Is it correct to say "testing passed / failed"?

Question: In software development, after I perform a number of tests on a program, is it grammatically correct to say "testing passed" (or failed)? It is probably correct to say "testing is completed", but it doesn't tell anything about the outcome.
Comment: Could you give a little more context to the question? Is the testing occurring inside the program itself or are you testing the program as a user.
Comment: @CodyPace testing as a user
Answer: It's common to say "Testing passed" or "testing failed". I don't think anyone would question this.
It's not a complete, grammatically correct sentence. What you really mean, I presume, is, "The software passed the tests." If we tried to read "testing passed" as a complete sentence, we'd have to conclude that "testing" is the subject and "passed" is the verb, that is, the "testing" has "passed" something. Which isn't what we mean at all. The testing hasn't passed; the software has passed.
You could phrase it as a passive: "Testing is passed." It that case the actual actor is unspecified, but in context we'd understand that to be "the software".
But as I say, people use sentence fragments all the time, in both formal and informal contexts. As long as everyone knows from context that you're talking about software testing, "Testing passed" conveys the desired meaning.
Answer: As @Jay's answer mentions, it is not likely "Testing passed" or "Testing failed" would cause any confusion in their intended meanings. But, I don't think "Testing passed" sounds better than "Testing successful". "Testing unsuccessful" could be used for "Testing failed".
Both phrases (testing successful and testing unsuccessful) are broadly used when you are referring to any test.
Actual usage:
Testing unsuccessful: Internet Explorer 9 for Windows
Answer: Your phrases

Testing passed
  Testing failed

are understandable and may be used to mean

Testing successful
  Testing unsuccessful

to describe the entire testing process and the actual tests.

Tests passed
  Tests failed

might be used after the test suite has been run to describe the tests themselves.
Testing usually consists of two parts: 1) the framework; and 2) the individual tests.  For example, in Rails, the framework would be: spec; rspec; or minitest; and the tests are files using the *_spec.rb suffix.


Can I use an iPhone to remote desktop to a PC, show the desktop on a TV with airplay, and use the iphone as a touchpad for the remote desktop?

Question: I've seen descriptions of running an RDP client on the iPhone.  I've also seen descriptions of using the iPhone as a touchpad/mouse replacement for a PC.  But I haven't seen a description of a combined application that shows the remote desktop screen via AirPlay (to an Apple TV) on a TV while enabling the iPhone to act as a touchpad for that remote desktop.  It would make the iPhone/AppleTV/TV combo a complete remote desktop solution without additional hardware (other than a network).
Answer: This works out of the box with AirPlay mirroring and any RDC client such as Screens for iOS.
Just establish a remote connection then double tap your home button and swipe the multitasking bar to the right. Enable AirPlay mirroring and you'll have what you described.


Is amyl nitrite used for sex?

Question: Do people use it for sex somehow? What is the effect? Just in the book,"Fight Club", the author describes this drug in a sex related context.
Comment: I edited your question to change amyl nitrate to amyl nitrite, which I think is what you meant. They're very different compounds so if you really did mean amyl nitrate, you can revert my edits.
Answer: Amyl Nitrite

Treats and prevents chest pain (angina pectoris).

And more pertinent for the question:

On the street, this medicine and others like it are sometimes called
  "poppers." They have been used by some people to cause a "high" or to
  improve sex. Use in this way is not recommended. Amyl nitrite can
  cause serious harmful effects if too much is inhaled.

Poppers are a name for inhaled nitrites which Amyl Nitrite is one of the most common. They can be lethal if used recreationally and cause vasodilation.

Poppers are rapid-onset, short-acting potent vasodilators that produce
  a rush characterized by warm sensations and feelings of dizziness.
  Poppers sometimes are used to facilitate anal intercourse because of
  their actions on the anal sphincter.

I have read reports about them being similar to Viagra and having a psychedelic effect. I have also included the Wikipedia link.
Comment: @M.Arrowsmith I'm sure the OP meant amyl nitrite, so I edited the question accordingly.
Comment: Thank you for this answer. However, I am just somehow confused, because the OP is asking about "Amyl nitrAte" and not "Amyl nitrIte", which are different substances in my knowledge. Probably this a typing error, but it would be nice if the OP (@Chank) could just clarify this. BR. MA
Comment: @CareyGregory. Ok. Thanks for the feedback. BR. MA

Is amyl nitrite used for sex?


Why do some brewing companies only export certain beers outside of their primary location?

Question: Wondering why it is that certain smaller brewing companies will export only certain beers out of their primary location? I am a huge fan of Goose Island (Chicago area based) and am having a tough time finding their Sofie and Matilda brews on the East Coast/NYC area.
Answer: I'd say it comes down to three things.
Distribution Rights
Breweries in most states are restricted by the three-tier system which divides the brewing industry into three categories:

Producers
Distributors
Retailers.

A few states allow the producer to engage in self-distribution (usually to a limited degree) but most require that a brewery get distribution rights with a third party, which will hold full, exclusive, and unlimited rights to shipping that producer's beer. ProBrewer.com has some excellent reading on the subject.

The rules and regulations pertaining to the distribution and advertising of beer products are highly regulated and are enacted and enforced at the state level. Therefore, each state has its own set of laws in which the brewer is responsible for knowing and abiding by. It is incumbent on you, the brewer, to know the specific regulations of each state in which you sell.

It boils down to what the distributor wants to do and state-by-state requirements for what can be sold there. Ohio has a cap on alcohol by volume of 12%. Any beer over 4% ABV in Oklahoma must be sold only at liquor stores at room temperature. It varies so much that some brewers don't want to go into those markets.
Demand
There's also the simple issue of supply and demand. In 2013, Founders Brewing delayed entering the Florida market for a few months while they brought on more 600BBL fermenters because of some slight under-reporting of potential market numbers. There's nothing worse than not being able to supply your customers with beer. (Ahem, Cigar City's Great Jai-Alai Shortage of 2013).
Expense
Bottling/canning beer is expensive. There's also only a certain amount of time available to package. This is why there will usually be only a certain number and type of beer that gets packaged in these containers until a brewery grows to a certain size that allows better economies of scale. Once there, it's easier to start releasing seasonals, one-offs, and more nuanced beer styles compared to just cranking out a wheat ale or amber ale.
Answer: There's lots of possible reason

Some beers don't taste the same after the pasteurization required for shipping commercially, so only local or limited run would work.
The area you're in may not be their target demographic/flavor profile.
They may just not have a distributor in your area or know if people want it.
They may not be a well known enough brand to justify shipping all of their products to an area and instead on just a few initially.
Intentionally driving up demand.

That being said, I show some of those beers available at areas well outside of their Chicago area, so it probably isn't the commercial shipping one.


Android Keyboard causing PhoneGap App to distort/zoom awkwardly

Question: The easiest way to explain what's happening is to show it:
Before the keyboard opens: http://imageshack.us/a/img24/3285/by8h.png
I've drawn a red box around the area that's getting distorted.
After the keyboard closes: http://imageshack.us/a/img27/454/6nbv.png
Looking at the same area (also boxed), an area of the app is distorted. It looks like it's been zoomed in on, and was unable to zoom out.
I originally thought the issue was being caused because the keyboard was compressing the app when it opened, but I adjusted the AndroidManifest.xml to prevent the keyboard from resizing the app window and  section of my index.html file to prevent the page from zooming.
Here's the <application> tag of my AndroidManifest.xml:
<application android:icon="@drawable/icon" android:label="@string/app_name"
    android:hardwareAccelerated="true"
    android:debuggable="true">
    <activity android:name="Craps" android:label="@string/app_name"
            android:theme="@android:style/Theme.Black.NoTitleBar"
            android:configChanges="orientation|keyboardHidden|keyboard|screenSize|locale"
            android:screenOrientation="landscape"
            android:windowSoftInputMode="adjustNothing">
        <intent-filter>
            <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
            <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
        </intent-filter>
    </activity>
</application>

I'd originally had android:windowSoftInputMode="adjustPan", but that didn't solve the issue, and I saw someone suggest using adjustNothing instead. I hadn't noticed any difference in the performance of the app, so I left adjustNothing.
And here's the <meta> tag I put in the  of my index.html to prevent zooming:
<meta name="viewport" content="user-scalable=0, width=device-width, height=device-height, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, target-densityDpi=device-dpi" />

One thing I did notice was that when the buffer
 scrolls (which happens on y-overflow), it all resizes and fixes itself. I thought that hiding/showing the areas affected by the zoom might resolve the issue, but that didn't work either.
Also, just as a result of how I built the engine, that table gets emptied and rebuilt anytime that a bet gets placed/wins/loses, so the table is constantly updating/changing, but that area of the app stays zoomed until the buffer scrolls.
Something that stands out in my mind, but I'm not sure if it has anything to do with it, is the thing in the center of the distorted area is the only image in that area of the page. The other headings of that table are FontAwesome icons. Might that have something to do with it?
Any help in tracking down what could be causing this or with possible solutions would be greatly appreciated!
If I can provide any more information to help track this issue down, please don't hesitate to ask!
To see the game working/playing as it should (it actually works really well in Chrome on tablets), it's up at http://duleone.com/craps/, which is why this zoom thing baffles me.
Comment: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en?hl%3Den#!topic/phonegap/WgUms65c1UI ... this is a link to a more fleshed out (and more screen caps to show what's happening) version of this question
Answer: Try putting this line in the html head:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0">

And perhaps put this in the config.xml:
<preference name="EnableViewportScale" value="false" />


Is there a scientifically sound faster-than-light travel system for a spaceship?

