Any plans to make a movie of one of Jack Vance's books?

Question: I'm curious if there have been, or currently are, plans to make a movie from one of Jack Vance's stories, and what the status of such plans are?
Comment: There was a radio serial made of Moon Moth on the now dead Seeing Ear Theatre. It was excellent, and if you know the story of moon moth, a radio play is a hilarious and trippy idea.
Comment: I felt that my answer to this one was pretty convincing, in light of the response from Vance's son. Is there anything else you'd like me to add before considering an acceptance?
Comment: There's a French comicbook version of tschai. If nothing else it'll have to do...
Answer: UPDATE: I spoke to my good friend John Vance a couple of days ago (his details are available on the official Jack Vance website).
I'm sure he won't mind me mentioning that the Demon Princes stories are currently under option for an upcoming TV pilot and that we've all to keep our fingers crossed.

Several of Vance's works have been made into films:

Bad Ronald (1974)
Méchant Garçon (Bad Ronald) (1992)

There was also a made-for-TV thriller:

Man in the Cage (1962)

and he screenwrote various episodes of Captain Video

As regards future works, from reading his fan pages as well as his own publisher's website, although numerous of his works have been optioned by Hollywood, there are no current plans to make any of them into films at this moment.
Comment: My understanding is that he sold numerous "rights" during his lifetime and later life but that none of them have yet been taken forward. His work is pretty dense and my guess is that none of the major studios are willing to convert his books (some of which are now 50+ years old) into high-budget films when more than 90% of the cash in Hollywood is being poured into young-adult fantasy movies, sequels/reboots of existing films and comic-book properties.
Comment: It also may be that a lot of his protagonists are not exactly... personable. But the Lyonesse trilogy (for fantasy) and the Gaean Reach setting (for sf) could work in today's long-form market.
Comment: Interesting information, but I'm wondering if the question was referring more to Vance's science fiction or fantasy stories. With all the sff being rushed into production after the success of 'Game of Thrones', Jack Vance's books would be a welcome addition.
Comment: @ImaginaryEvents - I just don't see it happening. Maybe thirty years ago but not in today's risk-averse climate. Look at the havok John Carter has caused to Disney.
Comment: Ah, very interesting, I believe those are films based on his mystery/detective novels? Which is cool, but yes as someone mentioned I am more interested in his sci-fi/fantasy. I would love to see a film of any number of his books, or a trilogy of films based on Cadwal Chronicles or Lyonesse.
Comment: Just to clarify, Mechant Garcon is also based on Bad Ronald.
Comment: @ImaginaryEvents - There's an update you might find interesting.
Comment: Regarding your update: oh, that's awesome! The Demon Princes would make a great series. Let's keep our fingers crossed.
Comment: @MichaelMartinez - I'll check back with him in a few months and update as soon as there's any news. These things usually take a fair amount of time. Don't forget to mark this as accepted. btw.
Answer: There definitely have been discussions over the film production of Vance's science fiction and fantasy work, including with Lucasfilm, as is evidenced in an interview given by original trilogy Star Wars storyboard artist David Russell to The Movie Blog in 2012.

Like the hundreds of other artists who were dying to work on Jedi, I was unable to get past the Lucasfilm front office. I happened to mention my problem to a good friend Jack Vance, a noted science fiction writer. It turned out that he was currently negotiating with Lucasfilm over the rights to one of his novels. Jack kindly suggested that I fly to Oakland, and he'd put a call into Lucasfilm to discuss his business, and afterwards hand the phone to me. Lacking any other option, I did as he suggested, and, probably out of consideration for Jack, ILM visual effects supervisor Joe Johnston agreed to an interview. However, he was impressed with my work—and so was Lucas, because shortly thereafter I was hired as a storyboard artist on Return of the Jedi! It was certainly a magic moment.

This was around the time of the publication of The Book of Dreams, the last in Vance's Demon Princes series, which was a rollicking space opera, and just the kind of thing Lucas might have been interested in (although anything that Vance had written up to that point could also have been a possibility).
There's no indication that work is in progress on any contemporary film adaptations of Vance's work (sadly).
Comment: How do we know you *really* feel that way, @Cugel? ;)
Comment: Cool citation. Man, I'm really kicking myself that I didn't go out to Oakland last year to meet Jack Vance, as I live here in Sunnyvale which is not far from there. I had talked to his son on the phone, and his son had extended me an invitation to go to his house and meet him. I kept postponing the drive, and then, sadly, Jack Vance passed away a few months later.
Comment: A real shame - I hear he was a great host. He was my hero growing up. I'm a writer now, and he definitely gets the credit (blame?) for that.
Answer: Sadly, most modern science-fiction movies are now about battles and CGI effects or, should I say, "big" battles with "big" CGI effects (Avatar...) and this, even when the original material was not necessarily about this stuff (think about the last two Star Trek movies).  This has become a necessity in order to become a blockbuster and covert the basic costs of making the movie and make a profit.
The movie about John Carter has go south because, while it was a movie with battles, these battles where only small battles, without any big, very big explosions.  Other movies like Waterworld or The Factor where even worse in that regard and therefore, have sunk miserably at the market.
Most of Jack Vance's works are based on small battles and therefore - while making great literature - are not suited to be transposed as big battles with big explosions on the screen and therefore are likely to fail as possible blockbusters.  You could say the same about the work of David Brin and of many other science-fictions writers.
A possible exception could be David Weber's Honor-verse.  However, the problem in this case is that beside the fact that any of the books in this serie is about battles, there is no story behind that to put on the screen.
Comment: Oh, the Honor series has more than enough hooks.  The Pavel Young character would be the bete noir, of course.  Start with her first posting and keep the officers she forms into a team which remains constant in subsequent movies. Make her an ex-fighter jock with a penchant for sneaking off in small boats to get some kills. You know, the usual drill.


Triple point storage in space travel

Question: Watching Apollo 13 and rereading Lost Moon, Jim Lovell's exciting recollection of the events on the crippled spaceship, I began to wonder. Why does NASA maintain the gasses at the triple point? A pressure vessel designed to handle very high vacuum (which H2 and O2 triple points are near complete vacuum) and low temperatures is thicker and more dense then a pressure vessel designed to handle modest amounts of pressure. Why wouldn't they store these gasses at higher pressures, at or near atmospheric pressure?
Comment: Which gasses are you referring to?  Cabin refresh or thruster fuel?
Comment: Both.  In Apollo 13 it was used as fuel cell oxidizer as well as cabin refresh.  But more research shows that H2 and O2 are stored at their triple point and used for main thruster fuel even on the space shuttle, so I figured I'd get whatever answers are available.
Answer: If you want a few hundred pages of gory detail on gas management, I found an original research report here.
Looking at excerpts from a book on cryogenics, one thing that's pointed out is that the triple point provides a stable pressure inside the container even as energy is added or removed, because the energy just changes some of the material from one state to another.  By comparison, a can of LOX needs pressure management because a little heat produces a gas head, and so on.
Comment: That original research report just made my entire engineering schooling worth it.  All over again.

Triple point storage in space travel


Which charging cable should I use? Short or long, and why?

Question: I have a 7" Android RCA VoyagerII tablet.  The instructions say I must use the very short cord charger that came with it and not even try anything else.  Is this true or can I use a regular long corded phone wall charger that matches the connector?
Answer: Why the OEM is advising you is to use the charging cable that was supplied since

Shorter cables are normally thicker and offer less resistance
Impedance of the cable is matched to the charger

On the other hand, longer cables are generally thinner and offer more resistance for charging current and takes longer to charge, besides the  impedance mis-match at phone and charger ends for charging to happen as rated.
You can measure the current output of OEM cable using apps like Ampere and 3C Battery Monitoring Widget
Do stick with OEM recommendations, unless you find a long cable that matches same performance as cable supplied.
Edit: For a detailed explanation which answers "why short cables are better and how to select a USB cable", see my answer How to choose micro USB cable for my device?. I believe that would fully equip you in making a right choice
Comment: Generally a good cable to go with is a 24/28awg rated Micro Usb. I have had very good success with these on a variety of devices.


question regarding resultant of 2 polynomials defined over finite field

Question: I have been studying "Introduction to finite fields" by Lidl & Neiderreiter and came across the  following statement concerning resultant $R(f,g)$ of 2 polynomials $f(x) = a_{0}x^{n} + a_{1}x^{n - 1} + \ldots + a_{n} \in K[x]$ and $g(x) = b_{0}x^{m} + b_{1}x^{m - 1} + \ldots + b_{m} \in K[x]$. The statement says "$R(f,g) = 0$ iff $f$ and $g$ have a common root, which is the same as saying that $f$ and $g$ have a common divisor in $K[x]$ of positive degree".
My question is, why is it necessary that common divisor of $f$ and $g$ must be a polynomial in $K[x]$? e.g. if $f$ and $g$ have a single common root $\alpha$ in some extension field, then $x - \alpha$ does not belong to $K[x]$.
Comment: One way to look at it is the following. If $f$ and $g$ have coefficients in $K$, then Euclid's algorithm calculating their gcd never needs to go outside the field $K$. Therefore the gcd will also have coefficients in $K$. So if $f$ and $g$ have a common zero (possibly in some extension field), then their gcd has positive degree. But that gcd still has coefficients in $K$.
Answer: Before doing anything else, we may consider where everything is living. As far as I'm aware of, the resultant $R(f,g)$ of two polynomials over a field $K$ is defined as the product of all $(\alpha-\beta)$ where $f(\alpha)=0$ and $g(\beta)=0$, where the roots are taken in an algebraic closure $\overline{K}$ of $K$.
With that definition, the resultant would be $0$, precisely if $f$ and $g$ have a common zero in the algebraic closure of $K$, which isn't entirely clear from the quotation. Your question then boils down to the question why two polynomials $f$ and $g$ having a common zero in some extension field $L/K$ need to have a common divisor in $K[x]$. The answer to this question is given by the concept of minimal polynomial. If $\eta$ is an element of an extension field, the minimal polynomial $\phi\in K[x]$ of $\eta$ is the monic polynomial of lowest degree having $\eta$ as a zero (where one can check that it is unique and irreducible over $K$). As an example, $x^2-2$ is a minimal polynomial of $\sqrt{2}$ over $\mathbb{F}_5$ (over $\mathbb{Q}$ as well, but you were talking about finite fields). The important property is that any polynomial over $K$ having $\eta$ as a root, has the minimal polynomial $\phi$ as a divisor. In the previous example, every polynomial in $\mathbb{F}_5[x]$ having $\sqrt{2}$ as a root, is divisible by $x^2-2$.
In our current case, this means that the polynomials $f$ and $g$ have a common root in $\alpha$ in $\overline{K}$ and so both $f$ and $g$ have the minimal polynomial of $\alpha$ over $K$ as a divisor. In particular, this minimal polynomial lies in $K[x]$.


