Ionizing an atom with a proton

Question: What happens when a proton collide with an atom? How does the ionization occurs, assuming the proton has enough kinetic energy? How much energy is required for the proton to enter the atomic nucleus, resulting a higher chemical element ion?
Comment: Too many questions here, and not very well defined. There are many processes that can happen depending on the energy and the target nucleus. Also note that merely getting a collision between the nucleus and the proton does not insure that the proton will *stay* there.
Answer:
What happens when a proton collide with an atom?

When we are talking of atoms and protons etc, we are in the quantum mechanical framework. Generally there will be an electromagnetic interaction, dependent on the energy of the proton. These interactions can be written down mathematically and the probability of the interaction taking place can be computed using Feynman diagrams. . The proton, to interact with an atom will be exchanging a virtual photon.

How does the ionization occurs, assuming the proton has enough kinetic energy?

The virtual photon exchange with an electron on the last filled energy level has to transfer enough energy for the electron to get out of the potential well where it is bound in a quantized energy level.

How much energy is required for the proton to enter the atomic nucleus, resulting a higher chemical element ion?

The chemical energies between atoms are of the order of electron volts. The energies involved in the nuclei of the atoms are of the order of million electron volts. A proton with  million electron volts energy in head on collision on ,an atom will sweep a lot of the electrons away (by virtual photon exchange)  until it is repulsed by the positive field of the nucleus. One cannot change atomic structure by using protons. It needs special quantum mechanical conditions to change the nucleon content of a nucleus, and protons, due to their charge are not  good candidates . Neutrons which can get near the nucleus and be captured or scattered by the strong nuclear forces are what contribute to fission processes.
Answer: I'll answer your question in a very general scenario. I hope your confusion is regarding how the proton enters the atom without interacting with other particles. The same confusion was faced by many scientists when they were observing the $\beta$ decay process. How does a fast moving electron leave the atom without facing sufficient repulsion from orbital electrons? Well, the answer is quantum mechanical. To answer this succintly, the $\beta$ particle tunnels through the nucleus and appears out of the atom! It is like looking at the repulsion as a potential barrier and the electron as a particle in front of it. The $\beta$ particle simply tunnels through the barrier(and has a probability for this).

Ionizing an atom with a proton


How do I change fonts and add colors in Contacts?

Question: I just discovered how to change fonts and add colors to Notes by using command T.  How can I change fonts and add colors to Contacts?  (Conmmand T does not work for Contacts).
Answer: The Contacts app uses the system font. To change font or font size in Contacts.app, you must change it for your whole system. There is a way to change the system font from San Francisco font to Lucida Grande font which may be more appealing to you. There is a small app that lets you pick between San Francisco and Lucida Grande fonts for your system. This web page provides a link to the application or you can go straight to it here.
Comment: And to expand a bit there is no supported, built-in way to change fonts/colors of the fields or text within the Address Book.app. The closest I have ever come to this is to add an emoji or two after the company or person's last name. But changing the system font changes *EVERY* app that uses the system font on the Mac. Not something I would generally recommend.


Any tool that would retrieve the ORIGINAL date a photo was created on even after it has been processed?

Question: As mentioned in the title, sometimes the desktop or mobile application used to process/edit a photo, especially if it has been moved, copied, re-saved, etc.. would cause the very original date of the image, the date it has been shot the first time, to change or even disappear. One would then be stuck with a "fake" date that reflects the date on which the image has been processed or saved last time.
Now does the original date remain "engraved" there, somewhere, no matter how much editing/processing work an image has undergone? Is it encrypted, or embedded somewhere in the file metadata or the EXIF data? In this case, is there any tool/software that can retrieve that original date from where it still is?
I know.. too much interrogations. Any help in this matter is truly appreciated.
Comment: Note that the EXIF data is a type of metadata.
Answer: Photo metadata, such as EXIF metadata, is written into a RAW, TIFF, or JPEG file in a data section which sits alongside the image (pixel) data. Data can be added, edited, or removed without affecting the image data. In theory it's possible to embed data (usually a copyright watermark) inside the image data, but a professional photographer is unlikely to use this method in the master file because it does (subtly) alter the image and because the data degrades every time the image is retouched.
If your software truly is editing or deleting the creation date in your photo metadata then you're unlikely to find any way to recover it. But make sure you browse all of the metadata in your image file in case you're simply not using software which reads all of the data available. (The file access/creation date shown in your operating system is unlikely to be the EXIF image creation date.)
If you're comfortable with using the command line, try Exiv2 which is very powerful for viewing, copying and editing metadata. If you prefer a graphical user interface then find a photo viewer/editor which lets you see all of the metadata written into a photo file.
Comment: It's worth noting that the original creation date should not be altered by editing software in normal operation, but *can* easily be changed, so while this is useful for keeping dates straight in a regular workflow, it shouldn't be taken as strong evidence against fakery or anything like that.
Comment: Also the creation date merely shows the date the cameras time setting thought it was... It is not necessarily always set accurately, and it too could have been set to a fake date.  It could not be considered absolute proof of anything.
Answer: There should be an EXIF tag DateTimeOriginal that should have the exposure date and time. It can be rewritten by other programs but I don't see the purpose of rewriting it.
Use EXIFTOOL or any other exif tool to retrieve the value.
Answer: You can take the photo using the infostain app, it gets the time from a server and then fixes it on your photo as an encoded serial number so you cannot forge it. You can lookup the serial number on their app or website and find out all sorts of information about the conditions of acquisition.
Comment: But someone can always remove the serial number.


How did 'phat' come to be used in music as slang?

Question: most prominently things like ''phat bass line'', meaning a bassline rich in texture ie has a full sound. Appears to have originated in African American use?
Comment: There's the French loan noun *Fête* "fest, party", and German *fetzig* "hip, lively". No idea where *phat* comes from but "fett, fat" is used in German in a similar sense as well and understood as "big, huge" (by me at least).
Answer: Slang Dictionary coverage of 'phat' (and 'fat')
The earliest slang dictionary entry for phat that I've found is from Connie Eble, College Slang 101 (1989):

PHAT Having a shapely body, applied to females. Popularly supposed from Pretty Hips and Thighs.

Five years later, two African-American slang dictionaries published in the same year offer contrasting definitions. From Clarence Major, Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (1994):

Pfat (1990s) superb; really wise and classy; "cool"; "hip." Y[outh] C[ulture] U[se].

And from Geneva Smitherman, Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner (1994):

PHAT ... Probably derived from "em-PHAT-ically"; also a play on the word "fat"

A year after that, Robert Chapman & Barbara Ann Kipfer, Dictionary of American Slang, third edition (1995) has this:

fat ... 5 adj (also phat) teenagers by 1951 Attractive; up to date; =Cool, DOPE, RAD | Fat is recorded by 1932 a[s] meaning "hot," in US dialect, and this may underlie the teenage use: If they are real fat, real crazy, naturally they're real cool—Newsweek [1951]/ Timberland boots have, in the parlance of the street, become "dope" and "phat," i.e. cool, greatest—New York Times 6 adj (also phat) 1980s students Sexy; having a shapely body | Some think this, when spelled phat, is an acronym for pretty hips and thighs: The three boys thought that Carolyn looked fat as she walked down the street—Delcastle [Technical High School, Wilmington, Delaware] Dictionary of Slang [1989]

The instance cited by Chapman & Kipfer from a 1951 issue of Newsweek appears in a longer article on teen slang. Here is a bit more of the article for context:

When talking, Utah bobbysoxers are bashing ears; when kissing, they are lumping lips. They seek out flicks (movies) and drive a wedge, a set of wheels or a rocket. When cutting classes they sluff. Chili means good deal; Dad is any young man, and drag it is let's hurry. Discussing the degrees of coolness, one Utah boy reported: "If you like a guy or gal, they're cool. If they are real fat, real crazy, naturally they're real cool." Salt Lake's highest accolade: frampton.

The New York Times citation in the same entry is evidently from the early 1990s.
Tom Dalzell, Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang (1996) has a lengthy discussion of phat. In the course of this discussion, the most striking point that the author makes is that the word—spelled phat—appears in a discussion of "Negro argot" in a 1963 issue of Time magazine. Here is a snippet from that Time magazine discussion:

Since slavery days, Negroes have created an ever-changing argot of their own, full of ambiguities, tinged with humor and sorrow. As might be expected, the Negro argot abounds in terms for the races:
greys, whities, paddies. Whites.
Mr. Charlie. A white man.
Miss Ann. A white woman.
...
fox, flavor. Pretty girl.
ace boon coon. Girl friend or buddy.
short. Automobile.
ragtop. Convertible.
stallion. A man who is handsome or husky or prosperous; also, a buxom woman.
mellow, phat, stone, boss. General adjectives of approval; a stone fox is a very pretty girl; a boss short is a big car.

Dalzell in Flappers 2 Rappers also offers this interesting observation:

As sometimes seems to be the case with slang that begins its journey meaning "rich," fat at some point began to take on a more general meaning of good. For example, American Speech in 1955 defined fat (shortened from "fat and happy") as "in an excellent situation." In his 1968  Hy Lit Dictionary, the archetypal fast-talking Philadelphia AM disc jockey [Hy Lit] included fat as "great, cool, you dig it."

'Phat' in a musical context: a 'phat bass line'
With regard to the posted question's focus on music-related use of phat, as in "a phat bass line," I note that—even in the mid-2000s (specifically 2005 and 2006)—slang dictionaries tended not to call out such use as entailing a special meaning, distinct from the meaning of phat in more general contexts. From Jeremy Sideris & Brittany McWilliams, From Grill to Dome: A Dictionary of African American Slang Words and Phrases (2005):

Phat: A state of excellence, or of graciousness.

And from Randy Kearse, Street Talk: Do Official Guide to Hip-Hop and Urban Slanguage (2006):

{something that's} phat adj. (general sl.) old & new school 1. outstanding; unique; the best of its kind. 2. hip; trendy; stylish (var. {something that's} phat to death/like a muhfka**) ex: "Now that was phat." "I think that's gonna be mad phat."

