Sony Vaio VPCCW - Brightness Changes automatically when using browser

Question: Screen brightness changes automatically when I am using my browser. There is question about this matter but it is closed for being too specific . I think this is a general issue about Sony Vaio laptops with nVidia graphics. I had this problem when I used 10.04 and it still exists on 12.04. Since this is too annoying I just duplicate that question by picheto:
"I'm using Google Chrome version 21.0.1180.89 on Ubuntu 12.04 and my laptop is a Sony VAIO VPCCW15FL (spec sheet). My video driver is the propietary "NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (post-release updates)(version-current updates)".
After installing Ubuntu, I discovered that neither the brightness control buttons (hardware) or the brightness slider (software) worked, and found out I could get the hardware buttons to work by installing the nvidiabl.deb package and oBacklight script. I'm using nvidiabl-dkms 0.77 and oBacklight 0.3.8. Still, the slider on the Ubuntu "Settings" does not work, but I don't care.
There is an annoying thing happening when loading certain pages in Google Chrome: the brightness goes up to 100% when loading the webpage or when leaving it (closing the tab or typing a different URL on the omnibox). However, the "brightness tooltip" (that default brightness notification) remembers the position it was set to, so if I adjust the brightness with the HW buttons, the level gets adjusted relative to the value it was set to before "going 100%".
I disabled the flash PPAPI plugin, but left the NPAPI plugin enabled, and the problem went away for pages with flash content. Still, the same thing happens when viewing HTML5 video, or when loading, for example, the Chrome Web Store or using the Scratchpad extension. I suppose it has to do with the rendering of certain elements using the GPU, but this is just a guess.
This brightness thing does not happen when using Firefox 15.0 or any other application I have used yet.
Does anybody know why this may be happening and what could I do to fix this without changing browser? Thanks a lot."
Answer: In case you are still having this issue, I removed oBacklight and tried this:
How to use xbacklight with brightness keys in a VAIO
Hope it helps ;)


How and where can I get data on US census block data by city and state?

Question: I am overwhelmed looking through dead ends on the US census website. Could someone that has solved this puzzle tell me where I can get the demographic and shapefile data?  Race and income are my biggest interests but I would like to pull any other data I can for my city, Anchorage, AK by census block.
Answer: Try NHGIS, it has built a resource that offers what you are looking for.
The race question is available at the block level from the 2010 Census Summary File 1 release; but the income question is available only through the American Community Survey (ACS) Summary File release which goes down to the block group level. If you want the information together, I would recommend using the ACS as a source.
Otherwise, if you have ArcGIS 10.1, you can just download this. It may work in previous versions, but it's a roll of the dice.
Here is what's available in the pre-joined Census data:
Condensed Codebook
Full Explanation of Each Variable
Update:
There are new resources for:
2012(Data)
and
2013(Data, Variables)
Answer: This is a bit involved, but for a project I worked on, we developed some tools to make it a little easier to load 2010 decennial census data ("SF1") into a SQL database. (This has been tested in Postgres and MySQL.)
First, you'd run these SQL scripts:

geo_2010.sql
all_sf1_files.sql

Then, download the SF1 data for Alaska. Inside that ZIP file is one "geoheader" file and 47 "segment" files. You want to import these into the tables created by the SQL scripts above. Note that the geoheader file is in fixed width, not CSV. There are some notes about using the csvkit library to convert the geoheaders into CSV here but if you know how to import fixed width files into your SQL database, that may not be necessary.
Then run all_sf1_tables_as_views.sql to create views that are more aligned with the SF1 documented tables, instead of the segmented files used for distribution.
You can join the geoheader table to the appropriate view on LOGRECNO. If you're using more than one state, you need to join on the compound keys STUSAB and LOGRECNO as LOGRECNO values are not unique across the entire 2010 SF1 data set. You can use various values from the geoheader table to filter down to blocks (summary level 101) in specific counties or places.
Block level shapefiles are here.
If you are satisfied with tract-level instead of block level, the project we did this work for, census.ire.org may be helpful. There's a Bulk Data page that allows you to download all data for a single table for a state at five major summary levels (state, county, place, tract, and county subdivision), as well as quickly download the corresponding shapefile for the state. This data also has changes since 2000 for columns wherever possible, including adjusting 2000 tract-level data to 2010 tract boundaries. If you want to use this data in SQL, there are SQL scripts that align to the bulk data format in the GitHub repo.
Comment: thanks a lot for your elaborated answer. May be you are the one who also knows the answer for [my question](http://opendata.stackexchange.com/q/5870/7044). I would really appreciate you help.
Answer: I've have been working with census data for newspaper projects for many years, and I would never, ever, use ACS data for small geography levels. The data is survey-based and the margins of error are laughably large. I don't know why they even release some of that data. (For example, a very recent product purported to show what counties people move to and from, nationwide. It had results such as, zero people moved from county x to county y, plus or minus 98. That's worse than useless).
So, if you must use ACS data, take a good hard look at the margins of error.
Answer: Be aware that the Census Bureau puts out a lot of guidance for ACS users. They stress caution in using ACS data across different periods and in comparison with the decennial census.
Also keep in mind that the ACS is not designed to produce population counts (but is designed to produce estimates of population characteristics). For example, users are encouraged to report the percent of population by race rather than the actual numbers by race if using the ACS.
Here's the user guidance page from the ACS Website: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/guidance_for_data_users/guidance_main/


Best ways to copy data and schema with mysql

Question: I'm looking for recommendations on the best way to copy data between locate and live deployments. I've just installed MYSQL work bench but can't see how to copy data from local to remote. Also in the MSSQL world there are useful tools like Data Compare that help with synchronisation. Is there a good quality equivalent in the mysql world.
Comment: One-time copy? (mysqldump) Constant synchronization? (cluster)
Answer: Along with MySQL dump there are tools like sqlyog that allow you to sync (not just import) both the schema and the data. I use this at when some of our OTE databases get out of sync with production.
Answer: mysqldump is a truly fantastic tool.  It simply generates a script of all the create table statements along with insert statements for all the data.  From memory it also generates the table create scripts in the same order (unlike SQL Server) - so you can use a simple side-by-side text comparison program such as Araxis Merge to compare the differences.
Answer: I would recommend using MYSQLDUMP. It's incredibly powerful and customizable. Here's a good link on how to perform a dump & move (otherwise known as a copy): LINK
Good luck.


The number of notes drums have

Question: I'm wondering if there is anything about the number of notes a drum set has. Western music typically has 12 notes, but that is for everything except drums. Wondering if there is a way to classify drum notes / sounds.
Comment: are you asking about non-pitched drums, like drum set, or pitched drums like timpani?
Comment: I am asking about like a drum set with snare and cymbals and such. But good question, I haven't thought about timpani, but I imagine that a timpani has notes like a guitar.
Answer: Drum sets don't really have notes in the traditional sense (usually).
they do have a number of what could be considered individual instruments set up in close proximity and played by one player.
The number of sounds (if you limit each drum to one sound) is equal to the number of drums there are.
Note that you have common techniques that are used that may have a special notation as well. For example a cross stick on a snare drum may be indicated with an X for a note head on what ever line or space the snare is notated on.
there are no standards for noting drumset, but there are some conventions that you can google search for, but in general the deeper the sound the lower on the staff it is notated. so bass drum down low, snare in the middle and cymbals up top.
also, note that is no standard drum set. you can have anything from 3 pieces, to a crazy Neil Peart type drum set that has over 30 pieces, or anything in between.
5 piece sets are common for beginners (kick, snare, 2 rack toms, and a floor tom) plus cymbals (typically hi hats, ride, and at least one crash)
Answer: There are timpani, which are tuned to definite notes.  Some  members of the 'drum kit'have a discernable pitch too.  Toms are sometimes tuned to fit in with the key of a song.  But though a snare drum head may be tightened or loosened there isn't really a pitch there.
There is drum kit notation that allocates a sound to various 'pitches' on the stave or keyboard.  Sometimes a pitch may indicate more than one instrument or playing technique by different notehead shapes.  This 'map' is typical, but by no means exhaustive.

Comment: I'm glad you mentioned drum kits can be tuned. Sometimes the pitch can be pretty clear if the drum has time to resonate.
Answer: From what I've learned drums that are either recorded live or composed in a daw are pitched to match the key of the song. For example if your song is played in a c scale... all of the drums are tuned to c. Although drums dont have a reputation for having notes, I've learned that lots of producers pitch the notes to the root note of the scale just to make the drums sound more uniformed to the other instruments. Even though it is not done live, it can be done. Creating drums in a daw is how most of the chart topping songs are made today. A lot of those drums are tuned to the frequencies most pleasing to the ears.
Comment: i have never heard of this before. what is your source for this information?
Answer: Each drum plays tones which consist of more than 1 note. One-headed drums are louder and more defined than 2 sided, which are more indefinite. They both are tuned to coincide with each other in a certain key for a melodic purpose, especially one headed drums.
Answer: The overtones and harmonic information produced by an unpitched drum are not all near multiples of the fundamental, and therefore human ears have a very difficult time determining the fundamental. Theoretically, such drums do have a specific note, but their timbre is so cluttered with random equally-loud frequencies that they aren't useful for constructing harmony.

The number of notes drums have


How does Emotional Intelligence go along with Dhamma practice?

