replacing my old galvanized pipes with pex, what do i do with the ground wires

Question: so ive got galvanized water lines servicing my house, along with that 6 or 7 wires that are clamped to the pipes,im going to relace everything with pex, im pretty sure i cant just clamp the wires back on the pex, my plan was to install 2 new grounding rods and connect all of grounds to it, any advice please
Comment: It sounds like too many unneeded grounds.  On old houses you might need one ground wire close to where the water comes into the house.  Ground rods use one single ground wire from the panel without any splices.  Extra ground wires might not be a bad thing, but wondering why so many.  Was house upgraded to a grounded(three prong receptacles) system?
Comment: I wonder if a bunch of retrofit equipment was grounded back to the pipe. Have you traced them back?
Comment: Might have had a ham radio person in the house. I'd make a new hole for the PEX pipe and cut the iron pipe inside the house after the grounding clamp, leaving the iron pipe outside the house physically in place but not connected to the water supply.  It's still functional as a ground electrode.
Answer: There are two different types of grounding wires in current use:

Ground Rods/Ufer Ground

This is a single wire that goes directly from your main panel to either an Ufer Ground, which is a ground bar embedded in concrete when the building is built (preferred and required in many locations when a new building is built) or to one or two 8 foot long ground rods. If there are two ground rods then they are normally at least 6 feet apart. Only one ground rod is needed if it is tested, but the test is expensive because it requires special equipment. Since ground rods are inexpensive, the usual procedure, unless you have an Ufer ground or possibly a water pipe ground, is to use two ground rods and then no test is needed.

Water Pipe Ground

This used to be the standard, since metal (whether galvanized or copper) underground water pipe provides a very effective ground. However, with the increasing use of PEX and PVC plumbing, that is a problem. The big problem is not when you replace all of your metal plumbing with PEX - you know you have to take care of the grounding at that time. The problem is if, as is often the case, the ground wire is attached somewhere in the middle of the house and a section of pipe between that location and where the pipe enters the house is replaced with PEX or PVC pipe and now you have lost the grounding and don't even know it.
That being said, some jurisdictions still require a water pipe ground, but (a) it must be attached as close as possible to where the pipe enters the house (to avoid problems of later pipe replacement breaking the ground path), (b) it is usually in addition to at least one ground rod and (c) it doesn't apply if the supply pipe (from the meter to your house) is plastic.
What you really need to do is check with your local permitting department to find the current rules. In my state (Maryland) as of ~ 2 years ago (when I had a heavy-up) the rules varied by county. Some counties required ground rods only and didn't care about water pipes at all. Some counties required a water pipe ground if appropriate and one ground rod. And my electrician was enough concerned about the possibility of the inspector saying you need a second ground rod, despite having the water pipe ground as required by my county, that he was prepared to install a second ground rod at inspection time if requested.
As far as 6 or 7 wires, that seems a little unusual. Normally it is just one wire, which goes to the main panel. You might have additional wires if there was a previous heavy-up and the previous too-small wire wasn't removed. Or you might have additional wires if TV, phone or other things are grounded to the water pipe. The ideal setup is really to ground everything to the main panel, which is in turn wired (single wire, no splices) to the ground rods and/or entrance water pipe.


How to detect cookie stuffing attacks?

Question: So the question is how to detect cookie stuffing attacks and how to protect against them?
In case of image-based cookie stuffing I can detect that related resources are not loaded and therefore consider this GET request as well as sent cookie invalid.
But what about iframe-based cookie stuffing?
Comment: You require automation for this, and without business model it's hard to say anything concrete, but basically partner and the website validation and verification has to be employed, so the fake requests are detected also based on signal analysis as well on the global databases. Also your qualification criteria, limits, the time-limited and review should help as well. Basically to answer complex problem is easy is concrete scenario.
Comment: If you're running something like "NoScript" would it not work in this scenario as it's unlikely that you've whitelisted the webite and so the code in the iframe can't run?
Comment: @MarkHillick how does NoScript protect you against HTTP cookies?
Comment: @AndrewSmith my business model is similar to Amazon - I have partners which produce some traffic to my website and in case of user's purchase I pay them money. So, any ideas how to protect it?
Comment: http://www.digeratimarketing.co.uk/images/iframes.jpg ;-) I am checking it actually I am looking into partner websites too heh
Comment: @curiousguy I saw a presentation a few years ago from Samy Kamkhar where Javascript was used to insert the cookie, NoScript can prevent some of these techniques (not everything obviously and not something delivered by a http response header). Rook answered much more eloquently than me below!
Answer: There is no one solution to this complex problem.
A client can enable the Do Not Track http header element.  But there is no guarentee that the server will respect it.  The PrivacySuite addon goes one step further to actively block tracking gadgets.  There are *MANY* other anti-tracking addons for firefox as well as some for Chrome and I have no idea which one(s) are the best.
Ad-block Plus will keep your browser from loading many of these tracking gadgets, and even if such a gadget where to be loaded it will block the targeted ads.  This solves the symptom but not the root of the problem.
NoScript might help,  but this doesn't stop a server from setting a cookie via the http cookie header.  It does however prevent some evercookie techniques.
Relivent TED talk:  Tracking the Trackers
Also its wroth while to learn about Google's "Remarketing" feature for advertizes.
Comment: Nice answer....

How to detect cookie stuffing attacks?


Views vs. inline subqueries SQL Server 2005/2008

Question: In certain areas in my application I need data from several tables in the database (I have  an application, the application has many attributes, each attribute has several definitions, and each definition has a value). I need the data from all these tables for an application. Should I use a view (one that would be rather large) or subqueries for selecting the records? In the case of subqueries is the optimizer able to work efficiently? I'm also interested if caching will work for subqueries.
Answer: Views are typically expanded in place into subqueries, unless you explicitly mark the views as persisted by dropping a clustered index on them.
Answer: This is an 'It depends' question.  A view might help to make the code more maintainable but complex selection predicates might confuse the optimiser.
Another option is a stored procedure that returns a record set.  If you reuse a subquery several times you may get some mileage from splitting up the query, selecting the subquery into a temporary table and combining the parts in a later step.
Without a more specific description of the problem it's hard to really give a meaningful answer.


What Pokemon can you hatch from the gift eggs?

Question: With the recent addition of friends and giving items, also a new egg has been introduced: a 7km egg hatching new Pokemon (source). Who are these Pokemon exactly?
Answer: There are 4 different Alolan forms of Pokemon found right now that will hatch. All of them evolve one state further. These are:

Vulpix,
Meowth
Sandshrew
Grimer

Below is a picture of the different forms and evolutions

(I do not know the source of the picture, it was shared in our local telegram group)
Also, a couiple of days later, the Alolan Rattata form is also hatchable (apart from catchable in the wild).
Comment: Any idea about the distribution? I got about 20 sandshrew, 20 meowth, 2 grimer so far but not a single vulpix. Is vulpix more rare, am I doing something wrong, or am I just extremely unlucky?
Comment: @hertitu your findings are correct. Vulpix is by far the rarest, followed by grimer. I don't know about exact numbers. Unfortunately, Vulpix becomes rarer when new hatches will be added in the future


How do neutron stars burn? Is it decay or fusion or something else?

Question:
What makes a neutron star burn, and what kind of fusion/decay is happening there?
What is supposed to happen with a neutron star in the long run? What if it cools, then what do the degenerated matter looks like after it cools? Will
the gravitational equilibrium be ruined after some burn time? How does it explode if it can explode at all?
Comment: It doesn't burn.
Answer: With normal stars, the "burning", that is to say the fusion reaction, produces a pressure that counteracts the pull of gravity to keep the star from collapsing.  But with neutron stars, the protons and electrons in the star have combined into neutrons*.
The Pauli exclusion principle causes the neutrons to resist further compression.  That is, the neutrons, being identical fermions, can't all be put in the same state.  So to get them closer and closer together you have to go into higher and higher energy states.  Thus, there is an energy cost in compressing the star, and this results in a sort of pressure called "degeneracy pressure".
It is this pressure that stabilizes the neutron star against collapse (assuming it doesn't have enough mass to overcome this pressure and become a black hole).  So they don't need to "burn" to maintain their stability, and so far as I know, they don't.  At least not in the sense of a normal star where you have atomic nuclei fusing.

Note: Neutrons aren't made of protons and elections, but this transformation can happen by means of the weak nuclear force.  Normally neutrons aren't stable outside of the atomic nucleus -- instead the transformation would go the other way and a free neutron would decay into a proton and electron (there's also an anti-electron neutrino produced).  But under the intense gravitational pressure in a collapsed star, the neutrons are stable, which allows us to end up with neutron stars.