It also bears observing that the expression "fat bass line appears to be considerably older in U.S. published English than "phat bass line."
I found two early matches for "phat bass line" in Elephind and Google Books searches. From a review of Don Jagwarr's Faded in the Columbia [University (New York City)] Daily Spectator (December 2, 1994):

Despite a slow start, the album warms up with "Who Do You Fear?" This track, containing samples  from A Tribe Called Quest's "Bonita Applebaum" and Digital Underground's "Humpty Dance," addresses the issue of seizing power through the use of a gun. "My Law" hits with a phat bass line. "Skank Wit' U" is definitely the most appealing song. This track makes you feel as though you are actually in the dance hall.

And from a review of Brandy's "Best Friend," in S2S Magazine (1995) [snippet view]:

I got one for you. This is Brandy's second single and it will match or do better that her smash single, "I Wanna Be Down." If you want to move this is the one. Phat beats, phat bass line and a good message. Brandy delivers with sultry singing. It's the total package. Check it out.

The earliest match for "fat bass line," are somewhat earlier. From a review of Andy Summers & Robert Fripp's I Advanced Masked in High Fidelity (December 1982) [combined snippets]:

This is particularly true of the title track and Hardy Country, which sounds like the former played backwards with a fat bass line and some percussion thrown in. This stuff is meant to be hypnotic, enticing ambient music, but as often as not it's simply headache inducing. To be fair there are other pieces—the spooky, humming Under Bridges of Silence, the ethereal Girl on a Swing—that are truly mesmerizing in a quiet kind of way.

From Larry Flick, "Into the Light: Gay Pride & the Club Community," in Billboard (June 27, 1992):

If you fancy a bit of Philly soul flavoring in your house music, don't miss "What Do You Want From Me" by Bobby Griffen (Cohiba). Remixes by Yvonne Turner maintain the original tune's retro angle while injecting highly programmable breaks and a fat bass line. Griffen possesses a rich baritone, and utilizes it to great effect here. Doesn't completely fit trendy mold, but it's a delightful interlude that requires a spin.

From a review of Original Flavor's "Here We Go," in Billboard (July 25, 1992):

You've certainly heard these party-boy rhymes before. But in this context, they are phrased in a relentlessly infectious manner. Cut's strongest element is the way it wraps a fat bass line around a live hip-hop drum pattern.

From a review of Mouth Music's Mo-Di in the [Santa Rosa, California] Oak Leaf (February 25, 1993):

Milking the Cow is track four. It has a quick percussion streak that drives the song. A fat bass line jumps in and the story begins. A mysterious voice that just seems to be floating around you comes in and takes the song even higher. It almost hums while it tells a story.

From a review of Joachim Kühn, Daniel Humair & J.-F. Jenny-Clark's Carambolage in Jazz Journal International (1993):

The Kuhn trio hits a brisk, easy swinging groove on the title track Carambolage with the band roaring intermittently behind them. Versage has tran[s]lucent piano, a beautifully firm, fat bass line and clean, shimmering cymbals whisking it along. The CMP recording is as clear as a bell and adds to the listener's enjoyment of this adventurous music.

And from a letter to the editor of Vibe (September 1993):

Thank you. You have finally given me a way to check out the black scene without being embarrassed, feared as a racist, or dumb. The writing in your magazine not only appealed to the fat-beat, fat-bass line, crazy-fat-lyric lover in me, but the college graduate (Morgan State University) in me was totally inspired as well.

Conclusions
The origins of phat are obscure and not made clearer by folk etymologies such as the "pretty hips and thighs" acronym theory and Geneva Smitherman's conjecture that it arose from "em-PHAT-ically."
The word appears (with the right spelling and in the relevant sense) in a 1963 discussion of "Negro argot" in Time magazine, but it also appears (with the wrong spelling and in the relevant sense) in a 1951 Newsweek article on teen slang—specifically, in the context of Utah teen slang. Chapman & Kipfer's 1995 edition of Dictionary of American Slang speculates that the teen slang use of fat in 1951 might itself be related to "US dialect" use fat in 1932 in the sense of "hot."
It's a pity that Chapman & Kipfer didn't identify the source of that recorded use or the particular dialect in which it occurred. Nevertheless, it seems quite possible that fat in the sense of "hot" in some unspecified U.S. dialect in 1932 found later expression in fat in the sense of "admirable or hip" in 1951 teen talk and again in phat in "Negro argot" in the sense of "worthy of approval" in 1963.
It does not appear from any of the sources that I consulted that phat (or fat) in a specifically musical context arose through a unique process of historical development that would distinguish it from the development of the general sense of phat (or fat) in the sense of "excellent, admirable, tasty, etc."
Answer: According to etymonline it was taken into hip-hop culture from street-slang for fat in a good or sexy sense. The rich and full bass meaning probably followed pretty naturally from there.

hip-hop slang, "great, excellent," 1992, originating perhaps in the
  late 1980s and meaning at first "sexiness in a woman." The word itself
  is presumably a variant of fat (q.v.) in one of its slang senses, with
  the kind of off-beat spelling preferred in street slang (compare
  boyz). The spelling is attested as far back as 1678, as an erroneous
  form of fat (a classical over-correction; see ph). This spelling is
  said by some to be an acronym, and supposed originals are offered:
  "pretty hot and tasty," or "pretty hips and thighs" among them, all
  unconvincing. These, too, may have been innovations given as
  explanations to women who felt insulted by the word.
Answer: The Merriam-Webster entry for phat says quite a lot about it.

phat adjective
slang
  highly attractive or gratifying : EXCELLENT
a phat beat moving through my body — Tara Roberts
More examples of phat in a sentence
That song has a phat beat
Fans agree that the rapper's latest CD is totally phat
First Known Use of phat
  1963, in the meaning defined above
History and Etymology for phat
  probably alteration of fat entry 1
Answer: phat OED
slang (orig. U.S., esp. among African Americans).

(a) Of a person, esp. a woman: sexy, attractive.  (b) Esp. of music:
  excellent, admirable; fashionable, 'cool'.Particularly associated with
  the hip-hop subculture.

As in:

1963   Time 2 Aug. 14   Negro argot... Mellow, phat, stone, boss.
  General adjectives of approval.


Possible scenarios for a periodic task that is run daily at 11:40 PM to process a data set available globally

Question: I'm testing an e-commerce website and there is a deviation that is occurring on a daily basis for a periodic task that runs daily at 11:40 PM.
In essence, what this task does that it picks all orders that are in a certain state (say state='X') and mark them as cancelled if the order reached state 'X' in the same day on which the task is triggered. Now in the database (mongo collection), the time on which an order reached state 'X' is saved as IST.
The deviation is there only for clients in Bangladesh that differs from Indian time by half an hour and my best guess is that the date changes. That said, the development team is pretty sure that this couldn't be the reason as they save the time in IST (something like 2018-11-14 17:36:59.439947) for all clients alike.
Comment: So what is your question?
Comment: What could be the possible scenarios to test this? What may the probable reasons for this deviation from the expected?
Answer: It sounds like you already have a scenario that isn't working, but the developers don't think that it's likely to be a problem.
My suggestion for your situation is to work closely with the developers to set up and run the scenario you've described, and have them run a debugger on it, stepping through each decision that it makes regarding what records it chooses, and how it processes them.
If it is consistently missing records from a certain timezone, then the developers should have no problem debugging the code and finding the reason.  This is a lot simpler than trying to guess what the scheduled task is doing.
If you're unable to recreate initially (based on the time of day the script is running being different), there should be a way for the developers to manipulate the time-source that the script is using, to believe that it is 11:40.
You may also wish to ask the developers how long the script typically takes to execute.  If it's over 20 minutes, and the script gets the current day each time, when it moves past 12:00 it will be a different day, and no records will have moved into state X on that day.
If you want any scenarios to help narrow it down, you may need to make it clearer what the exact problem is. Perhaps write it how you would write a bug report.  "Given When Then" format would be ideal.


Garbling in the wild (soft question)

Question: I am curious to know whether (Yao's) garbled circuits are actually deployed in practice. There has a lot of works on optimising garbled circuits (e.g., here and here) and I am interested in whether these simply of theoretical interest or with practical applications in mind. (A quick Google search did not yield much.)
Answer: Bolt labs uses Garbled circuits (from emp-toolkit) for channel management between the merchant and the customer. More on their blog post
In general, I don't think Garbled circuits is one of the most efficient MPC protocol out there for most tasks. So you're not likely to find many practical applications.
Answer: It is more likely to find applications of secret-sharing based multiparty computation instead of garbled circuit-based. In fact, of the former type several applications can be found such as the sugar beet in Denmark or the analysis of gender income inequality in Boston (sorry, I'm on mobile and it's hard to provide references).
MPC based on garbled circuits still needs to mature a bit more to be able to be competitive with respect to secret sharing based MPC in several different scenarios. Of course, it all depends on the setting, but some general disadvantages of garbled circuits are that they typically make use of a lot of bandwidth, and they also are typically restricted to binary computation, which restricts numerical applications. Their biggest advantage includes low round complexity, which is particularly useful in high-latency settings, but in low-latency scenarios, such as the ones in which some applications are being developed (small amount of servers connected by LAN or very good WAN), MPC based on secret sharing (perhaps plus a mix with GCs for certain non linear operations) is typically the best option.

Garbling in the wild (soft question)


how to make linear program simplex method use user provided feasible initial point

Question: In some linear program that is hard to find an initial feasible point, simplex method will fail in its phase one algorithm. But we can find such a feasible point through other method such as genetic algorithm: the problem is such solution may have many "noise" of small numbers for some coordinate. We want to use simplex to finish up such a solution that will eliminate those noise. But simplex method will not use the user provided x0. There is a proposed linear thansformation method to change the original problem so that 0 will be the original x0 and circumvent that restriction of simplex: https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/a/7699/4584. This method need additional work on reformate the problem. Is there more easy solution, such as modify a few lines of the code of simplexphaseone so that x0 will be used directly?
Answer: I don't understand how you got to this question because the phase 1 of the simplex algorithm is designed specifically to find a feasible point of the original problem from which phase 2 can start. There is no need to use a genetic algorithm or similar to find a better starting point.
But other than that, your question is very much specific to one particular implementation you appear to be using, but about which you tell us nothing. Clearly, if you implement the simplex method yourself, it is easy to just skip phase 1 and start phase 2 from somewhere. It's your code, you can implement it however you want. But if it's not a code you have written yourself you oftentimes do not have the luxury to just start it with phase 2. In that case, the easiest choice of course is to use it as is, i.e., including phase 1, since phase 1 is guaranteed to give you a starting point. If phase 1 fails, you need to explain to us

what implementation you are using
how phase 1 fails
what the error message means that you get from your code.

