mossoi

Yeah - I've got them blocked as well but it's maybe not the best thing to have on the site.

The page and contents load quickly and that's all good but each page seems to continue loading something for several minutes after everything relevant appears to have loaded (this is on a T1 connection so it's not a connection speed issue). Not sure what it is but it's annoying and somewhat disconcerting (just what IS it loading in the background?) especially as there are adverts on display which can include all sorts of nasties.

I find that my local Bonsai Ninja superstore has a good range of various firewall/virus/spyware Ninjas to suit my needs. I believe the new Wireless Firewall Ninja is out next week.

I think there is a lot to be learnt from studying the shape and size of different drums. They have evolved over thousands of years so there is a huge amount of practical experience already available. I would suggest researching and experimenting with different surface areas, volumes, shapes, materials, skin thickness etc..

Solids transfer sound faster and more efficiently than gases or liquids but you may not get the same audible volume. As Skye says, something that will displace a lot of air but remain within the audible range of frequency would be best. I think a bass drum has got to be one of the best for force to sound ratio, assuming you are going to be hitting a solid rather than detonating an explosive.

True, but often cookies are an integral part of spyware and server side data collection scripts. There has been a HUGE increase in the amount of spyware over the past couple of months. There are two tools which I find very useful for removing this stuff. Adaware and Hijackthis. Adaware is a user friendly hunt, warn and delete application. Hijackthis gives you a snapshot of the registry components that may be causing problems allowing you to decide what to delete (be careful though because it lists both good and bad components so deleting everything it lists WILL kill your OS).

Europe, C1700 minus disease and religion. Biggest balls up you've ever caused?

One brand of the stuff used in PC's is Artic Silver and works in two ways. It is a good conductor of heat and it smooths over any pits or roughness on the heat transfer surfaces to eliminate any air pockets that might provide insulation. http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/Kustom_PCs_Shop_Thermal_Interface_69.html

One step in this process is the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). Google returns plenty of info about this. Autoexec.bat does not exist on a vanilla build of Windows XP. If your not convinced whether DOS exists on Windows XP/2K then try and make a DOS boot disk from it. This is a link to a bit more info from Technet: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/default.asp?url=/WINDOWSXP/home/using/productdoc/en/choosing_between_NTFS_FAT_and_FAT32.asp and here's a thread in another forum that covers a bit more: http://www.webdesignforums.net/showthread.php?t=11136

DOS does not exist on Windows 2000 or XP. It uses a DOS emulator, Shell.

I've also met that horse but only to stroke its nose.

Just out of interest. How did you get an Alpha of Lonhorn?

If you are going to go for a branded PC I would only consider Dell (I have a lot of experience with their computers, which I've found to be pretty good unlike thier hard-sell tactics when you call them) the rest just aren't up to much at all. Personally I would build my own as this will give you a lot more freedom and work out cheaper in the end. As long as you stick with quality components there isn't really much of a difference other than preference so I'm not going to tell you why you must have X motherboard instead of Y but here are my recommendations: 64 bit AMD probably isn't worth it at the moment. There's very little software that can make full use of the architecture at the moment and there is a big premium on the cost as they are so new. It's worth researching motherboards and RAM as they are critical to the speed, performance and longevity of your system. If you're going to spend more on anything do it here. Get a decent case and power supply. My favourite cases are Lian Li. All aluminium and great to work in. I would go for a minimum 400W PSU - especially as more and more cases are being loaded with fans. SATA hard drives are pretty sweet. CD/DVD etc. bleh - I hardly ever use them so I just put any old junk in there! Seperate CD ROM and RW drives will be better if you want to copy media. Umm - that's about it. Don't get too involved in the arguments over exactly the best hardware - it all kinda boils down to how much you pay and what you want to do with it. And finally... If you aren't in any major rush then it might be an idea to wait for the release of the BTX form factor MB's, predicted 2nd quarter of this year, as they are set to be the next 'big thing'. It's even possible that after their release the cost of ATX systems will go down.

Is this also true of the Rolf Harris cover? I think an little experiment is needed...

OK, here's the proof and answer. Kedas, you were pretty close. Let's take a sample of 10,000 people to test. Out of these 10,000, 50 (0.5%) have the illness. 49 (98%) percent of these people will test positive. 1 (2%) will wrongly test negative. This leaves 9,950 (99.5%) people who don't have the illness. 199 (2%) of them will test positive by error. So we have a total of 248 (199 + 49) people who have tested positive for the illness. The probability of any one of these people having the illness is 49/248 (the number of correct positive tests over the total). This is approximately 20%! So there is hope for those that were diagnosed with the illness and a retest is certainly worthwhile. This example should make one think twice about statistics that are thrown about everyday (mainly by the scaremongering popular media).

