Can I submit my Research Proposal as a Writing Sample for a US PhD application in Humanities?

Question: I noticed that in US PhD application forms there is no separate portion for attaching a PhD research proposal. The writing sample I have is an essay from an undergraduate class and non-academic articles written for a newspaper. My master's theses were written for a different field and in a different language. So I wrote the PhD research proposal to address the competency in the field I wish to apply. The online applications do not say, and the admissions are not answering this question. Can I submit my research proposal as a writing sample or will combining the shorter undergraduate essay with  two newspaper articles into one writing sample be better?
Answer: I would advise against this. Writing samples and research proposals are distinct documents, and submitting one when you have been asked for the other is not likely to be a successful strategy.
A writing sample should demonstrate, first and foremost, your ability and your potential in the field in question. It should be a polished and high quality example of what you are capable of, hopefully suggesting to its readers that with the right training (i.e. theirs) you will develop into a real scholar and expert in the field. A writing sample is not a place to set out a research programme. If they ask you for a research proposal, then of course you have something to submit, but it is not surprising that many programmes do not: in the US system, you will be expected to work out the subject of your dissertation during your first couple of years in grad school, rather than arriving with a topic in hand that you are ready to start work on.
You would be better off submitting your undergraduate essay, assuming that it's in the right field, but in whatever time you have before submitting the application you should try to improve it as much as possible, so that it reflects as well as possible on your knowledge and ability. I don't know exactly how important writing samples are typically taken to be in the area of the humanities that you are applying in, but in some (e.g. philosophy) they are extremely important indeed, especially for candidates who come from non-US institutions and whose academic transcripts are harder for admissions committees to judge.
Answer: Unless there is some expectation of confidentiality in the research proposal you could use it. But most of the things you mention could serve as well. Even something from a different field. The purpose of the writing sample is to judge your competency with writing in the expected language, not necessarily the field of interest. You are applying to a doctoral program not because you don't need to learn what it is designed to teach, after all. I think this is especially true in the US, where most students enter with only a bachelors and aren't expected to have deep knowledge in the field beyond the basics.
Submit something that shows you can write effectively in English for the US, and can effectively carry an argument.


Can algebraic number fields be generalized in a similar way to function fields in 1 variable over a finite field?

Question: Global fields consist of finite extensions of $\mathbb{Q}$ (algebraic number fields) and finite extensions of $\mathbb{F}_q(x)$ (function fields in 1 variable over a finite field). The latter are isomorphic to the category of curves over $\mathbb{F}_q(x)$, and they can be generalized to function fields in $n$ variables over $\mathbb{F}_q(x)$, which are isomorphic to the category of varieties over $\mathbb{F}_q(x)$. Is there an analogous generalization of algebraic number fields?
Comment: Whilst the standard global fields are special in many ways, there is actually a well-developed class field theory for these higher-dimensional fields, with both idelic and ideal-theoretic descriptions due to Parshin, Kato, Saito in the 80s and many others since.
Comment: In fact, this question put me in mind of Kato's survey "Generalized class field theory" from the 1990 ICM, since in the introduction, Kato in his own inimitable way explains how human beings need to start doing arithmetic in fields which are finitely generated over their prime subfields rather than merely in the one-dimensional classical global fields.
Comment: There is an axiomatic characterization of global fields by Artin and Whaples. Classfield theory as done by Chevalley can be carried out provided these axioms are true. Therefore number fields and function fields in one variable are special. I do not think classfield theory can be carried out for function fields in more than one variable, for instance.
Comment: A little comment on your question: Studying varieties of dimension greater than 1 is not the same thing as studying their function fields.
Answer: The function fields (in one or more variables) over $\mathbb{F}_q$ are precisely the infinite, finitely generated fields of characteristic $p$.  Thus an at least reasonable characteristic $0$ analogue is given by the (necessarily infinite!) finitely generated fields of characteristic $0$.  In other words, function fields in finitely many (possibly zero) variables over a number field $K$.
Indeed there has been much work on generalizing arithmetic geometric statements over global fields to arithmetic geometric statements over arbitrary infinite, finitely generated fields.  The one which springs most readily to my mind is the following generalization of the Mordell-Weil theorem due to Lang and Neron: the group of rational points on any abelian variety over any finitely generated field is a finitely generated abelian group.
Comment: Finitely generated as a field extension is not the same as finitely generated as a $k$-algebra.
Comment: Wait, Prof. Clark, maybe I'm not reading what you wrote correctly, but it's a theorem of Zariski that given a field k, any finitely generated k-algebra that is also a field is necessarily algebraic, but aren't function fields always transcendental?
Comment: Either that or I'm wrong, rather!


How do airports generate "indirect" income?

Question: How do airports generate "indirect" income i.e. income from things other than aviation operations (landing, FBO services, repairs)?
Comment: Perhaps this question should ask how _do_ airports generate non-aviation income, rather than how _can_ they. The latter seems very broad and subjective, which makes it a bad fit for SE sites. For example, an airport _could_ smuggle drugs to raise cash, but that's probably not a helpful answer. :) In all seriousness, though, see [ask] for more information about what makes a good SE question.
Comment: Asking for the non-aviation income that airports have seems like it could be off-topic, considering that this is a site about aviation.
Comment: @fooot That seems like an overly literal reading. If we exclude completely irrelevant lines of business (e.g. drug smuggling, thank you reirab), the question is asking about aspects of running an airport. Specifically, where airports make money besides the obvious sources (terminal rental and landing fees). It's not particularly different from the questions that ask about the expenses involved with running an airline or how commercial airlines pay for fuel.

Just because a question "could" be off-topic doesn't mean it has to be closed.
Comment: @ZachLipton I understand your reasoning there. It's just that this question seems further removed from aviation than the others. It's a tough call and I waited until someone else made the first vote. I just wanted to communicate what made it seem off-topic to me and possibly others.
Comment: @ZachLipton Honestly, we probably should have closed it as too broad rather than off-topic. While the drug smuggling part was obviously a joke (though an airport would actually be well-suited for this purpose and baggage handlers at major airports have been busted for this,) the question, as originally stated, was extremely broad. The larger airports are practically cities in their own right. For that matter, SeaTac actually **is** a city. The number of ways that they _could_ generate revenue is pretty much limitless.
Answer: One way to approach this question is to look at the annual budget for an airport. I'm going to assume that you mean a large passenger airport as opposed to one focused on serving general aviation, cargo, etc...
Let's use SFO (San Francisco International) as our example. It's a city-owned airport, so the budget is a public document. Here's the budget for FY2014/15 and FY2015/16.
Page 5 (page 7 in the PDF) breaks down major sources of revenue. We have some that fall into the category of "direct" revenue in your question: landing fees, terminal rentals, etc... under the "aviation" category. Some of the terminal rental fees include space for purposes you might not consider aviation uses, like back offices for airline staff We also have $60-80M in "PFC Revenue." PFC stands for "Passenger Facility Charge"; it's a charge that is added to the ticket price of everyone flying out of that airport.
Finally, there are the non-aviation revenues. The bulk of those come in two categories: parking and concessions. Parking is self-explanatory. Concessions describes all the independent businesses that operate at the airport. Many businesses lease terminal space for retail shops (including duty-free), restaurants and take-out food, lounges, currency exchange, etc... They all pay rent and/or a share of revenue to the airport based on the terms of their lease. SFO also books about $23M/year in revenue off the sale of electricity, as the airport sells electricity to its tenants (airlines, concessions, etc...). I suspect, but am not positive, that these electricity sales are a nice moneymaker for the airport, as it can purchase hydropower from the City at extremely low cost and resell it at market (utility company) rates to its tenants. This is a quirk particular to San Francisco however.
If you scroll through the detailed budget in the PDF, you'll find entries for other revenue categories. Examples include advertising fees (Clear Channel pays the airport to put up ads in the terminals and other areas), revenue for things like ATMs and baggage carts, leases to rental car companies, fees paid by taxicabs and airport buses for the right to access airport property, and even permit fees paid by filmmakers and photographers using the airport. Heck, the airport even charges the regional transit agency $3.2M/year in rent and custodial fees for the airport train station. Browsing through the budget should give you a pretty good idea where a large US airport can make money from non-aviation services.
Comment: Another approach practiced to carrying degrees in various countries: receive massive government subsidies, either in the form of direct cash payments, or capital improvements the airport doesn't pay for.
Comment: and investment. E.g. Schiphol as a company has a profitable real estate investment and speculation arm, having part ownership in things like other airports, shopping malls, ports, etc. etc.
Comment: @JanHudec economically, the company is the airport... Else where do you stop. Schiphol hosts many companies that rent space in office buildings on its premises too. But technically by some definition they're not "the airport" because they're outside the perimeter fence (same as the long term car park, it too is outside the perimeter fence). Or what about the taxi licenses the airport sells without which a taxi operator isn't allowed to pick up fares at the airport? Is that "the airport" doing it or the company operating "the airport"?
Comment: @jwenting: Those are other activities of the company that owns the airport. I would not consider them indirect income of the _airport_ itself.
Comment: When I took an airport management course in college we were taught that parking fees is the #1 source of airport revenue.  I don't have any actual or current percentage numbers to back that up.
Answer: Airports tend to acquire a lot of land in their vicinity.
This can be to mitigate noise or complaints from people living under approach/departure paths, for safety in the event of insufficient elevation, for future expansion/extensions of runways or of parking facilities for cars/planes etc.
Grazing animals don't tend to worry too much about airplanes, so "spare" land is often used for agriculture and horticulture (growing animals and plants)  Low income but low costs too.
Some businesses need to be located near to airports for reasons, like courier/freight operations or rental car pickups.  Long-term carparks can be on remote and less-desirable parts of airport land and still generate a profit.  All this land can be re-designated as needs change in the future.
Airport companies will also own the roads across their land.  This can sometimes lead to odd interpretations and loopholes in road laws.  Locally, police cannot ticket a motorist for speeding on airport land roads, because its not public property.  So there are an inordinate amount of speedbumps and sharp turns. Also, bicycles are excluded from some roads used for pickup/drop off.
A motorist pays to use the parking, a traveller pays a departure tax in their ticket, an advertiser pays for billboard or signage space, and a business pays to lease a concession or shop space in the terminal.  Ultimately the visitor pays in the form of increased prices, $10 for a coffee.
The airport company controls everything on their land.  You cannot get a phone line or fibre installed to your site.  Instead, the telco terminates the service in a handover building at the boundary, and the airport company runs the lead-in the rest of the distance.  This is a license to print money because there is no competition so they can charge whatever the customer will pay.
Inside the terminal there are strict controls over transmitters too - you can't even have a wireless ethernet network of your own.  Instead you have to buy a SSID which is configured on the airport's own wireless infrastructure, and trunked back via a VLAN.  Everything costs money every month.    Admittedly this makes sense from a safety standpoint - high power transmitters may have an effect on operations by interfering with aircraft, or more likely interfering with hand-held radios.  And the supply of wireless from a single infrastructure will eliminate contention while providing a better and fairer service.
The stinger comes in the setup and on-going costs being a literal monopoly environment.


