PART III.
COURTS, JUDICIAL OFFICERS, AND PROCEEDINGS IN CIVIL CASES
TITLE IV.
CERTAIN WRITS AND PROCEEDINGS IN SPECIAL CASES
CHAPTER 255D. RETAIL INSTALLMENT SALES AND SERVICES
Chapter 255D: Section 10A Discrimination against cash buyers
Section 10A. No retail establishment offering goods and services for sale shall discriminate against a cash buyer by requiring the use of credit by a buyer in order to purchase such goods and services. All such retail establishments must accept legal tender when offered as payment by the buyer.
Wrong. The Sony patent is for a method using ultrasonic waves, not a magnetic field. And yes, magnetic fields fields are commonly used to study the brain, e.g. TMS, MRI, and fMRI.
The brain is an electrochemical computer. Waves of voltage change propagate along axons until reaching the axon terminal, whereby a neurotransmitter is released across a synapse, modifying the membrane potential of the post-synaptic cell and possibly triggering an action potential. TMS works because of the relationship between electric and magnetic fields, expressed in Maxwell's laws. A concentrated magnetic pulse interferes with the normal electrical properties of nervous tissue, causing measurable changes in perception or motor control.
What is the proposed mechanism by which an ultrasonic sound wave can transmit data to cortex? I guess high frequency sound waves could interfere with synaptic transmission, but I seriously doubt that this would be controllable in the way the Sony patent suggests.
In short, I am very doubtful that Sony's mechanism would work at all, and at the very least, it would definitely be impossible to read data back out from the brain using sound waves.
The other side of this is the fact that there are no interesting or compelling games out for PSP right now, in my opinion. I'm gonna pay close to $300 for Ridge Racer? Are you kidding me? I'll probably get a PSP in about 6 months, but that's assuming that the game library is vastly improved.
and a PPU's result matrices will be similarly compact
Presumably for each dynamic object in the scene, you would only need to read back a transformation matrix indicating the present position and orientation of each object, and possibly some additional data about the velocity/acceleration of the object and which objects it collided with. Thus the data sent back from the PPU over the bus could be fairly compact. This won't necessarily be the case with physical simulations such as particle systems, fluid dynamics, and cloth, because the CPU application might need to know the present position of all the points in a particle system or cloth mesh, for example. But for rigid body dynamics, it might not be too bad.
There will be no AIPU forthcoming. Why? There are a huge variety of AI algorithms in use in many different game genres. The AI in a FPS is radically different from the AI in an RTS or a sports game or a driving game. There is no common set of frequently used, parallelizable AI algorithms that could be built into silicon and that are applicable to all game genres. Graphics routines, as well as rigid body dynamics, fluid dynamics, etc. do have a common mathematical and algorithmic framework that can benefit from hardware acceleration. That being said, offloading work to the GPU, PPU, and sound card frees up more CPU time for AI.
It pains me to say it, but Microsoft could play a beneficial role in getting PPU technology standardized and widely disseminated. GPU makers, mainly NVIDIA and ATI, attempt to support both the latest versions of DirectX (Direct3D, HSLS, etc.) and OpenGL. OpenGL, of course, is a community-based standard worked on by a wide range of individuals and corporations. DirectX is controlled exclusively by Microsoft, as we all know. In the realm of physics, there is no standard API or library implementation. Instead there are several competing APIs such as Havok, Novodex, Meqon, etc. Unless some open or closed standard physics API emerges, there is no way PPU technology will take off. However, Microsoft could easily develop a physics API to fit in the DirectX framework. This would allow hardware makers to support a common, albeit closed, standard and allow game developers to adopt hardware-accelerated physics into the next generation of games.
But without some sort of common API standard, I think that PPU technology, interesting though it is, will not catch on.
Harvey is copying Elliot Spitzer's style, right out of the playbook. He didn't even bother to ask Blockbuster "what gives?" He just sued in a completely unprovoked manner.
Or maybe he went down to his local Blockbuster, rented a movie, kept it for a couple a weeks, tried to return it, and found out the ugly truth.
