Does the Apple IIgs FPI assert /CROMSEL for *write* accesses to the extended ROM space?

Question: The FPI (fast processor interface) ASIC in the Apple IIgs generates the /CROMSEL chip-select signal, which is used to select a ROM in the memory expansion slot. Obviously the /CROMSEL signal must be asserted for read accesses to the extended ROM space, but what about write accesses? If the 65816 performs a write to the extended rom space in banks F0-FD (F0-FB for ROM 3 systems), does the FPI assert /CROMSEL?
Answer: No, for writes to the extended ROM space, the IIgs ROM 01 FPI memory controller does not assert /CROMSEL. I assume it's the same for the newer CYA memory controller chip in ROM 03 systems but I have not tested.
Here are the logic analyzer traces. First is a read from F0/0000, in which /CROMSEL is asserted as expected:

Next is a write to the same address, in which /CROMSEL remains unasserted during phi2:

Interestingly, there is a 32ns period after the write to F0/0000 is over in which /CROMSEL becomes active, before going back to deselected before the end of /phi2. This suggests that in the FPI, /CROMSEL is implemented as an asynchronous disjunction of /WE and a registered address.
Answer:
If the 65816 performs a write to the extended rom space in banks F0-FD (F0-FB for ROM 3 systems), does the FPI assert /CROMSEL?

Yes, it does. CROMSEL is a select signal, and as such only dependant on the address, not any other signal (like direction).

The reason of providing CROMSEL is to make extended ROM selection easy and safe by avoiding the chance that ROM (card) developers only decode for Fx, creating a potential address collision for banks FE and FF.
Comment: "Select signal" does not necessarily mean that the /R, /W or R//W signals are not used to calculate the signal. There are also a lot of examples where a write to some address and a read from the same address access totally different devices.
Comment: @MartinRosenau And that's related how? Even with the special case soft switches (which  I guess you want to refer to), you need to differentiate between an address driven select signal, and a function selection by direction. Beside that, mind to explain why you think this invalidates my answer?
Comment: *And that's related how?* It's only because you wrote: "... is a select signal, and **as such** only dependent on the address ...". I just looked on the Acorn A3000 schematic: The ROM (sharing the address space with the MMU) /CS signal must be dependent on the direction (read) because the W//R signal is not connected to the ROMs... So there are examples of /CS signals being dependent on the W//R signal.
Comment: Thanks for sharing your knowledge, @Raffzahn, but I am looking for a citation or at least some anecdotal story about it, not just speculation. Thanks for explaining select signals, but MartinRosenau is right, and his example is spot-on. Often it is a good idea to not select a ROM when writing so that its /OE pin can be tied low without concern for bus contention. Eventually I will capture a trace with my logic analyzer showing what happens.
Comment: @MartinRosenau I see, you're viewing it from the receiving chip perspective. A valid PoV, but rather unusual when designing a system as select (not chip select) design is viewed from the generation side. Especially on the Apple II, where Woz played a lot with 'em :)
Comment: @ZaneKaminski What makes you think it's a speculation? Given, I haven't done a new card for the IIgs for some years :))
Comment: Sorry if I was being presumptuous, @Raffzahn. Anyway I have tested and confirmed that indeed nCROMSEL is deasserted when nWE is asserted, so nCROMSEL does depend on nWE. I will capture a trace with my logic analyzer tomorrow and post it.


Cannot get media type from 'x-mapp-php5'

Question: I am moving a WordPress site from a shared hosting package to a VPS at 1and1 hosting. They have PHP ver. 5.1.6 but PHP5 support is there. I added the following 2 lines on the top of .htaccess file to use that:
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

.htaccess is in mydomain.com/httpdocs
But is shows me this error: Cannot get media type from 'x-mapp-php5' and php file appears as simple text file. Please visit this
Cannot understand the reason. Please help me out.
Answer: Comment out the lines and give it a try ;)
#AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
#AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php


After here should I guess or is there a logic solution on Sudoku?

Question: From this point is it necessary to guess or is it possible to find a logic solution?
Answer: The short answer is

Yes there is a logical solution

However, it is a very complicated one

To solve this we need to use the 'BUG' principal.

A 'BUG' in Sudoku stands for 'Bi-value Universal Grave', which sounds scary. However all it means is that, for any given Sudoku, if there are two candidates in every remaining cell then there is not a unique solution. There is either no solutions, or 2 solutions.

As we can see in the above Sudoku, all cells contain two candidates, except one. This cell has 3 candidates and is in D1. This is an example of a 'BUG+1' where the grid is a BUG with one cell having three candidates. BUG+1s can be solved.

Please note:

BUGs work on the assumption that there is a unique solution. For the problem, I checked by putting the sudoku seed into a solver which calculated the number of solutions as 1, so I knew this could be solved using BUGs

To solve:

We need to look at the effect of removing one of the three candidates. One, and only one, of the candidates when removed will result in the rest of the grid having two candidates.

So:

If we remove 5 from the candidates, we get:

- 2 of each candidate in row D
- 2 of each candidate in column 1
- 2 of each candidate in box 4

So we don't have to look at the other candidates. To remove the BUG, D1 MUST be a 5.

And from there, there is a nice logical solution to the final answer, starting with removing 5 from the candidates in box 4, leaving two remaining possibilities. I can include it if needed.
Very tricky and advanced Sudoku this one!
Comment: @Yordan - Well, technically, _most_ of the techniques are guesses, in the sense that their solutions are based on enumerating possible moves and finding that only one kind of move works; others lead to a dead end either immediately or in a few more moves. The question is - how many moves "look-ahead" do you consider to be "logical reasoning", and how many - "guessing and trying".
Comment: Thanks a lot, but isn't this move a guess itself?
Comment: @Vilx-: Using the BUG like this is a "guess" in a slightly stronger sense than most moves: it is only justified by the knowledge that the solution is unique.  Most moves (however much look-ahead they have) don't rely on uniqueness: they would still be valid for a Sudoku with a non-unique solution, where as this reasoning with the BUG could lead you astray there.
Comment: @Yordan I wouldn't say so. We don't actually try filling in any of the grid itself, and by doing this we KNOW that D1 must be above value. So I would say this is logical and not a guess, as we know for certainty one of the values
Comment: Oh, never heard about the OHT+1 cevapvcyr, that's pretty interesting. I was checking if [one of these techniques](https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/a/30540/13190) would work, but apart from the very last one (which is basically guessing) I couldn't come up with something. It's relatively easy to come to the correct solution by just guessing a single cell and go from there till it's either solved or it contains an error, but I couldn't find a logical reason for filling in a number somewhere.
Comment: @KevinCruijssen I only found out about it a while back too. I think if I remember correctly most BUGs can be solved with an X wing as well?
Answer:

 If the $3,5$ pair (shown connected by the green line) is set with $3$ at the bottom (light blue), then the $3$ triggers the other end of the blue line to be a $5$, and the green $5$ triggers the other end of the orange line to be a $3$. This cancels $r8c2$.
Answer: The currently highest voted solution is good, however BUGs require you to assume that the puzzle has only one solution, which is usually reasonable to assume, but this has drawn criticism from some. So, if that's you for some reason, I'll offer another non-BUG solution (with the help of my favorite Sudoku Solver).
So, what you're missing is this:

There is an XY-chain on row 7.

The basic logic of it goes like this:

Column 1, Row 6 has only 2 possibilities.

First, it can be a 9. Looking at Box 5 (that is, the center box), its lower-left square can't be a 9.

Second, it could be a 5. If it is, the square immediately below it is an 8, which places a 2 in the same row, which places a 5 also in that row. This, in turn, removes the 5 as a possibility from the square immediately below it as well. Having only 2 possibilities itself, it must be a 9.

Now, notice what happens to the middle box when we do this. It removes 9 as a possibility from the same exact square as before.

Thus, if both of our original square's only two options eliminate 9 as a possibility from the same square, than we can safely eliminate 9 from that square, since it will be eliminated regardless.

This, in turn, places a 3 in the center box, and it all just caves in from there.

If you don't like that, you can apparently use a 3D Medusa on it as well (at least, according to the tool I'm using) and solve the whole thing almost instantly (since most of the remaining squares only have 2 options). Though this is quite complex.
If you want use an even more complex strategies, there is also an Alternating Inference Chain, a couple different types of Forcing Chains (which seem to be based on Alternating Inference Chains), Almost Locked Sets, and even a Death Blossom (which seems to be based off of locked sets.

All of these strategies mentioned (including the BUG strategy) are labeled "Diabolical Strategies" or "Extreme Strategies" by my tool, meaning this is quite a hard puzzle. Don't feel too bad if you had trouble with it. Some people (like myself) have trouble finding the "Tough Strategies" (like a swordfish), which are probably considerably easier than all of the above strategies.
Comment: True about the BUGs, I used a solver to find how many solutions before I wrote my answer to make sure there was a unique solutions :)
Comment: Fair enough. That certainly was a good idea :) I wasn't trying to say this puzzle had two solutions, but rather the technique in general requires you to assume this.
Comment: oh Dw I know, I think there's multiple ways you can solve this. BUGs was just the one I know about and noticed first, your answer is also totally valid! :)
Comment: I think there's an error in your logic/explanation. If C1R6 is 5, then both C4R6 and C4R8 are both forced to be 9, which is obviously invalid.
Comment: @HerbWolfe I think that's less of an error and more so another way of looking at it. If you continue the logic in R6, then yes, you end up putting a 9 in two places. Of course, if you eliminate the 9 in C4R6 by placing a 5 in C1R6, then place the 3 in C9R6, you could eliminate 3 as a possibility in C4R6, eliminating all it's possibilities. It's just another way of looking at it.
Comment: @HerbWolfe I should mention that I ran this through a solver, and that is basically what it told me. It very well may have been incorrect or bad at explaining it.
Comment: [On the validity of "uniqueness" assumptions ...](https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/q/93899/5373) (cc @BeastlyGerbil)
Answer:
 If the cell in row 6 column 4 is a 9, then this forces both the cells in row 6 column 1 and row 8 column 4 to be a 5. However this makes it impossible to place a 5 in the bottom left square. The cell in row 6 column 4 is therefore a 3, and the rest of the puzzle is readily solved.
Comment: Simple and elegant.