Amount of man hours to write a social network

Question: I have big dreams of writing the next Facebook (unrealistic I know) and I'm in the planning stages as we speak and I'm umming and ahing about using a php framework for this and how many development hours it would actually save me. If any? Also is it unrealistic for one person to hand code an entire social network solo? Whats the largest application anyone has written on their own? I should also point out that I have a day job, so late nights and evenings it is. And pregnant partners to deal with :)
Comment: Whether or not you succeed, attempting something like this will definitely make you a better programmer - so, I offer my encouragement.  However, it's difficult to say how many man hours it will take.  Getting a minimally functioning social-networking site up and running using today's frameworks isn't so difficult - you're looking at a week or so tops.  But getting it *polished, usable and scalable* is another story entirely.  That could takes months or years.  You also need to ask yourself: *what is your competitive advantage?*  Why would someone use your service over Facebook?
Comment: Do not even consider this without talking it over with your pregnant partner. If I were pregnant and my spouse decided to take on a project of this nature just when I was going to need his help the most, I'd be divorced very quickly. You need to consider the needs of your child to have interaction with his daddy and your wife to have the help a spouse is supposed to give. Having a baby is a full-time job on it's own. Your life as you know it is about to radically change, personal projects are often a thing of the past if you do parenthood right.
Comment: I hear there is just one guy who created and maintained the dating website plentyoffish: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture
Comment: @job, child is on the way, that means less than 8 months to go (unlikely she would know she was pregnant for at least a month) and lots of things to do to get ready for the event now as well as the 24-hour care afterwards.  And people aready pointed out this is a huge project probably in excess of 10000 development hours done part time and at night and not counting the marketing hours (another full time job for the next several years). The chances of it being done and making money before he is a parent are roughly 0.
Comment: Thanks Charles, it's good to hear some encouragement, some people on SE are fairly negative. I hope I had a competitive edge over facebook but would be foolish to divulge that information :) I see what you mean though, if I can get a bare bones site up functioning correctly within a couple if weeks I'll be happy!
Comment: I have to agree with @Job. 'Winner takes all' is now faster and bigger than ever before with goog being the largest example in recent years. That said, Friends Reunited could have been bigger than facebook but they fumbled it. Even if you have a better product than facebook, how are you realistically going to market it? Without marketing you may as well not bother. p.s. You mean 'number of hours' not 'amount of hours'
Comment: Social media is very saturated already. It is a winner-take-all model. You have to build something that is truly good.
Comment: @HLGEM, unless one earns enough $ before kids arrive.
Answer: Somehow, I think writing a webapp is not the main concern.
Much more important is thinking about how to make the damn thing gain traction.
Other than that, your question doesn't probably make a lot of sense. Writing something as complex and big as Facebook is not something you can do all by yourself, and I am pretty sure that nobody has the resources to start out that big anyway, even without a day job and offspring and stuff.
Comment: @benhowdle89 I mean people using it, of course. Everything else, such as people willing to invest money to have their ads appear on your social network, will come as a consequence.
Comment: @benhowdle89 Traction, as in, getting people to join and marketing it and getting the word out. Facebook has 500 million people and is used by celebrities and media outlets. When Facebook first started becoming popular/mainstream, they had the huge advantage of not sucking like MySpace did, so there were tons of users that switched over.
Comment: @Corey +1. Facebook may suck according to some individuals, but since millions around the world seem to think otherwise, I don't see a serious Facebook competitor having a chance to succeed any time soon. As of now, FB is probably "good enough" for a lot of people. That being said, everything can happen.
Comment: It's not enough that I think your site is better than FB, I would have to convince all my 'friends' and future friends to switch as well.
Comment: What do you mean by traction, in this context?
Comment: I'm not sure that those millions of people think otherwise, but rather Facebook was better than MySpace *at the time* and people slowly but surely switched. But it doesn't change the fact that Facebook, by most measures, sucks. (Ask most people about their privacy and they'll have string opinions that go against Facebook's policies.) People are fickle over free stuff and *when* something better comes along they'll migrate over to that as well. Until then "it's like eskimos and fish: If it's the only thing on the menu, you are going to eat it whether you like it or not." (Dennis Miller)
Comment: @Philip But how many people have stopped using Facebook over the privacy issues?  Not enough for Facebook to notice.  They'll only switch to an alternative over reasons like that once there's a site that replaces everything Facebook does well -- which would require a large user base.  Something else will be the turning point if Facebook dies.
Comment: I have to agree.

Frankly, the technology is the least of your worries.

The ideas that make your site better is the main thing to get the traction.
Comment: @Matthew Read: I've read about privacy issues with Facebook and decided not to bother in the first place. They turned evil with their ToS. I'd welcome any competitor.
Comment: I'd suggest starting with a niche market and going from there.
Answer:
I'm umming and ahing about using a php framework for this and how many development hours it would actually save me. If any?

My instinct on this is no - simply because you said the "next Facebook" and the nature of a social network is many, many users.  If you were putting together a team to do this, and you hired a CTO worth anything at all, and you asked what PHP framework (if any) should be used, he'd tell you to back up and consider what language should even be used. The language must be:

Popular. If you become the next Facebook, you're going to need a lot of developers.  Facebook reportedly has nearly 500.
Scalable. Nearly any language can be scalable - if you have the know-how to mess with the internals.  That article is all about how Facebook writes PHP extensions in C++, has rewritten parts of the Zend Engine, and eventually wrote a compiler which transforms PHP into C++ code and then compiles it.

If you are going to need scale like this, it's unlikely that any framework is going to help you unless it's already an open-source social network platform (maybe), or you plan on just dumping it and rewriting everything as soon as you've got a few hundred thousand users.

Also is it unrealistic for one person to hand code an entire social network solo?

Yes.
But, what exactly does "an entire social network mean"?  What features is it going to have?  The original Facebook was obviously easy enough to write by a single person.  But what it has now has been developed by teams of hundreds of developers for years:

News feed. pulling in data from all features of the application for hundreds of connections per user, scoring it for importance, and displaying it in real-time. Realize that the uniqueness per user of the scoring relevance and sheer number of concurrent users makes caching of any kind an insanely difficult problem.
Photos. Not just your average photo sharing site.  How/when are thumbnails generated, stored, and served?  What about full size images? These must come from a CDN of some kind otherwise you'll quickly be overloading the bandwidth of your average data center plan. How do they get there? What about user interface? Multiple uploads, invalid images, live editing (rotating, etc.)?  What about tagging?
Permissions. This one is a beast.  Just the architectural concepts alone, let alone coding it in a way that doesn't bring down your servers the first time you need a complicated check (All wall posts and photos and comments that I can see from a friend of a friend).  On Facebook, not only can every category of data have custom permissions, but almost every post can too! In the end, the UI must also know ahead of time what the permissions will be so you don't present the user with invalid links.
Likes.  If you thought the graph you created with friend connections was insane, now extend it to the ability for every one of your users to "like" anything on the internet.  Create a full-fledged API for this, and allow content-owners to come into Facebook after the fact and access the page created by this data.
And so on... Too many more features to name.

Whats the largest application anyone has written on their own?

Impossible to know, but I guarantee if they did any good at it, they weren't on their own for long.  If you are successful, then you're going to need more hands to continue building.

I should also point out that I have a day job, so late nights and evenings it is. And pregnant partners to deal with :)

Good luck :)
Comment: Renesis, thanks for this very helpful. I think i am going to start it and see what happens!
Answer: Writing a functional social network that people would actually want to use would require many many thousands of hours. Probably 10,000 At minimum.
Having 5 programmers work full time for 1 year would consume 10,000 man hours. Facebook for example most likely required many more times that for its first two years of operation.
Comment: This isn't just coding, you know. To make a Facebook clone using PHP, MySQL and jQuery as your tools, it probably wouldn't take very long. The design is rather simplistic. Rather, most of the work is probably spent making it *scale*. They have some ridiculous amount of servers that require many man-hours to install and maintain.
Comment: Really? What are you basing this on?
Comment: @Corey: scaling probably isn't even remotely close to the most significant and difficult problem that a budding social network developer will have to face. There is a humongous amount of work that goes into all the polish that makes a service like facebook or stackoverflow work well. Even then, twitter had significant uptime and scaling issues early in its life. That didn't prevent it's success. Scaling is a problem that can be dealt with after you have a few ten or hundred thousand users. Throwing some more expensive hardware at the problem will suit you well for quite awhile.
Comment: @Corey also scaling isn't just installing more servers.  For a site the size of Facebook, it's going to touch every tier of the service, fundamentally changing the nature of the DB layer and server layer, and even affecting UI/front-end architecture.
Comment: Throwing expensive hardware at the problem has to wait until you either have wealthy backers or have already begun monetizing it... especially if you have family responsibilities with your own money
Answer: So practically whatsisname's man hour number is right, if maybe even a little low. Facebook, according to Wikipedia:

Facebook has over 1,700 employees, and offices in 12 countries.