What is the relationship between Beleriand in the Silmarillion and Middle-earth in Lord of the Rings?

Question: I've read both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. Both take place in the 'west' of Arda, and Beleriand (where most of The Silmarillion takes place) is destroyed. So where is the Middle-earth of LotR? Does anything from The Silmarillion take place there? Can we point to places on the map that exist in both epics?
Comment: To supplement both answers, which are awesome, I would add that there is one "direct" connection to Beleriand in TLOTR.  Treebeard's song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9468-QKRoCg

reveals that Treebeard spent a great deal of time roaming around Belariand. As he notes in the last verse now *all those lands lie under the wave.*
Comment: @EricLippert - good find; also Galadriel's farewell to him: "Not in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again. Then in the willowmeads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring" - Tasarinan is of course in Beleriand.
Answer: I was about to answer in depth, but then an image search showed me an existing answer online, though there's quite a bit of extraneous text there. I'll borrow the maps from that blog, originally taken from Karen Wynn Fonstad's The Atlas of Middle-earth:
This is a map of Beleriand, in the first age. Conveniently, the Blue Mountains are circled:

And now a map of Middle-earth in the third age:

These are the same Ered Luin, Blue mountains. Beleriand, before it sank into the sea, was westwards of where the Shire is in the Third Age.
Comment: There are several things mentioned or hinted at in the Silmarillion about the eastern area - the Elves awoke somewhere in the east and passed a lot of land on the way to Beleriand, and Men also came from there - but the narrative itself for the first age takes place in Beleriand.
Comment: The other immediate clue on both maps is the Hill/Isle of Him(l/r)ing.
Comment: yes, it also explains that Elrond crosses the Ered Luin (from the west) and founds a settlement (Imladris/Rivendell) somewhere to the east of that mountain range.
Answer: To supplement Anver's answer, here is another map, sourced from History of Middle Earth 7: The Treason of Isengard, which contains an extended account of the first LotR map:

This was drawn by CT from one of JRRT's working maps so it may be considered an accurate representation.
Here, the island of Himling corresponds to the hill of Himring in Beleriand, and Tol Fuin with the highlands of Dorthonion/Taur-nu-Fuin.  To quote from CT's note regarding the Unfinished Tales redrawing:

Himling was the earlier form of Himring (the great hill on which Maedhros son of Fëanor had his fortress in The Silmarillion), and though the fact is nowhere referred to it is clear that Himring's top rose above the waters that covered drowned Beleriand. Some way to the west of it was a larger island named Tol Fuin, which must be the highest part of Taur-nu-Fuin.

Although Christopher Tolkien notes that "the fact is nowhere referred to", it actually is; in HoME 7: The Treason of Isengard, Chapter 6 "Council of Elrond (1)" text of "a single sheet of manuscript found in isolation" reads (in part):

Taur na Fuin (earlier name) became an island ... (so also Himling)

CT confirms in a footnote that this "single sheet" was only discovered after he had written the Unfinished Tales note; hence his original statement (now known to be incorrect).
The river in Lindon may be the remnants of the Gelion, and what's especially interesting is that if you examine the Beleriand map in The Silmarillion, you'll see that the westward protrusions of Ered Luin there (in the area of Mount Rerir/Lake Helevorn) correspond in shape to the same area in the map above (to the east of Himling).
Also interesting is a hint of the location of Utumno, in Return of the King (note 25 to Appendix A, discussing "the Lossoth, the Snowmen of Forochel"):

These are a strange, unfriendly people, remnant of the Forodwaith, Men of far-off days, accustomed to the bitter colds of the realm of Morgoth. Indeed those colds linger still in that region, though they lie hardly more than a hundred leagues north of the Shire.

From this it may be inferred that the remnants of Utumno are under the Icebay of Forochel, giving you another correspondence between the LotR maps and the tales of The Silmarillion.
In The Silmarillion we also read that, after the Battle of the Powers, which resulted in the first Chaining of Melkor:

In that time the shape of Middle-earth was changed, and the Great Sea that sundered it from Aman grew wide and deep; and it broke in upon the coasts and made a deep gulf to the southward. Many lesser bays were made between the Great Gulf and Helcaraxë far in the north, where Middle-earth and Aman came nigh together. Of these the Bay of Balar was the chief...

This seems to indicate that the Great Gulf is the Bay of Belfalas, assuming that its size in the First Age was comparable to its size in the Third.
The Great March of the Eldar also passes through some well-known locations:

And it came to pass after many years of journeying in this manner that the Eldar took their course through a forest, and they came to a great river, wider than any they had yet seen; and beyond it were mountains whose sharp horns seemed to pierce the realm of the stars. This river, it is said, was even the river which was after called Anduin the Great, and was ever the frontier of the west-lands of Middle-earth. But the mountains were the Hithaeglir, the Towers of Mist upon the borders of Eriador; yet they were taller and more terrible in those days, and were reared by Melkor to hinder the riding of Oromë.

And also of the wanderings of the Nandor:

Little is known of the wanderings of the Nandor, whom he led away down Anduin: some, it is said, dwelt age-long in the woods of the Vale of the Great River, some came at last to its mouths and there dwelt by the Sea, and yet others passing by Ered Nimrais, the White Mountains, came north again and entered the wilderness of Eriador between Ered Luin and the
far Mountains of Mist.

And finally, RotK Appendix A discusses the origins of the Barrow-downs and their relationship to the First Age:

It is said that the mounds of Tyrn Gorthad, as the Barrowdowns were called of old, are very ancient, and that many were built in the days of the old world of the First Age by the forefathers of the Edain, before they crossed the Blue Mountains into Beleriand, of which Lindon is all that now remains.
Comment: You're welcome, but Anver should get the accept.  He did answer first, and his answer does cover what you need to know; treat mine as supplementary if you wish.
Comment: That's awesome. Thanks!
Comment: +! for including Himring/Himling, and also Taur-nu-Fuin -> Tol Fuin, which I didn't realise earlier.
Answer: And to supplement their answers, a map from the LotR Fandom site:

The fully drawn bit is (the north-west corner of) Middle-earth in the Third Age, the faintly drawn part is Beleriand. Again you can see Tol Fuin and Tol Himring/Himling.
EDIT: Jimmy Shelter commented (quite rightly):

It's worth noting that the southern coast of the drowned lands in this map is conjectural (it can only ever be as Tolkien never mapped it) but consistent with "Many lesser bays were made between the Great Gulf and Helcaraxë far in the north" in The Silmarillion. The general assumption is that the "Great Gulf" is the Bay of Belfalas.
Comment: @StayOnTarget the Grey Havens only existed after the drowning of Beleriand, on the new coastline in Lindon. Cirdan's home in the First Age was the Havens of the Falas, and then the Isle of Balar.
Comment: I forgot to +1 this; it's great to have a joined map on this site (even if much of it is conjectural, it's still important that it be here).
Comment: @JimmyShelter I was pretty happy when I found the map; it nicely confirmed my thoughts ;)
Comment: Seems like this would have submerged the Grey Havens, which I thought was an ancient port which survived into the third age.


Is there a website that lists the environmental impact and/or carbon footprint of many products and practices?

Question: Perhaps a Q&A website like Sustainable Living?
Comment: There's a similar question [here](https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/q/7187/3379), but it doesn't have any answers yet.
Comment: One of the large UK supermarkets published a document with listed the carbon footprints of their top thousand or so products. I was reading it online in May 2019, but I can't find it now. It was incredibly comprehensive, with the different footprints of organic and battery farmed eggs, different brands of meat burgers, vegetables and so on. Its out there online somewhere...
Answer: There are lots of websites but all sites I know are aimed at researchers (so not intended for the general public) and usually apply to a specific country only.
Take for example this US Life Cycle Inventory Database. It contains inventories for various materials and services (lists of input and output for producing something) which can be used to calculate the environmental impact. Each inventory has a date and geographical location that shows when and where the numbers where gathered. Any good life-cycle analysis has to mention this location and date. This is important because a life-cycle analysis using data from only a few years ago may already be obsolete if the manufacturing process changed in the mean time. Likewise the data may not hold for other countries, for example because the used resources are mined or generated differently, or need to be transported over much longer distances.
This is actually the problem with any ecological footprint, carbon footprint, life-cycle analysis, etc. The numbers apply only to a specific location and often also a specific time. This also means that a website that lists various products or services has limited value because it's very likely that your particular situation is different.
So for the most accurate result for you, you will have to search online if NGOs or environmental organizations in your country provide any useful, recent statistics. Alternatively you can ask for information resources here in a new question, but please try to limit the scope of your question as much as possible (e.g. ask only about food, or about energy use at home, or about transportation) and do add in which country you live. Questions that result in a very long list of resources may be closed as too broad.
Answer: https://www.cfp-japan.jp/english/list/
I wouldn't call it comprehensive but it is what you're looking for.
A cursory web search lead to this and many more sites.
https://www.bettermeetsreality.com/carbon-footprint-of-common-everyday-things-products-foods/
Answer: The World Wildlife Fund has an Environmental Footprint Calculator, but it is does not go into much detail -- and it only does carbon footprint.
There are other carbon footprint calculators, such as Carbon Footprint.
Getting specific answers about individual products is really hard. See for example a question which I raised on this site a month ago about pet food .. still no clear answer.
For businesses, there are a number of consultancies offering advice on how to estimate and reduce carbon footprint (I won't list them .. as I can't really judges between them).