Edit: This is of course a very approximate picture.  The link posted by Thomas Thernel has much more detail.  One good point to emphasize is that, as you might expect, the density is greater at the center of a neutron star than at its outskirts, so the star won't really be all neutrons... you'll have more neutrons closer to the center, and more ordinary atomic nuclei further out.  Apparently some interesting sorts of structures can form from the remaining nuclei, even at the point where it's 90-95% neutrons.
Comment: Neutron degeneracy pressure can only be a fraction of the pressure required to support neutron stars. The Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit for ideal neutron degeneracy pressure in GR is 0.7 solar masses. All neutron stars with measured masses are more massive than this.
Answer: Tim Goodman's answer is right, and I just want to add a couple of things:
Though Neutron stars do not "burn" anything, for the most part, they DO shine, thanks to the fact that they are the remnants of the core of a star, and thus, when they are born, are roughly as hot as the center of a star.  They will thus shine in the same way that a hot poker shines when you stick it in a fire.
Second, neutron stars have a maximum possible mass, dictated by the rules of general relativity and the mass of a neutron.  If a neutron star has extra mass beyond this dumped on its surface (say, because it is orbiting an ordinary star, and that star accretes mass onto the NS), they can explode in a violent way.  To my understanding, this has not been observed, but it has been known to happen in White Dwarfs, which are held together by a very similar principle to neutron stars.  The end result is a supernova, and then a black hole.
Comment: Yes, that's right.  They just cool off and reach a final, static state at the same temperature as the space around them.
Comment: Thank you. I assume they stay cold forever, when nothing happens
Answer: The correct comparison for a neutron star is with a cinder spat out of the fire. The cinder will glow brightly for a short period of time and then fade rapidly. Such is the fate of neutron stars, because although born at $10^{11}$ K in the heart of a supernova, they have an extremely low heat capacity.
Contrary to common belief - neutron stars are not supported by neutron degeneracy pressure. Yes, this contributes, but a star supported solely by NDP would be limited to masses less than 0.7$M_{\odot}$. All known neutron stars are more massive than this. It is the strong nuclear force in incompressible, asymmetric nuclear matter that provides most of the support.
Neutron degeneracy is though largely responsible for the thermal properties of neutrons stars. Degenerate matter has an extremely low heat capacity, because there are no empty energy states for fermions to cool and fall into. That means that even though they are born with extremely high temperatures, they will be nearly isothermal (degenerate fermions also have long mean free paths and high thermal conductivity), with very little thermal energy.
Neutrino processes (URCA process, followed by modified URCA process - see What allows the modified Urca process to work at lower density than direct Urca in neutron star cooling?) can effectively and rapidly cool the star on timescales of initially seconds and later tens or hundreds of years. After about ten thousand years cooling from the surface by photons dominates.
As the neutron star cools, what distinguishes it from a normal star, is that its internal pressure is independent of temperature. That means that if it is in equlibrium once it cools to say a billion degrees (maybe after a year), it is already "effectively cold" and further cooling will not change its radius and density.
If we assume that most supernvovae from stars with initial masses between 8 and 20 solar masses produce neutron stars then there are probably about a billion of these dead cinders floating around in our Galaxy.
Comment: +1 For mentioning that neutron stars are not (solely) supported by neutron degeneracy pressure but (largely) by strong nucleon interactions.
Comment: I think this was the best of the answers.  One pet peeve though-- why do  so many people treat it as important that the pressure doesn't depend on temperature for fully degenerate matter?  That's not actually important *at all*, what matters is that the pressure is very high when the temperature is low (even zero).  But that has nothing to do with the slope, dP/dT, at T=0, it has to do with P at T=0, which is something completely different.  The slope could be steep there, and as long as P was high when T was low, it would still have the same effect.
Comment: @KenG I take your point that the change in pressure simply depends on the change of internal kinetic energy. However, it is much easier to explain why the size of a neutron star does not change even though it changes its temperature by orders of magnitude, by simply saying that $P \neq f(T)$. If $P$ was a function of $T$ that *would* affect the thermal history of a neutron star, since the release of GPE would keep it warm.
Comment: But that's just it, it's actually easy to explain that by simply saying that P = f(T), where f(T) is a *function that has a large value at T=0*.   That's all that matters.  The common language  "P is independent of T" is not clear enough.  If it is taken as a statement about dP/dT being 0, it  is of no importance, and not even true in white dwarfs.   It's much better to just say what P(0) is.  The other language is common, yet puzzling, since it sounds like it is claiming that any function that takes a nonzero value at zero argument is therefore independent of that argument.
Answer: I think this is a good almost-popular introduction to neutron stars, the processes expected to occur therein and their evolution.
Comment: Thanks for the link.  I had a rough idea of how neutron stars work (as given in my answer), but this business of "spaghetti" and "lasagna" like structures is really fascinating.
Answer: Neutron stars can actually "burn" and leave quark matter as an ash, according to some hypotheses.
The  Bodmer-Witten hypothesis states that quark matter made of up, down, and strange quarks might be the most stable form of matter. If one could find a way to melt neutrons and protons into stable, strange quark matter, this could unleash a very exothermic event, which can be described as a combustion process. Some argue that the core of a neutron star, due to its high density, might be an ideal place for this phase transition to happen. So in short, the neutron star could "burn" into a quark star and produce an explosion. The Bodmer-Witten hypothesis is a bit controversial but has very interesting astrophysical imiclations.
This is the theoretical basis of the quark nova model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark-nova
Comment: +1 Just for curiosity, the "nuclear" version of the BW hypothesis is this one: https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/803817/226902


Event Based == Asynchronous?

Question: Is "event based" the same as "asynchronous"?
Answer: No it doesn't imply that the events are asynchronous.
In a event driven single threaded system, you can fire events, but they are all processed serially. They may yield as part of their processing, but nothing happens concurrently, if they yield, they stop processing and have to wait until they are messaged again to start processing again.
Examples of this are Swing ( Java ), Twisted ( Python ), Node.js ( JavaScript ), EventMachine ( Ruby )
All of these examples are event driven message loops, but they are all single threaded, every event will block all subsequent events on that same thread.
In programming, asynchronous events are those occurring independently of the main program flow. Asynchronous actions are actions executed in a non-blocking scheme, allowing the main program flow to continue processing.
So just because something is event driven doesn't make it asynchronous, and just because something is asynchronous doesn't make it event driven either; much less concurrent.
Comment: @nickb from the Node.js front page "Node is similar in design to and influenced by systems like Ruby's Event Machine or Python's Twisted." and "But what about multiple-processor concurrency? Aren't threads necessary to scale programs to multi-core computers? You can start new processes via child_process.fork() these other processes will be scheduled in parallel."
Comment: I thought Node.js is in fact asynchronous.
Answer: They are essentially orthogonal concepts.
"event driven" essentially means that the code associated to certain function calls is bind at runtime (and can change through the execution).
Who "fires" the event doesn't know what will handle it, and who handle the event is defined to respond to the event through an association defined while the program executes. Typically though function pointers, reference or pointers to object carrying virtual methods etc.)
"asynchronous" means that a program flow doesn't have to wait for a call to be executed before proceed over (mostly implemented with a call that returns immediately after delegating the execution to another thread or process)
Not all events are asynchronous (think to the windows SendMessage, respect to PostMessage), and not all asynchronous calls are necessary implemented by "events" (although the use of the event mechanism is quite common to implement asynchronous calls)
Answer: One meaning of asynchronous is that at a point where you emit an computation, you don't wait for an answer, but you get the answer later. The answer comes in orthogonal to you normal control flow.
One way the answer comes in is using events: They happen spontaneously in this case, without your code triggering them. In a handler you may process the result.
Whereas the computation and answer is connected by the point in control flow for synchronous mode, you have to do the connection yourself in asynchronous mode. For example by use of a sequence number or something.

Event Based == Asynchronous?


How can I use the public buses in Abu Dhabi from/to the airport and inside the city?

Question: How can I use the public buses in Abu Dhabi from/to the airport and inside the city?
Answer: It turns out buses are a great option to get around in Abu Dhabi: efficient, easy to use, and very inexpensive.

You need a Hafilat card. One per passenger.
You can buy the card directly at the airport. If you arrive in Terminal A (new terminal), take a right and follow the signs to "bus tickets".
There is a counter with a clerk where you can use a credit card. There is also a machine (also with a helpful clerk) that only takes cash. However, there is an ATM right there as well.
The card has a fee of 10 AED (USD $2.7) and comes in increments of 10 AEDs. Example: if you take a card for 30 AED you have 20 AED to spend.
Rides from/to the city cost 4 AED, rides inside the city are around 2.5 AED. We chose a 30 AED card for a 3-day stay, which was plenty.
Buses from the airport are lines A1 and A2. They stop directly outside terminal A. They go every half hour, pretty much all day and night.
The best app for exact schedules and tracking stops is Google Maps.
The airport buses have a large luggage compartment under the bus. It's automatically opened and closed at every stop. When the bus shows up, just throw your bags in there and hop on.
Tap your card when entering the bus. There are card readers at every door. You also tap your card when you exit the bus as well.
The buses have TV screens that show mostly advertising but occasionally the next stops in both English and Arabic. You can also track progress easily on Google Maps.
When you are ready to exit, tap your card, get off, grab your bag and you are done.
Bus stations are well marked with the bus numbers on it. The buses themselves also have the numbers displayed. For example, bus 94 goes from/to the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

In our experience, buses were very efficient, clean, safe, easy to use and much cheaper than ride share (which also works fine in Abu Dhabi).


Documentation or evaluation instruments used for accreditation of CS programs under The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)?

Question: I was wondering if there is a repository about the documentation or evaluation instruments that are used for accreditation of CS programs under The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)? I mean it could be real data or examples on how an accreditation process is made. I know that there is some material on the ABET website, but it is very general.
Any help?
Answer: In my experience (Aerospace Engineering), the documentation provided to ABET during the accreditation process was stored in large binders, copies of which ended up on bookshelves in various conference rooms around the department. If you are able to visit an accredited department, you might be able to see them in person there. The CS department at my university is/was not ABET accredited, though the ECE department is. I don't know how either of those department treats their accreditation materials, but the ASE department left them lying all over for anyone off the street to see (more or less).
Comment: Really??? We kept ours in a locked room. Definitely wouldn't give access to just anyone.
Comment: @ff524, it might only have been in the conference room just off the chair's office, in which case, it might as well have been locked. Nevertheless, I saw the binders frequently, and I was not stopped when I opened one and flipped through it (as a student). What's so secret?


How to include instrumental uncertainty in the uncertainty of a measurement?

