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Comment Principia Mathematica and unprovable truths. (Score 1) 235

"Infinite" in actualized physical terms is meaningless

Set theory is the basic logic maths is built on, it didn't change much for over 2000yrs. About a century ago people like Cantor, Godel, Russell, and many others started looking at set theory and infinities. The line of enquiry culminated with Godel's incompleteness theorem showing that any and every set of things is dependent on something else outside the set, add what is outside the set and you still have something else outside the new set. Godel's discovery that maths is "incomplete" (contains unprovable truths) destroyed what Russell and others had been trying to do with their Principia Mathematica- show that all mathematical truths can be mechanically derived from a set of fundamental axioms (Newton's "clockwork universe").

In other words Godel discovered that (maths says) the Universe (with a capital U) is "turtles all the way down" (and up).

Comment Imperfect does not imply useless. (Score 2) 525

If the results match your prediction, then yes that's good evidence, do it a few more times and we've got something serious to talk about.

You mean like climate models correctly predicting phenomena before the phenomena was observed in nature, such as, "Stratospheric cooling", "polar amplification", and the global cooling effect from a large volcanic eruption ( AKA Mt Pinatubo). There are dozens of "blind predictions" for those who care to actually look at the forecasting (and hindcasting) skill of aggregate climate models.

At the end of the day, all of science is a model, the question is why do people who obviously haven't looked at climate models doubt their utility? Why do others doubt the evolutionary model of life, or the tectonic plate model? - Those kind of doubts do not come from scientific skepticism, they come from industry funded propagandists such as the heartland institute and are then disseminated through the opinion pages of papers such as the wall street journal.

Comment Re:Usable in Australia (Score 1, Informative) 317

Depending on where the units were placed, it's quite possible that the operating temperature would exceed 43 degrees even if the ambient temperature was below that.

Yes, official temperature readings measure the air temperature and are always taken in the shade. When the weatherman says the temp is 43deg, it's more like 53deg in direct sunlight.

Comment Close enough to free (Score 1) 125

All of these engine releases of late seem to have very reasonable terms. From the Unreal Engine 4 FAQ

How much do I have to pay for Unreal Engine 4?
UE4 is free to use, with a 5% royalty on gross product revenue after the first $3,000 per game per calendar quarter from commercial products. Read the EULA FAQ for more details.
I’m a consultant. Do I owe royalties on consulting fees?
No.

I think the reason for this is they all want to become the defacto-standard, they are all very keen to create a developer community around their toolset. Personally I like the UE4 / PhysX sales model since you don't pay until you make money from it. I'm interested in playing with these engines as a hobby but have no interest in writing a commercial game, If I was serious about developing and selling games, the license fees for any of the popular engines would be a very minor concern, it's a great example of a capitalist "win-win".

Selling model content to use in these engines is where the money is for individual devs/artists, kind of like the people who sold shovels during the gold rush. IIRC UE4 has some sort of public marketplace where you can release/sell models you have created.

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