A lot of man hours has gone into the Facebook as you see it.
Having said that, two things:

Looks like the original launching site took about a month to write. However, something that takes a month for a programming genius who had been programming for 12 years (wikipedia, again). Someone with less experience or talent would take considerably longer
The state of the art has advanced since 2002, a lot. We have things like SocialEngine (PHP), Pinax (Python), and CommunityEngine (Ruby). Thousands of hours have already gone into the development of these frameworks, so you will save yourself a significant amount of time by using things people have already written. Because, unless something's really special about your "users should be able to send messages to users" functionality, you save yourself all that time you would spend writing the messaging functionality... and that's just a small bit of the site.
It'll still be a lot of work. Using a framework will speed this up a lot - even just writing to a database can be annoyingly frustrating without a framework... but even beyond normal web frameworks and the frameworks I listed will be the secret sauce that makes everyone care about your site. Maybe it's design, maybe it's some wizbang feature, maybe you just do things differently... but that differentiating factor will still take time.
Comment: "programming genius"?  Not necessarily.  Experienced yes.  Genius.  No evidence.
Comment: It's true there's a difference between experience and professional experience. On the other hand, it sounds like Zuckerberger had at least a fundamental grasp on the basics (and Wikipedia paints it like he had a very *strong* grasp)... vs "I'm going to write a social network to teach myself programming"
Comment: There's a catch though to those frameworks and the functionality they provide: users expect that capability right from the beginning. So you will have to expend effort adding onto that with some new spiffy feature.
Comment: excellent point: users will ask, "What's so special about this?" when every site has (messaging, friending, following, etc). So it boils down to a marketing question: highlight your differences, and *be* different somehow
Comment: @S.Lott Zuckerberg was what, 8 when he started programming?  I wouldn't bother counting that as experience unless he WAS a genius and actually learned something beyond basic BASIC.
Answer: To get a recent example of a social network creation effort, you should have a look at the Diaspora social network project, which is an open source, decentralized, privacy friendly social network.
Regarding the man-hour aspect, I think they have started around May, last year and have just reached the Alpha stage, with 4 core developers and 200,000 US $ of donation. You can even have a look at their work on Github and see the number of active contributors.
Only counting 4 core developers they have probably already invested at least 7,000 man-hours and they are far from completion so I think whatisname's estimation of 10,000 man-hours sounds reasonable to get something basic, by today standard, working.
And they are also trying to be The Next Facebook.
Comment: I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg didnt get this sh*t when he said he wanted to make a better MySpace lol :)
Answer: If I were going to write the next social network, I would begin by considering not using server side code at all. I would do it in HTML5 and only invite people who are clever enough to use browsers that can interpret it fully.
If you write the script to the sequel to the Social Network, please include the part where I sued you for taking this idea that I gave you on programmers.SE and you gave me an undisclosed amount of money in excess of 65 million dollars.
Oops, forgot to answer the question.
That'll take you about a week and there are no security concerns at all.
Comment: Well Peter Turner, you make a fair point. A million upvotes to kicking Internet Explorer in the groin.
Comment: Peter Turner you are either extremely sarcastic and have a big humourous nature or you're an angry man! Ha :)
Comment: @benhowdle89 Yeah, that was using the  tag profusely, it renders ok on my machine, but I understand if it doesn't work everywhere.  :0
Answer: Writing a chat site and declaring it social network isn't difficult nor much coding effort. Hundreds of programmers are doing that right now, and all will fail to gain traction no matter how many features are coded in or how stylish it looks.
There is no user base to gain unless you can build a robust technical and usability interface to Facebook. That's a coding effort few are capable of, and some fail on proxy implementation willingness (Diaspora) to create a factual social network.
Btw, there might be easier target groups than Facebook users. (Though I'm probably not entitled to comment, since I have it cached in /etc/hosts as 127.0.0.5 ever since those tracking buttons appeared.)


Photoshop: Switch visibility between two layers

Question: For example, i got two adjustment layers (A and B). At last, i will only use one of them. While considering which one is better, i can compare them by turning A visible and B invisible, then A invisible and B visible. This is not so good because in the transition, there is a stage that BOTH layer A and B are invisible. Is there a single way/shortcut that i can switch their visibilities in one go?
Answer: You can create two layer comps (Window > Layer Comps).
Assign a shortcut to the next  and previous comp items (Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts > Panel Menus > Layer Comps)
Then just use your assigned shortcuts to toggle between comps.
Comment: Thanks Scott!! This is the solution! Thanks for introducing me Layer Comps. For more info for others: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/photoshop/cs/using/WSfd1234e1c4b69f30ea53e41001031ab64-7870a.html


Do I need an IP address or subnetwork for the long wire?

Question: Let's say I have a network to design and a portion of it is far away, say in another city. I bought or rent a wired connection. How should be my subnetwork configuration, do I need to use a subnetwork or IP for the wire(!) I used? Also, can someone explain what this long range cable(!) is? Thanks.
Comment: Welcome to NE, we hope you will both contribute to and learn from this community. Unfortunately, it is not clear what you are asking. Please edit your question and it will automatically start a reopen vote. You may find our [Question Checklist](http://meta.networkengineering.stackexchange.com/q/292/33) helpful to improve your question. Are you referring to something like dark fiber? Or are you acquiring a leased point to point line from a provider and if so, what are the details? Something else entirely?
Answer: Disclaimer: I'm assuming you're acquiring a private a point-to-point link.
If I understand you correctly, you're asking if you need an IP address on each end of the new connection. That depends on whether you are bridging (Layer-2) or routing (Layer-3) this connection.
Typically, a fibre provider will leave a fibre-to-ethernet converter that simply bridges the connection. If you want to keep the new location as an extension of your existing local network, you don't need to do anything (other than perhaps some switch config and merging the two networks into one subnet).
However, if you are routing the two networks (both on different subnets), you'll need an intermediary subnet for both end devices connected to the fibre, typically a /30, like this:
local LAN (10.0.1.0/24)->fibre int(192.168.0.1/30)->NEW_FIBRE->fibre int(192.168.0.2/30)->remote LAN (172.16.1.0/24)
Then on the local side, you'd have a route pointing 172.16.1.0/24 to 192.168.0.2, and on the remote side, 10.0.1.0/24 to 192.168.0.1.
Note that it's often beneficial to have an address on the external side of any connection for troubleshooting purposes.
Answer: You do not need a network address for the wire.  The wire is going to be a particular type of data link, probably Ethernet on both ends.  The long range cable is single mode fiber.  It could also be wireless microwave.


Which bootloader to use when dual booting a Mac without OSX (Win/Ubuntu)

Question: A while back I used Bootcamp to install Windows 8 on my 2011 27' iMac. Accidentally using the Windows installer I overwrote Windows onto my OSX partition. Now I would like to install Ubuntu on to my second partition, I have used Wubi to install it and now im not sure where to go. I cannot install REFIT because I have no OSX partition and I cant access Ubuntu through holding option on boot. Which bootloader should I use?
Comment: Does Ubuntu not show in the Windows loader?  Typically using WUBI, Ubuntu is added to the windows "longhorn" loader.
Answer: On a Mac that lacks an OS X installation, the best approach is typically to treat the computer as a BIOS machine: Use a BIOS-mode boot loader like LILO or GRUB and a Master Boot Record (MBR) partition scheme with no hint of a GUID Partition Table (GPT). On such a configuration, a WUBI-based installation should work, so if it's not working, you should describe precisely what's going wrong. You might also try running the Boot Info Script from a Linux emergency disc and post a link to the RESULTS.txt file that it creates. This will give us more information about how your disk is partitioned and what boot loaders are installed.
One more comment: Given your description of how you got to your current situation, I suspect you may have a damaged partition table, or at least one that could easily become damaged should you use the wrong tools on it. This is another reason to post the Boot Info Script's RESULTS.txt file, since it will reveal (to those who know how to read it) whether this is the case.


How can I set up overflow /tmp partition?

Question: I run Antergos as my OS. I have several drives in my computer: a 240gb SSD, a 320gb SATA hard drive, and a 120gb IDE drive. I store most everything on the SSD because I don't generally need more room than that, and I have the IDE drive set up as a network available drive to share with my laptop. My question is, is there any way that I can set it up so that if the /tmp partition on the SSD fills up (just happened while building catalyst-total) it can start to overflow seamlessly into the SATA drive on a pre-determined partition?
Comment: Yes, tmpfs will use swap space if sufficient RAM is not available. That means you can create and activate a swap partition on the SATA drive and it will be used as well for `/tmp` provided it's a tempfs.
Comment: Thanks so much, I can't believe I didn't realize that sooner.
Answer: tmpfs uses swap if sufficient RAM is not available. That means you can create and activate a swap partition on the SATA drive and it will be used for /tmp, provided it's a tmpfs.
In order to to that, create a swap partition and mount the swap space in your /etc/fstab. Furthermore, you have to ensure that the mounted tmpfs is of sufficient size. Use the size option. E.g.
# entries from /etc/fstab
UUID=d59ccb12-0b8e-42e4-b1e5-62e62b5b4c14 none  swap   sw        0   0
tmpfs                                     /tmp  tmpfs  size=20G  0   0


What is the difference between a dialog being dismissed or canceled in Android?

