How can I achieve this type of texture in illustrator?

Question: How do you achieve the textures on the right side of the mountain, where the noise seems to leave the shape. Is there a gradient applied, because there's slight differences in colors in places. And on the moon, how do you make it look like rough brush strokes?
Comment: That appears to me to be a *traditional illustration* by [Chiara Ghigilazza](https://chiaraghigliazza.com/BOREALI-book-covers). Probably using conte crayon. It can't easily be mimicked via Illustrator. It's possible to add textures in Illustrator, but the subtle variations would take considerable work and experience with Illustrator.
Comment: [Here](https://theaoi.com/wia/chiara-ghigliazza-i-boreali/) the artist says that for this project she *"worked mostly on digital, with some add of ink, watercolor textures and pencils."*. I don't think there is an easy effect you can add in Illustrator though. My guess is that the vector shapes were made in Illustrator, then the textures were added in Photoshop and a lot of manual digital painting was involved.
Comment: @user287001 Do you have suggestions of where I could learn more about making textures in photoshop, because I'm never really satisfied with how they turn out for me.
Answer: Illustrator gets easily overloaded if you have something this complex as vectors. Every grain must be an object. You may create them with sprayers, scatter brushes and by tracing raster images which contain noise, but finally you still have 100000 objects instead of a few megapixel bitmap image.Try at first to make the textures in Photoshop. If you have resolution high enough you can use them in Illustrator as raster images without making them vectors.
Modern Illustrator versions even allow you to use bitmap images as brushes, so you can draw with in Photoshop made or scanned real brush, pen or crayon strokes.
Let's try to make in Photoshop something like the moon.
We start with dark grey background and fill a circular selection with color to a new layer. The circle diameter is about 350 pixels:

Blending mode Dissolve makes randomly one pixel holes to the layer. The hole density increases if the layer opacity is decreased:

If we insert a layer mask we can easily control the opacity without deleting our original shape. An easy way to get the mask is to reselect the circle and click "insert layer mask" icon in the layers panel.
Here the layer mask is inserted, the layer opacity is returned to 100% but the mask has got a few px gaussian blur. It makes the black to white transition fuzzy and the edge gets a hole gradient:

If we paint manually with low opacity (a few %) soft brush some black to the white area in the mask we get the wanted roughness to the whole fill. In the right there's also shown the layer mask:

You can adjust the effect depth by applying Curves to the layer mask. To have bigger holes you should use lower resolution or paint full black dots to the mask with a scatter brush. The holes generated by the blending mode dissolve are 1x1 px.
The mountaintop can be made basically as a black shape on a dark grey background. A part of the black shape is partially covered by a pink shape. These all are in separate layers which are fully opaque and have blending mode =Normal.

The shapes are made by filling polygonal lasso selections with the paint bucket. The paint bucket had tool blending mode=dissolve instead of normal. It made the edges grainy due the transparency in the edge anti-aliasing.
Grainy textures are added one by one. Here they are all visible:

The black shape has got a little noise with Filter > Noise > Add noise.
The pink shape has got three different manual paintings to layer ON_PINK. They all are made manually with soft brushes which had tool blending mode = Dissolve. The colors were black, orange and red. A selection prevented painting over the border. The selection was made by Ctrl+Clicking the PINK layer icon in the layers panel.
There's some red noise on the grey background. It's painted manually to layer ON_GREY with a big and a small soft brush with tool blending mode = Dissolve. There's manually painted layer mask which fades the red noise smoothly.
NOTE: Noise and Dissolve are poor substitutes for real grainy textures. You can for ex. scratch some patterns onto paper with a grey pencil or other tool. After scanning them you can adjust contrast and colorize them.
Answer: Very unlikely to do that in Illustrator, however Adobe has recently released the Fresco app which is specifically aimed at producing more realistic drawing and painting textures, beyond current Illustrator/Photoshop capabilities, so you may want to try this:

https://www.behance.net/galleries/fresco
https://www.adobe.com/products/fresco.html


Convert Particle System to Object With Unique Faces

Question: I've been trying to find info around converting hair particles into a mesh, but with "unique" faces. I'm able to convert the particles into the mesh, which creates a number of linked objects under the Outliner window.
Once complete, each object (object.001, object.002 etc) is linked in so much that selecting a face on one selects that same face on all the others. I can't work out how to unlink them so that each face is its own unique face, and not linked to the rest. When trying to unlink it just removes it from the scene.
I've so far tried a few applications, (make instances real) etc, but I'm not sure how to combine it all into single object.
Any help is appreciated.
Answer: You can do it by going to Object > Relations > Make Single User.


Polarization of light and Brewster's angle in internal reflection

Question: In almost all sources I read so far, Brewster's angle is defined for light incident on an optically denser medium from an optically rarer medium. Is the concept of Brewster's angle applicable when light passes from an optically denser medium to an optically rarer medium? Will the reflected ray be completely polarized as in the usual case? In angles other than Brewster's angle, is the reflected or refracted rays partially polarized (composed predominantly of one direction of polarization over the other perpendicular direction) as in the regular case?
Answer: The Brewster angle is $\theta_B= \arctan (n_2/n_1)$, where $n_1$ is the refractive index for the light incident on an interface, which has a value whichever of $n_1$ or $n_2$ is greater. This angle is always less than the critical angle for total internal reflection, $\theta_c = \arcsin(n_2/n_1)$, where a critical angle exists ($n_1 > n_2$), since $\arcsin(x) > \arctan(x)$ for $0<x<1$.
The reflected wave is completely polarised at the Brewster angle.
The transmitted wave is partially polarised. At other angles there is partial polarisation of both reflected and transmitted waves.
Feel free to experiment with this app.
Answer: The concept of the Brewster angle has no restriction on the ratio of the refractive index of the incident and transmitted medium. One can see it as follows.
Let $p$-polarized light is incident from a medium of refractive index $n_1$ to a medium with index $n_2$. We define the relative index $n:=\frac{n_1}{n_2}$. The reflection coefficient for $p$-polarized light reads
$${r_p} = \frac{{\cos \left( {{\theta _1}} \right) - n\cos \left( {{\theta _2}} \right)}}{{\cos \left( {{\theta _1}} \right) + n\cos \left( {{\theta _2}} \right)}}.$$
To fulfill the Brewster condition, namely zero reflection coefficient, we demand $r_p=0$. Therefore
\begin{align}
& \cos \left( {{\theta _1}} \right) - n\cos \left( {{\theta _2}} \right) = 0, \\
\Rightarrow~ &\cos \left( {{\theta _1}} \right) = n\sqrt {1 - {{\sin }^2}\left( {{\theta _2}} \right)} , \\
\Rightarrow~ &\cos \left( {{\theta _1}} \right) = n\sqrt {1 - \frac{1}{{n_2^2}} \cdot n_2^2 \cdot {{\sin }^2}\left( {{\theta _2}} \right)} , \\
\Rightarrow~ &\cos\left( {{\theta _1}} \right) = n\sqrt {1 - \frac{1}{{n_2^2}} \cdot n_1^2 \cdot {{\sin }^2}\left( {{\theta _1}} \right)},\\
&~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\mathrm{Using~Snell's~law: {n_1}\sin \left( {{\theta _1}} \right) = {n_2}\sin \left( {{\theta _2}} \right).}\\ \\
 \Rightarrow~ & \cos^2\left( {{\theta _1}} \right) = {n^2}\left( {1 - {n^2}{{\sin }^2}\left( {{\theta _1}} \right)} \right), \\ \\
\Rightarrow~ & 1 - {\sin ^2}\left( {{\theta _1}} \right) = {n^2}\left( {1 - {n^2}{{\sin }^2}\left( {{\theta _1}} \right)} \right), \\ \\
\therefore~ & \sin \left( {{\theta _1}} \right) = \sqrt {\frac{1}{{1 + {n^2}}}}. \tag{1} \label{ppolaBrw}
\end{align}
As we can see from Eq. \eqref{ppolaBrw}, regardless of the value of relative index $n = \frac{n_1}{n_2}$, there is always an angle $\theta_1$ when the reflection coefficient is zero.


A full answer is just converted to comment

Question: I've just made an answer to the question, and referred to the proper tutorial that shows how to do exactly what the asker wants to do. I was not plagiarising a tutorial, but briefly described all the parts involved. What is the problem with my answer?
Answer: A couple of reasons:

By the scope defined in the help center, general purpose linux questions are off-topic.  In practice this is treated as bit of a gray area, as I have discussed elsewhere.
Here's another meta Q&A more specifically about "Raspbian", although it is pretty clear what is really meant is general linux questions.  In my answer there, I explain that part of the problem is that we do not have expertise in sufficient volume for us to field all such questions and ignore the existence of Unix & Linux, just as we do not have expertise in sufficient volume to ignore the existence of the larger Electrical Engineering.  Answering this question in the way it was answered does not provide anything hopeful in this sense, as I will try to explain.
If that question were migrated to U&L, it would be closed as a duplicate because it is something which has been dealt with many times in many places, as your response indicates.
It's worth noting that there's already at least one exact duplicate here with more information in it, so there are multiple reasons for this to have been closed.
In cases like this, it is fine to give someone a quick link and explain this is well documented and easily researched topic if you know what to search for.  This is all your "answer" was, so I converted it to a comment and closed the question.

