Arbitrary

The site is nice, but I point-blank don't see the connection between it and Myspace. Why would you need Myspace to get the tutorials in the site? Couldn't you just access the sites, grab the tutorials you want, and then leave? Since when does accessing a site need Myspace? And Myspace is NOT a good place to host your site, especially if you want clients to take you seriously. Myspace already has the bulk of the bad reputation for horribly designed interfaces, so you don't want to tarnish your reputation by hosting there. Even if you CAN design nicely on Myspace, just don't do it. There's no point in ruining your public reputation all over one site nor is there point in spending extra time (cough*wasting extra time*cough) on getting your site to work well in Myspace.You could easily make your site work nicely elsewhere, and make it standards-compliant in the mean time.

Well, I'd say around 8-9ish out of ten. Google is a nice site: it's simplistic and gets to the point in search. I've seen too many search sites that are littered with junk everywhere. Not only does that take a long time to load (and with search, the shorter time it takes for a search engine to load, the more time you have to actually get to the juicy parts of the search), it also hurts your eyes and distracts you from what you want. I've got to say though, that when I originally started using Google in third grade, I was actually attracted to use it entirely because of its design. I liked the O's that it used right above each search page and thought that was a very unique idea. Although I have since decided that Google's design is evidently not the best in the world, it's the best for what it does. Of course, there are issues--lots and lots of people have complained about adsense. And of course, Google's recent buying trend doesn't make it much different than other corporate giants--if you can't beat your competitors, just buy 'em out. Bad mentality there. We need more competition to actually improve. Look at what happened to Microsoft without competition. Frankly, I also think Google needs a bit more competition. As long as it has a main rival, it will be forced to improve its search engine and not just stay stagnant like it seems to have been doing recently. I also think it'd be nice just to have more choices: currently my choices are Google, MSN, Yahoo and Askjeeves. Frankly, the last three aren't very useful at all, so they really leave me with no choice but Google. With good competition, Google can be driven further.

So? In the case of watching music videos on TV and listening to music on the radio, there is a rather big difference: the copyright holders get PAID. Do you think they get paid when some random dude uploads a version of the copyrighted video up onto Youtube? Nope, they don't. There's a HUGE difference there. Yes, I know that most of the good things on Youtube are illegal. Frick, that's what I like about Youtube. But does that mean it's right? Does that mean that copyright holders don't care? You do know that copyright holders could care less if Youtube "dies" as a company because they refuse to let Youtube hold illegal videos? Less competition the better for them. Harmless? No, that ain't true. I don't know how many times I've managed to avoid buying the DVD version of something just by watching it on Youtube. Let's see...nearly all the anime my friends and I have ever watched...we've nabbed it off of Youtube. And no, we never tried to pay the copyright holders ANY tribute by going and buying the DVD version or otherwise giving them their fair due. That's plenty of losses for the creator. Erg, no. Youtube has millions of dollars, hence the reason why it is a perfect company for people to sue (especially now that it's backed up by Google....). These copyright holders won't care about shutting Youtube down. They just want to make sure their videos get off the site. To them, other videos can stay on the site if it so pleases the other copyright holders. And yes, people can create new accounts to get by the rules, but Youtube could also deal with copyrighted material better. Unfortunately, Youtube has never bothered to do so, hence the rising issues. Ehhh? But that's not really a debatable question...[laughs]. I can stop watching as long as I have the conviction to do so. And frankly, I rarely use Youtube anyway...it's too slow in loading on my computer. [grins] (well, of course, Google Video happens to be slower, but..eh)