Question: Recurringly in Sci-Fi spaceships manage to make it to lightspeed and above. Is there a scientifically plausible explanation of such capacity? How does it impact the spaceship's design and its passengers lives?
Comment: I disagree that this is off-topic - how do colonists get to a distant world?  A spaceship on a sufficiently long journey could be a person's whole world for their whole life.
Comment: Even if the answer is "no", the details provided will help shape a story that is not quite realistic but allows faster than light travel that is comfortably believable. Definitely on topic.
Comment: Don't quantum string balls suggest the Infinite Improbability Drive is much less… uh… improbable than it seemed?
Comment: @RobbieGoodwin how so? I just read the wikipedia article and I'm not sure I see the connection.
Comment: That was tongue-in-cheek. Still at one end Douglas Adams' Infinite Improbability Drive put the ship at every conceivable point in the universe simultaneously, then somehow wait for improbable states to realise a single solution. Pure pastiche.

On the other hand, quantum states give a probability distribution for the outcomes of each possible measurement on a system. Sounds much the same, outside academia.

On the gripping hand, if knowledge of both quantum and macro-physical states of the universal exhausts all that can be predicted about the system's behavior, whatever remains…
Answer: I was thinking about this topic a lot and I still didn't find any plausible FTL mechanism. Here is quick overview of important features of the most "standard" mechanisms used in science-fiction. None of them is scientifically sound, but some of them are plausible in principle.
Deformations of spacetime
This category of FTL transport mechanisms uses known fact, than general relativity theory  on its own allows very broad class of spacetime deformations.  Almost for any shape of spacetime, one can find distribution of mass that is capable of creating it. This allows solutions as the famous Alcubierre drive or traversable wormholes. There are, however, three very serious problems.
Problem of exotic matter
It is true, that the solutions of Einstein equations almost always exist and some of them allow FTL travelling, but almost always, this requires the so-called exotic matter. It is exotic in several aspects: it either has negative rest mass, or it has tachyonic properties. This means lot of troubles: in some cases, such matter could be spontaneously created from vacuum, producing energy in the process. By other words its existence would render our vacuum unstable. In other cases, this problem is not present, but such matter is likely to allow direct superluminar travelling and therefore necessarily time travelling. (In optimal case, we would like wormholes to grant us shortcuts to stars without breaking the causality, which is always troubling.) In all cases, such matter is unlike anything we have encountered so far and there is no good reason to think it will be discovered in the future.
Someone says quantum effects, like the Casimir effect, can take role of exotic mass. This seems very unlikely to me, since they are tiny compared to the rest masses already present in the system. For construction of warp-drive or a wormhole, we need effects comparable or bigger than the rest masses involved. If I would like to introduce exotic mass into my universe, I would probably postulate that new particles of these properties were discovered.
Problem of density
Another big problem is, that the spacetime is deformed only at very, very high densities. Even at densities of nuclei, around 1017 kg/m3, there has to be object of size of a neutron star to do anything at all. Probably much higher densities would be necessary for FTL construction.  This means that some form of reasonably stable ultra-dense matter would probably have to be introduced to allow this form of FTL.
Problem of too big mass
To achieve wormholes or warp-bubbles on scale of meters or kilometers, masses comparable to the mass of sun would be probably needed.
Warp drive

There are no indications that required exotic high-density mass should exist.
Automatically allows time travelling in the universe.
Probably requires existence of some stable high-density exotic matter,  like magmatter proposed in the Orion's Arm. It is unlikely we could build it only based on atoms. (This includes that it probably cannot be based on some field that is just "switched on", like it is in Star Trek. Required energy for such field would by far surpass any energy spaceship made out of atoms can carry, even in form of antimatter.)
Warp bubbles big enough to enclose spaceships require tremendous energies at very high densities. Civilization capable of their construction would probably find easier to "rewrite" themselves into objects of high densities and use smaller bubbles.

Wormholes

There are no indications that required exotic high-density mass should exist.
Wormholes would probably have mass comparable to planets or even stars.
Do not automatically allow time travelling. It can be prevented by Visser effect, how they called it in Orion's Arm. But the discussion of this effect is broader, including some scientific articles on the topic. Nicely explained on web of the Anderson Institute

It is thought that it may not be possible to convert a wormhole into a time machine; some analyses using the semi-classical approach to incorporating quantum effects into general relativity indicate that a feedback loop of virtual particles would circulate through the wormhole with ever-increasing intensity, destroying it before any information could be passed through it, in keeping with the chronology protection conjecture.
Would have to be transported in place by sub-light speed.

Tachyons, 'Mass Effect' or simply jump-drive

Jump-drive is used for example in Battlestar Galactica series without explanation of the mechanism. Similar jump drive is used in Mass Effect, where they offer basically this mechanism: Theory of relativity does not forbid existence of tachyons - particles that always move faster than speed of light. They can travel into past, thus breaking the causality, but this is not problem in principle.
Jump drive works so that the space-ship changes local Higgs field, which leads change of rest mass of particles of the ship. Eventually, all particles gain imaginary rest mass and become tachyons. Then they move faster than light.

Requires existence of tachyons. There are currently no indications they should exist.
Requires viability of change of the rest masses into imaginary values by changes of the Higgs field. (Probably not expected to be really possible, but plausible.)
Automatically allows time-machines.
Requires incredible amount of energy.
It is very improbable that the ship and crew would survive tachyonic state or transition to it. As the rest masses change, binding energy of every atom drop or wildly change and atoms become much bigger. Same things happen to the atomic nuclei.

Subspace/Hyperspace
Subspace/Hyperspace idea operates with assumption that it is possible to leave our spacetime into some other space, in which the speed of light would not be the limit. The biggest problem is how the transition into hyperspace should occur. We know how the matter behaves up to very high energies (hundreds of GeV) and we have not seen anything even remotely similar. From this, we can judge that if transition into hyperspace is possible, it would probably occur only using some very high energy mechanism. This brings similar problems as in the spacetime manipulation mechanisms.

There are no indications that the hyperspace should exist.
Does not necessarilly allow time travelling.  Structure of the hyperspace could dictate what is really "now". This violates principle of equivalence, but only if the hyperspace is concerned. (And it is therefore not in contradiction with experiments done so far.)
If the transition to hyperspace is possible, it probably requires so high energies we haven't noticed it so far. This might be prohibitively difficult to construct.

Communication via Quantum Entanglement
Here, it is simple. Although it is often used in science fiction, quantum entanglement is shown not to be able to transmit data faster than light. Wikipedia:

It is not possible, however, to use this effect to transmit classical information at faster-than-light speeds

References
There is a very extensive and scientifically serious overview on the web of Project Rho. (Although some of the listed FTL drives are not very plausible - and the author admits it.)
Comment: Thank you, I will reformulate it. I wanted to point out that if you allow superluminar travelling in arbitrary direction, it automatically means time travelling. (Wormholes avoid this problem, since you rather change the distances in space than travelling superluminarly.)
Comment: As I recall, the BSG FTLs were stated off-screen by producers to utilise wormholes.
Comment: I enjoyed reading your well thought out answer.  One thing no one ever mentions with regard to FLT is the issue of navigation.  For one thing, how the hell would you stop?  It would seem to require discharging an infinite amount of energy, just as accelerating to FLT would appear to require gaining an infinite amount of energy - or at least an unbounded amount of energy.
Comment: "but such matter is likely to allow superluminar travelling" — I thought that's exactly the point of a faster-than-light space travel system.
Comment: The thing about the warp drive field is the energy density required is very high, but it contains negative energy components. It may well be possible to drop the total energy to something manageable. Arithmetic on more complex fields has already dropped it from half the mass energy of the galaxy to a couple of Jupiter masses.
Comment: You are right, but the problem is not only the total mass, but also the density. Even if the required mass is small, if the required density is 1e20 kg/m^3, you cannot build it from atoms or related fields. The negative density remains the main problem, of course.
Answer: The Alcubierre drive is one of the proposed FTL drive systems that is the closest to being feasible.  In effect, it is very similar to the Star Trek warp drive, though an Alcubierre ship would probably look nothing like a Star Trek ship.  It works by distorting spacetime in front and behind the ship, compressing it in front and expanding it behind, while the ship moves in a bubble of undistorted space-time.
Such a ship would require exotic matter (matter with negative mass), or perhaps some manipulation of the Higgs-field (that could become possible following the discovery of the Higgs Boson), and would require a particular design in order to operate.  Depending on the multiple of lightspeed such a ship could achieve, it may still take quite some time to make a journey to another star, necessitating efficient self-sustaining life support or some sort of hibernation technology, or both.
The other mechanism for FTL travel that may be scientifically feasible is the traversable wormhole, but this is not so much travelling at greater than lightspeed as bypassing most of the space between here and there.  Such technology would require that the journey be made once in real space in order to carry the mouth of the wormhole to the desired destination.  Traversable wormholes may eventually not even require a ship, but if they are possible, I would imagine that at least initially, it would be desirable to have the mouths of the wormhole located a safe distance away from planets.  A wormhole ship could be little more than a sealed can shot into the mouth of the wormhole and caught on the other side; the passengers would not need to be aboard it very long at all, perhaps only an hour or so.  It may not even need to have more life support than a few emergency supplies.
Comment: Upvoted. This is more or less the answer I was going to give. I was going to say, under completely "hard" science, (i.e. the unimaginative and narrow-minded type that basically operates under the absurd assumption that no new scientific discoveries beyond what we have right now will ever be made. Ever.) no. Under semi-hard but still at least flexible science, the [Alcubierre drive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive), as Monty mentioned.
Comment: Fun fact: According to Alcubierre any FTL vehicle is potentially a time machine. But if you try to actually use it as a time machine, bad things could happen. (source: wikipedia and http://ccrg.rit.edu/files/FasterThanLight.pdf )
Comment: I've only taken a basic special relativity undergrad course, so it's extremely easy that I have something wrong here, but the formula for contraction of time when traveling at relativistic speeds has a limit of zero as you approach *c*. That is, when traveling at *c*, all "travel" takes 0 time and is instantaneous, from your own perspective. The math gets wonky with tachyons, since, IIRC, the formula would have those experience *negative* time, whatever that means. But anyway it may imply that from the perspective of those on board, no time at all passes while traveling FTL.
Comment: @KRyan, I'm not even sure there would *be* any time dilation, as from the ship's POV, *it is not moving*.  Any light that passes the ship from ahead or behind (inside the warp bubble) would do so with no red-shift or blue-shift.
Comment: while you could possibly get an Alcubierre drive to work, the radiation inside the bubble would ensure you'd not survive the experience (and most likely neither would anything else inside the bubble).
Comment: jwenting, radiation is an emisssion, correct?  So just block it.  Yeah, you might need new tech, or a lot of shielding.  But are you claiming that radiation is unblockable?
Answer: I will take "scientifically sound" to be "we are sure of the principles involved, and need technologies with better precision, more energy, or need to experiment with the engineering. In practice the solution might be very hard, and centuries away from being a normal technology." I would count nuclear fusion power in this category. Or perhaps a Dyson Sphere.
In which case the answer to the question in the title is "No."
The best examples worked through in accordance with theories of relativity, are scientifically plausible (by untested extrapolations of the theory) only if you allow for unknown exotic materials, or access to stupendous amounts of energy that would be game-changing beyond FTL travel in their own right.
The topic of FTL communication and travel is driven by science fiction first and foremost, because it gives access to a whole cosmos of settings and venues for
adventure and story telling.
That is not to say that these unknown materials do not exist (note they would not be combinations of atoms, electricity or anything technology can handle today). We still do not know what dark matter or dark energy are, and the big bang theory is widely accepted to include a short period of Inflation, where space expanded orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light. If these, or similar things at the edge of known physics, turn out to be true, then we don't fully know the consequences, and that might mean we would have a way to send material faster than light between locations, at a practical cost. However, I think it is quite reasonable to forecast that any such new physics will not have practical use for transport.