Question: Like the title says, what is the difference between a dialog being dismissed or canceled in Android?
Answer: Typically, a dialog is dismissed when its job is finished and it is being removed from the screen.  A dialog is canceled when the user wants to escape the dialog and presses the Back button.
For example, you have a standard Yes/No dialog on the screen.  If the user clicks No, then the dialog is dismissed and the value for No is returned to the caller.  If instead of choosing Yes or No, the user clicks Back to escape the dialog rather than make a choice then the dialog is canceled and no value is returned to the caller.
Comment: If you're using a DatePickerDialog, you should use an OnDateSetListener to get notified when the date changes.  If someone clicks the cancel button ... then it won't get called and the dialog will go away on its own.  For normal uses of the DatePickerDialog, you don't need to set other listeners.
Comment: Thanks for the reply. I'm trying to set what happens if the user pushes the cancel button on a datepicker. First I tried using a dismiss listener, and that worked, but also happened if the user chose a time. Then I tried a cancel listener, and it never went off, even if I pushed cancel. Do you know what I should do?
Comment: FYI, the back button triggers both the cancel listener and the dismiss listener.
Comment: What if i call cancel() instead of dismiss()
Answer: dismiss is something you have to explicitly call in your code, usually to respond to a click event on a button in your Dialog.  If you prefer, you can call dismissDialog in the Activity, which will in turn call dismiss on the Dialog.
The cancel method only executes when it is explicitly called in your code, or when the user presses the BACK button when your cancelable Dialog is open (as @Lee noted).
If you are using a DatePicker, then all of this is still the case.  As @Lee said, DatePickerDialog.OnDateSetListener just detects when the user has chosen a date from the DatePicker.
The Android Developer Reference provides more info on Dialogs.
Comment: You can also call the `cancel` method. There are two different listeners for dimissing and canceling.
Answer: Dismiss Calling the dismiss removes the dialog from the screen. This method can be
invoked safely from any thread. Note that you should not override this method to do cleanup when the dialog is dismissed, instead implement that in onStop.
Cancel Calling the cancel, cancels the dialog. This is essentially the same as calling dismiss(), but it will also call your DialogInterface.OnCancelListener, if registered.
Hide This method hides the dialog, but do not dismiss it.

And for more see here
Comment: @ВладиславШестернин absolutely and that's not a difference
Comment: cancel and dismiss both have callbacks:
Cancel   -> setOnCancelListener;
Dismiss -> setOnDismissListener;
Answer: The difference is all about returning the value to the caller function.
dialog.cancel() will normally be called when the user hits the back button rather than selecting the choices that alert dialog offers like OK/Dismiss and return null/no value to the caller. While
dialog.dismiss() is normally called when the user selects from the choices that alert dialog offers like hitting the Dismiss button on the dialog will dismiss the dialog and will return the non-null corresponding value to the caller. That's it.
Answer: Giving this example
val dialog = AlertDialog.Builder(this@MainActivity)
    .setTitle("Title")
    .setMessage("Message")
    .setPositiveButton("Dismiss") { dialog, _ ->
        dialog.dismiss()
    }.setNegativeButton("Cancel") { dialog, _ ->
        dialog.cancel()
    }.create()

dialog.setOnDismissListener {
    Log.i("TAG", "onDismissListener")
}
dialog.setOnCancelListener {
    Log.i("TAG", "onCancelListener")
}
dialog.show()

When click Dismiss button
onDismissListener

When click Cancel button
onCancelListener
onDismissListener

When system Back button
onCancelListener
onDismissListener


Alert for Unanswered Discussion Board Question

Question: I want to create a workflow that will email users when a question that was posted on the discussion board has gone unanswered for 48 hours. I can't seem to figure it out and have tried searching but all i see are setting workflows for
Answer: A little background info to get this working:

Discussion boards have two content types: Discussion and message.
Messages are the replies
Like all items in SP, Discussions and messages both have an ID property
Messages have a ParentItemID property, which is the id of the discussion that the reply is connected with.

With the above, you can create the following workflow:
First, set the workflow to run for each new item, but only for items of content type "discussion". (both of these are set on the workflow settings screen in spd). Also, create two workflow variables: DiscussionID and ReplyID. Then:

Pause for 48 hours
Set DiscussionID = CurrentItem:ID
Set ReplyID = workflow lookup:
data source: current list
field from source: ID
where field: parent item id =
value: variable: currentitemid
if ReplyID = 0, then send notification that there were no replies

To translate the above, for each new discussion, the workflow waits 48 hours, and then queries the list for any replies that have a parent item id of the original disucssion. If there are 20 replies, this step only returns the first. But we don't care how many replies there are, only whether or not there are any replies. If there are no replies at all, then the replyid variable will be 0.


How to remove my name from the editorial board of a journal on Beall's list?

Question: My name is listed on the editorial board of a journal on Beall's list against my will. I emailed them multiple times to ask them to remove my name from their website. They did not reply. How do I deal with this?
Comment: Have a chat with the legal office of your university.
Comment: This isn't an answer, but if you have a personal website, consider having an explicit line stating this. If you don't have a personal website -- considering building one for this reason (among the many other benefits it provides).
Comment: You can also sue the journal for defamation.
Comment: @Coder The website is hosted somewhere, someone had to pay for the DNS etc. Listing fake contact info isn't the holy grail of avoiding legal consequences. The legal fees will perhaps be big, but as Federico Poloni mentions your university could be interested in this too.
Comment: @NajibIdrissi Usually the address and the owner information of the scammy journal is false. In that case, how could one progress?
Answer: The best way to deal with this is to get legal help. Keep a copy of all your communications (email, etc.) with the journal, bring it to a lawyer and state your issue. Legal help can be expensive, but if you're seriously concerned about being listed and consider a high priority to get off the website, then I advise you to seek quality legal help as soon as possible.
In the mean time, you can also make a note on your personal website/blog/social media/profiles/wherever people access you and your work that you are not an editor of that journal.
Comment: ...how much money they have available for causes like this, and what their policies are in these situations (it's really case by case). It probably would not be acceptable to use grant money for this, because grant money is typically directed to a specific project/topic, and while this issue is clearly a professional issue, it's also personal to you and only tangentially related to your actual research that the grant money is intended (most likely) to fund.
Comment: For legal assistance on a professional issue such as this, would one expect to be able to use grant money or get support from one's institution, or would one typically have to pay for it out of pocket?
Comment: @PLL It really kind of depends on the situation/your institution. I would definitely try to get institutional help first, because the nature of the situation is one that could not just affect your reputation, but potentially the reputation of the institution you're associated with. I would make a case to the institution about how damaging you think this could be, and ask them for assistance with legal fees/the ability to utilize their legal resources (if applicable). Whether or not you actually get help from them depends on how closely you're connected to the institution...

How to remove my name from the editorial board of a journal on Beall’s list?


Weekly Steel Gain From Orders

Question: Is the amount of steel you'll earn in 1 week from the rewards for completing orders constant, assuming you complete them all?  If so, how much is it?  If not, is there a typical range?
Answer: EDIT:
There have been some changes to how orders work and new orders added since I posted this answer.  I have not had the chance to figure it out again since the changes, but I'll leave my old answer below until I can update it.

tl;dr
Yes, the rewards are constant, and the total amount is 6,600 steel.
Show Your Work
From my experience, I believe all daily orders reward 300 steel on completion, and all contract orders reward 100 steel (I'm not going to consider special community events, since the rewards vary and I don't think they are regularly scheduled).  There are 2 new daily orders each day, and 6 contract orders on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday.  Crunching the numbers:
2 daily orders * 7 days a week * 300 steel per order = 4200 steel per week
6 contract orders * 4 times a week * 100 steel per order = 2400 steel per week
4200 for daily orders + 2400 for contract orders = 6600 steel per week
But Wait, There's More
Note that this number only reflects steel gained from the reward for the order.  Orders are all based on completing a certain number of games of a certain type under certain conditions, so you will gain steel as loot from completing those games.  These calculations don't consider this "loot" steel, so the actual steel gain in a week will be higher, but will depend on the number and type of matches played to complete the order.

Weekly Steel Gain From Orders


Enabling Z value

Question: I have a polyline that when I created it I did not enable the z value. Is there away that I can enable the z value for my polyline so that I can add z values using 3D Analyst?
Answer: I don't know of a way to enable Z values afterwards, but here's a workflow to create a new polyline with Z enabled and copy the existing fields and data over:
1) Create a new polyline feature class which stores Z values.

2) Import the existing fields from the old polyline feature class.

3) Right click the new polyline feature class in ArcCatalog and go to Load Data.

4) Select the old polyline feature class as the Input Data, and follow the rest of the Load Data wizard.
Answer: Create a new feature class of type "Line", and check "Coordinates include Z values", continue through the options until you get to field names. Import your original lines which didn't have Z enabled.
Then, right click your new feature class, and "Load Data" from your original polyline feature class.

Enabling Z value


Could a fish fin evolve into an ear?

Question: If a vertebrate had a paired fin (specifically a sarcopterygian-like fin) in the correct place, would it be plausible for the fin to adapt into a structure analogous to the middle and outer ears of tetrapods? The vertebrate has no hearing parts besides the inner ear, and  would be transitioning to land as this structure evolves. It also has many fins along its body
Comment: I understand the mechanism you're proposing, I just don't think it's more likely than the jaw-to-ear model tetrapods followed.
Comment: its more likely that it would evolve an ear that looks like a fin, keep in mind external ears are just made of skin and cartilage and did not evolve from anything else.
Comment: Why do you want to have a fin evolve into an ear? I think it's implausible that it would happen, but there may be another way to get to your end goal.
Comment: Unrelated, but it is very common for mermaid and fish-like humanoids to have "earfins".
Comment: Do you mean lobe fin? Seems unlikely with an inner ear already in place. It would be like evolving true eyes on your shoulders when you already have eye spots on your head.
Comment: @rek The fin would be used to transmit sound to the inner ear, like the middle ear of tetrapods
Answer: Likely not, at least with hearing as we think of it.
Darwin's mechanism for evolution and natural selection requires gradual changes, where each one is slightly better than the last. Any change that does not produce immediate results should be filtered out by Natural Selection.
A fin would start with no apparatus analogous to an ear, and I can't think of any sequence of small changes (each improving on the previous body design) that would give a fin an entirely new function.

That said, we do have limited ability to hear through our bones. I can't find it upon googling, but my band director once showed me a silent tuning fork, where it would vibrate without making noise, but if you placed the end on your elbow and touched your eardrum, you could hear the tone. Another example would be placing the vibrating tines of a fork between your teeth and "hearing" the sound transmitted through your bones.
You could probably develop some similar structure to this where the creature "hears" through vibrations conducted up through its fin (especially if that fin is used to walk on later in the evolutionary sequence). This would be much easier to create via a Darwinian evolutionary path.
Now that I think about it, that is a very similar function to how snakes can "hear" vibrations in the ground. You might look into that as well for inspiration.
I hope that helps you!
Comment: But couldn't this bone conduction be used to transmit vibrations from an eardrum, like the ossicles in real tetrapods?
Comment: @IchthysKing the reason we have said ossicles to begin with, as far as we know, is because our ancestors would use their jaw bones to hear vibrations in the ground. Over time, some of the bones in the jaws came to become part of the ear, making hearing a lot better. You'd probably need a process in which, for whatever reason, this creatures started to use its fins to hear instead. I'd say it might be easier to explain actual ears becoming similar to fish fins through sexual selection than it'd be to have limbs develop into a hearing apparatus (unless you want to take a look at grasshoppers).