Having a Hungarian PR, but a non-European passport. Can I use interrail?

Question: I am actually quite confused, I have a Hungarian permanent residence but I live outside europe and carry a non-European citizenship.
I can enter any european country without needing a visa though. Does that mean I am eligible to get an interrail or is the eurail my only choice?
Answer: Interrail passes are available to European citizens and residents. As a resident of Hungary, you are therefore entitled to travel with an Interrail pass.
Be aware though, that your Hungarian residence permit alone, does not allow you to enter all other European countries without a visa if you with your citizenship otherwise would have needed one.
Comment: @greatone There are about 20 countries in Europe, which are *not* part of the Schengen area and to which a Hungarian residence permit does not necessarily grant access.
Comment: Are you sure that the OP won't be allowed to travel to other countries without a visa? https://helpers.hu/visa-free-travel-countries-hungary/ "The Hungarian resident permit is as good as a golden visa to Europe, since a third country national in possession of a valid resident permit is eligible for entering and staying in the territory of the Schengen Member States without possessing a visa for a period not exceeding 90 days within 180 days."


Why doesn't the guy in jail recognize Walter?

Question: Why doesn't the supposed killer recognize Walter when he went to jail to talk to him? After that scene, we later see that Walter went to college with him and they make eye contact at one point. So, I'm assuming that the falsely accused guy would have some memory of Walter...
Answer: In The Number 23, Walter does go and see Kyle Flinch the supposed killer in prison. Walter and Kyle talk there. As for the College or University Walter and Laura Tollins (the victim) attend at no time in the movie is it shown or suggested they attend the same class.
Walter looks through a window in the door of Laura's class where he witnesses the hand touching of the professor (Kyle Flinch) and his (Walter's then) girlfriend, Laura. Kyle does not see or acknowledge Walter at this point. The eye contact happens between Walter and Laura.
Laura and Kyle then go on with a relationship whilst Walter stalks and watch's from the shadows and such unseen. In a place as large as a school I can see no reason for Kyle to remember Walter, especially if they had no class together. Even if he had seen Walter in passing Walter would have been 15 years younger.


Can server errors cause major traffic drop from Google?

Question: My web server was down for about 30 min. The next day (30~ hours from the event) I noticed major drop in traffic from Google. The normal traffic to my site is about 2500 unique/day and after the event it dropped to 400/day. Other than this event nothing happened. Can this be the reason?
Answer: Leading up to the event search traffic may have been higher than it is now and not have to do with your server having problems. Just like traffic goes up during the holidays. I guess it would depend on the event if it was locally or nationally promoted. 30 minutes of downtime shouldn't affect your traffic.
Answer: That depends on if Google tried to crawl it while it was down.  If it did, it may have pushed it down or pulled it from its list thinking that it was a dead link.
Comment: Google may not think it's dead, that all depends on the server http response code.
Comment: yes the server was down. not connected to the interent for about 30 mins. but it normal for websites to go down once in a year.. so that can be the actual reason you think?
Answer: Google creates cache version of web pages, so even if its down it will still be ranked, but if its down for an extended amount of time a competitor can easily slip ahead (usually this happens when a competitor updates an existing web page that is listed in the search results).


Subdividing part of spherical object without getting weird bumps

Question: Ok so I use cube with level 4 subsurf modifier and 'to sphere' in edit mode so it becomes sphere, now I want to create some circles engraved into it so I need to create more topology there but when I subdivide few faces or subdivide smooth it creates weird bumps which are more notable under subsurf modifier. What would be good approach to do that. Here is what am I going for but I'm far away right now, I mean on these little circles on on three prong thingy, any thoughts?
Answer: Assuming a couple of levels of subdivision below those already applied, a fairly conventional method to insert features like this into curved surfaces is to use a topology something like this:

Retain an intact,featureless, more subdivided copy of the sphere in the same place, and assign a Shrinkwrap modifier to your model with the intact sphere as target. (You can hide the target sphere, or put it on another layer)
Make a vertex group in your model, of all the vertices you want to conform to the target surface, (for example, excluding the ones shaded blue in the picture) and aim the Shrinkwrap at that group.
The result:

Matcap - showing Srinkwrap off:

Matcap - showing Srinkwrap on:
Comment: Not my area, you'll have to ask around, but I think for games even now, it has to be a _lot_ lower than that for the final.. although tje hi-poly could be the basis for textures, normals etc...
Comment: Wow thanks man this looks promising! Thanks a lot.
Comment: I have one more question when I apply subsurf (4) on cube and round it using cast or to sphere it is fine it has some bumps but I want model to be relatively low-poly so I add level 2 subsurf to make it look better on render it creates artifacts on place where where corners of cube were, that s unless I use cast modifier. Would model like that be ok for selling online?
Comment: Is it OK when you Apply the Cast modifier? That would be fine.. but if it has to be subdivided _before_ casting, I don't think you can advertise it as lo-poly. Having said that, I've never sold on the open market.. only privately where that sort of thing can be discussed.  depending on your features, there are other typologies which _may_ be smoother with fewer polys.. e.g. a once Cat-Clark subdivided (all quad) icosphere .. which can be hard to work with.. your ref. is a cube, though...
Comment: When I first subsurfed cube than I used cast than I put subsurf again and I had to add cast/shrinkwrap to get rid of artifacts. Well icosphere would be hard to work with especially when uv-unwraping. So in your opinion what would be OK poly-count for this model?
Comment: Your ref looks like 20-40K? I really don't know, unless I know who/what it's for .. sorry not to be of more help...
Comment: ref is 240k but I think it's not displayed correctly on image. Let's say it will be used in game what about then? (I'm not going to do so I just trying to figure out whereabouts I know for games it should be relatively low-poly but I need some reference number) Well you were of help much, thank you!


How long is combined Meningoccocal ACWY vaccine effective for?

Question: If I have the combined ACWY vaccine against meningococcal meningitis, how long should it make me immune to this group of diseases for?
Answer: About 5 years. However, vaccine efficacy can vary from person to person.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6003a3.htm
Referring to the meningococcal vaccine, the CDC's ACIP wrote:
"After licensure, additional data on bactericidal antibody persistence, trends in meningococcal disease epidemiology in the United States, and VE have indicated many adolescents might not be protected for more than 5 years."
Comment: While we appreciate the link, it is better to summarize (Not copy) the pertinent parts of your citation here, so that if the link ever dies the answer is not useless. Please correct this, or your answer could be deleted.
Answer: The purpose of the vaccine is to protect children against the peak incidence of infection which is at ages 16-21.  The at risk groups are

Certain groups are at increased risk for meningococcal serogroups A, C, W, and Y but not serogroup B. These risk factors include HIV infection, travel to places where meningococcal disease is common (such as certain countries in Africa and in Saudi Arabia), and college students living in a dormitory. Other risk factors for serogroups A, C, W. and Y include having a previous viral infection, living in a crowded household, having an underlying chronic illness, and being exposed to cigarette smoke (either directly or second-hand).

Therefore the vaccination schedule for otherwise healthy children is

All adolescents should receive a dose of MenACWY at 11 or 12 years of age. A second (booster) dose is recommended at 16 years of age. Adolescents who receive their first dose at age 13 through 15 years should receive a booster dose at age 16 through 18 years. The minimum interval between MenACWY doses is 8 weeks. Adolescents who receive a first dose after their 16th birthday do not need a booster dose unless they become at increased risk for meningococcal disease. Colleges may not consider a second dose given even a few days before age 16 years as valid, so keep that in mind when scheduling patients.

The aim is to ensure that bactericidal level of antibody present.  Although a single vaccination creates antibodies, the disease progresses so rapidly that that body is unable to respond fast enough using memory cells to create a bactericidal response. Therefore the schedule calls for the booster shot.
The Meningococcal vaccines: WHO position paper, November 2011 says regarding effectiveness:

Recent estimates of the effectiveness of the first licensed quadrivalent vaccine suggest that within 3 to 4 years after vaccination, effectiveness is 80% to 85%.

http://www.immunize.org/askexperts/experts_meningococcal_acwy.asp


What difference does the clock make in synchronous vs asynchronous communication?

Question: I am new to embedded programming and have very little knowledge in how digital/electronic system works, but I have been given a task to bring up  USART communication between two chips. For that, I have started learning from the basics of serial communication etc etc. What I don't understand in serial protocol is that what is the difference between synchronous and asynchronous communication? Let us say I have two devices d1 and d2. They both are aware of their baud rates. d1 sends data at a baudrate of 9600 and d2 receives data at the same rate. Then my question is, how the clock plays role in synchronous communication? Means with baud-rate I think we have all the information of the communication channel. With this confusion I am not able to clearly understand the exact difference between synchronous and a synchronous communication.
Answer: With asynchronous data transmission, when there is no payload data to be sent, the data line becomes idle and therefore the receiver waits for a transition that marks the beginning of new incoming data. In this respect there is no definite phase relationship between data previously received and the new data arriving.
This is why it is called "asynchronous"

With synchronous data, either a clock is permanently present as a seperate signal or, the clock is embedded into the data (as per Manchester encoding or scrambling) so that the receiver is always aware when real payload data could be present. When no payload data is present the clock is still present. Manchester encoded data: -

how the clock plays role in synchronous communication?