Analogy: In the past, a weak understanding of chemical reactions prompted much searching for ways to transmute base materials to gold (even scientific luminaries, like Isaac Newton, spent time on this goal). Eventually that gave way to chemistry, one of the tenets of which was that transforming elements (i.e. altering the nature of elemental atoms) was considered impossible. Then came understanding of sub-atomic structure and radioactivity, followed by tools like linear accelerators that can and do transform elements between types. However, these tools and knowledge are not a practical way to make gold on demand, and never will be, although they have spawned useful technologies such as radioactive materials for medical imaging.
In the above if you take "making gold from other elements" -> "FTL Transport", and "unknown exotic matter" -> "sub-atomic theory", then this is an example of how wishful thinking can inspire research, but that the end scientific results are only vaguely related in the end. In my opinion, this applies to 99%+ of science and science fiction conjecture, pretty much for any technology that we don't understand well enough to be building it today.

The most likely long-distance starships are in my opinion most likely to be a generation ship - a self-sustaining colony taking many generations to arrive at its destination. Or perhaps an interstellar ark would be more practical, where most life forms are kept in or close to stasis in order to reduce resources needed by the ship to maintain them (and thus the size of the ship).
These types of long-term transport would be major projects and very exciting in their own right. However, they do lead to a very different kind of narrative. The stories associated with FTL can have a new adventure location each episode, or a galaxy-spanning grandeur. The stories associated with a travelling colony are much more inward-focussed.
Comment: +1 for "this is an example of how wishful thinking can inspire research, but that the end scientific results are only vaguely related in the end" ´, that is easy to forget and it kind of matters. Both to those doing the speculating and to those dismissing the speculation.
Answer: There are a few slightly far fetched theories. Here is one:
One found here, that NASA is supposedly working (I'm skeptical), is that by creating a special propeller that expands space time behind it, and contracts it in front of it, you can have a ship travel just about as fast as you want. But this would require special exotic matter, and about the energy mass of the planet Jupiter. Basically, with Earth technology,that would be impossible. But, maybe, if you got a certain shaped ring around the propeller you could reduce the energy mass required to about 1,600 pounds.

I originally thought that FTL (faster than light travel) was impossible. Above is what I came up with before I did a quick google search.
But if you want one with some interesting possibilities you could look at the one from Xenocide by Orson Scott Card. In that story faster than light travel was accomplished by going into another dimension. If a mind could physically hold the pattern of something (the layout of cells and molecules), then that something could be moved to another dimension, and destroyed in this one. It could then be remade in this dimension in another place. This "other" dimension would be defined for the specific story.
This mind that could hold the pattern would have to be very large, many hundreds of computer's worth (as it is in Xenocide)
Comment: @trejder Pretty much, mine was first, but his has more detail. I admit, mine is the lesser answer. (I upvoted his)
Comment: NASA's article, you're pointing to, talks about works actually based on Alcubierre drive, mentioned by _Monty Wild_, above. It seems, that both your answers talks about the same.
Comment: Great! Just, please, don't take my comment as compliance against your answer. I just observed the fact, that both answers generally rely on the same mechanism, shown in two different sources.


Should we tag (solved) story identification questions with the name of the author / property?

Question: If an identification question has an accepted answer, it would make sense to tag it with the author's name.  Or should we not tag it and leave it as a sort of trivia question for others?
Comment: Point of clarification: are you asking whether we should *always* tag them (i.e. the policy is that once the story is identified, the question should be tagged) or whether we *could* (i.e. it's possible to tag the story id question, but not mandatory)?
Answer: No, I don't think so. Not all story identification questions are resolved unambiguously, and sometimes the asker misremembered details. If you know the name of the author already, the question is often not interesting.
The tags on a question are tags that searchers might use. By definition, someone searching for an identification question does not know the name of the author. To retag the question would be counter-productive.
I would encourage using tags that reflect what themes the asker remembers, e.g. What is the title of a story about a elevator through time and the smallest possible change → time-travel obviously, and parallel-universe
(I'm not sure about that one — I put it in because it involves changing the timeline, but I can see the case against).
Comment: @Dima If the user misremembered details (conflating elements of multiple stories seems fairly common in Story ID questions), an accepted answer doesn't mean that the entire question is directly relevant to the author of the work in the answer. There could be two answers, both right, both citing different works, and one could be accepted because it was "more right"... or simply more detailed, better written, etc., in which case the issue Gilles describes is still valid, despite there being an accepted answer.
Comment: "By definition, someone searching for an identification question does not know the name of the author." Knowing the author != knowing the work (especially for an obscure work or a prolific author). An asker might also search based on *suspected* author(s). (I am uncertain on this question.)
Comment: @ThePopMachine Why wouldn't it? I know for a fact that plenty of people do it — [scifi.se]'s [tag:story-identification] tag is littered with deleted answers that say "I was looking for that! Glad to have found it!"
Comment: That is why I specifically wrote that the answer must be accepted.  It would be nice to have a mechanism to associate a question like that with the author.  Some sort of a hidden tag, perhaps?
Comment: I'm voting for this but will suggest a less stringent variation: tagging with the author should not push out another, more descriptive tag. Simply put, if these questions are to be useful they have to be searchable *by someone who also doesn't recall enough to find it themselves*, which is why tagging with the author is secondary.
Comment: The whole idea of searching for someone else's identification question makes no sense.   (I'm also in the camp the they shouldn't even need allowed as arbitrary and 'too localized')
Comment: One logical exception, of course would be when the OP has noted that they believe the author is Biggs Namewriter.
Comment: @RDFozz - Indeed. If OP knows that it's an Asimov story, they're more than entitled to tag it [Story-ID], [Asimov]. If they turn out to be wrong, we can always remove the tag later
Answer: I'm going to say that yes, providing that the answer is clearly proved to be the correct one (by an answer being accepted, for example). If there is any doubt, the the author's name should be excluded, until all doubt is removed.
Comment: Although this answer is the most upvoted, I must clarify that this is *not* standard practice on this site. We do not retag story identification questions based on their answers, even if they're accepted.
Comment: As I said on a comment to Giles' answer the author should be excluded if there is a more descriptive tag that could use that slot instead.
Comment: Note that (except if the OP states the author's name in their post) there may be answers that were well-received, but didn't happen to be what the OP was looking for by other authors. It would seem odd for them to be included if the question is tagged with an author (or a franchise, or anything not coming from the actual question itself, rather than from the accepted answer).
Answer: It's a nice idea, but where there isn't a tag in place for the author remember that (it seems to me that) quite a few of the story-identification questions are raised by first-time or relatively new visitors who may not have or indeed ever gain the rep required to create a new tag.
Answer: Current standard practice or not, yes, I'd like to see this happen. My argument for is that if I subscribe to an author's tag, it's because I am interested in seeing discussion about the author and their works. I'd like to know what others are saying about them, what is sticking out to other readers (what one person remembers might be different from what I remembered; what struck them powerfully might be different from my own interaction with the work). I'm following an author tag because I am a fan, and even though an answer might be accepted, if I am a knowledgeable fan of that author, I might be able to contribute to the question/answer through comments or provide an even better answer :)
Answer: One reason tags exist is not for people searching for answers, but people searching for questions. People who follow an author's tag are going to have interest in story-identification about their works.
Note that this is beneficial even if the tag were placed incorrectly, in fact particularly so, because an expert on that author's works is more likely to recognize the mistake than others would. And of course they may also help to confirm or add weight via comments or additional answers when they believe it is correct.
Answer: I'll say Yes, because it would help in ordering the information after the question has been answered, as Dima pointed out.
Also, it might be an interesting metric later for figuring out what author has the least memorable titles.
Answer: I think it would be a waste of time to add these tags. Single use tags without a tag wiki get deleted automatically by the system eventually (see Do not expire single-use tags that have a tag wiki), so we would just end up writing a whole lot of unnecessary tag wikis or else have things deleted. Plus, after all this time of not doing it this way, it would be too much work to change.
Instead of relying on tags, use an advanced search: <code>[story-identification] isaccepted:yes is:a</code> + title of the work.
You can tweak this search to remove the requirement that the answer be accepted or search for just an author instead of a title. It's very flexible.
Feel free to add more information to answers (accepted or not) to make it easier to find them. (This is especially important when the title of the work is generic.) For example, it might be good to add the full name of the author, the year of release, or a description to the answer.
Comment: Mmmmh, IIRC we're not concerned by that automatic tag deletion thing. Like, you used to be able to opt out (but can't anymore), and opt out we did. Edit: yeah, we did. [This query](https://data.stackexchange.com/scifi/query/924671/tags-without-excerpts-ordered-by-use) returns 6-years old stuff


