Kar remains, IMHO, the deepest character of any sci-fi show, and the B5 cast as a whole was easily the equal of other good sci-fi shows like Firefly or BSG.
The thing about BSG is that, at least through series one (I'll watch series two when they bring them all out in one DVD box set instead of messing around with half-series) it was almost all pain and suffering and grief and loss. Where was the light relief, the inspirational breakthrough, the hope, the joy? I remember one scene, at the end of one episode, when a very significant number is increased by one, and that's about it.
Having a plot that involves loss and suffering may bring more credibility, but it can be just as one-dimensional as the good-guys-always-winning if not handled well: credibility is not the same as killing off major characters indiscriminately or using the threat of wiping out the whole human race as your primary plot device. Some of the most moving episodes of Babylon 5 involved tragic fates for noble characters, but none of them was sacrificed randomly; compare and contrast with what happens in Firefly/Serenity (remember to mark those spoilers if you're replying). And of course, Babylon 5 was ultimately a story of hope, while BSG to date is more a story of survival without hope.
So yes, BSG is a good series, and by TV sci-fi standards it's one of the best. But based on the first series, I think it's too negative and one-dimensional in its approach so far, and in that respect it has a lot to learn from classics like Babylon 5.
We had a persistent problem back when I was at university, with a local firm who were fitting phone sockets in all the student rooms. They took on too much work, meaning that the installations weren't ready when the students moved in, or for several weeks afterwards.
Eventually, one of my neighbours looked up the company financial records, and with a little detective work, managed to track down the Managing Director's home phone number. He called at 7:30pm on Saturday night, apparently just as the MD was sitting down for a dinner with guests. We had two whole vans of engineers on-site within half an hour, and the entire building (40 rooms) was wired up before they left. Now that is the way to get service.:-)
The goods or service must work. If they do not work you are entitled to a refund or repair - your choice. If the merchant decides to refund you they are responsible for collecting the goods, if they decide to repair they are responsible for collecting the faulty goods. You are required to make the goods available for collection.
That's what we thought as well, but for some reason Trading Standards advised my father otherwise in this case, and one assumes they know the law pretty well in this area. There may have been some sort of complication that I don't know about, I suppose.
In a world where your name resides on thousands of databases around the world, it pays to know this sort of thing.
It also pays to know that the data protection legislation in the UK has a few huge loopholes, and credit checking is one of them. Try getting the credit reference agencies to remove an incorrect black mark on your record, and they'll tell you to get the organisation that put it there to fix it. If the organisation that put it there won't do so, you can add get the agencies to add an explanatory note to your record (for a price), but you can't make the incorrect black mark go away. You'll be spending the next several years using one of the few powers you do have in law: you can normally require any organisation that performs an automated credit check on you to undertake a manual review of your case, which would be able to see any notes you'd added (which of course the automated checks will not normally "see").
Why the credit checking system should have any special status under data protection law is an entirely different question, of course. I suspect lobbying money had a lot more to do with it than any intent to protect citizens' personal information from abuse.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Someone told me I wasn't thinking deeply enough about Mandelbrot's ideas and to take a closer look at his work, but it all just looked the same to me.
Until the grandparent mentioned "Verbraucherzentrale" I was assuming he was in the UK! We have some of the best consumer protection laws around. Instead of complaining to the company, just say to them that you'll "be in touch with Trading Standards" regarding this. Instant attitude correction.
That's a great theory, and I used to believe it, too. A recent encounter has introduced a lot of doubts, though: after my father received a bad DVD about a hobby from a company that was generally well regarded in the field, it turned out not to play properly. The attitude he got from the staff when he called about this was unconstructive, sometimes outright rude.
He got the local Trading Standards people involved, and the best they could do was say that the company in question was entitled to examine the merchandise before providing a refund, and that my father was obliged to send it back (at his expense in both time and money) so that could happen, with no apparent mechanism available to compensate him for this if it did turn out that the goods were faulty.
Now, letting the merchant examine the goods before refunding seems fair enough, particularly for something like a DVD that's easily ripped. However, if the merchant requires the customer to arrange the return, it seems only fair that if the goods are faulty, the merchant should also be required to compensate the customer for their time and costs returning the item. This, apparently, is not the case. As long as the rules on faulty returns are this one-sided, with the overheads falling almost entirely on the customer, all the legal safeguards about distance selling and the like aren't really worth very much other than for items of high value.