That's the point I'm making, I just didn't make it very clear in the post above but the bicep/tricep analogy makes the point nicely.

Exactly. Different parts of the brain are designed for different tasks. There is no dormant 85% percent that needs to be awoken. It's akin to saying that we only use 10% of our muscles to perform a certain act. If we could use all the muscles in our body to perform the task then we will become magnitudes better at it. I can't think of many practical examples where training my tongue will help me jump higher!

Opinionated neo-nazis aside, it's not actually the case that we only use 10% of our brains. All of our brain is used at some time for different tasks such as sight, smell, thought etc. Some reason that we are only using a fragment of our brain and that if only the rest can be unlocked we will have access to a new level of knowledge and understanding. This is usually said just before they tell you they can sell you their miraculous method of "unlocking the potential within" or some such rubbish that will allow you to levitate and perform acts of telekensis. I don't buy it, it smacks of pseudoscience.

One doesn't 'think' purely with one hemisphere of the brain although some functions are performed predominantly by a specific half. Personally, I would say that the night terrors were an effect of the stress of the nuns' attitudes towards you and possibly feelings of helplessness and fear. Forcing you to reverse something as natural as being left handed could quite easily cause emotional trauma that manifests as night terrors. It's not so much being forced to write with the wrong hand but more a case of lack of control of ones own life and a feeling of vunerability.

That is an acceptable answer for the second question. You still need to answer the first one.

Here's a little maths exercise that I found quite interesting. Assume there is a test for a fatal illness that is proven to be 98% accurate (a wrong diagnosis is given only 1 in 50 times) and the innacuracy is equal for both false negatives and false positives. Also assume that 0.5% of the tested population have the illness (1 in 200). If you are tested and your doctor tells you that you have contracted the illness what is the likelyhood that this diagnosis is correct? Is it worth demanding a second opinion? I'll post the answer and proof after we've had some responses.

That's not quite right. The manager took 2 bucks and gave back 3 which means that the bill came to $27 (25 + 2) not $28. Each man paid $9 (27/3) to cover both the room and the tip. The answer to this incarnation of this problem is in the error here: "So, each person payed 9$ total 9*3 = 27$ + the 2$ for the bell boy = 29$" ------------------------------------------------^ It should read: Each person paid $9 (total 9*3 = $27) to cover the room and the tip and was refunded $1 (total 1*3 = $3). 27 + 3 = $30 The discrepancy comes from the original problem including the bellboy's tip twice.

A lot of the martial arts evolved separately and in parallel, one can't say that the Japanese copied the Chinese. Many were developed as a means for the lower classes to overthrow the military classes and were practiced using farm tools or hidden behind dance and sports to mask the fact that they were fighting arts. I have spent many years studying the Japanese martial arts which were not covert and were practiced proudly and gained respect.

I want these substances to stay banned for a slightly different reason to those above. I was briefly in a national sports team (sadly not for long, I didn't quite make the grade) so I have experience of the feelings and emotions involved in striving for this level. Taking steriods is a big 'life' decision and not something that anybody should do lightly. If they were to be permitted then many people (myself included) would not want to get involved in that side of sport. This means that reaching the highest level becomes possible only for those who have decided to make a sport their chosen profession. I think there is a big difference between the American sports philosophy and that of the rest of the world in that the American public seem to be that much displaced from the sports men and women. Take American football for example, those guys are trained and trained to the absolute limit and have been throughout there teens passing through school on the strength of their sporting ability. The nearest comparison in the UK is rugby union, a sport which has only recently become professional (previous England rugby teams consisted of men who were lawyers and policemen in the week and rugby players at the weekend). I think sport should be kept as something that is accessible in this manner as I like to think of that world being achievable and common to all people rather than watching those that have been nurtured from an early age into becoming a 'sports machine' battle it out. Most athletes don't make it to the top and being an out of work professional sportsman is not an ideal situation - permitting steriods et al is a significant step in forcing people to go the way of the professional earlier in life and could force real talent to be overlooked because they just weren't prepared to burn their non-sports bridges quite that early on in life.

Dave - I had the same problem on chopper challenge with a score of just over 3000. or was it 38,000