Loss of reputation because a "user was removed"

Question: I just noticed that I lost 10 points of rep because "user was removed". I don't get it.
Comment: IIRC, you also lose reputation points in MO1.0 if someone deletes the account. But in MO1.0 the loss is "silent" (you don't get notified) and "asynchronous" (the loss may show up some time later when a reputation recalculation is triggered). The SE2 software make reputation computations much more real-time and transparent.
Comment: @WillieWong (and Todd Trimble): it is my understanding that on MO1.0 rep recalcs essentially *only* happened, when a mod triggered it *manually* for some user, that is to say never for almost everybody. I know I had the points for some self or otherwise deleted answers for months or even years. Only upon the move did the rep go away.
Comment: My guess is that someone deleted their account and part of that led to some reputation loss on your behalf (maybe they voted on one of your questions).
Comment: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126470/what-does-user-was-removed-mean-and-why-did-my-reputation-change-because-of-it
Comment: @ToddTrimble It may mean also that no-one who has upvoted you had his or her account deleted while on MO1.0.... `:-)`
Comment: @WillieWong : I never had that happen to me on MO1.0 -- I think I would've noticed a sudden drop like that, no matter when it occurred.
Comment: There ought to be a "show removed posts" checkbox at the bottom of your reputation history. Does it not show when you tick it?
Comment: Thanks, Andras. I ticked it, but I don't see it.
Comment: Yes, Willie, I figured that.
Answer: When a user is removed, their votes are removed as well. So the most likely explanation is that the user had voted for one of your answers and the reputation you gained from that vote was removed with the user.
The cause for deletion is usually either sock puppeting and vote fraud, or the user reqested to be deleted. In cases of high-reputation users with lots of votes, SE performs a different procedure that retains the votes.
Answer: This is one of the consequences of the recent upgrade to stackexchange software.  Maybe this aspect of the updated software doesn't always seem like an upgrade.  This happens from time to time on all stackexchange sites.  I once lost more than 200 reputation points on m.s.e. because of just one user being removed.  Who the user is, and which of your questions and answers are affected, is strictly secret, and that secrecy has been defended at length by a number of people.
Comment: The loss of reputation has always happened, the difference is that is it much more visible now that the reputation is instantly updated. Before that change users could have gone without a recalc that would show losses from deleted user and posts for months or years.


Year Fixed Effects in a Dynamic OLS Regression with Cointegrated Variables

Question: I am estimating a dynamic OLS model since I have variables that are non-stationary, but cointegrated. In addition, the data is a standard time-series (i.e. one observation per one time period) so technically not panel. I know that one should control for year fixed effects when you have panel data. My question is should I still control for year fixed effects even though my data technically isn't panel. Also, does it even make sense to control for year fixed effects when the independent and main dependent variable are non-stationary, but cointegrated?
Answer: No in pure time series we generally don't use fixed effects. If you have data on lets say monthly frequency you could include dummies for months in general, e.g. having February, March, April ... dummies but you would include them as a general dummies where all Februaries are part of the February dummy rather having a separate dummy for each time period.
You can also include dummies for time periods where you think that the period was special in some way. For example, you could include a special dummy for all crisis years. Similarly, you could include some dummies for structural breaks and so on.
Furthermore, dynamic OLS model is more of an umbrella term. For example, the above would hold for ARDL/Pesaran error correction model. There might be dynamic models that have further issues, it is always best to survey literature on the particular model you are actually using then just generalizing.
PS:

I know that one should control for year fixed effects when you have panel data.

This is actually not generally valid statement. Yes more often than not you want to control for year  fixed effects in panel data but not always.
Answer:
...I know that one should control for year fixed effects when you have
panel data...

Inserting time (e.g. seasonal) dummies in also standard for stationary time series models. If the dummies are seasonal, such a component would be called additive seasonality.

Also, does it even make sense to control for year fixed effects when
the independent and main dependent variable are non-stationary, but
cointegrated?

It's not clear from your question the context that would motivate such a model but in principle one can consider such models.
(Presumably, you are considering the possibility that deviation from the long-run equilibrium relationship---the stationary error term in a cointegration regression---now has seasonality or time trend.)
In a cointegration regression
$$
y_t = \beta x_t + \epsilon_t \quad (*)
$$
where $x$ and $y$ are I(1), and $\epsilon$ is I(0), the OLS $\hat{\beta}$ is super-consistent, even when $\epsilon_t$ is correlated with $x_t$.
So if there is additive seasonality being omitted in the model and
$\epsilon_t = D_t + \nu_t$, where $D_t$ is seasonal dummy and $\nu_t$ is true error term, $\hat{\beta}$ remains super-consistent.
For testing for cointegration, however, specification may matter.
For example, the Engel-Granger test computes ADF statistic of the residuals from $(*)$ (but with a different the asymptotic distribution under the null than ADF).
If there is omitted seasonality, the asymptotic distribution can be different from that of Engel-Granger and their critical values may not be valid.


How to define an approximation algorithm when it fails?

Question: I have an NP-hard problem P where we are trying to minimize some objective function subject to some constraints. Problem P is very hard in the sense that even finding a feasible solution is NP-hard! (i.e., finding a solution that satisfies the constraints is NP-hard).
Let OPT denotes the optimal algorithm for P. That is, OPT will return, given an instance of P, the best possible solution, or will report none exist. Now, suppose I designed an approximation algorithm, denoted ALG, that solves P (of course not to optimality).
Given an instance I1 of P, ALG may fail to find a feasible solution when actually one exists and of course OPT finds it. So, if I would like to measure the performance of ALG in terms of its approximation ratio, how would I do that? Should I ignore the instance I1? As far as I know, an approximation algorithm, by definition, must return, for any instance of the problem, a solution that has a bounded value compared to the optimal value. But in this case, given an instance of P, ALG may not be able to find any value and hence reports none.
For short, if an algorithm fails to find a solution to a problem, how do we measure its performance ratio? Is it even considered an approximation algorithm? Is there something related to this in the literature?
Comment: Is it even considered an approximation algorithm? Probably not.
Answer: The usual way out in such circumstances is bicriteria approximation algorithms. Suppose that given a set of possible solutions $S$, a constraint function $f$, and an objective function $g$, your goal is to find a solution $x \in S$ such that $f(x) \leq 1$ minimizing $g(x)$. A bicriteria approximation algorithm will find a solution $x \in S$ such that $f(x) \leq \alpha$ and $g(x) \leq \beta \mathrm{OPT}$, where OPT is the optimal solution to the original problem.
The quality of bicriteria approximation algorithms is thus measured by two parameters. The parameter $\beta$ corresponds to the approximation ratio, and $\alpha$ controls by how much the solution violates the constraints.


The holiness of Jerusalem

Question: Why is Jerusalem holy to the Jews? Can you justify this by Torah or Tanakh relevant verses?
Comment: This = https://judaism.stackexchange.com/q/12911
∩ https://judaism.stackexchange.com/q/96992
Comment: I think more of these "basic" questions should get more positive votes. Welcome to Mi Yodeya, and thanks for asking this great question. Say hello to your cute cat!
Comment: Aryeh Kaplan wrote a book on this
Answer: Wikipedia answers your question

Jerusalem appears in the Hebrew Bible 669 times [...] For example, the
  book of Psalms, which has been frequently recited and memorized by
  Jews for centuries, says:

"O God, the nations have entered into your inheritance, they have defiled the sanctuary of your holiness, they have turned Jerusalem
  into heaps of rubble...they have shed their blood like water round
  Jerusalem..." (Psalms 79:1–3);
"...O Jerusalem, the built up Jerusalem is like a city that is united together...Pray for the peace of Jerusalem..." (Psalms
  122:2–6);
"Jerusalem is surrounded by mountains as God surrounds his people forever" (Psalms 125:3);
"The builder of Jerusalem is God, the outcast of Israel he will gather in...Praise God O Jerusalem, laud your God O Zion." (Psalms
  147:2–12)

ohr.edu explains why the name Jerusalem itself doesn't appear directly in the Torah

Jerusalem is mentioned many hundreds of times in the Jewish Bible. [It doesn't appear in the Chumash (Five Books of Moses)] [...] because it was
  not yet called Jerusalem.
Under Jebusite rule and earlier, Jerusalem was divided into two
  cities, the western part called Jeru (Yere) and the eastern part
  called Salem (Shalem). Both of these names do appear in the Five
  Books: "And Malki-Tzedek, King of Shalem" (Genesis 14:18). "And
  Abraham called that place...Yere" (Genesis 21:14).
Around the time of Joshua's conquest, the Amorites consolidated the
  two halves of the city, and they combined the two names: Jeru-salem.
  From this point on in history, our Bible refers to Jerusalem countless
  times.
Furthermore, the Chumash refers 19 times to "the place that G-d will
  choose" as the center for Jewish life and religion (e.g. Deuteronomy
  12:11, 14, etc.) The Prophets Shmuel and Gad finally reveal to King
  David that this chosen place is Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.

For further reading see also here and there.
Comment: What does the number of mentioning proves? Egypt is mentioned multiple times too.
Answer:
In Judaism, holiness does not refer to spirituality but to specialty, Jerusalem is [somehow] different, it stands out, it allows certain things and prohibits others.

