Diatonic chords

Question: My understanding from the circle of 5ths is that there are 6 diatonic chords for each key, is that because the the 7th chord is diminished?
Comment: Where did you get 6 from?
Comment: Please quote a source, like a music theory text, to support your question.  "there are 6 diatonic chords...".  You have some great answers here but until we can confirm your question it's heard to say that it's been answered.  If, based on some formal definition of diatonic, your original statement is true, these answers are not.
Comment: @ggcg or the definition is wrong. We've also seen that a lot on this site where some material gets basic definitions wrong.
Comment: Perhaps OP means six *consonant* diatonic chords?
Comment: The vii° chord is also a diatonic chord. It MAY not have been written on the circle of fifths as it is a diminished chord, which means it can't work as a tonic chord (although it can RESOLVE to the tonic)
Answer: Diatonic chords are chords that are built of all chord tones (notes) that are in the key.  These chords are built in thirds starting from each of the notes in the key.
If we take the key of C major for simplicity(notes: C, D, E, F, G, A, B) and talk about triads (not sevenths or extended chords, again for simplicity) we will have the following chords:
C Major (C, E, G)
D minor (D, F, A)
E minor (E, G, B)
F Major (F, A, C)
G Major (G, B, D)
A minor (A, C, E)
B Dininished° (B, D, F)
Note that these are built by literally taking the note names in thirds, and keeping the notes within the key. You can take any major key and always get Major, minor, minor, Major, Major, minor, Diminished° chords.
for example key of G Major:
G Maj G, B, D)
A min (A, C, E)
B min (B, D, F#)
C Maj (C, E, G)
D Maj (D, F#, A)
E min (E, G, B)
F# Dim (F#, A, C)
The "flavor" of chord doesn't really dictate if the chord is diatonic, the only concern is that the notes are in the key.
You can do the same thing for 7th chords by added one more note a 3rd above the 5th and you will find that the "flavors" will be the same in every key.
Hope this helps.
Answer: There are seven diatonic chords. One can be built off of each scale degree. I think the confusion is if you start on the tonic of a major scale and go up 5ths in a major scale, you will be missing the 4th since the interval from scale degree 7 to scale 4 is a diminished 5th not a perfect 5th.
If you look at the Circle of 5ths in let's just say the key of C major, the F will be a 5th below not above the tonic. It's still in the circle, it's just you have to go down a 5th (or up a 4th) to get to it. The Lydian mode is the only mode diatonic mode where you can get all the notes of the scale just from going up Circle of 5ths
Answer: I think you're talking about the 6 most used chords from a key. As in 3 majors (I, IV, V) and 3 minors (ii, iii, vi). That leaves the diminished chord, which doesn't feature in many songs, compared to the other 6. But it can be thought of as an extension of the V chord, making V7 - a very commonly used chord, diatonically.
Answer: There are 7 diatonic TRIADS. This is only a vaguely interesting fact, and certainly not the basis of a set of 'rules' for constructing music.  It could be argued that in 20th century popular music the most USED chords are I7, IV7, V7 - only one of them diatonic.  (That's the basic blues chords.)
Don't work outward from theory.  Try to derive your 'theory' from observation of real music.  For instance, in today's music you'll rarely encounter a plain vii (dim) triad, even if it IS 'diatonic'.  Much more likely to run across iv, bVII, II7, #1dim7 etc. etc.   These are the 'chords of the key' in a very real sense, even if they're not diatonic.

Diatonic chords


Tracking a Powered off iPhone

Question: My husband misplaced his iPhone and then he left out of town and I found it. I turned it off and sent it overnight to him and it is now lost in the mail.  Can I track his iPhone if it is turned off?
Answer: You cannot track it if it is not connected in some way to a data network, either over your mobile connection, or WiFi.  If it's turned off, or out of reception, you cannot track it.
Depending on what version of the OS is installed, then when the phone is turned on again and gains reception it should start to be traceable, and you can put it in Lost Mode in the Find my iPhone app so that it will alert you and optionally display a message on the device, however you need to have turn this feature on in the device first for this to work.
If the unit is running iOS6, then anyone who eventually finds it will be able to wipe the device and restore a blank OS without having to turn it on thus bypassing this security, but if you are on iOS7 then this is not possible, and the unit is worthless to anyone finding it.

Tracking a Powered off iPhone


Why is it called "Shabbos Chol haMoed"?

Question: Why is the intermediate Shabbos of a festival referred to as Shabbos Chol haMoed (and not something else, e.g. Shabbos haMoed)? Aren't Shabbos and Chol opposites?
Comment: Its just a colloquialism that developed centuries ago for the obvious reason that the chunk of days are hol hamoed inasmuch as they are the part of the Moed which is not Yom Tov. When Shabbat falls out one of those days it is still "hol hamoed" since it is the part of the Moed that is not Yom Tov, and it is also Shabbat. | Strictly speaking it isn't hol, but it is a logical and useful convention for speech.
Comment: @mevaqesh This should be an answer not a comment. You might connect it to *gut yom tov* or add that it means *shabbos shel chol hamoed*.
Comment: @sabbahillel I won't post it as an answer, as I have no sources. While I think it makes enough sense that the question isn't really a question, without sources, it isn't a very strong answer. Thanks for your comment that it ought to be an answer, though.
Answer: in many of the rishonim it is not referred to as shabbat chol hamoed but generally as shabbat betoch hamoed or shabbat betoch haregel because shabbat chol hamoed is indeed contradictory.
Answer: The intermediary days of Succot and Pesach are known as "Chol Hamo'ed". It is a "mixed term", as a "mo'ed" implies a holiday with work restrictions, as many think of it. the "Chol" part means "profane" or colloquially, "weekday". During these days, work that would result in a monetary loss (that's a loose definition. See O.C. or your rav for details on what work is permitted.) is permitted during these days.
You are correct that Shabbat and "Chol" are opposites. But, the term "Shabbat" is a modifier for the entire term "Chol Hamo'ed" which describes the entire 4 or 5 days, themselves. In other words think of it as the Shabbat of the "Chol Hamo'ed" period.
Comment: Chol HaMoed can be six days if 1st day Sukkot is on Shabbat
Comment: I don't think this really answers the question which suggests that "Shabbat" and "Chol" aren't words that really make sense together. Why isn't it called "Shabbat Hamoed"?
Comment: @DoubleAA What is unclear in the count is that I did not include Hoshanna Rabbah. Even though it has the same laws as Chol Hamo'ed, it is not called that way.
Comment: @Daniel I think I did answer that in my 2nd paragraph. The term "Chol Hamo'ed" is a joint term and Shabbat is just a descriptor (modifier / adjective) of that term. It's like saying "Continental United States".

Why is it called "Shabbos Chol haMoed"?


SQL Server 2012: I can connect locally but not remotelly

Question: I'm trying to access a SQL Server 2012 database from a SQL Server Management Studio 2008 from a remote machine(on the same LAN). I can connect to the database using "sa" user under "SERVER_NAME\INSTANCE" on the local SQL Server Management Studio 2012, but I can't connect remotelly with "sa" even using "SERVER_NAME\INSTANCE", only "SERVER_NAME" or with the server IP address using the SQL Server Management Studio 2008. Already disabled firewall and made proper settings to connect with sa, am I missing some point?
Answer: Make sure that you have enabled TCP/IP for the SQL Server. Check also the port setting.
The full step by step guide for enabling is here
SQL Browser Service is only needed if you have more instances on one server. See here and here for some more information.
Comment: Turning on TCP/IP solved it for me.
Answer: Enable the SQL Browser Service on the server
You also need to make sure the firewall is open on the server on ports 1433 and 1434.
You can reference this identical question: SQL 2008 R2 Named Instance Client Connectivity Issues?


If I compile monerod from source, do I also have to compile the GUI to use the GUI?

Question: I monerod running on headless node in my home.  Let's say I want to use the GUI wallet as a light wallet on a different computer in my home, and I'll just use the node's daemon/blockchain.  Is the process just as easy as downloading a pre-compiled binary?  Would I have to also build from source?
Answer: There are no pre-compiled GUI binaries released yet. When beta is released you will be able to download binaries but for now you need to build them yourself.
Answer: After some experimenting, I have news on this question.
A trusted Monero contributor provided me with an unofficial pre-built binary (actually, it was a directory of files, plus an executable to run the GUI), since I wanted to help test the GUI.  I ran into some difficulties, but got it working with community help.
The short answer is no, the GUI does not have to be built from source in order for it to sync with a daemon (monerod) built from source, but the short answer is misleading.
I found out that the GUI does need to be built from the same version of the daemon that the GUI is connecting to.  In my case, I was able to enter my local IP address in the Settings tab of the GUI wallet, and then the GUI wallet connected to my daemon.  Unfortunately, the GUI wallet was unable to sync due to the version mismatch.
This answer may not always be the case, but it was my experience.
Edit: evidence suggests that the term "version mismatch" is misleading, where a more accurate term may be "feature mismatch."  That is, future official daemon releases will likely be compatible will dissimilar-version GUI builds, as long as both the daemon and GUI are beyond the version that contains relevant GUI wallet features.
Answer: I have just downloaded the pre-beta binary for macOS.
When running it with the official release 0.10.0.0, it said "Network status: Wrong version". When running in conjunction with monerod from a recent GitHub build (did brew install monero --HEAD -v), it says: "Network status: Connected". Note that in both cases it was able to sync past transactions from the blockchain.
As explained on the above link, the current official release (v0.10.0.0) isn't fully compatible and won't allow you to send funds. I didn't try to actually send money from the GUI yet. However, based on the Connected network status, I would think it doesn't really check the specific version or build, but rather the feature compatibility.


