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I use Firefox 2 on Windows XP computers, and Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista computers. These seem to be the most secure combinations for blocking sites that try to install trojans, but I really don't know much about preventing information from being stolen between different windows. What other types of attack vectors are you concerned about? I have a hardware firewall built into my router, which should help keep hackers out.

Are there any dangers to multi-tasking on the same computer? For example, if I was logged into a banking web site, could a malicious web site opened in another browsing window possibly steal any information I'm working with in the other window? I'm using Windows Vista, which is much more resistant to malicious code than Windows XP, but are there still risks if I multi-task?

It could be done whenever the information is necessary. There won't be a time when every terabyte of data needs to be opened at once. When a certain document is needed, just open it in Notepad instead of the original application. From there, the data can be copied into open source format. I wonder why the documents are zipped? Unless you are saving a major server's log files or other large files, compressing each text document shouldn't make much of a difference on modern hard drives and flash memory devices. Wouldn't it be better to reduce the open/save time by not compressing them?

Yes, reformatting a large number of documents might be difficult. However, I wouldn't consider any knowledge to be lost if the text itself is kept in plain text. You could just scroll past the unreadable code, and copy-paste the plain text contained within the document. This is very strange. I just compared the raw text of a Word document and an OpenOffice document in NotePad. The Word document had a little formatting data at the top, but the rest of the text was easy to read. In the OpenOffice document, the whole document appears to be written in unreadable code. Why is the document encrypted if I didn't choose to encrypt it?

I don't really understand the problem described in this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6265976.stm They seem to be saying that the contents of a document will be lost if nobody is able to find a copy of the software that was used to create the document. In all word processing programs I'm aware of, the text itself is stored as plain text within the file unless you encrypt it. You can open an old Word document in Notepad and still retrieve the text. You would have to set the font and style information again, but why is it such a large problem?

In their latest redesign, CNN.com completely removed the science page from the web site. They now have a very small science section at the bottom of the tech page. Wouldn't you agree that tech should be a category of science? Science can include so many different subjects that aren't related to human technology.

The article http://www.midwestbusiness.com/news/viewnews.asp?newsletterID=17347 talks about major solar storms that happen about every 100 years. The article focuses on satellites, but what would happen to fiber-optics and copper wiring? If telegraph wires actually exploded from a storm in 1859, what would happen to all of the utility wires we have now?

I agree that it would probably be impossible to interact with other expansion/collapse stages. I don't think any structured formations of matter could survive the compression stage. Would every compression stage of the universe be identical, so that there is only one type of element and all matter is distributed evenly? If so, how could there be change during expansion if the laws of physics remain the same? Wouldn't that require some type of randomness? I don't believe there is true randomness in the universe. Every event is the reaction of prior conditions following basic laws. If it were possible to replicate all prior conditions for a given event, I believe that any event could be replicated without change. That is interesting. It sounds like our own universe may have formed from an enormous star. Perhaps what we consider to be the "universe" really isn't the universe, but just a small part of a larger system.

The idea that the universe has a beginning and end seems too difficult to comprehend. It raises the questions "what caused the beginning?" and "what will happen after the end?" I can't understand why an unlimited amount of time would pass, and then the universe suddenly forms and expands, and then an unlimited amount of time passes again. I think the fact that the universe exists must be a law of physics. The universe must exist, just like any other law must be true. I believe that the universe is a never ending cycle. It has a phase of compression, it expands, and then compresses again. Given what we know about the universe, this is the only explanation that is logical to me. If the universe is a never ending cycle, could it have random differences in each cycle? For example, do you think there would be different galaxies, planets, and life forms each time? Or, do you think it repeats itself continuously, and all of us live the exact same lives every cycle? I believe that the cycle repeats itself each time, because true randomness seems unlikely in a universe based on laws.

Yes, I was creating another application with a built-in browser. It uses the "WebBrowser" control from the toolbox in Visual Basic. However, this control only uses the IE rendering engine. I've tested both IE and Firefox by loading web sites that I know have viruses or other malicious code. Here were the results I discovered: 1. IE7 with Windows XP - Many virus infections 2. Firefox with Windows XP - Some virus infections 3. Firefox with Windows Vista - Rare virus infections 4. IE7 with Windows Vista - No virus infections Firefox seems to be the best option for Windows XP, and IE7 seems to be the best option for Windows Vista. Therefore I would like to use the IE7 "WebBrowser" control for Vista users and use a Gecko engine for XP users. I will try to find some tutorials about this subject. Thank you for your advice.

The Visual Basic web control component uses the Internet Explorer core. The Vista version of Internet Explorer 7 works great with Vista's protected mode, but there are a lot of security problems with the XP version. Would it be possible for my applications to use the Firefox core when running on Windows XP, and the Internet Explorer core when running on Windows Vista? I'm not sure how to get the Visual Basic web component to use the Firefox core instead of the IE core. Is this even possible?

