I mentioned the commie part, aluding to the fact that open source software is a form of socialisim. At least, in the government by the prolitariat(sp?) sense of the word. See, by exagerating this minor point, and painting him as a frothing bolshevik communist, I hope to create a silly, almost surreal image of Linus for comic value, and....oh, never mind. *sigh*
You raise a good point though. In addition to the granola thing, anyone know if Linus smells like a dirty hippy?
They should also use the "Pro" moniker on the low end (aka Home) edition and rename "Pro" to "Corporate Edition." There seem to be far too many people that feel that they need the "Pro" version of something, simply because it's better.
Back when I worked at CHIMPUSA in college, i met many people like that. They had NT back office because it was 'more powerful' than workstation. When I asked them why it was better, they just stared at me blankly.
MS has a HORRIBLE nameing convention. First off, they keep changing it. Jesus Bill, I'm using all my gray matter remembering syntax for all your differing programming languages, can we keep the naming convention on the OS consistant?
How about going back to the NT names? Workstation for workstations, server for servers, and TheJesusCristServer(tm) for enterprise servers. ('The JesusCristServer, it works miracles!')
My guess is Microsoft needs a new CEO if it is to become an interesting company again. I wouldn't be surprised to see Ballmer step down one day after a fight with institutional investors. The big question: Who is the right person for that job?
Linus, Duh!
With Linus's commie-granola eating hippie mentality and programming genius, and Bill's influence, money, and evil, they will be eeeennveeenceble!
I'm thinking that if you were to take the mass of Mount Everest (1 'EM') and plug it into the equations that give you the schwartzchild radius for an object (URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_ra dius), I think that you could say that the energy needed to create an 'artificial' black hole will be at least equal to the additional mass needed to cause an object to collapse upon itself, since e=mc^2. I say at least, as your method of 'compression' will probably not be as efficient as gravity, and quite possibly many orders of magnitude less efficient.
Keeping the math simple (hahahahahha...I just SLAY myself....), we can clearly say that Mt. Everest is nowhere close enought to having enough mass to collapse. We could also safely say that another Mt. Everest compressed into the first will still be way off from the total mass needed to collapse, right? However, using the big 'E' man's classic, e=mc^2, we can safely say that a few billion tons of mass * the speed of light is a hell of a lot of energy. Now granted, uranium and plutionium are several times denser than rock, but considering that most nuclear devices can produce megaton yeilds from a scant few pounds of enriched fissile material, I think you can imagine how much energy a few billion tons of mass might be. So, I think it would be safe to say, just using some guesswork that it would take far less energy to simply obliterate the earth, than it would be to engage in black hole silliness. But, I give you points for romantic creativity.
BTW, while we are talking about it, your page misses a very obvious, plausable, and frighteningly simple method. I'd give this 10/10:
Modern nuclear weapons are fusion weapons. You fire off a fission weapon to generate the heat/pressure needed to start a fusion reaction. Once fusion is burning, you can dump as much hydrogen isotope into the reaction as you can lay your hands on. Duterium isn't that hard to get, and if you look at the weapon designs from the 1950's, either the Sovie Union or the US probably had the technology needed to construct a doomsday weapon capable of cracking the earth's mantle. Just light off a trillion-megaton yeild device, and that should pretty much take care of the earth. Want fragments rather than large chunks? Add more hydrogen. The only risk of failure is miscalculating the energy needed, and only destroying all life on the planet, rather than fragmenting it. And, just think, this is old technology that at least two countries have mastered. Sleep tight...
Hmmm, recently my GF got the WW tv show on DVD, and after watching Linda Carter on it, I'd have to say that Sarah Michelle Gellar couldn't cut it as WW. She is pretty, a competent actress, and certainally capable of handeling any physical stunts required, but she doesn't have nearly the mammalry potential that Linda did. I mean, she just couldn't fill out the role. For something like the you need the very brest actress you can find.
Joking aside, WW is an interesting character, as she is sort of the ultimate feminist. Girls watch her a feel empowered, and she is sexy and feminin without being some sort of angry man-hating radical, so she isn't threatining to men. A very clever and subversive character, there.
I love(d) Buffy and Angel... but somehow firefly didn't have the same magic....many people will probably disagree with me anyway
You hear the hereitic, we must BURN them for such blaspheme!
Seriously though, Buffy and Angel were crappy camp. Firefly is a drama. Don't even try to compare them, because firefly is light years (hah-get it?) beyond that other garbage.
Feasibility rating: 2/10. Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.