Question: Imagine to calculate the period of a pendulum using a software which takes his data from a cronometer that has an inerent instrumental uncertainty of 0.0025 s. In another discussion on this topic I found that the total uncertainty should be the sum in quadrature of both the instrumental and statistical error, so I would be tempted to say that the total uncertainty on my best value is:
$\sqrt{\sigma_{statistical}^2+\sigma_{instrumental}^2} = \sqrt{\sigma_{statistical}^2 + 0.0025^2}$ and in this case all of my measurements would be perfectly compatible with each other.
Despite this our professor once told us that the instrumental uncertainty should be divided by $\sqrt{12}$ and in this case our formula becomes $\sqrt{\sigma_{statistical}^2 + 0.0007^2}$. If I do this the means of different sets of measurements of the same period become pretty incompatible. Should I consider the first or the second formula? The first is more compatible with data, instead the second one should be mathematically more correct.
Comment: I think your prof means quantisation error, which gives that sqrt(12) factor. There are many different types of errors and quantisation error is not like the rest. dont just call it instrumental uncertainty.
Comment: The factor "1/12" is used, if the uncertainty is described by a uniform distribution, see the variance on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_uniform_distribution. Note that in the nominator we actually have to use the width $b-a$.
Answer: It depends on how "inherent instrumental uncertainty" is defined. If the chronometer counts "ticks" of duration $r$, and has no other source of error but this counting process, the maximum error is $r/2$. But a common measure of statistical error isn't the maximum, but the the variance, $\sigma^2$. That's  $r^2/12$ for a perfect digitizer. That's what you add to other estimated variances to estimate the total variance.


Why do all arguments for and against a creator automatically assume a creator pre-existing the universe?

Question: Surely an omnipotent being could travel back in time and create the circumstances leading to His creation. This would solve the problem of endless regression.
Is it really altogether impossible that the eventual conclusion of evolution is the creation of an omnipotent, eternal, all-knowing being?
Comment: Ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing can come out of nothing. Aristotle did have some  considerations that led to this catchphrase.
Comment: Why would an omnipotent being be beholden to such trivialities as time? Most theologians do not assume that God predates the universe temporally, eternal means timeless, not everlasting. Teilhard de Chardin argued that universe evolves towards the higher state of Omega Point, but not in the sense of creating the creator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point
Comment: Btw, a solution not altering the concept of God as *eternal* has been provided by the Kabbalah (the principles of *en sof* and *zimzum*) as well as Spinoza. Eternal would mean exactly not coming into being at a certain time, but being all time at once and therefore out of what we call time (especially not time traveling and still being in one particular time), as Conifold said.
Comment: @Confold, why not? What is wrong with the idea of a universe evolving into a creator of sorts? All living beings create offspring. Perhaps the universe is part of the life cycle of a creator. Please note, I'm not saying it is. I'm merely seeking definitive proof to the contrary. Anyway, thanks for your comments.
Comment: Time travel in the form you describe faces inconsistency problems, assuming your creator has free will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_paradox Even that aside, a being subject to time may well be very powerful, but it can hardly be called omnipotent, even if omnipotence is restricted by logical consistency.
Comment: In Vedanta, Hinduism, there is endless regression. There have been an infinite number of universes in the past and there will be an infinite number in the future; these are called kalpas, or cycles. At the beginning of each cycle the first being projected out of Brahman is the creator god - Brahma, who creates all the living beings and is the ruler of the cycle. Brahma is not an eternal 'god', he is simply a soul who has attained the office of Brahma for that particular cycle.
Comment: @ZaneScheepers - The explanation of your query involves "self creation."  Such that it makes the question invalid.  Self creation is not only illogical, and not worthy of   discussion, but impossible physically, and unworthy of research.  THE UNIVERSE CREATING  A CREATOR?  Do children create their parents?  Do we even need to ask?
Comment: Good question! I hope someone, somewhere is taking notes. I'm not.
Answer: Because creating something is "causing" it to exist. If God is the creator of the universe, then he is the cause of the universe's existence. But a cause must always exist before its effect. Therefore God must exist before the universe if he is the cause of the universe.
The issue with the idea of the universe "evolving" a deity isn't that such a thing looks metaphysically impossible. But rather that whatever that deity might be, it couldn't be the creator of the universe, but rather than opposite.
Comment: the water on the ground on tuesday didn't cause the rain to fall on monday.
Comment: Lol that's my point. Why not?
Comment: because a cause can't precede it's effect. When you see the rain make the ground wet, you don't think the water on the ground caused the rain to fall, right?
Comment: But it does. Water evaporates which results in rain.
Comment: shane, [time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time) **appears** to be causal and [one-directional](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time) to **us**.  but it might not be, and if it is not, we might not know the difference.  most physicists who accept the [Big Bang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang) believe that not only space and "stuff" was brought into existance 13.8 billion years ago, but that also *time*.  i.e. there **was no** *before* the Big Bang.
Comment: Thanks Robert. Couldn't have said it better myself. Our perception of time is one-directional, but there is no evidence that time can't move both ways.
Comment: @Zane - Time machines moving backwards are the stuff of Science Fiction.  But science progresses according to known evidence.  There "is no "evidence" that time moves in both directions" and that is what reasonable scientists go by---not "non-evidence." Which brings the discussion back to the empirical necessity of a Cause of the physical universe by a Spirit Being:  the Law of Causation being a prerequisite to explain existence.
Answer: It appears that the debate on God is rooted in theistic definitions of words. To have implicit belief in God, the language we speak has to be theistic; theism appears to dictate diction. theism itself appears to be a linguistical phenomena; atheists trying to disprove God fall into the trap of believing that something that doesn't exist needs to be disproven. There is a theist privilege in language and logic as well. That's why weak atheism appears to be an accommodationist view to keep theism in the privileged position of power.
Logic dictates semantics; logic bred theistic epistemic ideas into head just implicitly affirming God's existence.  this appears to create theistic notions in our syntaxes. Our children are linguistically and logically bred to have theistic notions without ever having to explicitly state a theist position.
Atheists are just people unlearning epistemology of God. Their language, their logic has yet to unlearn semantic theism. When they debate, they accidentally affirm God's existence just making presuppositional theistic statements.
It's revealing to know that logic has theistic suppositions; our lenses that reason are theistic lenses; logic deduces God's existence. intersectionality speaking, logic and theism have been bedfellows. Logicians are predominantly theistic; it appears logical theism has developed quite nicely that atheists are havin, to literally change our logical axioms such as God, as if God is an axiom, as if axiom is God.
Answer: it might be that God transcends time just as God transcends space, "stuff", and everything else that is part of creation.  perhaps God looks at spacetime in much the same way that physics describes it (where time is just another dimension or axis), but none of us, in our temporal and 3-dimensional existence, can visualize.
i wouldn't ascribe too many concrete attributes or properties to God.
Answer: automatically assume the existence of a creator  It is because the universe is a logical one. This is one of the self-evident truths all agree upon. (For example consider the Law of Non-contradiction)  And logically, a Creation cannot exist without a Creator...Cause...Source...Designer. This is a necessary axiom as a prerequisite to the discussion.  The Law of Causation applies here (not the theory, not the hypothesis, not the opinion, but the Law). Nihil sine Deo
Answer: The (attempted) maximal concept of a divine being involves this being "seeing all time at once," at eternity. Geometrically, this can be interpreted as a deity's temporal dimensionality being greater than that of linear (one-dimensional) time. A being in a two-dimensional time could perceive whole timelines at once, so that fits the Boethian thesis, here.
But another attempt to maximize this concept, then, would go a deity existing in some drastically higher-dimensional time. How drastic is this maximum? Mathematically, and for the relevant mathematician (who more or less initiated this discourse in its main sequence), the option of splitting infinity into relative and absolute forms and assimilating the divine nature to the scale of mathematical terms like ORD or V, is given, so here, for example, we would be talking about something like V-dimensional spacetime.
The upshot of all this conceptualization, modulo your question, is that time travel would be a weaker solution to the transcreation problem than what the divine nature is inherently, absolutely capable of. The maximal deity, over the picture of "infinite-dimensional spacetime" (actually, then infinite dimensionality over any metaphysically substantial "grid"), doesn't need to travel to one edge of a given temporal line segment, but can comprehend both edges simultaneously, and far more besides, "forever and ever, amen."
However, consider the Platonic demiurge. If the universe has a world-soul to its name, if the universe on a total level somehow exists as a living entity/force/???, and if all life is evolving "below," what is to stop the ur-lifeform from evolving, too? Now, we might imagine, then, a Form of the Good in place of a "properly" monotheistic deity, and the Form of the Good is not self-created (or created at all; indeed, one might think that this Form is the one of Creation (as a power) itself, after all). But the demiurge could be left to its own devices in such a way that the world-soul transforms into the demiurge "at the end of time" (at the completed synthesis of a mere temporal line segment, actually), whereupon the demiurge cycles back to the beginning of the segment and does not well-found but cofounds the world-soul through which it will one day truly come to exist. Or, then, some creation-relations can be read off theories of grounding and/or founding functions (in set/proof theory, as well as elsewhere).
A mordant example of your theme is, incidentally, a major plot point in a certain unfinished series of weird novels about a girl who saves an ambiguously Satanic cat. The cat is somehow involved in a plan by sentient antistars(???) in the insanely far future, a group of religious-seeming entities who send a malevolent, Hell-like force back to the Big Bang to reprogram the universe so that heat death doesn't occur. (This entity, the Versal Apex Predator (somehow the story actually involves the multiverse, and the absolute higher-order multiverse of multiverses known just as "the Verse"), is outright equated with Evil with a capital "E" and Hell with a capital "H.") But for whatever, on its way to the foundations of the world, it seems to intersect the cat, in part because the cat was also sent by an opposing faction to do... something...? We never quite find out what is going on, and we just barely read about how much is really at stake (if I remember correctly, one of the books, 4 or 5 I think, has an epigraph that says something like "you don't know what's at stake"). But so basically, an Antigod in a narrative setting where there is supposedly no positive God, however; and this Antigod goes back in time, to the beginning of time, to alter the fundamentals of future reality. But so as to create itself? Again, we don't know, or at least I don't (there were intended to be 27 books in the series, but the author left off at 5) because we don't know what the Versal Apex Predator was actually going to have to do to reprogram the Big Bang. The "ritual" of its future creation was effected by the antistars (again, I am assuming that this description matches what the author said these future time travelers were, and it seemed to me that when he talked about them being stars, he was being partly literal; and so their enemies became antistars instead), who sacrificed a trillion positive stars (or something) to generate the portal though which the Versal Apex Predator would go back in time. Why does the Apex evil not reach the beginning of time "automatically"? Arguably (very arguably), some kind of tachyon-theoretic explanation could have been intended by the author, in the sense that when Hell incarnate starts time-traveling into the past, it is not a jump to some location whereafter (more or less immediately, when the "portal collapses") the traveler resumes forward temporal orientation, but instead the Antigod is traveling backwards in time through and through, like tachyons (or, then, as tachyons, I guess), so it will take it however many eons to reach the Big Bang as there were eons from the Big Bang until the heat death so anathema to the antistars.
In preemptive counterpoint, City at the End of Time plays out with a future transpowerful evil force devouring the universe (or something), but there's a plan by one of the protagonists to reboot the cosmos. This guy doesn't create himself, as far as I know, though multiversal factors are reportedly involved (I didn't pick up much of those on my readthroughs of the book, but to be honest a lot of the prose just baffled me).
At any rate, quite a few "stories" have been advanced that play off this theme of self-defining powers operating on the metaphysical, and physical, nexus of the setting. Your question, and the hypothesis underlying it, seems to be a reasonable course of thinking, at least to the extent that the examples given seem reasonable. Overall, I would say that given an absolute context, of ORD-dimensional agency say, it seems unnecessary to burden a maximal creatrix with time-travel problems, though.