Basic idea: Sokal is a physics professor at NYU, and he got fed up with left-wing sociologists writing pseudo-scientific gibberish, so he wrote a hilarious nonsensical article entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, which was published in a trendy lit-crit journal. Needless to say, when the hoax was revealed it created quite a stir in philosophy and lit-crit circles.
Yes, we're talking science -- not politics. The aggregate opinions of the community have no bearing on the issue. Data does.
You are quite wrong. The aggregate opinions of the scientific community have everything to do with the issue. No reputable scientific journal or conference will publish work without subjecting it to a rigorous peer review process. What is peer review if not a consensus-taking operation to determine the correctness, value, novelty, and significance of a piece of scientific work? You claim "Data does", but no piece of data enters the scientific canon without surviving critical peer review. That is the way science works. Furthermore, communitarian interests determine what lines of inquiry are worthy of funding. With a few exceptions (notably some DoD projects), basic research is funded if it furthers the research goals of the scientific community.
Your lengthy quotation from Michael Crichton is nothing more than a list of a few outliers. For each example of when the community consensus was wrong, there are literally thousands if not millions of examples of when the community consensus was right. Practically every piece of published scientific literature is such an example.
Yes, the aggregate opinions of the scientific community are crucial to this discussion. In many ways, the scientific community is the most democratic of all modern enterprises.
...of course it probably hasn't entered into anyone's mind here that the whole thing is a 'hoax' project designed to cover up whatever actual project they might be wanting to or actually are currently working on.
The problem with this idea is that you wouldn't want your cover story to draw attention to itself, as this clearly has. You'd have more success burying your black project under some innocuous, reasonable-sounding project name, not something ridiculous like psychic teleportation.
You can also prove that there are no even primes larger than two. Of course the type of logical proofs used in math, CS, etc. are quite different from the type of proof in question in this thread. But your point is well-taken.
I've had similar problems (with Painkiller and Far Cry, no Doom 3 yet).
You wouldn't happen to have a mobo with VIA chipset, would you? The VIA 4in1 drivers are terrible. I can't get my AGP slot to work properly with the 4in1 driver installed. Removing the AGP driver fixes the stability issue, but at a significant performance cost.
If in fact you have a mobo with VIA chipset, you can find a lot of discussions about this issue on the forums at various mobo websites. It seems to be a problem that afflicts ATI and nVidia cards. However, there doesn't seem to be a solution other than removing the AGP drivers, as you have done.
My recommendation is to get a new mobo with an nVidia chipset (NF7).
So what is the practical difference between a countable set and an uncountable set if both take an infinite amount of time to count?
Well, it depends on what you mean by practical. On a computer, the only representable numbers are integers and rational numbers, both of which belong to countable sets. (Recall that 3.14159 is the rational number 314159/100000, so all the floating point numbers in a computer are rationals.)
The distinction between countable and uncountable sets (integers vs. reals, for example) is very important in mathematics for establishing properties about functions (e.g. calculus), measuring the size of sets (e.g. probability), and determining whether two sets share similar properties (e.g. topology). Outside the domains of pure and applied mathematics, I'm not sure that the abstract concepts of countability and uncountability are all that practical.
As a historical aside, the mathematician Georg Cantor, who discovered that there are different sizes of infinity, spent his last days in an insane asylum. Theselinks may be interesting.
Given an infinite supply would it matter if you counted by ones or by tens? How would this differ?
Your question could be interpreted this way: What is the difference between the sets A = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5,...} and B = {10, 20, 30, 40, 50,...}? Well, clearly set A contains set B as a proper subset, so A has elements that B does not. However, both sets are countable, since the function f(x) = 10x establishes a one-to-one correspondence between A and B.
"Indenumerable" is typically called "uncountable". The short explanation is that there are two (at least) "sizes" of infinity, countable infinity and uncountable infinity. If a set of numbers is countably infinite, then you could count them all in infinite time. Technically, this means the set can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the integers. Uncountably infinite sets are infinite and cannot be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the integers. It is somewhat counterintuitive, but an uncountable set has more elements than a countable set, although both are infinite. The real numbers are uncountable.