Incidentally, does anyone know the deal with returning box sets of DVDs if, several months after buying them, you discover that disc 6 of 7 doesn't play? It seems unreasonable to expect a customer to watch the entire box set within a few days of buying them, but there's also potential for abuse if a retailer must accept the set back several months later when any damage may or may not have had anything to do with the condition of the DVDs when they were sold.
I'm not sure that's correct, certainally not with council tax. Sure, you might get an account for the whole year, but you pay it monthly. The only reason they do the year thing is so that they can calculate your monthly payments.
For TV licences, if you pay monthly, you basically pay six months ahead. To be fair, and from recent personal experience, if you stop needing a licence at a particular address, they seem pretty good about refunding any overpaid months reasonably quickly. There have been a few horror stories about the TV licensing people in the past, mostly due to database screw-ups and/or assuming that there's no way anyone in today's society could possibly not need one (remind you of any big software firms?;-)), but it seems like they've cleaned up their act in recent years and generally do their job pretty well now.
Plus humans suck at fighting. We have soft underbellies, no claws, no proper teeth, our reproductive organs hang out in plain sight, we can't run fast, we can't climb trees quickly, our sense of smell sucks.
Sure, but unlike any of the other predators mentioned in this discussion, we make tools, and we're also much better at building shelters and forming communities for mutual benefit. A man vs. a tiger isn't a fair fight, but a dozen men with good firearms in vehicles vs. a tiger also isn't a fair fight. Why do you think the victims in horror stories usually meet their demise alone, somewhere completely bereft of effective shelter and weapons?
I don't see how to give a meaningful answer to the general questions asked here without some more context.
For what it's worth, I write high-performance, somewhat high-level maths libraries in C++ for a living. You can do a lot of things more easily in C++ than some people would expect, particularly if you have access to the right libraries (someone already mentioned diffpack, and there are also ports of BLAS and LAPACK for linear algebra, and many others). Of course a dedicated tool will usually be better than a general one - C++ isn't going to beat Matlab for ease of developing most purely mathematical algorithms any time soon - but a lot of people who invent factors of something-very-big difference have no idea what they're talking about.
However, be aware that programming serious maths using C++ is a skill in itself. A guy with general C++ experience and general maths experience is not nearly the same thing as a guy who has experience writing mathematical code in C++. For example, using C++'s default indexing strategy for matrices will do horrible things to your performance on many modern systems, because of the way caching works. Even something as simple as calculating the length of a vector using Pythagoras's Theorem in a naive way can cause horrible bugs. This sort of thing is dealt with on auto-pilot when you're using tools like Matlab, but if you're writing in a low-level language like C++ then you need to be on top of it.
If you want more specific advice about how easy/difficult it is to implement a particular aspect of mathematics in C++, you'll need to supply some more details, but I'm sure there are people reading this who could help.
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I disagree. What we need right now is a nice, healthy distrust of our government, and the laws it makes and policies it sets.
The law enforcement people, whether it's police or any other agency, are just the guys with the unfortunate job of enforcing those policies. A lot of them are decent people - I've dealt with the police on a handful of occasions (never on the wrong side of the law) and generally found them individually to be pleasant, professional and well-meaning.
The problem is, as always, the exceptions who are not so inclined, just as most of our society are good people but we still have criminals. Combine laws that are open to abuse with law enforcement people who are willing to abuse them, and that is when problems happen.
Sorry, typo: that should obviously have read "such a system could never work without Big Brother-scale surveillance of any use of copyright materials".
Sure, but I think you're looking with a very narrow view here. Most laws have little to do with property or scarcity of resources at all, but they all operate on the same basic principle: society is improved if everyone follows a particular law. (I'm glossing over the precondition that laws are made well, which obviously isn't universally true.)
Agreed again, but the fact that a law is easy to violate and this is widely abused does not mean that the law is not in the interest of society, nor that we should not try to enforce it and to punish those who do not obey it.
Take an extreme case: someone who is truly determined to kill another human at any cost will often be able to commit the murder, and we know that people do get murdered. We cannot make people invulnerable, nor provide sufficient resources to protect every individual all the time. Should we therefore accept that the law against murder is flawed, because it cannot be perfectly enforced? I hope we'd agree that such an argument would be inappropriate.