Skinny guy with belly fat

Question: I am 5.8" and 67k. My chest is 38" bt belly at the middle 34, which is full of fat in lower abdomen. It seems really bad. I do not need a six pack but a lean abdomen. Plz help me to get rid of the belly...
Answer: You cannot target fat burn to one specific part of your body. The only thing you can do is lose weight and eventually it will come off. I would recommend lifting some weights and making sure you get in enough protein so you don't lose muscle while you lose the fat you want to lose
Answer: As yisrael said in his answer, so-called "spot reduction" through exercise is now generally regarded as a myth and impossible. But there can be other factors that affect fat distribution and how easily it accumulates. There's multiple studies showing an inverse relation between testosterone levels and abdominal fat, although some of it is specifically visceral fat (which can still add to waist size). Perhaps you should get your testosterone levels checked and see if they fall within normal levels.
That said, you're slightly taller than me and the same weight. I've been strength training for over a year and also still have quite a bit of abdominal fat to lose. So I'd say you probably just need to bring the body fat percentage down.
Answer: There may be a lot of visceral fat in the abdomen, and round the heart which may explain the shape. This should be of some concern. The answer is the same however , regardless of the motives, be they vanity/pride or concern for health. More fat burning activity, and less fat producing eating, simple as that!
David form Cornwall U.K
Answer: Just to add some advice for your problem (kinda got the same) :

Don't starve yourselfs. Eat enough, but good nutriments. If you eat too much or bad aliments, you will take weights. But if you don't eat enough, you will loose some fat only temporally. Once you will eat a little more again, your body will stack more fat, just in case of another starvation. Just by eating proper meal, you can get ride of your problem.
Don't try to do abs exercises everyday. The key is not training your abs, but to burn fat. You can't loose fat only on a part of your body. Try some cardio, like running, bicycle... Or some weight lifting move, to reinforce your body and gain muscles.

Skinny guy with belly fat


Step Compression: Do you use it?

Question: I often times due to time constraints and given the limited amount of dynamic range permitted for my television mixes, use step compression on my narration track.  I find it causes less ear fatigue than compressing up to 4:1 or 5:1 directly on the track. (I know....I don't like it either. But I am only allowed a 3 decibel range of variation in my LT Dial Norm, -26 to -28 and I get about 4-6 hours to edit stems and mix an hour long show with untreated narration.) Instead, I use a compressor at 2:1 or 3:1 with a moderate attack at a moderately low threshold, do an automation pass on the VO, and then compress a bit harder at a shorter attack at a much higher threshold on my narration aux track.  This second compressor may have a ratio of 4:1 and a 5ms attack.  I find since the ear is not hearing a consistent press from the heavier compressor that it relieves ear fatigue while still getting that target element in the box.   What do you guys think of this?  I welcome any new approaches.
Comment: @MixingManiac would you use this technique for comedy or drama dialogue also?

I'm currently working on a short tv series (6 episodes at aprox 6 mins each) and am having difficulty in getting the dialogue to sound natural with this technique. Are you automating the volume on the vo after the first stage of compression ?
Comment: Yes and yes.  I would use a version of this technique in a lot of reality programming situations with dialog as well as the occasional dramatic reinactments and sitcoms. I generally set my ratio to perform a lighter level of volume reduction and I do automate the volume at the track level.  This is key. Your bus's threshold should be high enough that it only occasionally hits signal unless you use automation to increase the volume being sent at the track level.  This way you are not consistently hitting the 2nd compressor but it will help you stay within TV spec.
Answer: It's pretty much what you have to do with low budget Television... especially given the time constraints we usually have and the insane tech specs (try CBC -24 +/- 1  yup you read that right). I also find that it's far less annoying to have two compressors hitting 2 or 3db each than one compressor trying to do 4 to 6. If I have the time (like on the show I'm working on now) then I can do away with a lot of the compression as I have time to edit and volume graph. But we do what we have to, to make it sound as good as possible in the time we get.
Answer: could you post audio examples? because I've neither heard of the techniques you mention, and can't imagine how they sound.
best!
Comment: Well...posting examples may be difficult but I used my step compression technique on the first to episodes of Planet Earth with Sigourney Weaver (we had a day to place VO and mix in 5.1) and for How It's Made on Science Channel.  It should be pretty easy to get samples of those two online somewheres.

Step Compression: Do you use it?


Block mobile internet access except portable hotspot without rooting my phone

Question: I've seen many articles and tried many applications like 'mobiwol' 'droidwall' 'avast antivirus' 'foxfi'.
What my problem is that I've a very limited mobile data and I want to use it with my laptop with wireless/usb tethering without any android app accessing internet.
I was thinking to block all android application to access internet and just allow portable hotspot to access mobile data, then I'll connect via portable hotspot and use the data in my laptop. I found application like 'droidwall' or 'avast antivirus' which requires a rooted device, but I cannot root my device as it'll void warranty.
Then I found 'Noroot firewall' or 'mobiwol' which creates a virtual VPN to block internet access. That's exactly what I want. But I want to allow portable hotspot to access mobile data which is not possible see 2nd last answer here. So basically I'm struck.
Can anyone please suggest what should I do? or simply how can I use internet in laptop via android device without android app accessing mobile data?
Note: My device - samsung tab2 3100, android version 4.1.2
Answer:
Go to Settings>Data Usage
Check 'Restrict Background Data'

(It will prevent apps from using Data)


Jekyll is not detecting when a new folder is added

Question: I'm using Jekyll to create a new site. I'm using the command jekyll serve --watch to automatically rebuild the site each time a change is made.
This is working great so long as I make a change to an existing file. However, if I add a new folder, Jekyll does not notice it. I have stop Jekyll from watching, then restart it for it to notice the new folder and include it in my _site directory.
Is this expected behaviour or is there likely a problem with my setup?
Comment: What OS, what ruby version, what jekyll version?
Comment: Mac OS 10.7.5, Ruby Version 2.0.0p247, and Jekyll version 1.0.3
Answer: The same thing happens with my Jekyll. I believe the jekyll serve --watch command looks in the current directories for changes, not newly created ones.


Alternative to ScaleMP?

Question: Anyone know of an alternative to ScaleMP?  They let several x86 boxes boot as one large box.  Theoretically AMD's hypertransport should allow the same thing.
Any other companies or OSS projects doing this?
Answer: You should distinct between three types of technologies:
1) OS Kernel mods (in this case, modules or kernel patches)
[This technology is software-based]

LinuxPMI/OpenMosix (http://linuxpmi.org/)
OpenSSI (http://openssi.org/)
Kerrighed (http://www.kerrighed.org/)

In the technologies listed above, you modify the OS to provide the user a "feel" of an SMP, and you run an instance of the OS (Linux) on every one of the nodes. For example, LinuxPMI clearly states on their homepage that:
"LinuxPMI is a set of Linux kernel patches implementing process "migration" over a network. Its goal is to allow you to move a program from your machine to another machine, run it there for a while, and return it without it ever knowing it was gone"
While this functionality is neat, it is far from meeting what most users would spec as requirements for SMP.
None of these technologies enable, for example, a single application to transparently access and make use of resources (RAM, CPUs, or IO devices) across multiple physical nodes. Thus, those technologies could not really be considered an alternative to the technology from ScaleMP.
2) Virtualization Aggregation technologies
[This technology is software-based]
ScaleMP is in this space.
A couple of other companies operated here in the past: Virtual Iron (defunct, assets bought by Oracle), and 3LeafNetworks (defunct, assets bought by Huawei of China).
These technologies enable the creation of a virtual SMP. The single OS running on-top of this SMP is either not aware of the virtualization (ScaleMP, 3Leaf) or uses ParaVirt to function properly (Virtual Iron).
Using these technologies your application can transparently map and use RAM which is larger than the RAM available in a single physical node, use computing cores from multiple cluster nodes for the same threaded application, have a processor from one physical system read from a hard drive of another physical system and transmit the data from the NIC of yet another physical system.
This kind of functionality is what makes these technologies a viable alternative to the next group.
3) NUMA interconnects
[This technology is hardware-based]
Over the years, different companies have developed special chipsets to enable the creation of large SMP machines. Sequent was among the first to create such a chipset for x86 environments (it was acquired by IBM, and its technology is still inside the IBM XA-based servers, now at revision eX5). SGI has the NUMAlink now in use in their Altix UV line of products. Bull, a server vendor from France, has the MESCA chip in its scale-up servers. Those companies market the overall solution (a server product) and you cannot buy "just the interconnect" from them – and all offer only Intel-Xeon-based systems with their scale-up technology. Another company, called NumaScale, provides a connector-based (Adapter) which enables the aggregation of multiple AMD-Opteron-based systems; with NumaScale you could potentially create a "Do-It-Yourself" SMP out of cluster nodes.
Comment: Excellent summary of that rather arcane topic.I add the HP Superdome X, the Oracle SPARC M7-16, the Fujistsu SPARC M10-S4 to the "NUMA interconnects" section.
Answer: There's a company called Numascale that sells an adapter card containing a directory-based cache coherency and a router for a 3D torus network, allowing one to build ccNUMA machines out of smaller building blocks. The catch is that it's a HTX card, motherboards are probably in short supply.
Numascale also offers a card that plugs into a PCIe slot for power and picks up HT signals from an empty CPU socket for use with other motherboards not equipped with an HTX connector.
Comment: demo system specs http://www.numascale.com/numa_demo.html request demo realm access http://www.numascale.com/numa_access.php

Alternative to ScaleMP?


Beetle crawling up more than one level

Question: Can the beetle crawl up more than one level in a single move? For example, if the beetle is on ground level (level zero), can it move up on top of stack of two pieces (i.e. onto level 2) in one turn? I feel like it shouldn't be allowed to move in top of a stack of n pieces (i.e. onto level n+1) unless it is already on level n, since an actual beetle cannot jump or fly... I'd appreciate an answer, thanks.
Answer: Yes it can jump multiple levels.
From the rules here it says as follows.

The only way to block a Beetle that is on top of the Hive is to move another Beetle on top of it.  All four Beetles can be stacked on top of each other.