It may be that your phase 1 fails because there is no feasible point in your linear program and, consequently, no starting point for phase 2 can be found. Of course, in that case, that's a situation that you won't be able to correct by using a different method to choose a starting point for phase 2.
Comment: Usually theoretically valid theory is not quite true in practice, for a linear program with about 100,000 variables and around same number of constraints, interior-point or active-set method in linprog from Matlab tested not work. Same with open source CLP, GLPK, LP-SOLVE and etc. Linprogramming from Mathematica cannot utilize sparse matrix and will crash out of not enough memory. Phase one in simplex method of Matlab can surpass 1 million iteration without get a feasible solution, which is obviously exist since we can get one from GA-MPC.
Comment: ..., which is obviously exist sincewe can get one from GA-MPC and transform the original problem as mentioned in the link.
Comment: But then, again, I don't see what you will gain by starting from a different point. The algorithm used in phase-1 is exactly the same as in phase-2 -- it's just run on a different problem. In other words, if your implementation runs out of memory in phase-1, it is likely going to run out of memory during phase-2 as well, regardless from where you start it.
Comment: @Frank: If you are at an academic institution, and you are solving an LP with 100000 variables, you should be using CPLEX or Gurobi to decide you are resource-constrained computationally. Both solvers are top of the line, an order of magnitude faster than the competition, have the best heuristics, and will select simplex or interior-point methods automatically based on preprocessing the problem. If that doesn't work, then you still have other options besides a genetic algorithm.
Comment: Thank you Geoff, *http://www.aidic.it/cet/12/29/046.pdf* have a graph compared cplex and linprog.
Comment: @Frank: That comparison is poor because: 1) the linear program they use is far too small, 2) they list iterations without listing computational time, 3) the general writing and explanation is so poor, I can barely tell what they did, and 4) the problem looks almost like a pooling problem, which is not an LP.
Answer: If a user provides a basic feasible solution to simplex, I don't see why one couldn't start directly with Phase 2 simplex. (In fact, solvers that combine interior-point methods and simplex methods transition from the interior-point method to the simplex method by using a "cross-over" to find a basic feasible solution from the current interior-point iterate.)
That said, Wolfgang is absolutely right: Phase I either finds a basic feasible solution to the problem, or it fails, in which case your linear program is infeasible.
It could be that you mean that Phase I takes too long, in which case I'd recommend using an interior point method. In fact, if you find any feasible solution, you can use it as a starting point to an interior point method, whereas simplex can only use basic feasible solutions. I would not use a genetic algorithm to generate basic feasible solutions without using something like a cross-over procedure. I'm not even sure I would use a genetic algorithm to generate feasible solutions unless I had to; the technology for solving linear programs is so mature, even for problems containing millions to tens of millions of decision variables, that unless your problem were significantly larger than that, it would be difficult to see why you would want to use alternate methods to find feasible solutions because again:

the simplex method and interior-point methods each have robust initialization procedures that calculate valid initial points
the simplex method requires a basic feasible solution
interior-point methods merely require a feasible solution
Answer: Instead of modify simplexphaseone, as an alternative solution, we revised a few places of the repair operator of GA-MPC, so that it can finish up the solution by itself and get ride of those "noises". In our test case of TVaR constraint optimization problem, it can get solution as accurate as the linearized solution by linprog , but with running time 60% less than that of linprog.


Can I pay a "when this attacks, you may pay energy" cost multiple times?

Question: So say I have an Aetherstream Leopard and I have 10 energy counters to spend, when I attack with it can I spend all 10 energy counters to give it a +20/+0?
And same thing with an Aether Swooper, spend 10 energy counters when attacking to create 5 servos?
Answer: What you have there are examples of triggered abilities. They say "Whenever [this card] attacks, ..." and this means that the moment you declare them as attackers, the ability triggers once and only once, and it's put on the stack.
When the ability resolves you follow the text of the ability: you either pay the mentioned energy cost or you don't. You don't have the option of paying it several times in a single trigger because the ability doesn't say you do. And it doesn't trigger multiple times because "Whenever [this card] attacks, ..." is specifically a simplification of "When you declare [this creature] as an attacker, ...".
You would have been able to pay an arbitrary amount of energy if either of the following had been the case:

If the ability were an activated ability. Activated abilities look like "Cost: Effect". So if the swooper had had "[2 energy symbols]: Create a 1/1 artifact servo token", you could've created an army at any time, provided you had enough energy.
If the triggered ability had explicitly let you pay as much energy as you wanted. If the leopard had had "Whenever Aetherborn Leopard attacks, pay any amount of [energy symbol]. Aetherborn Leopard gets +2/+0 for each [energy symbol] spent this way" you could've pumped it to be as large as you wanted, provided you had enough energy.
Answer: In the examples you asked about, no, these are triggered abilities that trigger once the creature is declared as an attacker during your combat step.  Either you pay the energy to get the effect, or you don't.  That being said, if you use a card to untap the creature and gain an additional combat during the turn (Aggravated Assault for example), this will allow you to declare the creature as an attacker again under the new combat within the same turn and trigger the ability again.  Assuming you pay the energy for the leopard's triggered ability each combat in a single turn, the leopard would grow in power each combat as the affect lasts till end of turn.
However, there are energy abilities that are activated abilities.  Aethersquall Ancient, Aethertide Whale, Aetherwind Basker, Architect of the Untamed and Bristling Hydra are just a few that have "Pay {cost}:" where the cost is an activated ability that must be paid by energy and can be activated any number of times in a single turn so long as you can pay the cost.  So the Aetherwind Basker could get +10/+10 until end of turn if you had 10 energy.
Answer: No. The instructions you must follow when the ability resolves only give you to option of paying {E} or nothing at all.
In the unlikely event that the ability triggers twice in the same turn (or if the triggered ability is somehow copied), you are given the option to make the payment again. If you do, it will get +2/+0, and that would stack with the bonus from earlier instances of the ability.
Answer: Think about it this way (above answers are correct anyway). When you attack with it, you fulfill its condition of "when it attacks". at which point the card asks you "would you like to pay [E]?" to which you answer "I would like to pay [EEEEEE]" the card would decline as the questions is "would you like to pay [E]?" asked once. It is a yes or no question, not an open question.
You pay [E], it resolves the ability of you paying [E] and you move on with your life.
A different example is Longtusk Cub where the wording is completely different. Look at both and you see why you can do so in one and not the other.
Answer: No, abilities written as "When/Whenever X you may Y" are triggered abilities, and they can only be used when that trigger is met, in this case, "Whenever Aetherstream Leopard attacks, you may pay . If you do, it gets +2/+0 until end of turn." triggers when Aetherstream Leopard is declared as attacking, resolves and can't be used again until the leopard is declared as attacking again. If you get a second combat step on your turn, generally through abilities on some red cards (like Aggravated Assault) you can activate it again when the Leopard attacks again, and since the ability is until end of turn the second attack will still have the benefit from the first attack's boost.
If they wanted you to be able to pay more into it, they could have written the trigger like this:

Whenever Aetherstream Leopard attacks, you may pay any amount of . If you do, it gets +2/+0 until end of turn for each  spent this way.

This is closest to the original ability, being still triggered, but lets you decide how much energy to spend all at once, when the trigger resolves, letting you pump all ten energy you have into the trigger.
They could have also changed it from a triggered ability into an activated ability, but kept restrictions on when it can be used, like this:

: Aetherstream Leopard gets +2/+0 until end of turn. Use this ability only before blockers are declared and only while Aetherstream Leopard is attacking.

This makes it an activated ability with restricted timing, when it's attacking, and only before your opponent declares blockers (so no post block tricks), which is slightly later timing wise but as close as possible to the trigger, but allows you to repeat the process as long as you can afford the energy.


Hungarian naming convention: mixed type

Question: I'm using the HNC in this way for variables in PHP: $p_nId. p stands for parameter, so the scope of the variable, n for the type (though PHP is loosely typed, it gives some structure), so numeral here. Is there a type prefix in the HNC for a mixed type as well?
Comment: What does "mixed type" mean in this context? That the variable can be of *any* type?
Comment: @IMSoP Yes, does it actually mean something else? I indeed mean it can be of any type - sorry for any misunderstanding.
Comment: Ok, just seemed odd to use HN to indicate that you *don't* know the type. I'm also not sure there's a standard for such things, so the answer may be "if you want there to be"
Comment: @IMSoP okay, that seems legit. You can add it as an answer and I'll accept it unless someone comes up with a standard.
Answer: As far as I know, there is no standard set of abbreviations for Hungarian Notation, so you can just decide on your own (ensuring they are documented appropriately, of course!)
You may want to think carefully about what you want to indicate in your notation, however, rather than thinking in terms of base data types. For instance, an ID may be an integer, but $foo = $id +10 isn't likely to be a meaningful operation, so a HN which captures this distinction may be more useful.
Where you have a "mixed type" variable, it's likely that you actually know that it is one of a limited set of types - either a string or an array, say, but never a number or object. In that case, perhaps your HN should capture that information, rather than simply labeling the variable as "type unknown".
Edit: I just found a link to Charles Simonyi's original paper outlining the concepts, and skimming through I see that he does indeed suggest types should be related to their use, not their representation:

The test for type equivalence is simple: could the same set of operations be meaningfully applied to the quantities in questions? If so, the types are thought to be the same. If there are operations that apply to a quantity in exclusion of others, the type of the quantity is different.