Creating order in a settlement

Question: What one concept/ideology is most important in a group of people to encourage them to stop acting as individuals and begin acting in the interest of the whole settlement?
Answer: There really isn't one concept that will work for all groups in all times.
It is highly dependent on the society/culture and the settlement age for example. There really is two concepts that are the root of all the others - internal motivation and extrinsic motivation. Pretty much all methods are rooted in fear or desire.
Some methods would be:

Stringent punishment: This will obviously work much better in a fairly hierarchal society since otherwise punishment is much harder to effectively wield. Moral issues can be brought up by this to great effect.
Exclusion from the benefits of the settlement unless they are helping the settlement. You can also use this for moral discussion.
Capitalism: basically a communally created exclusion if there isn't output. Has all the risks and benefits of capitalism in the real world.
Religious teaching/orders: In a highly religious society orders from religious elders are often akin to law or even greater than law.
Answer: This is a tough one, among the reasons why is that nobody has really figured it out in the "real world."
At its most basic, the "usual" methods are:

Punishment to eradicate antisocial behavior.
Rewards to encourage prosocial behavior.

These punishments and rewards can be:
-physical (prison punishment or monetary reward)
-spiritual (hell or heaven)
-social (being shunned by neighbors or recognition by the community for work done)
Government, religion and neighborhood block associations are all largely built on these 2 concepts.
Answer: It should be noted that individualism isn't actually the natural state of a human being; it's one of many possible states of culture. The United States has a very individualist culture; we praise and value standing out from the group, being independent, moving away from your parent's home, sticking up for yourself, etc. Japan has a very collectivist culture-- a culture that values homogeneity, listening to your elders/betters/authority figures, multigenerational households, and avoiding conflict. Both forms of culture have both benefits and drawbacks. It might be worth researching various collectivist cultures from around the world to get a good grasp for how it looks in practice.
I'd suggest reading about the key traits of both collectivism and individualism and seeing a list of cultures that fall into various places along the collective/individual spectrum of values.
I wouldn't use it as my only source, but it's a good starting point.
Answer: Define what their collective enemy is. Every person places themselves into a myriad of different categories at different times to help identify themselves. Different situations require them to define themselves in these different ways. Examples:

aliens invade earth (definition: human)
Vikings invade Britain (definition: Saxon)
Bandits raid village (definition: inhabitant)

If you live in a village in Saxon Britain you are all three of those definitions, but you don't define yourself as Saxon when aliens invade, and defining yourself as human when the Vikings come along won't do you much good because they're human too.
Answer: I don't think there is really one idea above all others, but several ways to bind people together.  The general idea is oneness, what binds this group together?
Typically it starts out with blood.  Family sticks together.  That is who you trust and who you work with.  As people spread out and meet one another, other ideas emerge.  Religion, nationalism, common cause to live/trade/grow/raid.  As long as the group has a sense of identity on what makes them them and everyone else not them, then people will start to act in the best interests of the group.  Typically following that there will be a written or implicit laws/bonds of honor that govern their interactions with each other.  Just start by figuring out what brings them together and gives them a sense of shared identity.

Creating order in a settlement


Changing layer fill opacity in GIMP

Question: I am following this map-making tutorial (which uses Photoshop) and I would like to "set the fill opacity of the layer to 20% (not the overall layer opacity)".
(See point 3 of the tutorial)
How can I do that in GIMP?
Comment: GIMP has no layer effects/styles, so the best option is probably to do it manually on a different layer and lower the layer opacity, and change the layer blending mode.. You could group the layers if you want which might help if you need to move anything around. There's also a Layer Effects plugin for GIMP, which you'd need to search for.  It has a stroke effect you could use which is similar.
Answer: AFAIK there is no such thing in Gimp. Given the result, it seems equivalent in Gimp to
either:

Stroke the edges with a paint brush set to 20% opacity
Stroke the edges ("Line" mode, or brush at 100% opacity) on an additional layer, set to 20% opacity.

To recreate the image below:

Roads layer:

Tool: Paint brush, Hardness 100 brush,pure white,
Layer: overlay mode and 50% opacity

Edges layer:

Selection from Alpha to selection on the Roads layer
Edit>Stroke selection using tool: Paint brush,Hardness 75, pure black, 8px
Layer: overlay mode and 20% opacity
Comment: Thanks @xenoid. I have some difficulty in understanding the answer though.
Are these two alternative methods? What do you mean with "edges stroke 8 px" or with "stroke with on an additional layer"?
Comment: I have tried the following:
0) Create a new image, make the background brown with bucket fill (ideally this should be a better background)
1) On a different layer, I use the Pencil Tool [using White color, Brush 2, size 8 or less] to draw the roads.
2) I copy the previous layer and then make roads black by using bucket fill with Black.
3) I set both road layers (black and white) to Overlay, with Opacity set to 50% (white layer) and 20% (black layer)
Is that what you were suggesting with the second method?
Comment: Also, do I still apply the Unsharp Filter step? On the white roads layer, before duplicating them to to make the black roads layer?
Comment: No, just two layers, exactly as described in the (newly edited) answer. Unsharp Mask step not really necessary IMHO. Avoid the Pencil, it creates pixellated edges, the Edit>Stroke selection that comes newt can be crappy. First part of the answer is two alternative methods.
Comment: Thanks @xenoid. It works fine :)
For those interested, the opacity of first layer might have to be adjusted depending on the background (I have also made the road layer "normal" instead of "overlay" in one case).

Changing layer fill opacity in GIMP


Rejected edit seems correct

Question: I previously made this edit suggestion
as the question was relating to MS Access which requires nested joins to be bracketed and this was not included in the answer so it would not work. Other than that I didn't change anything else about the post but it was rejected by 3 different people as they said it deviates from the original intention of the post. Am I missing something?
Comment: *but after reading the comments below the answer* In addition to what Glorifindel said, if the comments on a post support you making the edit then also include that in your edit summary. We can't actually see comments when reviewing edits so a "based on comments on post [made change]" prompts people to open the post to check.
Comment: If the answer given isn't correct, the best thing to do is to downvote and to post your correct answer.
Comment: It's down to you if you want to re-raise it, but if you do, yes, make the comment clearer. **Glorfindel** has given an excellent answer, so follow that advice in the future :)
Comment: They most likely didn't look at the answer fully and just looked at the review which does look like you're trying to deviate from OP's code, but after reading the comments below the answer, this edit _should_ have been approved IMO. Out of interest, why are you only now inquiring about a review made 5 months ago?
Comment: Thanks George. Do you think I should re-raise it. Perhaps making it clearer in my comment the reason for the edit? Also, I was just randomly browsing my profile which got me thinking about it so that's why it's from a while ago lol
Answer: While editing code in an answer isn't so much of a problem as it is in questions, you should always specify why you make this change.

Bracketed nested joins

just specifies what you did, not why.

Bracketed nested joins, because otherwise the query doesn't compile in MS Access

would be much better.

Because suggested edits are reviewed by people who are not likely to be access-vba experts, they might just think you're changing formatting/indentation, which is largely a matter of personal preference, and leads to rejection of the kind:

This edit does not make the post even a little bit easier to read, easier to find, more accurate or more accessible. Changes are either completely superfluous or actively harm readability.
Comment: Ok, that makes sense. I will re-raise the suggestion with a clearer explanation
Answer: Quoting @Glorfindel answer

suggested edits are reviewed by people who are not likely to be access-vba experts

Those people should normally click Skip button. Even vba experts may click it if they are not 100% sure and don't want to spend time on checking it precisely.
It's unfair to edit answers like this, one should start with the simple comment first

This will cause error ... you have to put bracers ...

maybe author of the answer will read it and will fix it by himself. And even if not - your comment is there, it will get upvoted and then someone will fix the snippet.
High reputation will let you to edit answers in place, just wait for it, if you are an expert - you'll get it and will be able to avoid queue noobs ;) I am assuming that participating in editing means you also provide correct answers, asking good questions, etc. which all provide you with reputation.

Rejected edit seems correct


Do people have the right to split off part of a sovereign state?