Question: Emotional intelligence is an ability to deal with one's emotions. I am wondering how does it affect and get affected by the practice of the Dhamma? Does deeper meditative absorption lead to heightened awareness and control of one's emotions and vice versa or are they completely unrelated? Also, does the 'feeling' skandha include feeling of one's emotions? Are there any wholesome emotions one feels as the practice deepens? Are the Brahmaviharas all there is to wholesome emotions?
Answer: The Abhidhamma is useful for this question. I quote from The Abhidhamma in Practice by N.K.G. Mendis.
Starting from the top:

The Abhidhamma deals with realities existing in an ultimate sense,
called in Pali paramattha dhammaa. There are four such realities:

Citta, mind or consciousness, defined as that which knows or experiences an object. Citta occurs as distinct momentary states of
consciousness.
Cetasikas, the mental factors that arise and occur along with the cittas.
Ruupa, physical phenomena, or material form.
Nibbaana.

Next we go into the cetasikas:

The second reality or paramattha dhamma is the cetasikas. The
cetasikas are the mental factors or concomitants that arise and perish
together with consciousness (citta), sharing its object and basis.
The Abhidhamma lists 52 kinds of cetasikas. One is feeling (vedanaa),
another is perception (saññaa). The remaining 50 are grouped together
under the term sa"nkhaaraa.

And then we go into sa"nkhaaraa:

Sa"nkhaaraa is a collective term for the other fifty cetasikas. These fall into four groups:

Universal mental factors (sabba citta saadhaaranaa)
Particular mental factors (paki.n.nakaa)
Unwholesome mental factors (akusalaa)
Beautiful mental factors (sobhanaa)

There are 7 universal mental factors (including feeling and perception) and 6 particular mental factors. These are neutral:

The universals and particulars are, in themselves, ethically
indeterminate but become wholesome, unwholesome, or neither, depending
on the state of consciousness in which they occur.

There are 14 unwholesome mental factors and 25 beautiful mental factors.
The four Brahmaviharas are included in the list of 25 beautiful mental factors. Others on the list include mindfulness, faith, non-attachment, shame of evil, fear of evil, right action, right speech, right livelihood, wisdom etc.
The lists are very long, so I will let you take a look at it on the website yourself.

OP: I am wondering how does it (emotional intelligence) affect and get affected by the practice of the Dhamma?

With Dhamma practice, the unwholesome mental factors should become weaker and the beautiful mental factors should become stronger or more dominant. This is the increase of emotional intelligence that comes with the practice.

OP: Does deeper meditative absorption lead to heightened awareness and control of one's emotions and vice versa or are they completely
unrelated?

Your ability to consciously identify and eliminate unwholesome mental factors, and consciously apply beautiful mental factors, increase with the Dhamma practice, including meditation. You get more control over your mind, so to speak.

OP: Also, does the 'feeling' skandha include feeling of one's emotions?

The feeling aggregate is sensing the six sensory media, which includes thought and mind. Emotions are a kind of thought. So, yes.
But unlike externally originated sights, sound and smell which you cannot control, thoughts come out of your mind in a process chain described in this answer. So, you can control it through increasing emotional intelligence.

OP: Are there any wholesome emotions one feels as the practice deepens? Are the Brahmaviharas all there is to wholesome emotions?

No. As shown above, there are 25 wholesome mental factors including the four Brahmaviharas. So, Brahmaviharas are not all there is to wholesome mental factors.
Answer: When I read about the Brahmaviharas it said,

These four attitudes are said to be excellent or sublime because they are the right or ideal way of conduct towards living beings (sattesu samma patipatti). They provide, in fact, the answer to all situations arising from social contact.

I think there are additional "emotions", which aren't entirely/directly related to social contact -- things like joy, energy, faith. I'm not sure where courage fits in, maybe virya (strength).
Conversely I once heard "depression" described (from a non-Buddhist source) as "anger without enthusiasm", which I guess is funny.
Also if Brahmaviharas are excellent there's a doctrine about non-excellent emotions, hindrances and obscurations -- and asavas. I like this one for example -- Akkosa Sutta: Insult (SN 7.2) -- about anger.
Answer: Good householder,
practicing the Dhamma, walking the path of the real intelligent, is "all" about developing "emotional intelligence".
First of all one should know feeling (emotion), it's kinds, it's origin:

"'Feeling should be known. The cause by which feeling comes into play… The diversity in feeling… The result of feeling… The cessation of feeling… The path of practice for the cessation of feeling should be known.' Thus it has been said. In reference to what was it said?
"There are... Nibbedhika Sutta: Penetrative

Secondly it's very needed to know the different between household and renounciation feelings/emotions, especially for avoiding to make the Brahmaviharas just to another home and to avoid dangerous kinds of practice:

"'The eighteen explorations for the intellect should be known': thus was it said. And in reference to what was it said? Seeing a form via the eye, one explores a form that can act as the basis for happiness, one explores a form that can act as the basis for unhappiness, one explores a form that can act as the basis for equanimity. Hearing a sound via the ear ... Smelling an aroma via the nose ... Tasting a flavor via the tongue ... Feeling a tactile sensation via the body ... Cognizing an idea via the intellect, one explores an idea that can act as the basis for happiness, one explores an idea that can act as the basis for unhappiness, one explores an idea that can act as the basis for equanimity. Thus there are six happiness-explorations, six distress-explorations, and six equanimity-explorations. The eighteen explorations for the intellect should be known': thus was it said. And in reference to this was it said.
"'The thirty-six states to which beings are attached should be known': thus was it said. And in reference to what was it said? Six kinds of household joy & six kinds of renunciation joy; six kinds of household distress & six kinds of renunciation distress; six kinds of household equanimity & six kinds of renunciation equanimity.
"And what are the six kinds of...Salayatana-vibhanga Sutta: An Analysis of the Six Sense-media

Third, they have to be observed, making them to a frame of reference:

"And how does a monk remain focused on feelings in & of themselves? There is the case where a monk, when feeling a painful feeling, discerns, 'I am feeling a painful feeling.' When feeling a pleasant feeling, he discerns, 'I am feeling a pleasant feeling.' When feeling a neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling, he discerns, 'I am feeling a neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling.'
"When feeling a painful/pleasant/neither-painful-nor-pleasant... Satipatthana Sutta: Frames of Reference

Then, in regard of the Brahmaviharas (Sublime dwellings), which are better seen as "way of thoughts" or "dwelling of mind" then to be regarded as feeling/emotions, one can bring the gained intelligence (wisdom/insight) and ones heart ("emotions"), where the development of them is of great fruits, can, will, lead even to highers right liberation.
A perfect guide on the matter of bringing intelligence (head) and emotions (heart) together will help further in details if needed: *Head & Heart Together: Essays on the Buddhist Path, with it's heart-essay, right on the topic of good householders question: Head & Heart Together
Bringing Wisdom to the Brahmavihāras, "emotional intelligence.
[Note that this isn't given for trades for the world, stacks or exchange, but for liberation]


van won't start or go into gear

Question: I am trying to fix my moms van for her because she can't afford a shop to do it. she hadn't done a oil change in 3 years I came to find out. It began because it died and wouldnt start at a gas station. Easy fix I thought changed out the starter and it fired up no problem. but the oil was leaking almost as fast as I put it in. So I started looking for sources. Changed out the oil pan gasket and rear main seal. Then I found that the majority of oil was coming out of a sensor ( the vehicle speed sensor), went and got a new sensor and started to switch it out, this is where I got into the areas I'm not familiar with. In order to gain access to the bolt to remove the old sensor I had to remove the arm that runs from the transmission to the shifter inside the van. I was worried about doing that but there was no other way to get to the bolt. Got it changed out and everything put back together and went to test drive it and I put it in reverse and it wouldn't go anywhere put it back in park and the shifter won't come back into reverse or any other gear, and the van wont turn over.
Comment: Welcome to Motor Vehicle Maintenance & Repair!
Answer: It seems like you may have the shifter linkage put back in incorrectly. The van will have a neutral safety switch. If the transmission isn't in neutral, it won't start. If you got the linkage on wrong, it may not be going back into park/neutral and the ignition won't let you start it. You may try shifting it to which ever end (keeping your foot on the brake), then try to start it. If it doesn't start, click it one notch and try again. Do this through the full range to see if you can get it started. By doing this you may be able to tell if this is your issue as well as what you might need to do to get it right.
Comment: kinda what I had thought but I'm not a professional and so I like to get the opinions of those who know more than I do. I do pretty good most of the time but I usually only have one issue that I'm working on at one time.this van has been a true challenge!

van won't start or go into gear


How could humans reach distant stars and still stay as a united government if you can't use faster than light travel