Are there any good .Net libraries for building arbitrary sql commands? Not relational data

Question: I am looking for some library that takes the TextWriter approach to writing SQL commands (much like there is the HtmlTextWriter in .Net for writing html).  I am NOT writing CRUD-type commands for relational data, I am writing arbitrary SQL (bulk inserts, table creation, creating backups, etc).  Any suggestions are appreciated.
Answer: I'm not aware of any. I've thought about this myself in the past and considered writing one, but decided against it, because I don't think it really offers much value over and above just writing a plain SQL string. The drawback is, obviously, that it's harder to read the code and figure out what SQL is being constructed.
XML and HTML have much deeper levels of nesting than (typical) SQL queries. They also have a much more regular structure. That's why it makes sense to have a class to keep track of that structure. Doing the same in SQL would probably complicate the code more than it would simplify it.
Comment: Well put.  I think you're right about a library complicating SQL more than helping you write it.
Answer: If your using SQL server, have a look at RedGate software as they have a range of tools that help you manage SQL server databases.  I use the SSMS Addins that help you write SQL Statements then format them in a consistent way. It provides intellisense to make it faster to write SQL.  They also have a whole range of other great productivity tools for Microsoft SQL Server.
Alternatively Linq might be a alternative as well as it created a good cross over between SQL and .net programming.
Answer: Check this out: CodeSmith.  I wouldn't say that this is the best out there, but those who have used it (not myself personally) have been very positive about it:
http://www.codesmithtools.com/
Comment: Cool suggestion, I will look into using it.
Answer: I'm afraid that writing arbitrary SQL (bulk inserts, table creation, creating backups, etc) depends heavily on the Db and the tools that it provides.
For example, creating backups use a syntax totally arbitrary and have nothing to do with the table creation syntax.
I'm not sure what are you trying to find, but I think that T-SQL (if you are using MS SQL server) is what you need.


How to send XML data via HTTP POST with Android

Question: i am developing an Android client to do the following HTTPRequest and read the response. i created the back end and tested with a web service tester tool. this snippet was taken by that tool. since Android has limited support for SOAP i am looking for a way of doing this with HTTP POST. can anybody tell me a way to do this.
<code>POST /demo/internalsoapgateway HTTP/1.1
Host: myIP:PORT
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8
InteractiveMode: false
Authorization: Basic aWZzYXBwOmlmc2FwcA==
Accept-Language: en-US
SOAPAction: urn:soap_access_provider:BrowseCountry:QueryTrnCountry
User-Agent: Java/1.5.0_11
Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 381

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
    <soap:Body>
        <TRN_COUNTRY_QUERY xmlns="urn:ifsworld-com:schemas:browse_country_query_trn_country_request" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

        </TRN_COUNTRY_QUERY>

 </soap:Body>

</soap:Envelope>
</code>
Thank You !!
Answer: See this question: Sending pictures to a web server


Force a window to open on the monitor it was launched from

Question: Setup:

3 Monitors
DisplayFusion for the extra task bars on secondary / tertiary monitors
Win7

Problem:
On my my main monitor (Monitor 1) with the authentic Windows task bar, I have a visual studio Solution file pinned. On my secondary monitor (Monitor 2) I have a different Solution file pinned to the DF task bar. When I launch either file, Visual Studio launches on Monitor 1.
What I would like to happen:
Have files / applications will be launched on their respective monitors.
What I've tried:
Display Fusion has a "Window Location" tool to configure things like this... Except it's on an application basis, not individual files. So I can only tell it to open VS on a given monitor, rather than forcing file X on Monitor 1 and file Y on Monitor 2. I've also dug through the Advanced Settings and cannot find anything related, nor can I seem to find other SU questions about this. Googling tends to return stuff like "Make Excel open multiple work books in different windows instead of tabs" and things like that.
EDIT I should also note that DF's tool to configure shortcuts pinned to non-primary task bars does have a "Force to this monitor" field... But again this is on an application level and not individual files.
Comment: There are several tools that do this.  Which of those tools have you ruled out?
Comment: I have not been able to find any that do this. As I said, trying to google for a solution has been unhelpful. Perhaps poor google skills. Could you share the names of some tools...?
Answer: You can use *.* in a Window Location rule to make it work for all applications. Then just set it to "Current Monitor," and "All Windows." That will cause any new window to open on the monitor that the mouse cursor is currently on.


transaction costs for day trading options

Question: I want to day trade SPY options by buying at the open and closing the position later in the day,  but I need to know approximately how far into the money the contract will have to be for me to break even on the two trades.  In other words, how much it will cost to buy at the open and sell back later in the day.  Presumably this depends on what broker I would be using and how many contracts I'm trading, but any specific examples and/or broker recommendations would be appreciated.
Comment: Have you looked at bid ask spreads for options in the real world? They are pretty big and I doubt a day trading strategy would survive such large transactions costs.
Answer: Yes, your problem is that you have your primary transaction costs for making the trade then you have to pay your taxes to the market makers through the bid-ask spread. I highly doubt your strategy will work. Another thing is that on the open and the close for options, typically market makers will not post quotes (or the spread will increase) because volatility increases at these times. As such the bid-ask spread can widen significantly thus hurting your trading strategy even more. However there's a mathematical way to test if it's feasible.
One thing you could do is get a hold of the historical bid-ask on options then calculate the daily drift of the S&P500. If the drift is bigger than the average bid-ask spread then your strategy may be feasible. I'll tell you right now it's probably not - a weekly or monthly strategy however may be viable.
A better strategy you could try would be purchasing call options on companies that have recently crashed in price. Obviously you'll have to do research on the company to see if the crash is warranted. This strategy was employed by Cornwall Capital (one of the funds from the movie the Big Short) which actively sought underpriced options. One of their biggest successes was buying calls on Capital One after it crashed. Anyways do some research into that strategy and don't use Black-Scholes as a proxy for valuing options if you're going to try it.


What key should I transpose Db major to preserve the original feeling?

Question: I'm transposing a piece in Db major for a group of students I'm tutoring. However, they're not ready to play 5 flats just yet. I'm not the best at music theory; does anyone have any suggestions for what key I should transpose that would sound similar to the original key?
Comment: From the tags seems to be piano.
Answer: C or D I suppose.   But, particularly if this is on piano, it might actually be HARDER to play in a different key.  The 'all the black notes' keys can fall very nicely under the fingers, just as well as an 'all the white notes' one.  Self-taught pianists often 'busk' in G♭ and D♭ majors.   Maybe you're more scared of D♭ major than the students would be!
Answer: What instruments? C major is close and has the simplest key signature. D major is also close, and is easy for beginners on stringed instruments because there'll be plenty of opportunities to play notes on open strings (G, D, A, E).
Comment: One tag is 'piano'.
Answer: 'To preserve the original feeling' - any key. As, on piano, all notes are part of 12tet, and to most people, a transposed piece will sound the same in any key. Most will not include those with absolute pitch, or those who would be aware that it's been transposed by something like half an octave.
My suggestion would be to transpose to key D major. In fact, were there no accidentals in the sheet music, they could ignore all the flats, and pretend there were two sharps there instead.
If they're not ready for two sharps, an obvious new key would be C major - which even to seasoned musicians, may well not be obvious that the key had been changed anyway.
Comment: It's waaay too early to accept any answer, let alone this one! And what are you tutoring? 'Not the best at music theory' sound somewhat risky!


Why is there a 2" step down into my bathroom?

Question: Why is there a 2 inch step down into my 1931 bathroom?  The bathroom floor is 2 inches below the floor just outside the bathroom door.  It is the original floor in the bathroom as well as the floor outside the bathroom.
Comment: Wild guess - It is so that if there is a leak or spill in the bathroom it stays in the bathroom. You effectively have a semi-wet room where the room itself is a 2" overflow pan. Is there a floor drain? What is the floor material in the bathroom and the adjoining hallway? Any pics?
Comment: This may be one of those questions that the answer is simply "who knows? You'd have to ask the person that built it." 70+ year old houses have plenty of idiosyncrasies :) (one theory: the rest of the floors in your second floor were reinforced at some time with additional subfloors...the bath was not as they wanted to leave the original tile exposed.)
Comment: What type of foundation?  What area is the house in?
Comment: @Freiheit Or...(awaiting input from questioner about floor materials) it was framed for a "mud-bed" tile install and then floored with something else.
Comment: Our house is in Northern/Central NJ.  I don't know type of foundation (of the bathroom floor)  Our house foundation is cement.  There is no floor drain.  The bathroom floor is the original 1931 small tiles. The flooring right outside the bathroom is hardwood floor.
Comment: The toilet overflowed and flooded the bathroom floor and the water dripped down through the tile into the room below, which is our kitchen.  The water came down through the light fixture.
Answer: Because when you pour water or want to wash bathroom, water will not leak to the dry part of home near the door.
Comment: The toilet overflowed and flooded the bathroom floor and the water dripped down through the tile into the room below, which is our kitchen.  The water came down through the light fixture.
Answer: I'll jump in. The 1-inch range is typical, so a bath mat or entry mat wouldn't interfere with the door. They were meant to be water tight rooms, so caulk or re-caulk the bottoms of everything sitting on the floor.
Otherwise, it may be structural settlement from outright strain, most old places weren't built quite right for the literal tons of the bathroom.
One horrible thing that started to become the new trend was Builder's Grade. Due to bathroom floor construction back then, the structure was lowered to accommodate the double thick bathroom floor. But, the new trend was to put in 1/4-inch low-grade finished floor rather than the standard 3/4-inch quality floor for the rest of the house. You probably got switched backed by the builder to 3/4" & the bath therefore "suffered"...consider a shag carpet mat at the door.