Ugh. Tolerance, tolerance is the key. Don't generalize all Asians to be anything like Cho Seung. They're not. That would be utterly pointless--I don't want to see one madman ruin it for a whole group of people. It's already enough of a tragedy, so don't turn it into more of one by bringing prejudice into play. And I'm not really directing this toward you--I'm more directing this toward the general population who like to generalize. Yeah, I've seen this brought of before, and I agree that it is sad. But I think your point about the troops doesn't work: we know that there will be casualties in war. That cannot be avoided and it is something we knew even before we sent our soldiers out to battle. If we hadn't wanted those tragedies, we wouldn't have sent them. This incident, on the other hand, is very different. When I go to college somewhere, I don't expect to walk into a classroom and get shot. Of course, my point doesn't outweigh the importance of the lives of either people, it's just the way things go. Mmmm...but how does that help? I could use our school's code red analogy: When news of a shooter on campus come, we block the door and "isolate" ourselves from the rest of the campus. We don't let anyone in or out, in case we accidentally let the killer in. Yet, what if this killer is in our classroom? What exactly do we do then? Same in this case: if the killer is within, they're pretty much screwed. Ahhh gun control. You have a very good point there, as all the countries in Europe pointed out over and over in their newspapers. Though I'd like to say that I think both sides of this gun control issue have good points. If you don't have guns, such violence will never occur. On the other hand, if you do have guns and someone manages to procure a gun and starts a school shooting, you'd have a much harder time stopping it. (Yes, there are incidents where bystanders with guns were able to stop the shooter) So both sides work, making it a difficult issue. But I do agree that background checks should be more thorough--I mean, can it be that hard to just dig deeper in a background check? At the same time though, I'm not sure a deeper background check would've helped in this case: Cho Seung didn't have a record with the police or even a mental illness record (the psychologist didn't put anything down in his permanent records since he didn't think there was anything wrong). Agreed. And it's very much unfair for the rest of the population. As much as we'd like to think that the world is all fair and wouldn't condemn other races just because of one thing that one person did, the world doesn't work like that. [sigh]

Yeah, I agree with sparkx. There's just no way that Youtube staffers can keep up with the amount of people uploading materials that they don't own the copyright to. Uploading of illegal videos will have to continue if Youtube intends to continue making business--after all, I have a feeling that much of Youtube's audience comes from illegal video viewers. Most of the non-copyrighted content on there is just a bunch of crap that no one is interested in viewing. So, technically, Youtube gains business from having illegal, copyrighted content on their site--they gain traffic. Without it, most of their traffic is gone. That's a pretty good reason for Youtube to not fight extra hard against this whole copyright ordeal unless someone brings it right in their face. Frankly, I think it does affect sales. I know many friends of mine who have watched numerous animes on Youtube that would've caused them a good amount of cash to buy. And I also know that (1) they will never buy the animes as long as they can get them for free and (2) they never learned about the titles from Youtube, so the music videos there don't really count as advertising. Now, perhaps if they were absolutely fanatical about a series they'd go and buy it, but that has never happened. They all prefer nabbing things for free than spending money (especially since it is very costly). And looking at most of the music videos, they almost all suck as advertisements. They're more likely to direct an audience away from a certain show than direct them toward it. The few gems in the music video section is hidden by the overflowing amount of trash. [sigh]

