Dave

Not really. It's not exactly intelligence gathering-quality. They can't identify individuals, cars, etc. I wouldn't consider it a problem.

I find it amazing that these probes we launched in the 1980's (?) are still serving uses now. Has anyone got any ideas as to what's going on there?

Well, no. I don't know much about the physics of black holes, but I know that a body can't be accelerated to a speed greater than equal to c.

Mathematica >>>> Matlab any day of the week as far as that's concerned (imo)

I was quite embaressed when an American person I know asked if I knew where to get good pants from.

I've just finished an introductory course on Quantum Mechanics, and found the book "Space, Time and Quanta" by Robert Mills (suggested course textbook) to be of very good use. You'll probably get pretty good course notes as well, cos QM is pretty hard to get your head around, 'specially the wave equation stuff.

Eat it? Anyway, who's next to spotlighted?

I get the impression that this film probably isn't any good. The matrix twist could have been amusing (welcome back btw )

Area of the sail has to be pretty damned big. Plus the amount of acceleration you're going to get from the particles diminishes a lot they further out you get.

Changed. I just hope I changed it the right way

Did you take your pills today? After having the worst lecturer ever trying to teach us Matlab, I decided to give up with it. The second I finished that course, I removed it from my computer

Damn. If my aunt saw this (English teacher), she'd beat me with a lorry.

My girlfriend has had 2 pc laptops now, and I can quite conclusively say that they both suck, a lot. Windows just doesn't work on a laptop at all.

It absolutely dire - to be quite honest, most of the stuff in the top 40 sounds exactly the same, apart from the pathetic remakes of some of the old classics. Maybe they should pump some more of their vast fortunes into promoting some lesser known bands that have real talent, instead of things like Atomic Kitten, Girls Aloud, Avril Lavigne, etc. Some more promotion and funding for jazz would be rather nice as well.

Yeah, I think it's pretty important to point out that racism does extend both ways as well. There's a lot of this kind of thing going on in Britain.

And this is indeed the reason we've not done it. I think there's a lot of spamming that does go on around here and I try and delete it when possible. Any extra incentives to spam even more really aren't worth the trouble, and waste all the mods time deleting spam and soforth.

int main() { return 0; } A candidate for the most annoying: #include <stdio.h> int main() { while (true) printf("I'm both annoying _and_ useless!\n"); return 0; }

Quite. It is extremely important to get a solid grounding in this stuff, or else you're going to be screwed when you come to the more complex stuff.

Well, sure. Something like [math]\mathbb{R}^{n}[/math] is defined mathematically, it's just your physical interpretation of it. What exactly is as 4-dimensional cylinder? A cylinder is well defined in [math]\mathbb{R}^3[/math], but that may not necessarily extend to higher dimensions.

gogo apple powerbook linkage!

Ah, don't worry. We're all very polite and civilized over here. Well, some of us are anyway

No point in randomly insulting people I don't honestly see the point of it. We don't particularly need custom titles: if they weren't available to me, I don't think I'd care very much.

Trust me, I know what I'm talking about - I've read various articles on the subject as well as studied the mathematics behind it. This code is pretty tough to break. The particular encryption method is called RSA encryption and is extremely clever. It uses two huge (and I mean really, really big) prime numbers which form a private key. The public key is the product of these primes - which is naturally absolutely huge. What it surmounts to is the fact that trying to guess which two primes made the product is an extremely hard process, and one only achieveable by trial and error - or if you know a formula for the nth prime, which nobody (as far as I'm aware) has been able to produce for the last 2000 years or so. It's a little more complex than this, but you can have a look here for further information.

We'd constantly be getting requests for custom titles. afaik, that's why we don't do it atm.

Given a few months, probably. But I doubt they care that much. I also use 4096 bit keys, which makes it rather difficult to crack. Those were probably taken from the air by a helicopter. Not that'd I know, ofc.