Something that is perhaps closer is speeding: speed limits in many countries are widely broken by drivers, and speeding is often portrayed as a "victimless crime". Moreover, in many cases, this is justified: the fact that a particular speed is above the specified limit does not automatically imply that it is an inappropriate speed for the driving conditions at a given time, and a skilled and experienced driver may well be in a better position to judge this than a road planner working to a rule book several years previously.
Now, here's where the parallel really cuts in: in an ideal world, we might do away with arbitrary speed limits, in favour of enforcing dangerous/inconsiderate driving laws rigorously. Where speeding is dangerous, it would still be an offence, but where it is reasonable but for the law, it would cease to be illegal. However, it would be much more difficult for our legal systems to act against those who are driving in a dangerous or inconsiderate fashion under this scheme. Thus speed limits are, if you like, a concession to pragmatism.
A parallel view exists for things like copyright: clearly not all infringements of copyright violate the principles the laws are supposed to protect, though they may violate the letter of the laws intended to represent those principles in more concrete terms. For example, we have no way of telling that Joe Public really does only rip MP3s of new tracks to see whether they're any good, and honestly buys the music for anything he downloads that he wants to keep. I'm sure some people do do this, and I'm equally sure that many more do not. However, the economic impact of the abuses may be significantly damaging to society.
Again, in a better world, we would perhaps have some mechanism by which a consumer could sample copyright works for long enough to identify their value to that consumer, and then opt to pay the asking price or not. Having paid, they would then receive a secured version that allows them to use the material fairly without limitation, but completely prevents sharing it in unfair ways to the detriment of the people whose hard work went into producing it. Of course, such a system could never work with Big Brother-scale surveillance of any use of copyright materials, which
Thank you for that particularly obvious response. Did it occur to you that people try to kill other heads of state as well?
All property is protected artificially. The natural state of affairs is that if I am stronger than you, or have a more powerful weapon, then I can take anything you have.
Intellectual property is not the same as physical property in terms of its... uh, properties... but it does have a very similar role to play: society as a whole recognises the economic concept, as a means of facilitating interactions between its members, and that recognition works just fine as long as everyone plays by the same rules. People who act selfishly can get ahead temporarily, but they do so at the implicit expense at others, and thus society frowns on them.
What an odd perspective. The President of the United States seems to go pretty much everywhere inside a huge buffer of security provided by, essentially, his own private army. As far as I'm aware, no other country in the world feels the need to provide anything close to the level of the US Secret Service, presidential motorcade, etc. for their leaders. It's quite telling that you consider it perfectly reasonable for someone who is supposed to be a servant of the people to wreck thousands or millions of citizens' days everywhere they go.
Didn't you get the memo? We've now declared war on poor people, which means the law no longer applies.
I could have guessed that: your focus throughout this discussion has been on speed rather than accuracy. That's fair enough in your line of work, but not really relevant to this debate, where "serious" maths appears to be the order of the day.
We'll obviously have to agree to disagree on this one, so I leave you with one final thought: if you're not missing anything and I'm the one who doesn't understand, then why does Numerical Recipies in C++ use a function called pythag that implements the method I'm talking about (complete with checking relative sizes of the inputs and taking absolute values, as a real implementation must), and why do languages as diverse as Java and Tcl provide hypot functions in their libraries, with documentation explicitly noting that they avoid risks of intermediate underflow/overflow?
The point isn't whether division is more accurate than multiplication under normal circumstances, it's the vulnerability to destructive overflow/underflow. If that happens, doing things the naive way will be very much less accurate than a proper implementation based on the alternative approach I gave.
Really, this is elementary stuff. The fact that you keep missing the point doesn't mean there isn't a point, it just means you're not sufficiently familiar with the field to understand the danger. Please go and skim the first couple of chapters of a good numerical analysis textbook.
Pythagoras is accurate. A naive numerical implementation is not.
You know, this whole discussion is exactly what I was talking about when in my original post I wrote:
Really, if you're interested in what you're missing here, go check out an introductory numerical analysis textbook. They usually start by explaining the way floating point numbers are represented within a modern computer, and the kinds of errors that can creep into floating point calculations as a result. Getting things like Pythagoras and quadratics right (or rather, not unnecessarily wrong) are typical "case studies".
This sort of thing is one of the big differences between coding maths in a low-level programming language and coding maths with a dedicated tool like Matlab: with the dedicated tool, it's probably going out of its way behind the scenes to choose the most accurate algorithms for you, while if you choose to code things up low level, you have to do that sort of thing for yourself. It can be done, but it requires a much greater understanding of how computers do maths (which is not the same as how mathematicians do it).