There is no need of anything more than that and looking at the final comment, it seems the O.P. is happy.
If the question were one which was more unusual (e.g., because it involved more particularly unique aspects of the pi) and one which has not been sufficiently dealt with elsewhere online and someone was willing to do it here, then great.
We have a lot of questions that go unanswered because they do fall into this latter category.  If people have time to answer questions, it would be much better if they make an effort to research and answer those as best they can rather than cherry picking things quickly -- this just leads to exploiting the system in a mostly unhelpful way, which is why it is also frowned upon on, e.g., our parent site Stack Overflow.
Comment: Yes, I said that in the original answer here, first statement after the list.  The fact that a comment is helpful does not turn it into an answer or make a question magically on-topic, if that is why you are pointing this out.  The final state of the Q&A seems to be fine.
Comment: I thought that a workflow would be different : answer a question first, and then migrate it to a proper/more-relevant part of the SE network, like a Linux or Raspbian one
Comment: Migration can only be done by mods; [see here](http://meta.raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A5538+migrate) for some of my observations and opinions about that -- I close as "off-topic" much more often than I migrate for various reasons.  In any case, when it happens it depends on how the cookie crumbles.  It is possible that I or another mod may look at a "gray" question and leave it for a period of time to see what happens; this is one way of evaluating where our expertise potential currently is.  In any case, any answers are migrated *with* the question, they are not lost.
Comment: by the way - check the asker's comment on that question on my answer ;) It worked!


How to not burn the sugars in veggies when simmering in a dutch oven for a long time?

Question: I cooked a vegetable stew (onions, carrots, cabbage, potatoes) in a dutch oven on the stovetop for about 30-40 minutes on medium heat.  The food turned out fine, but there's a thick layer of black residue in the bottom of the dutch oven when I'm done cooking (which I am able to clean off).  Is this the burned sugars from within the veggies?  Is there a better way to cook for a long time with a dutch oven on a stovetop without leaving blackened residue on the bottom?
Comment: is your food dry once it's finished or is there still liquid?
Comment: The food is dry
Comment: there's your answer: either more water or less time or less heat.
Answer: It sounds like either your heat is too high, or there is not enough liquid in your stew. If you can't reduce the flame, consider a heat diffuser.
Comment: I'd never even heard of a heat diffuser!  I'll give it a try
Answer: You should mix the stew once in a while so everything has a chance to be at the bottom of the pot. A silicone spatula is good for scraping the bottom cleanly and getting those ingredients up and mixed around. Fold like you would an angel food cake and it won't take much mixing each time.
Answer: From my experience, I believe it to be the sugars and proteins in whatever liquid you're cooking in that is what's actually burning, and not the vegetables themselves.
You can try a few things:

As @myklbykl mentioned, stir frequently.  I typically aim for every 15 minutes, but my stews typically take more than an hour, not 30-40 minutes.  For yours, you might want to aim for every 5-10 minutes.  I also like a spatula, as the flat end helps you to make sure that you're scraping the bottom well.  (but I use wood, not silicone)
Turn the heat down.  You don't actually want to see the stew vigorously bubbling.  You typically want to see an occassional bubble, which for most stoves, if you have a well-fit lid is low or warm, not 'medium'.
Move the pot to the oven.  I know you said wanted to do it on the stove-top, but the more even heat means that you can keep the oven pretty low and not have the temperature gradient that you would by cooking it on the stove.
Add your potatoes later.  If they're breaking down on you, this will thicken the liquid and make it more likely to burn.  Instead, cut them smaller and add them later.
Change your potatoes.  Again, if they're breaking up on your, change to a 'waxy' (roasting) potato instead of a 'floury' (baking) potato.  If the stew still isn't thick enough for your liking five minutes before serving, take a box grater and grate a potato straight into the stew ... it'll act like instant mashed potatoes and thicken up quickly.
Comment: Thanks for the detailed response, I'll try some of these points next time I cook the stew and see how it turns out.


Should bribery be explicitly forbidden?

Question: I saw a question today from a new user offering access to a project's source code in return for an answer to their question. I've never seen something like this before, so it's probably quite rare. But out of curiosity, I tried to find any mention of it in the rules, and failed. This practice is at best tacky, and at worst could undermine the way this site works if it became widespread. Should it be explicitly called out in the code of conduct or terms of service?
Comment: OK, so the bribery is "I'll give you my code if you solve my problem"? If so, I don't really think it's a very effective way to bribe people - if somebody can solve the problem with the code, they'd very likely not need that code themselves. Also, if the code already has a problem, then is it really *that* valuable? I'm trying to wrap my head around how this is supposed to work.
Comment: That sounds slightly more reasonable...except if the Intagram clone was useful, we wouldn't be talking about an "instagram clone" but that thing. There have been Facebook clones, Twitter clones, Instagram clones, MySpace clones, etc since those became popular. And none of the clones have replaced the services they tried to emulate. Heck, I worked for a company that made one of these. Not by our choice but, hey, the customer was paying. You've not heard of that product, either, I assure you. So, I'm going to say that the Instagram clone wouldn't be a huge success either.
Comment: How is offering something of value to pay someone to perform a service *bribery* ?  The offer isn't being made to induce a public, or private, official to do something that they shouldn't ought to do.  Sure, the thing offered is of very little value, but it's an attempt to *pay* not to *bribe*.  It's called *commerce* !  And, arguably, the source code is worth more than the shiny reputation points often offered as bounties on questions - and no-one calls those *bribes*.
Comment: It said something like, "I'll give you the code for an Instagram clone if you answer my question." The question had no apparent connection to the Instagram clone.
Comment: I'm with @VLAZ - I'm not sure if "I give you more code" is bribery or treat :) Realistically I don't see what could be plausible post-answer payment for an answer... I can see bounty as a potential option, but clearly in such case it is better to wait till bounty at least will show up on the question...
Comment: [I found another question.](https://stackoverflow.com/q/68410198/8384089)  This time, someone is actually offering money for it.
Comment: @HighPerformanceMark Forgot to come back and respond before, but you're absolutely right. Bribery is not the right word. I found it tacky and used a word with negative connotation, which was putting unnecessary bias on what I was actually asking.
Answer: It's information that doesn't help answer a question and we already don't allow that so...

the source code is vital to the question or answer - vote to close the question as unclear or downvote and vote to delete the answer as it's useless.
the offer is in a comment - flag the comment as it adds nothing to the Q&A
the offer is in the question or answer - edit it out if it adds nothing and flag the post if the information is reinstated.
Answer: To be honest, I'm less concerned with the bribery aspect of the question, and more interested in its topicality.  If it's off-topic, it really doesn't matter what the OP offers in compensation; it should be closed and shut down, no questions.
In general though, those kinds of things can just be...edited out of a question.

Should bribery be explicitly forbidden?


How to deploy field dependencies using change sets

Question: I want to deploy field dependencies using change sets,How to deploy field dependencies using change sets ?
Answer: user10060, it looks like all you need to do is just add the controlling field and the dependent field to the change set, and the field dependencies will be included. If your controlling field is a standard field, then all you need is the dependent field.
Example 1: Contact fields, Birth Country and Birth State/Province
Birth State/Province is controlled by Birth Country. To deploy this dependency, I added both fields to my change set.
Example 2: Account field, Subindustry
Subindustry is a custom field controlled by the standard Industry field. To deploy this dependency, I added the single Subindustry field to the change set.
Comment: No problem, @RajSfdc. If you click View Source next to the dependent field after uploading the change set, you can see the metadata that's being deployed and confirm that the dependencies are included in the XML.


What are the best sites to learn LaTex from the scratch for writing journal articles?

Question: I am a LaTeX newbie. I am curious to hear your recommendations about the best places to learn it. More precisely, I am going to start writing my doctoral thesis in it. Our school already has a template but I would like to get the basics first before diving into that template. With that, I plan to continue writing my journal articles in LaTeX instead of MS Word (which is, as you may relate, sometimes painfully unfriendly to scholars when it comes to formatting).
Comment: I presume that Leslie Lamport's classic book is not suitable? Having the reference at hand is not a bad plan.
Comment: This is not an answer to your question and a question along these lines would be closed as shopping: But my advice is to investigate different LaTeX editors. For me, I started in TeXnicCenter and then switched to TeXMaker when I understood a bit more what was going on. Now I'd probably start in an online LaTeX editor so you don't have to install anything - such as OverLeaf
Comment: Check out https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/11/35864 and https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/4420/35864.
Comment: I hugely recommend Overleaf for a thesis. You can work on it anywhere (any computer with an internet browser). It's free and works insanely well.
Answer: My go to is Wiki. It literally has everything you need. It is laid out pretty great where you can both learn, and use it as a reference. I use it often. Also, the TeX - LaTeX StackExchange is an excellent place to get answers to specific problems.
Once you have an appropriate template, this will give you everything you need to format your thesis. Good luck!
Also, don't bog yourself down with the details (in my opinion). Understanding exactly what the LaTeX code is doing is going down a rabbit hole. Just focus on understanding what you need to do what you want.
Comment: The LaTeX wikibook sections can be of varying quality. Some passages are outdated, some are being kept updated regularly. For the basic ideas it is probably fine, but as soon as things get more advanced (and things can get more advanced quickly with LaTeX) I would be careful and double check the information from the Wikibook. (See also https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6393/35864)
Comment: I agree with @moewe's analysis of the LaTeX WikiBook.  The information there in my experience often doesn't illustrate "best practices", and, in some cases, even recommends some "worst practices".  If you have questions on that level, ask a question here.
Comment: The last paragraph is basically what I just wanted to add. Don't bother too much with the template. Those tend to be over-complicated monstrosities to cover every little detail using tons of Latex syntax that you are never going to need IRL.
Comment: I'd add to this the "short math guide" linked to near the bottom of this page: http://www.ams.org/publications/authors/tex/amslatex
Comment: LaTeX (in my opinion) is very fake it till you make it. Often, you will learn what you need to do what you want, and nothing else. Nearly everyone I know in academia has their templates and know how to create their sections etc. As others have stated, WikiBook may have some downfalls; I generally ONLY use it for math equations and so on. I can comment that the math sections are pretty darn well complete. My number one tip: you should have 0 warnings after compilation. If you have a warning, probe it!
Answer: Little known fact: arXiv is great for this. Look for papers in your field on arXiv, and instead of downloading the pdf, download the source file (changing the file type if needed, so that it will open). Not only will you learn how to make fancy tables, pictures, etc... --- you will also often get to read all the comments that the authors neglected to remove before submitting their paper.
Answer: I suggest that you just start using LaTeX for small projects, perhaps at sharelatex or overleaf. If you're really brand new to it, search online for latex tutorial.
Once you are underway, learn  features as you need them.
Ask questions on this site.
For a large project like your thesis, check out the workflow tag. You will find strategies for working on one chapter at a time by setting up a good file structure and naming conventions.
@Shinobii is right to warn you not to try to understand too much about LaTeX innards. You will probably never have to read what's in the university thesis template.
Comment: Sharelatex and Overleaf merged together since two years ago: https://it.overleaf.com/blog/sharelatex-joins-overleaf-2017-07-20
Comment: When I first encountered Latex I thought that it would be impossible ever to learn it, but I am now reasonably proficient. What changed? I went through a period of using Latex for everything I wrote.No more MSWord, MacOS Pages. Latex for everything. It was slow at first but quite soon your fingers learn their way around the language.
Answer: Check out the IITB LaTeX course at edX


synchronization (test-and-set)