There is no reference in the rules to moving one level at a time.  If a beetle was to move on top of a stack of all Beetles (as stated in the rules is possible)  then the Beetle would have to jump (or climb if you feel that makes more thematic sense) up more than one level at once.
Answer: Yes. From the FAQ on BoardGameGeek:

A beetle can directly climb up or down several levels (from the ground
  to the top of an adjacent tall stack, or from a tall stack down to the
  ground).

Beetle crawling up more than one level


What does Fair Trade guarantee?

Question: As a result of my social environment, i always buy coffee that has the Fair Trade label.
Of course it means i spend some extra cash that goes to the coffee producing farmers in exotic countries.
But i would like to know what the organisation is, that supervises the coffee trade, and what exactly the label guarantees.
Comment: My question is what the label guarantees to the end-producer.
Comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade_coffee The information is online if you just Google it.
Answer: If you mean the coffee bean farmer by 'end-producer',
Fair Trade guarantees a relative increase of the contract that the farmer can negotiate.
Say, for example a farmer gets USD 20,- for his entire crop usually, then
He might get USD 140,- for the same amount of beans when selling to a Fair Trade contracter.
Also see: How much do the farmers get about prices in Ethiopia.
Answer: As Jose Manuel Villasante Armas said, Fair Trade guarantees a minimum price for the farmers.
Another good point is, it has local/provincial social supports.
However, it does not care about environmental effects that much. UTZ certification or Rainforest Alliance are for that. They try to minimize the environmental impacts of coffee production. Unfortunately, those two do not care about farmer revenues, etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Answer: Sadly, the accepted answer by @Jose is incorrect. These days, "Fair Trade" guarantees pretty much nothing. As some researchers noted, the original idea of Fair Trade Coffee's long gone. For example, refer to Colleen Haight of the Stanford Innovation Review:  The Problem with Fair Trade Coffee.
The concept was adopted in 1988 to address the issue of so called "coffee crisis," caused by overproduction of coffee beans worldwide. The initiative was aimed to artificially raise the prices to make sure that coffee growers do not go bankrupt. The whole idea eventually backfired, as it didn't eliminate overproduction, and it is now not uncommon for participating coffee farmers to sell their product to independent buyers, just because those often pay more than so called "fair trade" buyers. See Coffee, Farming Families, and Fair Trade in Costa Rica: New Markets, Same Old Problems?
Nowadays, Fair Trade has been reduced to a simple marketing trick to facilitate "ethical consumerism" and make consumers pay a few dollars more per each bag of coffee, all that for a sole benefit of the distributor or the retailer. In other words, you are being duped and the farmer gets nothing extra.
See also: Fair Trade Debate
Answer: I think there are quite a lot of misconceptions about Fair Trade floating around here. There are several obvious key points addressed by the Fair Trade concept and several not so obvious points. There's also some discrepancy between what the Fair Trade company propagates and what actually happens to small scale coffee farmers. So I'll first summarize what Fair Trade says it does and then go on to summarize some of the literature on it.

Fair Trade guarantees a so called floor price to the producers. That's a minimum price guaranteed to protect against market fluctuations. It is 140 cents per pound for Arabica and 110 cents for a pound of Robusta if I remember correctly.
In addition a so called Fair Trade premium, 20 cents I believe is paid, which goes into community development, business development, environmental projects and similar things.
Also an additional 30 cents per pound are paid if the beans or produced using organic farming practices. So there is some incentive to switch to organic farming wherever it is feasible.
Participating in Fair Trade means that the producers must have some cooperative form. This is in many ways beneficial. Cooperative form means there is some kind of democratic process involved. Forming cooperatives usually increases market power, increases economy of scale, just to name a few benefits.
Fair Trade helps small-scale farmers (most coffee farmers are) finance their operations with cheap loans repayable after the produce has been sold. Getting loans is often difficult for small scale farmers.

So far so good. This is what the Fair Trade company says it is doing (Fairtrade Foundation 2012). The scientific evidence is however less straight forward and does not only produce a positive picture, however it does suggest that it has overall benefits.
There are many impact and case studies that suggest that farmers participating in the Fair Trade scheme have a significantly reduced livelihood vulnerability. They are e.g. in Nicaragua 4 times less likely to loose their land titles due to market price fluctuations of coffee. However it is also acknowledged that a lot of the produce has to be sold on the conventional market due to too low demand (Bacon 2005).
Other research suggests that Fair Trade does have a positive effect, but only for the most skilled and people owning a farm. However this income effect is not observed for unskilled farm workers. There's also in increase in school attendance in affected regions, although for children of farmers and workers the opposite may be true, probably due to increased economic opportunities (Dragusanu and Nunn 2015).
Anna Milford (2012) summarizes evidence of positive benefit of Fair Trade schemes for farmers, such as higher living standards, decreased child mortality etc. She notes that the forming of cooperatives to participate in the Fair Trade scheme reallocates market power and makes markets more competitive.
So in conclusion, if you go through the literature, you will find that there are very likely positive effects on the livelihood of small scale farmers. The picture is not very straight forward though and which mechanisms contribute to the increased living standards is also not clear. It could just be higher prices, but it could also be the forming of cooperatives and very likely it's a combination of several things.
One last note: Rainforest Alliance and UTZ have much lower environmental standards than organic farming certificates and also much lower social standards than Fair Trade. They are green washing and likely not much more.
References:

Bacon, C. (2005). Confronting the coffee crisis: can fair trade, organic, and specialty coffees reduce small-scale farmer vulnerability in northern Nicaragua?. World development, 33(3), 497-511.
Dragusanu, R. and Nunn, N (2015). The Impacts of Fair Trade Certification: Evidence From Coffee Producers in Costa Rica. Working Paper.
Fairtrade Foundation (2012). Fair Trade and Coffee: Commodity Briefing.
Milford, Anna B. (2012). The pro-competitive effect of coffee cooperatives in Chiapas, Mexico. Journal of Agricultural & Food Industrial Organization, 10(1).

What does Fair Trade guarantee?


Do manga artists draw their comics by hand or use computers?

Question: In the Bakuman manga, the authors show that the manga artists create a manga without using any technology like computers. Is that how the mangas are drawn?
Answer: Every artist has different drawing techniques.

Some fully use the computer (using a drawing tablet and photoshop)
Some fully draw by hand (using pencil, then pen, then erasing the pencil, the making the pen lined bolder)
Some use a combination of the two (Draw by hand, scan to computer, complete with photoshop).

It's really up to the artist.
Comment: @kartshan Benjamin Zhang Bin is a well known author using mostly only computer. However is not a japanese mangaka, but a chinese manhua artist.
Comment: A very popular author which often use a computer is Ken Akamatsu. You can follow him on twitter, it's very interesting and he's very active.
Comment: Thanks for the reply. Any famous mangaka who uses completely computer ?
Comment: a bit of a bonus.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdzjqOuO_Ig
Answer: Just to add up to @Madara's answer.
Computers are also used to generate backgrounds. They'll generate wire mesh objects and room, if neccesary they'll apply complicated lighting and shadows (like sunlight passing through a complicated ceiling), apply textures to the models, and then print them and work by hand over them!
You can see the process of an artist mastering this tools in the omakes from Ken Akamatsu's Negima! volumes.
He would sometimes take photographs in many places or search for pictures of certain architectural designs (castle, palaces, etc) and he and his team would reproduce them on wire mesh models.
The work of Ken Akamatsu on sceneries is gorgeous, and most of the time you wouldn't think was done with CGI since it still has a lot of hand-drawn work.
He also creates creatures models to create and reproduce more easily crowds.


How to create various timeline views of project tasks

Question: Since it is not possible to relate a timeline to different views of the same task list (See this question), has anyone found another way to use SharePoint task list and timeline features to show different views of a project timeline?
I tried creating a task list using lookup fields (as one user in this forum suggested), but that doesn't work, since you still have to manually add dates to these tasks, otherwise the timeline can't read them.
If I make different task lists for each phase of the project, I can create different timeline for each task list, but then I don't have an overall timeline view.
Has anyone found a solution to display different timeline views of a project while also allowing an overall timeline view of the entire project? Or is SharePoint simply not yet capable of showing multiple timeline views with varying filtered content?
Answer: Yes, there is a way to add multiple time lines. The limitation on SharePoint is that for a task list, there is only one default timeline in which the tasks are added.  We can add another timeline to the list using the list folder properties. If we query the folder properties, we can find the timeline_timeline property which contains the metadata for the graph. We can also find the default timeline name.
The solution is to use JavaScript COM and clone the timeline property. You can also add JavaScript to allow the user to change the default timeline graph or just use the web properties to select the default view.  This way you can have a master timeline as well as secondary timelines.
Find more technical details in this blog entry.
http://www.ozkary.com/2016/06/sharepoint-2013-adding-multiple.html


What is the significance of the license plate number on the Ford Anglia in Harry Potter?

Question: In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the flying Ford Anglia has a license plate number of 7990 TD. Is there any significance to this, or were those digits just randomly selected?
Answer: Based on the answer given to a somewhat similar question posted on SciFi a couple years back, they appear to be random:
Is there any significance to the licence plates on the Ford Anglia?
There is a link in one of the answers that shows the tag was the actual registration tag (the link is to a news story of the car being reported stolen from a studio lot).


How is the illusion of light streaks achieved in this photo?

Question: I've seen a photo with a nice light streaks illusion, that I believe was captured in the camera itself rather than added in post-processing. Can anyone explain how one can replicate it?
Answer: It looks to be a long exposure in a dark room using a flash that illuminates most of the field of view for only an instant. You can see the strobe flash being held in the lower right corner of the image.
The streaks of light are caused by camera movement and the dim bulbs in and around the art on the wall in the back of the room. It seems that in this case the camera was not only moved in the x and y axis, but also rotated around and moved in or out on the z axis. It appears the lens may have also been zoomed during exposure.
For several other questions that show the various effects that can be achieved by shooting points of light in a dark scene using camera/lens movements during longer exposure times, please see:
How do I get started with 'painting with light' photography?
What is the photography term for blurred / dragged lights?
How do I choose a lens for a "glow in the dark" indoor/lowlight event?
How is the circular motion blur created in this Instagram image?
Sometimes such effects are not desired:
Strange light when shooting long exposure
Why in a photo light lines of street lamps? How to remove them?
Comment: Is it likely that the photographer used a special device to move the camera or is it possible handheld?
Comment: It looks handheld to me. It also looks like the motion involved the photographers' feet as well as their hands.
Answer: One possible way to achieve the look is with multiple exposures.  One image is taken with near zero light in the room.  With the shutter set to Bulb, the photographer opens the shutter and keeps it locked with a cable release.  Then with a flashlight, the photographer "paints" in all of the streaks.
The 2nd exposure is then made with the flashlight pointed at the subject.  Of course, this could have been done in reverse order, too.
Yet another way would be to make a composite of two different images.