Question: If we didn't have the capability to use faster than light travel then how could we stay unified and are any realistic examples in science fiction?
Comment: Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been [moved to chat](https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/105295/discussion-on-question-by-miles-means-how-could-humans-reach-distant-stars-and-s).
Answer: If you have only lightspeed communications and STL transport, any organization larger than a single star system (including close binaries etc.) will be more a matter of cooperation than of actual government.
This is far, far worse than what the British Empire dealt with in the 18th and 19th centuries; instead of months for both travel and communication, you'll be seeing years, decades, or centuries even for a message from the outlying colony to reach the "capital world" -- and thousands to tens of thousands of years to send any kind of military force.
In general, this will mean any system will be on its own, left with advice that might be thought of as the English language library in Kolkata or Sidney during colonial times --  new books might well arrive continuously, beamed from the homeworld, but they'll be the ones that were requested anywhere from fifty to a thousand years ago (and that's still a tiny bubble in a big galaxy).
It's likely the "language of science" would remain reasonably constant, because of the library effect, but nothing else about the culture or government could reasonably maintain a connection with a land further separated in time than Columbus is from Donald Trump.
Comment: Even for the British empire, the problems were *huge* in the 17th century. An [amusing read](https://mises.org/library/pennsylvanias-anarchist-experiment-1681%E2%80%931690) on this details Pennsylvania's quasi-anarchist period, during which the colony was ungovernable for years at a time because her Quakers simply would not cooperate with William Penn unless he was physically present.
Comment: I don't think that the two cultures would even be recognizable that they were once one after only 70-80 years.
Comment: Columbus and Donald Trump? Rather [Ötzi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi) and Stephen Hawking.
Comment: @galactic_analyzer. The cultures wouldn't be recognizable as the same by the time the generation ship got to the colony. If the generation ship used some form of stasis, they would represent the "original" culture.
Answer: Medical Science Makes People Nearly Immortal
Let's say you are the governor of a planet 50 light years from Earth, there is no reason to care about the repercussions of ignoring an order from the home world since you will be dead before they can do anything about it. But... if medical science extends the life expectancy into the thousands of years, and planetary governors are lifetime appointees, then ignoring an order from 50 years ago that could result in major consequences for you 100 years from now suddenly seems like a very bad idea.
Why do planetary governors have to be lifetime appointees?
Historically, lifetime leaders and fixed-term leaders treat their rulership very differently.  Politicians who are constantly vying for re-election have to think in the short term because being unpopular for a few years will end their career, but people who rule for life are more likely to be able to think in long term goals.  Kings, Pharaohs, and Emperors would plan out building projects that could take decades to complete whereas in the modern world, any plan that takes more than 5 years typically falls apart as the opposing party works to undermine it.
Another more relatable example may be the supreme court justices in the United States.  Justices tend to treat their jobs very differently than Senators do because they are life-term leaders.  Where as Senators often write short-sighted bills because they are trying to stay in office, justices tend to show a lot more discretion for the long term effects of their decisions because their entire foreseeable future involves dealing with the aftermath of their choices as leaders.
A consequence 100 years from now may not seem like a big deal to us, but if you turn the math around and say that there is a consequence that you will have to live with for thousands of years... well that becomes a VERY big threat that modern man can not quite yet relate to, but a person who's already been a alive a few centuries will perfectly understand.
Comment: But would this really change the time spans we act and think in? I've yet to see a politician or political party who seriously plans 5 years or more ahead and is able and willing to execute those plans. And yet our lifespans are already much longer than those 5 years.
Comment: On the other hand, when 89,000 is the new 25, then mightn't the "age of conservatism" rise accordingly?
Comment: Probably the only really viable answer. But I suspect locals shall have overthrown, deposed & assassinated such governors long since. The question then becomes: how do you maintain this system of governance?  Also, while the governor might suffer consequences or be elevated in rank over the course of millennia, the actual people who acted in such a way to get the governor in trouble will be long dead. Or are you suggesting *everyone* is nearly immortal?
Comment: @elemtilas Everyone.  Conservatism increases with age.  If 99% of your population is over 50 then the "liberal youth" would become too much of a minority to depose the powers that be, and the downtrodden have been downtrodden for so long that they've accepted their place too long ago to be roused to action.
Comment: @Michael This is why I said they have to be lifetime appointees.  I've expanded on why this is so important in my anwer.
Comment: @elemtilas Human psychology intuitively understands Exploration vs. Exploitation.  For any outcome we can generally tell when the reward/regret of a known action is worth more than the probable reward/regret of exploration.  Because the risk of regret never goes down with exploration, there is in each problem an optimal stopping point that does not go any further by living to be older; so, longer lives do not significantly extend the age of conservatism.
 https://towardsdatascience.com/reinforcement-learning-demystified-exploration-vs-exploitation-in-multi-armed-bandit-setting-be950d2ee9f6
Answer:
If we didn't have the capability to use faster than light travel then how could we stay unified

IMHO, based on the colonization episodes along the history, we can't stay under a "united government". As soon as a colony becomes self-sufficient, it declares independence or at least demands self-determination. And, nota bene, this assumes a FTL-communication.
And, at STL flight speeds, a colony needs to become self-sufficient pretty soon.
The best an Earth-based government can do is to admit upfront it will happen this way and carve in the "Charter of human colonization" stone that any colony has self-determination rights the moment their ship leaves the Solar System.
If neither comms nor travel can happen at FTL, the colony is on its own in any practical sense.

are any realistic examples in science fiction?

The first to pop into my mind:

"Speaker for the dead", "Xenocide" and "Children of the Mind" by Orson Scott Card
the Hainish Cycle by Ursula K Le Guin

On independence vs self-determination
I realized that I totally misused the "self-determination" term in respect with its meaning under international law.
What I intended for the meaning od self-determination was something along the line of "Yeah, OK, in name, you are the source of law in regards with human rights. But it is up to us to organize ourselves how we see fit and, apart for the respect of human rights, we have no obligation to you (even if it's likely we will assist you if you ask)".
Comment: ...Except the Ender series *explicitly* has FTL communications. So it's not a good example. Not to mention FTL travel shows up in "Children of the Mind".
Comment: Wish I could upvote twice for the Orson Scott Card referral. Ender Saga for the win if you like deep philosophical introspection...
Comment: ...but Adrian's point, with which I agree, is that any sort of unity *without* at least FTL *communication* is basically impossible. Thus, examples *with* FTL comms are fair game, IMO.
Comment: @Halfthawed "explicitly has FTL communications. So it's not a good example." But it is the best example one can have in the give "no FTL travel". Because otherwise the answer is "Not a yota chance of a united governance of any kind, no matter how reduced", so FTL-comms is a requirement to speak about "humanity in space" (as opposed to just "humanoid species having Homo Sapiens as a distant ancestor")
Comment: @Blueriver: Hey, [we've repeatedly thought neutrinos might travel just a *bit* faster than the speed of light](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurements_of_neutrino_speed), either due to measurement errors, or because they outpace light from a supernova (due to being non-interacting, where light is slowed by "stuff" as it escapes). It may be unlikely, but we keep thinking we might have discovered it. Same deal with [early tachyon theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon). It's plausible, if not super-likely.
Comment: ...and the Hainish work has FTL comms in the form of the ansible, which Card uses in his own work, too.
Comment: @StarfishPrime 'ansible' was coined by Ursula Le Guin, but it's not only Orson Scott Card that adopted it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible#Use_by_later_authors
Comment: Isn't this self-determination as described in the answer a lot like the British Commonwealth nowadays? And I'd put a distinction between FTL and instanteous communication. Ansible IIRC was almost instant, regardless of distance.
Comment: @JanDorniak self-determination as described is close to the relation between nations and UN. It just happen that the Commonwealth has a lot in common with UN, yes. In re FTL comms, even when instant, it is still bound to the relativity in terms of time compression. See https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/200106 (I'm a lazy bum and that's a good enough explanation)
Comment: @AdrianColomitchi I don't question that. It's just that FTL comms sounds more like "very fast" rather then "almost instant regardless of distance". The difference between warp drives and jumps if you will. Though both are technically FTL
Comment: "Faster" implies there is speed (hence travel time) to measure. And I much prefer the other way around, it's more interesting plot-wise when the fastest means of communication is teleporting a thumb drive.
Comment: @JanDorniak '"very fast" rather then "almost instant regardless of distance"' - true, a FTL comms at 1.01c doesn't help much.
Comment: @AdrianColomitchi to have a one second ping to Proxima Centauri you would need around 300 million c if my back-of-envelope is correct.
Comment: @JanDorniak 267.6 Mc to be more precise
Comment: It seems unlikely that if a medium is discovered over which communication is not capped at c it will be the only medium with such property and it will be capped at 1.01c (or any multiple of c that makes FTL comms as useful/less than STL comms). Unlikely and a bit boring.
Comment: @ShadowRanger Interesting! For reality, at least. For fiction, nah, keep trying :D
Comment: I've recently come across the Worthing Saga, also by Card, which acutally presents a mechanism for empire with STL travel.
Answer: Give the job of governance to Artificial Intelligence's. Or perhaps the AIs just decided to take over.
Given that the AIs have an overarching purpose, the AIs might have the structure that actually allows for a multi-stellar or even galactic empire. Note the the purpose need not make sense to the humans. The AIs could have a goal that requires continuous expansion thus spreading to galactic scale. Likewise AIs could also require a static society so that human civilization retains coherency -- if nothing else to prevent disruption that affects their true goal.
By controlling essentially all aspects of human life, this would be stable even on a very large scale.
For example, considering the of meeting another galactic AI similar to Fred Saberhagen's Beserkers). Why do the Berserkers expand and destroy life it is assumed to be the result of a programming error or replication error in their programming. Nonetheless, the Berserkers grow in size and complexity and retain their characteristic even though they adapt to changing circumstances.
Our AIs could still have STL or light-speed communication networks for the purpose of being able to summon the full strength of the galactic empire if needed to defend against the Berserkers. Sure response would be slow, but it is assumed that the attacker would also have similar communications limits since the same physics must be followed. The AIs could even have planned ahead or criteria for abandoning stellar systems consistently even in such harsh situations.
Hopefully, our AIs decide to keep the humans as pets or they feel responsible for taking care of them, or something else that only the AIs understand but that allows us to continue existence in a desirable state.
Following a billion, or a trillion or more lines of code can cover a lot of planned societal choices, and it would be able to be followed consistently.