Question: I have benn wondering about the following possibility: if I have multiple hardware threads on the same
core, and then someone decides to use shared register to allow fast synchronization among threads that run on the CPU, and implements test-and-set on the register instead of doing it in main memory.
Will this work? and if it works, why?
Answer: Synchronization based on test-and-set requires a shared data storage location that all the involved threads can read and modify.  Your shared register is a shared data storage location.
The reason synchronizing on a register when the threads are running on different CPUs is that the register would not be shared (not be visible) to one of the threads.  You should think of registers as memory locations with some features removed to make them faster.
In fact, something similar to your scenario was possible on SPARC processors.  The SPARC had a large register file (something like 64 or 128 registers) with 8 registers that were always visible and then 24 register "windows" into the rest of the register file.  Usually these windows were used to implement fast stack frames, but there were several experimental runtime systems that used the windows to support multiple threads.
Comment: oh tanks, but can we implement test-and-set operation on registers? and the number of threads that can run on the same core will be restricted few? and why?
Comment: 1. Yes.  2. Huh?  3. Why what?
Comment: how we can implement test-and-set operation on registers? 2- I mean the scenario above will run a few threads on the same core? it will restricted the number of threads or not?
Comment: I still don't get what you are asking.  You implement test-and-set on a register by implementing an instruction that atomically copies the contents of register A to register B, and puts the value "1" in register A.
Comment: I don't know what you think will restrict the number of threads.  If you've allocated a register to be visible to all threads running on that CPU, then it doesn't matter how many threads could be run, they can all access the register.
Comment: THANK YOU so much, I got what I want to understand, but now I just want to know why we can implement test-and-set operation on these shared registers?

synchronization (test-and-set)


Accessing a samba 3 share from windows server 2008 r2

Question: I have a linux box (Ubuntu 10.04 server) that exports a couple of shares via SAMBA.
This is a very simple setup: plain workgroup sharing, no domain involved.
I can access this share from other linux boxes, from a Windows XP machine, and from a couple of Windows 7 machines (and from various Android devices) and it works like a charm.
Now I installed Windows Server 2008 r2 on a partition of the Windows XP machine and when I boot into WS2008r2 I cannot access the shares. The server is not listed in the network resources and typing \\server-name\share or \\server-ip\share just returns a 0x80004005 error code.
I've seen people complaining about KB2536276 and I uninstalled it, but to no avail...
Ideas?
Answer: Oh well, I just re-installed WS2008r2 and now I can access the share...


Probability and logic

Question: Is probability theory (using Kolmogorov's axioms) an extension of the propositional calculus, or an extension of first order logic?
Answer: Probability theory can be understood as an extension of the propositional calculus, and even of Aristotelean logic, but not of predicate logic in general. To clarify, propositional calculus is basically the truth-functional calculus of 'and' 'or' 'not' and material implication. Aristotelean logic permits quantification in one variable, so that one can capture statements such as "all A's are B's". Predicate logic is a great deal more expressive and permits quantification in any number of variables in a single sentence: for example it allows one to capture the difference between "there is some girl whom every boy loves" and "every boy loves some girl" and prove that the latter entails the former and not vice versa - not something one could do with Aristotelean logic.
If one uses an epistemic interpretation of probability, then one may speak of the probability of a proposition being true. Probability calculus provides a way to deal with ands, ors and nots that is compatible with the propositional calculus, but it does not allow one to peek inside an atomic proposition and say that individual components of it are more or less probable. If a proposition contains multiple quantifiers, there is no completely general way of accounting for how the probability of the expressions within it relate to the probability of the proposition as a whole. Some progress has been made into what is called probability logic and it remains an active area of research. Jon Williamson has written about it in the paper "Probability Logic" in "Handbook of the Logic of Argument and Inference" (Elsevier, 2002) and in his book "In Defence of Objective Bayesianism" (Oxford, 2010).
Comment: given that the central concern of logic is logical consequence (which essentially involves necessity) and the central concern of probability is, well, probability (uncertainty, whatever), I can't see how the latter could be considered an extension of the former.  obviously it will *use* logic to support its claims, but so does physics etc.  the idea of a "logic of probability" seems plausible, but it also seems a different species.  perhaps logic and probability should be thought od as species of inference.  Can you please elaborate on the idea that P is an "extension" of L?
Comment: Logical consequence doesn't just preserve truth: it preserves many kinds of modalities as well, and also, with some restrictions, probability. So typically if A entails B, and A is probable, then B is probable. If A, B are both probable, then "A and B" is less probable than either, "A or B" is at least as probable as either, etc. In other words, there are inferential probabilistic relations wherever there are relations of logical consequence...
Comment: Ernest Adams worked out how to take a probabilistic concept of uncertainty and show how relations of logical consequence constrain the upper and lower bounds on uncertainty when making probabilistic inferences. This gave rise to a kind of probabilistic deductive logic, distinct from inductive logic. There is a brief account of it in section 2.2 of the SEP article on Logic and Probability, and a longer account in his book, A Primer of Probability Logic.

Probability and logic


Where to prune an indoor avocado tree?

Question: I want to prune my indoor avocado tree to increase branching, and make it more bushy, not just one wobbly stem. Where should I cut it?
Comment: Wow, not a single brown tip on the leaves, well done!
Answer: Wow, amazing how healthy your plants looks. The container seems to be a bit small already for the size of your plant.
A few tips about pruning.
First, prune at the right time. This is usually early spring, just before growth season starts.
Second, try to figure out what the desired height of your plant is going to be. Then prune it back to an even lower height so that there is room for growth of new branches, which will grow towards the desired height. Also keep in mind to put it in a large(r) enough container, which can support the eventual height.
Last point, a general rule of thumb with pruning is to never prune off more than 1/3 of the plant. Some plants may not survive more.
Comment: ^^^ Somewhere above a shoot. Grab a leaf and around 1/16 inch above it cut the main stem at a 45.

Where to prune an indoor avocado tree?


Reheating a charcoal grill

Question: I use a covered charcoal grill (Weber 26") and can get the grilling temperature I want pretty reliably by setting the vents.  The problem comes when I have a roast that wants 350F and I want to grill some vegetables at 400-450.  The roast can come off and rest for the time the vegetables take, but I can't get the grill to heat up even if I open the vents all the way.  Any suggestions?
Comment: What kind of charcoal do you have, and how long is the meat roasting?
Comment: Usually the meat is roasting an hour or so.  I use briquettes, whatever brand I find.  I don't see too much difference.  If I restrict the air flow to cool them down, I find they do not reheat when the air is increased.
Answer: I suspect what's happening is that you've depleted your fuel, charcoal's just wood at the end of the day, and after an hour or so it will have a lot less to give. If you want a hotter flame you can:

Scrape the remaining coals together to concentrate the heat, this will give you high heat in say half your grill
Replenish your fuel: there's two ways you can do this, a) you can use a chimney starter ahead of time and add the fresh hot coals or b) you can add unlit charcoal directly to the fuel bed say 10 minutes before you want to grill. Some webers have hinged side panels on the grill surface you can swing up to add fuel, personally I found this was a great way to singe my arm hair off so I would just lift the whole thing off and add it that way
Use a long lasting charcoal: not all charcoal is created equally, some lasts much longer. I've found that Heat Beads or Weber brand charcoal lasts a lot longer than your standard supermarket stuff or lumpwood. It's more expensive, but if you don't want to have to add fuel it's the way to go

Reheating a charcoal grill


meaning of "mind-twisting"

Question:
The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory,
groaned as if it would deny what had happened. Bars of sunlight cast
through rents in the walls made motes of dust glitter where they yet
hung in the air. Scorch-marks marred the walls, the floors, the
ceilings. Broad black smears crossed the blistered paints and gilt of
once-bright murals, soot overlaying crumbling friezes of men and
animals which seemed to have attempted to walk before the madness grew
quiet. The dead lay everywhere, men and women and children, struck
down in attempted flight by the lightnings that had flashed down every
corridor, or seized by the fires that had stalked them, or sunken into
stone of the palace, the stones that had flowed and sought, almost
alive, before stillness came again. In odd counterpoint, colorful
tapestries and paintings, masterworks all, hung undisturbed except
where bulging walls had pushed them awry. Finely carved furnishings,
inlaid with ivory and gold, stood untouched except where rippling
floors had toppled them. The mind-twisting had struck at the core,
ignoring peripheral things.

This the first paragraph of The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan's first book of The Wheel of Time series. What does "mind-twisting" mean?
Answer: In this context Mr Jordan is referring to an in-universe concept called "Mind-Twisting", which is essentially what it says on the tin - physically twisting things using one's mind.

meaning of "mind-twisting"


What is better? Many articles in one publication or many publications with one article each one?