Overlay AutoCAD drawing on QGIS desktop shapefiles

Question: I have sewerage network data in shapefiles. I want to overlay with drawing.dwg file so i can update shape files in QGIS. How to directly open drawing.dwg file in QGIS desktop?
Answer: Try Project > Import/Export > Import Layers from DWG/DXF
This will ask you to specify the location of a new geopackage that the imported layers will be added to, and will ask for the source drawing. It can take some time to properly import all the layers but once it has finished they will keep their original CAD symbology.
Answer: QGIS doesn't work with .dwg but can open .dxf so your options are :

If you have autocad (or equivalent) save your .dwg in  dxf format
Ask your dwg provider to convert it to dxf for you
Use an online converter to convert your dwg to dxf (an internet search will provide several
options, as I never used one I can't suggest any)


What happens if a helicopter's propeller spins in reverse?

Question: I know airplanes and helicopters fly thanks to the same principle, the Bernoulli Principle. The wings and blades are designed so that the air travels faster across the up side than it does on the bottom side, generating an upward pressure, or lift. My question is... if the propeller rotates in reverse, does the pressure becomes downward? The distance the air has to travel from point A to B of the wing/blade is still the same so I would think that the way air moves around it do not matter. From the airplane perspective, I think this reverse rotation of the propeller would be equivalent to the airplane flying backward. So, what is the case here?
Comment: The Bernoulli principle isn't why planes fly. That's a common misconception. The majority of the lift comes from the angle of the wings/propellor blades. Run a helicopter propeller in reverse and it will accelerate downwards.
Comment: When a helicopter loses engine power, the pilot must autorotate the propeller to speed it up, by "feathering" the propeller blades properly.  In a sense, the propeller is spinning "backwards" at this point.  Very close to the ground, the pilot feathers the blades such that they provide the lift which allows the helicopter to land safely.  For more info, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation
Comment: It can be done, but as John says, not by reversing the rotation: https://youtu.be/SIOGuidZuew
Answer: As John Rennie said, it's mainly the angle of attack. The Bernoulli effect keeps the air following the upper surface. As it is pulled down, it provides some lift. The Bernoulli effect is caused by the fluid stream carrying surrounding fluid away, leaving a low pressure zone, & effectively sucking a nearby surface onto the stream, or the stream onto it. It makes the top of the wing, or rotor do it's bit to help lift the aircraft. That's why some planes have turned up wing tips, to stop air leaking back into the low pressure zone from the side.
Answer: It depends on whether you also reverse the angle of attack via the collective pitch control. A cambered airfoil will generate lift for a positive angle down to a slight negative angle. If the angle of attack in the reverse direction is made zero or positive, the rotor will generate lift. But it will be barkingly inefficient and the chopper will just get a bit lighter, it will not take off.
Experiments with fore-aft symmetrical airfoils with rounded trailing edges, like very flat ellipses, have been tried as a route to stopped-rotor technology, but they are already too inefficient and high-drag to be practical.


What should I do about a hole close to a plug that is too wide?

Question: I used spacking to fill a hole that is like really wide, but not that lengthy.  I painted it, then put more spacking on the hole. The hole is still noticeable. So like if I just keep putting more spacking, will it sooner or later look noramlish?
Answer: Muralo's Spackle™ shrinks as it dries. If you keep applying thin layers and letting them dry, you will eventually achieve a flat surface. If the Spackle is proud of the surrounding surface you should be able to sand it flat.


SharePoint Infopath 2010 development

Question: I am new to the SharePoint Infopath 2010 development. What are the required components that I need to install to start with the development.Is it possible in SharePoint foundation server? Can anyone please help me how to start in this?
Answer: In order to write any sort of code for your infopath form you will need to install the VSTA.
In the VSTA you can write your code in C# or VB.
The following are the steps to install VSTA :
1)Go to Control Panel and select Add and Remove Programs
2)Select Microsoft Office Professional, Right Click and Select Change
3)Select Add and Remove Features
4)Select Microsoft Infopath and click on the "+" sign
5)An option called as .NET Programmability Support will be present, click on the "+" sign.
6)You will find Visual Studio Tools for Applications(VSTA). Right click on it and select Run from my computer.
A small installation will start installing the VSTA.
After the VSTA is installed you can select Code Editor from the developer tab in the Infopath and begin coding.
For learning basic code behind you can refer to this link : http://panvega.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/how-to-access-infopath-fields-with-codebehind/
Happy Coding
Answer: In order to allow the users to add InfoPath Forms Web Parts and Form Template libraries, you are going to require InfoPath Forms Services to be activated, which is part of the Enterprise Features.
See the text and images of the *InfoPath Forms Services support * section on this page to determine if you have it activated.
Another way to tell if its not activated is if you go to design a new form in InfoPath 2010 and you get an error message telling you that Microsoft Office Forms Services is not available.
To activate it on your Farm, execute the following in a SharePoint 2010 Management Shell:
<code>Install-SPFeature -path "IPFSSiteFeatures" - force
Install-SPFeature -path "IPFSWebFeatures" - force
Enable-SPFeature -Identity c88c4ff1-dbf5-4649-ad9f-c6c426ebcbf5 -URL siteURL - force
</code>

SharePoint Infopath 2010 development


Adding DNS' to Ubuntu without editing `etc/resolv.conf`

Question: The internet on my network works with primary dns a.b.c.d and alternate as e.f.g.h and everytime I need it to work I need to append nameserver a.b.c.d and nameserver e.f.g.h to /etc/resolv.conf. Isn't there an easier way to do this that probably doesn't involve me doing this when PC restarts, I tried scripts, it works but it just seems as a hack.
Comment: Both of the answers below assume that you are using `/etc/network/interfaces` to configure your connections. I am sure that you are not. By default, you are using Network Manager. Please check here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/422293/remove-isp-provided-dns/422343#422343
Answer: Manually add those name servers in your /etc/network/interfaces file by inserting the line dns-nameservers a.b.d.c e.f.g.h underneath the interface(s) you are using (usually either eth0 or wlan0)
Answer: You can either do it by adding the DNS server in the /etc/network/interfaces adding the parameter dns-nameservers separating each DNS server with a space as following:
dns-nameservers 126.96.36.199 220.127.116.11

Example:
dns-nameservers 22.214.171.124 10.10.10.254

You can also edit the file /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/base and edit it the same way you edit the /etc/resolv.conf
Example:
nameserver 18.104.22.168
nameserver 10.10.10.254
search domain.local


How can I convert an RTF file to a pdf file?

Question: How can I convert an RTF file to a PDF one? I have the adobe PDF printer, should I use it? If so, how can I programmatically access it?
Comment: @Malfist - I updated my answer below as suggested by Henk to provide a fuller answer.
Answer: You could use the virtual print Driver doPdf http://www.dopdf.com/ if this is permitted on the production machine. This will convert more or less any file type to a pdf format not just rtf. It just appears as another printer within Print Manager once installed.
To use it in say winforms code I adapted the code found on the msdn printing example http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.drawing.printing.printdocument.aspx
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        try
        {
            streamToPrint = new System.IO.StreamReader
               (@"F:\temp\labTest.txt");
            try
            {
                printFont = new Font("Arial", 10);
                PrintDocument pd = new PrintDocument();
                pd.PrinterSettings.PrinterName = "doPDF v6";//<-------added
                pd.PrintPage += new PrintPageEventHandler
                   (this.pd_PrintPage);
                pd.Print();
            }
            finally
            {
                streamToPrint.Close();
            }
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);
        }

    }

The only part of the code I needed to add was that marked above e.g. pd.PrinterSettings.PrinterName = "doPDF v6";
There may be a printer enumeration method which would be more elegant and robust and against this one could test to see if the print driver existed perhaps against a config file setting.
Update:
Handling multiple pages is taken care of in this method : this.pd_PrintPage as per the msdn sample.
PrintDocument supports from and to page printing.
DoPdf will pops up a fileSaveAsDialog box automatically so the files can be saved as a pdf document.
What about rtf though?
A Microsoft format not supported very well so it would seem. This article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms996492.aspx with demo code uses the RichTextBox as a starting point and by using P/Invoke leverages the power of Win32 to print RTF as WYSIWG. The control defines it's own page length method replacing the one used above in the code snippet and still uses PrintDocument so it should be easy to use. You can assign any rtf using Rtb.rtf method.
Comment: Close, but a complete answer would include how to print RTF (with Paging etc). Also you probably want a PDF printer that let's you set the output filename.
Comment: @Henk, I have editted the article (added a piece at the end) that should address all the points you raise.
Comment: Doesn't work because it just prints the text of the RTF file, I.E. not the human readable part of it. It prints what would print if I opened the RTF file in Notepad.
Comment: @Malfist - did you adapt the code above using the article I referenced in the update section of my answer. I was seeing the human readable output as displayed by the Rtb and not the behaviour you describe which defeats the whole object of the exercise.
Answer: You can use a PDF printer, but then you still have a few problems to solve.
In order to handle text that spans multiple pages, you need this article to create a descendant of RichTextbox that handles the EM_FORMATRANGE Message.
There are a lot of (free) PDF printer out there, but I found that only BioPdf will let you control the filename of the output. They also have reasonable rates for licensed versions.
I have used this to create complex reports (combinations of multiple RTF segments and custom graphics) as attachments for emailing.
Answer: An RTF document has to be read and interpreted by some app that can understand that format. You would need to programmatically launch that app, load your RTF file, and send it to the PDF printer. Word would be good for that, since it has a nice .NET interface. An overview of the steps would be:
ApplicationClass word = new ApplicationClass();
Document doc = word.Documents.Open(ref filename, ...);
doc.PrintOut(...);