Stable does not mean stagnant. A multi-stellar society controlled by AIs would not necessarily be stagnant in order to be stable. There are shared network update algorithms that allow distributed software updates to occur, even dealing with lossy and slow communications. Sure, they have never been tested, developed or even planned for such large scale, but the AIs will develop such if it serves their purposes.
The AI logic may be completely inscrutable to humans, but it could allow parallel human development, perhaps even demanding trans-human development - Why? No mortal knows.

True AI could well be as far beyond our ability to understand as a cockroach trying to understand string theory. We already do not really understand how some of the limited AI that we use works. As a race, we may not even perceive that we are being controlled by an AI, life could be pleasant, fulfilling, etc.
BTW, I am well aware of software development process (see my profile). Yes, true AI may not happen soon, or ever. But at least theoretically, it certainly seems there is no inherent reason it can't exist. Certainly the wetware we use seems to be a very strong indication that it should be possible. I am not trying to predict the future of AI, I am trying to posit a realistic affirmative answer to the question of how civilization could be unified even though multi-stellar without FTL.

One additional embellishment. If you are familiar with Asimov's Psychohistory in the Foundation series, I would conjecture that very intelligent AI would effectively incorporate that ability. Given the ability to accurately predict the future (in the mass, not the individual level), they could also accurately predict the effects of their planned changes. This also argues that humans could well be allowed / encouraged /coerced to develop under the AI's rule. In fact, AI Psychohistory would improve their ability to govern at the multi-stellar level.
I add this not merely to buttress my claim that this is a realistic solution. But, also remind that something fundamentally unpredictable can break the stability and unity of any society, in Foundation, The Mule story is that discontinuity. The Mule was a mutant with the ability to alter the minds of other people, resulting in a large variation from Psychohistory.
Catastrophe caused by a rogue black-hole that triggers a supernova killing or harming systems for hundreds of light years could easily break or otherwise alter a smaller multi-stellar civilization.
Comment: "The AIs decide to keep the humans as pets or they feel responsible for taking care of them, or something else that only the AIs understand." + "Why? No mortal knows." - Ah, so your solution for a "united governance" is to create a perpetual "Deus ex machina", inscrutable, invincible and not affected by the decay of its physical support as any God should be.
Comment: @AdrianColomitchi - Yes, this pretty much is the definition of an AI society from a human viewpoint. Perhaps human transcendence is a aspect of joining the AI (though whether this is red pill or blue pill is still something the transcended humans would not know). Of course, AI software could be defective, resulting in the death of the AI god, etc. But that is a different question entirely.
Comment: "Likewise AIs could also require a static society so that the civilization retains coherency... By controlling essentially all aspects of human life, this would be stable even on a very large scale." You mean "stagnating". Like not even daring to think at trans-humanism, 'cause this will likely give them access to too much comms and processing power.
Comment: @AdrianColomitchi - I disagree, see update.
Comment: Oh, well, reality-check. Lemme see: "move fast and break things" and "Patch Tuesday/Exploit Wednesday" are still a thing. Wheeew! That AI? Not gonna happen soon :)
Comment: @AdrianColomitchi "Patch Tuesday/Exploit Wednesday" is an issue with new software, or old software that you are trying to add new features to. Software that has been actively patched without messing with the features for more than a few years tends to be very stable and hard to crack.  If these AIs have been around for centuries and are adaptable enough to organically learn what they need to learn without regular feature updates, then they could conceivably be unhackable.  Hacks can only happen when someone finds a mistake, but over enough time, there should be no mistakes left to find.
Comment: @Nosajimiki-ReinstateMonica "If these AIs have been around for centuries" Now, that's a big IF. Until it gets to be around for centuries, it needs to start getting around at all. In the current state of software development (and with the "planned obsolescence" mentality around for hardware), that's not gonna happen during nowadays time. Now, it's not that the interstellar flight is around the corner, so this is more like a moo point (a cow's opinion so to say; mine to be precise :) ).
Answer: Hibernation Cycles
Karl Schroeder's excellent novel Lockstep has a solution for this, albeit on a far smaller scale (a few solar systems close to Earth and the many planetoids in between).
In Lockstep, colonies hibernate in lockstep, going under for e.g. 11 months of every year (there are several different cycles). This allows a person to travel 11 months while hibernating, spending 1 month at his goal, then travel 11 months back, and arriving 1 month of experienced time after he left (there has only been one awake period while he was away. During downtime months, robots and other machines collect resources that allow the colonies to be fully active for a month, even in marginally habitable areas.
On a truly interstellar scale, downtime would have to be far longer, e.g. being awake a few years in every thousand - and every colony would have to agree to this cycle.
Say that at the end of every four-year awake cycle, every solar system elects a representative for the central government. Representatives travel nearly a thousand years in hibernation and arrive at the Capital at the beginning of the next awake cycle. Then they spend four years deciding on every issue that needs to be dealt with, after which they are sent back along with a package of edicts.
For colonies on Earthlike planets, it might be difficult to persuade the population of this - even with the promise of immense wealth during the awake period. A handful of rebels that decide to stay awake could become a large population in a thousand years and threaten the local order of things, unless robots hunt them down and either kill them or forcefully hibernate them (story idea!).
There is also the danger that some aliens might appear during a downtime and settle a lot of the 'empty' colonies. Of course, there might be emergency systems in place that awaken people out of time if something unexpected happens.
This might not be the most practical way to have an interstellar government, but it is a possible one.
Comment: +1 for "rebels refusing hibernation". Even better if it starts with an objective reason for which the refuse to return in hibernation is justified (e.g. medical condition developed, the robots are programmed with "don't kill an innocent" ethics. A boiling-the-frog dilemma between the 'good of the few' conflicting with 'the good of the all' developing over millennia, which never triggers a clear cut delta threshold for the robots to intervene).
Comment: FYI, in the book the most common cycle is 1 month awake then 360 months (30 years) hibernation.  Here's a good review of the book focusing on the worldbuilding aspects: [The Worldbuilding in _Lockstep_ Is So Good It Will Make You Giddy](https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-worldbuilding-in-lockstep-is-so-good-it-will-make-y-1584702572)
Comment: Thanks! It's been a few years since I read the book and I didn't have it nearby when I wrote my reply.
Answer: Interstellar relations based on logic of the Prisoner's Dilemma
This idea is explored in John C. Wright's stories beginning with Count To A Trillion.  The Prisoner's Dilemma is a thought experiment often discussed in an introduction to game theory.  It deals with a situation where two prisoners have a lot to gain by cooperating, but at any time either one can benefit from betraying the other's trust.  Why don't they betray each other?  Well, if the "game" is played only once, it makes sense to cheat, but if the game is played over and over again, it makes more sense to cooperate, because if you cheat the other player will retaliate and you'll both lose.
In an interstellar agreement, laws must be obeyed, treaties must be observed, contracts must be honored, over very long time spans, perhaps more than a lifetime.  Imagine an astronaut returns from a distant star, bearing a treaty that George Washington sent his ancestor to negotiate.  Would we honor the treaty?  What if it was highly offensive to our present-day sensibilities?  What if it included, for example, the right to import slaves to our markets?
If we broke the treaty, the other star wouldn't find out until long after our deaths.  So there's a huge temptation to break or ignore the treaty.  In a one-off case, no problem.  "Cheating" is to our advantage.
In the long run, though, if we want to have a stable interstellar civilization, we would need to learn to honor those agreements, at least to tolerate them for the duration of a new round-trip for a new ambassador to renegotiate them.  Because we would need to establish a reputation for honoring such agreements, or no other worlds would make any deals with us at all.  The other worlds would have to do the same.  "Cooperating" is to our long-run benefit.
EDIT: What would this actually look like?  I'd say it needs:

Profound cultural reverence for the rule of law (and contracts, oaths, treaties, etc), to the point that citizens would lay down their lives to enforce laws that they don't even like.
Willingness to inflict painful retribution against violators.  If any world proves to be a "pushover" that allows other worlds to cheat it, that world cannot cooperate as part of the network (or union, federation, whatever you call it).
Expectations made clear in advance.  One of the ways to do well at the repeated prisoner's dilemma is to tell the other player in advance how you will reward their cooperation or punish their defection, and follow through accordingly.  Your interstellar government would probably have a crystal-clear and unchanging constitution/compact/basiclaw that is its foundation.
Comment: And then you throw a bomb through a wormhole and something turns off consciousness for a few minutes...
Comment: "In an interstellar agreement, laws must be obeyed, treaties must be observed, contracts must be honored, over very long time spans, perhaps more than a lifetime." Not that it wouldn't be a nice-to-have feature even if only at the planetary scale and, preferable, now.
Answer: When round trip communication times are measured in decades (at a minimum!) the notion of "unified" is a bit tenuous. Forming consensus on an issue could easily take longer than an unmodified human lifespan, at which point you really have to take a long hard look at what you're doing and wonder what the point of it all is.
The daughter colonies of the interstellar civilisation could get a continuous stream of updates via super-powerful communication lasers and remain more or less culturally cohesive with their parent civilisation, but that's a big investment of time and effort for the parent and there's no real way for them to directly benefit from the relationship, either economically or culturally, for an extremely long time. What seems like novel research to the colonists might already have been a solved problem for the parents. What seems like an exciting new style of music or other entertainment medium to the parents might already have been seen as an old and fleeting and slightly embarassing fad to the colonists who originally created it, by the time a request for "more, more!" arrives.