Question: I have a large database with several transactional replication publications.  Each publication has 15-20 articles.  Some subscriptions are push, so each time a new article is added to the publication, a new large snapshot must be created.  In order to avoid this, I'm thinking to create a single publication per article (not adding the arcticle to an existing one), thus reducing the need for a large snapshot.  I'm wondering if this approach has any downsize.
Answer: My last position we had dozens of publications. We would group the articles by size where the largest tables with millions or tens of millions of rows would have their own publication and others would be grouped together. In some cases publications were grouped by tables that were needed for a single application. Some critical tables were also in their own publications so that if we needed to reinitialize it during the day, it wouldn't be because of some minor table.
But this also depends on your hardware, applications, etc. Some publications we would reinitialize during the day and no one complained. Others could only be done after hours.
We probably had over 1000 tables that we published so one table per article would be a no go. There is no hard answer on this.
Answer: You are able to add an article without creating a FULL snapshot each time.  See (http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Replication/119650/)
I have never created one publication per article, I would think managing that would be a huge headache.  One downside I could see is if you ever wanted to recreate a "group" of articles it would take quite a bit more time to create so many publications.


ASP.Net error: "The type 'foo' exists in both "temp1.dll" and "temp2.dll"

Question: When running a web application project, at seemingly random times a page may fail with a CS0433 error: type exists in multiple DLL's.  The DLL's are all generated DLL's residing in the "Temporary ASP.NET Files" directory.
Answer: Add the batch="false" attribute to the "compilation" element of the web.config file.
This problem occurs because of the way in which ASP.NET 2.0 uses the application references and the folder structure of the application to compile the application. If the batch property of the  element in the web.config file for the application is set to true, ASP.NET 2.0 compiles each folder in the application into a separate assembly.
http://www.sellsbrothers.com/1995
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919284
Comment: Helpful answer - syntax is here:
Comment: Heed this warning: "This method is recommended only for small applications... This causes memory fragmentation."
Comment: Man, thanks for that.  Was scrambling to fix this in a production site today.  Don't know what caused it yet (had been working fine for so long!), but this has fixed the issue for us.
Comment: thanks. This works. Woke up this morning with this error. MY ISP discountasp.net must have changed something. If it were not for this post, I'd still have the error. Thumbs down for my ISP.
Answer: This might happen if you place .cs files in App_Code and changed their build action to compile in a Web Application Project.
Either have the build action for the .cs files in App_Code as Content or change the name of App_Code to something else. I changed the name since intellisense won't fix .cs files marked as content.
More info at http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.se/2009/07/appcode-folder-doesnt-work-with-web.html
Answer: One possible reason for this error is that there are 2 aspx pages which are having the same name in their inherits= in the <@page language=......inherits=> line.
Changing the inherits= name solves the error.
Comment: This solved my problem, seems copy/paste of a usercontrol is a bit tricky when you don't need the codebehind to do anything.
Answer: Just in case someone else shares my problem, I got this error when trying to publish a Web Site of a newly branched project, build worked perfectly.
Turns out I had forgotten to remove the checkbox for "Allow precompiled site to be updatable" under publish Settings -> Configure precompile.
Answer: As another data point, I just had this problem without any evidence of circular references as described in the links in Ben's answer.  Building my web site project would fail with a few of these errors, and setting compilation batch="false" fixed it, but I didn't want to go that route as this is a large-ish production website.
This solution was in a subfolder of my D:\svn folder, which I had mapped to S:.  When I opened the solution from S:, these errors occurred, but if I went straight to D:\svn and opened the solution, no errors.
I also noticed that, despite having compilation batch="true" in my web.config, when opening the solution from the mapped S: drive all my .ascx files get compiled into their own assemblies.  If I open it from the physical location, the .ascx files get compiled into their respective folders' assemblies (which is how batch="true" is supposed to work).
Strange.
Answer: This error was due to conflict between class name of web form and wsdl stub(code behind file .cs) having the same class name i.e.
ASPX page: Dashboard
Class: partiacl class Dashboard
AppCode/APIServices.cs: public partial class Dashboard
Error was reproducible only on publishing the website but build and debug did not inform any error.
Answer: In my case deleting all output assemblies from bin folders in all projects in the solution solved the issue. Unfortunately I have no explanation for it.
Answer: In my case I had renamed a project, so also the dll had been renamed. When I just copied the new dll but didn't think of deleting the old one from the server, I soon had a bunch of pairs of classes with the same names. Deleting the outdated dll's was doing the trick (of cause).
Answer: None of these answers worked for me, however I did fix the problem. Since I was using VS's Publish function to deploy the web application, I selected the option to delete all existing files prior to publish in the Publish Web wizard. This forced a clean copy of the application and everything worked fine from there.
This solution might be helpful if your local debugging copy works fine but published system isn't. Also great if you don't want to take the time to track down individual dlls to delete and don't mind the production files being deleted first.
Answer: In my case, the problem was solved when I edited a Designer.cs file that still had the duplicated class name. for some reason, when i renamed the class "logout" to "logout2", in the designer file it was not automatically changed, and was still "logout", and this class name already existed in a precompiled dll in my project (that belongs to a third party web app that I work with and develop around of).
Comment: If you come up with a new way to cause the error message, feel free to add it :)
Answer: Got this problem when put a part of an aspx page into the separate user control. On my machine everything was fine, on the server got an error.
Renamed the problem class and file.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919284 Method 2: Reorder the folders in the application is writing about possible circular references
Answer: None of these solutions worked for me. Both of my conflicting DLLs were in C:\...\AppData\...\Temporary ASP.NET Files\...
The problem was that I had rolled back my source repo to an earlier version - before we moved a type from one project to another project within the same solution.
I tried deleting the newer DLL - which should not have even been there at all in the older codebase - from the "Temporary ASP.NET Files" location identified by msbuild. msbuild just put it back.
I also tried the  web.config setting that some here have used successfully, but that did not work either. Although, as I write this, I realize that there were actually two MVC projects within the same solution and both had errors, so the problem may have been that I did not add the setting to both.
I tried rolling my source repo forward and cleaning and rolling back again and cleaning. Nothing.
I tried deleting everything the "Temporary ASP.NET Files" location. msbuild  just put it back again.
Finally, I tried rebuilding in Visual Studio. Although the command line output and the "Errors" output both gave the same msbuild "Temporary ASP.NET Files" error, the Intellisense error - when hovering over the conflicted type - actually complained about DLLs in output directories. Apparently "Clean" and "Rebuild" were not doing their jobs. I manually deleted the DLLs in the output directories identified by Intellisense, and the problem was solved.
tl;dr - Make sure you're covering all of your web.configs with the batch setting, and try to leverage Intellisense for further clues.
Answer: My problem was linked to a .dll that was getting generated in my project folder.
If you are referencing another file, instead of doing everything you see above, what fixed my problem instantly was just deleting the .dll that was staying inside my /bin directory for my project.
The problem isn't necessarily a web.config fix - it's a circular reference that needs to get resolved.  I realized that I cleared the old .dll in my original project file but not in the project that was referencing it.
I don't recommend making the modification to your web.config file because that's just a band-aid fix - not really addressing the actual problem.  Do that if you don't feel like fixing the problem, but if you want to avoid future headaches, just remove the .dll from both places.
Answer: I had a partial class with the same name in two different projects.
I solved it by only leaving it in one project.
Answer: None of this solutions worked for me. Compiling in "Release" mode worked, but when I switched to "Debug" I got umpteen of this error Messages.
I don't understand why, but a simple restart of Visual Studio was my solution.
Answer: Sometimes it may help to remove the solution and create it again.
Since this use to happen when converted from VS2005 to vs2010 some references to framework 4.0 (after upgrading ) remains in the solution, even all projects are defined as 3.5.
Normally rebuilding the solution should clear these problems.
Answer: I had the same problem when I was compiling the application on a compiling server.
My controller had a simple static code, so I changed my ascx:
 <%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="controllerName.ascx.cs" Inherits="Controls.controllerName" %>

To
 <%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" Src="controllerName.ascx.cs" Inherits="Controls.controllerName" %>

Also removed the partial keyword from the codebehind and added a namespace to the codebehind.
This:
using System;
using System.Web.UI;

///
/// My controller
///
public partial class controllerName: UserControl
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
    }
}

To this:
using System;
using System.Web.UI;

namespace Controles
{
    ///
    /// My controller
    ///
    public class controllerName : UserControl
    {
        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
        }
    }
}

And that worked for me.
Answer: For me this happened when I had my PrecompiledWeb/Publish location set to the current directory which was where the site's root folder was too.
My Web Site was then seeing the publish folder as part of the project when compiling/building and then finding duplicates in that manner.
i.e. Don't put the published/precompiled version of your site in your site's code folders.
Answer: I faced with the problem in compile time.
I agree with the batch="true" attributes, error is telling there exist 2 assembly
Solution 1:  deleting one of them
Solution2: Configure one of them
Answer: If the DLL's are showing in a temporary folder, you should try cleaning your solution.
Answer: Posting my solution:
The issue was related to the "On-Access Scan" of Mcafee Antivirus. Disabling this solved the problem. Somehow, the ASP Temporary folder was not being used properly by ASP when the antivirus was ON.
Hope this helps someone.
Comment: Did you know why? My team also have this problem, and they say it is because of McAfee, however, based on corporate IT rules, we cant deactivate antivirus (which shouldnt interfere!).
Comment: We are still working on finding the exact cause. Unfortunately excluding the ASP Temporary folder from the On-Access Scan does not eprmanently solfe the issue.
Answer: App_Code folder is causing the problem , put the class outside the folder (Works fine)
App_Code folder is not designed for Web Application Projects
http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.in/2009/07/appcode-folder-doesnt-work-with-web.html
Answer: Go to Add reference and search for both the dll,
Both of the dll would have checked, uncheck one of the dll, as there are references to the same dll with different version ambiguity gets generated.
Answer: My solution was to replace CodePage="...." with CodeBehind="..." in the .aspx file. Somehow it was left as CodePage during a migration from previous .NET versions.
This page directive creates another dll file which conflicts with the projects dll file.
Answer: Had a similar problem, In my case, I noticed, that cleaning a solution doesn't clear the bin folder in the visual studio. There was old compiled .dll present in the folder that is causing the issue.
Solutions:

Manually delete bin folder and recompile
In case of publish, select delete existing files prior to publish.