You will need to use the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word namespace and add a reference to the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll assembly.
Comment: Yes I can, but how would I do so?
Comment: This will work fine, but not in a server environment. Microsoft does not recommend or support using the Office API in a server environment. See for example question 159744.
Comment: Fair enough, but nothing in the question points to a server environment. :-)
Answer: Actually, none of these are terribly reliable or do what I want. The solution is simple, install Adobe Acrobat and just have it open the RTF file using the Process class.
I also found a more reasonable approach. I save the file as an RTF, the open it in word, and save it as PDF (Word's Print As PDF plugin must be installed)
            SaveFileDialog sfd = new SaveFileDialog();
            sfd.Filter = "Personal Document File (*.pdf)|*.pdf";
            if (sfd.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK) {
                String filename = Path.GetTempFileName() + ".rtf";
                using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(filename)) {
                    sw.Write(previous);
                }

                Object oMissing = System.Reflection.Missing.Value;    //null for VB
                Object oTrue = true;
                Object oFalse = false;

                Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Application oWord = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Application();
                Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Document oWordDoc = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Document();

                oWord.Visible = false;
                Object rtfFile = filename;
                Object saveLoc = sfd.FileName;
                Object wdFormatPDF = 17;    //WdSaveFormat Enumeration
                oWordDoc = oWord.Documents.Add(ref rtfFile, ref oMissing, ref oMissing, ref oMissing);
                oWordDoc.SaveAs(ref saveLoc, ref wdFormatPDF, ref oMissing, ref oMissing, ref oMissing, ref oMissing, ref oMissing, ref oMissing,
                     ref oMissing, ref oMissing, ref oMissing, ref oMissing, ref oMissing, ref oMissing, ref oMissing, ref oMissing);

                oWordDoc.Close(ref oFalse, ref oMissing, ref oMissing);
                oWord.Quit(ref oFalse, ref oMissing, ref oMissing);

                //Get the MD5 hash and save it with it
                FileStream file = new FileStream(sfd.FileName, FileMode.Open);
                MD5 md5 = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider();
                byte[] retVal = md5.ComputeHash(file);
                file.Close();

                using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(sfd.FileName + ".md5")) {
                    sw.WriteLine(sfd.FileName + " - " + DateTime.Now.ToLongDateString() + " " + DateTime.Now.ToShortTimeString() + " md5: " + BinaryToHexConverter.To64CharChunks(retVal)[0]);
                }
            }


Why we always put log() before the joint pdf when we use MLE(Maximum likelihood Estimation)?

Question: Maybe this question is simple, but I really need some help.
When we use the Maximum Likelihood Estimation(MLE) to estimate the parameters, why we always put the log() before the joint density? To use the sum in place of product? But why?
The wikipedia said it will be convenient. Why?
Thank you.
Comment: If you get sums instead of many products you get linear functions. Linear functions are easier to compute and to play with. If you are optimizing, it is good to have linear functions. Linear optimization or linear programming has been largely studied.
Answer: Some reasons why taking the logarithm of the likelihood can be helpful include:

It turns the likelihood into a sum instead of a product.
In many cases, the individual terms of the sum are logs of exponentials which simplify.
In many cases, the log likelihood is a concave function while the likelihood itself is not concave.  When this is the case, convex optimization techniques can be used to find the MLE.
In numerical work, the likelihood is often nonzero but so tiny that it cannot be represented in double precision floating point.  For example, suppose that the likelihood is $1.0 \times 10^{-500}$.  This is too small to represent in double precision but could easily be the likelihood in a situation where we had 500 data points each with likelihood 0.1.  The logarithmic transformation reduces the range of values that have to be dealt with.
Answer: by using the log function our likelihood function is become more convenient and finding of its derivative is become more easy that's why we use log function. this is the only reason for using the log. in some cases derivative is not to easily calculate and after taking the log of likelihood function it's become simple. in the problem of MLE our aim is to maximize the likelihood function and after the applying log function there is no change in maximization.
Answer: There is one more (in addition to what was pointed out by ABHI and ABC) clear situation when taking log is useful: exponential family of distributions. Taking log  helps you to get rid of unpleasant (in root finding process) exponents.
Answer: One does not ALWAYS do that. But with an i.i.d. sample, one has
$$
L(\theta) = f_\theta(x_1) \cdots f_\theta(x_n)
$$
and one seeks the value of $\theta$ that maximizes that. Often (not always) finding the derivative of the function to be maximized is done. Finding $L'(\theta)$ directly is messy because the product rule needs to be applied to a product of many functions. Now look at
$$
\log L(\theta) = \log f_\theta(x_1) + \cdots + \log f_\theta(x_n).
$$
Finding the derivative can now be done simply by finding the derivative of each term separately and adding them up.


Calling and gathering results from py.test from within code

Question: I'm working on a system that needs to be able to test python files with py.test, and use the output (what tests passed and failed) within the program. Is there anyway to call py.test from within python, tell it to run the testing code in [name].py on the code in [otherName].py, and have it return the results of the test?
Answer: I think you are looking for Calling pytest from Python code at Usage and Invocations page.
Also limiting tests to the specific file could be done by Specifying tests / selecting tests.
In other words, this should do the trick:
<code>pytest.main(['my_test_file.py'])
</code>
P.S.: Py.test Documantation is pretty good, you can find most of the answers there ;).
Comment: If you need to get more detailed machine-parseable info you might want or need to write a little plugin and pass it to the pytest.main() call as second argument.  For example you could implement a "pytest_unconfigure(config)" hook function and then call ``config.getplugin("terminalreporter") and access its ``stats`` attribute - a dictionary mapping test outcomes to test reports.


in terms of battery life for the iphone 5, which battery is better? 3.8v1440mAh or 3.8v1560mAh?

Question: ok so if I have this right milli Amp hour= mAh, Whr = Watt hour, and v = Volt is charge capacity? Where is potential discharge or work capacity and V is the rate at which the "work" is being done?
Answer: The battery life of your iPhone depends on it's usage. 1440mAH or 1560mAH refers to the basic term that if your phone uses 1mA per hour(i.e 1 W/v) it can last for 1440 hours. But the usage will depend on what all software you are using. Like mobile network and heavy graphic intense games will use more power, applications that don't require a lot of processor power to work,(such as a clock) will not take so much amount thus you will have a longer battery life.
There are various articles explaining this online, if I find a suitable one I will post it in an edit soon.
Answer: You have a skewed understanding from what I can tell. This may be a bit overkill, but some simple physics couldn't hurt. Let's start with the basics:

Voltage, measured in Volts (V), is the potential energy of electrons between to points. It is analogous to pressure in pipes.
Current, measured in Amperes (A), is the rate at which electrons flow, equivalent to 1 Coulomb per 1 second (1 C/s, 6.241×10^18 electrons per second). It is analogous to the flow rate of water in pipes (the volume of water that flows by per unit of time, e.g. Litre/second).
Power, measured in Watts (W), is the rate at which electrons flow, multiplied by the potential energy of each electron. It is equivalent to a Volt Ampere (VA). I.e. 1 Amp of current at 1 Volt potential is 1 Watt of power.
Energy, measured in Joules (J), is the product of the power multiplied by the time over which it was applied. It is equivalent to 1 Watt Second (WS). I.e. 1 Watt of power being consumed for 1 second is 1 Joule.
Charge, measure in Ampere-Hours (Ah), is the product of the current flowing by how long it has been flowing for, regardless of voltage.

Multiplying charge by voltage gives you the Voltage-Ampere-Hours (VAh). From above, we can see that Voltage-Amperes are the same as Watts, so this gives us Watt-hours (Wh). Watt-hours are a measure of power, multiplied by a measure of time, which we've also established is Energy
A milliampere-hour has 3 parts: "milli" denotes that the quantity is 1 thousandth of the base unit, "Ampere-hour", which is a unit of charge.
At the same voltage, charge is proportional to energy stored in a battery.
We can run the simple calculations:
Battery 1)
3.8 V * 1440 mAh
= 3.8 V * 1.4 Ah (milli denotes 1/1000th)
= 5.32 VAh (multiply the values)
= 5.32 Wh (VA is the same as a W)
= 5.32 Ws * 3600 (3600 seconds in an hour)
= 19,152 Ws
= 19,152 J (Ws are the same as a J)

Battery 2)
3.8 V * 1560 mAh
= 3.8 V * 1.56 Ah (milli denotes 1/1000th)
= 5.928 VAh (multiply the values)
= 5.928 Wh (VA is the same as a W)
= 5.928 Ws * 3600 (3600 seconds in an hour)
= 21,340.8 Ws
= 21,340.8 J (Ws are the same as a J)

As you can see, the second battery holds ~11% more energy than the first.


How can I use a trained model to generate related images?