Our sages summarise it in the Mishna (Kelim 1):

"עֶשֶׂר קְדֻשּׁוֹת הֵן, אֶרֶץ יִשְׂרָאֵל מְקֻדֶּשֶׁת מִכָּל הָאֲרָצוֹת."
"There are ten degrees of holiness. The land of Israel is holier than any other land. Wherein lies its holiness? In that from it are brought the omer [barley offering brought on the second day of Passover], the first fruits, and the two loaves [offered on Shavuot], which may not be brought from any other land.
The walled cities are still more holy, in that they must send forth the metzoraim from their midst, and they may carry around a corpse therein as far as necessary, but once it is taken out, they may not bring it back.
Inside the wall of Jerusalem is more holy than these, because there the less holy [offerings] and the second tithe are eaten. The Temple Mount has greater sanctity, because men and women with discharges, menstruating women, and women who have given birth may not enter there. etc.
Comment: This is 100% true, but it's not what Cat was asking about.  The implication I read in the question is why it's important to us nowadays, and the answer is not because you can eat Maaser Sheni there, because you can't without Parah Adumah (and IIRC you need the Beis Hamikdash to be standing as well).
Comment: @Heshy IDK, it says *Why is Jerusalem holy to the Jews?"*

The holiness of Jerusalem


What kind of lens do I need to buy to create a fish eye effect?

Question: I would like to buy a lens that creates a fish eye effect. However, when I look it up, it comes up with all different prices and all different names. I have a proper Canon camera and I was wondering what the specific name for a fish eye effect lens is, and what the approximate cost is likely to be?
Comment: We don't do shopping questions, so price if off-topic since it changes to quickly and differs my market.  The part about different fisheye lens though is fine.
Comment: I think "What ballpark range should I expect for a fisheye lens?" is reasonable. This filters out gimmicky add-on lenses, for exampel.
Answer: There are various types of fisheye lenses and, to complicate matters further, the results change with sensor size, although there are fisheye lenses designed for APS-C cameras only that will not work on a full-frame.
A circular fisheye produces a circular image with usually a 180° degree field-of-view both horizontally and vertically. A rectangular fisheye produces a rectangular image and so the field-of-view can vary more, although 180° diagonally is more common. Some lenses have a wider or narrower view-angle, so check the specifications. Anything too wide is very hard to use since part of you such as your feet or a tripod used with be in the frame and it takes some work to edit them out.
If you use the Lens Search Tool on my site, you can easily find out what fisheye lenses exist for your camera. Just enable the fish icon and choose the lens mount to start. You can also restrict it to some brands and to Full-Frame if that is what you need.
Right now, if you search for EF-mount fisheye lenses, there are 9 results. Only 2 from Canon. Look at the row that says Perspective to see what type of fisheye each lens is. As the name part, you can see from the search results that they all include the word Fisheye in the name, while Tokina writes it like a compound word: Fish-Eye.
Comment: Note that circular fisheyes are designed for a particular sensor size. If you use a full frame fisheye on a a crop sensor body, you'll get a rectangular section cut out from the middle of the circle. Going the other way (with an APS circular fisheye on a full frame camera) works somewhat better - you get a circular image in the cropped sensor area, and (depending on the camera) it'll either switch to cropped mode (so you get a circle that fits the cropped frame) or record black round the edges (if the camera always records the fiull frrame).


Unit test coding standards

Question: Usually when talking about coding standards we refer to the code of the program itself, but what about the unit tests? Are there certain coding standards guidelines that are unique to unit tests? What are they?
Answer: Roy Osherove recommends the following pattern for naming your tests:
NameOfMethodUnderTest_StateUnderTest_ExpectedBehavior()

See http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2005/04/03/TestNamingStandards.aspx
Comment: I agree with Roy. It improves readability, eventhough ReSharper keeps telling me that I should remove them to `NameOfMethodUnderTestStateUnderTestExpectedBehavior()` ;)
Comment: How to make this work when the method is overloaded, so there can be multiple methods with same name?
Answer: Off the top of my head, I can think of three differences in coding style for test code.
In naming test methods, I follow the pattern of shouldDoSomethingWhenSomeConditionHolds.
Inside the test, it is customary to follow the following spacing pattern:
@Test
shouldReturnAccountBalenceWhenGetBalenceIsCalled() {
    // Some lines
    // of setup code
    // go here.

    // The action being tested happens after a blank line.

    // An assertion follows another blank line.
}

Some insist on only one assertion per test, but this is far from universal.
The DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) is less of a consideration in test code than in production code.  While some repeated code should be placed in a setUp method or a testUtils class, striving for zero repetition in test code will lead to tightly coupled and inflexible tests, which discourages refactoring.
Comment: That's the **Arrange , Act, Assert** pattern.
Comment: Of course, there are a variety of patterns, which is why you should provide an answer too.
Comment: DRY is still important. If you need to do same  asserts in multiple tests, create common function  and call it in all tests.
Comment: @MichaelFreidgeim Maybe we are just talking about degrees, but I have a significantly higher tolerance for repetition in test code. I have had several experiences of building test suites with very little repetition, and found that the tests became hard to modify and understand when requirements changed. Then I stopped worrying as much about DRY in tests, and my test suites have been easier to use.
Answer: The main thing is to remember that unit tests are essentially mini-specifications. This means that the emphasis must always be on readability.
Firstly, this means that names must clearly communicate what is under test and what is being asserted.
Secondly though, which is sometimes forgotten, is that as specifications they should be doing just that - specifying behaviour. That is, unit tests should not contain logic - or potentially they fall into the trap of repeating the program's functionality rather than testing it.
Sometimes the tests will involve objects which are complex to set up, you should strive to keep this set up logic separate from your tests using something like an object mother or a test data builder.
I'll just round off with a few book recommendations:
xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code: Excellent book, some say it's a bit dry but I don't think so. Goes into a lot of detail about lots of different ways of organising tests and how to keep them maintainable. Relevant if you're using something like NUnit etc.
The Art of Unit Testing: With Examples in .Net: The best book on the nitty-gritty of writing and maintaining tests. Despite being really new I find the mocking sections a little dated already as AAA syntax is now pretty standard rather than just another way of doing it.
Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests: This book is just amazing! By far the best unit testing book and the only advanced one which puts unit testing as a first class citizen in the design process. Was reading this when it was a public beta and been recommending since. Excellent real-worldish worked example used throughout the book. Would recommend reading Roy's book first though.
Comment: Yes, but that belongs outside the test in the test data builders (which should themselves be unit tested if the logic inside them isn't trivial). Exception to this would be 3rd party libraries which generally are "trusted" to be correct and could be used without tests.
Comment: IMHO it's ok for unit tests to contain logic:  It's perfectly reasonable to test a highly optimized, efficient version of an algorithm by using a naive algorithm that does the same thing to determine the correct behavior.  For example, imagine testing a hash table by building a linear search-based associative array.
Answer: Don't put logic in your unit tests. For example, let's say you're testing an add method, you could have something like this:
void MyTest_SaysHello()
{
   string name = "Bob";
   string expected = string.Format("Hello, {0}", name);
   IMyObjectType myObject = new MyObjectType();
   string actual = myObject.SayHello(name);
   Assert.AreEqual(expected, actual);
}

In this particular case, you're likely repeating the same logic as what's in the test, so you're essentially testing "1 + 1 == 1 + 1", rather than "1 + 1 == 2", which is the "real" test. So what you would really want your test code to look like is:
void MyTest_SaysHello()
{
   string expected = "Hello, Bob";
   IMyObjectType myObject = new MyObjectType();
   string actual = myObject.SayHello("Bob");
   Assert.AreEqual(expected, actual);
}

Comment: Small correction: I think you meant 'string expected = string.Format("Hello, Bob")' should be 'string expected = "Hello, Bob"'.
Comment: @MikeRosenblum you're obviously right, and someone tried to correct it, but two reviewers rejected this edit
Comment: @Konrad: that's odd. This is a programming forum, right?
Comment: I've edited the answer once again as suggested by Mike Rosenblum.
Answer: Long, descriptive method names.  Remember, test methods are never called from code (they're called by the unit test runner that discovers and calls them via reflection), so it's OK to go crazy and have method names 50-80 characters long.  Specific naming convention (camel-case, underscores, "should",  "must", "when", "given", etc.) is not really important as long as the name answers three questions:

what is under test?
what are the conditions?
what is the expected result?

Test methods should be short.
Test methods should have a simple, linear structure. No if or loop constructs.
Test methods should follow the "arrange-act-assert" pattern.
Each test should test one thing.  This usually means one assert per test.  A test like { Do A; Assert B; Assert C; } should be refactored into two: { Do A; Assert B; } and { Do A; Assert C; }
Avoid random data or things like 'DateTime.Now'
Ensure that all test fixture members are returned to their original state at the end of the test (e.g. using a teardown)
Even if you remove duplication ruthlessly in your production code, code duplication in test fixtures is a much smaller concern.
Answer: Somewhat similar to what Farmboy has already mentioned,
My method name format
 <MethodName>Should<actionPerformed>When<Condition>

e.g
 GetBalanceShouldReturnAccountBalance() {

Unit test coding standards


What happened to wives of Lord Krishna after he left?

Question: Lord Krishna has many wifes excluding Radha or Rukumini (i assume both are same), this question says about what happens to Radha after Lord Krishna. but What happened to other wives of Lord Krishna after he left?
Comment: The part of Radha is already asked. It is better to modify to ask what happened to Krishna's wives after Krishna so that both the question and answer can be salvageable.
Comment: i edited the question @Sarvabhouma
Comment: Related [Is it true that thieves kidnapped some of Krishna's wives?](https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/q/8879/3500)
Answer: Only very few scholars think that Radha and Rukmani are same. Most of the scriptures say that they were different.
What happened to Rukmiṇī and other major wives of lord Krishna after he left?
SB 11.31.20:

rāma-patnyaś ca tad-deham
 upaguhyāgnim āviśan
vasudeva-patnyas tad-gātraṁ
 pradyumnādīn hareḥ snuṣāḥ
kṛṣṇa-patnyo 'viśann agniṁ
 rukmiṇy-ādyās tad-ātmikāḥ
The wives of Lord Balarāma also entered the fire and embraced His body, and Vasudeva's wives entered his fire and embraced his body. The daughters-in-law of Lord Hari entered the funeral fires of their respective husbands, headed by Pradyumna. And Rukmiṇī and the other wives of Lord Kṛṣṇa — whose hearts were completely absorbed in Him — entered His fire.