This will solve the issue.
Answer: You should define an alias for one of your references.
In your project file .csproj add the following item:
<ItemGroup>
    <Reference Include="temp1.dll">
      <Aliases>MyAssembly</Aliases>
    </Reference>
</ItemGroup>

After adding the above ItemGroup, MyAssembly will represent a root namespace that will contain all namespaces in the assembly temp1.dll.
Then you can have access to the type foo, which is located in temp1.dll, as follow:
using MyAssembly.foo;


Where do public savings go?

Question: In Mankinw's Macroeconomics, he mentions that public and private savings form national saving, which ends up in the financial sector, which then people and firms use to purchase investment goods. But what happens in real life? If the US federal government runs a budget surplus, where does it go?
Answer: Most governments (outside of typically oil-producing nations that have sovereign wealth funds) are net debtors, so public deficits show up as increases in government debt outstanding, and public surpluses (public saving) show up as decreases in debt outstanding.
In the model used in Mankiw's book, the assumption is that government spending never constitutes investment (i.e, it doesn't create productive capital). In that model, it's also assumed that households hold government debt: government debt just soaks up some of the funds that would otherwise be available as "loanable funds" to private firms to produce "productive capital," shifting the supply curve to the left.
So, in that model, the quantity axis represents something like "private investment," and government saving shows up as an outward shift in the supply curve, which results in lower interest rates and more private investment.
There's another way of thinking about it, which doesn't require that one assume that government spending never forms capital like roads, bridges, airports, etc., nor that government deficits are paid for directly out of private saving. In that model, government deficits just show up as increases in demand for loanable funds, which increases interest rates. Implicitly, this does still mean that less private sector investment will occur. The opposite is of course true for government surpluses. The interpretation of the quantity axis then changes to something like "amount of financial intermediation."
Either model of loanable funds is, of course, a radical simplification of how financial intermediation works, and like anything in an intro course, it's worth remembering that tons of caveats apply.
Answer: The US has a very large debt and has been in debt since at least the 1830s. So any annual budget surplus simply goes towards paying off the debt.
In countries that have net savings, these go to the country's reserves. Some countries have their own special investment funds to invest these surplus funds — e.g. Singapore, Norway.

Where do public savings go?


Computational indistinguishability and example of non polynomial algorithm

Question: The wikipedia page on computational indistinguishability says that two ensembles are not distinguishable if "any non-uniform probabilistic polynomial time algorithm A" cannot tell them apart. To help me better understand the definition, I searched for an example of an algorithm that did not fit the above restriction---in particular a non polynomial time algorithm---that could differentiate between two computational indistinguishable ensembles. Rather to my surprise, I found none, so I ask, could anyone provide me with an example of one?
Comment: Brute force on the input of algorithm $A$? But otherwise I suspect the algorithm would be highly dependent on the underlying cryptographic primitive, the simplest example is RSA where integer factorization is subexponential (but not polynomial) but this isn't a great example, being public-key and all.
Comment: Another example is this: distinguish between a stream of output from Blowfish-CTR and AES-CTR (or generally two block ciphers with different block sizes in CTR mode). An algorithm can distinguish them without even touching the keys, using the birthday paradox, with complexity $\approx 2^{32}$, which is not polynomial-time (is exponential) but far better than brute-force.
Answer: I am not a complexity theorist, but I believe this fits the requirements.
The best known algorithms for factoring are superpolynomial time algorithm so they are not polynomial time. An example of something th superpolynomial time algorithm could distinguish are outputs from the Blum-Blum-Shub PRNG.
Answer: Here are two examples of attack algorithms that are not polynomial-time:

Exhaustive search.  Consider an algorithm that iteratively enumerates all possible keys, and checks to see if it seems to be correct.  The running time of this algorithm is non polynomial: for a $b$-bit key, it will take $2^b$ steps of computation, which is larger than any polynomial of $b$.
Factoring.  The running time of the state-of-the-art factoring algorithms is larger than any polynomial of $b$, where $b$ represents the number of bits of the number you want to factor.  For instance, the running time of some factoring algorithms is something like $2^{\sqrt{b}}$, which grows faster than any polynomial function of $b$.  As far as we know right now, there's no way to factor integers in polynomial time.

The definition you are considering only concerns itself with attack algorithms whose running time is a polynomial, so the above two attacks are considered out of scope (they're not considered a "break" of the cryptosystem).
Edit 2/22: In the context of distinguishing two probability distributions, if you want a natural example, try exhaustive keysearch: to distinguish AES-CTR output from true random, one algorithm might try  all possible $2^{128}$ keys to see if any of them match the observed value from the distribution, and output 1 if it matches, else 0.  This algorithm does distinguish the two probability distributions, but it takes exponential time.  (Strictly speaking, we should make this a $b$-bit key so that we can apply asymptotic running time, but whatever, hopefully you get the idea.)

P.S. If this gets to be a bit much and you need a study break, don't miss Eric Hughes' infamous advice on How to Give a Math Lecture at a Party (lyrics).
Comment: I understand the examples you give, but how would you apply them to a (sample from a) probability distribution? What would exhaustive search be like in this case? I mean, there is no "key" for which to check for correctness!
Comment: I'll try to clarify my question. I am familiar with run time analysis of algorithms, and big-O notation, my question is not about that; it's about algorithms (or statistical tests if you will) that are capable of distinguishing two *different* (but computationally indistinguishable) probability ensembles. From all I've read, being indistinguishable means that there is no non-uniform probabilistic polynomial time algorithm could tell one ensemble from the other. However, I could not find an example of an algorithm that *could* distinguish the two ensembles, and that's what I asked for.
Comment: (cont.) You mentioned exhaustive search, which is indeed non polynomial. But what does it mean to do exhaustive search when trying to distinguish two probability ensembles? To give a concrete example, what would it mean to do an exhaustive search in order to try to distinguish the output of a PRNG from the uniform distribution?

Does this clarify what I am trying to ask?
Comment: @wmnorth, any algorithm that spends, say, exponential time doing some computation before producing an output.  (I suspect I must not be understanding your question; why don't you try explaining what you real confusion is?)  Have you studied running time analysis of algorithms?  If not, any good algorithms textbook should have something on big-O notation and running time analysis -- I very much recommend you read it.
Comment: @wmnorth, sorry, I can't make any sense of your question.  I think you must have some hidden assumptions, or must be asking a different question than what you really want to know.  What does it mean for an algorithm to take exponential time when trying to distinguish two probability ensembles/  It just means that the running time is exponential.  I really don't understand what the confusion is.  (If you are asking for a *natural* example of an exponential time algorithm for distinguishing two probability distributions, that's different; if so, edit your question!)
Comment: @wmnorth, I've edited my answer to give a natural answer that arises in distinguishing two probability distributions, but I'm starting to get the impression  that I'm not going to be able to help you until you can more precisely state exactly what you want to know (and what you've already tried and where you got to stuck).


How to generate random points that lie on a line in QGIS?

Question: I have a shapefile with track lines and I need to generate random points from each 1 km of every line. There is a function in QGIS Random points but it offers to generate random points only inside a polygon. Any ideas for a specific plug-in or another solution?
Answer: What about from the processing toolbox where there's a tool called Random points along line.
You can also set the minimum distance.
Comment: Thanks! I took a me a while to find out this processing algorithm is in Commander (not displaying in Toolbox) but I did and it works!.
Comment: @MiroslavKutal, you will need to change the simplified interface to advanced at the bottom of the toolbox. And your welcome!
Answer: First off all you have to make sure that your Project and data CRS are in the Projected References. then go to:
Qgis > Processing > Toolbox > (type) Random points along line...
You´ll see it in Vector creation tools > right clik and execute...

Number points = If you put 1 you´ll only see one point,
Minimum distance = In meters (E.g. 1000).


GUI on Raspberry Pi cluster

Question: I was thinking of building a small cluster (due to the small price) but i want to know if i can get a gui (like xfce or lxde) to run o the master/ host or whatever.
Comment: Sure. There is no problem to install GUI if you run some OS.
Answer: It seems like you may not really understand what a cluster is or how it operates. There's nothing magic about a cluster. You don't get to just plug multiple RPis together and get Voltron.
Clusters are a group of computers working together through software. Generally speaking, the master takes very large task, splits it into multiple smaller tasks and distributes it to each machine. This can give you a huge performance gain in specific circumstances, but there are requirements for such a thing to be worthwhile.

You're going to need tasks that benefit from being paralyzed. Many jobs are serial by nature and simply can't be parallelized.
You're going to need large tasks for this to be worthwhile. When dealing with multiple processors, there's going to be an overhead introduced by adding parallelism. When you introduce multiple machines, that overhead is going to increase much more. You have network IO, managing software, and a few other things to contend with.
You need software that can manage your tasks. An off the shelf solution may work for you, but you may need to write your own.

Since all this is done via software, there is no reason that you can't use a GUI on the master device. Your RPi is capable of running many pieces of software simultaneously.
If you're just trying to learn about clusters, the RPi is great for that, but highly impractical for real life scenarios. If you have some legitimate, highly parallel tasks, I'd suggest either using a full computer (a standard i5 will destroy a small cluster of RPis) or look into abusing graphics shaders with openGL (The RPi has an awesome GPU, even if Broadcam infuriatingly refuses to support openCL).