You would probably need basic set theory, which you could get from a Discrete Math class, and Theory of Computation. Discrete Math and Theory of Computation are typically sophomore or junior level college courses. Two books I'd recommend are "Discrete and Combinatorial Mathematics" by Grimaldi and "Introduction to the Theory of Computation" by Sipser. The latter book is remarkably clear and easy to read, without losing mathematical precision and rigor.
When I was about 10, I had a portable black and white TV that would run on batteries. I figured that if the TV would run on batteries, there was no reason why a Nintendo wouldn't also. So I figured out the voltage that the Nintendo power supply drew and I taped together enough D-cell batteries to generate that voltage. I hooked the batteries up to the prongs on the adapter and surprisingly enough, it worked! Of course it drained the batteries rapidly, but who cares? I had a battery-powered Nintendo!
(Technical side-note: I believe I had a AC-DC converter involved in this somewhere, but it's been 15 years and I don't remember)
Re:C AND C++ ARE THE WORST LANGUAGES EVER DEVELOPE
on
Practical C++
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I couldn't agree less. It is not difficult at all to avoid memory leaks and segfaults, if you know what you are doing. Some simple rules like match every 'new' with a 'delete' and use 'delete []' if you used 'new []' will prevent the majority of these problems. Setting pointers to NULL before allocation with new and after deallocation with delete will allow you to check that your pointers are valid. But then you'd know all this if you had read 'Effective C++' and 'More Effective C++' by Scott Meyers, which are the two most useful programming books I've ever read. Meyers teachs that it's not hard to write good, correct C++ code if you know what you are doing.
I believe the poster was talking about mechanisms like the slots mechanism, which requires you to run the MOC preprocessor before you actually have valid C++. Among other annoyances with this system, emacs won't indent your code properly. Although Qt is generally a pretty nice and easy to use library, the signal/slot mechanism is obnoxious and definitely nonstandard.
There was a Slashdot post a few months ago about Qt4 which stated that Qt4 was scheduled to be released in early 2004. Does the publication of this book indicate that the Qt4 release date has been pushed back? I hope not, because some of the proposed changes in Qt4 seem interesting, especially the introduction of model/view architecture for the table, list, and tree view widgets.
Why Kylix is a poor product
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 1
I am a student and was able to purchase a standard developer license for Kylix2, normally about a thousand bucks, for only around a hundred. I was very impressed with C++ Builder 3 on Win95 several years ago and was eager to try out a Linux-based C++ RAD tool from Borland. (Note: I have no experience with Delphi, so I only used Kylix2 in C++ mode.) I have been previously impressed with JBuilder 6 on Linux. It had an extremely intuitive project management system, great support for Swing, and decent support for JDBC, XML, etc. It was extremely easy to interface existing Java libraries, e.g. XIndice, Java3D, etc., and newer JDKs with JBuilder projects. I was hoping to find Kylix performing to this standard with C++ and CLX.
Boy was I disappointed! First of all, when Kylix starts it opens a new project, instead of the last project opened. It was not easy to find a tree- or list-view of the files in the project, nor was it obvious how to add or remove files from the project permanently. When you try to save a project, Kylix uses some default project name, e.g. Unit1.something, rather than allowing you to specify a project name and options using a wizard at the time of project creation, as is the case with JBuilder.
Second, I found it impossible to get Kylix to use existing shared libraries I had written. Also, Kylix masks some X headers, XUtil.h I believe, making it impossible to use OpenGL. Of course, Kylix is designed for enterprise apps, not scientific apps, but it is still ridiculous that they would cripple the ability to use OpenGL and other libraries by masking some of the key X headers.
Overall I was extremely disappointed by Kylix. JBuilder is by far a superior product, as was C++ Builder. I have yet to find a product, open or proprietary, that makes scientific applications easy to build in a RAD/GUI fashion.
Before I get flamed for trying to write a scientific app with a product designed for building enterprise apps, let me point out that I attempted to build a database app in Kylix, only to fail. I built a similar app in JBuilder in only a few weeks.
It is matter of personal preference, to some degree. Personally, I prefer the EventListener mechanism in Java Swing to the signal/slot mechanism in QT. Of course, C++ does not support anonymous classes, but it does support inner classes with the same scoping (I think) as Java inner classes, so it would be relatively easy to write small Listener classes, registered with the appropriate widget, to handle callbacks and events. Again, personal preference.