Hungarian naming convention: mixed type


Trick to setup node fast - full sync

Question: I have a complete node up to date.  If I want a new independent node, I just rsync the complete .etherum dir to another machine, then delete the keysstore and create new account and I'm in businnes.  This is much much much faster than any kind of sync --fast or not. Am I missing anything here?
Answer: You can use geth export and import feature.
Export:
geth export <filename>
Import:
geth import <filename>
You have to install geth on the machine where you want to import the synced node data. For more detail you can visit this page.
Here is the link of answer with benchmarks link
Comment: yes, one can do it, but what for? Isn't exporting and re-importing rescanning the entire blockchain for validity (incl. transactions), and as such takes hours, if not days?
Comment: You are right, it may take time while importing. Its make sense lets try to copy and paste :)
Comment: Hi, thanks for this answer, I was aware of import and export, but my understanding was that it would take as long as a regular sync (as long as you have a very high bandwidth).  Because the import just saves the download that's all, it still replays the states and everything hence consuming a lot of CPU and time.  The good answer will come from a true benchmark.  I will not make en engagement, but will try to try both and compare elapsed time.

Trick to setup node fast - full sync


What do I have to do to get the Modernizr module to work in Drupal?

Question: I would like to use modernizr in drupal to take adcvantage of css media queries, box-shadow and border-radius. I have followed the installation instructions perfectly. I have installed the Drupal Modernizer module and created and properly placed my customized Modernizer build to include support for these three features. Does modernizr just pick up my already existing media queries and css3 styles automatically or do I have to do something else?
Answer: Modernizer detects feature support in browsers and adds css classes to the HTML element based on those features.  You use those css classes to target newer features to browsers that support them.  While it will add HTML5 support to older browsers via the HTML5Shiv, it will not add CSS3 support.
To add support for CSS3 features in older browsers, you'll need to add a polyfill  Modernizer has a method called Modernizr.load() that lets you load the polyfill only when you need it.
Answer: Modernizr does not add support for any HTML or CSS feature; it simply tests the browser's support for the feature. Of the three features you listed, I would strongly recommend against polyfills for border-radius and box-shadow, and only recommend a polyfill for CSS media queries. Both border-radius and box-shadow have natural fallback values: 0px/none.
If you'd like to know more about using Modernizr.load() within Drupal, I've written documentation for the module. My apologies, but the examples should be updated since they reference boxshadow and that is precisely what I just said to avoid :) However, the example code is still valid.
https://drupal.org/node/1913830
Here are some slides explaining all of the features of the Modernizr Drupal module, including the Test API, the Modernizr.load() API, and some thoughts regarding the future of how we discuss browser compatibility:
http://rupl.github.io/meet-modernizr/


Limitations on running Windows on latest Macbook Pro

Question: I'm strongly considering to buy latest Macbook Pro because of the hardware (i5 with Quad core) and design. I'm a Windows IT Pro and virtualization is a hard requirement for me, in addition to running Windows 10 most of the time. Would there be any limitations in terms of virtualization or other functionality in Windows I should be aware of or would it be just like buying any other high end computer?
Comment: Welcome to Ask Different! How will you be running Windows 10 on the MacBook? Natively or in a virtualised environment?
Comment: You're buying the latest MBP because of the *hardware and design*?  I **absolutely love** Apple but wouldn't touch the latest MBPs with a 10 foot pole because of their *hardware and design*.  Thermal issues, keyboard (failures/horrible typing experience), and dongle madness are just a few of the issues at the top of the list.
Comment: If you're going to use virtualization, there are no issues.  I use VirtualBox on an iMac with zerio issues.  Bootcamp can be finicky with drivers from time to time and IMO (very inconvenient to switch from one OS to the other). In the end, a Mac is a PC with a custom EFI.  I would do VM long before I do Bootcamp
Comment: i5 ? I thought the latest are sporting i7 or i9 processors...
Comment: According to Norwegian Apple Store website there is also new 13" models with i5, which I believe makes sense as it has quad core. In terms of the thermal problems they seem to be fixed. I don't necessarily need the newest edition but I want to buy one that has not been previously used. Most important is to know I can run BootCamp and have Hyper-V with full virtualization support.
Comment: @NimeshNeema Thanks! I wan't to run Windows 10 natively
Answer: You need macOS to download the drivers needed to install Windows 10. Once you have the drivers, you can install Windows 10 with or without macOS. Windows 10 will EFI boot and operate the same as any other new PC. There should be no limitations in terms of virtualization or other functionality in Windows.
Comment: This answer is not correct. user299397's answer is the correct one.
Comment: @Palmi: If you have knowledge that an answer is in error, then edit the answer. If the change is not accepted, then you can still leave a comment.
Comment: Sorry. Didn't realize that this is the procedure.
Answer: I don't think Hyper-V is supported unless something has changed.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/31049104#31049104


What should I do about the insect larvae found on my ceiling?

Question: Found 10 or so of these things on our ceiling this morning. I live in Central Oregon. Not sure what they are--is this an indication of worse things to come? Anything I need to inspect my house for, or shall I just throw them out?
Comment: Roger that. As I am doing more research, you are helping me lean towards moth larvae. We found an area in our pantry that had a fair amount of them hanging out. May be rid of them :)
Comment: Do a science experiment.  Many insects look similar at this stage.  Collect some and put them in a jar with a source of humidity (a piece of slightly damp paper towel), and some air holes.  When they turn into their adult form, you'll know what insect you're dealing with.  Then you'll have a clearer picture of why they're there and how to get rid of them and keep them out.
Comment: At a glance, they look like maggots. (perhaps they could be moth larvae). Maybe something died in the house recently. It's typical of rotting flesh or fibrous material. Is there any noticeable odor in the vicinity of where you are finding them? If you can inspect the area for a dead carcass or water damage and you find neither, then just keep your eyes out. Otherwise, you found your source.
Comment: those things only live a day or two in that form, and they need moisture to arrive at that form, so they won't be far from where they were hatched, and they are never single children...
Comment: Did you take the sample to a professional for evaluation?  The community is bright and well-intended, however, if the advice is wrong can you afford this?
Comment: @gatorback No, unfortunately I am on one of the low points of the roller coaster that is self employment, so I will have to ride this out. We did find that there was a fair amount of these in some grain ( as suggested in the answer below ), and were able to get rid of most of them. We have recently, however, had an influx of baby moths in the house, so we did miss some :)
Answer: That looks like the larvae stage of a pantry moth to me. Is it in or near your kitchen or some food storage? They can infest food like grain that is sitting in cabinets and you end up with many of them flying around your kitchen.
I think there are homemade traps you can make to keep their populations down in your kitchen. The real key is to identify what they're eating and address it - clean it up or get rid of it and try to make sure other foods nearby are well sealed so the moths can't move and expand.
Worlwide I think it is somewhat common to have these critters in bulk grain storage like a container of rice. You can try to remove them and rinse the food if you want to still use it and that'll probably be okay, but you should watch out for too many of them or other problems with the food like mold or excessive bug waste.
Comment: Check flour, corn meal, Bisquick etc for meal-worms and flour beetles. If you've got them, toss everything, and keep replacements in hermetically sealed (airtight, usually plastic) containers. That'll keep the problem from coming back if you buy some flour that happens to be contaminated.
Comment: Concur.  You need to go though your pantry, the sooner the better.  And figure out what they're in and clean or dispose.  Check everything else for seal.  Google "Indian Meal Moth" and the link above is good.


University Workload Model Design - Preparation time for Instruction and Assessment

Question: I work for a UoT (University of Technology) in SA as a curriculum development practitioner in the Health Science fields of study.
Our academic programmes are designed to run over a 30 academic week year. The minimum academic contact hours required for lecturing is 20 hours per week, excluding preparation of instructional materials, and the set up of formative assessment instruments and marking.
I want to get an idea from the colleagues on international level how they go about in determining a fair additional factor to calculate total T&L hours.
I noticed a 4hours for prep in one of the previous comments, but need more input here.
Comment: Why are you choosing to model the time required, rather than just asking people to report how much time they actually spend?
Comment: @DanielHatton makes a good point. Are you asking what other universities allocate, or what would be a "fair" allocation, because these are likely to be very different numbers.
Comment: Thanks for remark. I am asking what other universities allocate for the preparation of lectures, in other words: Contact time (n) + lecture preparation = n+?
Answer: Our workload allocation model allows 2 hours prep per taught contact session (lecture or practical - we don't really do seminars). So a 1 hour lecture would get a total allocation of 3 hours and a 3 hour practical would get 5 hours. Double if the class is being developed from scratch.
10 hours for the first dissertation/project student and 3 additional hours for each additional student.
We get no prep time for tutorials.
We are then given 20 minutes per essay per student and 10 minutes per short answer per student for marking.
Comment: I don't think so. They are not attached to any content module, and we have the same 4-6 students in our tutor group for the whole 4 years of their degree. They are generally focused on pastoral support, helping students learn how to navigate the university experience. We also set and provide feedback on course work design to teach students transferable academic skills: how to write an essay, how to draw a figure, how to give individual and group presentations, how to fill in a job application form, how to apply for a PhD etc.
Comment: 'we don't really do seminars'  Are you sure your "tutorials" are not, in fact, seminars by the [official HESA definition](https://www.hesa.ac.uk/collection/c16061/calculations_methods)?
Comment: Yep, OK, those really are HESA-definition tutorials.
Comment: Actual time to prep for an hour lecture on a new course can (and often does) far exceed the 5 hours (6 for doubling 3 minus the actual hour itself)...
Comment: Oh, absolutely. These times are a complete fiction. I reckon i spend around 6 hours on an old lecture and more like 16-24 on a new one.


Where can I learn more about PyPy's translation function?