When can you count ladies towards a Minyan?

Question: I've heard that there are situations in which one can count the ladies towards a Minyan. Is that true? Which situations?
Comment: See here for a comprehensive discussion of the issue:
http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/english/tfila/frimer2-1.htm
Answer: I think it's the case where a non-Jew  is trying to force a Jew to violate any mitzvah (or even any established Jewish custom) out of opposition to Judaism (rather than for some personal benefit). If ten Jews - and if I recall correctly, women are included - know about the situation, then as part of the mitzvah of kiddush Hashem, the Jew has to allow himself or herself to be killed rather than violate the mitzvah.
(Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh De'ah 157:1. Pischei Teshuvah there :7 mentions the question whether women count towards the ten, and references his comments to Yoreh De'ah 2:6, but I haven't yet found it there.)
Comment: I didn't get that the Pischei Teshuva since kiddush Hashem b'rabim is learned from the same pasuk as saying, for example, kadish with a minyan.
Comment: Yeah, that seems to be his question - whether בני ישראל comes to exclude women or geirim. It's too bad that I don't know the other place he's referring to, so I could see what arguments he brings to bear.
Answer: When you light Chanuka candles in Shul there is supposed to be a Minyan there. The Shaalos U'Teshuvos Rav Paalim in Orach Chaim Chelek 2 Siman 62 says that you can count ladies towards this Minyan.
Answer: One should try to read the Megillah for at least 10. There is a disagreement about whether women may be counted towards this total.


How did Harry become a Horcrux?

Question: To make a Horcrux, certainly murder can't be the only requirement. It is obvious a proper spell is needed for completing a Horcrux. Voldemort could have made a thousand Horcruxes, as he had already murdered a thousand people. But, how on earth did Harry become a Horcrux, with Voldemort murdering his mom and not using the Horcrux-making spell? Certainly Avada Kedavra is not the spell used for making a Horcrux.
Comment: Obligatory "**Aargh! Harry isn't a Horcrux**" comment...
Comment: What is your reason for thinking Avada Kedavra cannot be used to make a horcrux? Isn't this evidence that, under certain circumstances, it can be?
Comment: Here's a theory, Avada Kedavra *is* the spell for making a horcrux, but you have to carefully use it on yourself. Only someone very practiced with the spell could use it "safely" on himself. When the spell rebounded from Harry, it was too powerful, so it not only unintentionally split his soul, but killed his body as well.
Answer: J.K. Rowling addresses whether or not Harry is a proper Horcrux in Pottercast with The Leaky Cauldron (citation below) and reveals that Harry is not a Horcrux. Read on:

"Here is the thing: for convenience, I had Dumbledore say to Harry, "You were the Horcrux he never meant to make," but I think, by definition, a Horcrux has to be made intentionally. So because Voldemort never went through the grotesque process that I imagine creates a Horcrux with Harry, (SU: Mm-hm.) it was just that he had destabilized his soul so much that it split when he was hit by the backfiring curse. And so this part of it flies off, and attaches to the only living thing in the room. A part of it flees in the very-close-to-death limbo state that Voldemort then goes on and exists in. I suppose it's very close to being a Horcrux, but Harry did not become an evil object. He didn't have curses upon him that the other Horcruxes had. He himself was not contaminated by carrying this bit of parasitic soul."
[SNIP]
"I do think that the strict definition of "Horcrux," once I write the [Harry Potter Encyclopedia], will have to be given, and that the definition will be that a receptacle is prepared by Dark Magic to become the receptacle of a fragmented piece of soul, and that that piece of soul was deliberately detached from the master soul to act as a future safeguard, or anchor, to life, and a safeguard against death." JK Rowling - Pottercast 12.23.07 - The Leaky Cauldron

No, Harry was not an official Horcrux. There is a spell used to complete the process, which JKR has not yet revealed.
From Half-Blood Prince:

A Horcrux is the word used for an object in which a person has concealed part of their soul."
"I don't quite understand how that works, though, sir," said Riddle. His voice was carefully controlled, but Harry could sense his excitement.
"Well, you split your soul, you see," said Slughorn, "and hide part of it in an object outside the body. Then, even if one's body is attacked or destroyed, one cannot die, for part of the soul remains earthbound and undamaged. But of course, existence in such a form ..." Slughorn's face crumpled and Harry found himself remembering words he had heard nearly two years before: "I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost. . . but still, I was alive." "... few would want it, Tom, very few. Death would be preferable."
But Riddle's hunger was now apparent; his expression was greedy, he could no longer hide his longing.
"How do you split your soul?"
"Well," said Slughorn uncomfortably, "you must understand that the soul is supposed to remain intact and whole. Splitting it is an act of violation, it is against nature."
"But how do you do it?"
"By an act of evil — the supreme act of evil. By commiting murder. Killing rips the soul apart. The wizard intent upon creating a Horcrux would use the damage to his advantage: He would encase the torn portion —"
"Encase? But how — ?"
"There is a spell, do not ask me, I don't know!" said Slughorn shaking his head like an old elephant bothered by mosquitoes. " Do I look as though I have tried it — do I look like a killer?"
"No, sir, of course not," said Riddle quickly. "I'm sorry ... I didn't mean to offend . . ."
Half-Blood Prince - chapter 23 - Horcruxes - US Hardcover
Comment: @Anoplexian Did you read the first quote in the answer? She quite clearly states that she had Dumbledore use the word _for convenience_. The interviews offer further detail on the precise nature of what is and isn't a Horcrux, and makes it clear that Dumbledore was simplifying things for convenience, and that his statement isn't to be taken at complete face value.
Comment: @Anoplexian Not necessarily, no. Even just the text in the book shows that Harry was not a Horcrux. "There is a spell, do not ask me, I don't know!" says Slughorn. No such spell was used when Voldemort accidentally Avada Kedavra'ed him in 1981. Ergo, Harry was not a Horcrux. Maybe it's just me, but I always understood "the Horcrux he never intended to make" to mean "that is, not a _real_ Horcrux, just something like it", even before I knew about Rowling's explanation.
Comment: @JanusBahsJacquet So essentially we watched her retcon out of that hole? XD
Comment: I don't understand this, as Dumbledore EXPLICITLY states that Harry is a Horcrux in the King's Cross chapter of Deathly Hallows. So which actually is it? Which is more canon?
Answer: Although the spell is unknown, there exists a spell that is used to create horcrux, intentionally of course.
As explained here,

Creating a horcrux requires one to commit a murder, which, as "the supreme act of evil, (...) rips the soul apart." After the murder, a spell is cast to infuse part of the ripped soul into an object, which becomes the horcrux. The spell can be found in the book Secrets of the Darkest Art.

Voldemort had already created five horcruxes before going to Godric's Hollow to kill Harry, (and I suspect he was going to use Harry's death for making his last horcrux, although I have no canonical evidence to support my assumption). This evil act had made his soul highly unstable. [Ref: Page no 114, Deathly Hallows]

"And the more I've read about them," said Hermione, "the more horrible they seem, and the less I can believe that he actually made six. It warns in this book how unstable you make the rest of your soul by ripping it, and that's just by making one Horcrux!"

When Voldemort attempted to kill Harry, his killing curse rebounded off the protection spell and killed him physically. But due to the instability of his soul, a part of his soul was blown off during his death and sought out the nearest living thing, which incidentally was Harry. This is how Harry became Voldemort's sixth Horcrux, his accidental and unintentional Horcrux.
Comment: "I suspect he was going to use Harry's death for making his last horcrux, although I have no canonical evidence to support my assumption." Here you go: Half-Blood Prince, Page 506 of the first US edition, July 2005 (wow, so long ago): [Dumbledore speaking] "He seems to have reserved the process of making Horcruxes for particularly significant deaths. You would certainly have been that. He believed that in killing you, he was destroying the danger the prophecy had outlined. He believed he was making himself invincible. I am sure that he was intending to make his final Horcrux with your death."
Comment: ykombinator isn't bad at maths. REALLY. Just so you know, if you know the timeline of the correct order of the horcruxes, HARRY IS THE 6TH HORCUX. First, the diary. Second, Peverell's Ring. Followed by the Hufflepuff Cup, Slytherin Locket, Ravenclaw's Diadem, and the UNINTENTIONAL turning of Haary as a horcrux, and the last is Nagini. In conclusion, Tom constructed 5 horcruxes before he went to the 6th, whom we called as the boy who lived.
Comment: Do you have canon citation for unstable soul ju-ju?
Comment: Wow, thank you @Cyphase!
Comment: Check the edit!
Comment: Wait... he had five horcruxes before heading over to Godric's Hollow, but Harry is his seventh?
Comment: @snetch Perhaps someone is bad at maths? :-D
Comment: As an aside, I just read the rest of that chapter (pgs. 506-512). Those last four pages where Harry is doubting himself and focusing too much on the prophecy, and Dumbledore is trying to make him understand, and he finally does, actually brought a few tears to my eyes; it's so well written. Maybe I'm just in a mood..
Comment: You're welcome @ykombinator! I'm glad my comment reached you. :)
Answer: You ask "with voldy murdering his mom and not using the horcrux making spell?". The answer was provided by Dumbledore (emphasis mine):

"Tell him that on the night Lord Voldemort tried to kill him, when Lily cast her own life
  between them as a shield, the Killing Curse rebounded upon Lord Voldemort, and a
  fragment of Voldemort's soul was blasted apart from the whole, and latched itself onto
  the only living soul left in that collapsed building. ..." [ Deathly Hallows, Dumbledore finally explaining to Snape the full story as Harry is observing from Snape's memory ]

So, there were two events that happened to make Harry a "Horcrux" (quotes are there on purpose - see Slytheincess' answer):

Avada Kedavra, when bouncing off of Lily's protective magic around Harry, hit Voldemort himself instead, and ripped off a part of his soul.
Once his body was dead/gone/destroyed from Avada Kedavra, that ripped off soul piece tried to find a new host, and Harry was the only host available.
Answer:
For making a horcrux,certainly murder is not the only rule.