Other survivors of the Yadu dynasty — the women, children and old men
SB 11.31.25:

strī-bāla-vṛddhān ādāya
 hata-śeṣān dhanañjayaḥ
indraprasthaṁ samāveśya
 vajraṁ tatrābhyaṣecayat
Arjuna took the survivors of the Yadu dynasty — the women, children
  and old men — to Indraprastha. He installed Vajra (the son of Aniruddha) as ruler of
  the Yadus.

Related chapter of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam (Bhāgavata Purāṇa) : SB 11.31: The Disappearance of Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa
Comment: Sorry I am little confused. In last paragraph whom you are addressing by using word(at many places) _"his"_.?
Comment: @Rishabh Added the complete chapter link at the end of my answer, u may read it to understand the complete context.
Comment: @YDS I believe Arjuna lost the remainder of the wives to the Abhira bandits on his way back to the kingdom.
Answer: https://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/m18/m18005.htm  Swargarohana Parva Section V

16,000 women had been married to Vasudeva as his wives. When the time came, O Janamejaya, they, plunged into the Sarasvati. Casting off their (human) bodies there, they re-ascended to Heaven. Transformed into Apsaras, they approached the presence of Vasudeva.

Those 16,000 wives of Krishna were originally Apsaras born on earth as stated in Adi Parva, Section 67.

And, O king, the portions of the tribe of Apsaras which I have mentioned already, also became incarnate on earth according to Indra's commands--And sixteen thousand portions of those goddesses became, O king, in this world of men, the wives of Vasudeva.

Krishna also had other wives such as Rukmini and Satyabhama.
In Mausala Parva, Section 7 describes what happened to them

https://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/m16/m16007.htm
Rukmini, the princess of Gandhara, Saivya, Haimavati, and queen Jambavati ascended the funeral pyre. Satyabhama and other dear wives of Krishna entered the woods, O king, resolved to set themselves to the practice of penances. They began to live on fruits and roots and pass their time in the contemplation of Hari. Going beyond the Himavat, they took up their abode in a place called Kalpa.


Can police receive prison time for misconduct?

Question: Suppose that someone is a victim of police misconduct and the officer who was on duty at the time is eventually found guilty of police misconduct. Usually the victim walks out with award money (lawsuit or from suing an officer). Let's say the crime the officer committed was a felony or the victim isn't satisfied with the amount of money offered to them. Can they request that the alleged officer receive a (hefty) prison sentence rather than being awarded money of some kind? (Referring to U.S.)
Answer: There is no crime of "police misconduct" in the US, but murder or theft are certainly crimes which would qualify as "police misconduct". To take a real case, an officer in Georgia was convicted of aggravated assault, violating oath of office, and making a false statement (not murder, though he did kill the victim). In principle, he would also be liable in a lawsuit by the victim's family. However, these would be separate legal processes, the criminal prosecution being conducted by and at the discretion of the government prosecutor, and the monetary lawsuit being conducted by and at the discretion of the victim's family (on behalf of the victim).
It is possible that an officer will be convicted yet not found civilly liable, or vice versa; or both, or neither. The victim (or family) doesn't necessarily have any connection to the criminal case, although they typically can testify during the sentencing phase. In some jurisdictions (e.g. California), the victim has a right to testify at a sentencing hearing.
The result of a lawsuit can never be imprisonment – that has to come from criminal prosecution, and criminal prosecution does not result in a monetary reward to the victim (any criminal fine goes to the government).
Answer: For a police officer, there's a usually a difference between "misconduct" and "committing a crime", and another difference between "committing a crime" and "committing a crime that gets you sent to jail".
If the misconduct was actually such that it was a crime that would be punished by jail time, and if there was good evidence for it, then I would assume that the police would investigate it and eventually arrest this officer, take him to court, convict him, and send him to jail.
Whether the victim is satisfied with the money they received doesn't really matter. And nobody will send the police officer to jail because the victim demands it - the police officer will go to jail if a prosecutor thinks he should, and a judge or jury agrees. Independent of whether the victim demands it or not.


Should a wall be created as a plane or as a box?

Question: What are the benefits of a wall being as a plane or as a box? Should I use a plane with a box collider instead of mesh collider?
Answer: There's going to be a couple different things that you'll need to consider.
Note: that the benefits from the optimizations described below only really matter with a ton of walls. At that point, it might be wise to consider a different solution like binary space partitioning (BSP) for making your walls in your game. This would make your levels highly optimized for rendering (if designed correctly) and for physics (as you have a very good definition of what collides and what doesn't.
Rendering
A box is going to take more to render than a plane. It has more vertices and triangles meaning your vertex shader and the rasterizer are going to have to be run over more data. Therefore, only use a box when you need to in terms of visibility. Remove faces as needed for what the player will need to see.
Physics
You should always use a BoxCollider as opposed to a MeshCollider when you can. MeshColliders have to apply collisions per face (or as a convex hull) of the mesh and make raycasting and physics slower (but it's a negligible amount for just one box). Another thing with BoxColliders is that it's much harder for the player to phase through them when they are going really fast. Even with continuous collisions, if you find yourself still having things phase through walls, you can always just expand the BoxColliders
Productivity
If you're much faster working with planes with MeshColliders (because you don't need to adjust all the BoxColliders to match their dimensions) it may be fine to just use those if you get the performance you desire.
Answer: Expanding a bit on "Coburn"'s points:
Rendering: If you render the wall as only a plane, then the wall will only be visible from one side, as the plane (or more exactly its faces) only has one rendered side. So if the player is able to move around the wall, you would need multiple planes to cover all the sides, which means you end up with a box anyway.
Physics: Simple geometry colliders (spheres, boxes, etc.) are always faster to compute compared to full mesh colliders since not all faces of the mesh have to be checked individually. Instead "simple" raycasts can be used or distance calculations (e. g. distance to center of sphere minus sphere size).
For other physics engines that have a separate "plane collider" (which Unity doesn't), there is no "better" one. A plane might be slightly faster performance-wise, but you might then run into the issue of fast objects passing through it without actually colliding. Then you are left with either having thicker colliders (so box instead of plane) or move to Continous Collission Detection (CCD), as explained here.
Comment: @Bálint True. The user might then see the wall also from the other side although with wrong lighting in that case (light sent by the sources from the other side/room, instead the one he/she is standing in).
Comment: You can almost always turn backface culling off.
Comment: In your second point you didn't actually specify whether it is a pro or a con and for what. A plane seems simpler geometrically than a box, so is that your point?
Comment: @Bakuriu As far as I know, Unity does not have a "plane collider", so "box" is the nearest thing. I added a note for other physics engines.
Answer: One more thing about Rendering: When you have your own shadow-mapping implementation, walls made out of boxes can be superior to walls made out of planes due to peter-panning that can appear with planes.
Here's an explanation of the symptom:
http://www.opengl-tutorial.org/intermediate-tutorials/tutorial-16-shadow-mapping/#peter-panning
Comment: What is peter-panning?
Comment: did you follow the link that i provided? should be self-explanatory.
Answer: I was always told that if u are going to have shadows that its best to make it solid to help with light bleeding because the difference in depth is to small and it will bleed.
I could be wrong, but I make all of my walls and stuff like that two sided, a wall will only be a few verts so it shouldn't be that much of a saving by having it a plane.
There are some things that I leave sides of but its mostly the bottom or top of stuff that has lots of stuff around it to help with light bleeding.
I do the same for physics, didn't every really think about it but to me it seemed right to use a wall as a wall and a plane as a plane but that is just me
Comment: This is in an important point that the other answers are missing. [I have tried to build a room with planes](https://i.imgur.com/nNnUXB6.png) but they only let light pass one way so the shadows are completely messed up.


Which is the correct form "Timisoara's public transport network" or Timisoara public transport network?

Question: I often see it without the 's on the maps around the world.
Is it grammatically correct to write it without the 's
Answer: What we are trying to say here is "The public transport network of Timisoara" / "The Timisoara public transport network". So, we can change "the" to "-'s" in this sentence and it would have the same meaning.
However, it is not uncommon to omit the "the" in titles, street signs, newspaper articles etc in order for it to be read faster. This is perfectly grammatically correct as well.
Therefore, as we said that changing "the Timisoara public transport network" to "Timisoara's public transport network" gives the sentence the same meaning, we can see that omitting "-'s" is grammatically correct as well.
Answer: In connected speech or text, it needs to be definite, so it needs either the possessive "Timișoara's public transport network" or the definite article "The Timișoara public transport network".
Titles, captions of diagrams etc, often use "headlinese", omitting articles and some function words; in that context forms like "Timișoara public transport network" are not uncommon.
Answer: Different interpretation from the other answers:
Timisoara's public transport network: You are refering to the public transport network of Timisoara, as in Mathilda's car
Timisoara public transport network: You are refering to the name Timisoara public transport network.
Both would be correct.