Question: Suppose I have a data set of a large number of related images and I extract HOG features and train it using SVM Classifier or KNN Classifier. How can I use this model to generate a new image which is related to the images in the dataset (rather than testing on a new image which we do traditionally)?
Answer: There are multiple aspects which render your approach infeasible:

SVM is a learning technique where high-dimensional data is mapped to lower dimension (a couple of hyperplanes, decision boundaries, which pass through support vectors). It doesn't have an inverse mapping: It is not super trivial to go from a point within a decision space back to the space of actual data. In other words, it's not generative. If your learning method supports going back from low-dimensional embedding to the higher dimensions space (such as GPLVM), your task could be easier.
HOG is not exactly reversible. Please check Hoggles, where the authors reveal what HOG features tend to understand, via formulating the visualization as in inverse problem. Therefore, it might not be able to synthesize consistent colors, or even detailed features. The synthesized image might end up looking just like a Hoggle image.

I would suggest the Generative Adverserial Networks for this task, which have been quite successful in image synthesis:
Here are some papers about it:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.03242v1.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.2661v1.pdf

Here are some open source software:

https://github.com/junyanz/iGAN
https://github.com/carpedm20/DCGAN-tensorflow
https://github.com/jacobgil/keras-dcgan


My English teacher said that non-progressive verbs cannot be use with the ing but there are some exceptions

Question: For example, I saw a sentence that says: in the 19th century, Europeans wanting to immigrate to the USA could do so as long as they did not have any infectious diseases.
So , I'm confused. Why did they use want+ing in this sentence?
Comment: What is a "non-progressive" verb??
Answer: The 'rule' was probably given to help students avoid sentences like

*I am owning this beautiful new car.
*I am wanting to go home.

(Though note that even for the progressive usage, the 'rule' is not totally accurate – "If anyone is wanting a fresh cup of coffee ..." is probably totally acceptable nowadays in informal speech. It's a hedged, softened, variant.)
But in the given example we have what is variously known as a [present] participial clause, or phrase in traditional grammar, here used as a post-modifier of a noun.  There isn't any restriction forbidding ing-clauses with punctive (non-durative) verbs being used:

The bodies of soldiers dying at the front were often recovered during
  cease-fires.
Shattering under the impact, the medieval window would now be no
  more than a memory.

'Want' is far less punctive a verb than the verbs in these two examples.
Answer: You need to distinguish between the present participle ending in "ing", and the verb phrase, usually called "continuous" or "progressive", which is constructed using that participle: they are very different in usage.
Pretty well any verb has a participle in "-ing" (the only exceptions are modals like can, will, should). This participle can introduce a clause with adjectival or adverbial force, such as "wanting to immigrate to the USA" in your example: the whole clause describes or limits the noun "Europeans", so it has adjectival force. It denotes something happening at the same time, but not necessarily continuously or "progressively".
The "progressive" form is a quite different construction, which happens to use the same form of the verb. You can distinguish it because it always has a form of BE preceding the "-ing" word.
As your teacher says, there are classes of verb which are not normally used in the progressive: want is an example.
Advanced usage note: Many verbs that do not normally take the progressive can do so, for example where the speaker wants to emphasise that it is happening at the precise moment. But these forms are rare in writing.
Answer: "Want" is usually non-progressive. As you said, there are exceptions. This isn't uncommon.
http://www.english-zone.com/verbs/prgverbchrt.html


Applying directly and through recruiter for different jobs same company

Question: I applied online for an analyst position at a bank but received no feedback except an automatic reply that the application was received. A few weeks later I was contacted by a recruitment agency about a different role in the same company, I have since interviewed for that role and been successful, and are now proceeding to the offer stage and signing the contracts. Would by previous application affect the offer, since they had my resume prior to being introduced by the recruiter? Or should I not say anything because they are different roles? Will the company HR even find out?
Answer: I dont see this as being an issue. I work for a large corporation and all the paperwork we have, including online resumes and personal application requests, it would be highly unlikely for them to ever create any sort of issue with your first resume. From personal experience I think it will get lost in the shuffle.
Answer: The recruiter must be using a different avenue. I'd say that your recruiter earned their money since whoever got your resume at the bank is sitting on that resume.
Make sure that you tell the recruiter what you did earlier so that everything is above board and in the clear.
Answer: Could the previous application matter if brought to their attention?
TLDR;
It could matter, but it's not in your interest to bring it up, nor would it be expected of you to raise it.
Reason it could matter #1: Employer Interview notes
Your previous analyst application would have some notes associated with the applicaiton. Given that you never heard back, it's very likely that those notes would be very uninteresting (e.g. "Candidate bulk rejected as a suitable candidate was hired"), but they could have negative/critical commentary (e.g. "candidate unsuitable because of X"). Given that you never received an interview the likelihood of those notes affecting your newly accepted offer is very low. But either way, it's not really in your interest to highlight this to HR. They certainly wouldn't expect you to anyway.
Reason it could matter #2: Recruiter contracts
The employer signs a contract with the recruiter before engaging them. Usually (but not always) these agreements have clauses that prevent fees being payable to the recruiter if the employer was already aware of the candidate, usually within some period of time.
In this case if the employer were to notify the recruiter that they were aware of your application, the recruiter might not be paid. At this point the recruiter might stop supporting the candidate since they're no longer incentivised to do so, but you've already receved the offer so that doesn't affect you.


Infinite domains and nested quantification

Question: It is not difficult to exhibit a sentence $\phi$ with nested quantification such that $\phi$ is true only in infinite domains. Say, let $\phi$ be $\forall x \neg Rxx \wedge \forall x \exists y Rxy \wedge \forall x \forall y \forall z (Rxy \wedge Ryz \rightarrow Rxz)$. Note, however, that this sentence employs nested quantification in the second conjunct, specifically, a $\forall \exists$ alternation. Question: is there any sentence without nested quantification and without function symbols which is only true in infinite domains?
Comment: Any sentence of the form $\forall x_1\ldots\forall x_n\Phi(x_1,\ldots, x_n)$ (where $\Phi$ contains no quantor) that is true in some domain is also true in every subdomain.
Comment: That implies that without $\exists$ you cannot enforce infinite domain. And even if there are some $\exists$, but all are outmost (i.e., there is no $\forall \exists$, only $\exists\ldots \exists \forall\ldots \forall$), then the we can get rid of these and add finitely many constants - and still cannot enforce infinite domain.
Comment: @HagenvonEitzen - Perhaps I'm too dense (or perhaps my question is unclear), but I don't see the relevance of your comment. Can you expand?
Answer: If you allow function symbols, then the answer is yes. Consider the language $\Sigma$ consisting of a binary function symbol $f$ and a binary relation symbol $R$, and let $\varphi$ be the $\Sigma$-sentence
$$\mbox{$R$ is a strict linear order and for all distinct $x$ and $y$, $f(x,y)$ is $R$-between $x$ and $y$.}$$

With only relation symbols, the answer is no: any subset of a $\Sigma$-structure $\mathcal{M}$ is also a substructure of $\mathcal{M}$ if $\Sigma$ is relational; this means that any satisfiable $\Sigma$-sentence of the form $\forall x_1,...,x_n\psi(x_1,...,x_n)$ with $\psi$ quantifier-free has a finite model (take any finite substructure of any model of $\psi$). Meanwhile it's not hard to show that any satisfiable $\Sigma$-sentence of the form $\exists x_1,...,x_n\psi(x_1,...,x_n)$ with $\psi$ quantifier-free has a finite model (pick an arbitrary model, and look at a finite substructure containing the witnesses to the sentence).
Note that the argument of the last sentence also shows that no sentence of the form $\exists y_1,..., y_m\forall x_1,...,x_n\psi(y_1,..., y_n, x_1,...,x_n)$ with $\psi$ quantifier-free. So "$\forall \exists$" is really where all the necessary complexity is, if we disallow function symbols.
Comment: Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for.


laser spectral width vs. linewidth

Question: I have been racking my brains over the differences between laser spectral width and something called the linewidth.  The linewidth was written about in detail by Henry in 1982.  The spectral width is the width at -20dB down from peak of the wavelength spectrum of the laser.  I am looking at some laser data right now that is saying that laser x has 10 kHz linewidth and 60 pm spectral width.  You can convert spectral width from frequency to wavelength as in this article and I have done that calculation.  By that calculation, a laser with a linewidth of 10kHz should have a wavelength width of about 1x10^-6 nm, not 0.06 nm.  Linewidth is often measured with self-heterodyne technique, not a spectrum analyzer.
  What am I missing?
Comment: link us to the data sheet
Answer: I assume you are looking at a diode laser (LD) data sheet. In practical terms, spectral width is a measure of tunability of the LD as you vary injection current and temperature. This is quite useful in experiments (say atomic physics with alkali atoms).
The linewidth is related to the phase noise of laser. It is very complicated to derive the linewidth from first principles. Agarwal is a standard reference if you wish to know more.
A practical semi-conductor LD has a typical free running linewidth of 40Mhz. This means, the uncertainty in the frequency is 40MHz. However, this entire frequency band can shift with changes in temperature and fluctuations in injection current.
This rather broad linewidth can be narrowed by optical feedback to obtain the so called external/extended cavity diode laser (ECDL). Check out this seminal paper by Weimann and Hollberg (pdf) for more information. I have built many ECDL systems from the ground up with sub-MHz linewidths. It can be quite a tricky endeavor.
Measuring the linewidth can be quite tricky. The usual direct technique is to beat the unknown laser with a known standard reference and study the beat signal. The equipment necessary is very expensive. However, you can make rough estimates from say a simple saturation spectroscopy based frequency locking setup by studying the amplitude fluctuations of the "error signal". Granted that it is crude and limited to the natural linewidth of your atomic system, but it does not need super expensive equipment or complicated electronics. There are other ways to use atomic physics (EIT, CPT resonances etc) to make reasonable estimates of laser linewidth and it all depends on what your goal is.
Comment: Yes, the data I am looking at is for an ECDL and it is a datasheet.  Thanks for the great answer!  I have looked at the spectral plots for the laser (on datasheet) and the width 20 dB down from peak (power vs lambda) is indeed around 60 pm so I don't think that spectral width refers to tunability.  Another point is that "reach" or "distance limit" quoted by manufacturer corresponds to a spectral width of 60 pm and that spectral width is sigmaL in equation 1 [here](http://mathscinotes.wordpress.com/2010/10/06/dispersion-power-penalty-modeling-part-1/ "Title")
Comment: I don't think the blog you linked to is applicable to a semi-conductor diode laser. Your link seems to be about light propagation in an optical fiber, which is a different problem altogether, unless you are referring to a fiber laser (most likely a Raman fiber laser). In a Raman laser the scattering is inelastic and hence bandwidth of such sources are very large. Coherence is built up from spontaneous emission. Check [Raymer's](http://oco.uoregon.edu/raymer-group/publiations) group for papers from the 80's (6 onwards).
Comment: I am still a bit lost, though.  In [this paper](http://www.cbc.ca), Agrawal defines data error rates in terms of the "spectral width"[link](http://example.com)
Comment: Dead/bad link. :)
Answer: You have to convert center wavelength to frequency, then add and subtract the line width (Hz), then convert those frequencies back to wavelength, and then find the difference of the two wavelengths. This is $\Delta \nu$, or simple line width.
John
Comment: Welcome on Physics SE :) The system supports the use of LaTeX for formulas :)
Answer: Maybe linewidth of spec is the width of only one longitudinal mode. If your LD is not SLM, the spectral width should be the width between the first and the last longitudinal mode, so the spectral width will be far greater than linewidth.