Question: On one hand we have sovereign nation states with stable, recognised borders. On the other hand there can be groups of people inside them that want to split off to become independent, or join a neighbouring country. I can feel sympathy for both sides. I would not want part of my country to split off, but if all the people living there feel not connected to the rest of the country, I may need to accept that. Is there any rational guideline that can help here? Would it be a matter of majority vote for the region? What about migration changing that majority?
Comment: Well, it pretty much depends on one's theory of sovereignity, doesn't it? One might argue that supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses. However, making whomever catches a scimitar tossed by a watery tart king could also be the basis for a system of government. In short, the term 'nation state' is problematic for philosophical investigation because it conflates two independent concepts - the collective right of a people to govern themselves and the rights of states to act autonomously among the community of states.
Comment: I agree. You could also say that the answer depends on what gives people rights.
Comment: I basically agree with both of the commentators above, but I can see why one would start the question here -- it's ultimately a question about what it means to be a state and for people to be in/a part of/citizens of that state.
Comment: @benrudgers that should be "whoever," because it is the subject of "catches".  The direct object of "making" is the entire phrase "whoever catches a scimitar tossed by a watery tart."
Comment: @phoog Thanks, I wasn't expecting an English inquisition.
Comment: @benrudgers Sorry, it is my curse to be bothered by these things.
Comment: @phoog It's mine to write pretentiously at times...and to gratuitously allude to Monty Python bits.
Answer: I don't think there's any one answer that all will accept on this question, but to simplify the sorting process for you, the real question you are asking is: "What is a state?" and then within this specifically the question of how such a state relates to its members.
In terms of philosophical theories of the state (in this case the polis), the earliest two philosophers, I know of, in the West who consider this question are Plato and Aristotle.
For Plato, the state is either a small village (early in the Republic) or a complicated system where the members of the state are split among three roles: philosopher-kings, guardians, and producers (for an extended treatment see here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-politics/). On such an account, the parties all agree that this is the best way to accomplish justice as they are enlightened by its presence. On such an account, it makes no sense to split off from the state.
From what I understand, there's a different account in the Laws of how things should be arranged but I'm not familiar with the details.
Moving to Aristotle, Aristotle believed the state was prior to the individual and the family. What this means is that the state is the organic whole of human living (like a hive to bees or pack to dogs). On such an account, it seems unlikely that it would make sense to split off, but it seems distantly conceivable.
Many contemporary Aristotelians are communitarians which means that they think each community is determined by a shared set of values, and that these sets of values are incommensurate with others. On such an account, each community is a polis which can be held together in a larger federation -- but this federation is dissolvable.

Augustine in the City of God adapts elements of Plato's philosophy to present the idea of dual citizenship for Christians in Rome and Heaven. On such an account, the state below is more arbitrary and maleable since the image of justice is through religion not the state.
I'm not familiar enough with Aquinas's account of the state to provide the contours, but I gather it's a somewhat communitarian picture but not overly prone to allowing schisms emphasizing the holistic aspects of the Aristotelian picture.

Moving forward to Hobbes and Locke, we arrive at the idea that the state arises through negotiations of power and the surrendering of the right to bash others in (social contract theory). On such theories, I don't see the ultimate objection to schisms in the state. For instance, it's hard to see why such a contract isn't malleable enough to allow for that as say per se Scotland devolving or something like that.
In this era, we also see the rise of the consideration of notions of sovereignty. For Hobbes, sovereignty occurs either when people contract together and agree to follow a common authority or when people bandy together for mutual protection. This sovereignty is revokable --as makes sense under a contract theory of governance. As ben rudgers suggests, one clear method of revocation is to kill the sovereign. But it's less clear whether a sovereign can allow for secession on the part of some parts of the state. (Source for this paragraph: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes-moral/)
For Locke, the contract works in such a way that most freedoms are granted to the citizens by the sovereign, but these are established in nature and self-evident. Thus, insofar as the state is legitimate, there should be no need to schism. Insofar as the state is illegitimate, schism is no longer the right word.

The Kantian picture of the state is a Republic guided by reason with the power of the state. Such an image depends on a type of federating where the size of the particular state is less important than the unity of the rational whole of humanity.
Hegel is similar to Kant in seeing the state as ultimately a product of reason and similar to Aristotle in seeing the state as an organic whole larger and prior to the individual humans and families that make it up. At  the same time, the Hegelian picture depends on internal conflicts and their modifications. The net result of that is that Hegel would find such dissolution where states break apart to be a temporary resolution until their inevitable reunion in something larger and more complete as an integration between the individuals, families, the community, and Absolute spirit. (long story ...).

There's going to be some other theories to consider as well I'm guessing, but these are the ones I can sketch briefly.
Comment: Not a criticism: I believe Locke's theory would present a complexity. Since the common should be self-governed, the super-state either allows self-government or it does not. If it allows self-government, then why would the faction need to split away? If it does not allow self-government, then *of course* it is the right of a people being lorded over to form their own government. What takes us out of the "State of War" is surrendering our right to combat the intrusion of other people in a state that is sufficient enough to exercise our rights. I'm currently reading his Treatises.
Comment: The answer seems to ignore sovereignty and therefore the central issue of the question - what legitimate basis does the state have for claims upon the people within its borders - e.g. why does Plato's republic have the right to educate the children within it's borders - or more practically, what gave Sparta the right to impose Spartan ways upon the people of Sparta, but not on the people of Crete?
Comment: @virmaior My point exactly. This question is not an academic exercise. The question is not who has the right. The question is who has the stronger army.
Comment: @Axeman a very fair point. I'm not a big Locke guy (as you can probably tell). I will try to amend this tomorrow -- between teaching and writing.
Comment: Do you think General Sherman had Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Locke in mind when he burned Atlanta to the ground?
Comment: @benrudgers in a sense the answer "ignores sovereignty" because the notion doesn't exist in the philosophers considered.
Comment: @user4894 I could be wrong but I don't think Sherman was thinking much about what concept in political philosophy legitimated his actions against Georgia.
Comment: @virmaior Sovereignty seems to be the gist of Hobbes - but perhaps I misunderstood *Leviathan*. It's also in the title of the question [as of this writing]. It is hard to see how there can be a Hobbesian moment by moment social contract (in contrast to something like fealty) where the sovereign has been empowered to force the continuation of the contract. Indeed, Hobbes envisioned that the individual would fight the sovereign on the gallows platform.
Comment: @user4894 I take questions on philosophy.se to be academic exercises inherently.
Comment: @benrudgers I'll try to modify the Hobbes remarks. I'm not a Hobbes scholar, so I'm not too familiar with the details.
Comment: @Axeman I've made some brief amendments -- they might not be enough.
Answer: It depends on how the sovereign state handles ownership, but lets start with the extremes as they are the easiest to explain:
Consider an Absolute monarch - the rights to everything lie with the monarch, who can do as they wish, however if they own the people of the sovereign state, then the people cannot do anything.
Now consider a 100% democracy: If the sovereign state is purely democratic, then 1% of the population owns 1% of the resources, including land. In that case, the 1% would have the right to do whatever they wish with their 1% ownership and could take it elsewhere if they so chose, however the question becomes how does an individual (or group of individuals) know where THEIR share is? square miles? GDP per capita of the area? population density? however they choose, they then need to get 50% of the other group to buy-in.
Answer: The US Declaration of Independence starts with the following:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Comment: Simply quoting the Declaration of Independence without commentary or summary is not really an answer.  It is definitely relevant, but poorly focused.
Comment: I didn't think it needed any additional comment, To my mind, the text itself answered the question.
Answer: According to Ayn Rand, a region should be allowed to secede from a country if it wants to do so to improve the provision of individual rights:
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/secession.html
Why is this a rational guideline? Rationality consists primarily in refusing to adopt institutions that would lead to a person being unable to act on criticisms he has of a particular habit or idea. A government that suppresses individual rights will prevent people from acting on their criticisms of whatever the government aims to promote. I shoudl note that being able to act on an idea does entail that you will succeed or that you will have a comfortable as a result of acting on it. A person who wants to spend his time being drunk is not going to have a particularly comfortable life or get rich since he will be unable to think a lot of the time as a result of acting on his ideas.
An example of illegitimate secession: in the case of the American Civil War the South seceded in order to preserve and extend slavery. Some Southern sent secession commissioners to other states to argue the case for secession, such as William L. Harris, the commissioner from Mississippi to Georgia who said:

Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the
  negro, as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of
  self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with
  the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social equality.
This new administration comes into power, under the solemn pledge to
  overturn and strike down this great feature of our Union, without
  which it would never have been formed, and to substitute in its stead
  their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white
  races.

The Southerners wanted to be able to keep black people as slaves and so stop them from leaving their masters if they thought they could do better in some other way. This is not rational since the slaveowners were forcing the slaves to act against their judgement.
An example of a legitimate secession: the Estonians wanted to secede from the Soviet Union to adopt their 1918 constitution which stated that:

All civic freedoms, the freedom of expression, of the press, of
  religion, of assembly, of association, and the freedom to strike as
  well as the inviolability of the individual and the home, shall be
  irrefutably effective within the territory of the Estonian Republic...