Could a fish fin evolve into an ear?


Connect an iPhone to OpenVPN

Question: Is there a way to connect an iPhone to our company OpenVPN server?
Answer: I have it working on a jailbroken iPhone 3.x. Detailed instructions can be found at http://chandraonline.net/blog/?p=22.
Comment: @That's great, thanks. Now if only it worked on non-jailbroken iPhones...
Answer: As of the latest iPhone OS release (3.0) this is not possible. I am unsure if someone could create an 'all in one' client that connects to OpenVPN and then allows you to browse the web from within the same app.
But certainly any app that connected to OpenVPN could not then be put into the background allowing you to use the built in Mobile Safari or Mobile Mail over the VPN.
Comment: Your answer is no longer correct.
Answer: I've looked into this and unfortunately it's not possible, and it's unlikely to happen any time soon. While it's relatively easy to write the software for the iPhone, the problem is that it needs a tap/tun interface to create the OpenVPN tunnel, which is not present in the iPhone currently.
Comment: Your answer is no longer correct.
Answer: There seems to be a solution for jailbroken iPhones here:
http://code.gerade.org/tunemu/
I haven't tested it though.
Comment: Thanks a lot for the hint! Maybe something could be made by developing an app which includes this code and an integrated web view. So we could at least browse the web servers on the VPN. Of course it would be way better to have this system-wide.
Answer: OpenVPN.net finally released an official client for iOS:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/openvpn-connect/id590379981
Comment: Wow we had to wait almost 4 years since I asked this question to get an answer...

Connect an iPhone to OpenVPN


Handling multiple accounts

Question: I'm having a hard time trying to understand the best way (even better, trying to fully understand a way) to handle multiple accounts (both client(js / ts) and program(anchor/rust) side).
If I want to call a method from my program and send multiple accounts for it to handle, is there a way to do it without using "remaining_accounts"? If yes, how could it be done? If not, how could "remaining_accounts" be properly used (I'm finding it quite confusing at the moment)?
Also, how could both ways be handled, if possible, on the program side?
Comment: Could you provide some context on where `remain_accounts` is from?
Comment: I was looking at possible solutions, and found this one (amongst a few other examples referring the same): https://solana.stackexchange.com/questions/633/can-i-use-vec-to-pass-multiple-accounts-into-an-anchor-program?rq=1
However, every search that I did regarding this, seems somehow confusing. Therefore, I was looking for a more straight forward solution (if possible) or, last case scenario, understand this one.
Comment: I actually just found this: https://medium.com/@Arrivant_/gaming-applications-anchor-a89e37aeb5ad
Will have a deeper look at it and see what I can extract =) (at first, it looks like a long thread on anchor "remaining_accounts" which can be quite useful)
Comment: Come back when you're done, and post an answer to your own question with what you learned!
Comment: @steveluscher, forgot about this.. :( will post a possible answer in a min
Answer: Was able to find a suitable solution to use remaining_accounts.
Below is an example on how to iterate through the remaining_accounts, deserialize and change a variable on the account, and serialize it back.
pub fn some_function(ctx:Context<SomeContext>, ammount_to_change: u64) -> Result<()>
    {
        for account in ctx.remaining_accounts.iter() {

            let _account_key = account.key();
            let mut data = account.try_borrow_mut_data()?;

            let mut account_to_write = BaseAccount::try_deserialize(&mut data.as_ref()).expect("Error Deserializing Data");

            account_to_write.var_to_change += ammount_to_change;

            account_to_write.try_serialize(&mut data.as_mut())?;

        }
        Ok(())
    }

The call on the TS side, could be something like
const someOutput = await program.methods.someFunction(new anchor.BN('insert ammount here')).accounts({
        }).remainingAccounts([{pubkey: yourPDA, isSigner: false, isWritable: true}]).rpc();

Handling multiple accounts


Employment contract specifies 40 hours. Normal?

Question: Recently I received an offer for a Project Management position at IT company.
Before I've been working for about 6 years as a contractor/freelancer, and also I've never been working as an employee in Canada(Ontario) (we moved here from a different country).
In the offer, I have a clause that I have to work a minimum of 40 hours a week, and, if needed, more as the business will require. Guys, I wonder is it common in Canada(or more specific in Ontario) to include "hours" for such position?
Thank you.
Comment: The "hours thing" is typically referred to as "employment". Most jobs require butts in chairs, with the idea being that if you can do your job in less time, then you should be doing more with the rest of the time too.
Comment: It seems a reasonable clause, you get a salary, they want 40 hours minimum. What is your problem with that? What happens if they don't give you 40 hours of work to do though?
Comment: They don't give me work. There is a team that I should lead. I set goals and we need to reach them.  My concern is that they will start to measure how many hours I "gave them" instead of measuring mine and my team's output. Before I always had contracts with requirements that should be implemented - never had this "hours" thing
Comment: Yes, it is common. Expect to work much more than 40 hours and not to be paid overtime
Comment: Find me a job where you can leave as soon as your work is done for the day. Every salaried or waged job I've done or know about assumes that you'll stay for at least a set number of hours no matter what; sometimes with fixed hours to start and finish, sometimes flexible working where you add up your total hours. You can't just say "I've finished, I'm taking a half-day."
Answer: Freelancing and contract work is often measured by output and results.
Many if not most jobs are judged and remunerated based on hours. It's perfectly normal to do so.

My concern is that they will start to measure how many hours I "gave them" instead of measuring mine and my team's output.

They should be doing both. But in any case if you want the job you do it by the companies rules, or negotiate different ones. In most cases it's not really negotiable unless there is a special reason.
Answer: Yes, it's perfectly normal. Salaried jobs generally expect 40 hours' work, and more when necessary to get the work done.
The "minimum of 40" wording is in there probably not for you, but because the people who wrote it have had trouble with slackers in the past. If you're not a slacker you'll be fine.
It's a good idea to ask your hiring manager about workday expectations, even before you accept the offer. Do they want to see you show up at particular time, take a lunch break at another time, and go home at a third time?  Do they expect you to be on a conference call with contractors in Asia at 6am or 7pm? If so they will tell you.  If they don't care they'll tell you. Flexible workdays might be good in a big city; you can work early or late to avoid rush hour traffic.
Good luck.


Convergence or divergence for $\int_1^\infty \frac{1}{x\sqrt{x}-1} dx$

Question: Consider the following integral: $$\int _1 ^\infty \frac{1}{x\sqrt{x}-1} dx$$
So I can see that this integral is improper both at $\infty$ and at $1$.
Using $\lim\limits_{x\to\infty} x^{3/2}\frac{1}{x\sqrt{x}-1}=1 \in (0,\infty),3/2>1 $ we get that the integral is convergent at $\infty$ . As for convergence at $1$, I tried to use $\lim\limits_{x\to\infty} (1-x) \frac{1}{x\sqrt{x}-1}$, but this is equal to $-\frac{2}{3}$ so I can't apply the criterion of convergence ( or divergence ) in this case because the limit is not in the interval $[0,\infty)$. I want to know how to solve the convergence or divergence of this integral without calculating the integral is that's possible.
Comment: You can see it is divergent by taking $ u = \sqrt{x}$. The integral then has the form $\int_1^{\infty} \frac{u}{u^3-1}du$. You can bound this below by $\int_1^{\infty} \frac{1}{u^2-\frac{1}{u^2}}du$ which diverges.
Answer: By $y=\sqrt x-1 \implies dy=\frac12\frac1{\sqrt x}dx$ we have
$$\int _1 ^\infty \frac{1}{x\sqrt{x}-1} dx=\int _0 ^\infty \frac{2(y+1)}{(y+1)^2(y+1)-1} dy=\int _0 ^\infty \frac{2(y+1)}{y^3+3y^2+3y} dy$$
which diverges at $0$ by limit comparison test with $\int_0^1 \frac1y dy$.
Answer: Note that as $x\to\infty$,
$${1\over x\sqrt{x} - 1} \sim {1\over x\sqrt{x}},$$
so this integrates at $\infty$.
At 1, we have
$${1\over x\sqrt{x} - 1} = {x\sqrt{x} + 1\over x^3 - 1}
\sim {2\over x^3 -1} = {2\over (x-1)(x^2 + x + 1)}\sim {2\over 3(x-1)}$$
as $x \to 1$.
This does not integrate at 1.
Comment: Nice , wanted to write the same :)
Answer: $$I=\int_1^\infty\frac{1}{x\sqrt{x}-1}dx\overset{\sqrt{x}=y}{=}2\int_1^\infty\frac{y}{y^3-1}dy\overset{1/y=x}{=}2\int_0^1\frac{1}{1-x^3}dx$$
$$=\frac23\int_0^1\frac{dx}{1-x}+\frac23\int_0^1\frac{x+2}{x^2+x+1}dx$$
The first integral diverges and the second one converges, so $I$ diverges.


What are these wires visible in Space Shuttle ODS/APAS-95?

Question: What are these three wires connected in a y-shape called and what is their role? Some sort of alignment guide? Sorry for the hard to see picture.
Comment: Broken link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=howtohotwirespaceshuttle
Answer: That y-cable assembly was called the "centerline camera crosshair". It worked in conjunction with the docking camera below it and the docking target on the ISS.

(Image source)
The crew would use the centerline camera to view the relative alignment of the crosshair and the docking target during the final stage of rendezvous/docking.
Reference: Orbital docking system centerline color television camera system test
The best drawings I could find with the crosshair labeled:

From Space Shuttle Systems Handbook Volume 3, pages 389 and 391 in the pdf.
There is some video of the centerline camera crosshairs at 4:18 in this STS-86 postflight video (in this case the station shown is the Mir).