Murder is not the only rule, but it is a necessary step in order to create a horcrux.

It is obvious, we need a proper spell for making one.Voldy would have made a thousand horcruxes, as he already murdered a thousand people.

He only wanted 7 because he believed 7 to be the most powerful magical number.

But, how on earth Harry became one, with voldy murdering his mom and not using the horcrux making spell? Certainly Avada kedavara is not the spell for making horcrux.

That's explained in @ykombinator's answer.
My two cents: just as Voldemort handpicked very exclusive/rare objects for his horcruxes, he handpicked his victims as well. James or Lily were two meaningless people on his way to power. He could dispose of them. Harry, on the other hand, was the one he marked as an equal after hearing about the profecy. So Harry, of course, would have been the last and most important victim of the set.
What I don't really know is whether Voldemort had already picked an object to make a horcrux with when he went to kill Harry. I guess the spell is to force the part of soul to "store" itself in a specific physical container. In absence of the spell (since Voldemort's body was gone, so he wasn't able to perform it), the part of unstable soul found a life-form in baby Harry and stayed there, something Tom Riddle did not intend or foresee.
Answer: When Voldemort went to Godric's Hollow, he had already created 5 horcruxes. He was timing all his horcrux creation to significant killings and important objects to encase part of his soul. Harry was the biggest threat to Voldemort created by the prophecy. It must have seemed a very important killing for Voldemort. He was so intent on making Horcruxes and to evade death in all possible manner that he had forgotten basic rules of old magic.
Therefore, when Voldemort went to Godric's Hollow, it can be assumed that he went prepared to create a Horcrux with the killing of Harry Potter. What was the supposed object cannot be said with certainity.
We do not know the procedure of making a horcrux as it has not been discussed or described. It is possible that the wizard intent on making a horcrux has to cast the horcrux creating spell, followed by killing to rip the soul apart and then some other spell to encase the soul fragment.
But as the curse to kill harry potter rebounded, it split voldemort's soul as planned. But Voldemort's body was gone. He could no longer encase the soul fragment to complete horcrux formation. Soul has a property to live in a body. Only a encasing spell can put the soul outside the body in a physical object. Voldemort's soul which was left unstable latched itself to the only living thing it could find, Harry himself.
This was the reason that Harry contained the soul but was not posessed by it, rather it was becoming a part of him and providing him qualities like being a parselmouth.
Answer: I completely support ykombinator's answer with this additional thought:
Voldemort was an extremely skilled and powerful wizard. He had spent years to hone his skills. That means he came prepared. Since Voldemort was mortified by death, it's reasonable to assume that making horcruxes wasn't his only preventive action. I think he protected himself with the most powerful artifacts and spells available, as well.
So there might have been a spell to transfer his soul into a new body should he be killed. Or maybe he unleashed the horcrux spell as a last-second attempt to do something when he realized he was dying.
All in all, it doesn't feel right that he would die without any struggle after all these efforts to stay alive.
Answer: Yeah! Even I feel the same. Voldemort was so obsessed with making the last horcrux that he was actually waiting for the opportunity but the prophecy must have interrupted his mind and he might have thought to finish it before moving to make the next one. So, he might have jumped to Godric's Hollow to kill 'em all. But, since several things must have crossed his mind, which might have made him weaker and the spell he cast was so weak that Lily's magical love destroyed voldemort.
Answer: As said by Slytherincess, JKR did approach this question:

Here is the thing: for convenience, I had Dumbledore say to Harry, "You were the Horcrux he never meant to make," but I think, by definition, a Horcrux has to be made intentionally. So because Voldemort never went through the grotesque process that I imagine creates a Horcrux with Harry, (SU: Mm-hm.) it was just that he had destabilized his soul so much that it split when he was hit by the backfiring curse. And so this part of it flies off, and attaches to the only living thing in the room. A part of it flees in the very-close-to-death limbo state that Voldemort then goes on and exists in. I suppose it's very close to being a Horcrux, but Harry did not become an evil object. He didn't have curses upon him that the other Horcruxes had. He himself was not contaminated by carrying this bit of parasitic soul.

I like to assume that since when Voldemort's soul split an additional time from being so unstable, and the piece attaches to Harry (the closest living thing it could survive off of), it kept Harry from being killed with the killing curse. After all, you can't kill a Horcrux with the curse. The boy who lived likely owed his survival to the person who tried to kill him in the first place.
Answer: OK so, when the curse rebounded on Voldemort, the horcrux was Harry because Harry was the closest and only living thing,so technically Harry is  the horcrux Voldemort never meant to make. I hope that answered your question.
Comment: Doesn't really add any new insights to the answers that are already here.
Comment: This answer is just plain wrong, I'm afraid :  http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/11530/how-did-harry-become-a-horcrux/11546#11546
Answer: since its me, i have a theory. lily potter was never killed by Voldemort directly. you see, James found out that Voldemort was there to kill harry, and he purposefully went to fight him. . .without a wand. he did this so that he could buy lily time to get away with harry, so he must have known he would die. . . which means he died for lily and harry. this means that when Voldemort tried to kill lily to get to harry, it was her the curse rebounded off of, hitting Voldemort. this exploded the house, which is what really killed lily, something harry would never have seen. and Harry's scar is there from Voldemort soul entering it, since he would have been the only living thing in the room. remember, Dumbledore said that only powerful dark magic could have caused him to get that scar, but he never says that it was definitely avada kedavra that caused it.
Answer: See, Harry became a horcrux since on the night of his parents death, Voldemort tried to kill him with an avada kadavra curse. The spell rebounded and took Voldemorts body.(well not really, just Voldemoert became powerless). Part of Voldemorts body/soul that Voldemoert lost that night went into Harry through the curse. This is sort of hard to explain, but imagine that the blade of magic that came from the wand went into the scar that it made on Harry's forehead. Then, the curse rebounded, and Voldemort lost part of himself, and that, just like the wand magic, went into Harry's scar, and then became part of Harry. I'm hoping this helped.
Comment: This answer does not seem to be support by any canon. If you look at other answers, Harry was not a horcrux.

How did Harry become a Horcrux?


absolute Xpath is not working for Gmail login page

Question: I have tested the Gmail login page and was trying to verify the Sign in label in the Gmail login page above the user name field.  I am using FirePath to generate the Xpath.  When I inspect the element Sign in using Firebug, FirePath generated the absolute Xpath html/body/div[1]/div[2]/div[1]/div/h2.  When I copy this Xpath and execute it, the testcase fails.  Adding // to the absolute Xpath works, i.e. //html/body/div[1]/div[2]/div[1]/div/h2. To summarize, the absolute Xpath works with / (single slash) whereas relative Xpath works with //.  Can anyone correct my mistakes or explain this?
Comment: A more general question comes to my mind: Why don't you use Ids instead of XPaths to locate elements? Ids seems easier to read for a human, more stable and reliable in this particular context. And Gmail Web page provides them :-)
Comment: You can use this //h2[contains(text(),'Sign in ')] for label
Answer: As much as possible, please avoid using absolute xpaths, any small change in the page layouts and your xpaths may become completely useless, as much as possible, use the class names, ids etc... For the gmail sign-in,
//div[@class='signin-box']//div[@class='email-div']//input[@id='Email']

is the xpath for the UserName Text field, likewise for the password field, it'd be
//div[@class='signin-box']//div[@class='passwd-div']//input[@id='Passwd']

Comment: Excellent suggestion - it makes a lot of sense to work with relative paths. Using class and ID identifiers - which change a lot less often than page layouts - is a good way of saving yourself heartache later.
Comment: Might be a bit off-topic comment, but... why work with XPath at all, if you refer to elements' ids in them? Why don't you simply locate elements `By.id()`?
Answer: From my experience, sometimes the way XPaths are read by Selenium are different from what you expect, especially if you've verified the XPaths are correct in Firepath.
Yes, both of the XPaths you've posted point to the same element and should work identically, but for some reason, only the relative one is working correctly in the IDE.
The main takeaway from this is to avoid absolute XPaths like the plague!  Always use relative ones, but make them more specific, so other elements aren't found instead (since Selenium picks the first out of all the matches).
This is nice and short://div/h2.  But if there are any other h2 elements on the page before this one, they will be found as well.
If you want to be more precise, try: //div/h2[contains(text(),"Sign in")].
I tested each of the above with Firepath and Selenium IDE and they work.
Comment: `//div[@class="signin-box"]/h2[contains(text(),"Sign in")]`
Answer: You mentioned three ways to start an Xpath.  /html matches a html tag at the top of the document.  //html matches any html tag anywhere in the document.  html matches any html tag that is a child of the context element.  I do not know how Selenium 2 defines the context element.  If the context element is not the top of the document, you will get the behavior you observed.
If you have not read the sections of the W3C Xpath specification on locations and abbreviations, you may benefit from doing so.  It is not very long.
Comment: You're correct about /html and //html, but the Selenium IDE isn't recognizing /html and any element that follows it (at least on that Gmail login page).  I think that's what the OP was confused about.
Answer: I would suggest never use complete xpath in any UI test. And the reason is if anything gets change in the UI structure then your test will fail. And there will be huge cost towards maintaining your test cases. So for any UI test we should try to identify elements based on their unique id/class/div name etc.
For your case to find out sign in link you can use the following command:
selenium.GetText("//div[@class='signin-box']/h2");

Hope this will help you.
Comment: If you use [PageObject](https://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/PageObjects) design pattern, the cost of maintenance can be much lower. If page structure changes, you will need to update only one class.