I should admit, though, that my main annoyance with the Qt signal/slot mechanism is that it confuses Emacs, screwing up indentation and syntax highlighting. Annoying, but not enough to make me stop using QT.
That's true, the Java API has a very large number of classes. But what I like about their docs is the use of frames, which is normally quite annoying, but is well-done in the case of JavaDoc. Also, you can select a particular package to view, such as javax.swing or java.util, which greatly limits the number of classes you have to browse. Also, I like the ability to see clearly what members are new in each class and what members are inherited and/or reimplemented. Also, getters and setters are listed together in the Java docs, but not in the QT docs. I think these features make the Java docs easier to navigate than the QT docs.
I have recently spent a good deal of time programming with QT3. While QT is the best C++ GUI library and application framework, I think it needs some improvement. Here are my gripes, in no particular order.
First, the signal/slot mechanism really bugs me. I am annoyed with the need to use non-ANSI C++ techniques (e.g. public slots, moc) to achieve results that could easily be done with legal C++ code. While not strictly illegal, the use of the SIGNAL and SLOT macros, along with the Q_OBJECT macro, are not very good techniques. Specifically the reliance on macros to achieve basic GUI functionality violates a key principle in Meyers' "Effective C++", namely avoiding reliance on the preprocessor.
Second, several GUI widgets do not have a proper separation of data from view. I am thinking specifically of QTable and QListView. A better approach, from an OO design perspective, is the one taken in Java Swing. The JTable and JTree provide a nice mechanism for separating the data model from the GUI display. I find it obnoxious to have to subclass QTable and build-in data model methods to achieve results that would be cleaner under a Model-View design paradigm.
The QT online documentation is not easy to navigate. They should take a lesson from the Java API docs and reorganize the QT docs along those lines.
Slashdot Mirror
GENERAL LAWS OF MASSACHUSETTS
PART III. COURTS, JUDICIAL OFFICERS, AND PROCEEDINGS IN CIVIL CASES
TITLE IV. CERTAIN WRITS AND PROCEEDINGS IN SPECIAL CASES
CHAPTER 255D. RETAIL INSTALLMENT SALES AND SERVICES
Chapter 255D: Section 10A Discrimination against cash buyers
Section 10A. No retail establishment offering goods and services for sale shall discriminate against a cash buyer by requiring the use of credit by a buyer in order to purchase such goods and services. All such retail establishments must accept legal tender when offered as payment by the buyer.
Wrong. The Sony patent is for a method using ultrasonic waves, not a magnetic field. And yes, magnetic fields fields are commonly used to study the brain, e.g. TMS, MRI, and fMRI.
What is the proposed mechanism by which an ultrasonic sound wave can transmit data to cortex? I guess high frequency sound waves could interfere with synaptic transmission, but I seriously doubt that this would be controllable in the way the Sony patent suggests.
In short, I am very doubtful that Sony's mechanism would work at all, and at the very least, it would definitely be impossible to read data back out from the brain using sound waves.
The other side of this is the fact that there are no interesting or compelling games out for PSP right now, in my opinion. I'm gonna pay close to $300 for Ridge Racer? Are you kidding me? I'll probably get a PSP in about 6 months, but that's assuming that the game library is vastly improved.
and a PPU's result matrices will be similarly compact
Presumably for each dynamic object in the scene, you would only need to read back a transformation matrix indicating the present position and orientation of each object, and possibly some additional data about the velocity/acceleration of the object and which objects it collided with. Thus the data sent back from the PPU over the bus could be fairly compact. This won't necessarily be the case with physical simulations such as particle systems, fluid dynamics, and cloth, because the CPU application might need to know the present position of all the points in a particle system or cloth mesh, for example. But for rigid body dynamics, it might not be too bad.