Spatially-explicit global database of parent rock chemistry?

Question: As the title suggests, I am looking for the most reliable database(s) of parent-or bedrock chemistry, e.g. the concentration of nitrogen, phosphorus and some other metals (basically plant nutrients). Since I am not a researcher in this area, it is very hard for me to determine, I would really appreciate if someone can point me to a specific source or direction.
Comment: Bedrock chemistry may not be relevant to soil chemistry, particularly for transported soils and regolith or for very deep bedrock. I am not aware of any such database. What ultimately are you trying to do?
Answer: No such thing exists.
Some of the data you're looking for may be available from government geological surveys.
For example, the Australian state of New South Wales provides this in their online map tool:
https://minview.geoscience.nsw.gov.au
Click "Add layer", then "Geochemistry", then "All surface geochemistry". MinView from GSNSW is probably one of the better tools, anywhere in the world. Finding something like that on a global scale is impossible. You will be probably luckier with the more developed countries which invest quite a lot into this thing (like Australia and its states).


Does QGIS support Galaxy Tab 4 10.1 4G LTE?

Question: I need a tablet for outdoor work and i would like to know if this device "Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 10.1 4G LTE" works fine with QGIS mobile application.
Comment: Have you tried QField?
Comment: Welcome to gis.stackexchange! Please note that a good question on this site is expected to show some degree of research on your part, i.e. what you have tried and - if applicable - code so far. For more info, you can check our [faq].
Answer: I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, no 4G though.  I tried to install QGIS and was able to.  However, the main panel was missing (Project, Edit, View, etc) so I couldn't find a way to connect to the GPS.  From the information I've gathered, it is buggy and seems to not install properly and/or work at all but seems to be getting better.
Here are some useful resources I found:
A wiki site for QGIS/Android, http://hub.qgis.org/
This is more of open source solutions website.  They have a section dedicated to QGIS/Android; http://www.opengis.ch/android-gis/
If you are going to attempt to install QGIS on your Android device, you'll need Ministro, which is a free download at the Play Store
Answer: You may try NextGIS mobile. This is native Android application with good QGIS integration.

The documentation is here: http://docs.nextgis.com/docs_ngmobile/source/toc.html
For collaborating field work I also recommend nextgis.com web GIS. It free and also has integration with QGIS (via NextGIS Connect plugin) and Mobile (native).


Are American witches and wizards forbidden to use magic before Ilvermorny?

Question: The British Ministry does not care about underage magic, before students go to Ollivander. Is MACUSA stricter on preschool magic?
Comment: Yes. That's why American wizards don't become great wizards. One British guy knocked down dozens of American aurors and finally another British guy stopped him.
Comment: Also recall how Voldemort (who was more dangerous than even Grindelwald) ran away after seeing British aurors. British wizards are better at magic because they were allowed to freely explore their superpowers early in their life.
Comment: If you're talking about Grindelwald, he isn't British.
Answer: It's unclear - but MACUSA was stricter on school-aged wizards.
It's unclear what the rules for young wizards under eleven who haven't started at Ilvermorny yet are. However, laws in America are certainly stricter, as (though the law may have changed in 1965) American wizards aren't allowed a wand until after they're sorted into their house at Ilvermorny, and are legally required to leave their wands in Ilvermorny until they turn seventeen.

Once students have been allocated a house they are led into a large hall where they select (or are selected by) a wand. Until the 1965 repeal of Rappaport's Law, which enforced very strict conformity with the Statute of Secrecy, no child was allowed a wand until they arrived at Ilvermorny. Moreover, wands had to be left at Ilvermorny during vacations and only upon attaining seventeen years of age was the witch or wizard legally allowed to carry a wand outside school. - Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (Pottermore)

America does certainly have stricter laws for school-aged wizards, as they don't allow young wizards to have wands at any point outside of Ilvermorny. However, how MACUSA handles underage magic done by wizard children who haven't started going to Ilvermorny yet isn't clear.
MACUSA didn't tolerate magic phenomena, that may apply here.
Though children of that age often can't control their magic, so can't truly be 'blamed' for it, it's unclear if MACUSA would consider that, as they're also intolerant of magical creatures, most of which are also 'innocent' and not trying to flout the Statute of Secrecy or reveal magic to Muggles.

MACUSA was also more intolerant of such magical phenomena as ghosts, poltergeists and fantastic creatures than its European equivalents, because of the risk such beasts and spirits posed of alerting No-Majs to the existence of magic. - 1920s Wizarding America (Pottermore)

It's likely that their intolerance towards magical phenomena in general, including ones that couldn't help it like magical creatures, would have some effect on their treatment of young wizard children's accidental magic. It seems very likely they'd be at least somewhat stricter on it, though it's unclear exactly how they handle it. With their general stricter stance on magical phenomena, though, it seems very likely that their laws about young wizard children would be stricter than Britain's.
Comment: tha is just before the repeal of Rapports Law?
Comment: @padfoot Yes - it's unclear what happened after the repeal of Rappaport's Law.
Answer: Before the repeal of Rappaport's Law students weren't allowed wands outside of school.

Until the 1965 repeal of Rappaport's Law, which enforced very strict conformity with the Statute of Secrecy, no child was allowed a wand until they arrived at Ilvermorny. Moreover, wands had to be left at Ilvermorny during vacations and only upon attaining seventeen years of age was the witch or wizard legally allowed to carry a wand outside school.- Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry - Pottermore

We can't be sure about what the laws were like after the revocation of Rappaport's Law. But since they are saying the word "until" it might be safe to assume that things changed with magic after the change in laws. Macusa was modeled on The Wizards council of Great Britain but that predates The Ministry of Magic so we cant be sure about their underage laws.

MACUSA was modeled on the Wizards' Council of Great Britain, which predated the Ministry of Magic. Representatives from magical communities all over North America were elected to MACUSA to create laws that both policed and protected American wizardkind.- The Magical Congress of the United States of America (MACUSA) - Pottermore
Answer: It does not seem possible to prevent children from performing uncontrollable magic
That's the point, isn't it? Small children start to use magic instinctively - that's how you know they are wizards. Seems like magical abilities can be shown at pretty young age, before one can explain the child about rules and law.

A tiny boy no older than two was crouched outside a large pyramid-shaped tent, holding a wand and poking happily at a slug in the grass, which was swelling slowly to the size of a salami.

Does not seem possible to imply any restrictions on their behavior, apparently they often even do not realize what they are doing (remember Harry's curious cases before he found out he was a wizard).
Moreover, remember it's dangerous to prevent children from performing magic (Ariana and Credence are good examples)
Thus, controlling pre-school magic should be up to parents.
Which is pretty much the same as in Britain. Thought we do not know how strict is the punishment for careless parents in each country.


Distribution from a traditional IRA and future contributions to a Roth IRA

Question: I am 60+. Can I still make contributions to my Roth IRA in future years if I start taking distributions from my traditional IRA this year?
Answer: The amount of money you can contribute to a IRA is based on your age, marital status, filing status and income for the tax year.
The IRS discusses those rules in the Retirement Topics section of their website.

For 2014 and 2015, your total contributions to all of your traditional
  and Roth IRAs cannot be more than:

$5,500 ($6,500 if you're age 50 or older), or
your taxable compensation for the year, if your compensation was less than this dollar limit.

So that means that you can't contribute more than your taxable income, unless:

Spousal IRAs
If you file a joint return, you and your spouse can each make IRA
  contributions even if only one of you has taxable compensation. The
  amount of your combined contributions can't be more than the taxable
  compensation reported on your joint return. It doesn't matter which
  spouse earned the compensation.

Regarding your age:

IRA contributions after age 70½
You can't make regular contributions to a traditional IRA in the year
  you reach 70½ and older. However, you can still contribute to a Roth
  IRA and make rollover contributions to a Roth or traditional IRA
  regardless of your age.

For the Roth IRA the tax law limits the maximum contribution based on your income and filing status. The maximum income to still be able to make a full Roth contribution can be as high as 181K for Married filing Jointly or as low as 0 if filing as married filing Separately.
Conclusion:
Because you are older than 59½ you can make withdrawals from your Regular IRA, and if you or your spouse have taxable compensation you may be able to make Roth IRA contributions. Because the only thing you included in your question is your age you can't get a simple answer. Please discuss this with a tax expert if the IRS documentation doesn't clearly fit your situation.
Comment: As I remember it, at age 70½ and thereafter when RMDs must be taken from the Traditional IRA, the RMD amount is not eligible to be rolled over to a Roth IRA. If you wish to roll over money from your Traditional IRA to your Roth IRA, you must take an _additional distribution_ over and above the RMD amount (pay taxes on that additional amount too), and then roll over that additional distribution amount to your Roth IRA.
Comment: @DilipSarwate - right, OP might offer his exact age to help us give him a more precise answer.
Answer: As mhoran noted, with earned income you can deposit to a Roth at any age.
For the fact that you're asking about withdrawing from a Traditional IRA but depositing to Roth, I'll suggest you consider the Roth conversion.
Now (still in 2014) convert what you wish, say, $20K. Then in March when doing your taxes, you can see the tax impact and back out (recharacterize) the exact amount you wish to get your taxable income, and perhaps tax due, to the exact number you wish.
I've used this strategy for a decade for my mother in law. 10 years of converting the exact amount to put her taxable income at exactly the top of the 15% bracket each year.


Guidelines for identifying "power users"?