Question: I've been having a hard time trying to understand PyPy's translation.  It looks like something absolutely revolutionary from simply reading the description, however I'm hard-pressed to find good documentation on actually translating a real world piece of code to something such as LLVM.  Does such a thing exist?  The official PyPy documentation on it just skims over the functionality, rather than providing anything I can try out myself.
Answer: This document seems to go into quite a bit of detail (and I think a complete description is out of scope for a stackoverflow answer):

http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/translation.html

The general idea of translating from one language to another isn't particularly revolutionary, but it has only recently been gaining popularity / applicability in "real-world" applications.  GWT does this with Java (generating Javascript) and there is a library for translating Haskell into various other languages as well (called YHC)
Comment: Link is dead (PyPy moved). Is this the same doc? http://pypy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/translation.html
Comment: @leewangzhong It probably is, but I'm afraid I'm not really sure what the original link looked like at this point.
Comment: Oh yeah, we have ways to find out. https://web.archive.org/web/20111227090444/http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/translation.html . Worth an update to your answer?
Answer: If you want some hand-on examples, PyPy's Getting Started document has a section titled "Trying out the translator".
Answer: PyPy translator is in general, not intended for more public use. We use it for translating
our own python interpreter (including JIT and GCs, both written in RPython, this restricted
subset of Python). The idea is that with good JIT and GC, you'll be able to speedups even
without knowing or using PyPy's translation toolchain (and more importantly, without
restricting yourself to RPython).
Cheers,
fijal
Answer: Are you looking for Python specific translation, or just the general "how do you compile some code to bytecode"? If the latter is your case, check the LLVM tutorial. I especially find chapter two, which teaches you to write a compiler for your own language, interesting.
Answer:
It looks like something absolutely revolutionary from simply reading the description,

As far as I know, PyPy is novel in the sense that it is the first system expressly designed for implementing languages.  Other tools exist to help with much of the very front end, such as parser generators, or for the very back end, such as code generation, but not much existed for connecting the two.


Can I play Gta 5 missions any time during the day?

Question: I know when you start a GTA mission sometimes it pauses and makes it a new time of day. But can you do some missions any time during the day? Personally I like the light of day to main missions and night time to do side missions. BUT if GTA makes a mission a certain time of day I could care less when to start a mission. So do GTA missions have a set time that they start, like if I start a mission will it pause and switch to a certain time?
Comment: Why'd this get a -1? XD
Answer: Yes a Story Mission changes the time, because some missions have a better feeling at a diffrent time.
But Side Missions are synchron with the time you are playing when you start the side mission.
Answer: As far as I know. You can't. Unless your on PC and have a trainer that can change time of day.


What's the actual physics of diffusion filters?

Question: Recently, I purchased a Tiffen Black Pro Mist which adds halation to highlights via diffusion. I read online that diffusion filters do not add data as the entirety of the effect can be recreated in post with more flexibility. It appears that the size of the halation is proportional to the intensity of the light source. What's the actual physics of diffusion filters? Thanks in advance.
Answer:
I read online that diffusion filters do not add data as the entirety of the effect can be recreated in post with more flexibility.

Yes and no.  But in practice mostly no.
Yes, in principle, the effect of a diffusion filter is equivalent to applying some kind of blur to the image in post-processing — most typically gaussian blur, although other kinds of point spread functions can also be achieved with suitable filter design.  However, this equivalence only holds if the conversion of light hitting the camera sensor into digital image data is perfectly linear (and there are no other non-linear processing steps applied in between).  And in practice it pretty much never is.
The most relevant (and least avoidable) non-linear effect here is overexposure clipping: if too much light hits a particular pixel on the sensor, it saturates and cannot register any more.  In practice, what this does is cause the color of all sufficiently bright spots in the image to be recorded as 100% white, regardless of how bright they actually are or what their actual color is.
In practice, some of the light from very bright spots always spills over into surrounding pixels because your camera optics are never perfect and always cause some small amount of diffusion.  This creates a characteristic glow or halo effect around very bright spots.  While this glow is a result of imperfections in the imaging process, in photography it's actually a desirable feature, as it makes bright highlights "look bright" and also reveals their color to the viewer.
Adding a diffusion filter in front of your lens is one way of making this glow effect even stronger, causing bright lights to "pop out" even more as their light spills more strongly onto neighboring pixels.  If you try to emulate this effect by applying blur in post-processing, the problem you'll run into is that the very spots of your image where you'd most want this effect to apply to are the bright points that will be clipped to white in the digital image data.  Thus, fake diffusion glow done in post-processing will generally be both weaker and less saturated than what can be achieved with a real optical diffusion filter.  And the brighter the highlight, the bigger the difference will be.

In principle, you could try to minimize the difference by reducing exposure until even the brightest pixels in your image won't clip at all — basically following a hardline ETTR approach.  The problem here is that if you're shooting a scene with bright point light sources (which is exactly the kind of scene where you'd want extra diffusion), reducing exposure until they no longer clip at all can leave the rest of the scene nearly pitch black — so dark that even a RAW image from a high-quality sensor won't have enough shadow detail to yield a decent image quality after bringing the brightness up (after blurring) in postprocessing.
So, in practice, some amount of highlight clipping is all but unavoidable with scenes like this.  And then in becomes important to use real physical filters or other physical techniques for any effects (like diffusion or starbursts) that primarily affect the bright spots that the sensor will clip.
Ps. What if you're shooting film instead of digital?  Well, film saturation is intrinsically non-linear.  While film doesn't have a sharp clipping threshold like a digital sensor does, it still mutes bright highlights — there's still no way to go beyond 100% white (or 100% black in a negative).  So while you can certainly apply blur to a film photo in postprocessing (e.g. during printing), it still won't produce the same kind of extended and colorful halos around small bright points of light as a diffusion filter on the camera would.
Comment: It might be useful to add as an example a scene with multiple bright lights that would exceed the saturation limit by different amounts.  If one is using a diffusion filter, the halos would be of different sizes based upon brightness.  By contrast, in the absence of diffusion, the lights would appear essentially identical meaning that it would be impossible to accurately create the diffusion effect in post unless one has some other means of knowing how bright the different lights were.
Comment: This is the best answer but it might be informative to add a bit on HDR and how you can use both low exposure that won't oversaturate and exposure sufficient for everything else not to be black.
Answer: Diffusion filters cause a portion of the light to refract/bend by creating some kind of obstruction. The amount (percentage) of the light that is scattered is indicated by the filter's strength rating. And because it is a relative amount of scattered light, stronger light sources will show more halation/bloom.
There are different ways of causing the effect such as using mesh/screen as the filter, embedding/coating the filter with particulates, etching the filter, etc. In the case of the Tiffen filters it appears that they are using aberrations... kind of like micro-lenses.
image from Tiffen
Comment: Good explanation. I quibble with the word "obstruction" though. Perhaps more "transition", as the micro-lenses of the Tiffen filter don't really obstruct. They just are a transition edge where the light takes a different propagation path.
Comment: @scottbb, others use obstructions (etched lines, etc)... one could consider the boundaries of the micro lenses as lines/obstructions.


English version of a Cuban expression

Question: There is a Cuban phrase that means - literally- I HAVE MONEY EVEN TO MAKE DESSERT WITH IT, or something like that. I guess it's like having too much of something. Is there an English expression for this?
Comment: A sheer guess would be something along the lines of "money to burn", but we would need more context to figure that out. Esteban, see http://ell.stackexchange.com/q/2725/748 for another example of asking for a phrase translation. It may give you some ideas for how to better frame your question.
Comment: Hi Esteban Alvarez. I have edited the question, as asking for a "translation" didn't seem accurate. Is this what you meant?
Comment: @Esteban: I don't really understand how that Cuban phrase works. Do you mean "dessert" as in *sweet course / pudding / afters*? I can't see how you could *literally* use money to make something nice to eat. Is there something "lost in translation" there?
Comment: I think he means it's a literal translation.
Comment: @nxx: I know *that!* (OP says so). I'm asking how it can work in the (Spanish?) original, since I can't see any semantic connection between money and *even* having enough to make dessert (with it?).
Comment: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/42010208997768818/
Answer: It's not completely clear to me what exactly OP's Cuban phrase is supposed to mean, but I'm going to hazard a guess and say it might be the equivalent of the common English phrase...

He's got money to burn

Cambridge Dictionaries define this in that link as to spend a lot of money on things that are not necessary, but I think that implication of actually spending money doesn't need to be present. It might be possible to say, for example,

He's so mean he won't even tip the postman at Christmas, but I know he's got money to burn.

(i.e. - it can just mean he has a lot of money, even if he doesn't often spend much)

In case it's not obvious, the figurative allusion is to the idea that one could be so rich he didn't even care about using money to buy coal for the fire - he could just burn banknotes to keep warm. It's the same idea in this stereotypical image of an ostentatiously wealthy man...

As @nxx's answer suggests, there are a very large number of idiomatic expressions in English for having enough/a lot/too much of something - most of which can be used for a wide range of different (good, bad, or neutral) things. As money to burn is so common, "creative variations" do sometimes occur...

I only smoke after sex, but I bought my full duty-free allowance when I came back from holiday abroad last month, so I've got cigarettes to burn.

...but such "extensions" are rare, and very rarely used of anything that couldn't be literally burned.
Answer: There are a number of English expressions that I think are appropriate:
to have "something coming out of your ears",
which means

to have more of something than you want or need

eg, I have money coming out (of) my ears.
to have something "in spades":

in large amounts or to a very great degree

eg, I have money in spades.
to have "more than I can shake a stick at"

a lot of

eg, I have more money than I can shake a stick at.
These can all be used for things other than money, too, and all imply having an excess. So you are lucky if these apply to you!

