Dave

Whilst we're on the issue of the name: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/25/vista_trademark_dispute/ Vista is already a trademark of another company, who ironically sell corporate software. I think they stand a pretty good chance of winning some kind of court case against MS because of the obvious confusion that will arise with the different names. Any thoughts?

You heard the man Personally I share the same view as Klaynos. I don't think we're going to see much more than XP with a few tweaks.

I have to say that this doesn't look like it's going anywhere. The reason I didn't contribute to this thread is because I have my feet in both camps (I dualboot). However, after 5 pages of some rather inconsistent arguments from some people, I'm beginning to doubt whether it's worth keeping this thread open. Comments?

Yet another example of how IRC is good for you. Go there now... [/subliminal]

Right! The link is now fixed. More importantly, the new IRC applet is now fixed. Go to the homepage (as in http://www.scienceforums.net/) and clicky on IRC Chatroom on the left hand toolbar. This'll open the applet. Enjoy, and get as many people on there as you can!

No; you can just sit down and go through everything line by line if you wanted to look at it and prove it. It's just it's rather a lot to go through, that's all

ZoneAlarm really doesn't like Windows filesharing in XP. If you select Firewall in the left hand toolbar, click on Zones, select your local network's zone and then set that to "Trusted" it may fix the problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem Quite a nice problem, but the proof was essentially broken down into about 2,000 subcases which were brute-forced by computers. Not a very elegent way of doing it, although Wikipedia says there's been some other proof in 2004. The classification of finite simple groups is a little more abstract, but it sufficies to say that the proof of that particular theorem is about 15,000 pages long. My lecturer calls it the "Big Monster" theorem because of the sheer size of the proof.

Personally I would say that a lot of these attacks are designed not only to incite fear, but encourage the political parties to do certain things. A good example is the Madrid bombings, which caused Spain to pull out of Iraq.

n has to be a natural number greater than two.

It was proved correct.

Arguably, many petty criminals incite fear into people by, say, repeatedly throwing bricks and soforth through the windows of people's houses. I'd say that this fits your description - acts of violence designed to incite fear - but I'd hardly call those sort of people terrorists.

Fair enough; just a suggestion

You might want to check the Windows Firewall settings; that was my problem last time that happened.

It's a huge undertaking, and it consumes a lot of time and effort. Ultimately, I think it will probably fail - nice gesture though.

Personally I think the best value for money at the moment is the 200GB drives. Good for mass-data storage. That WD drive is very good for installing the base OS on (since it's pretty fast), but as you say, games will eat up a lot of space.

In the analysis course I took, we started with the familiar Taylor series of exp at 1: [math]e = 1+ 1 + \frac{1}{2!} + \frac{1}{3!} + \cdots[/math] We then went on to prove that the limit converges to this. It's not particularly hard, and I'm sure that most other Analysis courses approach it in a similar style. Edit: Just noticed matt's post makes it a little redundant, but never mind.

You just take the first two terms of the Taylor series.

Har har For a moment then, I actually thought you were being serious

ICANN is basically a regulatory body for the world's DNS servers. They approve all the big decisions such as adding new TLDs and also handle things like complaints and registrant issues. Their problem? Well, it's simple - there's just too much red tape. You have committies for every single decision and all sorts of other bureaucratic stuff. Not to mention the recent .net fiasco (which, in my opinion, was only partially ICANN's fault but still ridiculous). I should probably point out that ICANN doesn't have juristiction over every registrar on the internet. Not every registrar joined ICANN when they were set up - Nominet (the .uk registrar), for instance, is completely independent of ICANN and is about a million times better run.

For very simple applications like this, Windows file sharing is fairly easy as mentioned above. It's the method I'd use, at least.

Not too bad at all Personally I would have gone for the X800, but it's still a bit pricey at the moment. Nice HD as well, although I might have gone for a bigger one. For the price, it's a fairly good buy.

Use matt's expansion of [math](1+x)^t[/math] with [math]x = -\beta^2[/math] and [imath]t = -\frac{1}{2}[/imath].

I have a copy of the proof, but I'm obviously not going to be able to understand it. The problem is that a lot of number theorists have little knowledge of modular forms and vice versa. And, of course, the proof is an absolute monster using hundreds of results from all over the place. Nice to see you around again, bloodhound

Whilst this is a bit offtopic, I should point out that it's not quite as simple as this. The above statement is certainly true; however, it can be expanded upon. You should be able to see that [imath]e^{(2n+1)i\pi} = -1[/imath] for [imath]n \in \mathbb{Z}[/imath], since [imath](-1)^{2n+1} = -1[/imath]. So you can quite easily say that [imath]\log(-1) = (2n+1)i\pi[/imath]. There's quite a nice little article about this at Dr. Math that I found from a quick google. I suggest people check it out, since it's rather informative