Whether you extract the clock from the data (or have a dedicated clock line) you need a clock; that is fundamental to any data transmission. Asynchronous transmission re-creates a clock internally based on the agreed baud rate and the first transition of data following an idle period. From this point on until the end of the data block it generates a clock internally for the whole transmission.
So the clock plays a vital role in both asynchronous and synchronous data communications.

with baud-rate I think we have all the information of the
  communication channel

Not quite - knowing baud rate at both ends is useful but it doesn't tell you when bits actually change state in the data - this "synchronization" to the data is performed by the idle-to-start bit transmission in asynchronous data and is everpresent in synchronous data communication.
Comment: is there any advantages of one or another regarding transfer speed?
Comment: Manchester encoding (and sometimes scrambling) always suffers from an extra overhead that reduces the payload bit rate.
Answer: In Synchronous mode, the clock is shared between the 2 devices. Example SPI --> At each Clock Cycle, the slave sample the data sent from the master.
In Asynchrounous mode; there is no clock shared and the 2 devices need to work at the same frequency. Asynchronous challenge lies in making sure that both devices are at the same frequency (whatever voltage, temperature, drift ...)
Answer: In General  Digital Systems to communicate serially between two or more devices we need some reference that is Clock. Based on the Clock reference there are two modes of Serial communications.
Synchronous Serial Communication

In Synchronous communication, the communicating devices should at least need two lines to send the Data. One line for Clock it will be the reference and another line will be the data to be sent. Basically clock is given by any system or on-chip clock. Its Frequency based on the Baud Rate.
Refer the Image: Clock is separate and Data is separate and absence of start and stop bits
Asynchronous Serial Communication

In Asynchronous Serial communication  using single line data can transfer between the devices. Here there is no need of clock line separately, this will handled by some Start and Stop bits with in the data block itself.
Refer the Image: Clock is absent but start, stop and other supporting bits are presence
Note :
Synchronous communication suitable for Bulk data transfer.It
mostly transfer the data frames by frames
ASynchronous Serial communication suitable for byte transfer.It mostly transfer the data byte by bytes.


What kind of output is this?

Question: I know I have seen it before, on older Tv's, was wondering what to look for to convert it to optical.
Answer: It's hard to say without knowing what TV it is. Since it's an RCA socket, there's a good chance that it is simply coaxial S/PDIF, rather than optical S/PDIF (TOSLINK). If this is the case, you will need a coaxial to optical S/PDIF converter such as this. I would ignore the 3-pin connector, especially if the user guide doesn't say what it's for.
Comment: Thanks! So, literally right after posting I realised that there was a box around the Coaxial S/PDIF and felt like an idiot, cause I was definitely looking at the three pin.
Comment: @ADSquared That puzzled me at first as well. The 3-pin should have been blanked off if it's meant for technicians.

What kind of output is this?


Plausible hypothesis on why gravity might fail on earth

Question: I've been grappling with a story for a while, involving a scenario where gravity starts to fail. The goal of the story is mostly how people react to the knowledge that the world will end. But, I also wanted to include some sort of scientific group that is trying to figure out why. Are there plausible reasons that gravity would fail? I like stories to have at least a pinch of truth as an anchor, and I do want some sort of thought process that scientists would go through. Obviously there would be talking heads on TV giving reasons, so, what would those reasons be.
Comment: "Obviously there would be talking heads on TV giving reasons" Not for long.  Gravity failing would radically alter, among other things, the Sun, the orbits of planets (we'd drift out into space in a larger and larger orbit - possibly an escape trajectory and freeze in short order).  The atmosphere would reduce in surface pressure *and* would likely start to escape into space (but we'd freeze long before that happened).  Oceans and pressure from Earth's core would imply an expansion of the crust (really bad).  The list of ways even a small change in gravity would kills us is alarming.
Comment: Required watching?: [Patema Inverted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patema_Inverted)
Comment: you might want to check out [The Age of Mircles by Karen Thompson Walker](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/08/age-miracles-thompson-walker-review) which covers the same theme you are pursuing.
Comment: A rogue planet enters into orbit around the Earth. The two gravities cancel eachother out. The world ends when the two collide. It's not an original idea but it's accurate.
Comment: Welcome to Worldbuilding.SE!  We're glad you could join us!  When you have a moment, please [click here](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6388/welcome-to-worldbuilding-se?noredirect=1) to learn more about our culture and take our [tour].  Thanks!
Comment: Patema Inverted is an interesting anime with this kind of gravity failure as a backdrop. I don't remember the reason they gave, but I remember being satisfied that it was scientific enough to be interesting, but vague enough to be presentable without actually existing.
Comment: About the use of gravitons, I want to remind you about the wave/corpuscle duality that was first observed on light and later confirmed on electrons and other particles... we can understand any wave as particles using the same mathematical principles, for example if we understand sound waves as particles we get [phonons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon). Now, gravitons are the particles for gravitational waves. We know gravitational waves exist, and we can explain phenomena using gravitons. Yet, we don't know whatever or not gravitational waves are discrete, that is, if there is a quantum.
Comment: In his novel "[On](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_(novel))", Adam Roberts speculates that over use of zero point energy could rotate a planet's gravitational field to be parallel to the surface instead of towards the centre.
Comment: Everyone is assuming gravity is a fundamental force, but there is no evidence that gravitons exist. Entropic gravity is much more interesting. Either way it still leads to the same answer for this question: unless there is no mass, there is gravity
Answer: Totally different idea.
In late 2283, a research team at the University of New Tokyo finally cracked the Unified Field problem.  This gained them one of the most prestigious Nobel Prizes ever awarded in history.
The results of this were initially amazing: it allowed on demand gravity control, the benefits of which were immense.  Needless to say, everyone started making gravity control devices for vehicle levitation, space exploration, construction, etc.  You name it, we found an application for gravity control.
However, what nobody had anticipated was that the count of particles moderating the forces in the unified field theorem had been a balanced set of parameters, and the changes that occurred as a result of gravity control led to an ever increasing instability.
In essence we'd been living in a local minimum for this parameter equation where everything was stable, but gravity control eventually pushed us out of this local minimum into an incredibly unstable landscape.  One of the major side effects of this was that gravity slowly, but irreversibly, started to decrease.
Comment: This almost sounds like an allegory for the Earth's dependence on oil. We become dependent on a specific resource and start to use it for everything everywhere. That same widespread deployment turns around and bites us. Good suggestion.
Comment: I was just reading this answer thinking how did I not hear about this... then I reread the date!
Comment: I like this answer because it provides your story with so many possibilities, the hubris and arrogance, and ignorance, of the society that has become dependent on technology.
Possibly also an answer too to the Fermi Paradox :) A great filter indeed.
Answer: We need to have more fun with this question
Keep in mind that gravity is but one characteristic of mass.  You can't change just gravity without side effects.  Those side effects are valuable to you as they can be used to advance your plot.

A wormhole appears at the center of the planet, pulling mass away from the core.  Thanks to the shell theorem, gravity must reduce to zero as you approach the center of the planetary sphere.  Thus, the appearance wouldn't be immediately noticable, and if the mass were drawn off slowly enough, it wouldn't be appreciably obvious.  Note that there would be side effects, such as liquid core currents changing, which would change the magnetosphere and possibly plate tectonics.
Something in the universe, some ribbon of effect we know nothing about, is passing through our solar system and, thus, our planet is passing through it.  This ribbon is changing the positive charge strength forcing atomic nucleai to spread apart.  Not only is this reducing the density of planetary mass (and therefore gravity), but it's also causing the planet to increase in circumference.
Something unseen is passing through the solar system.  A "dark planet" (or, perhaps of greater interest, a ribbon of dark asteroids) with sufficient mass as any point of its passing to change the effective gravity on Earth.  The planet or ribbon can pass through on a parabolic arc such that it would affect the Earth for most of a year.  The side effect is that Earthlings standing on the side closest to the dark planet/belt/ribbon would be lighter, while those on the opposite side would feel heavier.  Earthquakes would be normal.  Shifting the Earth's orbit (perhaps moving it further from the sun, thereby solving global warming) would be expected.
Q is really bored and decides to change the gravitational constant of the universe — but only in the Sol system.  Not only would this be really hard to figure out what was going on, but ships leaving the system would sail through a breakwater (I'm using the wrong word, that point in the ocean when leaving a beach when the undersea landmass drops away and you get serious wave action.  It killed the best friend of Moana's father.  It was really sad and should convince all to live in Iowa).
The theory that you can treat gravity as coming from a point source at the center of a sphere is only true when the sphere is reasonably solid or homogenous.  Let's have some reaction (let's blame it on the Somalis this time, they built a planetary core implosion device) that caused the inner 25% of the planet's volume to suddenly compress such that a massive void appeared between the new basically neutronium core and the rest of the core/mantle.  Not only would this change gravity by pulling a lot of mass further away from the surface, but it would have the side effect of the planet slowly starting to wobble in its rotation until that big marble comes in contact with the rest of the core and begins acting like that child's tooth in a paint can... or until the sudden vacuum causes the planet to violently shrink.