These rights were not granted by the Soviet Union and so the Estonians wanted to leave and took the opportunity to do so in the late 80s and early 90s.
Comment: Although I disagree with the views of Ayn Rand, and would hesitate to call them philosophically mature, I think people have been a bit quick to downvote what seems to be a reasonable attempt to answer the question with reference to an established source.  The argument that "legitimacy comes from expanded affordances to individual choice" seems like a decent Lockean suggestion, though the novelist is perhaps not an authoritative source.
Comment: Czechoslovakia was never part of the Soviet Union.  It was an independent country that was at times firmly in the USSR's sphere of influence.  See the Wikipedia article [Czechoslovakia–Soviet Union relations](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovakia%E2%80%93Soviet_Union_relations) for more information.
Comment: So why was the South's wanting to form their own country where they could live by their own values, different from any other group's wanting to do the same?  The only difference i'm seeing is that most people today disagree with some of the former's values.
Comment: The second example is factually inaccurate and the substantial quotation is irrelevant to Rand's position. The answer is poor irrespective of one's opinion about the quality of the referenced philosopher.
Comment: The answer has been edited to improve explanations and examples.
Answer: I believe the answer is a "guarded/qualified" yes.  If 2/3, or more, of the owners of a given area want to separate from a larger area, and have not been coerced to do so, they have the right to do so.  What gives them this right?  They are the owners of the area.


Duplicate items with different statistics in Destiny

Question: I have recently bought Destiny, and I have noticed that I seem to acquire many duplicate items. For example, I have three Firebreak helmets (however one of them is Firebreak Type 4), and I also acquired three Trax Callum I scout rifles, (although I have dismantled two of them). However, each of these items says that they unlock at different levels and have different attack powers/defense points, even though they are the same thing. Is this a bug, or is this normal?
Comment: You don't seem to be asking a question.
Answer: In Destiny, all of the weapons and armor are randomly generated except for Legendary and Exotic equipment. Generally the higher the level requirement, the better the stats that are rolled for your equipment. Legendary and exotic equipment will actually have unique names/stats that are the same for multiple copies of the same piece.
This is completely normal, and part of the "Destiny" way of doing loot drops.
Comment: @RobV the legendaries have fixed *stats*, but the *perks* can roll differently.  I think this is what you meant, but I'd consider weapon stats to be attack, impact, range, etc.  These stats remain the same unless modified by perks.
Comment: Even Legendary Equipment is randomly generated, you can buy versions with fixed stats from vendors but legendaries you receive from drops will have some stats randomly generated.  Only Exotics have truly fixed stats (except the Attack stat which was upped after The Dark Below)
Comment: Yes that was what I meant
Answer: Perfectly normal! :)
Green and blue items will roll very similar names and stats all the time. Mangala Skin... always, I always find these on my hunter even at level 32. The first google result for Mangala skin is a reddit post titled "I hate Mangala Skin" (I can relate).
Legendaries and Exotics are a different story.

All exotic weapons of the same name are exactly the same (aside from ones from different expansion versions).
All raid obtained legendary weapons of the same name are exactly the same.
All exotic armor of the same name have the same benefits, but their stats can differ.
All legendary armor of the same name will be slightly different in both its benefits and stats.
All legendary weapons of the same name not obtained from a raid will be slightly different in benefits (Glass Half Full for example) but its stats will be exactly the same (Impact level, rate of fire, etc.).
Answer: Random, except legendary and exotic. Based on level, Grimoire rank and chosen difficulty probably.
I will say though the Up for Anything legendary auto-rifle I missed and picked up at the postmaster has different stats than the vendor. I don't mean benefits, the vendor's is less stable and some less pronounced differences, same damage though. I don't think stability is part of its benefits.


Permanent connections with Arduino Due

Question: The Arduino Uno (for some models) has the ability to dislodge its IC chip. You can mount this on a piece of perfboard and, in essence, have a permanent connection. I will need the beefier Arduino Due, but I do not know how to make permanent connections with this device. Is there any way to form some kind of permanent connection with this board?
Comment: @Gerben Having more pins and more memory doesn't really equate to the chip being more powerful. It's still the same wimpy 8-bit core as the '328P. It just means you can be a little lazier with your programming and memory usage.
Comment: Your first sentence is wrong – there is no Arduino that can take its own chips off the board – but perhaps you meant to refer to Arduinos that have the chip in a socket.  Or maybe you are referring to the pin sockets along the edges of the boards.  In any case, you can buy little plastic cases to contain Unos, Dues, etc which may help hold pins into the pin sockets; or less elegantly, can hot-glue your wires in place
Comment: The AT91SAM3X8E is only available in QFP and BGA packages. Not in DIP like the UNO.
Comment: The chip on the Arduino Mega (ATmega1280) is available in DIP. So that might be an alternative, that's a bit more powerful then the UNO.
Answer: What it sounds like you want is an Arduino Due footprint prototyping shield.
Arduino make one, although it is out of stock, but it gives you an idea of what you are looking for. There are plenty of other designs out there for purchase of varying degrees of complexity.
You solder the pins in place and mount it on top of your Due just like any shield, and solder your wires and components in where you want them.
An alternative option, of course, is to step away from Arduino and investigate some of the many other chips from other manufacturers out there that are considerably more powerful than the 8-bit ATMegas used on the low-end Arduinos, and yet are still available in a DIP footprint - chips like the PIC32MX1xx/2xx series from Microchip - 28 pin DIP (just like the 328P) yet 50MHz, 32-bit power.  Yes, it will be a bit of a learning curve, but there are helpful options out there that can assist you, like the chipKIT system including the handy DP32 board from Digilent.
Comment: Also investigate the [Teensy 3](https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/teensy31.html) for a much beefier Arduino-compatible system with a small footprint which can be soldered to perfboard etc.
Answer: You can disolder the female pin headers from pcb and make permanent connections on the remaining holes.
Answer: I think the best thing you can do with this, is that you use temporary wires to connect and test the application and later, when you'll come to part, where you should "make-a-solid", you just solder these wires to the bottom, where pin headers are. I think this is the simplest way to do it.
If you want to do it a bit better, desolder female header pins and solder cables to those holes. It's more electronics-approved that way.
Or the simplest (but not the brighest): Jumper wires can be glued into female header pins, but I strongly unrecommend this option, as same as making a shield for this.
There's another(and most elegant too!) option of making a PCB version of arduino: Add the AtMega, few passive components and proper pads, to solder wires on.

Permanent connections with Arduino Due


Why are urban birds still scared of humans?

Question: I understand that animals are naturally scared of humans because we basically slaughtered every living thing we found in our way for millennia. How long does it take for them to genetically 'forget' we are a threat?
Comment: What's your evidence that an individual animal who has never encountered humans before is "scared" of humans more than other species?
Comment: @MCM I am not really sure I understand? I was referring to animals that have encountered humans before. I am mostly curious about the recent phenomenon of urban birds who have co-existed alongside with humans for a few decades now, and that for the most part these humans presented no threat to them. It seems to me that even after years of co-existence they still prefer keeping a safe distance from us humans.
Comment: @IsopycnalOscillation, if they have seen humans before then their natural fear response is justified.  In the city I live, I've noticed that some children are particularly cruel to birds constantly chasing them away.
Comment: I don't follow the premise of the question. Urban birds are a lot less scared of humans than wild birds.
Comment: a) Plenty of birds in the city will get very close to humans, relative to countryside birds (if you've ever been to Trafalgar square in London you will know how close birds are willing to get, try getting that close to a pheasant in a field!). b) It may be that "scaredness" (let's go with timidness) is not a genetic trait - or has a very large environmental component (i.e. largely determined by previous experience of human).
Answer: Perhaps counter-intuitively, fear of humans is often a learned behaviour. There are accounts, such as one made by Charles Darwin following his visit to the Galapagos islands;

In Charles Island, which had then been colonized about six years, I saw a boy sitting by a well with a switch in his hand, with which he killed the doves and finches as they came to drink. He had already procured a little heap of them for his dinner, and he said that he had constantly been in the habit of waiting by this well for the same purpose. It would appear that the birds of this archipelago, not having as yet learnt that man is a more dangerous animal than the tortoise or the Amblyrhynchus, disregard him, in the same manner as in England shy birds, such as magpies, disregard the cows and horses grazing in our fields.
From "The Voyage of the Beagle" - http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/hum100/Beagle17.html

Birds born and bred in proximity to humans will have learned that we are actually to be avoided.
Ducks and swans, for instance, (and this is quite anecdotal) live in very close proximity to a lot of humans in cities, and feel confident walking picking up food. However if you try to get close to one they are very quick to get out of the way. The only exceptions to this are learned behaviours, such as when someone stands and feeds them.
In the wild animals may be cautious of humans if we are much bigger than them, but if they have no experience at all of human contact they  may just ignore them. This quite often happens with film crews in Antarctica, as in the below image from the BBC's Frozen Planet series.
Comment: I guess I am biased because I would never hurt an animal. There may as well be other people out there doing just that - therefore perpetuating their fear of us. It's just so sad, when I go to the local creek, I would love to see more birds, I know they are there because I can hear them...
Comment: @IsopycnalOscillation I would guess that this is much beyond animal cruelty and probably goes as deep as innate behaviour. We hunted ducks and swans for food, ones that were innately fearful of humans survived and propagated and the next generation were predisposed to fear humans a bit more. Rinse and repeat for thousands of years. This would only be compounded by learned behaviour.
Comment: @GoodGravy Great point.