Hmmm...I think your site's in need of a more professional set of colors. The current choice of colors and design makes it look more like a blog than a serious site. Also, I think your site content has too much stuff about it being "cool" and having "free stuff". It'd be better to be less vague (and use less promotional phrases), as that usually turns people off. People aren't going to have the patience to scroll through paragraphs and paragraphs of promotional words with no meaning to them before they actually get to the meat of the site. Also, that little moving snippet at the top of the page is rather...annoying. I think marquees were named one of the more annoying aspects of web design that much of the audience dislikes, so it's better to get rid of it and just go for a more static design. The same goes for that flashing "stop hot linking" sign--it hurts my eyes. I'd prefer it if it weren't there. Your links section could also be modified to be a bit more professional--perhaps add some other colors to make the section stand out. It is, after all your navigation, and if you're not going to tell visitors what the point of your website is in your content, they might as well find out for themselves through inferences by looking at the navigation. The logo in the header could use some fixing as well. Right now it doesn't fit at all into the dark gray background--it reminds me of those old newspapers that have weirdly designed headers. I also think the title of the site (Gold Member) could be a bit more descriptive--when I first thought of the title, the first thing that popped into my mind was credit cards. Your link names could also be more professional---like "the fun page" probably isn't a great way to describe a page. It feels more like a children's site than one catered to the majority of the internet audience. In terms of a portal site (which I believe your site seems to be), Gold Member is rather lacking. Let's look at the problems you face while running such a site: (1) Your site lacks the publicity that most other portal sites already have. If you were a well-known site and decided to add several portal-like features, then they're more likely to be used. If you're a relatively unknown site, it's better to cater to a single topic (such as snakes or gmail news or something of the sort) than it is to widely spread your topics. If you cater to a single topic, the keywords on your site will mostly focus on that topic, which means that search engines are more likely to rank you higher for that topic and people who search for the topic are more likely to visit your site. (2) Much of the content makes your site look unprofessional. If it were more of a topic-centered/personal site, that might be forgiven. But a portal site most likely won't be forgiven--it's taken to higher professional standards than your regular old site. I think the addition of the clock at the bottom of the home page would fit as unprofessional-- (1) it's unneeded so it feels rather out of place, (2) its colors don't match up to the rest of the site. There are also other problems such as this: First of all, these are not your servers. Whoever uploads a file, that file is obviously not going to your server--it's going to either TinyPic, ImageFile or EasyShare's servers. That's a pretty big sign of unprofessionality--claiming to offer something when you really don't offer it. Then when I go to the search page, it says: It's quite obvious that this is not GoldSearch's search engine, so why bother claiming Google's search engine as your own. That, like the above example, is rather unprofessional. Better, I think, to just come out and say that it's Google's instead of pretending that it's yours. Nonetheless, considering that this only took you thirty minutes, you did quite a nice job on it. I'm assuming you'll be fixing it up later on and add more content of your own to it (portal sites don't work well unless your famous, remember?). Good luck, all the same.

No, the people who make the games and movies know that they're wrong. Most of these game programmers took plenty of physics classes (this should tell all: https://www.amazon.com/Physics-Game-Developg/dp/0596000065), but obviously in a game you have to twist physics a bit. If everything adhered perfectly to what happens in real life, then (1) it would no longer be a game and (2) it'd be a very boring game. For instance, take a look at the N game. It's creators claim that it's loosely based on physics, but it obviously also twists things to make the game more interesting and to add "ninja-like superpowers" to the player. Without those ninja-like capabilities, the point of the game (as well as its name) wouldn't be there. In fact, there have been some recent ideas as to whether or not they should make games adhere more to the laws of physics. I think there are more efforts to do this. And plus a lot of these movies are based on books which are obviously labeled fiction. In fiction I suppose you can make up whatever you want without adhering to the laws of science. After all, it's not as if Dan Brown's the Da Vinci Code sticks to hard facts--he obviously had to make up some stuff in there to make things more fun. That's life, I guess.

I remember once upon a time I had glasses and hated them, so I got contacts. I've been wearing contacts ever since, but I've never enjoyed the experience (hard contacts that I wear to bed every night and take off during the day). I suppose the main problem is that putting on the contacts is just an extra (and very annoying as well) task to do, while putting on glasses doesn't really take much effort. Despite the advertised perfect fit, I still find the contacts to be irritating while in my eye. I can't get the fact out of my mind that there's an object in my eye and it shouldn't be there. Having contacts in my eyes somehow severely limits my motion for fear of getting poked in the eye. (Which, I suppose is one of the main reasons I switched to night time contacts--so that I'd have more mobility during the day)And the eye doctor recently told me something that freaked me out: She said that since my contact lenses were getting older, they were getting brittler and thus had a higher chance of breaking at any time of the day. Frankly, I wouldn't want to deal with the pain of a bunch of shattered glass shards lingering in my eye after it broke, and to get a new pair of lenses, I have to restart the treatment, which would cost my parents another thousand or so bucks. Not the least bit worth it.Besides, contact lenses are not only expensive for the initial treatment, all fluids that you have to purchase thereafter are equally costly.