English version of a Cuban expression


Sharepoint 2010 Changing Width of List Column

Question: So I am using an Issue List (the premade template) on SP2010 and two of the columns I have activated for the default view are 'Created By' and 'Modified By', in addition to the 4 or so other columns.  My organization uses very long Display Names in Active Directory so the names in these two columns make them very long when items are added to the list.  I have to use an Issue List because of the 'send email when item is Assigned To someone' feature.
My goal is to narrow the 'Created By' and 'Modified By' columns because the names are so long that they take up a ton of space without wrapping down to the second line making the other columns super narrow and making the list look terrible.  I use Designer and have tried multiple fixes I've found online that involve removing the 'nowrap=nowrap' code and adding length, overflow, and white-space code to the columns.  The steps I have taken can be found here: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/change-width-columns-sharepoint-47331.html, as well as other places online including some threads on this forum.
My problem is that making these changes does make the columns narrower on my site.... when it contains no items.  As soon as I add an item, the two columns stretch out with my super long Display Name taking up one line and therefore smushing all the other columns and making their text wrap down to like 10 lines in some cases.  Whats weird is that if I open up Designer after I add an item to the list- the site actually looks correct in Designer with my Display Name wrapped over 3 or 4 lines and the columns being as narrow as they're supposed to be- but this doesn't reflect on the actual site.
Is there anyway I can get these columns narrower and keep them that way or make my Display Names wrap so they dont take up so much space horizontally.  Am I missing something here?  Is this not possible because of the type of columns they are?  Any help is much appreciated.  Thanks.
Answer: Add the following style within the page using Content Editor webpart...
<code><style type="text/css">
.ms-vh, .ms-vh2-nofilter, .ms-vh2-nograd, .ms-vh2, .ms-vb
{
    white-space: normal;
}
</style>
</code>
I got the information from Ryan's post.


Is it safe to install CCleaner now?

Question: About 4 or 5 weeks ago, i read a article on THN(the hacker news) that the ccleaner servers were hacked to distribute malware and as a result millions of computers were affected who had downloaded and installed ccleaner in month of August. I have also ccleaner installed on my older pc which i had downloaded before August and my pc is not infected.But I buyed a new laptop now, then it will be safe to install ccleaner now?
Comment: Yes it is safe to install now.
Comment: You may want to reconsider the actual use of ccleaner. Logs and cache don't just 'accumulate', they are either there for a good reason (cache) or are automatically wiped under disk pressure/rollover (logs).
Comment: @Sirens as you said logs and cache are there for a good reason, then how the performance of a machine can be enhanced by wiping this out? As most people people thinks (including me) that ccleaner can make our pc even faster.
Comment: @daya It doesn't -- purely placebo. Most likely it'll just make things worse since without cache the device has to rebuild the caches. There are some unique, troubleshooting instances where it'll make sense to clear caches (if for example you see CPU pinned at 100 by a certain system process) otherwise it does worse than nothing. Just because most people think it does something doesn't mean it actually does anything
Comment: @Sirens thanks for your explanation, the conclusion is we don't really need ccleaner, am I right?
Comment: @daya Right. Windows has been designed to handle this on its own.
Answer:
Is it safe to install ...

It is nearly impossible to be sure that some software is safe to install. It can always contain a back door, have bugs in it which might be exploitable from a remote system or similar.
All one can say that the specific problem with CCleaner was fixed according to Avast and that currently no other problems are publicly known with this software. If you consider this safe enough is up to you.

Is it safe to install CCleaner now?


Please help with this issue with my plant!

Question: My curry leaf plant which is potted in a 10 inch container with store bought potting mix has leaves which have got brown on the edges and dry. Also, the newest branch has very light coloured leaves. The plant is in Delhi, India and is getting 3 hours of hot sunlight and temperature is 30~41 degrees celsius. Please help diagnose the issue with my plant. I have posted several times earlier but have got no response.
Answer: It looks like it might not be getting enough sunlight, which makes sense because 3 hours of sun isn't very much for a part/full sun plant like a curry tree. Also the wilty leaf edges make me wonder if it's getting enough water, the soil certainly looks dry.
Comment: The soil is moist at the surface. One day I kept it in full sunlight for 7 hours and then I am seeing this, and it was not hardened off. So how should I proceed?
Answer: I'm not an expert on curry leaf plants, but it looks like the problem is that it needs fertilizer to me (especially nitrogen), due to the yellowing leaves.


Will an assembly language book for intel x86 processor be compatible with amd processors?

Question: I'm wanting to get an assembly book to learn assembly, and was wandering if i get a book for intel x86 processor will there be any problems assembling the code on an amd processor?
Comment: Just want to add a link to this book. I quite like it: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Intel-Assembly-Language-Programming/dp/1478119209
Comment: http://stackoverflow.com/q/1109569
Answer: For the most part you shouldn't notice any problems at all. Any introductory text will be using very common mnemonics (commands) and macros. Intel tried to introduce a 64-bit processor, IA-64 Itanium, that broke compatibility with the 8086 family of processors. AMD stepped up and designed a 64 bit processor that continued to work with older programming. Obvoiusly, this is what ended up being popular and Intel had to drop IA-64 and make something to work like AMD's.(Duntemann 106-107)
So now both AMD and Intel work from a set of instructions that work almost exactly the same. Little things here and there, but because the market demands it there are little differences to us the programmers. Anything you'll be learning will address when a particular mnemonic came along and which models it begins working on, for all but the latest and most obscure stuff you probably won't need for awhile anyway.
I would highly recommend Jeff Duntemann's Step by Step Assembly language. I learned from this originally 15 years ago. I was going to relearn it, and bought some other book... It just didn't work. So I found that Duntemann had released a new edition in 2009. It does a quick cover of the differences with some aspects of x86_64 but focuses on 32 bit. It really a back to front programming guide with more than just assembly. Editing, good commenting, linking, how the cpu moves data, base number counting, etc.
His website.
http://duntemann.com/assembly.html
Amazon link for the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Assembly-Language-Step---Step-Programming/dp/0470497025/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367027229&sr=8-1&keywords=jeff+duntemann
Comment: You are right, so am I. Sorry, the answer is confusing. "No, there will be no problems." I'll edit it to reflect that.
Answer: I think it will be compatible(but still depends on what AMD you are using), as cited in Wiki:

x86 assembly language is a family of backward-compatible assembly
  languages, which provide some level of compatibility all the way back
  to the Intel 8008. x86 assembly languages are used to produce object
  code for the x86 class of processors, which includes Intel's Core
  series and AMD's Phenom and Phenom II series.
Comment: @Steve314: regarding the 64-bit being easier part ... unfortunately no. Some of the high/low-byte quirks came back in 64-bit; for example, unlike AH ... DH, the bits 8..15 of R8 - R15 can't be used for byte instructions. Having more registers to juggle with will also require more mental capacity to maintain labels.
Comment: Maybe also worth mentioning - writing in assembler got easier in 32 bit relative to 16 bit (and I don't just mean dropping segmented addressing), and probably continued getting easier in 64 bit. The original 16-bit x86 was a little awkward because particular registers had particular purposes in mind, so there was some irregularity in which instructions supported which addressing modes and which registers. The scheme was designed for hand-written assembler, which tends to follow register-usage patterns quite strongly, but that still means you have to know the expected patterns.
Comment: As I understand it, because optimising compilers can keep track of what all the registers are being used for without such conventions, and can optimise better with more freedom of choice, more recent versions are more regular. The register names are now mostly historic - the base and index registers are now mostly interchangeable and mostly general purpose.
Answer: You will mostly have the same instructions.
There is an instruction named "CPUID" which lets you among other things identify the processor. Obviously it will give different results on AMD and Intel CPUs. And once you know which processor you have, you need to follow the instructions in AMD and Intel manuals separately to get more information about the processor.
Each processor has a different set of features (for example MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3 and so on), and you use the CPUID instruction to find what features are available. Once a feature is available, it is the same on all processors. Some instructions were only ever available on one processor; those instructions are usually not used by anybody.


Why is the Proton Synchrotron Booster at four levels?

Question: I wonder what the benefits of having a cyclotron at 4 levels are. Why do they split the proton beam into 4 bunches, accelerate them and merge them into one before the next accelerator?
Answer: The most stringent requirements for the Proton Synchrotron Booster (PSB) come from the intensity side. In particular it needs to fill the Proton Synchrotron (PS) with as many particle as possible wasting as little time as possible. This is because as the beam coasts at injection energy in the partially filled PS, it suffers a lot from collective effects, especially space charge, giving some intensity loss.
At the time of the design study, three design options were identified for the PSB: a Rapid Cycling Synchrotron (RCS), two interlaced rings at $600~$MeV (Twin Accelerator Ring Transfer (TART)) or a system of four superposed rings at $800~$MeV [1]. Eventually the choice was made for the latter, I guess following estimates of cost and risk.
Having a machine made up of four (vertically-stacked) rings allows delivering four time more particles per unit time, being de facto four machines which simultaneously fill up the PS. With some clever magnet design, combining together the four rings, quite a lot of equipment cost can be saved while maintaining a very compact machine.
Note that the next PSB upgrade, foreseen by the LHC Injector Upgrade (LIU) and being deployed right now, consists in increasing its max energy. This will in turn allow for an increase of the PS injection energy, mitigating the nasty effects discussed above and, in the end, providing more intensity for the luminosity upgrade of the LHC.


Why does Java have a "NullPointerException" when there are no pointers in Java?

