dwarfie76

Nah, that's OK... I will leave you with a joke though: Q: What's a polar bear? A: It's a rectangular bear after a coordinates transform.

Forgive me if I am wrong, but wouldn't it be a 55% chance of getting one at 1 in 10 odds? That's what I keep getting, as my answer, but as a high school freshman I'm probably wrong. I'll get back to banging my head against the wall trying to figure it out now, thanks. :oops: I get 63% The probability of x discrete events occurring over a given interval, with a known average number of events occurring accross that interval follows a poisson distribution. Things like the number of cars passing through an intersection every five minutes, or the number of phone calls an office recieves in an hour - or the number of widgets a mob will drop in x number of kills in an MMORPG. Poisson distributions follow the formula: P(x) = (exp(-y) * y^x) / x! Where x is the number of occurences you want to find the probability for, y is the average number of occurences per interval and P(x) is the probability of x occurences happening in that interval. The probability, given 1 drop per ten kills of obtaining 1 item is 37%. However we are interested (since you can only have one of these items in your posession at any time) in the probability of getting at least one item. Which is the sum of all the probabilities for getting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 items per ten kills. Or more easily worked out as one (one hundred percent chance of getting between naught and ten items per ten kills) minus the probability of getting zero. The probability of getting zero according to the poisson distribution formula is 37% so the probability of getting at least one item per ten kills is 63%.

Tried playing in low detail?

No, we've observed that it exists. At any rate, the whole purpose of my bringing up gravity was to illustrate that "proof" of either side's case is an entirely moot point.

Damn... That's harsh man. I often spend an hour or two playing runescape of an evening with my daughter on my knee (she's four this month). And she just loves pointing out monsters for me to hit - although she won't let me hit goblins because she thinks they look like turtles. Tough break man, really tough.

Have you tried the standalone runescape client you can download from the runescape website?

OK, can the other computers on the network connect to runescape or is it just yours?

Holden Monaro all the way baby.

No, that doesn't mean anything bad. It's just little packets of information being sent from computer to computer trying to find a way from yours to the runescape server. It means it's resolving and at least trying to get there, which is a good sign. It just means your problem is obscure and tricky rather than serious :( It might help if you could tell us a bit more about your setup. Are you on dialup or broadband? Are there other computers on your network or do you plug straight into a router/modem to connect to the internet?

Bowling is fun if it's something that neither of you take too seriously. And you don't need to talk to her much... just listen. She liked you enough to say yes when you asked her out. If you're shy just ask her a few questions about herself and let her do the bulk of the talking. You'll find she's probably just as nervous as you are.

Is there proof of gravity? :shock: Nuhuh, Gravity is only a theory; I propose intelligent falling, gravity is so complex that it needs to be created by a 'pusher'. I believe the person pushing us to the 'centre of gravity' is God. Teach the controversyÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ãâæ What are you talking about? Gravity is a proven force of attraction between to bodies. When you drop an apple, it falls, satelites revolve around planets, and planets around stars, and the moon causes changes in the tide. Listen, there is no proof of evolution, and no proof of the big bang, and no proof of any of the other theories of how the universe started, so how is God the only one we can rule out because of lack of proof. I believe Death_By_Pod may have just been joining me in a little hornet's nest stirring.

I had a great time at school.

Is there proof of gravity?

Well, the quick and dirty way is to grab the code for one of the auto-generated stats images that people use as signatures - and display it on your website. Most of them have the ability to customise the colours etc to fit into your site's colour scheme.

I'm inclined to be thinking along the same lines as Ms Vega above. That either your hosts file is blocking you, or you're being blocked at the network level (router, domain controller, something like that). try going to a command prompt (start -> run -> type "command" -> OK) and entering: tracert http://jolt7.runescape.com and paste the results back in here.

The Selfish Gene - another of my favourite philosophical musings.

