Dave

I highly doubt this. As matt has said about twice now, we can do whatever we want to in mathematics as long as it makes logical sense. It makes perfect sense to define complex numbers. If you don't like it, then that's your problem, not ours.

It's not a very efficient means of spreading the virus, and doesn't necessarily infect more people that way. In fact, you'd probably infect less people, since victims need to come in contact with infected bodily fluids or have some kind of sexual contact.

I wasn't doubting their abilities to co-ordinate attacks. What I was questioning was the ability to co-ordinate a very large number of attacks without security forces noticing. Remember these people work in cells to avoid detection, and when you have a lot of cells on the move, people pick up on this. No, you don't. But the size of the container limits how far you can get the virus quite significantly. There's no doubting that it is nastier than a chemical weapon. The main impact is the psychological impact on a nation, showing that they can be infected at the terrorists' whim. My point is that the two are nothing alike. The spread of a disease depends greatly on the number of people initially infected, where they're infected, and most importantly the characteristics of the disease. I'm fairly certain that people like the US military have modelled quite a lot of bio-warfare attacks. With the proper precautions, you can prevent these things from killing too many people. Remember, the Spanish Flu epidemic was back in the early 1900's just after the war. We've come quite a long way since then in terms of dealing with things like epidemics. Sure, the emission methods are similar. The difference is that influenza survives for up to an hour (as far as I'm aware) in the open air, which gives it time to find a victim or be left on a kitchen surface somewhere for someone to pick up. Ebola doesn't have this nicety. Even so, in a bio-warfare situation, some people are almost certain to come down with symptoms earlier than others and present to doctors with petechiae or other things that could tip them off. At this point, CDC are contacted and then (I presume) the Government gets involved. Most people will isolate themselves from the world by going to bed and not getting out until they feel better - especially with something as awful as flu, and even more so if you get it really bad. Yes, some people would be going around shaking hands and going and seeing people, but it's not as bad as you might believe it to be. No, they wouldn't. No right-minded doctor would. But, when they start with the onset of the second stage of symptoms, it's likely they'd go to the ER, and then a doctor would know almost certainly that something was seriously wrong. I would advise you not to guesstimate that kind of thing. The spread of disease is extremely complex, and depends on an awful lot of factors. Even when you think you know all of the variables, another one can crop up rather easily, throwing the entire situation down the toilet.

Well, for under $100, you're going to be able to buy a Celeron, just about. Maybe an entry level P4 if you're lucky. Some of the earlier AMD AthlonXP chips are available for that price, but they're not terribly wonderful. I would also recommend either looking around for second hand options or upping the amount you're prepared to spend.

I just created the table in MySQL, and tested the query (looked fine to me), and it seems to work fine. I guess it's a quirk in Access, because it doesn't really implement SQL very well. Try removing the space between / and the column names? I don't really know

Proof by contradiction seems to be the way to go with this question (indeed, with pretty much every "show this is unique" type question).

I'll do the first one for you, and then it's up to you 50 ppb is, I assume, 50 parts per billion. Now, I'll also assume that your version of billion is the American one, hence 1 billion = 109. So 50ppb = 50/109. You should be able to simplify that down.

Yes, they're both equivalent. I got the same answer from doing it quickly in my head

Well, quite, That last thing made pretty much no sense at all

There's only so many places that you can hit at one time. For one, you'd need a lot of people to produce the samples and containers, then another load of people to actually deploy them. Plus, obtaining the virus isn't exactly child's play, either. The more people you have, the more chance there is of getting caught. Something like Ebola just isn't practical for this kind of warfare. It is indeed the same scenario that Clancy uses, and that's because it's the most efficient for the given scenario.

The point I was trying to make is that this virus isn't the super-virus that everyone sees it to be. Some strains may be aerosol transmitted, but it's still very delicate. You could kill it with some normal household materials quite easily. It's not that easy to transmit. As far as I'm aware, the time quoted is for the virus being released into a normal sample of air with no outside factors. Not necessarily. First of all, for this supposed terrorist attack to occur, it would have to be done covertly. The reason? Well, if you just walk into an airport/large public place with a large container full of viral load, and assuming you're not caught and deploy the virus, it's not going to be very hard for your average security guard to see what's going on. The flights/trains will be grounded and the entire area quarantined. Whilst a relatively small number of people will escape, the resultant infection should be fairly small if effective precautions are brought in elsewhere. All of this means the virus would have to be transported in fairly small containers. Coupled with the fact that the virus has 1-2 minutes survival time, you'd probably only infect a handful of people. The terrorists would be betting that the incubation period is long enough to infect enough people before the authorities and places like CDC realise what's going on. To this end, they would have to target multiple facilities to maximize the outbreak. So yes, although it would infect some/quite a lot of people, the attack wouldn't be as successful as you'd think - as long as the appropriate measures were taken to deal with the outbreak, that is. I'm quite sure. Influenza is a totally different beast to Ebola. Care to quote your sources? Indeed they can, although I fail to see the point.