I really hope that this is just a joke, as there are so many things wrong with this plan, that it makes my head hurt. The feasability is about 0/10. Black holes don't have infinite gravity. The mass of a hole is the same as the mass before it collapsed. So, if you collapse a baseball into a black hole, you have a black hole that weighs the same as a baseball. THE PROBLEM is that it would create an event horizon so small that it would probably pass between all the particles between the surface and the center of the earth. (atoms are mostly empty space, when not being compressed by the immense gravity of say, a neutron star.) Once you have created it, it still only has the gravitational potential of a baseball. Not very menacing.
So, you make a bigger black hole. The energy or mass you need to create a noticable black hole is probably going to be enough, that it could be better used to simply vaporize the earth.
However, I wouldn't be surprised if alot of JS functionality that would be very useful to google either now or in the future is simply "missing" on IE7
...Or perhaps you just need to take your 'paranoid episode' medicine. Really, go outside and take a deep breath of fresh air.
But Microsoft controls the web (through IE), and they won't allow the web to become a competitor to Windows.
Microsoft controlls JACK on the web. A lot of people just use their browser to view it with. Other than getting people in the habbit of using MS products, that is the extent of any control they have. If they don't keep up, people will just bypass them. Look at tabbed browsing. MS didn't impliment it, and now they are playing catch up. The web cannot compete with windows. One is an operating system. The other is a collection of pr0n, egomanical blog rants, and photos of peoples cats. And since a photo of 'mr. snuggums' won't boot my damn computer, I don't see any competition between the two.
Orin Kerr, Associate Professor of Law at George Washington University writes at The Volokh Conspiracy that the Department of Justice is having trouble finding abuses of the USA PATRIOT Act.
The first rule of the PATRIOT act is that you do not talk about the PATRIOT act.
While I agree with everything you're saying, none of it excuses the monsterously bad dialog, mostly from Annakin, in Eps 1 and 2. It's not a bad story at all, and the character development is interesting, but the actual writing (as opposed to the concepts behind it) is just so bad.
Amen Botha! If GL would just let someone else write the dialouge, they could be some of the best films ever made. The imagry is gorgeous, the story vast. But the dialouge is PAINFUL.
A chaotic neutral is someone who values individuality and personal freedoms (chaotic) and has no bias toward good or evil. Since their morals aren't strongly alinged to good or evil, they might commit acts that fall under either catagory in the name of self-interest. Any impulsive or selfish personality could fall under this category. They have no desire to spread woe or promote the greater good, simply to be allowed to do whatever they wish.
Now, someone who was mentally ill could certainly fit this patern, but there is a whole sub-topic of alingment and sanity. It could be argued that anything with a basically human mind that was chaotic evil would be homcidial and deranged. Many serial killers would certainly fit the category. However, I would say that the reason one acts out an alingment is moot in the discussion of what alingment a person is.
You mention the phrase, 'striving for neutrality'. That sounds like a out of the book description of neutrality, which I don't buy. Nobody goes around saying, 'Hmmm, the forces of good are getting to strong, let's throw in with evil today'. I mean, really, how does one 'strive for neutrality' in the spectrum of good and evil?
The games are DESIGNED to addict you. You don't make subscription money if you don't have a good core base of addicts.
A little paranoid are we?
As someone who dabbles in game programming, I can pretty much say that when the designers sit down at a table to create a new MMORPG, the first thing they say isn't, 'How can we write an addictive game that will suck people in for years'. It's probably more like, 'Can we create a persistent online world that doesn't creash every three minutes?'.
All these games are modeled after Dungeons and Dragons. Perhaps not directly, but the whole leveling concept came from Gary Gygax and crew's seminal 1970's designs. While the leveling treadmill can be viewed as behavior reinforcement, it wasn't designed to be some machallavian (sp?) plot. Or, rather if it was, then Gygax is some kind of friggen Nostradomus.
I don't think that Gygax could have forseen what would come of his legacy.
Game designers and programmers are trying to solve a very complicated set of technical problems when they design a game, while making it fun to play. Just because some people have personality issues, don't run around say that programmers are putting crack in the drinking water.
There are people who are gambling addicts, sports addicts, workaholics, drinkers, etc. Pick an endeavor and someone has already obsessed over it in a self destructive fashion. It's the people that are the problem, not the games.
Interesting line of though: Lets start spreading counter propaganda supporting RPGs...
Crisitianity: Multiple crusades into the middle east to purge the 'heathens' from the holy land.