Question: Are there any guidelines for determining whether an audience type are "power users" and if their usage warrants more powerful features? For instance, could a user who orders products from a b2b application 5 times per week be considered a "power user" if the average order is 1 order per week?
Comment: Define 'power' for your users and define 'powerful' for your features and make sure that they match is probably the best guideline you can find.
Answer: You are approaching the problem from the wrong side. If you try to find out which users can be stuck into a labelled category, you end up with categories mostly useless for UX.
The right thing to do is to find out how people interact with your site. If there is a strong difference between the way of interaction, or the user needs, you classify your users according to these differences. Starting from there, you can give convenient labels to your groups which help you communicate about them with other stakeholders.
For example, you could find out that people who have 3 orders in their ordering history are happy with a simple list view, while people with more than 15 orders have trouble finding a specific order in their history. Or that your straightforward billing system is good enough for most users, but that customers who bring in more than $xxx in revenue per year get personalized conditions from the sales team and the system is not equipped to deal with these creative pricing structures. Maybe even both is the case in the same system, and if it is, it is very likely that the second group (revenue over $xxx) overlaps with the first (many orders). In this case, it can make sense to call this group of people "power users", but you can also choose whatever other label is useful.
On the other hand, you can have useful classifications completely independent of any order volume considerations. Maybe you have the kind of customer who knows how much he can spend, but doesn't care about brands; this customer needs a way to compare similar items by price. Another kind of customer is brand loyal and needs to filter by brand. The third one cares about a technical spec of the product, and faced with a database of 100 000 types of paper, wants to filter out the CO2-neutral papers in thickness between 90 and 130 gm/m^2 ones and hates you for categorizing your shop by brand. None of these is more "power" than another one, but all of these require a different functionality.

There is a different separation which was a somewhat popular research topic in the early 90's academic research on usability. It is about the difference between people who create mental models when working with a computer and people who don't. This difference is noticeable in all other areas of life, but the consequences are very visible in computer usage. People who create a mental model intuitively know how to do what they want to do. People who don't either click around wildly, usually ending their task in frustrating failure, or follow a script (a step-by-step tutorial) they got from someone or developed in a long and painful trial-and-error process. They are helpless when faced with the tiniest deviation from the expected path. The first group is frequently called "power users" in the context of many applications.
There is rarely a need to make this distinction in practice. The second group (no mental model) is prevalent. Even people generally capable of making one just don't have the cognitive capacity or the motivation to do it for every piece of software they encounter. Besides, creating a mental model takes time, and at the beginning, the people creating the mental model (which is the fast track to becoming an expert) are still, well, beginners. These first encounters also happen to be the ones when a person decides whether to use your application more frequently. So, in practice, you design for the helpless people, by giving them a clear path to success with minimal intervention. The power users are generally happy with this too, because they don't have to squander much precious mental resources in learning the application. Just pay attention to not dumb it down so much that they can't do what they wanted to.
There is a place where the power users matter more. When you are writing software which is a tool for creation, you have many more experts who use it on a daily basis and have the time, motivation and capacity to learn it. For example, in a CAD system, you can assume that many of your users will be from the "mental model building" kind, and that they need a high degree of flexibility and also know what they are doing. It is quite a challenge to design this kind of software, because you want to make their job efficient without losing the beginners. But if you are writing a web shop, this is not what you have to worry about.
Answer: Power user is not a relational entity rather it is an absolute factor because it is completely based on the individual's mental mapping of your site and his rememberance and domain knowledge. It can be relational to you under factors of 'Average order' etc. This is wrong notion to decide power user. You can decide power user by having adabtable design. Example: user who knows (you assume he knows) a particular icon stands for the Action-A and if you find the bounce off (from server logs) is too high then introduce label to the icon and not just icon. User learns and forgets things over time. So the assumption of power user is variable with respect to time.


Can the word "geek" be used as an adjective?

Question: I'd like to know whether I should use the word "geek" as an adjective or noun?
Answer: The word "geek" is a noun, just like "dog" or "cat" is. It can be used as an adjective though, but in a slightly altered way:

He looked geeky with those glasses on, holding that laptop firmly under his arm.

Here, geeky is being used as an adjective, meaning that person looks like a geek because of the arguments given afterwards.
Comment: @majid Not really - you can put anything in a (nick)name. A grammatical correct nickname though, would be something like: `geekyMajid`, or `majidTheGeek`.
Comment: so, is wrong using this word as "majid geek" if majid be a name?
Answer: Any noun can be used as an adjective without changing its form:

Geekspeak, geek-speak, and geek speak are three compounds that consist of two nouns each. The first noun modifies the second by telling you what kind of "speak" it is. There are many different types, e.g., business speak and corporate speak etc.

I can't see why it'd be wrong to use "Majid Geek" as a handle.

In "Majid Geek", you say "Majid is a name". In this phrase, "Majid" functions as an adjective because it tells us what kind of geek you are. But because "Majid" is an Arabic name, most native Anglophones won't understand what it is or what it means. I don't and didn't know that it was an Arabic name.

Also, the word order isn't English. If you want "geek" to be an adjective, English word order is "Geek Majid". But even if the name were "Geek Thatcher", "Geek would probably be considered only a noun that functions as a name (proper noun), not an adjective in that two-word phrase. To be an adjective in a name, it'd have to be Geeky Majid, but even then it would be an adjective that functions as a proper noun (name).
In geekmobile and geekthink, geek functions as an adjective. It's all a matter of context.


What is the purpose of glass in mirror as it only reflect very little light?

Question: In a typical mirror there is a thick layer of glass followed by a thin layer of silver  coated on one side of the mirror which reflects most of the light, what purpose do the glass have?
Answer: Silver sheet is expensive, and it deforms easily.
"Float glass" is quite smooth and flat, and smoothness & flatness are crucial for a good mirror. It is also very stiff and highly elastic, so leaning on it will not usually damage it. Simply painting the back of a sheet of glass makes a usable mirror: reflection off the front surface amounts to a few percent.  Not nearly as bright as silver, but cheap and optically good.
It turns out that it's easy to deposit an extremely thin layer of silver on glass.  The silver is very highly reflective, and conforms to the shape of the glass surface; so silver-coated glass makes an excellent mirror.
Unfortunately silver oxidizes and stains easily, so a silver-coated mirror could become junk in a few days.  The solution is to coat the silver onto the back of the glass, then cover the silver with a protective layer of paint.
The few-percent reflectivity of the front surface of the glass is sometimes a problem, because it produces an image that is at a slightly different distance than the primary image reflected from the silvered back surface.  The primary image is usually so bright that you won't notice the front surface image, but it's not very difficult to prove the front surface image is there.  For example, try reflecting a laser pointer at an angle off of a bathroom mirror, and look at the reflected spots on the wall.
Answer: The glass is there to protect the "silvered" (aluminium for a lot of mirrors) reflecting surface from corrosion and damage whilst being handled.
Such a mirror is called a back-silvered mirror and there will also be a protective coating of paint/lacquer on the back of the reflecting surface.
For mirrors of optical quality (manufactured to tolerances of a fraction of the wavelength of light) are usually front-silvered and so have to be handled with great care.
The potential distortion and absorption of light by a layer of glass is thus avoided in such mirrors.
Answer: First The glass substrate cutted and polished with special radius of curvature, then a thin layer of Al,Au or Ag is deposited on this substrate and form a mirror with specific focal length. So we can not have curved mirror only with thin metal layer, you need the substrate in deposition process in chamber.
Second, optical characteristics depend on  radius of curvature. And for a mirror with certain focal length you need a substrate that is robust and tight under pressure and stress and temperature changes. Because if these parameters channged, caused the materials change their dimensions and this leads to change radius  of curvature.
Most glasses have very small changes with stress, pressures and temperature changes, so we use them as optical substrates. (Specially  BK7)
Comment: Interesting I didn't know mirror is actually curved!
Comment: It is only curved if it's used, for example, as a telescope mirror.  I think you were asking about flat mirrors used, e.g., over your bathroom sink.


css3 text-shadow in IE9

Question: Is there an easy way to have css3 text-shadow's working in IE9?  At least a single text shadow would be great.  I guess ideally IE8 is supported as well.  I'm hoping there's a simple jquery plugin or .htc file which just looks at text-shadow css property of an element and implements it for IE9.
Answer: Yes, but not how you would imagine. According to caniuse (a very good resource) there is no support and no polyfill available for adding text-shadow support to IE9. However, IE has their own proprietary text shadow (detailed here).
Example implementation, taken from their website (works in IE5.5 through IE9):
p.shadow {
    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(color=#0000FF,direction=45);
}

For cross-browser compatibility and future-proofing of code, remember to also use the CSS3 standard text-shadow property (detailed here). This is especially important considering that IE10 has officially announced their intent to drop support for legacy dx filters. Going forward, IE10+ will only support the CSS3 standard text-shadow.
Comment: When you say filters won't work in IE10, does that mean they won't even work if I change the browser mode to IE9? Because none of these filters are working for me in IE10 with browser mode IE9. Should I just assume that they would work on a real IE9 browser?
Comment: @andrewtweber might make sense to verify this in browserstack.com -- but yeah, that sounds like IE10 engine dropped it completely.  In IE9, choosing IE7 mode also has bizzare quirks like that (i.e. ie7 doesn't like console.log() but ie9 handles it alright in ie7 mode)
Comment: I'm using IE11 to simulate older browsers. Is it worth mentioning that the function to render these filters is [deactivated](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/06/04/legacy-dx-filters-removed-from-ie10-release-preview.aspx) by default?
Answer: As IE9 does not support CSS3 text-shadow, I would just use the filter property for IE instead. Live example: http://jsfiddle.net/dmM2S/
text-shadow:1px 1px 1px red; /* CSS3 */

can be replaced with
filter: Shadow(Color=red, Direction=130, Strength=1); /* IE Proprietary Filter*/

You can get the results to be very similar.
Comment: filter: Shadow(Color=red, Direction=130, Strength=1); /* IE Proprietary Filter*/ makes it even worse than having no text-shadow at all.
Comment: @feklee: IE10 dropped support for filters in an effort to become more standards compliant: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/12/07/moving-to-standards-based-web-graphics-in-ie10.aspx. If you check the fiddle in IE10 you will see that only the CSS3 `text-shadow` works.
Comment: filter: glow(color=black, strength=1) seems to give a better effect
Comment: Be careful with specifying `filter: Shadow` and `text-shadow` at the same time, like in your [fiddle](http://jsfiddle.net/dmM2S/). After all, IE10 will support `text-shadow` and I assume that it also supports `filter: Shadow`. The result of applying both properties could be interesting.
Answer: Try CSS Generator.
You can choose values and see the results online. Then you get the code in the clipboard.
This is one example of generated code:
text-shadow: 1px 1px 2px #a8aaad;
filter: dropshadow(color=#a8aaad, offx=1, offy=1);