My employer has declined my annual leave request a week before my holiday - is this legal?

Question: A couple of months ago I requested 5 days annual leave, and gave my employer the dates.  The employer did not acknowledge the request, but sent an automated e-mail a week before the leave was due to start, telling me that the request had been declined.  It's not the first  time it has happened, and my colleagues say that this is the normal practice in this workplace.  Is it a requirement for the employer to give reasonable notice when declining leave, and if so, what is the minimum period it must give?  I have now requested two weeks leave in July (and I can be flexible on the dates), plus the week that was  declined in May, and again it has failed to acknowledge the request, or give any indication when I can expect a  response.  If the company continues this pattern of behaviour I will clearly be forced into taking  my annual leave entitlement at a time of the company's choosing, which has previously not been in whole weeks, but rather random days dictated by the company.
Comment: I don't know if its legal, but I do know that you should seriously consider finding a better employer.
Comment: I'd say that the legality is not really of much importance in practice. Good choices are finding a better employer, or alternatively tell your manager that your request is not a request but a notification when you will go on holiday, and you go on that holiday. If your manager doesn't agree then you are back to finding a better employer.
Answer: It is legal for a U.K. employer to refuse leave and they must do so the same period before the leave as the amount of the leave. A week for your 5 days leave complies.
They must, however, allow you to take your annual leave within the year. They can dictate when.
See https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights/booking-time-off-
Comment: While this is legal, it is counter productive for the company to the extreme. Many holidays need booking a long time ahead. My manager better tell me that I have holidays or not, or I will be asking him _every single day_.
Comment: @gnasher729 and that would be a great answer on workplace.se but this site is about the law
Comment: The document you cite says that (in the absence of a contract) they need to give 10 days notice for 5 days leave.


Toneholes on different instruments

Question: Why do toneholes work well on some instruments but not others? I've noticed that with brass instruments, toneholes are almost never seen, while in woodwinds they are the primary method of changing pitch (with a few exceptions). What I have thought is that the higher registers of brass instruments no not facilitate tone holes (and the keyed trumpet actually was using register holes), though through my own experiments have noticed that even with a short lip reed instrument (well, actually, it was just a length of PVC pipe) toneholes were becoming weak even in the first register and with only a few holes uncovered. I have tried to find more information on this, but I've not found anything that covers why higher harmonics would have a problem with this.
Answer: The physical principles of tone holes are the same for all instruments, and in fact they were widely used in brass instruments before the invention of reliable valves. The problem is that too many holes in the thin metal material degrade the specific "metallic" tone quality that we want these instruments for.
(Why brass tubes are more susceptible to this problem than wooden tubes (material or geometry?), I don't know. Maybe instrumentalists and composers are just more nitpicking about their tone quality - many composers refused to allow either tone holes or valves in their brass instruments even after the modern versions were invented and continued to require at least some natural horns in their scores, to produce the purest possible rendering of important chords.)
Comment: Well, that's part of it.  It's also because brass instruments produce near-perfect square waves, and tone holes break them up.  The sine(flute) or triangle (reed) waveforms aren't so picky, so to speak.  It's also a LOT harder to force the overtone series with a reed-based mouthpiece than with vibrating lips (which drive all brass instruments).
Comment: @CarlWitthoft Brass instruments don't produce square waves.  Clarinets do, however, even with all those tone holes.
Comment: @phoog  It's not that simple.  Single-reeds don't produce a square wave -ish thing except perhaps at very high frequencies. They only generate odd harmonics, but with amplitude ratios that don't make a very clean 'triangle'  .  Trumpet shape looks a lot like an asymmetric square wave with a little overshoot, but again player skill and note range affects that.
Comment: @CarlWitthoft then why doesn't a trumpet sound anything like a square wave?

Toneholes on different instruments


Pronunciation of "faisons" in French lyric diction

Question: In French lyric diction (poetry and art song), is the first vowel in "faisons" /œ/, as it is in everyday pronunciation?
Answer: [fə.zɔ̃] is the usual pronunciation in France. Faire has a highly irregular pronunciation. The letters ai are pronounced /ə/ in:

the nous form of the present indicative.
all the forms in the  imperfect indicative.

In this other answer @Gilles explains that this strange pronunciation might have its origin  in the fact that in the 17th century, the people in Paris wrongly pronounced the present participle [fə.zɑ̃] and this pronunciation spread to those other forms, and outside Paris.
I gather in France the vast majority of people will pronounce [fə] and not [fœ]. I could not say about other French speaking countries.
I wanted to refer you to an online pronunciation of the verb and hit upon this one which sounds entirely wrong to me. If you listen to the one on Wiktionary you will get it right.
Comment: Sorry to cause /œ/ vs. /ə/ confusion. When singing art song, we generally transcribe as /œ/, since the vowel is sustained when you sing. My question was really whether the /ə/ in "faisons" is perhaps a casual alternative to /ɛ/ and therefore not used in lyric diction (just as final "-e" is not pronounced in casual speech but gives an entire additional syllable when you sing, unless elided), or whether the first syllable is immutably /fə/ (and therefore sung /fœ/)?
Comment: Re your first audio link, I strongly suspect "Lauren" (who provided the audio) may not be Francophone - to my ears her pronunciation of "vous faites" also sounds distinctly British...
Comment: @Counterpoise In France pronouncing /ɛ/ would **definitely not** be not be an alternative. But artistic licence probably allows to move away from  the vernacular?
Comment: Great, that definitely decides it! As a non-Francophone I don't have the necessary instincts, that's what I needed to tap into. Just to intrigue you further, the singers' transcription will therefore be /fœ zõ/, though I'm not at all sure why we are taught that phoneme as /õ/ rather than /ɔ̃/...


What features from Lion will be lost when upgrading to Mountain Lion?

Question: I know Mountain Lion has some cool new features that Lion did not have, but will it overwrite any of Lion's functionality?
Answer: Of course.  In adding features, the behavior of previous features changes, not always for the better.
If you find features that were present in Lion but missing in Mountain Lion, please edit this answer to add your contributions to this list.

Mountain Lion drops support for some models of Macs supported by Lion.
Clicking the top right corner no longer triggers Spotlight (Spotlight's menubar icon is still present, adjacent to the new Notification Center icon).
The battery indicator in the menubar will no longer offer to show the remaining time.
X11.app is included, but that app alone no longer provides X11 functionality. When the user first runs X11.app – or an app that requires X11 – a dialogue guides the user to Apple's article HT5293 about XQuartz, which provides the functionality.
Mail.app and Safari.app drop support for RSS Feeds.
Comment: With respect: for some points – especially those likely to generate commentary – a separate answer may be desirable.
Comment: As for RSS: the old archives are still left in `~/Library/Mail/V2/RSS`. No idea how to use those though. :-(
Answer: One of the bigger-deal removals for some is the 'Web sharing' button in the System Preferences > Sharing tab that controls Apache. Apache is still there, and can be manually set up, but the old one-click solution is gone. That was one of the things I used to demonstrate to people new to the Mac that they found astonishing.
Comment: I found http://clickontyler.com/blog/2012/02/web-sharing-mountain-lion/ to be a handy way to get one-click control over Apache.
Answer:
Safari doesn't have separate source windows
Calendar doesn't support scheduling scripts
The option to disable smooth scrolling was removed
The tab for installed updates was removed from the Software Update preferences
Mail doesn't support notes
Nested menu titles like >File>Duplicate no longer work in the keyboard shortcut preferences
Old files cannot be locked automatically
Safari doesn't have RSS buttons
Comment: They dropped support for notes in Mail already? Didn't they just add that feature in Lion?
Comment: I don't remember if they added support for iCloud notes in Lion, but Mail supported IMAP notes in 10.6 and earlier versions.
Comment: They removed notes from Mail, but made Notes its own app.  The feature still exists, just not as part of the email program.
Answer: Safari Changes:
Activity Window Missing:
Prior to Mountain Lion, there was an Activity window that could be opened from "Safari > Window > Activity". Now however, that functionality is no longer available. I found the Activity window to be especially useful for downloading videos from sites like YouTube. I'm sure there were many other uses for it, but that was what I primarily used it for.
Delete Button No Longer Goes to Previous Page:
In Lion, one could navigate to the previous page in Safari by pressing the delete key, but in Mountain Lion this feature is no longer active by default (in Mountain Lion it's Cmd[). However, you can activate it with this terminal command:
defaults write com.apple.Safari com.apple.Safari.ContentPageGroupIdentifier.WebKit2BackspaceKeyNavigationEnabled -bool YES