GUI on Raspberry Pi cluster


Performance Metrics be on Own Server or Own Server Instance

Question: We would like to collect SQL Server performance metrics (memory, Cpu, page writes/sec, batches/sec,active sessions), etc. I heard its a rule not to collect Sql server metrics on the live Financial Server itself. Place it somewhere else. Should the monitor metrics be on a Different server instance or be on a totally different server? Should I consider Sql server standard, or anything lower?
Answer: The issue is mostly because of resource competition. Any tool or method you use to monitor your server will introduce observer overhead. This goes for traces, Extended Events, home grown scripts, or third party monitoring tools.
The goal of putting them on a separate server is to reduce further overhead.
Monitoring queries write a lot to disk at regular intervals, and often get hit with rollup/aggregation queries to report on metrics, smooth data out, etc.
Those queries are usually big and ugly because those tables don't have a lot of indexes. Lots of indexes to help reporting queries would just slow those big/regular writes down.
Production resources should be solely for production data. It's not just a rule for monitoring tools, but for dev, QA, UAT, or demo databases sitting in prod. They're a potential performance liability that's easy to avoid.
Answer: If you want to get a lightweight performance tool that will provide plenty of information on the health of your SQL Server, I would use the tools provided by Brent Ozar.
http://www.brentozar.com.
If you are planning to use a perfmon to capture CPU, Memory, page writes/reads sec etc.. I would collect them from another server for a short period of time. I would then analyze them with PAL
https://github.com/clinthuffman/PAL
Comment: I would prefer not to consume server resources running perfmon locally. The one exception would be if I wanted to measure network performance.


AGPL License/Distribution

Question: We carry Mongodb version 3.4.10 in our installer and installer will install mongodb. We are not modifying the source code we are using it "AS-IS". We do not link the mongo db. We have Architectural separation from our commercial product. we use the libraries/drivers provided by mongodb to connect to the database. their drivers are Apache license v 2.0. We are providing our product via SaaS, do we have to give out the source code if we provide via SaaS(Software as a Service)?
Comment: If you provide your customers with an installer and they install it on their own system, then I do not understand how this is "Software as a Service." It sounds like you are distributing the software plain and simple.
Comment: Also MongoDB as of October 2018 is using the "Server Side Public License" which appears *not* to be open source. Version 3.4.10 is possibly before that, which means it might be AGPL instead, but you should probably verify that your version is AGPL (e.g. you cannot install any security patches published by MongoDB after October 2018 on top of an older version without making it SSPL and therefore not open source).
Comment: Also note the contradiction between "*we do not link the mongo db*" and "*we use the libraries ... provided by mongodb*".
Comment: @Brandin you want to write your comments up as an answer?
Comment: It could be clarified a bit first. But rereading this I think what OP is saying is that they develop their own application and link in a driver from https://docs.mongodb.com/ecosystem/drivers/ (which are all Apache licensed) into their product. Then, they distribute their own product (closed source) along with MongoDB Community server (3.4.10, AGPL licensed?) as an installer. Then their customer installs that onto a machine in order to use it to provide a SaaS to other customers. So I guess the question is whether they can own keep their code closed source. But this is just my reading.
Answer: The latest versions of MongoDB is licensed under the Server Side Public License. The drivers continue to be licensed under the Apache license. Mongo maintains an FAQ page that I believe answers your question (https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq). Their position is "The copyleft condition of Section 13 of the SSPL applies only when you are offering the functionality of MongoDB, or modified versions of MongoDB, to third parties as a service. There is no copyleft condition for other SaaS applications that use MongoDB as a database."

They have a similar position for code under the AGPL versions (see blog post here: https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/the-agpl). "To say this another way: if you modify the core database source code, the goal is that you have to contribute those modifications back to the community. Note however that it is NOT required that applications using mongo be published.... This is why Mongo DB drivers are all licensed under an Apache license."

AGPL License/Distribution


Shifter cable. VW New Beetle 1998

Question: How do I physically put my 98 VW Beetle into 3rd gear?  The shifter cable  broke and I need to put my car in my garage and can't push it up hill.
Answer:
This linkage is between the airbox and the engine ontop of the transmission.
Turn the linkage one way then the other, then put it in the between the two extremes to find (neutral). Then press down and turn counterclockwise that will be 1st gear.
If you want a higher gear from there second is hold down and full clockwise.
If you are going to be going uphill I don't suggest third gear or higher.

Shifter cable. VW New Beetle 1998


Photons have a property from the matter they interact with?

Question: When a photon leaves its source and hits our eye, our brain sees the source of the photon (Like a lightbulb or a star). When a photon is ejected from its source and bounces off of an object we see the object it bounced off. I hope
I've been right so far.
My question is this: Do photons have some kind of property of the matter that they interact with that takes form when we observe the photon and see that matter? If so, where does that information go when a photon bounces off an object?
Comment: Yes, we model some interactions through electromagnetic (EM) field which permeates spacetime, but IMHO it's only an image of a source charge translated in our mostly linear time and space as we see it. The shape of the generated EM field reflects the changes which the charge has undergone, so another charge "receives" it and undergoes the same, but opposite change (well, approximately). Recall that a photon itself spends no time traveling between the charges, so it might be observed as a quantum leap in our linear time. In a sense, you almost immediately interact with even the stars :)
Answer: A photon is an elementary particle with zero mass, moves always with the velocity of light c, and has energy given by E=h*nu . It has spin +1 or -1 and its wavefunction also has a polarization which will build up the polarization of the emergent from many photons classical electromagnetic wave.
Its energy is a property that characterizes the emitting particle/molecule/ion  at the source . If it comes from a specific atomic energy level it will have a definite energy . If it comes from plasma in a magnetic field ( as the corona of the sun) it will be in a continuum.
A photon can interact in various ways when hitting an object:
1) it can be absorbed completely raising an electron to a higher energy level. This may decay back to ground or cascade down, dividing the energy into more than one decay photons.
3) It may scatter elastically
4) it may Compton scatter off an electron or the field of molecules, changing energy
The information it carries because of its origin is lost when it interacts with the object. If a new photon comes out, a radiative decay of the excited level, it will carry that information in its energy until it is absorbed by the retina or the detector.
Comment: Isn't it a quantum theory thing that information can't be destroyed? Sorry for my lack of vocabulary on the matter.
Comment: think of throwing a red ball into a container of other red balls, then shake the container.  Now try to find your original red ball. No information is totally lost here, just mixed up.
Comment: It is a theoretical statement; is it retrievable, should be the question. The photon did disturb the cones on the retina and the information of its existence was transferred, maybe of its energy if the color was noted , but spin and polarization information is dispersed as far as perception of one photon goes. As the other answer states, light emerging from zillions of photons is a different matter.
Answer: One single photon is not enough for you to see objects. If there would be just one photon coming to your eye, you would first see only darkness (before the photon arrives), then you would notice a dim point for very short time (when the photon hit your retina), followed by darkness again.
You can see objects because there is a constant flow of huge amount of photons in all directions. If you see a blue object, it just means that blue photons were bounced, while other photons were absorbed by the object. This already tells you something about the object (it reflects blue). In more complex cases you can even do spectral analysis of the reflected light and find the chemical composition of the object. So in a sense the reflected photons do carry information about what they bounce off. But you cannot make spectrum from one single photon. It must be a collection of photons of various energies.
Individual photons do not encode complex information about what they bounce off. You cannot say that some particular photon was reflected from wood, just based on that individual photon. Photons have energy (which is the color), they have momentum and polarization. None of these features can keep any complicated story about what the photon encountered. For example when you detect a blue photon, you can just say that it must have been born in some process that has energy equal to that of a blue light (2.5 eV), or it might have been Doppler shifted to that color. And you can say that the photon was definitely not absorbed between its birth and its detection (otherwise you would not be able to detect it).
The fact that you can see shapes of objects is due to the lens in your eye. The lens can "sort" the photons according to the direction they are coming from. All photons coming from a single location in the scene are sent to a single location on your retina. Photons from a different location in the scene are sent to a different location on your retina. The image of objects is created on your retina thanks to the fact that there is a lot of photons coming from every point in the scene into all directions, so your lens can fill the complete picture (all "pixels").


Professor X's mind reading and Wolverine's adamantium skull

Question: Can Professor X read the mind of Wolverine even if he has an adamantium skull?
Answer: Yes, Wolverine's adamantium laced skull did not prevent his mind from being read by any competent telepath. Charles Xavier, Jean Grey and Emma Frost were all able to read Wolverine's calm mind despite his adamantium advantage.
However, when Wolverine was enraged or in a berserk frenzy his mind became much harder to read and control which made it possible for Wolverine to block access to his mind during that time.
Early in their relationship, Xavier found it quite difficult to access Logan's memories which appeared to be layered with psychic limitations imposed by an unknown source and periods of memory loss. It took Xavier many years to help Logan reconstruct his memory. This reconstruction helped Xavier to be able to read Logan's mind later in their interactions.
Professor X entry in Wikipedia

After his bruising encounter with Cyclops and Emma Frost, Professor X is forced to revisit the biggest challenge and the biggest failure of his career, Wolverine, when the feral mutant asks for Charles' help in freeing his son from the clutches of the Hellfire Club. As the two search for Daken, Wolverine reveals that when he first joined the X-Men he attempted to assassinate Xavier due to some unknown programming. In response, the Professor broke Logan's mind and rebuilt it so that any and all programming he received was forgotten. Revealed in "X-Men Legacy" #217.
Answer: Wolverine or any other mutant/meta-human who posses the ability to regenerate has a small natural resistance to telepathy due to there brain cells healing to the way they were before they were altered. This effect is not potent enough to fully stop any good psychic from accessing and changing anything.


Books on development of collective identities (tribal, ethnic, national etc) and people's identification as part of the collective through time?