Offhand, I can think of two examples of (mostly) hard-scifi settings with both sublight space travel and communication that I thought were OK: Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe, and Charles Stross' Neptune's Brood setting (even if the book itself left a little to be desired).
In the former case, there was no interstellar government but there was an interstellar culture of sorts. Near-lightspeed interstellar spacecraft travelled between colony worlds (and occasionally founded new ones) taking art, technology and people as they went. This slow diffusion of ideas meant that the rate at which the colonies grew apart was limited to some degree, and whilst leaving your own world for another would mean a massive culture shock when you arrived (and another almost as big if you ever wanted to return) you'd meet people at the other end who were more or less human, doing human things with human brains. The crews of the spacecraft spent so much time travelling at relativistic speeds and in hibernation that the passing of time during sublight travel wasn't an issue for them and their memories and experiences would have spanned much of starfaring human history. They might be seen as a sort of loosely associated society, though certainly not an intergrated one, or one capable of being governed.
In the latter case, the main driver of interstellar cohesion was debt finance. Colonies cost a lot to set up, and you had to borrow a lot to do so, and you had to give something useful back or you risk having your colony cut off from critical supplies of manpower and valuable and interesting new ideas if you decided to renege on your debts. There was a complex financial system set up around bank transactions that would take decades to resolve. The critical thing there was that the inhabitants of the civilisation had more or less human minds, but were in fact human-modelled artificial intelligences in robotic bodies and so were extremely long lived. The rate of cultural change was lower, and having your mind uploaded to a new body in a new world to live and work there for a few decades before returning wasn't seen as a particularly big deal.
This situation resolves the lack of FTL communications by stretching out the lifetimes of the people involved so that communication delay wasn't a problem.
Comment: @Graham um, I have said as much in my answer.
Comment: @elemtilas everyone would benefit, if only for anthropological/sociological reasons, but both transmission and reception of those signals requires a non-trivial investment of effort, especially for the parent colony. It is easy to see how it might be reprioritised by either end.
Comment: Re *Neptune's Brood*, an important point in that setting is that there are no humans.  Everyone is a robot, and their consciousnesses can survive forever, be transferred between bodies, be backed up or duplicated, and be slowed/frozen for the duration of STL travel.  The economics in that context only hold true because the people involved can still be alive and unchanged after centuries or millennia.  On the scale of humanity, perhaps even with generation ships, this is going to fail immediately.
Comment: I think the homeworld, and indeed all other post-colonial worlds would benefit from an interconnected webwork of communications. Much the same way anyone living in Small Town, USA can benefit by watching cultural events in Senegal or Philippines transpire on Youtube or read about recent research (another Moonlet around Earth, recently discovered e.g.) Individuals may not be able to communicate with others in far distant worlds, but cultures and scientific advancement will still benefit.
Comment: The ever growing database of human culture & knowledge will benefit the descendants of all who receive those precious packets of data from fellow humans long dead.
Comment: This is true, of course. But if the whole point is to unify the galactic government over extremely non-trivial differences of time & space, then I suppose a similarly non-trivial investment must be made. I mean ultimately, the homeworld needs to know how things fare in all the other colonies, so they naturally need comms coming inbound. Directives going outbound of course mean a whole array of such devices pointing out into space around the homeworld. Might as put that network to *good use*, because, in all honesty, trying to unify such a govt is a waste of effort.
Answer: Theocracy
There was a time when sending a message from Spain to Constantinople meant taking a trip that could take a few weeks, either by ship or on horseback. Still the pope reigned sovereign, because he was the one validating the rule of kings.
Religion will do wonders to unite people under a banner.
Comment: The pope didn't have a millennium of lag between a request from an outlying land, and any reply getting back.
Comment: @ZeissIkon is right - the Pope was *able* to validate kings because it only took a few weeks to communicate. By the time the Space Church receives word of an unruly king, that king will be long dead. By the time the Space Pope's return message is received by that king's descendants, that Pope will be long dead. Literally generations of people will live and die in the time it takes for these far-flung societies to interact in any way. Those far-away folks might just now be finding out about the Great Schism of 1054, and may well have had one of their own by then.
Comment: @Renan Well, the question does say "_distant_ stars", and the _nearest_ star is 4.2 light years away, so...
Comment: I have a completely original idea about an almost godlike emperor who brings humanity together but then sacrifices his body to keep it together and then everyone starts worshipping his corpse, while his disembodied will is holding humanity's FTL communications together. IN SPACE.
Comment: @leinaD_natipaC, sounds kinda thin. I don't really think you could get anywhere with it. And it sounds kind of grim. And dark.
Comment: You seem to have an inaccurate understanding of either the history of europe or the term 'unified.'
Comment: OP didn't state how wide his star confederacy is.
Comment: @leinaD_natipaC as King Satan sings, "the universe is the corpse of god".
Comment: The Pope had considerably less control than most people realize.  There were a number of cases of a king replying "Yeah?  You and what army?", and the Pope being unable to muster a sufficient army to enforce his demands.
Answer: The Imperium of Man in the Warhammer 40,000 franchise controls more distant worlds by a system of regional governance, each world has a Planetary Governor who is empowered to do whatever they deem appropriate with their world, with the caveat that they pay taxes and give up soldiers for the empire on a regular basis.
To ensure this, the tax-collectors come in warships and are perfectly able to claim their tithes by force.
To make sure it doesn't come to that, most worlds have a branch of an organisation known as the Adeptus Arbites, essentially the FBI if the FBI had the equipment, look/feel and authority of the Judges from Judge Dredd.
This organisation generally stays hands-off, they deal with security and legal threats to the Empire at large, not local issues. They hunt interstellar criminals and assist the empire's trouble-shooters, The Inquisition, as problems come up.
Their real purpose is to be an utterly loyal cadre of trained paramilitary, they aren't local. They're brought in from offworld and serve to remind the governor of their duty, either by being visible, or if necessary by killing them and replacing them with someone more suitable if they turn rogue.
Essentially, the imperium holds itself together by a system of internal checks and balances and does not assume that any of its citizens actually want to be part of the empire.
Comment: The scope of the problem is completely different. Unreliable travel for a year still gives you a chance of punishing the people responsible for an uprising. If the travel time is three hundred years, by the time you arrive, why are you even there? Heck, you as the commander of the punitive expedition probably no longer quite know what you're doing there, and why it would be better to continue on your mission instead of, say, joining the "colony".
Comment: Yes but the imperium has the warp at its disposal and astropaths. The first human galactic federation in the warhammer universe collapsed completely when the warp became so violent that they where essentially cut off from one another.
Comment: Faster than light communication in the warhammer universe does exist, but it's usually unreliable at best, and the travel-times are months to years, so it's very much still the same problem.
Comment: This is a scenario that crops up quite often in Warhammer 40k's backstory. Assistive or Punitive forces arriving irrelevantly late. What happens next is variable, but it's not uncommon for an army to arrive 300 years late and still bomb the planet back to the stone-age rather than sensibly reevaluate their orders. The Warp being what it is, armies have found themselves travelling back in time. interstellar communication and travel in 40k are so unreliable that time-travel happens routinely enough for an entire department of the inquisition to exist to deal with it.
Answer: With an extremely hierarchical division of powers
Different aspects of government would have to be decided semi-independently at different levels of the hierarchy.
Laws would be set, trade deals decided and space-based military directed by each star system government. Policing policies and a militia-like military might be the domain of a planetary government. Individual regions might set their own by-laws.
Only very high level aspects of governance would be decided centrally, such as the constitution and core principles of governance, such as political philosophy. If the galactic government broadcasts an amendment to the Constitution it will take centuries, but every star system will eventually be expected to update their own laws accordingly. Obviously these amendments couldn't be voted on by the planets as it would take too long, so the central galactic government would need to claim legitimacy from something other than a purely Democratic mandate.
Answer: My initial thought was the same as everyone else's: "Impossible"
But you asked for how, so I came to this:
It is the best government possible.
After a few millenia of trying out different government systems, humanity has found the one that actually works, and has scientifically proven that no better system exists and any change to this system will make it worse.
The star colonies adapt this system because it would be irrational if not outright stupid not to. Of course, this system takes the long communication delays into account and has the necessary autonomy for far-away colonies taken into account, so the whole "unified government" is mostly structural, rather than day-to-day - but it's not like any federated government today would be unfamiliar with such a setup.
Comment: in short "You use a system of government that works in this situation"... kinda a non-answer isn't it?
Comment: @Ruadhan not what I am writing, no. "this works" is not the same as "this is proven to be the optimum solution". Just that it works doesn't mean you should stop looking for something better. But once you have proven that no better exists, you would be foolish to abandon the best.
Comment: I mean that your answer is kind of recursive. The question is essentially "what kind of government works in this situation" and your answer is "the kind of government that works in this situation". I mean, technically accurate, but unhelpful :P You have hints of an answer in the idea of a government that is structural rather than day-to-day, eg: a decentralised government. Maybe you could expand on that!
Comment: Right. So...what's the answer to the query?  In other words, what is "the one that actually works"?
Answer: Not possible
To stay unified, you not only need to communicate; the government also needs to be able to project power over its domain.
Interstellar warfare is a logistical and economical nightmare with sublight travel, hence any colony which wishes to declare independence can do so with impunity. The New World managed to drive the Brits out even though these had much shorter logistic routes than any interstellar force would have to manage.
Comment: Not quite. To stay unified, it's enough if everyone benefits from being unified. This excludes an interstellar empire with dominions and colonies, but not a voluntary organization that simply benefits from being (some) part of a bigger whole. Which probably means that this "government" would be doing very little :)
Comment: @Luaan that sounds unstable. the UK benefited from the EU and still brexited. there'll always be someone who thinks they can do better without the organization.
Comment: @Luaan there is no practical way to communicate meaningfully over distances where message takes hundreds or even thousands of years to arrive. If we on Earth now received a message sent to us by Roman empire, what would be the point?
Comment: The projection of force argument, yes, it's good to see someone remembered it. The trick is how to render unnecessary. The Thirteen Colonies drove out the British because they had French support.
Answer: Resource control
He who controls the spice controls the universe ~ Dune
The only way for this to work is by making colonies dependent on the central government.
Now, as others have mentioned, colonies basically need to be self-reliant if they want to survive, since the capital won't be able to help them in case of emergency. But that's just what the colonies need; the central government might have other priorities.
A forward-thinking central government may design the colonies such that they can be self-reliant for everything they need to survive... but no better.
More specifically, the future technology might require some foundational equipment or raw material which is only found on the capital system. This may be due to a fluke (Mars' red dust has some unique property not found anywhere else in the universe) or a deliberate choice by the government: matter/anti-matter containers are used in all future powerplants, but their development and manufacture is only allowed in Minerva station orbiting Jupiter and the Ares fablab on Mars.
The possibility of artificial control is eased by the fact that building the equipment is extremely difficult, requiring infrastructure which can take decades or even centuries to build. So any counterfeiting operation would need to be very secretive, or it'll be found and quickly vaporized.
The colonies then rely on a consistent supply line of antimatter containment chambers from the capital system. Thankfully autonomous freight ships come all the time with "maintenance" quantities of containers. In the case of a disaster at the colony which requires many replacement containers, each ship also has emergency stores which can be accessed, but not without broadcasting a signal.
Other freighters heading towards the colony which receive the signal will know not to make their emergency stores available (to stop the colony from creating a stockpile), and the capital will send out an armada to the colony to help with the repairs (if such help is still needed 100 years later) and ensure the emergency supplies were used for their intended purpose and not to create a stockpile. If an illegal stockpile is discovered... well, that's why they sent an armada and not a civilian ship.
And obviously, if any rebellious behavior is observed in a colony, those freighters can just turn around. Good luck being independent and having to survive with primitive, pathetic, 21st-century technology.
Workable, but very fragile
This would arguably work (as long as the government keeps its monopoly on the resource), since colonies would need to choose between 30th-century technology by accepting the central government or losing the technology they can't think of living without.
However, it would give humanity a huge single point of failure. All it takes is a single failed science experiment making the Sun go supernova to destroy humanity's only source of this fundamental raw material.
Answer: Not practical
If you can't go Faster Than Light, than the gap between worlds is just too much to handle. Trying to communicate over a several year time lag isn't an effective means of having an Empire. It's just not practical to have a united government if you need to okay everything through a central bureaucracy that could take multiple life times to respond.
Not to mention that sub-light speeds has it's own massive reach of problem when it comes to physical transport. Sure, going .99c would get you there almost as fast as light, but it would take you months of real time to get to that speed using most conventional means of acceleration. In other words, worlds separated by four light years, even moving at .99c, it would probably take anywhere from five to six years to get from place to place. Now, while trade is possible, it not great to order something and have it arrive in half a lifetime, it's more going to be the variety of 'We'll load all the best stuff we have and sell it when we get there and hope they want it."
No Empire. It's not practical, there are just too many problems. And, if you want a series which handled this realistically, I'd recommend The Unincorporated Series, which does technically deal with the concept of a multi-star empire at sub-light speeds, (specifically, how it is feasible or rewarding), but that's only at the very end of the last book. (Most of the series is economic warfare across the solar system until it just turns to regular warfare across the solar system.)
Comment: RE *The Unincorporated Series*, could you provide more information. For example, book titles and their author. Thanks. At 0.99 c, the time dilation is a factor of seven. Acceleration times will be almost a year, shiptime, to get there (assuming comfortable rates of acceleration).
Comment: @a4android *The Unicorporated Man* series, books are  *The Unicorporated Man*, *The Unicorporated War*,  *The Unicorporated Woman*,  *The Unicorporated Future*, by brothers Dani and Eytan Kollin.
Comment: Much appreciated. Thank you for the information.
Answer: One may communicate instantly using quantum entangled particles, yet I seriously doubt instant communication will alleviate the difficulties of maintaining a unified government when physical travel requires hundreds or thousands of years between the "home planet" and the "colony"...IMHO
Comment: "One may communicate instantly using quantum entangled particles" May not. The  law of physics still forbid it. That unified govt should start to cut this red tape, it stops humanity from progressing. Especially those thermodynamics laws are a nuisance :)
Comment: No reason to presume the laws of physics hold true in this world. OP could you elaborate on why quantum entanglement doesn't count as FTL travel?