laser spectral width vs. linewidth


Promotion under informal conditions

Question: I was proposed to be promoted under the condition that I promise to not leave my current company within a year. There is no contract, just an informal agreement. My question is whether it is reasonable to request such a promise and how should this informal contract be approached if I receive a competitive offer within this year.
Comment: What is the "agreement" exactly mean? Does it mean if you get promoted, then starting from that date you have to stay for at least one year?
Comment: Is this verbal contract enforceable :-)
Answer:
My question is whether it is reasonable to request such a promise and
  how should this informal contract be approached if I receive a
  competitive offer within this year.

Yes, it's reasonable to request such an informal promise. Your boss is basically saying "I'd like to promote you, but for it to be worthwhile to the company, I'd like you to promise me that you'll stick around for at least a year."
If you plan to stick around for at least a year, then it's reasonable for you to make such a promise.
Since this is an informal promise, and not contractual, you get to decide how much your word/promise is actually worth.
If you don't care about standing by your commitments, then just accept the promotion, and if something comes up just say "I changed my mind."
If you do care, then don't make a promise you won't keep. If you need to keep open the possibility of leaving within the year, just say "I can't make that promise."
As @HLGEM rightly points out - it never hurts to be known as someone who will keep a promise even when it is difficult!
Comment: If I have given a commitment whether it is writing or not I will try to honor that. Yes sometimes life interrupts and you can't such as when you have to move to another state to care for your sick mother, but short of something like that, I would not look at other jobs if I agreed to stay for a year and I would turn down any interviews telling them I was committed until such and such date. It is a small world and it never hurts to be known as someone who will keep a promise even when it is difficult.
Answer: It's entirely reasonable for a manager to want to invest in someone who's going to be around long enough for that investment to pay itself back.
There's nothing wrong about asking you what your plans are. If you don't know, you can ask for a bit more time to think about it, or you can say you don't know (in which case someone else will probably be given that position) or you can lie about it (which I would consider a bit too selfish, personally).
As you said, all you're being asked for is your plans and expectations, not a signed commitment. If you can honestly say "yes, I plan to stay for at least a year", and then six months from now something major causes you to change your plans... well, life happens.
Comment: is it reasonable? at the moment its only your opinion in many parts of the world your view would be regarded with suspicion at the very least
Comment: I'm not sure I understand your objection, @Pepone. It's an informal question. You're entitled to decline to answer it, but by doing so you will also decline the opportunity offered. The alternative is not to be offered the opportunity at all and for management to promote someone they don't feel they have to ask; I fail to see how that would be better.

Promotion under informal conditions


i am wondering about internet bandwidth

Question: what is the origin of the bandwidth, we get on internet?
suppose we get 10 Mbps link at home and we get it from some ISP but from where ISP gets that and on and on?
Comment: Each connection point can set limits for each output port.
Answer: You many be under the incorrect impression that there is a single Internet. The Internet is really just a collection of ISPs connecting their networks together.
Each link on the Internet has its own bandwidth. The link between you and your ISP has a particular bandwidth, independent of anything else. Your ISP has links to other ISPs, and those links each have their own bandwidths, independent of any other links.
Your ISP should strive to strike a balance between the total bandwidth it offers to its customers and the bandwidth it has with its peers. This balance will not be a 1:1 ratio; it is very likely that your ISP has much more bandwidth to its customers than it does to other ISPs. This is called an oversubscription, and it works because not all its customers are using all their bandwidth at the same time. There are formulae which may be used to calculate the proper oversubscription ratio. Really bad ISPs can be too far oversubscribed, and their customers can suffer from network congestion.
Answer: There are two main types of connection between ISPs (and few in between variants).
A peering link is a link between two ISPs to allow the (direct and indirect)  customers of one ISP to communicate with the (direct and indirect) customers of the other ISP. Depending on the relative market power of the ISPs there may or may not be payment involved.
A transit link is a link where one (usually larger) ISP provides another (usually smaller) ISP with connectivity to the internet in general.
A good ISP will try to keep their internal links and their peering and transit links to other providers uncongested most of the time. A bad ISP may not.
At the top of the pile are transit free ISPs. These ISPs buy no transit and rely entirely on peering.

i am wondering about internet bandwidth


Hilbert polynomial for any invertible sheaf

Question: Let $X$ be a projective scheme over algebraically closed field $k$, $L$ is invertible sheaf on $X$ and $\mathcal F \in \operatorname{Coh}(X)$ , we define Hilbert polynomial $P_{\mathcal F}(n)=\chi(\mathcal F \otimes L^n).$ Is there any way to prove that $P$ is polynomial not using Riemann-Roch and Chern classes. I think that there should be some argument similar to mdeland's argument(Why is the Euler characteristic of powers of a line bundle a polynomial in the power?), which works for locally free $\mathcal F$.
Comment: Why should something be proved without using very simple and standard techniques?
Comment: Do you know how to compute the Hilbert polynomial of a projective variety, say as outlined in Hartshorne I.7?
Comment: @BenLim Yes, I'm able to prove it in the case of very ample $L$.
Answer: Prove that $\chi (\mathcal F \otimes L_1^{n} \otimes L_2^m)$ is a polynomial function of $n$ and $m$ of degree $d$ when $L_1$ and $L_2$ are very ample. You can do this by exactly the same induction argument. (If you have a function of two variables whose successive differences in both variables are degree $d-1$ polynomials, then it is a degree $d$ polynomial.)
Then write your divisor as a difference of two ample divisors and set $m=-n$.


How to take picture with blur background using FujiFilm HS10

Question: I tried a lot to take portrait pictures with blur background using my FujiFilm HS10 but haven't succeeded yet. I use f2.8 but still cannot get the effect. Can any of the experts give me any suggestion.
Comment: And a bunch of other duplicates as well.
Answer: It may help to realize that depth of field depends in part on the distance to the subject. Even at large apertures (low numbers like f/2.8), the depth of field will be much greater if you focus on something far away than if your subject is close to the camera.
So, if your goal is a portrait with a soft background, get relatively close to the subject and use a large aperture like the f/2.8 setting that you're trying. If you want the background to be very blurry, increase the distance between subject and background.


Crosshair as standard mouse pointer. But how?

Question: All I want is to change the default mouse cursor (the upward pointing arrow) into a crosshair. I don't need instructions on how to download a cursor theme, I just want a crosshair as the standard pointer. That's all. But I can't get it done. Can't find a theme with a crosshair as default cursor, either. I do have a Windows .cur file with the perfect crosshair pointer. Can that be imported, perhaps? Whatever is possible to get me that crosshair, please provide extensive instructions because I'm new to this. Thanks.
Answer: http://gursormaker.sourceforge.net/ allows for importing and creating of X11 cursors. Probably .curs too.
Comment: Yes, well, I downloaded and installed Gursormaker a while ago and it's nowhere to be found. Doesn't show up in the dash, can't find it with the Application Finder or Quick Launch, nothing. But can't I edit a script (or config file) that just switches the pointer to a crosshair cursor instead of an arrow? You know, something like "default_pointer=crosshair.png" ?


Using powershell to get the connection parameters of the sql server

Question: I'm creating a script to get the CNAME and port that the SharePoint servers use. Is there an out of the box way of doing this? I know that there are plugins I can use but would prefer not to.
Answer: It is technically possible for each site collection in the farm to be on different SQL servers so the closest you can probably get is to look at the iterate through all of the site collections on all of the web apps and look at SPSite.ContentDatabase.Server property.
An alternative way to get this is to iterate through the webApplications on the farm and then simply pull the information you want from the databases in the .ContentDatabases collection of each SPWebApplication.
Which route you take depends on the specific needs of the script though the second approach would probably be faster, particularly on a large farm.


Excel Chart Object without source data in Word going back to Excel

Question: I have an Excel object chart in word. The chart is a line graph. The data is there because when I mouse over the line, I see each individual x and y value. However, the word file chart was sent to me. So, when I left click and "edit data" I get an error message that says
"The linked file is nto available. To edit the link, click the File tab. Click the Info tab, and then under related Documents, click Edit Links to Files"
Clearly, since this was not created on my machine, I can't edit the links and find the data.
I found a macro that will take a chart and recreate the data when the source data is lost or corrupted but that was written for or only works in Excel (or at least I don't know how to manipulate it to work with Word). The issue is when I copy and paste the chart into an Excel workbook, the chart copies but my data disappears. I guess that it tries to find the source data and then can't find it and makes it blank.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Answer: A simple Copy and Paste may not work as you expected and will end up with an error. Use Paste Special option with "Keep Source Formatting and Link Data". It will ensure the source format is applied to the another worksheet.
Right click > Paste Special > "Keep Source Formatting and Link Data"
Hope this helps.