How to uninstall Ubuntu Feisty

Question: I have Ubuntu running by itself on an older computer. I would like to repurpose the computer using old DOS software. I am having the problem that DOS 5.0 won't recognize hard disk with Ubuntu on it. So I cannot reformat C: and experience joy. Will the Ubuntu disk I installed with help me uninstall the program?
Answer: Yes, you need to boot the Ubuntu installation disc and use gparted to format the hard disk as Fat so that DOS will recognise it & the filesystem.
Answer: First of all, there is no way to "uninstall" ubuntu. When you want another OS, you simply let the new installer overwrite all the data on the hard drive. Also, DOS not recognizing the hard drive has nothing to do with ubuntu being installed on it.
It is important to understand the difference between a hard drive and a partion. A physical hard drive is the device you put inside your computer, and it will usually be identified by ubuntu as something like "/dev/sda". A partition, on the other hand, is a logical section of the drive, which ubuntu would show as something similar to "/dev/sda1". In this example it indicates that it is the first partition of the drive "sda". Partitions can be created, deleted or formatted, and you can have several on a single drive.
When you talk about "C:", you actually mean the partition that Windows usually creates to install itself on. This partition is not present in this case and doesn't need to be in order to install any OS.
Now to solve your problem, is the DOS installer not detecting the physical drive, or does it not recognize the partition? If it can't find the hard drive, you may be out of luck, although I suggest you ask someone who is good with DOS. If the hard drive is recognized, you should try to create a new partition table and a new partition. In case the installer doesn't support this, you should boot from an ubuntu CD, and run GParted. This program will allow you to create the partition that DOS needs.
Answer: MS DOS 5.0 was released in 1991 and is not maintained by Microsoft any longer. How old is this computer? Since it can run Feisty the hardware can't be that old. MS DOS 5.0 is not appropriate for hardware newer than 2000 and will cause problems like driver issues. If you really want to run DOS on that machine try Free DOS instead, it has the advantage of being still maintained. Another solution would be to install DOSbox or use VirtualBox and set up a virtual machine to install Free DOS in there. You probably want to install a more recent and lightweight Linux distribution first.

How to uninstall Ubuntu Feisty


Are Mallow and Geno unique to Super Mario RPG?

Question: Are Mallow and Geno unique to Super Mario RPG? Not so much Mallow, but Geno was very unique and I was wondering if he made any other appearances in other games. Super Mario Galaxy would be one of the games where I would suspect he could be featured or have a cameo...
Answer: Geno makes a small cameo in doll form in Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga. The Super Mario Wiki explains that

he appears as the mechanical host of the Star 'Stache Smash arcade game in Little
  Fungitown, explaining the rules of the minigame.

Mallow does not appear in any other games.
Comment: Geno has a Mii costume in Super Smash Bros for Wii U
Answer: Mallow himself doesn't appear in any other games, but minor characters occasionally pop up who look like they might be from his species. Geno (or at least the doll he inhabited) had a cameo explaining one of the minigames in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga.
The most popular theory behind their rarity is that Square-Enix kept the rights to the original characters in Super Mario RPG, and generally does not allow Nintendo to use them again. This has never been officially confirmed one way or the other, but worth noting is that the end credits of M&L:SS do list Geno as belonging to Square-Enix. This confirms that Squeenix does indeed own those characters, and Nintendo really does have to get permission. But on the other hand, Nintendo got permission, at least for this case. Had Squeenix been refusing this whole time, and only relented this once? Or has Nintendo just never asked before? Nobody outside these companies is sure, and the people in a position to know aren't telling.
Answer: That cloud power up from Super Mario Galaxy resembles Mallow from SMRPG!you're right! Geno did appear in superstar saga in little Fungi town!That's where they could be/are!


A socket operation wasattempted to an unreachable network, using bluetooth

Question: I've followed a blog article about making an application which finds Bluetooth devices and by selecting a file we can upload it to phone.
web article link: http://www.substanceofcode.com/2008/06/20/sending-files-to-mobile-phone-using-bluetooth-and-obex/
private void uploadButtonActionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt) {
    //GEN-FIRST:event_uploadButtonActionPerformed
    try {
        // Get selected item from list
        ListItem selectedItem = (ListItem) deviceList.getSelectedValue();
        RemoteDevice device = selectedItem.getDevice();

        // Build URL for the bluetooth device, note the port 9
        String url = "btgoep://" + device.getBluetoothAddress() + ":9";

        // Get file as bytes
        FileInputStream stream = new FileInputStream(fileTextField.getText());
        File f = new File(fileTextField.getText());
        int size = (int) f.length();
        byte[] file = new byte[size];
        stream.read(file);

        // Filename
        String filename = f.getName();

        // Trigger the task in a different thread so it won't block the UI
        SendFileTask task = new SendFileTask(url, file, filename);
        Thread thread = new Thread(task);
        task.run();
    } catch(Exception ex) {
        System.err.println("Ex: " + ex.getMessage());
        ex.printStackTrace();
    }

Now when running app, I can see list of devices available and I can select a device and also select a file for upload but when I click send it throws an error and it's content is:
A socket operation was attempted to an unreachable network.
javax.bluetooth.BluetoothConnectionException: Failed to connect; [10051] A socket     operation was attempted to an unreachable network.
at com.intel.bluetooth.BluetoothStackMicrosoft.connect(Native Method)
at com.intel.bluetooth.BluetoothStackMicrosoft.access$700(BluetoothStackMicrosoft.java:44)
at com.intel.bluetooth.BluetoothStackMicrosoft$ConnectThread.run(BluetoothStackMicrosoft.java:651)

Comment: run a netstat to find out wheter server socket is listening at that port
Comment: Ditto what @TechExchange said, and also the usuals: Firewall? Same subnet? Proxy?
Comment: which port is for bluetooth?
Answer: I have faced with the same issue on Windows 7, 64 bit and after I removed device from the list of Bluetooth Devices and then paired it again the problem was gone.


Meaning of the words "Wanted Dead Or Alive"

Question: What is the meaning of the famous words "Wanted Dead Or Alive"? Did they mean that it was for some reason legal for ordinary people to kill the fugitive described on the poster? Is there still this power in the world, for someone to declare that other people may legally be killed?
Comment: Maybe it only meant that the reward was payable *even* if the criminal was delivered dead, without meaning that the criminal could be killed without reason (i.e., if the criminal surrendered you would have had to deliver him alive, but if he resisted arrest or was violent and you had to lawfully kill him you would still get to be paid the reward). Wikipedia does not help much here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanted_poster
Comment: In any way, a more clear antecedent would be the bounties offered for scalps in colonial (and postcolonial) USA and Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalping#Colonial_wars
Answer: In the USA, people acting as Bounty Hunters have been (and in some cases still are today) legally allowed to arrest fugitives who have a valid warrant out for their arrest.
If said fugitive uses deadly force to evade or deter capture, of course the arresting parties are perfectly legally allowed to defend themselves (also with deadly force). But historically (until 1985!) you could shoot someone merely for trying to evade capture.
Technically this doesn't allow you just flat out murder a sleeping person. But once they are dead, they can't exactly dispute your version of events either. If they were wanted for a bad enough crime, law enforcement probably isn't going to be too inclined to get picky.
The exact details of the modern situation are probably better asked on a Law or Politics stack. But I did touch above on it being not quite as extreme now, but still in some situations quite possible for a private citizen to make a living as a bounty hunter in the USA.
Comment: So "wanted dead or alive" is not a distinction of the particular fugitive. Every fugitive is wanted dead or alive.
Comment: Sure it is. Its saying they'll still pay the bounty, even if you kill him. There were some situations where that was not the case.


network design for sql server

Question: Guys I would like to ask how do you all design networks for sql server deployments I would also like to hear the reasoning on why you designed it the way you did? I'm getting ready to implement some database mirroring using sql server 2008. So I was thinking to  have the network guys set up vlan for sql server than set up link aggregation. I also thought about having 2 nics for regular traffic than 2 nics for sql server traffic but I guess if I use link aggregation it's pointless to use two vlans one for regular traffic and the other for sql data based traffic. Anyway can you guys pleas let me know what you do at your various shops
Answer: I usually setup pretty much everything redundant.  You can setup a dedicated VLAN if you'd like, but a large amount of traffic will be coming to the SQL Server, so that may just put extra load on the switches CPU for no reason.
Any NIC that you have there should be two of.  Bridge them together in Windows.  This will make Windows use them as a single NIC.  Nothing special needs to be done to the switch to make this work.  This way if one NIC stops working (or the cable is cut or the port dies, etc) the other NIC will handle the traffic.  Best practice states that you would have each NIC connected to a separate network switch.
You can run the mirroring traffic over a separate private network, but most of the time this is overkill.  The Network link isn't going to be the bottleneck, the disks will be long before the network is.
Answer: It depends what you want to achieve. We did this for a large bank's loyalty programme:
2 x Web front-end with Network Load Balancing on a DMZ
2 x SQL Server 2005 (clustered) inside the LAN, but that can also be in its own segment in its own DMZ.
1 x App server, in the same network segment as SQL, which does one fast pipe into the SQL cluster. Since the web is slower than SQL every time, there was no need to have two NICs into SQL (except for redundancy).
Hope that helps!

network design for sql server


Why do we only see the clouds directly infront of the moon glow from moon light?

Question: Surly the moon is not projecting a direct beam of light which only lights up the small area of clouds around the moon. What phenomenon is happening that only allows us to see that center focus glow and not all the clouds glowing?
Comment: Diffused light is not enough to go through the thick clouds. This happens every time with every light source. What you see comes straight to your light from the source or via reflection /diffusion. If you would move you would see the Moon through a different cloud spot.
Comment: To add to @Alchimista 's comment, the total illuminance in any solid angle is roughly constant, so the farther off-axis you go the greater view area per unit illumination, i.e. the flux density drops off.
Answer: This is an experiment that you can do at home:

Put a paper fixed in front of a light bulb
Move your head around and see how the bright spot on the paper accompany your moves.

