Dave

Well, you would say that I'd say there's quite a few problems with that system though. It's not really democracy if you're getting a select few to decide the outcome of something - plus the system is very much open to people who might like to tap into/monitor the phonecalls, and possibly change the outcome.

Surely it matters that you call the entire nation or people don't get a chance to vote for who they want to? Or am I just getting confused?

This made me laugh quite a lot.

Now that's how I want to go

Slipping out of the plane in a comedy cartoon fashion? ofc it wouldn't be cartoon like if you didn't leave a man-shaped impression 40ft down in the ground

Just changed the names around for some of the forums. This is a kind of guide as to what you should try and put in each: General Mathematics: Anything that doesn't fit into any of the other subforums. Analysis/Calculus: Any analysis problems (e.g. differential equations, questions with convergence/limits/continuity/etc). Modern/Abstract Algebra: Linear Algebra, set theory, equivalence relations, etc. Applied Mathematics: This is the old Stats and Geometry forums, and its use is now for any maths of a more applied nature. Hope you find it easier to choose where to post your stuff now Cheers.

Yeah, that's a good one, and you're not likely to feel anything on impact. Combining that with a banana skin could be interesting.

Don't really see the problem with them tbh; there are methods of blocking them out, so if you want to block em out, then that's your decision. They don't really seem to affect me too much.

ExtraSense did get quite annoying after a while though, as they all do. But on the whole, we have some of the best quality posters around here that I've seen on any of the forums that I frequent. (desperate drag to get it back on topic )

Sure, I do it at home (as you rightly heard me say ). I use dyndns.org to get myself a nice hostname for the dynamic IP because BT won't give me a static IP unless I change to some stupidly expensive service. Basically I have my ADSL router (which is a netgear DG814 for anyone that cares) set up to let traffic through on port 80 to my server machine, which is an old PII 450MHz. The only downside to it is that I can't assign an IP to the top level of my domain name because that requires a static IP. On that box there's also an ftp server and a nice mailserver (postfix) that I hooked up with mysql to give myself a nice virtual mail system. Load balancing isn't a problem unless you've got quite a few visitors on your site. I don't, so obviously it's not a problem. Server security is another issue, but since I use gentoo, I make sure I'm patched up to the most frequent updates. Having as few ports open as possible is also pretty essential. Oh, and don't even try it on anything below a DSL/Cable connection unless you like the idea of running a server on 56k dialup (?!)

Well, quite. There's a lot of difference between those people that are coming here looking for actual answers and those that come on here and deliberately spam/say "the laws of physics are wrong!!!!! cheese is a new fundamental constant!!!!!11"/etc, and I think YT was probably referring to those of the latter kind

rofl I think the old classic, being flattened by a grand piano is quite funny

Missed this one, so I'm just posting a quick followup now. I agree wholeheartedly that we get quite a few people on here that join just to either spam their way to post count heaven (mentioning no names, of course) or to post a variety of non-scientific viewpoints on things without backing them up or listening to reason. Fortunately the latter is fairly infrequent compared to the former, otherwise most of the people on here would have gone quite mad by now. However, we obviously want this community to grow; this isn't going to happen without some kind of advertisement on the internet, and you're going to pick up the odd person here and there who doesn't know what they're talking about. I'm quite impressed with the quality of the posts on these forums. There are multiple other forums out there without the kind of quality we get here, and without key members who contribute greatly to answering peoples questions and posting new ideas. Even though some of the new members aren't exactly perfect (okay, that's a bit of an understatement ), we've managed to pick up quite a few people who definately know what they're talking about and that has to be a valuable thing.

Yes, it would be nice to get some more people like that around here. However, they're pretty hard to come by most of the time I think the site has gone from strength to strength over the past few months. It wasn't all that busy around here until then, and now we have quite a few members around posting stuff on various topics every day. You can tell the quality of the members on here from the members/posts ratio; we have about 55,000 posts between about 1,700 users. It's very nice to see new users on here who aren't just spamming all the time and I think it's very encouraging.

Slightly off topic, but what do you think the funniest way to go out would be?

Well as someone said, it's kindof a borderline case.

But they are great fun to pilot and destroy things with

like a tiger?

A teacher was giving a lesson on the circulation of the blood. Trying to make the matter clearer, she said, "Now, class, if I stood on my head, the blood, as you know, would run into it, and I would turn red in the face." "Yes," the class said. "Then why is it that while I am standing upright in the ordinary position, the blood doesn't run into my feet?" A little fellow shouted, "Cause yer feet ain't empty."

Well if you can, so will I (June 4th ) 19/m/UK

Not impossible. Just very, very hard

I'll quite freely admit that I don't pay for the vast majority of music; however, being quite a fan of Jazz and things like that, often I can't find soundtracks that I want to listen to, so for the odd track or two it's quite useful.

Must be some kind of bug in vB then, although I have to say I'm not having a problem.

Sounds like a good idea to me, although I have to say I think I'll probably use Apple's Music Store when it comes out over here in the UK for the songs I can't find on the net.

Yeah, usually paying a small amount for some web hosting is usually the best option; there's not many places around that'll dish out mysql/php for free with no adverts, unless you happen to know a guy with a server