I was reading an interesting article at http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/index.htm that says Microsoft claims Linux and other free software programs are violating its patents. If it can, Microsoft may be planning to demand royalties from Linux users and distributors. I wonder how this could affect the prices to host web sites on Linux servers? Also, isn't Apple's Mac OS probably violating many of the same patents as Linux?

Ok, I will tell him that he will need a new display. Thank you, everyone, for your help.

A person at work turned on his laptop this morning, and he was unable to see anything on the right side of the screen. This is what the screen looks like: The left side looks normal, but the right side looks like this from the moment I press the power button. The screen doesn't appear to be physically cracked or damaged. He said he used the laptop a lot this weekend, and he doesn't remember dropping it or anything. When I connect the laptop to a monitor, the screen looks fine. Has anybody seen anything like this before?

Now, all of the sites are working again. I checked the traffic stats for my site, and the traffic did not drop during the time I was unable to access it. Therefore, I think this is a problem isolated to my ISP. I just don't understand why I was able to ping those sites from a command prompt.

I waited for about 20 minutes, but I never saw an error page. The indicator showed that the site was loading, and the Firefox status bar said "Waiting for scienceforums.net..." but nothing ever came up. The title "Science Forums, The Original" at the top of the window won't even load. I tried restarting the computers and the cable modem, but it never makes a difference. The sites normally just start working again several days later.

I am having trouble accessing certain web sites, including ScienceForums.net and my own dedicated server. This has happened before, and it can sometimes take several days before I can access them again. When I ping ScienceForums or my server, all pings are returned from the correct IP addresses. However, I am not able to load anything from them in a web browser. I've tried using Internet Explorer and Firefox with Windows Vista, and I've tried Firefox with Linux on my other computer. None of them will load anything unless I use a proxy server site, which I am using now. I contacted my ISP, and they said their DNS servers are working. They said it isn't their problem because I can access other sites. I contacted my server host, and they said everything is working fine on their end. I just don't understand why I can ping these sites, but I can't load any web pages.

Hi Klaynos, Thank you for your reply. I looked at the decimal places, and I see 2 after the decimal. I'm not very good at math, but should I change this? My professor wanted column D to have 2 decimal places and column E to have 4. On his sample answers, cell D5 reads "0.11" and cell E5 reads "0.0121".

You can visit http://eflierz.com/Ttest.xls to download the spreadsheet I'm working on. Also, here is a screenshot of it. Thank you very much for any help you can provide.

I tried that, but I still got the same incorrect answer.

I tried Open Office, but I had the exact same problem. I know my calculator is correct because those numbers match my teacher's answers in the sample experiment he provided. It works when I only cross-reference one cell at a time. For example, I can say cell A1=0.18 and cell B1=A1^2 and then I will get the answer 0.0324 in B1. However, there is a lot of data and I have cells that cross-reference other cells with equations. For example, cell A1 has the number .5 and the average of all numbers in column A is .68. Cell B1 has the equation A1-.68 which is -0.18. Cell C1 has the equation B1^2 which is giving the incorrect answer of 0.0316.

I am putting a lot of data into Microsoft Excel that needs to be squared and totaled for a scientific experiment. However, the numbers I get from Excel differ significantly from the numbers I get from a graphing calculator and the scientific calculator in my computer. When I try 0.18^2 in Excel I get 0.0316 but I get 0.0324 on a calculator. When I add all the numbers together, they aren't even close. I've tried changing the number of decimal places in an Excel cell, but that doesn't make a difference. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Oh, this reminds me of something strange that happened several months ago. I was eating lunch in a restaurant and looking out the window at the busy highway. The cars were going by quickly, but then everything looked like it was freezing into frames. The cars actually looked like they stopped for a second, and I could see the details on the tires and everything. I felt a little dizzy for a moment, and then everything went back to normal. I forgot this had happened, and I don't think I created a post about it here. Doesn't this sound strange?

To us, our lives do not appear to occur in an instant flash. Our lives also do not occur so slowly that everything appears to be frozen. What exactly causes our perception of the rate in which something happens? Imagine that you are watching a bird fly across the sky in an open field. It wouldn’t appear to happen in an instant flash. However, couldn’t it seem to happen instantly if your perception of all other events were at an equally higher rate? If you had a perception of the Earth’s rotation where the Sun appeared to move across the sky every few moments, the bird would move too quickly for you to notice it. Is there a type of universal time force that causes everything to happen at the rate in which we see it happen? Or, are our minds like DVD players that read events and then play them at a speed in which we can comprehend?

Yes, that is another thing that made me think the sample could be fake. I suppose they could edit the background, but why would they do that if this is really a sample of their "remove people" service?