Question: What are some good books on how common people identified throughout history in the sense of them belonging to a collective, from tribal to ethnic and national collective, and generally how those concepts emerged and evolved through time?
Comment: Source requests are generally out of scope for H:SE (See [ask]). However, this may be a candidate to test out the new [reference request proposal](http://meta.history.stackexchange.com/a/3344/1401).  Thoughts?
Comment: @MarkC.Wallace Better than the question about historians, IMO.
Answer: The classic text that comes to mind is The Invention of Tradition (1983), edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. It is a collection of essays that explore how nationalism developed in various (primarily British) contexts. It argues that collective identity is not something natural, but rather is manufactured. It may, though, fall short of what you seek if you are looking for the history of how people, globally, have felt about collective identity over time. It focuses on case studies of how certain identities began, as a way to demonstrate their artifice.
Google Books summary:

Many of the traditions which we think of as very ancient in their origins were not in fact sanctioned by long usage over the centuries, but were invented comparatively recently. This book explores examples of this process of invention - the creation of Welsh and Scottish 'national culture'; the elaboration of British royal rituals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the origins of imperial rituals in British India and Africa; and the attempts by radical movements to develop counter-traditions of their own. It addresses the complex interaction of past and present, bringing together historians and anthropologists in a fascinating study of ritual and symbolism which poses new questions for the understanding of our history.

The other classic text, though I have not read it, is Benedict Anderson's field spurring Imagined Communities, written a year before:

Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the 'imagined communities' of nationality, and explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialization of religious faiths, the decline of antique kinship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of secular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time and space. He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was adopted by popular movements in Europe, by imperialist powers, and by the movements of anti-imperialist resistance in Asia and Africa.


What is considered a good post edit?

Question: Is there any suggestions about what it is considering good editing in posts? What kind of things should I not edit?
Answer: The block that is shown to the users who don't have the privilege of editing every post contains the following points:

Fix grammatical, or spelling errors
Clarify meaning without changing it
Correct minor mistakes
Add related resources or links
Always respect the original author

To this, I would add the following clarifications:

The first point doesn't mean to change the spelling of a word from British English to American English, or vice versa. It is probably better to have a consistent spelling, though.
The third point is not valid for code shown in a post: If the code is using the wrong function, leave a comment to the post author. Even in the case the user wrote the function name with a typo, leave a comment, and let the user change the code.
The edit should not be too minor: Always edit as much as possible in a post. Bear in mind that the suggested edits are reviewed from one or more users; when you are suggesting an edit, make the time they take to review worth it. If, for example, you are going to correct the spelling of I (first person singular) from i, correct every occurrence of the pronoun.
If you see a post that refers a module without linking it, add a link, and (possibly) an excerpt from the project page.
If you see a post containing a link to a screenshot, change the link to show the screenshot in the post page.
If you see code that is poorly formatted, re-format it to make it more readable; for example, remove the empty lines that are present, and which make the code take more vertical space than necessary.
If you see a tag in the title, remove it, or edit the title to insert the tag organically and conversationally.
Don't highlight random words; if you see random words being highlighted, change them.
Don't use code formatting to highlight random words; removed that formatting when you see it being used for something that is not code or that would not be escaped because using characters that have a special meaning in HTML.

See also

When editing a post, should I Americanize spelling?
I see a question with poorly formatted code. Should I fix it?
What should be done with questions that give the link for the code instead of showing it?
Are tags allowed in question's titles?
Comment: so i like to highlight drupal keywords. does the community approve or disapprove of that. If someone has really low rep (like ~500) and they're struggling with a view i believe highlighting drupal verbiage is key to learning and understanding by those we help.
Comment: Highlighting words in a given answer doesn't help as providing links to project pages or documentation. Highlighting a word doesn't mean telling the users what that word means, but a link to the documentation helps users to better understand a concept that has been barely touched in an answer.

What is considered a good post edit?


How to spawn the wither

Question: I saw on youtube that the wither is hard to beat, so I thought I would attempt to kill one to prove I'm better than it. After searching "Wither", it only came up with a wither skeleton. How do I spawn the wither, and how to I make the spawner?
Comment: Good luck. He is mental hard. Ensure you have some badass enchantments and ample space to move about before you take him on
Comment: After searching wither it only says a wither skeletion? I should've took you right to the wither mob or the *witherstorm*.
Answer: To spawn a Wither you need to build it like with Golems (Snow and Iron), you need 4 Soul Sand in a T Shape and 3 Wither Skeleton Heads on top of the top 3 Soul Sand Blocks More Info here, when it's made it'll cause an explosion and the fight is on
Comment: Doesn't seem to explode if you spawn it from the egg in creative mode...
Answer: As Memor-X said, you can spawn a Wither with 4 Soul Sand and 3 Wither Skeleton Heads.
However, if you desire to spawn the wither by "unlegit" means you can use the command:
<code>/Summon WitherBoss
</code>
This instantly spawns a Wither Boss in front of you.
Obviously you have to have commands enabled to use this command.
Answer: Make a T out of 4 pieces of soulsand and place three wither skulls across the top of the T.
This will create a wither. It will charge for a moment then explode, so RUN! Then it will start exploding the land around it so dont do it in your house. Good luck!
Answer: You can spawn a Wither by placing 4 soul sand and 3 wither skeleton skulls like this:
<code>SS: Soul sand | WSS: Wither skeleton skull

|WSS|WSS|WSS|
|SS |SS |SS |
|   |SS |   |
</code>

How to spawn the wither


How can I calculate the force required to bend a 10 mm thick plate in a rolling machine?

Question: We have a rolling machine with 3 rollers; the bottom has two rollers with diameters of 168 mm and one top roller with a diameter of 219 mm.  I want to calculate the required force to bend a 10 mm thick plate which is 2,500 mm wide.  The rolling machine is connected to a 10 HP motor with a gear box and the rollers have an rpm of 8.
Comment: What's the spacing between the two bottom rollers?
Answer: The deflection of a beam, $\delta$ mm in terms of the force is:
$$\delta = \frac{WL^3}{48EI}$$
Where $I = \frac{1}{12}b*h^3$ – in your case h is 10 mm, b = 2500 mm.  E is the modulus, and based on your material – for steel it is 200 GPa.  Using this, and the knowledge of the unspecified L (length between the bottom rollers), you can calculate how much you will bend the plate.
Now, to keep the plate permanently bent, you will need to exceed the elastic limit of the material – so you need to bend it so the stresses exceed the yield strength at the temperature you're working the material.  For your case, that's when:
$$ \sigma = \frac{WLh}{8I}$$
Exceeds your yield strength – which for steel runs at 250 MPa.  The fun about permanent bending – you had to exceed some sort of $\delta_{min}$ to meet this yield strength, then your sheet will continue bending as you apply more force, to a full $\delta$.  However, when you remove the piece from the machine, it will "spring back" – the worst it will spring back will be $\delta – \delta_{min}$ – so you usually have to overshoot by a bit, check to see if it's bent enough, and bend it a second time.
Comment: This answer is mostly correct, but its worth mentioning that the yield strength of the steel is highly dependent on the steel itself. And the deflection you should aim for is equal to $\delta_y + \delta$, where $\delta_y$ is the deflection at yield and $\delta$, the desired final deflection. This way, the steel will elastically lose all of $\delta_y$ but keep $\delta$. Also, in this case the given equation for $\delta$ is no longer valid since it assumes elastic deformations. The force to be applied should be equal to the yield force, since the piece will keep deforming under constant load.
Comment: what is the value of W in above formula
Answer: W = P/L. The load is assumed to be uniform along the top rol length. Another L is the spacing of bottom rollers, called the bending span. This L only before the bending starts. Say at the top 12 o'clock at each bottom roller. Once it does, the L becomes shorter as the support of the plate moves to 1 o'clock at the left and 11 o'clock at the right roller. The shorter the span L the more power is needed.


Glass container mess

Question: I have glass containers have metal lids,  that I use to keep all of my dry food in so the mice cant get them as we live in the country. Every time I open the jar the coffee, quinoa, or what ever flys out/ or is sucked out when the lid is opened. How do I stop this from happening??
Comment: Can you include a photo of the jars? We will need to know what the lids look like. It would be idea if you could include: one jar with the lid on it, a second jar with the lid off of it, and the lid that was on the second jar.
Answer: It sounds as though the jars are very full, and the coffee / quinoa particles near the top of the jar get sucked out when the lid is removed. One option would be to keep the jars half-empty. The space between the jar's contents and the lid would act as a "suction buffer" and should keep everything out of the "suck zone".
Answer: Keep the jar vertical while loosening the lid, which should prevent contents from being up against the lid.
Once the lid is loose, slowly tip the lid up to open it.  This will prevent a large wash of air into the jar as well as acting as a barrier to the contents falling out.
Answer: It's likely static electricity generated when the lids rub against the glass of the jar. Most likely your lids have some sort of rubber or plastic seal. If you think back to your school science experiments, you can generate static electricity by rubbing certain types of plastic on glass. Try touching the jar and yourself to something metal to discharge the static electricity first.
https://www.hunker.com/13416156/elimination-methods-of-static-electricity-from-glass
Answer: I'll assume that the contents aren't flying out because the jar is filled to the brim and you happen to tilt the jar when you remove the lid. This can happen with both screw-top and 'flat' tops (like Milo tins). Flat tops can also cause vibrations (like beating a drum) when they pop open, which would agitate the contents.
Try covering the mouth of the jar with a piece of tissue paper before putting the lid on. When you remove the lid, keep a finger on the tissue so that it stays with the glass part of the jar. You should be able to then gently lift the tissue without sucking out the contents.
Answer: Depending on how large the jars are: Open them inside a zip-lock freezer bag. That way, if you do spill something, it will be inside the bag. You can then put the bag/jar down on a counter, remove the jar from the bag, use what you need, and put what is in the bag back in the jar.