Why can a deterministic portfolio only grow at risk free rate

Question: In black scholes derivation we assume that portfolio grows at risk free rate because the process is deterministic, my question is why is it riskfree rate? If i have information about some event in the market(deterministic), i can earn interest over riskfree rate. So why risk free rate?
Comment: Because the process is known to be deterministic by a broad set of market participants. Is the simultaneous existence of two different risk free rates consistent with an economic equilibrium? If investors could invest at a risk free rate of $r_A$ or a risk free rate of $r_B$ where $r_B > r_A$, why would anyone invest at $r_A$?
Answer: This is how Black Scholes justified it (copied from Black Scholes original paper)
Answer: The Black Scholes model assumes that the market is efficient. That is, the pricing of stocks is efficient and therefore you cannot out perform the stock market in the long run. Many but not all economists take this view. The Black Scholes model also assumes a single interest rate. Part of the justification for this assumption is that if long term bonds are offering a greater interest rate than short term bonds the reason for that must be that interest rates are rising and in a rising interest rate environment you do not want to hold long term bonds.
You wrote:
    If i have information about some event in the market(deterministic), i can earn interest over risk free rate.
One question is, how did you get this information? Did you have inside information? If it is the second then you cannot legally act on it.
The Black Scholes model makes certain assumptions. For example, it assumes that if a certain stock went down yesterday that does not tell us anything about what the stock will do tomorrow. Is that assumption right? I am not sure but it is close to right. When you model something with a set of equations it will not be perfect. You need to make simplifying assumptions. In the case of Black Scholes, one of the assumptions is that the excepted return in a money market and the stock market is the same. I do not really believe that but I would argue that the two are closely related. Therefore, the Black Scholes assumption about interest rates is okay.
I hope that helps.
Bob


Who gave King Richard I the title Coeur de Lion?

Question: When King Richard I went to the Holy land during the Third Crusade, he was given the title coeur de lion (French for lion heart). Who gave him that title? I Imagine that it was a French person.
Comment: "Lion Heart" is not a title in the medieval sense.  It is a nickname like "Sigurd Snake Eye", "Igne Hunchback", "Pedro the Cruel", "Juan la Loca", etc.  In the medieval sense a title consists of a ruling office or rank and the name of the territory ruled in that rank.  Examples include Count of Burgundy, Duke of Burgundy, King of burgundy, Landgrave of Alsace, Margrave of Moravia, Earl of March, Prince of Orange, etc.  The combination of the rank and the territory showed that the bearer claimed legal "title" to use the powers of that rank or office  in that territory.
Answer: Actually, Richard had acquired that name before he went on the Crusades. Richard and two of his brothers rose up in rebellion against their father, Henry II. They went to France to obtain the support of Louis VII, and it was Louis who actually knighted Richard. This established his initial ties to the French.
When the brothers set out to attack their father, Richard rallied the support of a number of barons from Aquitaine. Eventually, the brothers were defeated and Richard went to his father and begged for forgiveness. His father granted it, but also gave Richard the task of returning to Aquitaine to punish the barons who had fought for him in the rebellion. Many of these barons had very well fortified castles, so this task was not at all easy. It was during this campaign that Richard acquired the name "Lion Heart".
I don't believe there is any record of who exactly coined the phrase, but it was apparently his French adversaries who recognized his courage. I read some sources that suggested it was French minstrels who first used the term to add color to their tales, but no one can be sure.
Comment: Pretty sure he earned the nickname before fighting the barons, while fighting his Father (who was somehow nicknamed Hercules/Heracles since he was very good at fighting). It was a french nickname yes, but he spoke french and was in Aquitaine for quite a while, I highly doubt his adversaries would praise him and says he's so brave, most likely this came from his side after a peculiar event (maybe he led a charge that went well or went back to fight after beeing out of it, or charged to save one of his brother or something...)
Answer: They were ALL French. The House of Plantagenet (especially early on), in fact ALL of the Angevins, are French. They all spoke French (or a dialect thereof) as a FIRST language. Richard himself didn't speak English.
Comment: Yes quite; thank you for pointing this out. And not to mention the Plantagenets' predecessors the Normans...


How fast does autocomplete need to be for a good user experience?

Question: Has there been any study into how quickly autocomplete suggestions need to show up for a good user experience?
Comment: See this post: http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/36231/when-should-you-start-autocompleting-a-search-in-autocomplete-search-field?rq=1
Comment: Thanks @JonW, that's an interesting question. I can't imagine wanting to actually delay results, as that OP was considering.
Comment: For what it's worth [JQueryUI autocomplete has a default delay](http://api.jqueryui.com/autocomplete/#option-delay) of 300ms which can be reduced for local data. Also consider interaction with screen readers - eg aria-autocomplete options.
Comment: ...and [flickr fell over YUI's 200ms default delay option](http://code.flickr.net/2009/03/18/building-fast-client-side-searches/)
Answer: Giving immediate results with first character is the way to go, according to me.
If the search history is saved for the particular user (Like in google if your are logged in, or on your Mac/Windows, where you're the only user) then this is a valuable thing to have. Most of the time in chrome/spotlight I just type one letter and hit return for my frequent websites/applications. Like F+return will get me to facebook in less than a second. I also feel that it sort of makes my experience more personal, I know this is my system and it knows my usual requests and is expediting the process.
There is also the notion of the impatient user. As the systems get more powerful and the bandwidth increases, people are getting less tolerant of wait-time. No one likes watching the "Loading..." prompt. Why I bring this up is, if you delay the search by a couple characters, it might lead the user to believe that the system is slow/not good enough to guess things right off the bat.
The downsides is, you need a fast enough system to make it a fluid experience (else you will end up with a flickering search results list).
Edit:
Just remembered Nielsen's time scale explanation for UX.
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/powers-of-10-time-scales-in-ux/
It resonates with what I wrote above.
Instant results:

0.1 second is the response time limit if you want users to feel like their actions are directly causing something to happen on the screen . For example, if you click on an expandable menu and see the expanded version in less than 0.1 seconds, then it feels as if you made the menu open up.
To create the illusion of direct manipulation , a user interface must be faster than 0.1 second.

1 sec results:

When the computer takes more than 0.1 second but less than 1 second to respond to your input, it feels like the computer is causing the result to appear. Although users notice the short delay, they stay focused on their current train of thought during the one-second interval.
This means that during 1-second response times, users retain the feeling of being in control of the interaction even though they notice that it's a 2-way interaction (between them and the computer). By contrast, with 0.1 second response times, users simply feel like they're doing something themselves.
Answer: We presume that

an autocomplete is essentially a search operation, and
that users understand that they are searching.

Though I don't have a paper to cite, I have seen that around a 1000-1600ms window is range before which people begin to purse their lips or otherwise get 'the stare'
If this is a multi-use field that does not absolutely present itself as a 'search box' then you can probably have it delay a little longer.
Generally, even with apps with slower UX allowances, a search field involves a more hurried state of mind.
Comment: 1 second would be pretty long for simpler autocompeltes. As I note [in this answer](http://ux.stackexchange.com/a/36235/7627) many big-name apps have effectively instant autocomplete
Comment: Wow, I wouldn't think that >1000 ms response time would be acceptable for autocomplete, especially with Google's being so stinking fast.
Comment: @BenBrocka All politeness intended to you and OP, but if this was a big-brand app I don't think the question would be asked as it is here.  Users' expectations are set by many things, including product & brand image. I wouldn't even expect a McDonald's site to have lightning autocomplete; 'internet utilities' is not what they 'sell'
Comment: That said, I think the 'lightning' autocomplete experience is a reasonable ideal.  I've even heard of people engineering a page to include a quick-load set of some 100 or so terms, so that the autocomplete fills in with something instantaneously, and then updates with more as the AJAX results come in.
Answer: I am not aware of any studies on this subject. A search of journal archives (in particular, ACM SIGCHI) did not yield anything useful - a handful of studies that looked at autocomplete mechanisms as part of their studies, but none that answered this question specifically.
HCI is still a young field, and published answers to questions about particular widgets and their design are generally exceptions, rather than the norm.


Etale cohomology -- Why study it?