Kinda. What makes me happy may not make you happy. What causes me to suffer might actually alleviate suffering in others - like paying my taxes. It's probably more in line with the hippocratic oath "above all, do no harm" than Christ's new commandment. Only up to a point. Certain actions may be deemed 'good' or 'bad' depending on the situation at hand, but the overriding principle remains constant. Take the example mentioned earlier of stealling a drug you can't afford to buy to cure a terminally ill relative. Certainly stealling the drug alleviates the suffering caused by the disease, and also the grief felt by the family. But it causes suffering in the owner of the pharmacy who has had his goods stolen, anxiety among other pharmacists that people will steal their goods to cure their relatives, and it will cause the drug companies to factor losses from theft into their profit margins making the drugs more expensive meaning even fewer people will be able to afford them in the long run. Weighing up the suffering alleviated and caused across the entire population we can still call this an imoral act. Although we should probably not judge it as harshly as my stealling your wallet to pay for my lunch. On the other hand, if there was a plague sweeping the earth, and scientist held the cure, but he wasn't going to hand it over unless control of all the governments of the planet was handed over to him, along with the population of the earth becoming his personal slaves. Breaking into his house and stealling the cure so that other scientists could replicate it and save the earth's population would be moral because it would alleviate a greater amount of suffering than it caused. I doesn't provide for specific instructions in every circumstance, we have to use our capacity for rational thought to explore the possible consequences of our actions and determine the appropriate course of action. However it does provide at least a framework for doing so. Something which I believe most religious tenets are lacking in.

George Jacob Holyoake was an English orator in the 1800s. Imprisoned for blasphemy in 1841 he coined the term "secularism" to describe his beliefs. The following is taken from "Principles of Secularism" (1870) Which, coupled with the ideas in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is where I derive my opinion that a solid foundation for a universal secular morality can be derived. In a nutshell: I know that actions which cause me suffering are bad (to me). I also know that actions which relieve my suffering, or cause me to be happy are good (to me). I know that you, and everyone else, is a lot like me. I can deduce that actions which cause you sufferring are bad (to you) and that actions which alleviate your suffering or make you happy are good (to you). If we agree that actions which cause suffering are bad, and actions which relieve suffering or lead to happiness are good, we can determine whether an action is 'good' or 'bad' by the amount of suffering or happiness it creates - across the entire population. So while me stealing your wallet may make me slightly happy to get a free lunch. It would make you very upset. It would also cause others not directly affected to become anxious that their wallets may be stolen. We can say that stealing your wallet would be an imoral thing to do.

So what do you make of Holyoake's arguments then that we can indeed deduce a set of universal morals from purely secular utilitarian maxims?

So you think the only reason anyone would be an atheist is because they would prefer not to feel guilty about a life of looting and pillaging? To tell the truth, I believe that the reason most religious people cling to their faith is because it makes life easier for them. They don't have to think for themselves, just follow the instructions that are written down for them and if, by chance, they stumble into a moral or ethical dillema, just trot down to see the local pastor/rabbi/imam/priest and get some more instructions.

OK, try using a different browser maybe.

Then he'd be looking at recoding it using client-side scripting which would be a righteous pain in the behind. Possible - using the MSXML component for IE and the corresponding XML classes for firefox to fire off the HTTP requests, then using regular expressions to work through the results. Still... the Perl script gives a good outline of what needs to be done to achieve it.

Good. Much easier to discuss this if we have a baseline for "intelligence". I still disagree though. Maths is essentially about problem solving. Problem solving is an intuitive process. Sure there are theories and formulas to be committed to memory or written down on a piece of paper, and most school-level maths is indeed simply inputting data into an algorithm and pulling data out the other end. But real world maths is about taking what you learnt at school and applying it intuitively to the situation at hand. I'm fairly sure most builders go through school without being set the problem: If Jane is building a house, and the house is 15 metres across and needs a roof pitch of 15 degrees, how long does Jane need to make the sides of her roof trusses. But they would come up against that problem numerous times throughout their working lives and be able to apply what they had learnt about trigonometry at school to work out how much timber to order.

But you only need to enter your pin once per login. Unless you mean make entering the pin mandatory every time you access the bank. In which case there would be a mass revolt.

http://search.cpan.org/~madcoder/Runesc ... e/Stats.pm It's not mine, so don't go crediting me with anything, but that should give you everything you need. All the source code is there - freeware so you can use it without royalties - as well as instructions for use.