Comment: For the **Activity window of Safari**, there's an [answer](http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/60230/8546) under [How to regain features from Safari 5 that are not found in Safari 6?](http://apple.stackexchange.com/q/58812/8546); more answers under [How to mimic Safari 5 Activity window with Mountain Lion, to save FLV video files?](http://apple.stackexchange.com/q/59449/8546).
Answer: Disk Utility may lose the ability to present S.M.A.R.T. status
The underlying cause, as I see it: in Disk Utility, a physical disk may be invisible.
Without Disk Utility
S.M.A.R.T. status will be visible in System Information, or with a command such as this:
diskutil info disk0 | grep SMART

Answer: In addition to operating system features that are removed, many third party applications will not work, at least until they are upgraded by their developers.  There's a pretty extensive community built list at http://roaringapps.com/apps:table/.
Answer: Safari 6 removes the ability to change the default fonts in webpages (see Safari 6: How to change default fonts?).  Note that this will also happen even if you upgrade to Safari 6 in Lion.
Answer: MAIL has lost its progress bar and also the belly-button indicators by each mailbox... so you don't know when servers are being checked, or when mails are being sent or downloaded nor how they are progressing... or not.
Also, MAIL has lost its DELETE button, so you have to use the Delete button on the keyboard.  Minor hassle, but why add hassle?
Comment: All of these are still available. But you have to search for these options a little. To see the progress bar, click on *Hide* (top left) and the little triangle on the bottom left. The delete button is the *trash can* which is shown in the default layout of the toolbar. You can customize the toolbar by right-clicking it.


Is there a night bus from San Gil, Colombia to Bogota, Colombia?

Question: I've searched far and wide (well over a day's worth of searching) to see if there's a night bus from San Gil to Bogota. I need to know because of my flight. If I can depart from Bogota earlier, I can save a lot more money; hence the need for the night bus. Can someone PLEASE help me determine whether or not there is a night bus?
Answer: San Gil is on the way to Bucaramanga, so any bus in the route Bucaramanga <-> Bogotá may stop there. But of course in Colombia it is important to cross check in advance.
I found a company called Berlinas that has a line:
http://www.berlinasdelfonce.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=80&Itemid=5

Recorrido (route, it indicates one way, but both are shown in the timetable):
Bogotá, Tunja, Barbosa, Socorro, San Gil, Piedecuesta, Bucaramanga.

As a side note, take a blanket for your trip: in the buses they normally have the air conditioner in a freezing temperature!
Comment: Yes, I saw that too, but for some reason they only have dates for the next few days, which isn't very helpful.
Comment: What about making a phone call to the bus company?
Answer: This is kinda tough... I'm pretty sure there are overnight buses, but San Gil is a small town so it's not going to show as a "destination" stop or "departure" point you can find when you search for fares. Likely you'll have to call the bus company and ask what routes would go near or pass by your San Gil.. and if they even pick up people there.
Search online to see which bus company websites have fares between Bogota and larger cities to the north: like Bucaramanga, Cucuta, Valledupar, etc. Certain companies are only in certain regions.
Here's a good list I found:
http://www.colombiainfo.org/en-us/transport/bus.aspx
I noticed Expreso Brasilia has routes from Bogota to the north coast, which might be your best bet. Be sure to explicitly ask the route/road a certain bus takes to make sure they can let you on at San Gil.
I've heard you can find cheaper fares at the bus terminal itself, and also probably get better info than anyone else here could give you. Does San Gil have any sort of bus terminal? Do buses stop at any gas stations or restaurants there? Is there any nearby city where buses stop? Bucaramanga maybe?
ps: I've traveled by bus from Bogota to Cali around late December and the overnight fares were all gone... I think people prefer them I guess as traveling by bus is pretty tiring during the day (at least it was for me... 12 hrs was close to unbearable!)


Is there a Printer Driver for a Fuji Xerox Docu Print CM205B Laser Printer?

Question: I am very new to Ubuntu, having sold Windows based (and MSDOS + CP/M) computers for the last 30 years. How do I get a Fuji Xerox Docu Print CM205B Laser Printer working under Ubuntu?
Answer: Please ask only one question per thread. When it comes to print drivers, I found this: The official site has both Windows and Mac drivers. Ubuntu uses the same printing system as Mac OSX, so you should be fine.
I guess you should be able to just plug in the printer, possibly do an "Add printer", and select it from the list. If you have trouble, you can try to figure out how to install the Mac drivers, or since it's a laser printer, you can likely use one of the generic PostScript drivers.
I'm looking for more specific info, but the Linux Printing website seems to be having trouble at the moment. I'll update this answer with more info as I find it.


How can I set up a private virtual LAN for my laptop and its guest VMs

Question: I have two VirtualBox guest VMs running Linux under a MacOS X host.
I'm using bridged networking mode but I am not in control of the DHCP server and can not give my host+guests static IPs. Any time a DHCP lease expires, or I join a different network, I have to deal with my VM IPs changing, and consequently change all my firewall rules and /etc/hosts entries, etc. which is a pain to say the least.
So I want to set up a virtual LAN on my laptop like 10.20.30.0/24. Then make my host OS (the laptop) be .1, and the guest VMs be .2 and .3. The VMs need to be able to access the Internet through the host's connection. Sometimes that would be out the wired interface, other times out the AirPort. It would be ideal if, when the host's internet connection changes from wired to wireless, guest internet access is not interrupted.
Can I do this on OS X? What commands do I run, sysctls to set, etc.
Answer: I haven't tried it on an OS X host but "Host-only networking" does what you want. See: http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06.html


What is Tom Bombadil's importance in The Lord of the Rings?

Question: Tom Bombadil is definitely one of the weirdest characters in all of The Lord of the Rings, he just comes out of nowhere, stumbling upon Frodo and Sam while singing. His actions are just incredibly unusual compared to the other characters in LotR. My question is for what reason does Tolkien add Bombadil into his story? How is he important to the development of the story?
Comment: I suspect it's more a case of Tolkein being reluctant to throw it away, rather than wanting to include it as an essential part of the story. Bombadil does rescue the hobbits from the barrow wights.
Comment: What always struck me was that Tolkein was not only proficient in writing prose, but poetry as well! LOTR is filled with songs and poems Tolkein wrote himself. I always felt it was part of the world he wanted to create. He wanted to add poetry, and Tom Bombadil was a great character for it. That's not the only reason, but I felt it was a main one for this character odditity.
Comment: FWIW, when I read LoTR I did not find Tom Bombadil to be out of place at all. To me, Tom Bombadil was clearly an enlightened being in Middle Earth. Perhaps it's because (tales of) enlightened beings are common in my culture (I am from India) that I did not find Tom Bombadil weird (dare I say, even *relatable*?). A few years ago I came across a [short essay](https://justpaste.it/h0j) that expressed the same view very well, namely that Tom Bombail is a "Buddha", perhaps you will find this perspective interesting too.
Comment: *The Lord of the Rings* is not a tightly edited series of books. Some editors would have had Tolkien remove poems, allusions to legends, and lots of other details. They contribute to world-building, but some would say they take focus away from the main story. This is a stylistic choice. Tolkien and his fans like having these extras; some people do not and write in a style where things are only included if they have a specific reason.
Comment: Interesting read: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/1586/who-or-what-was-tom-bombadil
Comment: @Mick, you make an interesting point, but a slightly unsatisfying one. This is my second time reading Fellowship of the Ring and in my one and a half years of high school English (as well as middle school English) I've learned that most things in writing have some sort of purpose. Not seeing one has bothered me, and my dad doesn't know either.
Comment: A 'bit of a reach' (or more). Have a look at Melchizedek. From 'nowhere' to 'nowhere'. Of value.  Peter Jackson not so certain of his value, evidently.
Answer: Tolkien said that Bombadil represented a sort of passive pacifism, which was important to represent in the story but couldn't play much of a role in the actual plot.
From Tolkien's Letters, letter #144:

Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a 'comment'. I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford  Magazine about  1933),  and he  represents  something  that  I  feel  important,  though  I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function. I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. but if you have, as it were taken 'a vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference  to  yourself,  watching,  observing,  and  to  some  extent  knowing,  then  the  question  of  the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there  are  in  fact  things  with  which  it  cannot  cope;  and  upon  which  its  existence  nonetheless depends. Ultimately  only  the  victory  of  the  West  will  allow  Bombadil  to  continue,  or  even  to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron.