Yeah, I agree. For the most part, I don't see the point of selling to online advertising firms my address, phone number, and numerous other pieces of information for free. It's better to lie to them than it is to be burdened with mass mailings/emailings of advertisements, and most of these organizations don't really need to contact me to accomplish whatever I want them to do. Usually for locations I give a pretty vague location--like I'd say I'm in the United States, which is the truth but doesn't really get stalkers anywhere. There are some sites that ask for zip codes and actually check the random number I enter for accuracy. For those I just Google a random city and paste the zip code that shows up. For age, though, I tend to be more honest. I guess I just find that age isn't a big identifying factor for stalkers--it's hard to track someone down with only their age and a very vague location. There are hundreds and thousands of people in a certain country with that very age, after all. For that same reason I don't really bother lying about my gender either--it's too general to pinpoint anyone down. At the same time though, if people don't ask, they're not going to get an answer, so I often end up with a mistaken gender. Personally, in most cases I see nothing wrong with lying on the internet. Now, if you're a trusted news source or someone of that caliber, then we've got a problem. But if you're just talking to another unknown person, it's not a huge deal. Security is probably more important than just a random stranger you meet who decides to become your "friend".

Although I don't believe in in God's existence at all, I can come up with some possible things you could do. Take a look at the human rights situation in China, with their internet censorship and all. You could help them develop a network connection that would somehow override the current Chinese government's imposing. Now of course that'd be insanely difficult as it is the government you're going against, but all the same, it's still good for the common person. You could also develop cheaper computers so that they can be sold in underdeveloped nations so that they can use them to their advantage. (I'm thinking back to that one child per computer program. That was quite useful, but perhaps you could build on that somehow)

Well, in order to do that...you'd have to connect to the database first: <?phpmysql_connect("hostname", "username", "password") or die("Unable to connect to MySQL");mysql_select_db("name");?> The hostname on most servers is usually "localhost". If you find that that doesn't work, then you should probably contact your host. (Usually if it doesn't work, the host has some sort of warning telling you that as well...) The die part basically just prints an error message. If you want more detailed error messages, then mysql_error() would work better. Then, to insert stuff: mysql_query("INSERT INTO people (name, email) VALUES('Person', 'person@gmail.com' ) ") or die(mysql_error()); Most mysql queries are nice like that. The insert into basically just puts the data into the database called "people". The database people has columns name and email, of which the values "person" and "person@gmail.com" are added into, respectively. That's about it for inserting data. Though for passwords it would obviously be a good idea to md5 hash it before inserting it into the database. And even before that, it'd be more secure if you got rid of quotes, semicolons and slashes. (php's stripslashes is quite nice for the latter)

Hmm.. But atheism has nothing to do with believing whether or not what will happen after death, rather, it's whether one believes in a god or not. Therefore, if you believe a god will cause something to happen after death, you aren't an atheist. However, if you believe that something that happens after death is independent of god, you are an atheist. Me, I am an atheist. I won't bother to explain why because that would just take up pages and pages and I'm sure a simple Google search would describe my reasons well enough. Now, to the proof discussion. If you read any creationist books, they do offer a bunch of proof for the existence of god. For instance, I believe there's one argument that says that there had to be a higher being behind the creation of life because the molecules of the universe simply do not arrange themselves in a certain way so that living things will be created. Someone (god) had to be behind that arranging because according to them, that arranging was too perfect if it were random. Nonetheless, there also exists a lot more proof against the existence of god. Therefore, I'm inclined to say I agree with the latter simply because more proof points there. And frankly, another reason for my being atheist is this: I view religion as a crutch. For instance, if I had problems, I'd turn to religion to solve them, I'd turn to praying to god to help me. But I don't like this feeling of dependency on anyone (even if in reality I'd have to solve my own problems anyway), I just dislike that feeling. So I resort to being atheist to avoid that crutch. I want independence, and I don't ever want to feel like I'm helpless without this supernatural being. No, the original bible would be the Old Testament. Frankly, I find the Old and New Testament Gods to be very very different from each other. The Old Testament god seems to be more of a vengeful creature than the New Testament one. So yeah, it is rather contradicting, in a sense. I agree with Arkane wholly. Much of religion does teach morals, of which you do not need religion to learn. Just because someone is atheist does not mean they lack morals--that's a matter of what their parents instill into them.