What else, my fellow WorldBuildians!  In what other ways can be bend, contort, graffiti, or otherwise ignore the fundamental rules of orbital mechanics and classical physics to bring about, if nothing else, the appearance of a lessening gravity?
Comment: You forgot to pay the gravity bill... https://goo.gl/images/h8NWJN
Comment: This sounds like the most plausible (or, least implausible) of the existing answers as I write this, according to current science.
Comment: Is the term you're looking for "shelf break" or "continental slope?" ([source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_margin))
Answer: The Gravitational Constant is not uniform throughout space and time
Scientists have long speculated that some fundamental constants of the universe, like the speed of light or the fine structure constants, are varying through time.
Why not make it varying through space as well? This way a part of the galaxy can decay while the other parts are still bound by normal gravity.
Comment: Notably, if the parameters vary through time, you've lost conservation of energy. If they vary across space, you've lost conservation of momentum. (Noether's Theorem means every conservation law is equivalent to a symmetry; if you lose one you lose the other.)
Answer: Unexpectedly for all the community of scientists in the world, gravitons (the particles mediating gravitational force) have a finite life time, and they are starting to decay.
The more they decay, the more gravity is weakened. After a certain time gravity will no longer bind together masses, so unless they are electrically charged and can rely on good old Coulomb force, they are bound to separate.
Space will be filled with atoms traveling around, no longer aggregated.
Comment: "gravitons have a finite life time" - usually the particle life time is measured from its creation, and decaying force carriers would only manifest as a force that decays more than quadratically with distance. You'd need the life time to change over time. Do note that real-life gravity seems to have no such super-quadratic dropoff - and increasing it would crank up the expansion of the universe rather significantly. And in any case, we'd drift away from our Sun as a planet far before we'd drift away from our planet.as individual organisms, even without the increased expansion...
Comment: This is a VERY interesting way of looking at it!
Comment: Also deeply depressing for the story, because the result would be inescapable.  Kind of an On the Beach ending.  "And in the universe, there was silence."
Comment: @JohnDvorak Perhaps the gravity particles act more like air does for sound — carrying it, but not being created when gravitational force is emitted. However, all the particles (that I know of) we've encountered have decayed exponentially, making this seem somewhat unrealistic to me.
Answer: In order of decreasing viability (all of which are still super low):

The simulation hypothesis, that we are all living in a simulation, is really your best bet here. If gravity were capable of failing one would expect to see stars sort of just blinking out of existence every now and then, which we don't. That being said if we are living in a simulation (which is quite likely) then really the simulators can do whatever they want with physics.
Aliens, "pull the fabric of space-time taught." does it mean anything? not really no. is it intuitive? yes.
Act of god. plain simple, always in style. I'd go with this explaination myself
Freak variation in the gravitational constant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-variation_of_fundamental_constants. it's not certain that G the graviational constant of the universe is always well constant, Some theories hold that it varies. If it suddenly varies down (possibly even as a result of human tampering, probably not though.) gravity turns "off" simple as that. that being said this wipes out the universe not just earth. Bare in mind suddenly in this context could still be upwards of a million years or just a few seconds so it gives you a lot of narrative freedom.
Presence of large numbers of "Anti-Gravitons". the Graviton (a hypothetical particle that carries the force of gravity) sometimes has an even more hypothetical counter part called the anti graviton aleins fire a bunch of theese at us and they react in unexpected ways with currently existing gravitons destroying them and sending the excess energy away as gravitational waves.
Vacuum decay? there is a thing called Vacuum decay, most likely it will simply wipe out everything if real however there is a INCREDIBLY small chance that it simply re-writes the laws of reality instead.

All of these answers (except Act of god & simulation, which have their own problems) are pseudo-scientific to the extreme and highly unlikely to actually work. If you go for simulation, god, or either of the aliens options you can always also put gravity back before the earth if fully destroyed leaving people left on earth with just a bunch of earth-quakes and a new outlook on life to deal with, if that's you narrative intention that is.
Comment: Do you mean pull it "taut"?
Comment: I haven't fully decided on an ending, so anything is possible... obviously life as everyone would know it would end... I have toyed with aliens or dimensional sources, but mostly as a way to narrate. As if all the story lines I'm presenting are part of a massive archeological find, and some being, whether an alien civilization or humans that somehow escape come back to piece together events.
Comment: Well of course i'm speaking nonsense when i say "pull it taut" however there is a demonstration of the behaviour of gravity where you place two balls on rubber sheet and they move together in this demonstration pulling the sheet taut will cause gravity to cease existing. of course in reality it's meaningless and more or less impossible but it makes more plausible explanation than a lot of stuff in sci-fi. in closest real world terms it would be the equivalent of using artificial gravity to exactly cancel out earths gravity
Answer: It sounds like the big rip theory answers your question. Space-time expands and therefore the entire universe expands. The theory says the expansion will eventually overcome gravity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip
Comment: I hadn't heard of this one, thank you.
Answer: To diminish gravity, you have to diminish mass.  Currently the only way we know how to do that is to convert it explosively into energy.  I don't think that will work for you here because if you converted enough of Earth that we would notice the lower gravity, the created energy would probably melt the crust and everyone on it.  That makes for a short and tragic story.
What you probably need here is a dimensional doorway, but that is way beyond our hard science, so the rest of this answer will be in violation of your "science-based" tag.
If a dimensional doorway existed at the core of our planet, and if a steady stream of core material poured through that doorway and into another plane of existence, and if no reciprocal mass or energy came back through the doorway into our reality, then the planet would slowly (or not so slowly) loose mass.  As this happened, the gravity would diminish, but so would the rotational velocity (making our days longer) and the magnetic field (making our days a lot more interesting, i.e. nuclear sunburn).  It would get you what you are looking for in terms of failing gravity but the side effects might pose more urgent threats than the sudden weight loss.
Comment: Interestingly, covering mass to energy would not reduce its gravitational pull, as mass and energy are equivalent.  They are actually represented by the same term in the Einstein field equations.
Comment: @JoelKeene, Really?  That is non-intuitive.  So in a super nova, as a wave of energy propagates out in all directions, that energy has mass and therefore exudes gravity (in addition to its concussive force).  I didn't think that energy had mass.  The more I hang out on this site, the more I realize that Einstein was the moment when scientists and laymen became separate species.
Answer: Some ideas:

Space is warped, and Earth's gravity well intersects with something on the other side of the warp. The space where our planet once sat is becoming a wormhole, and gravity is failing from our perspective as a result. See the illustration below.
After the largest underground nuclear bomb test in history, or maybe after another exciting and seemingly innocuous experiment at CERN, the small forces keeping atoms together in the earth's crust have ceased to function normally. The earth is losing mass to radiation at an alarming rate. In some parts of the world, people are dying from radiation sickness; in other parts, people are unable to reproduce, and in other parts the radiation exposure is minimal but the gravitational effects are nonetheless observable. Furthermore, this loss of mass results in large cave-ins, and cities falling into the ground like in Centralia PA.
Mass hysteria. It's not really happening, just everybody thinks it is.
Earth's gravity has been slowly dying for a long time, but the change was imperceptibly small until now. Now the change is accelerating asymptotically. It only seems to be affecting our planet, but really this is just a stage in the lifecycle of every planet, and we haven't observed it before.
Beings from another spacial dimension create some 5th dimensional equivalent to a dyson-sphere around our planet.
Beings from this spacial dimension create an actual dyson-sphere around our planet

Hope this helps!
Comment: Mass hysteria is intriguing. It could open some more psychology to the story.
Answer: Gravity As A Wave
Currently we don't know if gravity is a wave or a particle, but I've read it theorized that it's both, similar to photons. If we assume that gravity can exist as a wave, then perhaps a wave that happen to be the inverse of the gravitational wave signature of Earth's gravity well could cancel out that waveform an therefore nullify gravity. I'm not sure if destructive interference would actually apply to gravity waves, but maybe!
I would expect something like that to be temporary or fleeting, but there are plenty of cosmological events that might create gravity waves. It could even be a failed human experiment or intentional attack from an outside force.
Comment: Welcome to Worldbuilding! Just so you're aware, they have experimentally verified that gravitational waves (i.e. what it looks like you're talking about) do exist. It's a bit more complicated than this but the general idea of putting something that gives an equally strong gravitational field but with the force in the opposite direction would cancel out Earth's gravity at a point/small region. Gravitational waves are just a perturbation and those emitted by Earth are negligibly weak, but if you had a pair of merging black holes relatively nearby, then indeed, who knows what the result would be?
Answer: Dark Energy / The Big Rip
There is a possibility that this will eventually happen.  It depends on the energy density of dark energy in the universe, which we are currently unable to measure accurately enough to tell.
Strictly speaking, this is not gravity failing so much as the expansion of space accelerating, but for all intents and purposes the results are the same.  Basically everything in the universe is accelerating away from everything else, even on tiny scales, but the rate of expansion is greatly overpowered by gravity except on intergalactic scales.  But if the expansion continues to accelerate, eventually it will overpower gravity.
This will actually create a predictable sequence of events that can happen on human-measurable scales.  It could make a great setting for a frantic race against the clock as scientists struggle to figure out a way of escaping the universe before everything ends.
Using one hypothetical example using real equations, the Big Rip could happen 22 billion years from now.  (This will be long after our own solar system is gone, but humanity's descendants could still be around).
60 million years before the end, galaxies become gravitationally unbound.  Your setting is a lone solar system in a starless void.  It is still habitable but the knowledge that there was once such a thing as stars could be long forgotten.
About 3 months before the end, the gravitational attraction between the planet and its star is overpowered by the expansion of space.  The planet begins to move away from its star, first slowly and then picking up speed until people are forced to use technology to survive the cold.  But things are going to get much worse...
Gravity starts to weaken.  Quakes and cataclysmic upheaval become commonplace as the pressure holding the planet's insides inside diminishes.  The atmosphere grows thin.  The oceans boil.  In the last few minutes before the end, the gravitational force cannot hold the planet together anymore and every planet in the solar system explodes at around the same time that the distant sun evaporates into the void.
Anyone who manages to survive in spacecrafts have only a few minutes left before the accelerating expansion of space overpowers the binding energy of matter itself.  There might be a few moments where they can actually feel it building up inside them before it rips apart their bodies, then their molecules, atoms, and finally subatomic particles themselves.
You can adjust the timing if you want to introduce any kind of handwavium physical laws that we don't know about yet.
Answer: This wouldn't necessarily reduce gravity, but it would reduce the sensation of gravity.
Make the Earth start Spinning faster for some reason.
Maybe the core's Dynamo got stronger due to (insert handwave here) resulting in the Earth spinning faster due to the Handwave Principle of Handaway.
The centrifugal force would mean that everything on Earth would feel a slight force push them upward, and the net force felt by things on Earth would be weaker.
Comment: @Punintended If you get enough spin to counteract gravity, that would necessarily rip the Earth apart. Yes, increasing the Earth's spin would not result in equal gravity, but it would mean that you might get crazy weather and ocean currents, making the consequences even worse, which is good for the story.
Comment: This would only affect gravity perpendicular to the axis of rotation.  Earth already has [different axial and equatorial diameters](https://www.universetoday.com/15055/diameter-of-earth/), not to mention [gravities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Earth#Latitude).  By the time you get enough spin to counteract gravity entirely, you'd have a *lot* of shape deformation, not to mention some pretty crazy gravity differences as you change latitude
Comment: The planet Mesklin from the old sci-fi classic "Mission of Gravity" was a high-g world spinning fast enough that the gravity was human-survivable (although not comfortable) at the equator.
Answer: Your best bet is to use gravitons, the quantum particle/fundamental force-carrying particle of gravity. Dark matter is also a good candidate. Gravitons are similar to photons, the quantum particle of the electromagnetic force (also responsible for giving us light). Like Photons, gravitons are thought to have zero rest mass. This means gravitons travel forever at the speed of light and do not decay. However, gravitons could actually have a very small rest mass which would theoretically allow them to decay into other (lighter) particles.
Here are some options:

Gravitons, which have some infinitesimal but nonzero rest mass, are finally starting to decay en-mass into other force-carrying particles such as photons or gluons.
Society is emulated within a computer and is failing to floating point arithmetic errors. For instance in Javascript .1 + .2 = 0.30000000000000004. For instance plank's constant could be wrong.
Dark Matter/Dark Energy - Physicists today observe large objects being attracted to certain areas of space that appear to be empty. Since we cannot observe what is attracting matter to these places other than that the attraction is happening via the gravitational force, we assume there is some massive body that is invisible to detection attracting everything. This scenario gives you the greatest flexibility since we really don't understand too much about Dark Matter/Energy. You could make it another form of life that exists in alternate dimensions or just have dark matter and energy be moving around the universe causing havoc.
Answer: While you can't turn off gravity without getting rid of mass, it's possible to mess it up by counteracting it with another invisible force pointing in a different direction. For instance, when you're in a car that takes a sharp turn, you can feel being pushed outward. This is the centrifugal force, and it can even dominate over gravity when the turn is sharp enough, in which case the car flips over.
How is this relevant to your case? See, we all experience a centrifugal force because of the earth's spin. A fraction of this force counteracts gravity (which always points to the core), however the effect is tiny because the earth spins slowly and has a huge radius: The closer you are at the equator, the stronger the effect. So, if you want to mess up gravity on earth, you can do so by making it spin faster.
There's actually a formula you can use to calculate the centrifugal force, and compare it to gravity. Without getting into details, you can do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to determine that earth's gravity would start getting messed up by centrifugal forces if it were to spin ~10 times faster. That is, if the duration of a day (sunrise to sunset) were ~1hr long.
How exactly would earth's gravity get messed up? In short, people at the poles would be unaffected, while those at the equator would basically start floating around (along with the entirety of the atmosphere). Things wouldn't be flung into space, though, because of inertia. People in between would feel lighter (reduced gravity), as well as experience a mysterious pull toward the equator (i.e., southward in the northern hemisphere, and northward in the southern hemisphere).
In the above apocalyptic scenario, you can imagine that, as the earth spins faster and faster, a certain priviledged few would travel hurriedly toward the poles as the rest of humanity (as well as the atmosphere) gets pulled increasingly strongly toward the equator. It would be a very bizarre situation indeed, as what we all perceive as "down" would no longer feel like "down" anymore; as the earth's spins increases, "down" would increasingly be directed toward the horizon and in the direction of the equator. Not to mention you'd feel lighter and lighter, which, under "normal" conditions, is quite a pleasurable experience.
There's a catch, of course: How do you actually spin the earth up in a fairly reasonable fashion as to make for a dramatic human story that's actually based on well-established scientific principles? One way I could think of, is reducing the earth's moment of inertia; i.e., changing its internal mass distribution. The more concentrated a body's mass is distributed along the rotation axis, the faster it rotates (conservation of angular momentum). So, without changing anything on the surface where the human drama unfolds, you need a mechanism that can plausibly cause the internal mass to get more concentrated toward the core.
By playing around with some numbers, it turns out that you need to cram ~99% of the earth's mass right at the core to make the earth spin faster by a factor of ~10. The only mechanism I can think of that could possibly cause such a huge re-distribution of mass, is a swarm of black holes orbiting around each other in the vicinity of the earth's core. Note that these would have to be tiny, since an earth-mass black hole is ~1cm in size and you obviously don't want to add any mass to the earth, since that would mess up "natural" gravity.
In any case, I didn't investigate the dynamics of a swarm of black holes; i.e., I don't know how quickly they could gobble up a good fraction of the earth's mass as to make the spin-up effect noticeable within a reasonable human timeframe (e.g., years of months). I can't even comment on the stability of such a hypothetical system, since I didn't do any pertinent calculations.
Comment: Just read an article about what would happen if the earth spun faster https://www.popsci.com/earth-spin-faster#page-4 !
Answer: I would suggest something in the lines of what happened at the end of Melancholia: a second large mass comes very close (and for some reason stays put at the required distance to make the story interesting), pretty much deforming gravity on Earth. If you need it to be transparent, non-spherically shaped, anything works really. Not every piece of debris (or alien planet-ship) is perfectly spherical.
For more discussion on the plausibility and effects of such an event, see these network questions:
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19068/is-the-melancholia-dance-of-death-possible
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15083/is-melancholias-orbit-impossible
Note I am suggesting some articifial means to keep the large second object in place, enough to disturb pretty much everything gravity related, without breaking any of the underlying physics.
Also be aware that normal gravity is the single most important thing keeping our atmosphere together.
Answer: Thinking about this, I realised that the shell theorem is your friend, and would need to stretch reality a lot less than some other solutions. I may have to backtrack a bit to explain this, as it is indeed based on hard science.
The problem in the question is that as far as we know, gravity is basically, positive only - there isn't negative (anti) gravity, or gravity shields. So the classic solutions have to centre around either mass reduction, or increasingly unlikely/pseudoscientific explanations with implausible implications.
But there is another way gravity can fail. Let's start with the shell theorem. This is a mathematical/physics principle, that if you are anywhere inside a hollow symmetrical spherical shell, of any thickness, you don't experience any net gravity from it - it all cancels out. (Less mass but closer on one side, more mass but further away on the other, and they always exactly match).
But suppose mass appears above you, that isn't part of a symmetrical shell. Now, you will experience some reduction in earths gravity locally, because of the upward pull. Just not very much.
You'll have to check this out, but I guess this could work, especially given that the question allows for limited scientific plausibility:

a research satellite is launched to perform some kind of extreme research in the vacuum of space, in some suitable orbit just outside earth's atmosphere.
Unknown to those running it, and for [handwave] reasons, the satellite is acting as some kind of dense matter attractor - maybe it warps space or leaves behind some particle, or locally perturbs the vacuum state.
The end result is that a series of mini-black holes appear in its wake, conveniently growing and of a size sufficient to influence earths surface gravity below.
The satellite of course fails, after one or 2 orbits, but the mass concentrations continue to grow. They don't form a symmetrical shell, but a linear trail. They inherit the velocity of the satellite, so they don't immediately just fall inward to earth?
The earth isn't affected much in its orbit - at least not immediately - but if figures out carefully, maybe there would be a local/regional impact on surface gravity, with scope for it to get worse, and other side effects, without having to "break" physics or cause immediate planetary breakup.....? It would have a more severe effect on high altitude objects, as well, which might be useful in a story.
Answer: Negative mass

We had taken for granted for ages that gravity is only attractive. But it turned out that it wasn't.
While trying to create chambers of absolute vacuum, it turned out that speed of effect of gravitation is related to the absolute amount of gravitational entropy ( how much of the available mass of the universe can be present at a given location).
By creating a perfect vacuum scientists were able to stop the effects of gravity within a region.
What was originally understood as vacuum wasn't really vacuum, but a region of space of negative mass which in the presence of other positive behaved like vacuum.
Immediately new research begun and more and more people start researching on this. Meanwhile it turns out that by creating more and more perfect vacuums, we are creating more regions of negative mass.

This negative mass is termed as Anti Dark Matter for it only interacts through gravitational forces and is repulsive.

Termination of a vacuum doesn't always ensure that all the positive mass covers up the negative.
As the gravitational interactions are very weak it was only noticed many more years later that the experiments which were run had caused a small leakage of negative mass that had somehow made it to the near the earth's outer core where it nicely found and equilibrium and settled.