Dungeons and Dragons: Multiple crusades to AM/PM to get fresh bags of 'Cheetos'.
Crisitianity: The Inquisition, where thousands of innocent people were rounded up to be tortured and killed in faux witch hunts.
Dungeons and Dragons: Alingment quizes, where thousands of hours were wasted discussing the phillosophical ramifications about wither Han Solo was Chaotic Good or Chaotic Neutral.
Crisitianity: Failed to take a moral stand against the actions of the Nazi party as they killed millions of Jews.
Dungeons and Dragons: Failed to take a stand againts gamers who don't bathe enough. No Jews have died to date, however one Saul Rosenberg of South Beach Florida once had to stand in a small elevator for four and a half minutes with a smelly gamer.
Crisitianity: Failed to take a strong stand against sexual crimes performed by Catholic priests for decades, often involving children.
Dungeons and Dragons: Failed to take a strong stand aginst childish sexual antics during post adventure drinking binges where the 'dwarf tries to pat the serving wench on the bum.'
While neither group is perfect, I think that this proves, scientifically and without any shaddow of a doubt, that Cristians are clearly morally inferrior to Gamers. QED.
I can't say much as I've never played a collector card game or RPG.
Who the hell let this joker in? Hey buddy, read the top of the page, it says 'news for nerds'. Who do you think you are, comming in here and talking trash like that? Now beat it, or I'll PK you with my 3rd level drow ninja/assassin.
The military would certainly reject me on the grounds that I am Chaotic Evil, and just as likely to fire on my comrades as the enemy --- discriminating bastards.
Chaotic neutral is the best alingment to be. I might shoot an enemy. I might throw a greande into a friend's tent. I might help an nun cross a busy street. I might quit the army to become a nun. Who knows? I sure as hell don't. It will be as much as a suprise to me as everyone else...
I do not mean to cast aspersions on D and D players, but if IDF says that people who indulge in fantasy games, as a statistical group, have personality traits that make them a lower security risk, then I am inclined to believe them.
If you look at the ratio of black people in the US prison system to whites, and compare that to the ratio in the general population, you might say that African-Americans are more prone to crime, and thus shouldn't be trusted. How is one statement any less Predjudice than the other?
Oh, and since you post to Slashdot, you don't mind if the police search your house for pirated software, since slashdot posters are more prone to participate in piracy, do you?
"I am an equal oppurtunity cynic, I hate everyone equally"
I don't get what is so different between a GPU and this PPU thing. A GPU is mainly multiplying vectors and matrices and dot products and division, physics simulation is not very different, although the result is handled differently.
Quite differently. You are suggesting that one draws the matrix results and the other just stores the matrix results, but there is a more important factor than that. All the data that is pushed onto the grpahics card is essentially on a one-way trip. After going through the T&L pipeline, it guts pushed into a video buffer, drawn and then overwritten. I'm not even sure that there is capacity to write back data to general memory from the AGP cards, since this incurs a big performance hit. Any physics chip will need to be able to matrix math and then save the results for further useage, since you need to maintain things like mass, velocity, heading, etc.
Using a GPU chip as the starting point for a PPU wouldn't be an entirely bad idea, though. Interestingly enough, I think the rendering community would love to have a 3d accelerator that could use specialized GPU rendering speeds and the ability to write the image generated to the hard drive, so it's not like you are the only person thinking along those lines.
Learn Kung-Fu. It lets you fight off agent Smith, and you can avenger your master after he is slain by ninjas. Plus, I have yet to see someon who holds a MBA or Math degree with those cool Shaolin dragon and lion brands on their wrists.
[tinfoilhat]I am sticking to my 5.25" floppy, it's the only reliable way to backup data.[/tinfoilhat]
Fool. Using this untested, so called 'floppy disk' will only lead to data loss. The only tested, and reliable storage meidum is the punch card. Don't trust these new fangled gadgets until they have been proven to be more than some mad scientist's pipe dream.
Slashdot Mirror
I mentioned the commie part, aluding to the fact that open source software is a form of socialisim. At least, in the government by the prolitariat(sp?) sense of the word. See, by exagerating this minor point, and painting him as a frothing bolshevik communist, I hope to create a silly, almost surreal image of Linus for comic value, and....oh, never mind. *sigh*
You raise a good point though. In addition to the granola thing, anyone know if Linus smells like a dirty hippy?
*ducks*
In addition it could also possibly pose an interesting safety issue, since a pedestrian or motorist would not hear it coming.