Hmmm...well, in order to do that, you'd have to use the HTML "GET" variable in your forms. So it'd look something like this: <form action="example.php" method="get"> Then, you'd have one of your form fields called "user" and then in example.php you'd get the name (in this case James) from that form field called "user". You can then use that name in your SQL query to get the information based on the name and print that information out. That way, if you ever access the url example.php?user=James, it'll always use the name in its SQL query to get and print information about James because the ?user=James refers to the GET form field "user" which is filled in by the url to be "James". Sorry if that wasn't too clear. Perhaps a Google of HTML get method would help plenty. :-)

There's a voice in the back of my mind urging me to say "Just get rid of the gaming forums; they're useless!" But I guess I'll try being a bit more reasonable. It is very possible to have a gaming forum without spam. So maybe the gaming forum as a whole shouldn't have post count but specific topics that usually require "better" posts should? Like when a moderator finds a topic to be interesting/worthy of discussion, they'd mark at as having post count. (Or perhaps that system would be waaay too complicated...) Same. But a lot of the threads are what you would consider spamming...And people can't exactly be warned off that. Every new member will inevitably go do that because it looks like an easy way to gain credits (which it is).

Paranoid: ModerateSchizoid: HighSchizotypal: ModerateAntisocial: LowBorderline: LowHistrionic: LowNarcissistic: LowAvoidant: HighDependent: LowObsessive-Compulsive: HighGuess I'm not so normal then. Haha.But still, these tests are usually pretty pointless. They are, after all, just a bunch of internet quizzes. Anyone could make them and claim that they were somehow realistic when they're really not. For most of these personality disorders, if I were given the chance to look at all the definitions for every word, I'm sure I'd be able to pick the ones I'm most like better than the quiz can. And besides, in these quizzes there are no gray areas while in real life there obviously are. I won't be making one decision all the time or even most of the time--most of my decisions will depend on the situation. Those questions are insanely difficult to answer. The quiz either needs to offer more options or it needs to allow more of a free-response type thing.I do wonder though--do personality tests designed by psychologists also use this multiple-choice style test? Because they're not particularly good at deciphering what a person may be thinking--they categorize each person too much. For instance in most multiple choice quizzes:-A lot of traits are linked together. They come to the conclusion that if a person possesses trait A they also possess trait B. Not true in real life; things can be independent of one another, after all-Mutually exclusive traits--if a person has trait A they cannot have trait B. Also not possible. In real life, it's possible to exercise trait A under a given situation (say one of high stress) and then exercise trait B under another given situation (say one of low stress)People do not simply belong in these categories. It'd be better if there were more detail--say "If situation X occurs, then trait A will be exhibited. However, if situation Y occurs, then trait B will be exhibited," or something of the sort.

Yeah, that's true. Getting revenge like that doesn't really get you anywhere. Better to learn from your mistakes than try to force the blame on others by hacking them back. I mean, yes, hackers who hurt your connection like that are bad, but doing something like that back to them--now that's just utterly disgusting. Doesn't make you any better than the hackers.

Thanks for answering. Ahhh...I'm thinking that this amortized constant time thing is key. I don't really get the mechanics behind it, but according to the dictionary definition for amortized (putting it off to some other time), it probably puts off the add functions so that it creates a new array later, causing an artificial kind of constant time.By List I'm assuming you mean LinkedList? As looking at the documentation for List, it seems to be rather general...