Both, I would hope One other point I would like to make (that's already been made by people here) is that contradiction is rather the wrong word to be using. Something like "Does defining the complex numbers lead to inconsistencies in mathematics?" would be a better way of phrasing your question.

Unfortunately, blike's domain expired and hasn't been re-registered yet - we don't have any access to the offsite server for the time being. Things should be sorted in a couple of days, though.

Because I have uberleet skillz when it comes to Chopper Challenge. Remember, the forum used to have the arcade about 6 months ago. That's when I first learnt the necessary skills. And if you think I'm cheating, take a look at atm's Tetris score. That's just pure insanity.

Closed - posting in a thread that hasn't been used for 2 years isn't appropriate or necessary. Especially when the post is the one above.

It's a bit of a cock-up all around, really. There were supposed to be some significant revisions in this version of XP. For an OS that's supposed to be "revolutionary", we don't appear to be getting much apart from shiny bits that are inevitably useless. Considering it's over-budget, late and generally bloated, I can't see it being any good.

I don't understand why you're all so worried about this; Ebola outbreaks are (fairly) common in Africa. There's a couple of reasons that it stays there and doesn't come here: 1) Africa is big - really, really big. The population density is such that if one village were to get infected, then the outbreak would stop there. 2) Ebola is very fragile, and can't survive in the outside for more than about 1-2 minutes at most. 3) Even if it were to get to somewhere like the US, appropriate quarantine/preventative measures would be quite effective in stopping the disease from spreading. The trouble is, Ebola is a very, very efficient virus when it comes to killing a patient and as such, the epidemic would tend to burn out rapidly. You'd see a high outbreak at first, and then the death tolls would reduce rather rapidly. You can model this using something like the SEIR equations. It's much more effective (and, I daresay, easier) for a load of terrorists to detonate a nuclear warhead than pull off a feat like releasing a strain of Ebola into the country. If you want a non-sciency kind of view on this, then I suggest you read Tom Clancy's book, "Executive Decision". It's rather a good read, and the science behind it seems to be valid enough.

If Longhorn is anything like XP, then it will be nothing of the sort. I suspect that it will try to simulate OS X and fail miserably. Portage is a package management system; it allows the user to control specifically what is installed on the system. Packages can be obtained (in source format), compiled, optimized and install with the run of a single command. Kindof like the Add/Remove Programs thing in Windows, except about 2000 times more usable and infinitely better at doing what it does. For example, if I want to update every package on the system to the latest version, I need simply type: emerge -u world Portage does the rest for me - obtaining sources, compiling and installing. RPMs are somewhat of a different beast. They contain a package/program that has already been compiled (unless you have a sRPM, but that's a different story). On systems that use rpm files, you can install these by using a similar command. They're harder to maintain (in my opinion) and can quite easily break your system because of the absolutely abysmal dependence system. To a certain extent. WINE will allow you to run Windows applications undex Linux. It's basically an open-source implementation of the Windows APIs. Just be aware that it's still in development - not all programs will work under it, and the ones that do will be quite slow.

Indeed. A lot of proxies, when given an URL to block, will automatically resolve the name and check the IP address also. It's still not very handy, since if you have multiple domains hosted on one server they all get blocked - annoying to say the least.

Unless there's a rather good reason as to why this thread should be re-opened, it will remain closed for the time being.

Okay, this thread is now re-open. The other posts have been junked - try and get it right this time, guys.

Probably not - I suspect most of them are going to be pretty GUIs that allow people to set things up easily. Most of those things are fairly useless. A simple software EQ is pretty much all you need.

Ahha, I'm wrong again. I don't know where I get these ideas from, you know

Oh, woohoo. I'm going to have to have a look in the documentation.

If you go to http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/Warn.php you should be able to see the list. I'm not entirely sure though.