Yes, but the bike will be a huge smash hit with NINJAS!
'My name is robert, and Ninjas are soooo sweet.'
They should also use the "Pro" moniker on the low end (aka Home) edition and rename "Pro" to "Corporate Edition." There seem to be far too many people that feel that they need the "Pro" version of something, simply because it's better.
Back when I worked at CHIMPUSA in college, i met many people like that. They had NT back office because it was 'more powerful' than workstation. When I asked them why it was better, they just stared at me blankly.
MS has a HORRIBLE nameing convention. First off, they keep changing it. Jesus Bill, I'm using all my gray matter remembering syntax for all your differing programming languages, can we keep the naming convention on the OS consistant?
How about going back to the NT names? Workstation for workstations, server for servers, and TheJesusCristServer(tm) for enterprise servers. ('The JesusCristServer, it works miracles!')
My guess is Microsoft needs a new CEO if it is to become an interesting company again. I wouldn't be surprised to see Ballmer step down one day after a fight with institutional investors. The big question: Who is the right person for that job?
Linus, Duh!
With Linus's commie-granola eating hippie mentality and programming genius, and Bill's influence, money, and evil, they will be eeeennveeenceble!
I'm thinking that if you were to take the mass of Mount Everest (1 'EM') and plug it into the equations that give you the schwartzchild radius for an object (URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_ra dius), I think that you could say that the energy needed to create an 'artificial' black hole will be at least equal to the additional mass needed to cause an object to collapse upon itself, since e=mc^2. I say at least, as your method of 'compression' will probably not be as efficient as gravity, and quite possibly many orders of magnitude less efficient.
Keeping the math simple (hahahahahha...I just SLAY myself....), we can clearly say that Mt. Everest is nowhere close enought to having enough mass to collapse. We could also safely say that another Mt. Everest compressed into the first will still be way off from the total mass needed to collapse, right? However, using the big 'E' man's classic, e=mc^2, we can safely say that a few billion tons of mass * the speed of light is a hell of a lot of energy. Now granted, uranium and plutionium are several times denser than rock, but considering that most nuclear devices can produce megaton yeilds from a scant few pounds of enriched fissile material, I think you can imagine how much energy a few billion tons of mass might be. So, I think it would be safe to say, just using some guesswork that it would take far less energy to simply obliterate the earth, than it would be to engage in black hole silliness. But, I give you points for romantic creativity.
BTW, while we are talking about it, your page misses a very obvious, plausable, and frighteningly simple method. I'd give this 10/10:
Modern nuclear weapons are fusion weapons. You fire off a fission weapon to generate the heat/pressure needed to start a fusion reaction. Once fusion is burning, you can dump as much hydrogen isotope into the reaction as you can lay your hands on. Duterium isn't that hard to get, and if you look at the weapon designs from the 1950's, either the Sovie Union or the US probably had the technology needed to construct a doomsday weapon capable of cracking the earth's mantle. Just light off a trillion-megaton yeild device, and that should pretty much take care of the earth. Want fragments rather than large chunks? Add more hydrogen. The only risk of failure is miscalculating the energy needed, and only destroying all life on the planet, rather than fragmenting it. And, just think, this is old technology that at least two countries have mastered. Sleep tight...
I was going to go with DVD*R and DVD/R.
Wow, and that totaly beats out my ideas: DVD(E^i^pi)R and DVD(dx/dy*dy/dt)R.
Hmmm, recently my GF got the WW tv show on DVD, and after watching Linda Carter on it, I'd have to say that Sarah Michelle Gellar couldn't cut it as WW. She is pretty, a competent actress, and certainally capable of handeling any physical stunts required, but she doesn't have nearly the mammalry potential that Linda did. I mean, she just couldn't fill out the role. For something like the you need the very brest actress you can find.
Joking aside, WW is an interesting character, as she is sort of the ultimate feminist. Girls watch her a feel empowered, and she is sexy and feminin without being some sort of angry man-hating radical, so she isn't threatining to men. A very clever and subversive character, there.
I love(d) Buffy and Angel... but somehow firefly didn't have the same magic. ...many people will probably disagree with me anyway
You hear the hereitic, we must BURN them for such blaspheme!
Seriously though, Buffy and Angel were crappy camp. Firefly is a drama. Don't even try to compare them, because firefly is light years (hah-get it?) beyond that other garbage.
Feasibility rating: 2/10. Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.
