Dave

Although my faith in humanity is rapidly diminishing, I would still hope that your average person would be able to tell the difference between a tree and a sentient being. However, you do have a point; if some politician who is being paid an awful lot of money by cloning companies comes along, I'm fairly sure that they'd put enough spin on it to make it start sounding appealing to some people.

I suppose a big enough one would be, yes. It would have to have a focal point quite some distance away though.

Well the first and second series were because of the novelty value, but the rest of the series have been a complete letdown tbh, not worth watching at all. They also have weekly tasks for their food budget and things like that so it can be quite entertaining at times.

No problems, although maybe you could've posted in this thread about the registry

Windows (and a lot of its programs) uses the registry in place of lots of preference files to store details about what settings you've customized. It keeps a lot of the clutter out of the filesystem, and it keeps it organized (to a certain degree). The registry is stored somewhere deep in the windows directories where you're not likely to find it DLLs are just shared libraries; I'm not sure where they come into what you're asking?

You've never seen/heard the plot of Big Brother? That amazes me. They basically shove 12 people in a house for 10 weeks or so who are constantly monitored by cameras and have no contact with the outside world, and then evict one person each week until there's about 3 or 4 and then they boot the other 2 or 3 out, leaving 1 winner who collects a cash prize. That's the general jist of it, at least.

Just to give you a little hint and since I've had a question about what you can and can't assume; You may assume standard results such as Taylor series of functions, for example. Basically if you write a proof with standard results (within reason), you'll get the credit. Just do what you think is best

On the agenda this time: two gay guys, a self confessed homophobe, a lesbian political activist (who is an ex-prostitute), a woman who is divorced at 26, a woman who is actually a man, an ex-male stripper who is now a flight attendant, the most arrogant guy you've ever met, a guy who said he was "probably the most intelligent person you've interviewed", a Jade Goody type figure with the most annoying voice on the face of the planet, a page 3 model wanabee and, to top the list - a history of arts student. My heart goes out to her.

Don't worry, it almost certainly is.

Is anyone in the UK actually watching this? I've never seen such a load of drivel in my life. They're trying to boost ratings by throwing in a load of completely mismatched people and generally making their life hell. Personally it makes me want to watch it even less. Perhaps they should come around to the fact that the show's idea is good at first, and after that it just becomes boring. 5 series of this is really starting to get on my nerves now

True; but there's other ways of destroying ships without pointing lots of mirrors at them. For all we know, he could have used a group of specially trained woodpeckers to peck holes in the side of the boats and sink them that way

A pretty easy one just for kicks, and it's a fairly standard proof. Prove that [math]e^{i\theta} = \cos(\theta) + i\sin(\theta)[/math] and hence show [math]e^{\pi i} = -1[/math] (for the more adventurous, try showing [math](\cos(\theta) + i \sin(\theta))^n = \cos(n\theta) + i\sin(n\theta)[/math]).

You're all probably right, it's just I'm very cynical and don't believe a lot of what people say they did in history; mainly because they tend to brag a lot.

I still have my doubts

You're going to need a lot of mirrors if the ship is a fair distance away, and Archimedes didn't have the modern day trigonometry like we do today. I highly doubt he did it myself.

I would assume this was probably the greatest problem.

Yes, it would be a nice resource for reference; although the idea is somewhat dependent on people giving me the proper theorems etc. The new LaTeX system should help a lot in typesetting the things as well.

I don't honestly have a clue why it's coming up all the time. As a very last resort you could do a re-install, but that's a lot of hassle for such a small problem.

Don't know whether you've all noticed, but there's an encyclopedia module included in this version of vbPortal (which is the portal system we use for vBulletin). I have a few ideas to create a mathematical encyclopedia section (there's already a science encyclopedia with 1 entry in it ) to link to various key ideas (e.g. famous theorems, matrix operations, definitions of important functions, etc), a bit like MathWorld but on a smaller scale. This way, if someone has a question in the future that we've already answered using a theorem, we don't have to go and state the theorem every time, just point a link to it. Any thoughts/suggestions?

Those look like icons for Mac OS X, although I daresay you can port them to 'doze with a utility.

I have to say I prefer the second form myself, but each to his/her own

I wouldn't suggest you attempt to overclock your computer then.