As Earth passes through various regions of space, overtime this negative mass at the core had been collecting more and more of negative mass, and it is growing exponentially.
It is cancelling out the effects of the earth's core and mantle by overlapping and creating regions of 'vacuum'
Answer: Gravity is caused by bending of space time (IRL).
A big corporation has worked out a way of flattening it artificially - effectively "antigravity", and sells it as a product.
Answer: The changing/failing gravity is a floating point error in the universe simulation.
Many existing simulations of varying complexity use floating point numbers for their calculations. For example, the Unity game engine uses a floating point number for gravity strength. In this case, the floating point number would be the lifetime or duration of the gravity effect. It could even be tracking the lifetime of the universe, and the gravity is just a side effect.
Comment: Welcome to Worldbuilding, Jarod S! If you have a moment, please take the [tour] and visit the [help] to learn more about the site. You may also find [meta] and [The Sandbox](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions) (both of which require 5 rep to post on) useful. [Here](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6388) is a meta post on the culture and style of Worldbuilding.SE, just to help you understand our scope and methods, and how we do things here. Have fun!
Answer: Earth isn't real.  I'm borrowing an idea from fiction:
Specifically, Mutineer's Moon, the first book of David Weber's Fifth Imperium series.  They needed to hide a very large starship in our solar system--they took the surface off the Moon and put it on the starship, tossed the core into the sun and took the moon's place.
Lets take this further--at some time in the past aliens replaced Earth with a hidden starship.  The fakery is good enough that even sounding of the innards doesen't reveal that it's starship and not planet.  However, the starship is nowhere near as massive as the planet, it had to use a gravity generator to make things look real.
The maintenance system on the starship is failing.  There are actually many gravity generators in the starship so a failure doesn't leave the planet coming apart, but now they are wearing out.  As generators fail the others take up the load--but not quite evenly and the additional load on them speeds their own failure and once enough have failed they can't maintain 1g anymore.
When all the generators are dead there will still be some gravity due to the mass of the ship and the mass of the crust that was laid over the ship, but it won't be anything like 1g and won't keep an atmosphere for the long term.
Answer: A great many people have independently considered the idea that gravity doesn't attract, it repels. The attraction observed between neighboring bodies is do to partial shielding of the bodies by one another. The shielding is small and proportional to mass. This doesn't actually work if you dig into the details, but you have to dig pretty deeply. The advantage now is that the source of gravitational pressure can be entirely divorced from mass and located a very long way away. Enabling this view of gravity would open up all kinds of options. It would seem that you are on the cusp of some event horizon that is about to isolate our corner of the universe from it's source of gravitination.
Comment: Do you have anything to back up your statement that gravity is repulsive? Because gravitational attraction between bodies has been measured in a lab
Comment: @L.Dutch I said it doesn't work. I know it doesn't work. But it is far from obvious that it doesn't work, and it opens up a lot of options. Hence "enabling this view ..."
Answer: Alien Transportation System
OK, this one sounds a bit "space opera"-ish, but you can probably dress it up and make it pretty.
Aliens from an alternate dimension/universe/what-have-you use "our" dimension/universe/etc as a convenient way to travel great distances in "their" dimension, because the mapping between the dimensions is such that traveling (a short distance) in "our" dimension is equivalent to traveling (a very very long distance) in theirs. Jumping from a "small" dimension (theirs) to a "big" dimension (ours) requires very little energy - but traveling from a "big" dimension to a "small" dimension requires A Lot of energy - and the energy (and thus the mass) is removed from the local area near the jump site and transferred to the "small" dimension. And, again unfortunately, the Sol system just happens to be conveniently located for their use - so they're sucking the energy/mass out of our area. Oh, BTW, that means the sun is going to go nova. Sorry about your luck, humans - BUT as a consolation prize the aliens have offered each and every human a set of genuine Alien Ginsu Steak Knives! They slice! They dice! They make your star blow up! Wooooo!
Answer: No
Gravity doesn't "fail", any more than the other fundamental forces fail.  If they could, we would live in an entirely different universe.  If any of the forces "started to fail", so many catastrophic things would happen all at once that there would be no grace period.
Comment: A brief look at the history of science yields that long-held theories about the way the universe works have a broad tendency toward failure. We're constantly revising our understanding of the universe because we're frequently wrong. Gravity is just a theory which we hold to be true because we've never observed it failing, but without a solid understanding of how much probabilistic weight a single instance of nonfailure yields, our lives are too short to develop the kind of certainty this answer reflects; at least not without some higher source of absolute knowledge.
Comment: I'm with @boxcartenant.  I was regularly frustrated by a young woman taking nursing classes because she would spout today's medical understanding and complete her statement with the phrase, "and that's a medical fact!"  She's 20 something.  I'm 50 something.  I've lived long enough to know some of the so-called medical facts she's spouting didn't even exist at one point or changed to accomodate recent research.  Our understanding of just about everything is hardly complete.  To paraphrase the movie *Volcano,* "we're scientists, 'certainty' is a big word."
Comment: @boxcartenant:  Long-held theories are being revised, not invalidated.  Newton's Law of Gravity still works for most purposes.  There have been some big changes, but they tend to explain new things.  Photons explained the previously unexplained cases of the photoelectric effect and black-body radiation, but optics wasn't really affected.  We know that physical laws are pretty much the same all over the observable Universe.
Comment: @DavidThornley Good feedback. I think, though, a revision is essentially a partial invalidation. We'll never completely invalidate gravity, because we can plainly see that things are falling, but we might revise our understanding of it so significantly that it would be unrecognizable against its current form; so while the laws might be the same everywhere, their application may be entirely different from what we currently suppose.
Comment: This is not a reality check.
Comment: I understand that in the real world it wouldn't. But, that is the crux of the story. Kind of a Titanic "too big to fail" situation. It is supposed to be chaos, the story will be exploring different people from different communities... how they either come together or fall apart. Scientists would have to posit theories to some extent, either to comfort the public, or not.
Comment: "how they either come together or fall apart" Well, they will literally fall apart without gravity.
Comment: Except that for the fundamental forces, immutable constants, etc., there have been no refutations over time.  Deepenings of understanding, sure (gravity isn't suction, for instance), but if you change how gravity, the strong/weak nuclear force, or electromagnetism works, literally everything in the universe stops working too.


Help Text On Fields of Custom Lightning Component

Question: I have a lightning component in which i want to display help text for the fields. I can use  for sure. But is there any way to get the help text from backend. I mean when we create the field in the org we provide some help text. Can that help text be called in the custom component?
Comment: You can use the field describe calls to get the help text for fields. However there's no out of the box way in which the help text can be shown directly in the components. You will have to use a custom wrapper to wrap the help text along with other field information.
Answer: Out of the box is not there, but there is a workaround.
You can hold the loading of help text until you get the help text response from server.
Lets say there are fields called Test_Field1__c and Test_Field2__c on Test_Object__c.
In Apex:
@AuraEnabled
public static Map<String, String> getHelpText() {
    String helpText1 = Test_Object__c.Test_Field1__c.getDescribe().getInlineHelpText();
    String helpText2 = Test_Object__c.Test_Field2__c.getDescribe().getInlineHelpText();
    return Map<String, String> { 'Test_Field1__c'=>helpText1, 'Test_Field2__c'=>helpText2 };
}

And in lightning component
<aura:attribute name="helpText1" type="String" default="" />
<aura:attribute name="helpText2" type="String" default="" />
<aura:attribute name="initDone" type="Boolean" default="false" />
<aura:handler name="init" value="{!this}" action="{!c.doInit}" />
<aura:if isTrue="{!v.initDone}">
    <lightning:helptext content="{!v.helpText1}" />

    <lightning:helptext content="{!v.helpText2}" />

</aura:if>

In js controller
doInit: function(component) {
   //call apex
    var action = component.get('c.getHelpText');

    action.setCallback(this, function(response){
        var resp = response.getReturnValue();
        component.set("v.helpText1", resp.Test_Field1__c);
        component.set("v.helpText2", resp.Test_Field2__c);
        component.set("v.initDone", true);
    });
    $A.enqueueAction(action);
}

Comment: Hi @Aditya thanks for the reply. this is what i was looking for!
Comment: @SmrutiRanjanBiswal glad it helped, you can mark the answer accepted as well so other also can take the reference from here :-)
Comment: yeah sure. Can u also help me with how to get the 'Guidance for Success of Sales Path to the Custom Component or to Apex'
Comment: @SmrutiRanjanBiswal that is a part of metadata https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_meta.meta/api_meta/meta_pathassistant.htm
you need to use Metadata API in order to get this to apex which is a bit complex to use. lightning:picklistPath is there to create the path in component, but it doesn't help with guidance of success or fields. Not sure if something else is there!


Logging into Google play

Question: I have 4 gmail accounts in my phone but when I go to Google play it is trying to use an obsolete account and in Google play there is no drop down box to choose an active account. (Google play was using one of my active gmail accounts but it all of a sudden stopped working and went back to the inactive gmail account. I also cannot delete the obsolete account off my phone because in settings/account preferences it says in gray "not all settings are available" and there is nothing to click. I was trying to delete it so google play would not try and use it for signing into google play)
Answer: Open play store and slide from left to right then you can see a drop-down list in the navigation pane. There you can choose the account.
Google play store is inter connected with the Google+ app in your mobile. If you want to remove an account in play store, you can do it by removing that account at google+ app in your mobile. It won't delete your account.

Logging into Google play


Is setting up my own VPN more secure than buying from third party vendors?

Question: When Googling for the most trusted VPN provider (for keeping your anonymity), some users say that the best way to go is to just setup your own (e.g., OpenVPN) using a dedicated server. How is this more secure if the provider of the dedicated server and their ISP still has access to your internet traffic data?
Answer: In general setting up your own will be less secure because:

there are more ways for your identity to leak out when you are hosting your own service. For example, if you use a dedicated server you might need to register a domain name.
you lose the anonymity of many, many users utilizing the third party VPN service. (If you are one of a few users of your self-hosted VPN, it will be easier to identify you.)
you may not have the expertise to understand the latest security issues related to your hardware, host, network and software stack
Answer: Using a VPN service does not anonymize you from Nation-State actors.  For example, VPNs have been used as honeypots in the past by the FBI to catch Carders in Europe. If you are concerned with Nation-State type threats (I don't think you are), read up on the tor proxy or OPSEC methodologies needed for that type threat (you are probably already screwed btw). However, If you want to secure your connection from spying eyes while you are in a hotel or at a coffee shop, using a home VPN (or a ssh socks proxy to route through a home server) is more secure than using a third party.  For example, the third party could be viewing your traffic as your connection routes from the vpn tunnel back out to the Internet, anything that's not SSL/TLS encrypted is fair game.
Perhaps reading up on using a socks proxy (ssh) or even OpenVPN to set up a service at your house would be a good idea.


Is it possible to design NSCell subclasses in Interface Builder?