In Letter #20, Tolkien also reveals the out-of-universe inspiration for Bombadil:

Do you think Tom Bombadil, the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside, could be made into the hero of a story? Or is he, as I suspect, fully enshrined in the enclosed verses?

The other answers have some good analysis of Bombadil and his role and purpose, but I thought it would also be useful to have what the author himself said about his intentions in introducing the character.
There is also some existing discussion of this and other related issues on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange, which I checked before posting this answer:

Who or what was Tom Bombadil?
Why was Tom Bombadil so unconcerned about the fate of Middle-earth?
In Tolkien's opinion, does Tom Bombadil (and the concept of pacifism) actually hold any power?
Comment: Seems to me that the author's statement of the reason should be the accepted answer, rather than our opinions.
Comment: @WGroleau Not necessarily. A well-supported speculation can be worth at least as much as a plain quote from the author. We've got some interesting questions about these issues here on this site: see [The author of a literary work disagrees with critics about meaning—who's right?](https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2009/17) and [How much weight should we give authors' declarations of their intent after the fact?](https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2008/17)
Comment: We should give the author credit for knowing his own mind—else call him a liar.
Comment: @WGroleau Well, that's why I posted this answer - it's certainly useful and relevant information. But other interpretations might also be interesting; knowing the author's intented meaning doesn't necessarily invalidate other meanings that might come out from the text. (Full disclosure: I haven't actually read the other answers here well enough to vote on them yet, so I don't know how plausible or well-supported they all are.)
Comment: is there any online version of : `he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933)`  ?
Answer: Bombadil is indeed an anomaly, and does not appear to fit very well into Tolkien's overall narrative. He comes from nowhere (although he has been there all along, unobserved), and disappears equally abruptly from the story. Unless the author has given us some hints about the character's relevance, we are reduced to speculation, so let us just consider the mechanics of the story.
Tolkien has to get the four hobbits from Crickhollow to Bree, where they will meet Aragorn, unharmed, and without Gandalf to protect them; and yet they need to have some adventures on the way, otherwise the story becomes uninteresting. Gandalf's absence is Tolkien's biggest problem, and so Bombadil is basically a (slightly unreliable) stand-in for Gandalf.
The hobbits are in no position to face the nine riders on their own. Neither can they just walk through the Old Forest and have a pleasant hike to Bree. So, we have Old Man Willow, which Bombadil rescues the hobbits from, and then the barrow wights, where he rescues them again, and in between these two escapades, a pleasant interlude in Bombadil's house, with Goldberry and plenty of food and rhyming verse.
I have a suspicion that Tolkien had some attachment to Bombadil. Maybe Bombadil represents the author, since he is older than any other living thing in Middle Earth, and is unaffected by the power of the One Ring, and presumably, he is also unaffected by the destruction of the ring at the story's climax. Only an author has this much power to do as he pleases in his own stories. Tolkien is, perhaps, pulling a Hitchcock on us, since the director liked to make cameo appearances in his own films.
In the Council of Elrond, Gandalf is right when he says that they cannot give the Ring to Bombadil, since he would probably just lose it. With the Ring in his own pocket, Tolkien loses the plot.
Comment: In, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, no 19, Tolkien explained that Tom was meant to represent "the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside". Tolkien was quite attached to that "spirit", and much of LotR can be seen as a nostalgic love-letter to that countryside of his youth, and dealing with its disappearance (for example in the Scouring of the Shire).
Comment: In Tolkien's cosmology, evil redoundeth only to Eru's great glory. The Witch King has awakened evil trees and barrow wights, and Tom must help the hobbits thru his realm. This leads to Merry picking up a very important short sword. Evil deeds backfire on the do-er - the Witch King - in unexpected ways.
Answer: This is opinion: I have no way to back it up.
I believe Tolkien introduced Tom Bombadil as a symbol of mankind before the fall, a sort of creature of pure, unadulterated nature. (Others have speculated this as well.) Think of him a bit like Adam, of the Adam and Eve in Genesis, before it all went south. He lives in harmony with nature and has some control over it, which makes sense because nature was a thing created for man's use and there was no enmity between man and nature before the fall. He's peaceable and happy because he's not tainted by evil or regret - he knows what evil is but he's not affected by it. He's unlike other characters because, well, no other character is like him - unfallen and unaffected by brokenness. Of course the ring has no effect on him, and neither do wights. Tolkien, a Christian, was (I think) making a point about the limits of the power of evil, and introducing a point of hope and optimism (here is something evil will never win against) in a story that then gets bleaker before it gets better.
It's important not to push the analogy too far: T.B. might be a symbol of the purity of the original creation, or Adam himself, but not a Jesus or God one. Tolkien was clear about that; this link might be of interest: FAQ / Who is Tom Bombadil in the Tolkien Wiki.
In LotR there are other echoes of the idea that someone who has never done X (X some bad thing) cannot be affected by X. For T.B, X is evil itself.
Tolkien has to handwave a bit during the Council of Elrond because of Bombadil - people propose just giving the ring to Bombadil and calling it a day, but Gandalf says no. I always thought the explanation was weak; why would Bombadil be so carefree and detached as to forget he had it? But I think I see the opposing problem - if people could just pass every awkward, evil bit of magic to Bombadil, he'd end up as the caretaker of a growing mountain of other people's dark efforts and failings. It wouldn't be a peaceful existence - there would constantly be evil characters going to Bombadil's land to grab the bad stuff. Bombadil, the ultimate symbol of freedom from the effects of evil, would get trapped in the role of taking care of everyone else's evil schemes and follies. It's no way to live, so Bombadil simply doesn't. He withdraws instead, only joining the world when he sees value in it to others, such as bumbling into the hobbits when they need help.
Comment: +1 but I somewhat disagree that the "_he would forget about it [the ring]_" argument is handwaving. As you rightly say, if the world piled "the evil things" (e.g. the ring) on TB, he would come under siege from the evil characters trying to grab them. If he actively "guarded" those things – acted to prevent the evil characters getting them – then he would, indeed, have fallen under the influence of those "evil things" (since those things will affect his actions). IMHO, the only consistent response would be one of complete indifference to the ring _et al._: he would, indeed, forget about them.
Comment: Interesting. But - Bombadil isn't just unaffected by the Ring's power - Bombadil demonstrates that his power is unimaginably greater than the Ring's, and by extension, greater than Sauron's, far greater than Gandalf. So, I think that it doesn't fit to think of him like Adam or Eve. The episode with Bombadil does serve to demonstrate that while the Ring is powerful, it pales in comparison to other powers.
Comment: @DonBranson  Just... - I commented above at it being (perhaps) a glance at Melchizedek. That fits perhaps more closely with Don's "much greater powers".
Answer: Bombadil is also part of the world-building. He's part of the world, and his whole purpose in it is something that nobody short of Eru fully understands.
Tolkien mentions things like this in passing. Gandalf, after his returning from his trip Outside, mentions some creatures at the very nadir of his fall in Moria:

Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day.

