Thought Torrent - Ad-hoc Update

The folks at the Quantum Random Bit Generator Service want you to prove you're human by more than just recognizing characters;


they want you to do some math, too.


those in love with fancy calculators or Mathematica and it's ilk can just write the answer
1. Differentiate
7*6*cos(x) + 4*7*-sin(x + π/2)

2. Evaluate
7*6*cos(2*π) + 4*7*-sin(2*π + π/2)
those in love with scientific calculators can skip to the last line
= 7*6*cos(2*π) + 4*7*-sin(3π/2)
= 7*6*cos(0) + 4*7*-sin(π/2)
those in love with four-function calculators can skip to the last line
= 7*6*1 + 4*7*-1
= 42 - 28
= 14

That's one of the hardest ones I've seen on the form; you can see several of us cock it up on brad's post.

In other amusements, I've been attempting photography again and I might be hanging around Otakon. I'm not sure because I'm also moving (not far, but still) and I don't know who will be there.

Also, I've done My First MS API programming and I have to say that I hate how verbose everything is. For example:
Label txt = new Label();
txt.Text = "Hello world!";
txt.Font = new Font(txt.Font, FontStyle.Bold);
I'd rather write:
txt = Label.new :text => "Hello world!", :bold => true
or even:
Label txt = new Label();
txt.Text = "Hello world!";
txt.Font.Bold = true;
A getter, but not a setter, exists for the Bold property, so you have to resort to creating a new object and assigning that.
If I see any more variable names like Form1 and button3, I may stab something. Don't worry, I'll get a pumpkin for my desk.

In somewhat happy things, the GUI builder generates such awful code that I'm tempted to write one of my own that does some basic automatic refactoring and stuff. So button{1,2,3,4,5,6} are built using an array and a loop.