Question: I'm trying to subclass NSCell for use in a NSTableView. The cell I want to create is fairly complicated so it would be very useful if I could design it in Interface Builder and then load the NSCell from a nib.
Is this possible? How do I do it?
Comment: Now that NSTableView supports NSTableCellView, I wonder if there is a better way to support doing everything from IB.
Answer: The question was about a subclass of NSCell; the other answers seem to be doing something else, likely taking advantage of UITableViewCell being a view.
NSCell is not a view.  While laying a custom cell out in IB would be a useful thing to be able to do, I think the answer is basically "no, this is not possible".  When you subclass NSCell, you're pretty much just doing your own drawing.  There isn't support subcells, or parameterized auto layout (ala NSView's springs and struts), which is I suspect what you're looking for.
The only caveat is that you could design an NSCell subclass that did do layout of sub-elements and provided parameters for setting those subelements and all tweakable parameters.  Then, you would need to write an IB plugin to make that cell and accompanying inspector available at design time in IB.
This, however, is probably harder than writing a little custom app that does more or less the same thing.  Put an NSCell in a control in the middle of a window, and make yourself UI for tweaking the parameters you're interested in.  Bindings can make this pretty straightforward for positioning stuff (i.e. bind an x value to a slider), though you will not get direct manipulation of the elements of course.  When you're done, you could archive your cell and load the archive at runtime in your real app, or you could just log out the properties and set them in code in your app.
Answer: Some answers in this thread have gone off topic because they're talking about Cocoa Touch, when the original question was about Cocoa - the 2 APIs are quite different in this regard and Cocoa Touch makes it easy because UITableViewCell is a view subclass. NSCell isn't, and that's the problem
For information, I had to do something very similar in NSOutlineView recently - which is basically the same, but a little harder if anything because you have to deal with disclosure / collapse of levels. If you're interested in the code, I posted about it here: http://www.stevestreeting.com/2010/08/08/cocoa-tip-using-custom-table-outline-cells-designed-in-ib/
HTH
Answer: As Ken says, NSCells and NSViews are different, and you can only lay out NSView hierarchies in NIB, not NSCells (which don't have any explicit hierarchy).
On the other hand, there's nothing preventing you from having a hierarchy of NSViews and using that to draw your NSCell -- you could add them as a subview of your cell's parent view, tell them to display, and remove them from the window and nobody would be the wiser.
In this case, using a NIB would work, although it seems like a ton of hassle. Typically I've just replaced the object that takes NSCells with a custom one that takes my NSViews, but that means writing your own mouse-handling code, which is very touchy.
On the other hand, my approach lets you bind the views' values in NIB, so you don't have to do any extra work, which is cool.
Answer: In IB, start an empty XIB.  Now go to the pallete and drag in a UITableViewCell, double click to bring up and edit.
include only the custom UITableViewCell (no other UIViews or other top level controls) - make sure it's a real UITableViewCell in IB, or you cannot set a reuse identifier (as opposed to casting a UIView in IB as your custom UITableViewCell class).
  Then you can add lables or whatever you like within the cell, as well as setting the reuse identifier or set whatever disclosure indicator you might like.
To use, you provide code like this in the tableView:cellForRow:atIndexPath: method:
YourCustomCellClass *cell = (YourCustomCellClass *)[tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:<IDYouSetInXIBFile>];
if ( cell == nil )
{
        NSArray *topLevelObjects = [[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:<YourXIBName> owner:self options:nil];
    id firstObject = [topLevelObjects objectAtIndex:0];
    if ( [ firstObject isKindOfClass:[UITableViewCell class]] )
        cell = firstObject;
    else cell = [topLevelObjects objectAtIndex:1];
}

If you have any labels or other controls you want to reference in your code, wire them in IB to your custom cell class - NOT the file's owner, which you do not ever need to set using the above code (you can leave it as NSObject).
Edit: I note you are really looking for an NSCell answer, but the code approach to using IB should be identical in Cocoa with the Cocoa Touch code I used above as loadNibNamed is a standard Cocoa call.
Comment: Somehow I did it wrong the first time, but your detailed instructions (the start) saved the day. Thanx!
Answer: Joar Wingfors wrote an article for Stepwise a few years back on a related topic, Subviews in TableView Rows.
The principal technique is to create an NSCell that can host an NSView.  If you were to do this, you could then design an NSView subclass in Interface Builder that you could embed anywhere you need that specific cell.
Another possibility, if you can target Leopard, is to see whether you need to use an NSTableView or whether you can use an NSCollectionView.  Collection views deal directly in terms of "item views" rather than in cells, so they're much more straightforward to design in Interface Builder.
Answer: I found some interesting examples which I do not totally understand, though.

GitX extends the NSTextFieldCell in their PBIconAndTextCell, referencing this post.
WWDC 2009 - Session 110 "Presenting User Data with Table Views and Browsers" talks "Adding subviews" and "Custom cell editors". (I do not have the source code, though.)
Display an NSTextfieldCell containing text and an image within a NSTableView, #70
Display an NSTextfieldCell containing text and an image within a NSTableView, #71

The last 2 examples work with NSTableViewDataSource and NSTableViewDelegate. I would like to use Bindings an ArrayController in the InterfaceBuilder to connect other UI elements like text fields.

I stumbled into another discussion where Abizern points out PXListView by Alex Rozanski which looks very promising!
I am trying to implement a solution for the problem myself. Please find my project on github and the latest rendering problems over here.
Answer: I do it like this:
/* example of a silly way to load a UITableViewCell from a standalone nib */

+ (CEntryTableViewCell *)cell
{
// TODO -- this is really silly.
NSArray *theObjects = [[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"EntryTableViewCell" owner:self options:NULL];
for (id theObject in theObjects)
    if ([theObject isKindOfClass:self])
        return(theObject);
NSAssert(NO, @"Could not find object of class CEntryTableViewCell in nib");
return(NULL);
}

However it isn't very efficient and if you're loading lot of data it might hurt you. Of course you should be using a reuseIdentifier which should force this code to only run a handful of times per table.
Comment: The question was for Cocoa, not Cocoa Touch
Answer: 1) Create NSViewController TableViewCell.h
2) Create in TableViewCell.h some procedures like
-(void)setText:(NSString *)text image:(NSImage *)image

3) In Main class #import "TableViewCell.h"
4) In Main class in  -(NSView *)tableView:viewForTableColumn:row: write:
NSImage *img = //some image
TableViewCell *cell = [[TableViewCell alloc] initWithWindowNibName:@"TableViewCell"];
cell.view.init;
[cell setText:@"some text" image:img];
return cell;

Hope this will help =)
Answer: I want to provide a more modern approach here.
Starting with iOS 5, UITableView has a method
(void)registerNib:(UINib *)nib forCellReuseIdentifier:(NSString *)identifier
Once you registered your NIB containing your cell, just use
- (id)dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:(NSString *)identifier
to get a new cell. If a cell is available for reuse, it will be returned, otherwise a new cell is automatically created, and in that case this means loaded from the NIB file.
Answer: Add your UITableViewCell to your tableviewcontroller and declare an IBOutlet property:
@interface KuguTableViewController : UITableViewController {
    IBOutlet UITableViewCell *customTypeCell;
}

@property (readonly)  UITableViewCell *customTypeCell;

... then in cellForRowAtIndexPath you can just use your cell and set it to be reused:
static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"CustomCell"
cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
if (cell == nil)
        cell = customTypeCell;
        cell.reuseIdentifier = CellIdentifier;

Comment: doesn't deserve a minus though.


Samsung Galaxy S3 not turning on

Question: My Samsung Galaxy S3 battery died. A green robot with download message appeared when I plug it into a wall outlet to be charged. Seeing this for the first time, I thought it might have been some virus, so I removed and replaced the battery. The same thing happened again. After removing and replacing the battery a second time, the robot disappeared and my phone has been dead since, despite being left to charge for 5+ hours and several attempts removing/replacing battery and using the 2/3keys turning methods and plugging it directly to a laptop. How do i get it working. If fast boot is a possible solution, how is that done?
Comment: "download message" What is the exact text of the message?
Answer: you can Follow this Guide to Flash your Galaxy S3's Firmware again.
Things you have to do for this are as follows

Download the latest firmware for your device at sammobile
Copy the firmware to your device either by Recovery mode or Samsung Kies or Samsung ODIN
Flash the firmware on to your device using ODIN

The Complete process with pictures is provided in that link. Hope it helps
Comment: Please include the most important steps into your answer

Samsung Galaxy S3 not turning on


Boot up black screen

Question: During boot up I get for a fraction of a second a black screen with three lines of errors. Otherwise the system works perfectly, boots ok and operates very fast. Should I bother about those lines? Is there a way to stop the screen and read what the info is? Thanks for a kind suggestion.
Answer: Execute on terminal dmesg | grep error. That's probably going to show those errors you see at boot. You can just use dmesg to see all the output and search manually.
If your errors are like:
usb 1-1.4: string descriptor 0 read error: -22

Then it should be fine, otherwise you can create a new question or ask me in the comments :)
Comment: Many thanks I much obliged for offer to help out. I am pasting the result - just errors off dmesg: CPI Error: [^^^GFX0.AFN4] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND (20160930/psargs-359)
[    5.675871] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_SB.PCI0.LPCB.EC0.SACL] (Node ffff8aac960ca370), AE_NOT_FOUND (20160930/psparse-543)
[    5.675879] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_SB.PCI0.LPCB.EC0._Q09] (Node ffff8aac960ca528), AE_NOT_FOUND (20160930/psparse-543)
[    5.84402
Comment: Hmm im not really sure but it seems some driver isn't correctly configured. If you don't miss anything and your computer works let it be that way. otherwise you better ask a new question.
Comment: Thanks a lot. Everything works fine, I will live with it. If not broken, do not repair :)

Boot up black screen


I downloaded a file from TOR and it dissapeared

Question: I downloaded a file from TOR and it dissapeared. Should I be worried? it also dissapeared from the download history too.
Comment: Try to do a search for the file.
Tor downloads to:
tor-browser_en-US---Browser----Downloads
Answer: Would this be TOR on a Tails installation?
In the case of Tails, the download would by default go to your /home/amnesia/Tor\ Browser/ directory. On Tails this location is not permanent.  Upon reboot it will vanish, as will your download history.  This behavior is normal/working-as-designed.
If this is the case, you'll need to:

Configure permanent storage
Re-download your file
Move downloaded file from /home/amnesia/Tor\ Browser -> /home/amnesia/Persistent/Tor\ Browser/

To Configure Permanent Storage

Applications -> Tails -> Configure Persistent Volume
At a minimum turn on Personal Data
Click Save
Reboot

Storage configuration changes only become active after reboot so you'll want to wait on downloading your file until after you've configured the storage.  Otherwise, you'll have nowhere to place the file for permanent storage.