Also, if you can communicate instantly, you can send messages to computers instantly, so maybe you can remotely control the AI overlords of the colony...
Comment: @Thymine: Because in order to use the spooky entangled pair you have to ship a way to decode what it means STL. At which point you may as well have just sent an STL message. Quantum entangled pairs can only seem to transmit information FTL if you already know what the information is and when you're meant to get it.
Comment: @JoeBloggs I was kind of thinking at the colony's inception they'd bring a quantum entangled computer with them. For sure any quantum entanglement communication still requires us to ignore some science
Comment: @Thymine: If we're ignoring science then having a computer with some kind of entangled FTL communication module is one of the more sane options!
Comment: @JoeBloggs Can you elaborate on two comments ago? "Quantum entangled pairs can only seem to transmit information FTL if you already know what the information is and when you're meant to get it." - I thought knowing the information on either side was required to confirm the system is working as expected, but once you had an entangled system on either end you could actually send new info FTL (without breaking our real world physics). I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to say this with any certainty, so any help is appreciated.
Comment: @TCooper when you have one of two entangled particles, you know the state of the other one when you measured yours. not only can you do this only once (as the pairs state is now collapsed), you also do not have any way to _set_ the state, so you can't encode any data, only measure what it randomly is.
Comment: @ths oh, duh. Thanks. So it always requires at least some info to be sent over classical communication... let's just hand-wave that part away for this story lol
Comment: @TCooper: What ths said. Basically you can only 'get' an entangled message if you know when you're meant to be measuring and what you should decode the collapsed state (which you can't control) into ahead of time. At which point you've just added a pointless step to a timestamped message and the whole thing is pointlessly pointless. Even checking that the pair did actually collapse to the same state needs you to go back to the first part of the pair and say 'did you see what I just saw?', which is just classical all the way.
Answer: In the Takeshi Kovacs series they figured out a way to download the human consciousness to digital media and pair with FTL communications they effectively had interstellar travel by buying/renting a body on the other side. Extra bodies were made available because criminals (and debtors) didn't physically sit in a prison, they had their bodies taken and set in digital storage. This got even crazier by bionics and genetic engineering special made bodies. This let's the leadership be able to travel anywhere nearly instantly and also have the ability to project force as long as they had an ally in control of a "sleeving" facility. As a side effect the rich and powerful are effectively immortal
Answer: Have the same society replicated multiple times across the galaxy.
We have created what we believe to be the ideal stable, creative harmonious society. Cloning is the predominant method of reproduction. Clones undergo a 20 year "incubation" period: a carefully controlled time of education, training and developmental training. At the end of the incubation period a new copy of each individual is released into society and work begins on the next generation.
Everyone has learned to operate and co-operate in a society which contains a number of copies of him- or herself at different stages of development. Whenever the empire expands, it does so by sending out a new self-replicating batch of the same set of individuals. It is one empire because it is ruled and sustained by the "same" people.
Maybe some random variation is allowed. Maybe there is a certain amount of sexual reproduction. There is communication between neighboring solar systems to sync up or, if necessary, "reboot" failed variations.
But maybe no variation is permitted (or desired). Technologies may develop at different rates due to accidents of environment or experience but there is no serious conflict because the individuals feel a deep sense of belonging to their society and kinship with their "other selves" whether on the same planet or in more distant locations.
Until one day... when our story begins!
Answer: Robert Reed's Marrow universe has one way - humans (and all the other space-faring species) are immortal. Needless to say, this makes their perspective very different from ours, and worthwhile large-scale projects can take tens of thousands of years.
In a world like this, if you had an evil empire ruling over the galaxy, sure, it's going to take you hundreds of thousands of years to project power - but by the time you get there, the people responsible are probably still there. Of course, there's still the other tiny problem - why bother? What is on the other side of the galaxy that has any value whatsoever to you, as the God Emperor of a Unified Human Government?
Most real world "proto-empires" failed for much the same reason, and indeed, it is rare to see a colony providing benefits to the "parent" country - much more often, they are net resource sinks and the only real justification for having them tend to be along the lines of prestige, cultural extension and such. Even if a colony is beneficial to people at home (e.g. Rome's imports of grains from North Africa and exports of tools), it only lasts for a short time, historically speaking, and tends to cause more trouble home than it solves. It's hard to imagine how a colony 300 years away would ever be any benefit to someone back home.
Answer: Use an AI gouvrnement: The home world writes its government strategy into a computer code and builds multiple identical computers that are given to the colons when they leave. The computers then acts as a governors in the different colonies.
If the code is written well enough and the computer is smart enough, then it can govern exactly in the way that the home world would if it were able to make the decisions. Moreover, all the computers have the same code, share a common objective and know it. They can work out what the other colonies will do without communicating. For example, if a threat appears and a coordinated response is necessary, then each colony will take the most logical action based on the fact that all the others will do the same.
Answer: If you can keep travel to about a century round-trip it's doable, but hard.  A century is about as long as people can realistically plan for (my son won't live to see it but my granddaughter will.  I know my granddaughter and want her to do well.)  So you start with that as a base.
Secondly you'd need the capital planet to have exclusive access to interstellar travel, or at least interstellar warships.
Thirdly you'd need the colonies to be dependent on the Capital for something other than interstellar flight.  For example in Finity's End there are almost 0 habitable worlds, so the colonies are all Stations orbiting gas giants with valuable minerals and the the like that require a certain amount of specialist material from earth no matter how efficient they are.
With these parameters you essentially end up with an Imperial hegemony, regardless of the overall rulership of the colony planet.  Something similar to the Imperium of Man in 40k (minus the FTL and demons).  Each colony could be a democracy or theocracy or dictatorship, but as long as they paid tithes to the throneworld they're allowed to do as they wish.  You couldn't get direct rule, as others have pointed out the distances involved just don't allow for it.  But if the only guys with starships and Big Mac Sauce demand a 10% tithe once every X amount of years or you get cut off and slowly die, you'll pay attention and toe the line.  Mostly.  Of course you'd need enough Imperial traffic to make sure the colony isn't building their own shipping, and have dangerous enough transports/transport escorts to blow up anything they might try.  And the colonies would likely send representatives to the Throneworld to work out super-long-term things like using colony world's people for future empire expansion and discuss inter-planetary trade.
In the end I don't think it would last for eternity.  Invariably somebody would figure out how to make The Thing Only The Throneworld Has, or builds a secret fleet to overthrow the Imperial Oppressors.  Or even just expansion beyond the 100-year limit resulting in the creation of Satraps that eventually grow into separate star nations by peaceful or nonpeaceful means.
Answer: You send delegates and radio transmissions between star systems via a Stargate like the one the US government has in a missile silo at Cheyenne Mountain.
Comment: Sorry, MaxW, this doesn't answer the question. Travel & communications via a Stargate is faster-than-light travel. FTL travel is deliberately excluded from the scenario.
Answer: First, you are going to have to assume some form of instantaneous communications through a very malleable space/time configuration. Not such a stretch, because all of the limitations on information traveling faster then light assume that time is actually a 'thing', and that this 'thing' somehow passes. In a dimension (thick enough physics textbook) in which time does not exist as anything meaningful to the physics (and it is beginning to appear as if the quantum world really doesn't care about time), then limitations on information travel time are irrelevant. Information, after all, is neither energy nor matter. It is the medium or mechanism of information transfer that is governed by energy and matter restrictions.
Second, you are going to have to assume an empire-wide economy, with one and only one empire-wide bank. All financial transactions have to go through this one bank. Perhaps it owns the patents and the intellectual property rights of the instantaneous communications system (Sort of like the Elizabeth Moon Vatta's War series and spin-offs, and the ansibles being controlled by only one company. However, in the Vatta's War series, there were apparently a few system-wide banks but I don't recall if it was a universal currency or if each system had their own).
Thirdly, consider that a bank account balance, or the 'cost of goods'. or the 'stock market price', although technically 'information', is not really 'information that causes something to happen' in the classical physical sense. Your bank balance is the same, everywhere in the universe. Revealing what it is, anywhere, is not really 'transferring information', it is just 'revealing existing information'. Compound interest increases a bank balance at the same rate, and the numbers are the same, no matter where you are. 'Instantaneous communications' is the ultimate block chain, available everywhere.