Errg. There's a pretty big difference between Javascript and Java. What you're asking for here is most definitely Javascript, which is used on the internet to make dynamic web pages. Java is a whole different matter entirely--it doesn't have to be used on the internet and is quite versatile in terms of uses. (Servlets, applets, so on and so forth) As for what you're looking for, I'd suggest you search Google. I just searched for "disable enable button javascript" and this script came up. Perhaps something like this will help: <script language="javascript">function enableField(){document.form1.address2.disabled=false;} </script><a href="java script:enableField()">Click here to enable the element<a/> Basically the form element address2 is disabled from the start and when you click on the link that leads to java script:enableField(), javascript will change document.form1.address2.disabled to false which enables the form field. As for your pop-up, you could just make the href part direct to a popup as well as have the javascript function called.

Paint.NET is quite nice. My dad downloaded it and I've used it once or twice--it seems like an improvement on MSPaint (a rather large improvement, though, mind you.) Now, of course, besides Paint.NET, everything basically boils down to two choices: the GIMP or Photoshop. If you had money, I'd definitely recommend Photoshop (it's the greatest!) If you lack money (which seems to be obvious from your post), then I'd suggest just downloading the GIMP. Since you already seem to have the GIMP, if you are still unsatisfied, perhaps you could try Paint.NET. But I do think that the GIMP has more features than Paint.NET, so it'd be rather pointless for you to do so.

Agreed with sparkx. It's usually not a good thing to ask about hacking with a negative connotation to it. This is one of those either learn on your own (somehow) or learn quietly off of some random tutorial you nick off then net. For me, I've also gotten free Internet without doing any hacking (though it's useless as well since I don't need it). It just so happens that most people around my neighborhood don't protect their Internet.

The design is quite nice--it looks a lot more professional now. Perhaps the design is the indication of a new era of phpbb. Me, though, I haven't really been following up on phpbb at all (mainly because of the massive bad press surrounding it), but I guess with phpbb 3 it's okay to give it a new start.Though on another note about the design: rounded corners are a bit overused. Perhaps it would've been nicer if they had come up with a more original design so that they're more likely to stick in customers minds? Ahhh, who knows.

@foolakadugie, agreed. StumbleUpon definitely has an interesting system there. I like how often I get an interesting website everything I randomly browse around. It's better than typing in random words to Google and hoping for something interesting on my more boring days.More on topic: Making a search engine is infinitely hard, especially if you want a successful search engine and not just something that's there for playing purposes. As simple as Google may look, that is only on the outside. If you really want something as successful as Google, it'll take a lot of work, just like CaptainRon has said.On the other hand, you could also just make a small-scaled version of a search engine for fun so that you understand the basics of how it works. But if you were seriously dedicated, it's time to start setting up a schedule for yourself.

@sparkx, I think it depends. It's good to practice everything in moderation, whether you spend eight hours on the computer or eight hours doing something else, that's still a long time. I once spent four hours a day playing badminton. Was that worth my time? Hardly. Did that waste my homework time? Definitely. Nearly everything can be a waste of time depending on how you look at it. Like I, for one, would find football to be pointless.If you're going to ask someone what they can do that's "funner", that differs from person to person. Better to do what you like, regardless of what other people says. (Unless, of course, you happen to be harming your own health, in which case, it might be better to back down)I spend at maximum six hours on the computer, though some of the time is taken up by schoolwork. I could go without the computer for quite a while, assuming that there's something else to occupy me (say a pile of books, a rubix cube, or just plain something)EDIT: Oh, and I don't think SilverFox meant it literally that he would "die". It's probably just a figure of speech that he really likes to spend time on the computer. XD

I've been studying for the AP CS test and just read that ArrayLists add objects in constant time, which I don't really get. Why would ArrayLists add in constant time when it needs to copy all of the objects in the array to a new array just to allocate a new space for the new object? Wouldn't that mean the ArrayList would run in O(n) time?The only explanation I can come up with is if the ArrayList doesn't change the array right away and instead puts the add function onto some sort of stack and waits until it gets numerous add functions and then performs all the add functions so that it only needs to create a new array once per x number of add functions.I'm rather confused, so any help would be appreciated.

Oh gods! So that's why. Thank you! =] No wonder the numbers were turning out to be so big.