Dave

I like the arcade idea. I really want Chopper Challenge back so I can whoop everyone's ass again I don't like the "fire the mods" option as much though

Moved here because it's a better place for it. On the subject of the new forum - and I'm sure I say this a lot - I just don't think there's the interest in the subject to warrant a new forum for it. For the most part, the threads can go in the Applied Math forum.

That really doesn't make much sense at all.

Neither would I. It's getting to the point of ridicule: when are they going to do something that will seriously make the House of Commons secure? I suppose the argument will always be that it's inconvenient, but in this day and age, we're going to have to spend a little time making sure that people aren't trying to bomb the most important part of our Government

By that logic cracking an RSA cipher should be relatively simple But I do get what you're saying. These are more brain-teasers than codes.

QM (or rather Dr. Heisenberg) says that you can't know the position and momentum of a particle at any one time. I would say that you can't really "stack" all the events in the manner you describe.

I would expect that since a lot of maths graduates go into finance, and the fact that a lot of people graduating with compsci degrees can't get a job as easily as they could, this wouldn't necessarily be true.

Well, that's not strictly speaking true anymore. Give a few supercomputers a 512 byte key and they can get that in a few hours due to the massive computational power and some clever trickery when factoring the prime numbers out from the public key. It does get really hard when you get the big keys though. So strictly speaking, RSA isn't a true one-way algorithm. There aren't all that many one-way algorithms about.

Hmm. I guess that sums that up then.

The SFN logo looks quite nice I think - maybe some nice limited-offer merchandise leik? I want a mug/mouse mat, still.

? Got linkage? I was about to say I'd be amazed if you didn't have some sort of graduated income tax, but just about nothing surprises me with the US these days.

Well, not really. He said that they're very, very closely linked (i.e. spacetime), but space and time are most certainly not the same. Also, you need to think about what you're saying. What does "speed of time" actually mean? What you're describing there is more like the rate of expansion of the universe, but that has a lot more factors in it - namely gravity.

I was wondering what people's suggestions might be for things we could do for our 100,000th post celebrations? Please don't reply with things like "parteh!!!!111" etc, because they're annoying. I was thinking something along the lines of an alternate colour scheme/style or some major site improvement, etc.

Quite. Weather prediction is an extraordinary complex beast, and the algorithms behind it (and the supercomputers) are stupidly complex. The trouble is, these are always based on looking at what has happened to similar weather patterns in the past, and a lot of the time very small factors can have extremely large effects - the weather patterns may look almost identical to another earlier pattern, but there are extremely minute differences in some variables which throws the entire thing.

Most democratic countries do, but there are ways around it, especially for the big spenders at the top. The US Tax Code is like the UK Tax Code: extremely complex, with lots of loopholes to "help" the large corporations get larger.

Blatently IE is not broken at all.

I'm by no means a genius and my strengths definately aren't in economics/business. But common sense tells me something like an exponential curve with some kind of cap at 30% would do the trick.

The military is not very likely to care what the people think tbh. It'll just end up going back to a dictatorship like before.

Gee, that's such a bad thing.

I vaguely mention 3 years being read somewhere, but I don't think that's right. The problem is actually stopping the damn thing once you've got it started.

Perhaps not. Let's just wait and see what he says; probably misinterpreted the title or something.

That would be useful. I've never heard of this before.

Cracking codes whilst creating zoos? I know Zoology is a career working with and studying animals (because my friend is doing it). Never heard of that though.

(I think yourdad is of the male variety, just for the record)

I just keep imagining what would have happened if those guys had had bombs attached to them. All of Parliament gone in a few microseconds, would have caused absolute chaos.