There will be no AIPU forthcoming. Why? There are a huge variety of AI algorithms in use in many different game genres. The AI in a FPS is radically different from the AI in an RTS or a sports game or a driving game. There is no common set of frequently used, parallelizable AI algorithms that could be built into silicon and that are applicable to all game genres. Graphics routines, as well as rigid body dynamics, fluid dynamics, etc. do have a common mathematical and algorithmic framework that can benefit from hardware acceleration. That being said, offloading work to the GPU, PPU, and sound card frees up more CPU time for AI.
But without some sort of common API standard, I think that PPU technology, interesting though it is, will not catch on.
Or maybe he went down to his local Blockbuster, rented a movie, kept it for a couple a weeks, tried to return it, and found out the ugly truth.
Basic idea: Sokal is a physics professor at NYU, and he got fed up with left-wing sociologists writing pseudo-scientific gibberish, so he wrote a hilarious nonsensical article entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, which was published in a trendy lit-crit journal. Needless to say, when the hoax was revealed it created quite a stir in philosophy and lit-crit circles.
You are quite wrong. The aggregate opinions of the scientific community have everything to do with the issue. No reputable scientific journal or conference will publish work without subjecting it to a rigorous peer review process. What is peer review if not a consensus-taking operation to determine the correctness, value, novelty, and significance of a piece of scientific work? You claim "Data does", but no piece of data enters the scientific canon without surviving critical peer review. That is the way science works. Furthermore, communitarian interests determine what lines of inquiry are worthy of funding. With a few exceptions (notably some DoD projects), basic research is funded if it furthers the research goals of the scientific community.
Your lengthy quotation from Michael Crichton is nothing more than a list of a few outliers. For each example of when the community consensus was wrong, there are literally thousands if not millions of examples of when the community consensus was right. Practically every piece of published scientific literature is such an example.
Yes, the aggregate opinions of the scientific community are crucial to this discussion. In many ways, the scientific community is the most democratic of all modern enterprises.
The problem with this idea is that you wouldn't want your cover story to draw attention to itself, as this clearly has. You'd have more success burying your black project under some innocuous, reasonable-sounding project name, not something ridiculous like psychic teleportation.
You can also prove that there are no even primes larger than two. Of course the type of logical proofs used in math, CS, etc. are quite different from the type of proof in question in this thread. But your point is well-taken.
Didn't Doom3 teach us anything about the folly of living on Mars?
You wouldn't happen to have a mobo with VIA chipset, would you? The VIA 4in1 drivers are terrible. I can't get my AGP slot to work properly with the 4in1 driver installed. Removing the AGP driver fixes the stability issue, but at a significant performance cost.
If in fact you have a mobo with VIA chipset, you can find a lot of discussions about this issue on the forums at various mobo websites. It seems to be a problem that afflicts ATI and nVidia cards. However, there doesn't seem to be a solution other than removing the AGP drivers, as you have done.
My recommendation is to get a new mobo with an nVidia chipset (NF7).
Well, it depends on what you mean by practical. On a computer, the only representable numbers are integers and rational numbers, both of which belong to countable sets. (Recall that 3.14159 is the rational number 314159/100000, so all the floating point numbers in a computer are rationals.)
The distinction between countable and uncountable sets (integers vs. reals, for example) is very important in mathematics for establishing properties about functions (e.g. calculus), measuring the size of sets (e.g. probability), and determining whether two sets share similar properties (e.g. topology). Outside the domains of pure and applied mathematics, I'm not sure that the abstract concepts of countability and uncountability are all that practical.
As a historical aside, the mathematician Georg Cantor, who discovered that there are different sizes of infinity, spent his last days in an insane asylum.
These links may be interesting.
Given an infinite supply would it matter if you counted by ones or by tens? How would this differ?
Your question could be interpreted this way: What is the difference between the sets A = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...} and B = {10, 20, 30, 40, 50, ...}? Well, clearly set A contains set B as a proper subset, so A has elements that B does not. However, both sets are countable, since the function f(x) = 10x establishes a one-to-one correspondence between A and B.
"Indenumerable" is typically called "uncountable". The short explanation is that there are two (at least) "sizes" of infinity, countable infinity and uncountable infinity. If a set of numbers is countably infinite, then you could count them all in infinite time. Technically, this means the set can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the integers. Uncountably infinite sets are infinite and cannot be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the integers. It is somewhat counterintuitive, but an uncountable set has more elements than a countable set, although both are infinite. The real numbers are uncountable.