The maps that Tolkien made include a lot of places the the hobbits never see, and some that are not even named in the narrative.
It's all done to give the reader a picture of a world that is not only larger than the Shire, but is also far older.
Do you think it's a coincidence that the very oldest resident of Middle-Earth (aside from Maiar), and by far its biggest enigma, dwells within a day's walk of where the story begins and ends?
Answer: One reason that Bombadil does not really "fit" in the narrative may be that The Lord of the Rings was originally a sequel to The Hobbit.  At that time, The Hobbit was only indirectly connected to the world of the Silmarillion and was "only" a children's story with ogres speaking in cockney accents and other silly things.
So the adventures until the hobbits reach Bree still very much have a feel of that type of children's story and Tom Bombadil actually fits very well into that type of story.
As Tolkien further developed The Lord of the Rings and rolled both it and The Hobbit into the mythology of the Silmarillion, the story became much more serious and "adult", but some of the earlier elements were left in place, even though they don't have quite the same feel as the items developed later.
Comment: I'm unsure what you are saying.  Are you aware that a significant portion (perhaps even most) of the Silmarillion was written prior to The Hobbit?
Comment: I believe you are mistaken.   The Silmarillion was what he initially started with.  He did not start on Lord of the Rings until after The Hobbit, and he started that specifically as a sequel to The Hobbit.  During this development, he shifted into a more serious and lengthy tale directly related to his Silmarillion mythology.  Also during this time he re-wrote portions of The Hobbit (mostly dealing with the Bilbo-Gollum-Ring encounter).
Comment: @paul23 In Christopher Tolkien's vast History of Middle Earth, he goes into (amazing) detail on the birth of LoTR, promised to Unwin (publisher) as a Hobbit sequel, and how it was gradually woven into the wider and unpublished earlier writings of what ultimately became the Silmarillion. LoTR started as another book for children, with Bingo-Bolger Baggins as the main protagonist (later renamed to Frodo) who meets with the mysterious travelling hobbit Trotter (later Strider)! It was at the Council of Elrond that he really changed gear ....
Comment: (cont'd)... although didn't JRRT write a letter to Unwin at that point claiming that the story was significantly complete? Quite funny. The enduring element of LoTR for me is the way the story shifts from "innocent hobbit adventure" to "epic" over the course of that first book or so, with the hobbit's disregard for their great danger partly driven by the fact that the *author didn't understand the danger either*! The 2nd time I read it, I was hopping at how the hobbits had so little urgency and were brushing off the Black Riders. Run! Now! Go! Arrgh! Forget going to the pub! :-)
Comment: This idea does not sit well with the fact that work on lotr started well before the rest of the universum was developed. But more importantly, Tolkien was often rewriting large parts of lotr.
Comment: In my research about the lord of the rings books I discovered that Tolkien initially started with this trilogy. Only after later (but before publishing/final rewrite) of lord of the rings did he actually start developing the world. So the world is *build* around what is written in lord of the rings. The hobbit is written much later.
Answer: I'm reading Fellowship (again) right now, and I had a similar thought when I reached the Forest/Barrow section, and I thought for a long while why it might be.
I found my answer ('my' rather than 'the' because it's just an opinion) when the Council are discussing what to do about the ring. Bombadil is suggested as a solution - in fact the suggestion veers towards the idea of 'weaponising' Bombadil, then towards him keeping the Ring within his protection/seclusion, but both are dealt with swiftly as impossible. I (chose to?) interpret this as Tolkien's in-line explanation of why greater entities (Bombadil, or the Valar, or a greater collection of Maiar) in general couldn't or wouldn't just resolve the issue themselves. This is probably dealt with extensively elsewhere in the Histories, or Silmarillion, though I don't remember where, but if you take the Lord of the Rings series as a set by themselves without the rest of the legendarium, it seems to me to give the satisfactory 'answer' for why the West doesn't just come back and go to open war with Sauron.
The story of the Ring is, after all, a vehicle for the closing of the Third Age and the beginning of the dominion of Humankind, so it makes sense (to me) that a more powerful being choosing a pacifist stance is included. The Elves are already departing for the West, and the remaining Elves in Middle-Earth are already but a small number of the previous population.
Bombadil's existence (nor that of Goldberry) is never really 'dealt with' at least not in my recollection (this read-through is after maybe 10 years since I last read the series) so one can only assume they sort of just fade into the background, not being corporeal any more. I have wondered before whether the 'feeling' that Tolkien mentions in the letter #144 (quote above) is due his environment at the time (wartime and after) where simple enjoyment of things is basically non-existent because everyone is so preoccupied.
Comment: In isolation in LOTR Bombadil seems like an after thought, but he does play a wider part in middle earth, just like the wizards are there to maintain balance, bombadil is a purer form of nature, with less specific purpose than the wizards because at the time when he was created there wasn't conflict that needed to be dealt with, I'd liken him to a shepherd to Treebeard and the Ents, as Treebeard is a shepherd to the trees.
Answer: Quality literature is rarely about the plot, but instead the plot serves to deliver a message (and perhaps to engage the reader long enough to get the message). Other elements besides the plot also serve to deliver the message (e.g. places, names, auxiliary characters, etc.)
The Lord of the Rings is full of messages - about Truth, war and peace, virtue, character, bravery, honesty, commitment, greed, etc. A key message of the work is the archetypal battle of good versus evil. Evil is hell-bent on destroying all that is good: how will it be defeated? How will the innocent be protected?
As @Rand al'Thor explains in his answer, Bombadil is an important part of the message: good triumphs over evil, not through an escape to innocent pacifism, but by honest individuals standing forth with courage give and risk all they have and are. This message is repeated as the Hobbits leave the Shire, as the Ents rally against Isengard, as Rivendale supports Rohan at Helm's Deep, as Rohan responds to Gondor's call for help, etc.
There is something beautiful and refreshing about a complete release of the cares of the world (Bombadil), but the absence of Bombadil from the rest of the story IS a deliberate part of the message: evil is not defeated by innocence - we must proactively fight against evil in order to establish peace.


Can anyone point me toward articles/theory that syntax and morphology operate on the same principles?

Question: Looking for articles and or theories that explore the idea that morphology and syntax are not separate but operate on the same principles; for example, that the sentence is just an extended morphological word (using those terms generally, external of their various theoretical use).
Comment: Most of Chomsky's theories use the term _syntax_ to cover both morphology and syntax. Of course, this is assumed by fiat, but if you buy it, you can use it.
Comment: JGgray, welcome to [linguistics.se]! I added another tag to your question since you're asking for references.
Answer: First, I'll point to a previous question on this SE, What meaningful distinction is there between morphology and syntax?. I'll just present one line of approach.
A seminal article is Mark Baker's 1985 The Mirror Principle and morphosyntactic explanation, wherein he defines the Mirror Principle as follows:

Morphological derivations must directly reflect syntactic derivations (and vice
  versa).

Subsequently, Distributed Morphology (DM) was developed by Morris Halle & Alec Marantz and colleagues. I quote from their 1993 paper, Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection (pdf):

[...] we take the phonological realization of the terminal elements in the syntax to be governed by lexical (Vocabulary) entries that relate bundles of morphosyntactic features to bundles of phonological features.
We have called our approach Distributed Morphology to highlight the fact that the machinery of what traditionally has been called morphology is not concentrated in a single component of the grammar, but rather is distributed among several different components.

Two points: first, it is in a sense the opposite of what you mention in your question, in that a morphologically derived word is claimed to have internal syntactic structure. Second, DM is not pure syntax (hence the "Distributed" label): it does have a number of post-syntactic operations that derives morphological generalizations such as syncretism (where different morphosyntactic feature bundles like first person singular and second person singular are realized by the same morpheme).
There are a number of resources for DM:

The Wikipedia article
Rolf Noyer's DM Frequently Asked Questions page and bibliography, both written in the late 90s
Heidi Harley and Rolf Noyer 1999, State-of-the-Article: Distributed Morphology (pdf), another overview which also has an attached bibliography
David Embick and Rolf Noyer 2006, Distributed Morphology and the syntax-morphology interface (pdf), a handbook article
Andrew Nevins and Karlos Arregi 2012, Morphotactics: Basque Auxiliaries and The Structure of Spellout, a recent book that shows Distributed Morphology "in action" by using the framework to account for the morphosyntax of the Basque auxiliary system.
Answer: If one focuses on morphosyntax (inflectional morphology), the differences might be hard to spot. On the other hand, morphological creation of new words (derivational morphology) seems to rely on some different principles. For example:

Idioms are essential to derivational morphology. Existing words change meaning during their existence. The existence of words is so fundamental people argue about it all the time. Sentences usually don't have existence, no one complains about people making up new sentences.
New coinage don't have to be transparent. They can be interpreted through their components and through the context. The sum of information as to reach a certain level to achieve comprehension.
Comment: There is no spoon.
Answer: Human language users commit some things about their language to memory, but for other matters, they wing it.  The memorized things must be finite in number, of course, because we have only a finite amount of time to memorize and a finite capacity to store memories.  But the rest of the language, which we create and understand ad hoc, from expression to expression, is infinite.
We memorize words, but deal with phrases ad hoc, for the most part.  The number of words is finite (pace Langendoen and Postal in The Vastness of Natural Languages), while the number of phrases is infinite.  Morphology describes words, a finite list of things, but syntax must describe the infinity of phrases, so syntax and morphology must differ in a fundamental way.
Sorry I didn't answer your question.
Comment: The number of *actual* words, or anything else actual, is finite. The number of morphemes (either way) is also finite. But the number of *possible* (generable) words is infinite, given any recursive word-formation process. Whether or not we memorize words for the most part would depend on the possibility of having encountered a word like "muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine", or worse.
Comment: @user6726, Yes, "given any recursive word-formation process".  That's a tautology.


Upgrade 11.10 to 12.04 on Eee PC failed. GLIBC_2.14 not found

Question: I was upgrading my Eee PC from 11.10 to 12.04 as prompted and the upgrade locked up (the lappy was plugged into power - so that wasn't the problem). The system won't boot now and I'm getting an error that "GLIBC_2.14 not found". I am unable to boot into any recovery mode or prior version. The lappy was a dual boot, but when I installed Ubuntu the first time, I opted out of that option (whoops). Now I can't load, it goes into a forever 'ubuntu' loading screen. I have a fresh install on a memory stick, but when I set the lappy to boot from it - it doesn't work. Help. I have no idea what to do next...  ??
Answer: I have encountered a similar issue trying to upgrade Linux Mint 12 (Lisa - based on Ubuntu 11.10)to Linux mint 13 (Maya - based on Ubuntu 12.04).
I think you need to install GLIBC manually. If some dependancy issue doesn't let you install it then you might need to remove the offending package, download .deb from one of the repositories, install them manually using 'dpkg' and then try the upgrade again.
Here is a link that I think might be useful:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=103237#p586961