I really hope that this is just a joke, as there are so many things wrong with this plan, that it makes my head hurt. The feasability is about 0/10. Black holes don't have infinite gravity. The mass of a hole is the same as the mass before it collapsed. So, if you collapse a baseball into a black hole, you have a black hole that weighs the same as a baseball. THE PROBLEM is that it would create an event horizon so small that it would probably pass between all the particles between the surface and the center of the earth. (atoms are mostly empty space, when not being compressed by the immense gravity of say, a neutron star.) Once you have created it, it still only has the gravitational potential of a baseball. Not very menacing.
So, you make a bigger black hole. The energy or mass you need to create a noticable black hole is probably going to be enough, that it could be better used to simply vaporize the earth.
Nice try, though.
However, I wouldn't be surprised if alot of JS functionality that would be very useful to google either now or in the future is simply "missing" on IE7
...Or perhaps you just need to take your 'paranoid episode' medicine. Really, go outside and take a deep breath of fresh air.
But Microsoft controls the web (through IE), and they won't allow the web to become a competitor to Windows.
Microsoft controlls JACK on the web. A lot of people just use their browser to view it with. Other than getting people in the habbit of using MS products, that is the extent of any control they have. If they don't keep up, people will just bypass them. Look at tabbed browsing. MS didn't impliment it, and now they are playing catch up. The web cannot compete with windows. One is an operating system. The other is a collection of pr0n, egomanical blog rants, and photos of peoples cats. And since a photo of 'mr. snuggums' won't boot my damn computer, I don't see any competition between the two.
I, for one, welcome our new office work performing over-
Awe, crap, who am I kidding? I'm going to be freakin' outsourced to one of these little @#$@#$ers...
DIE, YOU LITTLE ROTTER! R2D2 WAS TWICE THE BOT YOU WILL EVER BE!
Who plays D&D with a table? What's wrong with the woods behind my parent's house?
LIGHTNING BOLT! LIGHTNING BOLT! LIGHTNING BOLT!
That he may be named as a result of a slashdot link is scary.
Dear god, I don't think the world is ready for a Goatsecx Jones....
Orin Kerr, Associate Professor of Law at George Washington University writes at The Volokh Conspiracy that the Department of Justice is having trouble finding abuses of the USA PATRIOT Act.
The first rule of the PATRIOT act is that you do not talk about the PATRIOT act.
While I agree with everything you're saying, none of it excuses the monsterously bad dialog, mostly from Annakin, in Eps 1 and 2. It's not a bad story at all, and the character development is interesting, but the actual writing (as opposed to the concepts behind it) is just so bad.
Amen Botha! If GL would just let someone else write the dialouge, they could be some of the best films ever made. The imagry is gorgeous, the story vast. But the dialouge is PAINFUL.
You get to see her in diapers...
Ah, someone to debate alignment with!
A chaotic neutral is someone who values individuality and personal freedoms (chaotic) and has no bias toward good or evil. Since their morals aren't strongly alinged to good or evil, they might commit acts that fall under either catagory in the name of self-interest. Any impulsive or selfish personality could fall under this category. They have no desire to spread woe or promote the greater good, simply to be allowed to do whatever they wish.
Now, someone who was mentally ill could certainly fit this patern, but there is a whole sub-topic of alingment and sanity. It could be argued that anything with a basically human mind that was chaotic evil would be homcidial and deranged. Many serial killers would certainly fit the category. However, I would say that the reason one acts out an alingment is moot in the discussion of what alingment a person is.
You mention the phrase, 'striving for neutrality'. That sounds like a out of the book description of neutrality, which I don't buy. Nobody goes around saying, 'Hmmm, the forces of good are getting to strong, let's throw in with evil today'. I mean, really, how does one 'strive for neutrality' in the spectrum of good and evil?
The games are DESIGNED to addict you. You don't make subscription money if you don't have a good core base of addicts.
A little paranoid are we?
As someone who dabbles in game programming, I can pretty much say that when the designers sit down at a table to create a new MMORPG, the first thing they say isn't, 'How can we write an addictive game that will suck people in for years'. It's probably more like, 'Can we create a persistent online world that doesn't creash every three minutes?'.
All these games are modeled after Dungeons and Dragons. Perhaps not directly, but the whole leveling concept came from Gary Gygax and crew's seminal 1970's designs. While the leveling treadmill can be viewed as behavior reinforcement, it wasn't designed to be some machallavian (sp?) plot. Or, rather if it was, then Gygax is some kind of friggen Nostradomus. I don't think that Gygax could have forseen what would come of his legacy.