Glass container mess


Use and Sound of Extended Chords

Question: What are the use for extended chords in songs? I know the 7th can be used for suspense or a leading tone, but I would like to know when to use extended chords and what their tonality and use is.
Comment: I'm writing an answer that covers a few specific examples, but every extended chord has its own "character". They have their own tonal colour, and their own functional aspects too. For example, you might find this youtube.com/watch?v=hclftWDxrSk video useful/interesting to you, and that only covers 2 chords, the 13th and the 11th. I understand why you're asking this question, but understand the world of extended chords covers a lot of ground, as each one is a bit different. Have fun exploring them :)
Comment: Also check out this chord progression https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rvTNw0YKlA , which I personally love.  Shows how exciting and interesting extended chords can be!
Answer: Extended chord are just chords that have extra notes added to them to color the harmony. The 3 main ways they are typically used are:
Highlighting notes in the Melody
The harmony and melody should always be working together. The melody will typically play chord tones and what are known as non-harmonic tones. If certain non-harmonic tones stick out and define the melody, you may want to reinforce them. A simple example is if you were playing a CM7 and the melody started on a D then you may want to play a CM9 to reflect where the melody starts.
Voice Leading
Extensions can be used to smooth out voice leading with  and to aid it in general. For example in the progression Dm9-G13-Cmaj7 each of these chords has an E in them which is very helpful in voice leading.
Extra Tension
There are times especially when you are using a dominant chord you can add notes to the chord to give it a little more tension.  For example in C you could add a 9th to a G7 to give it a little more tension or even alter it (turn it into a #9 or b9) for even more tension.
There's a lot more to these chords then what I mentioned above, but this should get you started.
Answer: Generally the term extended chords refers to chords that have notes added beyond the 7th (such as 9th, 11th and 13th chords).  Your question is very general so it's hard to give a concise answer.  Often, an extended chord would have a similar function to a triad or a 7th chord built on the same root, and an extended chord would be used to get a richer or more sophisticated sound.
Extended chords are strongly associated with jazz and R&B, so if you were doing an arrangement or writing original music and wanted give it a jazz or R&B sound, the use of extended chords would be a way to do that.

Use and Sound of Extended Chords


Make Minecraft songs stop in custom resource packs?

Question: I am having problems with Minecraft resource packs. I decided to make adventure maps with custom music using the resource packs. After spending some time making the files, everything did work, and the audio did play correctly. But, what I noticed was that the Minecraft default music would still play over top of my music when I played it. I tried to go to the settings and turn it off, but if you turn the "Music" setting down under the Music & Sounds option, then it will turn off both my music, and the Minecraft music. If I turn the music option back on, and play the audio, it will play, and then eventually another Minecraft song will play over top of it. Is there any way I can make just the Minecraft songs stop playing when I play my music?
Comment: Do you play your music with commandblocks?
Comment: @Lars I beleive he is saying this is background music installed in his resource pack.
Answer: You have to override all of the different music files of minecraft, which are
music/game/calm1-3, music/game/hal1-4, music/game/nuance1-2 and music/game/piano1-3
Otherwise the non-overridden songs will still play.
Minecraft will play one of these songs every 5 minutes, which means that two songs can never overlap, however, if you are using <code>/playsound</code> for this, then minecraft will also play those songs at random intervals, causing two songs to overlap
minecraft wiki on sounds: https://minecraft.wiki/w/Sounds.json
Comment: just make a few new files in the assets\minecraft\sounds\music\game called calm1 ..calm2 ..calm3 ..hal1 ..hal2 ect, just having the file in there overrides the music so just put some empty files. For the entire folder structure goto http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Resource_pack

--EDIT
these files have to be in your recourcepack, not in your actual minecraft files
Comment: Yes, I am using command blocks to play the music with the /playsound command. My question is, how do I override the minecraft music files?
Comment: I do not know what is happening, but all of the folders in my resource pack are assets/minecraft/sounds/music, and the files in the music file are calm1-3, hal1-4, nuance1-2, piano1-3, and my song file, just as you said. These files are all just supposed to be normal folders with nothing in them right? Because minecraft will still play songs over it.
Comment: In your recourcepack, make the files calm1-3 hal1-4 ect just empty files, if a file just exists then when minecraft tries to play it's calm1-3 hal1-4 ect songs, then it will look in the recourcepack first and it will therefore play the "empty" music file, which basically means no music
Answer: If you want only your music to play: Turn off Music in "Options" and keep the master volume up. I did this on a minecraft server with a recourcepack and it worked.
Comment: Except that he has his custom sounds in the music folder, which uses the music volume. He could move them out to the root sounds folder and do what you are saying, but then anyone wanting to turn off the music will have to use the master volume and turn off all sounds.


What does it mean to have a stable government?

Question: I am doing an assessment and I have to write about why having a stable government is attractive to illegal immigrants. I do not know what exactly a stable government is though. Does it refer to the system eg having parties or does it refer to the politicians not being corrupt or both? Or is it something completely different?
Comment: A stable government is attractive to *most* people--I'd argue for obvious reasons--namely personal safety, fewer fiscal risks, etc.
Comment: Why *illegal* immigrants? People usually don't set out to be illegal immigrants. Most people who are currently staying illegally in Europe (and I would guess the US) did not even enter illegally. That category is entirely a result of the host society's legal and political process but not very relevant when it comes to examining the beliefs of the migrants themselves.
Comment: What do you mean by stable? Is Italy stable ?
Answer: Stable first and foremost means just that: Not changing constantly. Some countries like Thailand or Mauritania go through a military coup every 10-20 years, sometimes even more frequently. The problem is not merely that new people are coming to power but rather that you can't even trust that a given government will be able to govern to the end of its term or that regular political processes (e.g. elections) will be allowed to run their course.
More benignly, the French fourth Republic has a bad reputation in France because governments seldom lasted more than a few months. After that, coalition members would disagree on something and look for new partners or demand some changes to the composition of the government. The transitions were peaceful and happened within the framework of the constitution of the time but it is still remembered as a period of instability.
And of course some governments that are very bad in other respects (e.g. corrupt, inefficient, autocratic and repressive) are still quite stable. But very often, power is highly personalized in such countries and the transition from one strongman to the next is not easy.
"Stable" could also be a short-hand to cover several other related ideas: Democratic, open, peaceful, not corrupt, etc.
Comment: In a democracy, the government can change approximately every 4 years. Wouldn't that be less stability than a military coup every 10-20 years? (Of course it isn't, but your answer could benefit from explaining why)
Comment: @Philipp It seems I address that, in particular in the second sentence of the first paragraph and in the third paragraph.
Comment: My first thought was that the *peaceful* transition of power is the biggest part of being "stable", but your example of the Fourth Republic seems to contradict that.  Interesting.  I'll have to go look into that more.
Answer: I think it means "not changing"
Stable:

not likely to fall or give way, as a structure, support, foundation, etc.; firm; steady.
able or likely to continue or last; firmly established; enduring or permanent: a stable government.
resistant to sudden change or deterioration: A stable economy is the aim of every government.
steadfast; not wavering or changeable, as in character or purpose; dependable.
not subject to emotional instability or illness; sane; mentally sound.
Physics. having the ability to react to a disturbing force by maintaining or reestablishing position, form, etc.
Chemistry. not readily decomposing, as a compound; resisting molecular or chemical change.
Comment: This is really just a link-only answer. I recognize it's not a good question, but it could be improved with explanations as to how these concepts relate to government, e.g. little concern of regime change, relatively small fluctuations in the economy, etc.
Comment: @Avi The reason why link only answers are a problem is because someone has to follow the link in order to find it useful, and the link can go dead.
Comment: that is one reason, the other being that link only answers provide no more information than a Google search might.
Answer: A stable government means that there is no cognitive dissonance within yourself. If your beliefs, thoughts, or actions are not in unison, then your government is not stable. If your government is not stable, you are contributing to the chaos that exists in the world.


Old wallet problem

Question: Hello bitcoin comunity in need help with an old wallet on a Toshiba tablet. Stuck at synchronisation ... I have some btc in it but i have this problem.
The tablet runs Bitcoin core v0.8.7.4-unk-beta on windows 8.1.
It has reach about 576412 block till about 51 weeks ago then it stopped synchronising.
I encripted the wallet , made a back up ant transfer it on a laptop with the new 0.21.1 version.
The transfered amount was sent in 2015 , but when i transfered the wallet.dat it reads 0 btc.
I reached 99.1 % of sync on my laptop but it went past that date and didn,t verify that transaction of the incomings btc. The balance stayed 0.
I tried searching the addresses manualy on the blockchain , and all results were , this address dont exist.
I noticed when i transfered the dat file all original transaction adresses changed completely. And everyone shows either non existant or 0 inputs or outputs.
I believe the wallet hide somehow the original addresses and i cant get the corect priv key.
I tried dumping the wallet and checking all addresses individualy still returns 0 in every one.
I cant use dumpwallet on the tablet because that command is not available in v0.8.7
How can i find the original btc address.
But since the tablet is of friend of mine ,he asked me for help.I cant start it synchronising. Im afraid to update it forcecfuly , because i've red you can loose the amount of the wallet. I believe the original version is not installed but copied over , i dont find the btc core in the remove programs tab on windows.
All help will be apreciated.
I can give adittional info if needed.
Sorry for my bad english.
Answer: You can try the command dumpprivkey into the console.
First get all your UTXOs typing the command listunspent into the console, then you will have all your BTC address with funds, then you can take their private key with the command dumpprivkey <address>. Once you have it, you can use a light wallet like Electrum and import your private key there, then you will be able to spend your funds.
Keep in mind as your wallet is still syncing, your final balance may not be correct, but if you are sure you have some Bitcoins in that wallet, you should be able to recover them through those steps.

Old wallet problem