Hope this helps.
(Technical side-note: I believe I had a AC-DC converter involved in this somewhere, but it's been 15 years and I don't remember)
I couldn't agree less. It is not difficult at all to avoid memory leaks and segfaults, if you know what you are doing. Some simple rules like match every 'new' with a 'delete' and use 'delete []' if you used 'new []' will prevent the majority of these problems. Setting pointers to NULL before allocation with new and after deallocation with delete will allow you to check that your pointers are valid. But then you'd know all this if you had read 'Effective C++' and 'More Effective C++' by Scott Meyers, which are the two most useful programming books I've ever read. Meyers teachs that it's not hard to write good, correct C++ code if you know what you are doing.
I believe the poster was talking about mechanisms like the slots mechanism, which requires you to run the MOC preprocessor before you actually have valid C++. Among other annoyances with this system, emacs won't indent your code properly. Although Qt is generally a pretty nice and easy to use library, the signal/slot mechanism is obnoxious and definitely nonstandard.
There was a Slashdot post a few months ago about Qt4 which stated that Qt4 was scheduled to be released in early 2004. Does the publication of this book indicate that the Qt4 release date has been pushed back? I hope not, because some of the proposed changes in Qt4 seem interesting, especially the introduction of model/view architecture for the table, list, and tree view widgets.
Boy was I disappointed! First of all, when Kylix starts it opens a new project, instead of the last project opened. It was not easy to find a tree- or list-view of the files in the project, nor was it obvious how to add or remove files from the project permanently. When you try to save a project, Kylix uses some default project name, e.g. Unit1.something, rather than allowing you to specify a project name and options using a wizard at the time of project creation, as is the case with JBuilder.
Second, I found it impossible to get Kylix to use existing shared libraries I had written. Also, Kylix masks some X headers, XUtil.h I believe, making it impossible to use OpenGL. Of course, Kylix is designed for enterprise apps, not scientific apps, but it is still ridiculous that they would cripple the ability to use OpenGL and other libraries by masking some of the key X headers.
Overall I was extremely disappointed by Kylix. JBuilder is by far a superior product, as was C++ Builder. I have yet to find a product, open or proprietary, that makes scientific applications easy to build in a RAD/GUI fashion.
Before I get flamed for trying to write a scientific app with a product designed for building enterprise apps, let me point out that I attempted to build a database app in Kylix, only to fail. I built a similar app in JBuilder in only a few weeks.
I should admit, though, that my main annoyance with the Qt signal/slot mechanism is that it confuses Emacs, screwing up indentation and syntax highlighting. Annoying, but not enough to make me stop using QT.
That's true, the Java API has a very large number of classes. But what I like about their docs is the use of frames, which is normally quite annoying, but is well-done in the case of JavaDoc. Also, you can select a particular package to view, such as javax.swing or java.util, which greatly limits the number of classes you have to browse. Also, I like the ability to see clearly what members are new in each class and what members are inherited and/or reimplemented. Also, getters and setters are listed together in the Java docs, but not in the QT docs. I think these features make the Java docs easier to navigate than the QT docs.
First, the signal/slot mechanism really bugs me. I am annoyed with the need to use non-ANSI C++ techniques (e.g. public slots, moc) to achieve results that could easily be done with legal C++ code. While not strictly illegal, the use of the SIGNAL and SLOT macros, along with the Q_OBJECT macro, are not very good techniques. Specifically the reliance on macros to achieve basic GUI functionality violates a key principle in Meyers' "Effective C++", namely avoiding reliance on the preprocessor.
Second, several GUI widgets do not have a proper separation of data from view. I am thinking specifically of QTable and QListView. A better approach, from an OO design perspective, is the one taken in Java Swing. The JTable and JTree provide a nice mechanism for separating the data model from the GUI display. I find it obnoxious to have to subclass QTable and build-in data model methods to achieve results that would be cleaner under a Model-View design paradigm.
The QT online documentation is not easy to navigate. They should take a lesson from the Java API docs and reorganize the QT docs along those lines.