Question: Why do I get an exception called NullPointerException if in Java there is no such concept as a pointer?
Comment: Because it *should* have been called `NullReferenceException`, but someone wasn't thinking straight.
Comment: This. One of my pet Java peeves.
Comment: @tzaman +1 the longer I'm studying Java the more I dislike it for inconsistency and self contradiction.
Comment: possible duplicate of [Java: Why aren't NullPointerExceptions called NullReferenceExceptions?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/101072/java-why-arent-nullpointerexceptions-called-nullreferenceexceptions)
Comment: because pointer and reference is the same thing.
Comment: No, it is not the same
Comment: Just wait till you get into the _wonderful_ world of Java generics. __
Comment: @tzaman Are they not suppose to be equivalent of C++ templates?
Comment: What they're _supposed to be_ and what they _are_ are two vastly different things. Read about Type Erasure, you'll see.
Comment: probably because the exception was created when java was still trying to almost be be c++... oh wait
Comment: @Justin I'm glad they gave up.
Answer: There are no general purpose pointers in Java, that you can easily manipulate by adding and subtracting arbitrary values like in C. This can lead to all sorts of problems for those unused to them.
However, Java still needs to distinguish between an object and "no object". It's just the name of the exception that means you're trying to use an object reference that doesn't have a backing object behind it.
You could just as easily call it NoObjectException or DereferenceException, or one of a myriad of other names to minimise the possibility that people would think Java had general purpose pointers.
But NullPointerException is what the language creators opted for, probably because they were used to coding in C and/or C++.
Comment: Because const would define a constant. Final is slightly different to the const from C++ inasmuch as you can delay setting the final and, once set, it can't be changed. It seems to me that final is _exactly_ the right term. Once you set it, bang, that's the final value it's allowed to have.
Comment: If only null would have been included in the type system :-/
Comment: @paxidiablo so why on earth they invented final instead of using const. And if you think about it final isn't that descriptive as const is.
Comment: Java is object-oriented (or so I have been told). So why does it need to distinguish between an object and "no object"? In an object-oriented system, a "null pointer/reference" would be equivalent to a NullObject or an UndefinedObject. This object would, most probably, not understand most of the messages sent to it and trigger an error that way, but there's no need for a "NullPointerException". The real reason is the last sentence of the answer. 'Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.' (Alan Kay)
Answer: Yes this is one of the first annoying things I learned when learning Java LOL.
It really should be called NullReferenceException, NoObjectException or DereferenceException as paxdiablo mentioned.
References don't even have to represented internally as pointers and you shouldn't have to care.
"Most VMs including Sun's use handles, not pointers. A handle is a pointer to a pointer so who knows how they came up with using that?"
Oh Microsoft's Java VM actually does use pointers rather than handles so go figure.
Comment: But a reference is nothing but an immutable pointer, at least conceptually, hence ....
Answer: Technically thats correct, it really should be called NullReferenceException
Comment: Reference is the same as pointer. Saying that one synonym must be used but not the other is nonsense.
Answer: Because internally object variables are pointers to those objects. However, you don't get the pointer value except by calling System.identityHashCode(object) on most JVM implementations, which returns the pointer to the object.
EDIT: You are almost all right, I was almost wrong: identityHashCode is much more complex than returning just a pointer. I just took a look at the JVM source, and they implented a few hashcode generators. However, at least in the case where hashCode (a constant? i don't know) is a constant, they return the object pointer. Here is their source for the curious:
static inline intptr_t get_next_hash(Thread * Self, oop obj) {
  intptr_t value = 0 ;
  if (hashCode == 0) {
     // This form uses an unguarded global Park-Miller RNG,
     // so it's possible for two threads to race and generate the same RNG.
     // On MP system we'll have lots of RW access to a global, so the
     // mechanism induces lots of coherency traffic.
     value = os::random() ;
  } else
  if (hashCode == 1) {
     // This variation has the property of being stable (idempotent)
     // between STW operations.  This can be useful in some of the 1-0
     // synchronization schemes.
     intptr_t addrBits = intptr_t(obj) >> 3 ;
     value = addrBits ^ (addrBits >> 5) ^ GVars.stwRandom ;
  } else
  if (hashCode == 2) {
     value = 1 ;            // for sensitivity testing
  } else
  if (hashCode == 3) {
     value = ++GVars.hcSequence ;
  } else
  if (hashCode == 4) {
     value = intptr_t(obj) ;
  } else {
     // Marsaglia's xor-shift scheme with thread-specific state
     // This is probably the best overall implementation -- we'll
     // likely make this the default in future releases.
     unsigned t = Self->_hashStateX ;
     t ^= (t << 11) ;
     Self->_hashStateX = Self->_hashStateY ;
     Self->_hashStateY = Self->_hashStateZ ;
     Self->_hashStateZ = Self->_hashStateW ;
     unsigned v = Self->_hashStateW ;
     v = (v ^ (v >> 19)) ^ (t ^ (t >> 8)) ;
     Self->_hashStateW = v ;
     value = v ;
  }

  value &= markOopDesc::hash_mask;
  if (value == 0) value = 0xBAD ;
  assert (value != markOopDesc::no_hash, "invariant") ;
  TEVENT (hashCode: GENERATE) ;
  return value;
}

Comment: @Knowing it returns an int.   But it is _not_ a pointer.  It's a ... (wait for it) ... hashcode.  Which in some JVMs is a function of the address, but it doesn't have to be.  The behavior isn't specified by the JLS.

And incidentally, because it's a hashcode, two objects can have identical idenityHashCode() values.

I'm not going to downvote, but the last part of Daniel's answer is incorrect: it is wrong on more than one level to say that identityHashCode values are pointers.
Comment: @Daniel just out of curiuosity, and in what variable type you store this pointer?
Comment: The pointer itself is an int. So on 64bit systems, the hash might be something slightly different (like the 4 upper bytes xord to the 4 lower bytes of the address).
Comment: @Daniel, references cannot be pointers internally, because pointer and reference is the same thing. They are synonyms.
Comment: @Val: On some systems, references are pointers which are identified in metadata so that if the GC freezes a program's execution and examines the call stack, it can determine where every live pointer/reference to an unpinned object is located.  While the program is frozen, the GC can copy an object to a new location and replace every pointer to it with a pointer to the new copy; some clever algorithms can make this surprisingly cheap to do.  An "ordinary" pointers can only exist to an object if it's pinned; the GC can't tell where all ordinary pointers are, but it doesn't need to.
Answer: Because all the variables(on RHS of assignment) you declare are references to some objects in heap space. If a reference is not pointing any where then on accessing of that variable throws nullpointerexception.
Answer: If you have an object with let's say a list as an attribute and you don't explicitly allocate space for it, the running program will throw you that error.
Look into a debugger (Eclipse or what not) to see what your objects holds when you don't initialize them properly and then things are going to be pretty clear.
I think it was done so that there is a notion between object that have space in the memory and those that don't.


Mirror desktop items on two monitors

Question: I don't want to mirror my monitors but I would like the files in ~/Desktop to display on both. Right now they only display on my primary monitor. Is it possible?
Answer: You can't make items appear twice on what is essentially the same desktop, but you can view the contents of your desktop as a folder.
The simplest method using default settings is to open a new folder in Finder,  Cmd ⌘   N  , then Desktop should be one of the Favourites on the Sidebar.

Mirror desktop items on two monitors


FileNotFoundException on opening FileOutputStream on same file read using java nio

Question: I have a text editor that uses code almost identical to the below for reading and writing. When I open small files for editting, I always get this error when I try to save them again. The really interesting thing though is that my text editor works fine for files with about 600 bytes or more (seems to vary each time), behaviour that I haven't been able to replicate here.
My current workaround is to check for file size < 1024 bytes, and use java.io if that's the case.
import java.io.*;
import java.nio.*;
import java.nio.channels.*;
import java.nio.charset.*;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String text = null;
        try {
            FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream("test.txt");
            FileChannel ifc = fis.getChannel();
            CharBuffer cb = Charset.forName("ISO-8859-15").newDecoder().
                    decode(ifc.map(FileChannel.MapMode.READ_ONLY, 0,
                    (int) ifc.size()));
            text = cb.toString();
            ifc.close();
            fis.close();
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();
        }

        try {
            FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("test.txt");
            OutputStreamWriter osw = new OutputStreamWriter(
                    fos, "ISO-8859-15");
            osw.write(text);
            osw.close();
            fos.close();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

For the above code, I get this error for various sizes of test.txt from 4 bytes to 10kb:
java.io.FileNotFoundException: test.txt (The requested operation cannot be perfo
rmed on a file with a user-mapped section open)
        at java.io.FileOutputStream.open(Native Method)
        at java.io.FileOutputStream.<init>(Unknown Source)
        at java.io.FileOutputStream.<init>(Unknown Source)
        at Test.main(Test.java:23)

Can anyone explain what I'm doing wrong and how I can get this to work while still reading with nio?
Answer: Stephen C told you to unmap the buffer.
However, here is a link to STILL OPEN ( from 2002 ) request for MappedBybeBuffer.unmap method.
It has a few workarounds suggested, so you may try them.
Answer: You need to explicitly unmap the region that you mapped with the FileChannel.map(...) call.
The Javadoc for map(...) says this:

A mapping, once established, is not dependent upon the file channel that was used to create it. Closing the channel, in particular, has no effect upon the validity of the mapping.


Interpretation of $\langle \phi | A | \psi \rangle$

Question: If the current state of some quantum system is $| \psi \rangle$, what is the physical interpretation of
$$
\langle \phi | A | \psi \rangle
$$
where $|\phi\rangle$ is some other -maybe the same- quantum state, and $A$ is a generic self-adjoint operator?
Answer: The matrix element $\langle \phi | A | \psi \rangle$ can have a lot of meanings depending on context.

If $A$ is self-adjoint and $|\phi \rangle = |\psi \rangle$, then it is the expectation value of $A$.
If $A$ is unitary, it can be a time evolution operator, so $A|\psi\rangle$ is what $|\psi \rangle$ evolves into. Then the matrix element tells us how much the final state is like $|\phi\rangle$.
If $A$ is self-adjoint and the vectors are general, it doesn't really have a general meaning, except in some special cases. For example, suppose the Hamiltonian has a term proportional to $A$. Then there will be a piece of the time evolution that looks like $e^{-iAt}$, in which case the matrix element tells us about the transition rate from $|\psi\rangle$ to $|\phi\rangle$ (see Fermi's golden rule).
Answer: Given a system in a quantum state $|\psi\rangle$, we act on it with the operator $A$ (this could mean many different things depending on what the operator $A$ is) which leaves the system in the state $A | \psi \rangle$. The quantity $| \langle \phi| A | \psi \rangle |^2$ then gives the probability that the system is in the state $|\phi\rangle$ after the action of $A$.
For example, if $A = e^{- i H t}$ where $H$ is the Hamiltonian, then acting on a system with $A$ simply means allowing it to evolve by a time $t$.