Game designers and programmers are trying to solve a very complicated set of technical problems when they design a game, while making it fun to play. Just because some people have personality issues, don't run around say that programmers are putting crack in the drinking water.
There are people who are gambling addicts, sports addicts, workaholics, drinkers, etc. Pick an endeavor and someone has already obsessed over it in a self destructive fashion. It's the people that are the problem, not the games.
Interesting line of though: Lets start spreading counter propaganda supporting RPGs...
Crisitianity: Multiple crusades into the middle east to purge the 'heathens' from the holy land.
Dungeons and Dragons: Multiple crusades to AM/PM to get fresh bags of 'Cheetos'.
Crisitianity: The Inquisition, where thousands of innocent people were rounded up to be tortured and killed in faux witch hunts.
Dungeons and Dragons: Alingment quizes, where thousands of hours were wasted discussing the phillosophical ramifications about wither Han Solo was Chaotic Good or Chaotic Neutral.
Crisitianity: Failed to take a moral stand against the actions of the Nazi party as they killed millions of Jews.
Dungeons and Dragons: Failed to take a stand againts gamers who don't bathe enough. No Jews have died to date, however one Saul Rosenberg of South Beach Florida once had to stand in a small elevator for four and a half minutes with a smelly gamer.
Crisitianity: Failed to take a strong stand against sexual crimes performed by Catholic priests for decades, often involving children.
Dungeons and Dragons: Failed to take a strong stand aginst childish sexual antics during post adventure drinking binges where the 'dwarf tries to pat the serving wench on the bum.'
While neither group is perfect, I think that this proves, scientifically and without any shaddow of a doubt, that Cristians are clearly morally inferrior to Gamers. QED.
I can't say much as I've never played a collector card game or RPG.
Who the hell let this joker in? Hey buddy, read the top of the page, it says 'news for nerds'. Who do you think you are, comming in here and talking trash like that? Now beat it, or I'll PK you with my 3rd level drow ninja/assassin.
The military would certainly reject me on the grounds that I am Chaotic Evil, and just as likely to fire on my comrades as the enemy --- discriminating bastards.
Chaotic neutral is the best alingment to be. I might shoot an enemy. I might throw a greande into a friend's tent. I might help an nun cross a busy street. I might quit the army to become a nun. Who knows? I sure as hell don't. It will be as much as a suprise to me as everyone else...
I do not mean to cast aspersions on D and D players, but if IDF says that people who indulge in fantasy games, as a statistical group, have personality traits that make them a lower security risk, then I am inclined to believe them.
If you look at the ratio of black people in the US prison system to whites, and compare that to the ratio in the general population, you might say that African-Americans are more prone to crime, and thus shouldn't be trusted. How is one statement any less Predjudice than the other?
Oh, and since you post to Slashdot, you don't mind if the police search your house for pirated software, since slashdot posters are more prone to participate in piracy, do you?
"I am an equal oppurtunity cynic, I hate everyone equally"
I don't get what is so different between a GPU and this PPU thing. A GPU is mainly multiplying vectors and matrices and dot products and division, physics simulation is not very different, although the result is handled differently.
Quite differently. You are suggesting that one draws the matrix results and the other just stores the matrix results, but there is a more important factor than that. All the data that is pushed onto the grpahics card is essentially on a one-way trip. After going through the T&L pipeline, it guts pushed into a video buffer, drawn and then overwritten. I'm not even sure that there is capacity to write back data to general memory from the AGP cards, since this incurs a big performance hit. Any physics chip will need to be able to matrix math and then save the results for further useage, since you need to maintain things like mass, velocity, heading, etc.
Using a GPU chip as the starting point for a PPU wouldn't be an entirely bad idea, though. Interestingly enough, I think the rendering community would love to have a 3d accelerator that could use specialized GPU rendering speeds and the ability to write the image generated to the hard drive, so it's not like you are the only person thinking along those lines.
Learn Kung-Fu. It lets you fight off agent Smith, and you can avenger your master after he is slain by ninjas. Plus, I have yet to see someon who holds a MBA or Math degree with those cool Shaolin dragon and lion brands on their wrists.
[tinfoilhat]I am sticking to my 5.25" floppy, it's the only reliable way to backup data.[/tinfoilhat]
Fool. Using this untested, so called 'floppy disk' will only lead to data loss. The only tested, and reliable storage meidum is the punch card. Don't trust these new fangled gadgets until they have been proven to be more than some mad scientist's pipe dream.