Answer: I was looking for a cross-browser text-stroke solution that works when overlaid on background images. think I have a solution for this that doesn't involve extra mark-up, js and works in IE7-9 (I haven't tested 6), and doesn't cause aliasing problems.
This is a combination of using CSS3 text-shadow, which has good support except IE (http://caniuse.com/#search=text-shadow), then using a combination of filters for IE.  CSS3 text-stroke support is poor at the moment.
IE Filters
The glow filter (http://www.impressivewebs.com/css3-text-shadow-ie/) looks terrible, so I didn't use that.
David Hewitt's answer involved adding dropshadow filters in a combination of directions. ClearType is then removed unfortunately so we end up with badly aliased text.
I then combined some of the elements suggested on useragentman with the dropshadow filters.
Putting it together
This example would be black text with a white stroke. I'm using conditional html classes by the way to target IE (http://paulirish.com/2008/conditional-stylesheets-vs-css-hacks-answer-neither/).
#myelement {
    color: #000000;
    text-shadow:
    -1px -1px 0 #ffffff,
    1px -1px 0 #ffffff,
    -1px 1px 0 #ffffff,
    1px 1px 0 #ffffff;
}

html.ie7 #myelement,
html.ie8 #myelement,
html.ie9 #myelement {
    background-color: white;
    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Chroma(color='white') progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=100) progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropshadow(color=#ffffff,offX=1,offY=1) progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropshadow(color=#ffffff,offX=-1,offY=1) progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropshadow(color=#ffffff,offX=1,offY=-1) progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropshadow(color=#ffffff,offX=-1,offY=-1);
    zoom: 1;
}

Comment: +1 This is a good approach because it prevents future IE versions (which may support text-shadow) from applying both text-shadow AND the filter to the same text.
Comment: @Moses: in fact, in this case it's unnecessary, since the version of IE that introduced `text-shadow` (IE10) was also the same version that dropped support for the old `filter` styles, so they can never clash. (however, for other styles it is necessary -- eg `transform` is supported in IE9, and can thus clash with `filter` styles doing the same thing, with messy results)
Comment: The best looking solution I've found! :)
Answer: I tried out the filters referenced above and strongly disliked the effect it created. I also didn't want to use any plugins since they'd slow down loading time for what seems like such a basic effect.
In my case I was looking for a text shadow with a 0px blur, which means the shadow is an exact replica of the text but just offset and behind. This effect can be easily recreated with jquery.

This will create an identical effect to the css3 text-shadow below.
    text-shadow: -3px 2px 0px rgba(0, 0, 0, 1.0);

here's a working example (see the large white text over the main banner image) http://www.cb.restaurantconnectinc.com/
Answer: The answer of crdunst is pretty neat and the best looking answer I've found but there's no explanation on how to use and the code is bigger than needed.
The only code you need:
#element {
    background-color: #cacbcf;
    text-shadow: 2px 2px 4px rgba(0,0,0, 0.5);
    filter: chroma(color=#cacbcf) progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropshadow(color=#60000000, offX=2, offY=2);
}

First you MUST specify a background-color - if your element should be transparent just copy the background-color of the parent or let it inherit. The color at the chroma-filter must match the background-color to fix those artifacts around the text (but here you must copy the color, you can't write inherit). Note that I haven't shortened the dropshadow-filter - it works but the shadows are then cut to the element dimensions (noticeable with big shadows; try to set the offsets to atleast 4).
TIP: If you want to use colors with transparency (alpha-channel) write in a #AARRGGBB notation, where AA stands for a hexadezimal value of the opacity - from 01 to FE, because FF and ironically also 00 means no transparency and is therefore useless.. ^^ Just go a little lower than in the rgba notation because the shadows aren't soft and the same alpha value would appear darker then. ;)
A nice snippet to convert the alpha value for IE (JavaScript, just paste into the console):
var number = 0.5; //alpha value from the rgba() notation
("0"+(Math.round(0.75 * number * 255).toString(16))).slice(-2);

ISSUES: The text/font behaves like an image after the shadow is applied; it gets pixelated and blurry after you zoom in... But that's IE's issue, not mine.

Live demo of the shadow here: http://jsfiddle.net/12khvfru/2/

css3 text-shadow in IE9


Banga Sauce Preservative

Question: Ripe and mature Palm fruits.  Boil soft and pound to get   paste,  remove some palm oil,  then filter to get banga Sauce. How  do I get a long shief life Preservative.?
Comment: Even if somebody on this site was to give you advice on how to can and preserve a commercial product, you should not trust that advice. This is a site of amateur and professional cooks and bakers, so while some might have professional competence on how to cook and serve food safely, commercial processing and preservation is a different area of knowledge, any advice on commercial preservation techniques you will have to double check with professionals that you know by name and can hold responsible.
Comment: Even though it is unlikely that somebody can recommend a "stir in and forget" preservative - knowing the exact recipe (the amount of oils, salt, sugars and water in a recipe are immensely important when it comes to shelf life, with or without synthetic preservatives added) and intended storage conditions will certainly help.
Comment: Banga Sauce without sugar or salt.  To be canned like Tin Tomatoes  or placed in Satchet to be kept iSn
Comment: Three quater of the oil content will be extracted. Just  a little quantity of Water to have it tick like tin Tomatoes.
Comment: If there is anyone on this site with commercial experience with strong (200 series E numbers) preservatives - I AM NOT - that person should be found and encouraged to write a canonical ....
Answer: If this is for a commercial product, talk to a distributor/maker of preservatives directly and discuss your exact product - be prepared for them mandating changes to the recipe. They will also know what your local laws (and the laws of any intended target market) allow or do not allow.
Consider consulting academic/professional literature on food preservation - but in the end, unless you are formally trained expert in these things, it is best to keep the responsibility with the food additive maker as much as possible.
If this is for home preservation, if no known good recipes for a shelf stable version exist, the effort needed to create one is not unlikely to be too high to be worth it - and mistakes when experimenting with chemical preservatives (benzoates, nitrates....) can yield harmful product that makes you or your family sick.
There is no "stir in enough poison to make bacteria dead and leave us alive" solution that works for all foods and storage conditions. Using a chemical preservative in the wrong way can result in a product that does not visibly spoil but turns poisonous (eg by botulism) because you killed everything that could stop it from doing so - or which is poisonous due to overdosing the preservative.
Comment: @OkoroosamudiamenI - there are very few sauces that will last two years outside refrigeration - I'm assuming opened, because for closed storage you can probably just can them, especially with commercial equipment. If you can think of any sauces that last like that, you might contact that company and ask what preservatives they use, or you might look at the ingredients list, and search for manufacturers of any named preservative.  You may or may not be able to use the same methods (if they depend on acidity, or sugar or salt levels), but they should be able to point you in the right direction.
Comment: Please it is for commercial purpose.  I will  greatly appreciate it if you connect me to makers of Preservative.  I really  want the Banga Sauce with Preservative that will not have poison or harm.  But can have a duration of about two years outside the refridgerator.

Banga Sauce Preservative


Is there any open source Java Library or java source code to simplify boolean expression

Question: Is there any open source Java Library or java source code to simplify Boolean expression like
<code>!((A.B+C).(!A+BC))
</code>
Where,
<code>! - represents NOT
+ - represents OR
. - represents AND
</code>
Your help would be greatly appreciated in this regard
Comment: possible duplicate of [Simplify boolean expression algorithm](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5311099/simplify-boolean-expression-algorithm)
Comment: See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5104207/simplification-of-boolean-expression-in-java and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/767437/tool-to-refactor-boolean-expressions
Comment: I wouldn't say that's a dupe because in this case the input material is not a valid boolean expression
Answer: No, I don't think so, but it should be pretty simple to write a parser for such a language using ANTLR (declarative) or JParsec (programmatic)
For ANTLR, use the First Order Logic Grammar as starting point.
For JParsec, the JParceC calculator tutorial gets close to what you need.
Answer: Smells like SQL?  You could trivialy translate the !,.,+ into NOT, AND, OR, filter out certain magic keywords, then pass them on to a traditional JDBC back-end.
"SELECT 1 WHERE " + expression
Otherwise, it sounds like you need a full logical AST+parser (antlr), since simply constructing a DOM representing the expression isn't going to be terribly useful (and consequently, there aren't that many tools that generally take an expression object-graph and apply generic axioms).. There are some HIGHLY specialized variants of this - lookup rule engines like drools.  But I'm guessing that isn't doing exactly what you want.
Answer: I am not aware of any API in java.
However, you can split your expression and build a predicates for each part.
You might be interested to take a look on this
Answer: First of all let me confirm if I get your question correctly - are you looking at ability to code the given expression in simplified manner?
If yes then you can try Xtend : http://eclipse.org/xtend/ and Xtext http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/
Xtend is a statically-typed programming language which compiles to comprehensible Java source code. Xtend is developed using Xtext.
Xtext is a framework for development of programming languages and domain specific languages.
Above info is not applicable if you are looking at algorithm to simply the given expression.
Hope the information is useful to you.
Comment: While Xtend is nice, I don't think this is an answer to the OP's question


copying oracle to sqlserver 2005 jdbc

Question: Is there any way of copying a database from oracle to sqlserver 2005? Thanks
Answer: You can migrate from Oracle to SQL Server with Microsoft's SQL Server Migration Assistant. It is available both to SQL Server 2005 and 2008.
If you have lots of (complicated) stored procedures and such, the migration might get a bit tedious. I have only experience with databases with simple procedures and could just rewrite them and do the data copy to empty tables in SQL Server with the import functionality using Oracle connector (usable from SQL Server if you have installed Oracle client tools to the SQL Server machine). This way I didn't even need to use the Migration Assistant tool.

copying oracle to sqlserver 2005 jdbc