Will OS linked to your microsoft account to transfer to another pc, be saved to cloud

Question: Hi I did some research and found out that I could link my microsoft account so that when I make drastic changes to my pc, I can still reinstall the OS i have (Windows 10 pro). In the sites of people doing this, they all have changed motherboards, CPU, but didn't change their hdd or sdd. Here's my problem. I wanted to know if the OS linked to my account become saved to cloud so that even if I even change my whole pc entirely, If I link my account, I can reinstall OS on that new pc. I have this problem because I am changing my motherboard,CPU,RAM,graphics card, and hdd/sdd. Please ask any questions.
Comment: No; It doesn't;
Comment: @Ramhound do you have any proofs that it won't work after changing hardvare?
Answer: License is typically locked to either CPU/Bios, HDD (serial number) or NIC Mac address.
Hard to say if you can choose which it uses.
You can try emailing MS Support and see if they can lock as needed.
If it's a purchased license, you should be able to reinstall using the Install key.
Answer: I've made a linkage to Microsoft account and it work's nicely.
I can not make a screenshot right now from that PC but it's linked.
According to docs it must work on new PC with same account. According to this instruction.
Furthermore, I've just tested my MS account and found interesting fact. I've recently upgraded my PC. I've changed CPU, RAM count and Graphics card. On first I only changed CPU. Now Microsoft thinks I have two PC. But it didn't detect one with new CPU and old Graphis.


How do you transfer MCPE worlds to PC?

Question: I have a world that I would like to put on my PC for backup reasons. My tablet is a Kindle Fire and my PC runs Windows 10. How might I go about accomplishing this task?
Comment: Hello, and welcome to Arqade! Just some advice (I may be wrong), but I am *pretty* sure MCPE and Java Edition are incompatable, since one is written in C++ and the other in Java.
Comment: They are two different games. You could just as well ask to convert Terraria maps into Roblox maps. Sure, there might be a tool out there that tries its best, but there aren't really compatible.
Comment: If what you want is just a file that you could restore to your Kindle, then it is OK to copy the save file to your computer. However, you cannot run the game using that world, as the Java edition is different and not compatible with the PE version. However, you can download an emulator app that supports games like Minecraft PE on your computer. One of them, Bluestacks, can be found [here](https://www.bluestacks.com/).
Comment: Are you using the Java or Windows 10 version of the game? If the former, then yes, it is not possible. If the latter, you can export the world and run the file on your computer to import it into the Win10 version.
Answer: If you're referring to making a backup on your PC. You can simply upload the world from the "games" folder. I recommend ES File Explorer for this one as it shows the icon of the apps. Also, the "games" folder is located OUTSIDE the Android folder. The world name would be random. Just try to find the world that you want to upload by opening the world folder and looking at it's "world_icon.jpeg" file. Upload that world to Google Drive and download it from your computer. Simple as that!
Comment: NOTE: There are multiple folders in the "games" folder. Open the Minecraftworlds folder and follow the world icon step.

How do you transfer MCPE worlds to PC?


Missing SQL Service stored procedure

Question: I am receiving a message from a commercial program stating that the "LogMessage" stored procedure is not found.  There does not appear to be a stored procedure called LogMessage in the associated MS SQLServer 2000 database.  What can I do to track down the missing procedure, other than calling the company?
Answer: The reason you couldn't find it is because it's not there.  Unless you have the original proc, you're going to have to call the company.
Granted, you could take a stab at creating the proc, yourself.  But why bother when somebody already has the original proc?
Is this a fresh install of the commercial product?  If so, this is completely their responsibility.
Comment: Can you add Jen A's comment re permissions?  Then I can select this as the best answer.
Comment: It's been a while since I've worked with SQL 2000, but SQL 2005 definitely has a distinct error message for indicating that the permission was denied.  Have you verified that the same error message is generated in SQL 2000 if the user doesn't have the proper permission?

I just want to verify! ;-)
Answer: Occasionally you will also get this message if you do not have permissions to access the stored procedure.  Log in as 'sa' or equivalent to verify that the proc is indeed missing.
Answer: LogMessage seems pretty self-explanatory.  You could probably take a stab at creating one yourself just to see what happens, if you can't easily get the real thing.
Create a new table called LoggedMessages and just insert to the table when the proc is called.  Then see what pops in.
Kind of hacky, but given that it's a logging mechanism, which is tangential to the main features of the app, you could give it a try.
Answer: Well, if the company is out of business, unhelpful, etc, or your in a hurry, then attach a SQL trace, look at what kind and how many parameters are being passed and create a stored procedure with that name and signature.  It may take some experimentation to get the signature right dependening on the data access API being used.  The body of the stored procedure would be empty.  Since this is just logging, presumably this will let the rest of the app run, but logging would be off.
Make sure that the rest of the schema is there. Obviously if the entire schema is missing, then this trick won't work.
If you have a maintenance agreement with the vendor go holler at them, that's what maintenance  and support is for.

Missing SQL Service stored procedure


Why do Airbus A220s manufactured in Mobile, AL have Canadian test registrations?

Question: I noticed that there are occasionally test flights by Airbus A220 aircraft in and out of the Airbus production site at Mobile, Alabama (KMOB). Some of these aircraft use what are presumably test registrations for the flights, but these test registrations are Canadian. Here is one such flight, using registration C-GPUV. I know the A220 was originally the C-Series, produced exclusively in Montreal by Bombardier, a Canadian company, but shouldn't the aircraft produced in the US use US test registrations?
Comment: `shouldn't the aircraft produced in the US use US test registrations?` I don't think this premise stands up. An aircraft can be registered anywhere, to suit its owners effectively. Lots of people register their aircraft according to the legal regime they want to operate under. I.e., I presume Airbus want to align to Canadian regulations
Answer: The airplanes are built/owned by an Airbus subsidiary incorporated in Canada, and the Mirabel facility is still the primary production facility and location for the engineering organization, etc.
Mobile is effectively a "branch plant".
It's still a Canadian certificated design, being built by a Canadian incorporated business entity (an AB subsidiary), with Transport Canada as the primary regulator for all certification matters. Therefore, aircraft have Canadian Registration before a C of A is issued.
Answer: The various certification organizations have reciprocity agreements.  When the FAA certifies an aircraft, Europe, Canada, Australia, etc. accept that certification.  That way, Boeing (for example) doesn't have to go through cert multiple times in different countries when it wants to sell to different customers, or those customers want to operate in different countries.
Not all countries have the capability to certificate an aircraft a the highest standard.  It takes a large investment to get to that point.
The A220 was a Bombardier made CSeries that went through cert in Canada.  It would be terribly expensive to re-certificate an aircraft just because you built a new factory in a different country.
Furthermore, you are not limited to the manufacturer's country of origin for the initial cert.  For example Bell Helicopter (Textron) from Ft. Worth Texas often certificates helicopters in Canada.
Here is a list of bilateral agreements from the FAA.  These agreements do not have to be symmetrical -- i.e. Country A may accept cert from Country B, but not vis-versa.
Comment: As a side note, Bell Helicopter Textron has facilities in Mirabel. Not very far from Airbus, if I'm not mistaken.
Comment: Yes, I believe that is a maintenance and training facility that they also use as a home base for cert and some other things.  Their HQ and primary engineering design team is in Ft. Worth.
Comment: I thought they also designed and built some in Mirabel, but I may be mistaken. We regularly heard about the company in the years after they set shop there, but it's been a long time since I heard anything. Could be that their role changed over time, too.
Comment: Hard to tell.  It does appear that most Bell commercial helicopters are assembled and delivered in Mirabel.


What makes a network private

Question: What makes an Ethereum network private?

1) Is the networkid alone enough?
2) Or is it necessary that the network be on a VPN?
3) Or does it have to be within a LAN?
Answer: Usually private network, in the context of Ethereum, means it doesn't have public access allowed, or it is restricted somehow.
As you say it can done through several ways like runnig in a LAN without connection to external nodes. Or within a WAN, connecting external nodes trough a VPN. It can also run in the Internet, but only allow connections from a set of know bootnodes and reject everything else.
The networkid is only used to separate different networks. So transactions from one network will not be accepted in another. You can use a public network id for your private network but if you try to connect that node to the public network it will be rejected and blacklisted, so it is better to not reuse a public network id.
Comment: Note that networkID is not present inside the TX, so you can actually use the exact same TX on EVERY ethereum network. This is why you can use, for example, the same TX on the mainnet or on the many testnets around.
Answer: The term "ethereum private network" is mainly used to distinguish an ethereum network that is NOT the public ethereum network (mainnet).  Typically an ethereum private network has its own genesis block that is different than the one used in mainnet and has a different network id.  An ethereum private network can run on any kind of network (public, private, VPN, LAN, etc).

What makes a network private


Error installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on VMWare Workstation

Question: I'm trying to install Ubuntu on my VMWare Workstation. When installation phase finishes and I see the message asking me to reboot my PC, I click reboot button, but then nothing happens. I just see the black screen with the message saying

[5.004836] sd 2:0:0:0 [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through

and then I can wait for ages with no result. I tried to use Ctrl+Alt+Del or some SysRq combinations, but none of them helped. Once I just occasionnaly rammed into my keyboard and VM displayed some read block error messages, but my HDD's S.M.A.R.T. seems to be fine. It's also not likely that my SSD and both HDD's would simultaneously broke (I've tried to install OS on all of them).
I've also checked SHA-1 hash of the *.iso image I'm installing OS from, and it seems to be OK too (I re-downloaded it several times and checked it's checksum again just in case).
Is there anything I can do to determine the source of the problem? I've never had this kind of issues with any other earlier versions of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS @ Windows 7 host @ VMWare Workstation 12.01
Answer: Updating VMWare to the latest version has solved the problem.


Kuwait visa in old passport and would like to apply with my new name passport for UK visa

Question: Hope for explanations I'm a bit worried, I'm resident of Kuwait with my maiden name and recently I have received new passport with my marriage name. Can I apply from Kuwait for U.K.visa with my new passport and no evidence inside it about Kuwait residence
Answer: UK embassy/consulate will almost certainly require you to provide proof of residence in Kuwait to order to apply for a visa from its territory.
Having a valid visa in an expired passport is not an issue. Simply include old passport and a copy of marriage certificate (and any papers proving the name change if there are any) with your visa application.
Comment: Thank you for answer , i have residence card but it's on my maiden name , I will take your advise and put marriage certificate