Question: I know (at least I think I know) that some of the main motivating problems in the development of etale cohomology were the Weil conjectures.  I'd like to know what other problems one can solve using the machinery of etale cohomology.  I know a little bit about how etale cohomology groups appear in algebraic number theory but I'd like to know about ways that these things show up in other mathematical subjects as well.  Is there anything that an algebraic topologist should really know about etale cohomology?  What about a differential geometer?
Answer: $\DeclareMathOperator{\gal}{Gal}$
Here's a comment which one can make to differential geometers which at least explains what etale cohomology "does". Given an algebraic variety over the reals, say a smooth one, its complex points are a complex manifold but with a little extra structure: the complex points admit an automorphism coming from complex conjugation. Hence the singular cohomology groups inherit an induced automorphism, which is extra information that is sometimes worth carrying around. In short: the cohomology of an algebraic variety defined over the reals inherits an action of $\gal(\mathbb{C}/\mathbb{R})$.
The great thing about etale cohomology is that a number theorist can now do the same trick with algebraic varieties defined over $\mathbb{Q}$. The etale cohomology groups of this variety will have the same dimension as the singular cohomology groups (and are indeed isomorphic to them via a comparison theorem, once the coefficient ring is big enough) but the advantage is that that they inherit a structure of the amazingly rich and complicated group $\gal(\bar{\mathbb{Q}}/\mathbb{Q})$. I've often found that this comment sees off differential geometers, with the thought "well at least I sort-of know the point of it now". A differential geometer probably doesn't want to study $\gal(\bar{\mathbb{Q}}/\mathbb{Q})$ though.
If I put my Langlands-philosophy hat on though, I can see a huge motivation for etale cohomology: Langlands says that automorphic forms should give rise to representations of Galois groups, and etale cohomology is a very powerful machine for constructing representations of Galois groups, so that's why I might be interested in it even if I'm not an algebraic geometer.
Finally, I guess a much simpler motivating good reason for etale cohomology is that geometry is definitely facilitated when you have cohomology theories around. That much is clear. But if you're doing algebraic geometry over a field that isn't $\mathbb C$ or $\mathbb R$ then classical cohomology theories aren't going to cut it, and the Zariski topology is so awful that you can't use it alone to do geometry---you're going to need some help. Hence etale cohomology, which gives the right answers: e.g. a smooth projective curve over any field has a genus, and etale cohomology is a theory which assigns to it an $H^1$ of dimension $2g$ (<pedant> at least if you use $\ell$-adic cohomology for $\ell$ not zero in the field <\pedant>).
Comment: thanks such a clear answer expecially the last paraghraph
Answer: a) Conceptually an algebraic topologist should be interested in étale cohomology, because it answers a very naïve question: given an algebraic variety over $\mathbb C$, how do I calculate algebraically its singular cohomology? The obvious answer "why, I'll just take the cohomology of the constant sheaf $\mathbb Z$ " fails in a spectacular way: if the variety is irreducible ( a reasonable assumption) the cohomology will be zero in positive degree because constant sheaves are flabby, hence acyclic. This is because the Zariski topology of an algebraic variety is too coarse and doesn't allow for the innumerable singular simplices at the algebraic topologist's disposal.Of course you might say "who cares? I'll just do it my singular way " but then what is to be done in non-zero characteristic?
This is where Grothendieck's étale cohomology comes in : it allows one to compute a most reasonable cohomology for constant sheaves. And for sheaves of finite abelian groups over complex varieties, a difficult theorem ( aptly named comparison theorem) proved by Mike Artin says that étale cohomology  coincides with singular cohomology.
b)You ask : "...what other problems one can solve using the machinery of etale cohomology?"
Well, there is the proof  ( which won him a Fields medal) by Voevodski of Milnor's conjecture on quadratic forms, which had been the preeminent open problem in quadratic form theory for 30 years. He introduced $\mathbb A^1$-homotopy which opened a quite active field of research by your algebraic topology colleagues. Here is a survey article by Fabien Morel on $\mathbb A^1$- algebraic topology:
http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~morel/ICMfinal1.pdf
Finally, talking of references, an excellent and very user-friendly set of notes by Milne on étale cohomology can be freely downloaded from
http://www.jmilne.org/math/CourseNotes/LEC.pdf
Answer: This review by Bloch
 answers the first part of your question. Algebraic topology like Sullivan's "Geometric Topology" make use of etale cohomology and etale homotopy.
Comment: ... and rather creepy.  What's up with the private parts?
Comment: There is also the homophone "peak" for "peek". (Hardly the most important thing, but my inner sub-ed wanted to cavil.)
Answer: One of the annoying aspects with sheaf cohomology in algebraic geometry is that - even for curves over the complex numbers - the cohomological dimensions are not what you want them to be, if you are use to the Betti cohomology.
Etale cohomology fixes this problem by defining a cohomology from the covers of a space. This is a standard algebro-topological phenomena: e.g. the fundamental group of a space is indeed the direct limit on the deck groups of covers of the space.
I don't know if this helps any computations in algebraic topology though.

Etale cohomology -- Why study it?


What determines the values of weights in a neural network?

Question: I am trying to understand how weights are actually gotten. What is generating them in a neural network? What is the algorithm that gives them certain values?
Answer: Typically, weights are randomly initialized. Then, as the model is optimized for its given task, those weights are steadily made "better" as determined by the network's loss function. This is also referred to as "training" the neural network.
By far the most popular way of updating weights in a neural net is the backpropagation algorithm, most simply with stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Essentially, the algorithm determines how much each individual weight contributed to the network's loss. It then updates that weight in the direction that would reduce the loss.
I recommend going through Michael Nielsen's online book to learn the basics.
Answer: I agree with @PhilipRaeisghasem, in most architectures, weights are initialized in a random manner. However, some research papers suggest applying a random normal distribution initialization to the weights in the case of Convolutional Neural Networks (for computer vision).
Comment: Absolutely. I didn't think getting into specific initialization distributions would be super beneficial for someone asking such a basic question. But you're right.
Comment: I absolutely overthought that question. Thanks for replying.


How can I insulate an area without an attic above it?

Question: My laundry room and a walk-in closet are freezing cold. They're on the ground floor in part of the house that is single-story. So, there is no attic above them. How do I insulate these areas when there's no attic access? Is the only option to pull down the ceiling, insulate, and then re-install the drywall?
Answer: Well, just like in surgeries, you can come in from either side, either take off the top or take off the bottom.  Generally speaking it is easier to take off the bottom.  However, you don't say how much of a gap there is (if you know) between the drywall and the bottom of the roof.  If you don't have enough space to put enough insulation in to make it worth your while,  then you might have to remove the roof and raise it enough to put in adequate insulation/
Comment: I cut a hatch in the garage's ceiling, crawled to the area over the house, and insulated.


Spoke max tension

Question: When replacing spokes on the rear wheel of my road bike using a tension meter what should the max tension be? I had a spoke snap whilst riding a couple of days ago and it became lodged in the cassette locking my back wheel which caused it to buckle. I will true it up using the spokes but am unsure about max tension and then whether to back off the tension to ride again.
Comment: *If* the rest of the spokes are still equally tensioned, just tension the new spoke to the same tension. However, usually spokes don't break while your spokes are equally tensioned, so you won't have one observed tension to go by. You'll most likely need to redo the entire spoke-tensioning / wheel-truing process. Equal spoke tension is much more important to wheel stability than absolute tension.
Answer: There is no hard-and-fast rule for max spoke tension.  (Other than "Dang, there's a crack in the rim at this spoke hole." That means you added too much tension...)
In my limited wheelbuilding experience, I've found that the non-drive side spoke tension on 10- or 11-speed rear wheels pretty much sets the tension of the drive-side spokes.
First, all of the spokes need to have sufficient tension to prevent them from ever becoming unloaded.  Spokes that become completely unloaded (no tension at all on the spoke) will fail rapidly.  The exact force to ensure that no spokes ever become completely unloaded is going to depend on the usage, the wheel geometry, and probably the phase of the moon.  I'd say anything above 50 kgf will probably suffice.
Second, spoke tension mustn't be so high that you risk catastrophic failure from transient loads like hitting a bump.  You don't want your wheel tacoing out from under you during a fast descent just because you hit a misaligned pavement joint.  Spokes at high tensions risk such failures because the high tension can put wheel components close to the point of permanent deformation (cracking, bending or, in the case of spokes, stretching permanently).  Again, exact values depend on the components, geometry, and a lot of other factors.  But I'd venture anything greater than 120-140 kgf is too much.
In my experience, when truing up a new 10- or 11-speed rear wheel, once the non-drive side tension is greater than 50-60 kgf, drive-side tensions start getting up over 100 kgf.
In other words, once you get enough tension on the non-drive side spokes to prevent them from unloading, drive-side spokes are getting up close to maximum safe tension.
DT Swiss has a blog entry/sales pitch at https://www.blog.dtswiss.com/spoke-tension/ that I think is worth reading.
Comment: Oops, you are correct that you did not mention breaking spokes in that context. So, how does transient load increase spoke tension enough to cause permanent stretching?
Comment: Regarding breaking spokes by transient loads, have you ever read how load is spread on a tensioned spoke wheel?
Comment: @ojs *Regarding breaking spokes by transient loads* Where do I say anything about "breaking spokes by transient loads"?  I posted "Spokes at high tensions risk such failures because the high tension can put wheel components close to the point of permanent deformation (cracking, bending or, **in the case of spokes, stretching permanently**)"
Answer: For asymmetric wheels (most rear wheels which don't use a single speed or internal gear hub) you'll usually try to use the maximum allowed tension on the drive side. The limit is set by the rim manufacturer, most allow around 1200N of tension.
The non-drive side requires much less tension to pull the rim towards the center ("to dish it"). Low spoke tension is bad because bumps in the road can unload the spokes completely which can allow them to move slightly (causing abrasion/wear) or even unscrew.
Therefore you'll want to use the maximum tension on the drive side to be able to use sufficient tension on the non-drive side. With 1200N on the drive side you'll reach about 600N on the non-drive side.
Use a high-quality spoke wrench and grease or lube on the drive side spoke nipples.
Comment: Thanks for that, that was a great answer.

Spoke max tension


How to stay motivated when you don't like the products you're testing?

Question: I work in a very great team which are aware of testing and everyone is great to work with. But I have a problem though. I don't have the interest in the domain I am working. At the beginning, I had to learn everything from the technical environment and all the products and functionalities, and as I was new to the team and the role, it was challenging. But now, after 2 years, I get bored to talk about it. I have difficulties to show interests in what we do and to be more implicated.I started to ask myself if it was that I didn't enjoy to test anymore.
Comment: @nobalG yes, I am in the same shoes as you and think that most of the answers are going to be "I am in the same shoes" or so..
Comment: Most  of the answers will be like, "I'm in the same shoes right now" or so
Comment: No job is going to be exciting and self-motivating 100% of the time, sometimes we need to self-discipline ourselves through stretches to be professionals.  That said, if you've not enjoyed your job for a long time, it might not be the worst to look for a change if you can figure out what would make things better.
Comment: Why don't you go in consultancy or freelance? New project every 12 to 36 months. :)
Answer: I hear you! I've been in your shoes and it feels all too familiar. I remember that whenever I've told someone what I am working on, I just could not express and show any fake excitement at all and just tried to not talk about the products I was working on at all by quickly changing the subject.
Not being aligned with and interested in the products you are testing, or company's business itself is actually a problem but it is not the end of the world as well.

try moving your focus to other things: focus on technology, try out different and new testing techniques, types of testing, improve and expand your area of expertise. Just to pick one idea from many: approaching the testing from the idea of Personas may really shine new light on the very same products under test
if it is at all possible, talk to your boss and clearly state that you are not as excited and motivated about the products as before. It is really okay to get bored working on the same thing for a long time
take a vacation/break from work altogether
compare yourself version "today" and version "a year ago" or "half a year ago" - what have you learned and achieved during this time at your work? If you cannot recall anything you are proud of or something notable - that's a bad sign and you need changes
if nothing works and nothing changes, get yourself out of the comfort zone and change your job - it is quite an exciting time to be in the industry - it is trending - there are a lot of exciting opportunities out there and we have a chance to work on really interesting products and ideas - we have a chance to work on something we are really excited about - not something we have to work on
Answer: You are already motivating yourself by talking about your experiences here.