But, why is that? How is it that not all the paper is lighted the same?
When light travels through a translucent material some of it gets reflected back, some bounces inside of it and some goes through. As always the shortest path is the easiest, so the light coming straight "bulb-paper-eye" gets through easily (brightest spot) and as you go further from the center you are not seeing direct light anymore, but diffused light, so it gets dimmer and dimmer because to get to your eye it has to bounce in the right direction. That doesn't imply that the rest of the paper is not getting light, it is just not bouncing in your direction and the same happens with the clouds.
Answer: The light is scattered by the particles in the clouds. These particles are relatively large, compared to the wavelength of light, and so the type of scattering is called "Mie Scattering".
Light that hits a cloud particle may be scattered in any direction, but it is much more likely to be scattered forwards than than to be scattered to the side. What this means is that around the moon the clouds appear lit up, to the side the clouds appear dark. The amount of scattering doesn't depend much on the colour of the light, so the scattered light appears the same colour as the moon (ie white)

Here is an image from hyperphysics http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmos/blusky.html which illustrates how Mie scattering creates a white glare around the sun, or moon, and how Rayleigh scattering from air molecules causes the sky to appear blue.
Comment: @Alchimista, are you sure with that moon color statement? Isn't phenomenon is a [22° halo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22%C2%B0_halo)? Ice crystals act like prisms refracting the light concentrically and since the bluer portions are scattered more than the redder portions the "fringe" appears "warmer"? I'd might ask this a separate question to avoid extended discussion here.
Comment: Actually it is a nice place to add a nice comment. To everyone wondering what the real colour of moon is, well look at amber brown tint around the moon in the described situation (ie photo in the question). A bit of blu is removed by our sky of course but that is the most close to the real colour you can get without travelling there.
Comment: No. In this case it is just that the light is attenuated so we can see it free of over contrast. So its brown grey / ocher colour becomes evident like in the above photograph. Other phenomena are halo and corona but those are unrelated to my comment and to the photo. @try-catch-finally
Comment: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/the-moon-is-not-black-and-white-it-just-looks-that-way/


Lightning Node High Availability/High Throughput

Question: Are there any resources/best practises on running a highly available/high throughput lightning node? If my lightning service where to take off, should I be running multiple lightning nodes or a single lightning node? Would it be possible to scale horizontally? Maybe each channel could be managed on a different machine?
Answer: So there are a couple things to consider here:

The database, it needs to be remotely available if you are going to failover your Lightning node. We talk about adding support to eclair for a remote database (postgres) in our blog post here
Safely accessing the database. If you have two nodes writing to the database at the same time, it is possible that they write conflicting versions which could result in a penalty transaction on the blockchain. This means you need some sort of locking mechanism to access the database. We have implemented this on eclair as well, you can find the blog post about it here and the actual PR on eclair here.
The final thing that needs to be considered is how to make the key material available in a highly available, yet secure way. This is still something we are exploring at Suredbits. The "dumb" thing to do is just replicate the keys across every node you have.

Now you should be able to spin up an arbitrary amount of nodes. There should be 1 master node that is actively updating the database, and n shadow nodes that are waiting for the master node to fail. For implementing this, you can use something like Amazon's ELB and health check's to determine when the current master node fails, and you should promote one of the "shadow" nodes.
You can see a demo of this here on youtube
Answer:
Are there any resources/best practises on running a highly available/high throughput lightning node?

In Lightning Network, any disturbances (electricity outage, server crash) while running the application can result in permanent loss of funds. It is thus recommended that you run your server in a managed facility like cloud or colo if you are not able to provide high reliability of the servers yourself. This should especially be true in your case since you will be running multiple nodes that will route payments. Any server malfunction can have direct monetary losses.
For attaining high throughput (higher lightning routing) you can use autopilot feature to determine which nodes to connect to and what amount of liquidity you must have in each channel. The things that you might want to consider include increasing the centrality of your node, increase probability to have well funded routes, and improve your presence within your own geography.

If my lightning service where to take off, should I be running multiple lightning nodes or a single lightning node?

Depends on the service that you want to provide. If you want to provide a custodial solution, then running one lightning node may be considered. However, increasing the number of nodes will increase the probability of your routing capabilities, prevent bottlenecks and hence provide a better customer service.
If you want the users to be in charge of their funds, you have no option but to use multiple lightning nodes, one for each user.

Maybe each channel could be managed on a different machine?

No need to run different nodes on a different machine. You can create separate directories within the same machine and run the lightning node.
Comment: re: *"It is thus recommended that you run your server in a managed facility like cloud or colo if you are not able to provide high reliability of the servers yourself."* - I'm not sure I like the idea of hosting a high-capacity hot wallet on someone else's servers, as there are other security methods worth mentioning, eg watchtowers. Also, a lightning node does not require perfect uptime, it just needs to be online enough to ensure no channel partners have attempted to claim an outdated channel state (how much uptime this is will vary according to channel settings).
Comment: @chytrik I agree with your reasoning, but one of the issue that needs to be tackled is preventing force closes of channels. If OP is running a custodial solution, then their node will have high routing. If the server crashes at a time when multiple HTLCs are being routed, then it can lead to the peers force closing the channels if those peers are not able to fulfill those HTLCs. Watchtowers can play a role in ensuring that the peer does not cheat me, but honest force closing of channels is a legitimate concern that can cost high fees if this situation happens often.
Comment: that is a fair point; there is cost to manage channels. Thanks for elaborating


Why does my film camera not use entire roll of film?

Question: I have a point and shoot olympus mju zoom 105. It had been working perfectly fine with the first few rolls of film but recently whenever I have put a new lot of film in it automatically rewinds the film after taking only 6 photos.
Any ideas as to why this might be happening?
Thanks.
Comment: Did this only happen once? And what did you do next?
Comment: Is it always exactly six?
Answer: Had the same problem once with 135 film and a Canon EOS 300v.
Turns out, that:

the battery was quite low (and old)
it was winter-time outside with -5 °C
and some idiot (me) had the habit of tightening the film before putting it into the camera.

I did so for years with manually winded cameras. But the electronics measured maybe to much needed force and therefore decided to wind back.
Answer: The most likely theories:

Your batteries are weak.  Replace them.
There is excessive tension in the winding mechanism that is fooling the camera into thinking that the roll is done.  This would need professional repair, most likely.
The film is not winding cleanly onto the take-up spool.  Make sure you are loading the film correctly.  If the film engages crookedly, it's possible the camera would experience higher winding tension than it should.
Overloaded bulk rolls of film can cause similar symptoms.  Make sure you're using commercially-loaded 36-exposure (or fewer) rolls.  (Bulk-loaded film - which is available from a few commercial sources but is usually done at home - should be fine, but is more likely to cause problems.)
It might just be that the cartridges that manufacturer uses are tighter than other cartridges.  Try another brand of film and see if it's any better.


Exporting Volume Group From One Server To Another Difficulties

Question: I'm attempting to migrate a volume group from one Ubuntu 12.10 server to a new Ubuntu 12.10 Server(upgrades). My existing VG is spread across 3 physical drives, and within the VG is 2 logical volumes. I would like to move the three drives and the entire VG to the new machine and I'm following these steps: (naturally sudo is implied, and I'm doing this over ssh)
1. I unmount both LVs
 - no problems encountered with this step
2. I set the VG to inactive using "vgchange -an fileserver"
 - I get the response: 0 logical volume(s) in volume group "fileserver" now active
3. I enter: vgexport fileserver
 - and I get the response: Volume group "fileserver" has active logical volumes
if I run lvscan it displays all my LVs as ACTIVE which is clearly not what I want. As far as I know, I use the vgchange command to set all LVs in my VG to INACTIVE and even though the cli is telling me that 0 logical volumes in my VG are active after doing this, running lvscan on the very next line is telling me they are indeed active and thus I'm not able to export.
can anybody out there shed some light?
Answer: After a few days of searching for a solution I found this:
http://slashzeroconf.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/lvm2-remove-or-deactivate-problem/
which helped me out a lot. Using "dmsetup remove " did set the drive as inactive and I was able to export to my new system.


How does solar activity (e.g. flares, coronal mass ejections) change over the life cycle of a Sun-like star?

Question: As a Sun-like star is born from a collapsed nebula and generates energy by nuclear fusion some of that energy is converted to magnetic fields which fuel solar activity. How does that activity evolve as the star itself evolves?
Comment: To add to Joan's answer, it is one of the active research problems in Stellar Physics. We have no satisfactory explanation as to why should the diagram repeat itself after 11 years. What's so special about that number?
Answer: As in the Earth and more than in the the giant gaseous planets the Sun's magnetic field is generated like in a dynamo. A few facts about it:

The rotating plasma inside the Sun acts like a dynamo creating it's
magnetic field.
The plasma is ionized so all interact with the magnetic field and
vice-versa.
The sun as a fluid body also has Differential rotation, that
means the equatorial part of it rotates faster than the poles. This provokes what is known as the Solar cycle every 11 years.

At the begining of the Solar cycle the Sun's magnetic field is pointed North-South as in the Earth. During the cycle the differential rotation makes the plasma interact with the magnetic field causing it to be displaced. This makes the first the Sun's spots appear near the poles. As the cycle advances the magnetic field get more and more scrambled, it's orientation changes to west-east and the spots appear closet to the equator. Finally the magnetic field can't hold the "pressure" and "breaks" like a rubber band creating the biggest spots and flares. The magnetic field stabilizes again but with a south-north polarity and the cycles begins again.
Take a look at this gif image that shows how the cycle go.
And in this image you can see what is know as the butterfly diagram that shows how the Sun's spots are located closer to the equator as the cycle advances. And it lasts 11 years.
Comment: I was looking for an answer over the lifetime of the Sun (billions of years).
Comment: Just read these papers

The world's largest turbulence simulation unmasks the flow of energy in astrophysical plasmas

https://www.pppl.gov/news/2022/worlds-largest-turbulence-simulation-unmasks-flow-energy-astrophysical-plasmas

Reconnection-driven energy cascade in magnetohydrodynamic turbulence

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn7627
Answer: Magnetic activity depends on rotation due to the dynamo mechanism. Younger stars in general rotate faster. They (stars like the sun) spin down because their ionised winds interact with their magnetic fields and gradually remove angular momentum. A star like the Sun at 100 million years old may have had a rotation period of 0.5-5 days - much faster than the present-day Sun.
Roughly speaking, magnetic activity scales with the square of angular velocity, so young stars can be orders of magnitude more active than the Sun, manifested as much stronger coronal X-ray emission, flares and much greater coverage of starspots and strong magnetic fields.
Conversely, stars older than the Sun should be a bit less active, although the rate of spindown slows with rotation rate and so the changes beyond a few billion years are not so great and not so well calibrated.
A useful review article would be Ribas et al. (2005)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005ApJ...622..680R