Speed isn't the point; accuracy is. I'm afraid I don't have time right now to explain the details, but please refer to a good textbook such as Numerical Recipes and you'll find all the background there.
That's exactly not the way to do it: consider what happens if one of x and y is much greater than the other, as for example if you have a vector very slightly misaligned with the x- or y-axis.
To avoid this problem, you can rearrange as x*sqrt(1+(y/x)*(y/x)), or the same but pulling y out, depending on which is bigger. (In practice you'd calculate y/x only once, of course.)
I have a bit of a soft spot for Andromeda too. It's hardly highbrow TV - it sets out unashamedly to be an "action hour" - but it does that well. And it actually has a few things that most "good" sci-fi shows don't, not least some semblance of real tactics and concessions to physics during space combat.
I am indeed. Thanks for the info!
Was that a serious question? :o)
They did; it was called Crusade, and was set in the same universe as Babylon 5 but a little after the end of the original five-year arc. Unfortunately, despite having a promising beginning, it was canned halfway through series one. In true JMS style, it later transpired that he was planning a huge plot twist at the end of that series, basically wrapping up what everyone expected to be the whole five-season arc within just the first season and then developing from there.
Alas, if the TV execs won't trust JMS to make such a concept work even after the success of B5, it's hard to see anyone else doing it, at least in the near future. Apparently sci-fi regular audience viewing figures aren't high enough to justify the kind of magic you can get in an extended storyline, and the pressure to make every episode accessible to the casual viewer seems to be too dominant today. [See also: Firefly.]
You're not. I agree that it's a good show, certainly one of the best sci-fi offerings of recent years, but I don't buy all the "whole new level" stuff.
I think because sci-fi was very tame, good-guys-always-winning fare for so long, some of the recent, more realistic shows like BSG have carried more weight with the viewer. This is partly because the plots are more credible and the characters can present a wider range of emotions, of course, but I reckon it's also -- in part -- simple novelty value. Of course, BSG wasn't the first to do this; indeed, Babylon 5 itself might have a fair claim on that honour.
In any case, playing with Gritty Realism(TM) is not automatically the same as acting well, and other series have had gritty characters, too. Sure, not every sci-fi actor is waiting for their Oscar, but I would put many of those in B5 up against any of the cast of the new BSG when it comes to portraying a character of substance and interest. G'Kar remains, IMHO, the deepest character of any sci-fi show, and the B5 cast as a whole was easily the equal of other good sci-fi shows like Firefly or BSG.
The thing about BSG is that, at least through series one (I'll watch series two when they bring them all out in one DVD box set instead of messing around with half-series) it was almost all pain and suffering and grief and loss. Where was the light relief, the inspirational breakthrough, the hope, the joy? I remember one scene, at the end of one episode, when a very significant number is increased by one, and that's about it.
Having a plot that involves loss and suffering may bring more credibility, but it can be just as one-dimensional as the good-guys-always-winning if not handled well: credibility is not the same as killing off major characters indiscriminately or using the threat of wiping out the whole human race as your primary plot device. Some of the most moving episodes of Babylon 5 involved tragic fates for noble characters, but none of them was sacrificed randomly; compare and contrast with what happens in Firefly/Serenity (remember to mark those spoilers if you're replying). And of course, Babylon 5 was ultimately a story of hope, while BSG to date is more a story of survival without hope.
So yes, BSG is a good series, and by TV sci-fi standards it's one of the best. But based on the first series, I think it's too negative and one-dimensional in its approach so far, and in that respect it has a lot to learn from classics like Babylon 5.
Yes, Amazon's returns system these days seems to be exemplary.
IME, the problems are usually with the smaller, specialist vendors, rather than the big name companies selling maintstream products.
Yep, that strategy can be highly effective.
We had a persistent problem back when I was at university, with a local firm who were fitting phone sockets in all the student rooms. They took on too much work, meaning that the installations weren't ready when the students moved in, or for several weeks afterwards.
Eventually, one of my neighbours looked up the company financial records, and with a little detective work, managed to track down the Managing Director's home phone number. He called at 7:30pm on Saturday night, apparently just as the MD was sitting down for a dinner with guests. We had two whole vans of engineers on-site within half an hour, and the entire building (40 rooms) was wired up before they left. Now that is the way to get service. :-)
That's what we thought as well, but for some reason Trading Standards advised my father otherwise in this case, and one assumes they know the law pretty well in this area. There may have been some sort of complication that I don't know about, I suppose.