For an interconnected economy to work, financial transactions would have to be made pretty much instantaneously. Money comes out of one account as soon as it goes into another. Money can not appear to exist in two different worlds, at the same time. Either instantaneous accounting exists, or otherwise, money would have to be physical, and would have to be physically carried from one system to another, like the boat loads of gold moved around the world in the 17th and 18th century. Totally impractical in a modern economy because this 'wealth' is taken out of the economy while it is being transported. Can you imagine the chaos if a corporation could be bankrupt on one planet, and no one knows it on another planet and so it is still conducting business and taking on debt? Completely unworkable.
Just like the Roman Empire, individual systems would have a great deal of autonomy in local governance, social laws and cultural conventions, and local courts and penalties. Rome allowed a lot of individual local autonomy, but the thing that mattered - the financial empire and the financial integration (the only real reason to have an empire) - was closely controlled because Rome controlled the vehicle for international trade - the Roman denarius. By controlling the currency, and centralizing trade, they controlled the empire.
The advantage of your empire over the Roman Empire, is that it is expanding and being created at the same time. It is not like an existing society being taken over by the Romans. Thus, the common currency and connected financial empire would exist from the get-go. Only one currency would ever have been used in interstellar trade. The colonists would have brought their cloud computing currency with them, as they built more outposts. Corporate towns would be financially tied very closely to the head office. Same accounting system, same books, same currency.
Thus, the empire could be controlled simply by the threat of shutting a node off from this system of instantaneous communication, universal financial economy, cloud information system, and block chain technology. Either the colony co-operated, or it was essentially cut off completely from all cloud financing, cloud banking, cloud computing, cloud data, and essentially civilization. Any renegade colony would become a backwater and descend into stagnation, its only source of contact being slower-than-light physical transfer.
And, really, if it takes ten years or more for a renegade colony to get any weapon to you try to attack you, what kind of threat is that? Methinks a financial and data embargo would suffice to keep any colony in check, without worries that they might be any kind of threat to you. 'Give us our freedom or in 100 years we will blow up your cities.'
Answer: Slow down the people
If you're a society of uploaded people, you think as fast as your resources allow. The usual assumption is that people will want to keep their perception of time the same, but with no more physical humans, why burn through the energy stores quickly? If everybody runs at 1/100th speed, the speed of light is effectively 100 times faster.
One problem is that this is only a solution for a very advanced society. It only makes sense if not only everybody is uploaded, but also if you've already disassembled all the stars so that their energy isn't wasted.
Answer: The American model of Representative Democracy works just fine on an intergalactic scale. Indeed, it was first designed in a time where travel was slow and communication was difficult.
To get around the problems of slow travel and difficult communication, there are 4 tiers of government: The municipality, the County, the State and the Nation. On an intergalactic level, there would be two more levels: The planet and the Empire.
The local levels are designed for more direct citizen participation. For example, a town voting on a proposition will collect yay or nay votes from every citizen, while the State, the citizens vote for representatives, and only those representatives vote on the state or national laws.
On the national level (or in your case, an intergalactic level), the state residents would vote for electors - people they trust to make an informed decision, and those electors would choose the president.
Comment: The 'national' tier is all that's under discussion and it's completely unworkable here for the reasons laid out by ths. The US has been very stable over its existence but even it had numerous rebellions and pockets of anarchic lawlessness. If the central government were completely unable to project force to end such disturbances, the country would've broken up long ago.
Comment: On the other hand, if the electors were able to communicate quickly with one another, if the elected were able to communicate quickly with the citizenry, the entire scenario behind this question would be different... but still lead to the same disunity if there were no way to project force. (Remote shutoff of the ship's lifesupport? Pretty wasteful/ruthless...)
Answer: My question to you is, "Why do you want all communications to go through Earth?" A central, authoritative government only works quickly because it is close by. Additionally, by the time a new colony gets started and is self-sufficient enough to rebel, the originating world is probably dead.
The British Empire, in its heyday, did not route all requests through the monarchy - it relied on regional governors to maintain order directly, then it flowed up the chain of command as the problems grew.
The United States government also does this - problems are dealt with at the lowest possible level. When a problem arises that requires the help of a higher level, the two levels have to be on good terms. These mutual requirements start chaining and cumulating, meaning that your fringe planets have to be on good terms with your middle planets have to be on good terms with your near planets have to be on good terms with Earth. By going to regional leaders, communications time is cut down to only a few years.
There eventually becomes the problem of a colony planet becoming self-sustaining, but since they're not even human anymore, you can safely blast them away. Earth has probably gone extinct anyways.
A nice book with an example of the limitations of no-FTL travel (i.e., hard science-fiction) is Existence by David Brin, where their method of colonizing planets is to upload their consciousness into a hard format and fling millions of them out into space like a virus.
Answer: Government is, in many ways, a fiction that we collectively pretend into existence; the objective difference between a dictator and a crime boss is pretty flimsy.
So a hundred planets are under the same government if they collectively pretend that their governments are in fact the same government, even if there are no governmental structures above the level of the planet.
If the central government officially grants legitimacy to the branches of the government on every other planet, and those branches all claim to derive their legitimacy from that central government, then it doesn't matter how different the branches end up being in practice; their initial charters can all give their people the right to democratically modify their charters as needed, such that each planetary branch grows a completely different constitution over time.
Even if a given planetary branch is overthrown in a coup, the new people in charge may still decide to claim the mantle of legitimacy from the central government. (This has plenty of historical precedent: non-Egyptian pharaohs ruling as pharaohs, non-Chinese dynasties ruling as dynasties, conquering kings claiming the same divine right to rule as the ousted kings.) That wouldn't be guaranteed to happen, of course. But it could happen.
Note that this approach probably doesn't work if the central government has nontrivial demands of the planetary branches; for example, this system won't allow the central government to extract resources and labor from other planets, because they won't stand for it. But if the central government represents benign democracy and stability, and only sends peaceful envoys that don't have the authority to try to interfere with things, then the legitimacy that they confer can be useful enough to justify claiming it.
Answer: This can only happen when the planet is supervised by machines with sort of super power that is very hard to detroyed by the clever and want-to-be-free beings supervied.
(1) The machine supervisor system (MSS) constantly receive commands from the central government system (CGS). The commands send by the CGS may travel billions of years at light speed to reach the MSS.
(2) The MSS have enough pattern recognition capabilities to checkout whether the supervised society work as the expected rules, if not, then punishment will be excuted, like bombing. The expected rules is updated constantly by the command stream from CGS.
(3) The MSS have super power that is very hard to detroyed by the clever and want-to-be-free beings supervied. For example, it is space based + land based. If the land based part is being attacked, then the space based part will lauch nuclear weapons to punish. If any space technology (to attack the space based part) is find to be being developed, then the facility will be destroyed immediately.
(4) Being supervised by a super power doesn't mean slavary or bad life. The commands send to the MSS may just to keep the society under control, not to force them to work for the CGS. Another example is "no war" command. If any war is detected, then nuclear weapon is launched to destroy both side. Another example is "pupulate control" command - then over pupulation will never happen.
(5) Any system have bugs that can be exploited. The MSS is very hard to destroy doesn't mean it will never be destroyed. Once it is destroyed, this planet goes free which may not be a good thing, like war will come back and pupulation will explode. If you want your control over the planet to be longer, then you'd better not to use this system as a slavary system. Once those folks realize the MSS is infact good for them, the majority will not want to destroy it - do you want't to detroy a system that can prevent war/over population/over consumption of resoruce?
(6) Machine may have bug and fail, it doesn't have the "final underlying judgement" human beings have. Then it is possible a bug or an attack in the machin trigger a "destroy all" action which destroy the society on the planet.This is something you have to pay to get the galaxy government. This is why even we need such superpower very much, such MSS can't be used on earth - you need more backup planet in case some planet is occasionlly destroyed by the system for your race to live on.
If it is not machine super power based, then the being in the local government will soon find out there is no need to be governed by the central government.
Answer: Post-scarcity Economy, combined with a high value and respect on intellectual property and art and culture
Although the post-scarcity economy concept is sometimes used as a 'catch-all' solution, in this regard it would remove most of the reasons why conflicts happen - battling over resources such as 'land', 'money' or 'power'.
If technology exists where robots could build anything we wish, removing concepts of ownership, hunger, and even production, then humanity can concentrate on what it does best: intellectual pursuits, art and cultural development.
If the following are achieved:

The ability to have as much food as we want
The ability to build anything we want, no matter how large (or how small)
The ability to have as much space as we want (artificial habitats, or even make new planets)

Then we can exist fine, without any 'needs'. The issue then comes in mammalian emotional feelings of dominance which can be tempered by trade. Trade what? Well, although FTL is not possible, we can still communicate with each other at lightspeed, and therefore transmit and receive virtual 'items'.
These could be:

Blueprints for new items to build or food to have
New technological methods, programmes, VR worlds etc.
Original works, such as music and art, which are not available on your own world
News (even though many years or decades old) and very old and late communication between individuals

Cultural exchange is still possible at light speed - in a post-economy society. It would still be valuable therefore to remain at least loosely unified to gain new knowledge available on other planets.
Answer: In Orson Scott Card's Worthing Saga, the rich can afford to be put in suspended animation. This means that they can rule for centuries, so having it take decades to get to colonies and back isn't as much of an issue.


Is this an 8 bar blues chord progression? How to know if it is or isn't?

Question: I just read sheet music from a book on country piano with this chord progression: C-C-F-F-G-G-C-G. This is 8 bars long. Would you call this an 8 bar blues chord progression? All the examples I found on wikipedia did mention other 8 bar blues chord progressions but something exactly like this one. How can  know if this is an 8 bar blues chord progression or not?
As far as I know a lot of country songs actually use blues progressions.
Answer: There are many variations possible on the 8 bar blues, so this could certainly be one.  I'd say it depends on the tune: does it sound bluesy?
Answer: Yes. The last 4 are definitely a blues turnaround. Limited to I IV and V chords is consistent. In fact I can't seem to play it without making it bluesy.
But I also agree with @herman's answer. The ear is the true judge.
Since it is so short, it could even be just a phrase in a larger lyrical structure. If you play it in 2/4, with a Motown kinda beat... yeah that could definitely turn into a song with some tambourine in it. :)
Answer: Since a blues progression usually makes use of the Blues scale, then in this case the C blues scale would be being used.
This would be the following notes: C Eb F Gb G Bb C(again)
Does the melody only make use of these notes? If so then it might possibly be a blues progression.
Furthermore it does seem to look a lot like a blues progression, except instead of using 4 bars of the tonic chord (C in this case) to start, they use only 2; and again after the subdominant chord (F in this case) they have left out the 2 bars of the tonic.
Comment: I think you need an F in the blues scale.
Comment: Could also be using the major blues notes - C, D, Eb, E, G and A, particularly as there are no dom7th chords shown.


Change cell colour based on another cell containing text

Question: I am new to Google Sheets and trying to create a custom formula in conditional formatting. Looking to see if someone would be kind enough to help.
The picture below is a sample size of two list of Serial numbers. What I need is the cells to change color if a match is detected. What I was doing before was putting both list under one column and using the formula =countif(B:B,B1)>1. But this formula no longer works for me because now my list have cells that contain more than 1 serial number.

So what I need help with making a formula that would change the color of the cells if anything in C column is found in the B column. But for cells with more than one serial number, the cell in Column B  would only change once all serial numbers on the cell were matched.  I'm basically trying to verify that all Serial numbers on column C are in column B. But i dont know how to go about it or cells with more than one S/N.
This sounds like a super complicated task. I dont know if i should be asking here. If im at the wrong place please point me where to go
Answer: use find insteand of countif

=find(B1,B:B)>1

Find returns how many times it finds a string in the text or cell value


What is wet hopping and how does it differ from dry?

Question: Specifically what types of beer would you use wet hopping for and how does it affect the flavor/process differently than dry hopping a beer?
Comment: This question is probably mistagged, as you get no official "utilization" in the way brewers mean from dry or wet hopping.
Comment: Wet hopping can happen at the start of the boil, so there is indeed an IBU consideration there.  Dry hopping traditionally post ferment does nothing for IBUs.
Comment: Fair enough - I was feeding off the compare/contrast with dry-hopping part of the question I suppose.
Comment: I was a little undecided on the tags when posting, thanks for clarifying them.
Answer: Wet hopping is adding fresh hops to the fermentor to impart flavor and aroma to the finished beer. The principles are the same as for dry hopping - the hops are added to secondary (or to primary after fermentation is complete) 3-5 days before racking. The main difference is the hops are fresh, i.e. "wet" - the freshness gives a more vibrant aroma and cleaner flavour.
Fresh hops weigh 4-6 times more than their dry counterpart, so this needs to be taken into account when weighing. For example, if you normally dry hop with 1/2oz, then you'll need to wet hop with around 2-3oz of fresh hops.
Introducing spoilage organisms into the beer from fresh hops is unlikely, especially when added after (primary) fermentation is complete. Even so, you may want to put the hops in the freezer overnight to kill any pests, although this makes them slightly less fresh.
With fresh hops, the most desirable qualities that distinguish them from dry hops are the freshness of the volatile oils. This makes them best suited to flavoring and aroma additions, which also means there is less need to worry about the IBUs, since they contribute relatively little bitterness compared to the bittering additions. When using fresh hops in the kettle, remember that they contain a lot of water, which will be added to your wort. If you want to hit your SG on the mark, you'll need to compensate for the water added. Assuming wet hops weigh 5 times more than dry, then 4/5s of that weight is water. For example, 2oz of dry hops is 10oz when wet. Since 2oz of the wet hops is hop matter, the remaning 8oz is water.
Comment: mdma:  You're right about the solubility and lack of isomerization of alpha acids but apart from those, hop polyphenols and oxidized beta-acids can have bitter qualities and are imparted to the beer during dry-hopping.
Comment: Wet hops can be used for bitterness too, not just for aroma and taste.
Comment: I like this answer, as it aligns with my background on the subject, is well expressed, and complete.
Comment: @pjreddie - I didn't think bitterness could be imparted using hops cold since the bittering compounds - alpha acids - are insoluble until they are isomerised by heat. Can you tell me how wet/dry hopping can introduce bitterness?
Comment: One more for hops adding slight bitterness when used in a dry hopping addition. Hops are bitter; they taste bitter. Add them to something, they will make it a bit more bitter, boiled or not.
Answer: Hops are normally picked from the bines (yes with a 'b') and quickly brought to a processing facility where they are dried in a controlled environment.  The hops are then vacuum packed and set out whole or further shipped out for pelletization.  These are all dried hops.
The term wet hopping is used to describe hops that are picked, and in the same short order, brought to the brew house and used.  Generally that happens same day as picking or the next day.  Wet (fresh) hops are very perishable...which is why they usually get dried for storage reasons.
Dry hopping is a technique term that normally describes the process of adding hops (wet or dried) to finished beer.  Many breweries that have access to "wet" hops will indeed dry hop the finished beer as well as use them in the boil.
There aren't any limits to using wet hops if you have a supply of fresh/wet hops put them in any beer you like and see what the results are.
The types of beer that use wet hops are typically are pale ales and IPAs.  Any style that is hop forward and where you want hop character to shine.