SQA is like a, how should I put it, emmm, testers Anonymous meeting. We share our experiences together, whether it is a frustration or a success or a technique. You can also talk with your peers at work over a cup of tea.
Organize an afternoon tea session with developers, testers and managers. Back in my old days, one place I worked for had this culture of Friday afternoon tea, where people shared a few jokes and talked about how they planned to spend their weekend.
You can try increasing the awareness towards testers within your company by organizing presentations, show casing what testers have been doing lately, what you have achieved; is there an important bug we have managed to catch lately? Tell others about testers.
Attend local testers meetups; there are normally a few testers meet ups here and there, simply drop in and meet new people and exchange your ideas.
If you have developed resentfulness towards a certain product, ask for a secondment in a different apartment, working on something else. Refresh your mind and come back to work.
Answer: I'm in the same shoes right now with my current project. The people in QA team are great, but apparently not the QA team itself. Separately, everyone is a very fun, positive and good person, but when it comes to work side, most of them become unrecognizable. And that's the main reason why I'm constantly losing all the interest in the project. Test cases are written incorrectly, automation code quality is very poor, the total absence of any sort of responsibility feeling within the team. Well, my solutions to the problem might not sound fair, but so far I found them as an escape from this boring atmosphere:

Try to learn new technologies. This can be in development, QA, DevOps, machine learning sides. I sometimes watch Pluralsight / Lynda courses right at the work desk. Even my manager sees it sometimes, and not making conclusions why I got bored :))
Talk to manager/director to see if any new projects are coming up in a very close future. Propose yourself as leading QA for it. The new challenge might wake your interest in the field.
Constantly keep connections with respectful in the field recruiters. They might call any next day for a great opportunity in a good company. No, I'm not saying switch the job, but being familiar with what's going on on the market and how much companies are willing to pay will keep you informed all the time.
Answer: Not sure what is your area and why you find it so boring.
In my long IT career I worked in many different problem areas, as different as accounting, under-performing mortgage servicing, bioinformatics, and much more. Every time, learning more about the problem area helped me to see why the problems are solved, and increase my satisfaction in solving them.
When I took classes in biology, I was able to understand better underlying problem, and ask biologists question which uncovered fundamental misunderstanding in our model (which would make our results worthless). Mortgage servicing itself is ridiculously complex, in some states laws are different in every county, and parametrizing it correctly (and make sure it works) is real puzzle. Maybe what helps is that I always loved complicated logical/math puzzles, and my current job is just a way to get paid for solving puzzles for other people :-)
Usually person is frustrated when person cannot control environment. So if you take a position that complication in your work, and required changes, are just random malicious requests to make your life miserable - it is frustrating of course. But if you make effort to understand why users are requesting all those seemingly random changes, what is the source of the complexity: you will see that the complexity has a reason, and solving it is less frustrating and more satisfying.
I sincerely doubt that after just 2 years you got into the very bottom of the current problem and it's complexity - and if you did, you should see way where it could be solved better, or where your users have needs not covered by the current system.
My project manager has saying, that there are only two issues that matter: communication and leadership. Communicate with your customers/users, and show leadership to solve the problems they have.
Comment: +1 for the "why".I always find learning 'why" before "how" on any subject keeps my interest alive.
Answer: I guess you lost your mojo because you feel that you cannot change anything in the product/company. if you keep finding bugs, but a company keeps ignoring them. Good news: it is 21 century, it is OK to change jobs every 2-3 years.
As long as you are not sure - I suggest you to run small experiments. start using another testing method, try a new communication way, learn a new tool or language, ignite weekly informal meetings around development etc.

How to stay motivated when you don’t like the products you’re testing?


Gtalk to IRC proxy?

Question: Is there some software that exists that acts as a proxy so that someone using gtalk can talk to an IRC channel? I looked into bitlbee but it seems like the reverse of what I want. It allows you to talk to IM protocols using your IRC client, correct?
Comment: What you're looking for is a jabber-irc transport
Answer: You're looking for something like Spectrum2 (link below) which allows you to connect to specific channels on IRC servers.  The problem is finding a public gateway which supports this type of service.  Spectrum2 is typically stood up next to a private Jabber server and not a public one.
About the only public service that I can find, that supports Spectrum2, is HotChilli and their page doesn't note whether or not the IRC module is enabled.  This should give you and idea of what to search for though.
Spectrum2 - http://spectrum.im/

Gtalk to IRC proxy?


Pacific N.W. sandy, sloped probably acidic soil. Needs ground cover!

Question: I have a 5 acre parcel of land and just excavated it, leaving just large cedars and firs. I am trying to find a low ground cover that's pretty dense and can cover at least an acre of hillside that can't be mowed. Any help would be appreciated.
Answer: Cotoneaster Queen of Carpets, height up to a foot, spread up to 6 feet or more, or C. microphyllus, which forms more of a hummock reaching about 2 feet as it matures, spread up to 4 feet, sometimes more. Both provide evergreen ground cover, though in severe winters, may be semi evergreen; takes a while to achieve full spread (probably around 8 years). Tiny flowers much loved by bees, red berries in fall on both.
Update: Just thought of another one - dwarf Bamboo, the Pleioblastus varieties such as P. pygmaeus, which spreads up to 6 feet because its quite invasive, gets about 10 inches high. Note that the variegated ones (P. variegatus, P. auricomis) do not have such a wide spread.
Answer: This answer assumes your hill lies on the West side of the Cascade Mountains. Hillside plantings for the Okanagan or the more arid and cold areas of Washington, Oregon and B.C. would look quite different.
Spreading cotoneaster (Cotoneaster sp.) is very common and successful plant for hillsides in the Pacific Northwest and, as Bamboo notes, C. procumbens 'Queen of Carpets' is an excellent choice that is low (< 1'), wide spreading (6-8') and quite dense. Other Cotoneasters well adapted to this area include bearberry cotoneaster (C. dammeri)(1' x 6'), gray-leaf cotoneaster (C. glaucophyllus)(3' x 6'), willow-leaf cotoneaster (C. salicifolius)(2' x 6'). For a large hillside, the taller varieties (2-3') may be more effective as they are better weed suppressors.
St Johnswort (Hypericum calycinum) is another commonly used hillside plant, 1.5 feet tall and 4-5' wide, all summer flowering and very tough, but can look a bit tired by the end of our typically rainless summers.

A Seattle hillside of Hypericum calycinum in early September
The Pacific Northwest is a weird climatic hybrid between wet maritime England, and the dry summer Mediterranean coast, so there are lots of other options. Any good choice for a dry hillside in the Northeastern or Midwestern U.S. will work for you. Hence junipers (Juniperus sp.)(2' x 6'+, but slow), Gro-low fragrant sumac (Rhus aromatica 'Gro-Low')(2' x 6'+), or bush honeysuckle (Diervilla sp.)(1.5' x 6') are good choices for your hill.

Diervilla sp. planting near Everett, WA
If the slope is sunny, warm and sandy, you can also use plants more typical of California such as rock rose (Cistus x hybridus, C. purpureus and others)(1-3' x 6'+) or California lilac (Cenoanthus gloriosa), but, after these plants are established, they should get NO supplemental water during the summer.

Cistus sp. planting near Everett, WA
Alternatively, there are number of attractive native groundcovers. bearberry (Actostaphyllos uva-ursi)(0.5' x 4') is an attractive mat-forming broadleaf evergreen that is found native growing on sunny, sandy, acidic locations. For shadier spots, creeping Oregon grape (Mahonia repens)(1' x 6') and salal (Gautheria shalllon)(In sun,  1' x 6'+, in shade 4' x 6'+, suckering great distances) are better choices. Both are evergreen, adapted to dry unirrigated sites, and grow in full sun as well as shade.

A Seattle planting of Mahonia repens with Actostaphyllos uva-ursi behind
You can, of course, plant several of these. Since you have over an acre to work with, it would seem a shame to use only one plant.
As a final option, you can leave the slope as it is or plant any of the above but fail to consistently weed. In five to ten years, Himalayan blackberry will own your hillside. The birds will be pleased, but your neighbors might not be.

Himalayan blackberry near Everett,WA


What does " doesn't dream" mean?

Question: When I was reading a novel, I got confused by this sentence:

"When he is around, she doesn't dream."

Clearly it's not the literal meaning. Then what does it mean? Can you help me?
My guess is "sleep well" or "carefree"
Answer: The most obvious meaning is that she doesn't have aspirations or hopes when he is around.
Most people would consider this a literal use of the term dream. You probably mean that you know it doesn't mean dream in its most common sense of the brain activity that occurs during sleep.
It is quite apparently being used in the following sense:

v.
  dreamed or dreamt (drĕmt), dream·ing, dreams
  v.intr.
  ...
  3. To have a deep aspiration or hope: dreaming of a world at peace.

American Heritage Dictionary
Comment: Thank you! I did know it wasn't the common meaning... Your answers help me understand the novel much more in depth!
Answer: Without any further context, your example sentence

When he is around, she doesn't dream.

could have one of several different meanings
In order to dream during sleep one usually needs a quiet, undisturbed environment.  Dreaming takes place during a phase called rapid eye movement, which occurs during deep sleep a few minutes after falling asleep, and only last for a relatively short period of time compared to the entire sleep duration.
Lack of dreaming can be a symptom that the person is on edge or worried since they will not allow themselves to fall into a deep sleep.
Your sentence could metaphorically mean she doesn't sleep well when he is around possibly due to his snoring or any one of a number of reasons.
To dream (about) is to think about or wish for or want something.  Possibly your sentence is saying that when he is away, she dreams about him, but when he is around she has no need to do so.

She dreams about the day he returns
  She dreams about chocolate cake every night

To dream can also mean to have ambition

She has no time for her own hopes and dreams when he is around

The question is

If he is not around, what would she be dreaming of?
Comment: Thank you! I now believe it means "no hopes or no ambitions" after reviewing the context. It was a novel chapter full of sentimental descriptions so I hardly think it was a literal use.
Comment: It's from a novel I've been reading.

What does " doesn't dream" mean?