It also pays to know that the data protection legislation in the UK has a few huge loopholes, and credit checking is one of them. Try getting the credit reference agencies to remove an incorrect black mark on your record, and they'll tell you to get the organisation that put it there to fix it. If the organisation that put it there won't do so, you can add get the agencies to add an explanatory note to your record (for a price), but you can't make the incorrect black mark go away. You'll be spending the next several years using one of the few powers you do have in law: you can normally require any organisation that performs an automated credit check on you to undertake a manual review of your case, which would be able to see any notes you'd added (which of course the automated checks will not normally "see").
Why the credit checking system should have any special status under data protection law is an entirely different question, of course. I suspect lobbying money had a lot more to do with it than any intent to protect citizens' personal information from abuse.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Someone told me I wasn't thinking deeply enough about Mandelbrot's ideas and to take a closer look at his work, but it all just looked the same to me.
That's a great theory, and I used to believe it, too. A recent encounter has introduced a lot of doubts, though: after my father received a bad DVD about a hobby from a company that was generally well regarded in the field, it turned out not to play properly. The attitude he got from the staff when he called about this was unconstructive, sometimes outright rude.
He got the local Trading Standards people involved, and the best they could do was say that the company in question was entitled to examine the merchandise before providing a refund, and that my father was obliged to send it back (at his expense in both time and money) so that could happen, with no apparent mechanism available to compensate him for this if it did turn out that the goods were faulty.
Now, letting the merchant examine the goods before refunding seems fair enough, particularly for something like a DVD that's easily ripped. However, if the merchant requires the customer to arrange the return, it seems only fair that if the goods are faulty, the merchant should also be required to compensate the customer for their time and costs returning the item. This, apparently, is not the case. As long as the rules on faulty returns are this one-sided, with the overheads falling almost entirely on the customer, all the legal safeguards about distance selling and the like aren't really worth very much other than for items of high value.
Incidentally, does anyone know the deal with returning box sets of DVDs if, several months after buying them, you discover that disc 6 of 7 doesn't play? It seems unreasonable to expect a customer to watch the entire box set within a few days of buying them, but there's also potential for abuse if a retailer must accept the set back several months later when any damage may or may not have had anything to do with the condition of the DVDs when they were sold.
For TV licences, if you pay monthly, you basically pay six months ahead. To be fair, and from recent personal experience, if you stop needing a licence at a particular address, they seem pretty good about refunding any overpaid months reasonably quickly. There have been a few horror stories about the TV licensing people in the past, mostly due to database screw-ups and/or assuming that there's no way anyone in today's society could possibly not need one (remind you of any big software firms? ;-)), but it seems like they've cleaned up their act in recent years and generally do their job pretty well now.
Sure, but unlike any of the other predators mentioned in this discussion, we make tools, and we're also much better at building shelters and forming communities for mutual benefit. A man vs. a tiger isn't a fair fight, but a dozen men with good firearms in vehicles vs. a tiger also isn't a fair fight. Why do you think the victims in horror stories usually meet their demise alone, somewhere completely bereft of effective shelter and weapons?
I don't see how to give a meaningful answer to the general questions asked here without some more context.
For what it's worth, I write high-performance, somewhat high-level maths libraries in C++ for a living. You can do a lot of things more easily in C++ than some people would expect, particularly if you have access to the right libraries (someone already mentioned diffpack, and there are also ports of BLAS and LAPACK for linear algebra, and many others). Of course a dedicated tool will usually be better than a general one - C++ isn't going to beat Matlab for ease of developing most purely mathematical algorithms any time soon - but a lot of people who invent factors of something-very-big difference have no idea what they're talking about.
However, be aware that programming serious maths using C++ is a skill in itself. A guy with general C++ experience and general maths experience is not nearly the same thing as a guy who has experience writing mathematical code in C++. For example, using C++'s default indexing strategy for matrices will do horrible things to your performance on many modern systems, because of the way caching works. Even something as simple as calculating the length of a vector using Pythagoras's Theorem in a naive way can cause horrible bugs. This sort of thing is dealt with on auto-pilot when you're using tools like Matlab, but if you're writing in a low-level language like C++ then you need to be on top of it.
If you want more specific advice about how easy/difficult it is to implement a particular aspect of mathematics in C++, you'll need to supply some more details, but I'm sure there are people reading this who could help.