Why does Pandora keep playing Incubus when it should know I hate it?

Question: I've downvoted every Incubus song that has ever come on my Pandora radio and it insists on trying to keep playing more Incubus. It seems the more I downvote one song, it tries to play different Incubus songs. What is going on here and how can I train it to understand my hate for Incubus better?
Answer: Pandora will "ban" an artist from a station if you give thumbs down to two of that artists songs.  The only exceptions are if that artist is part of the definition of the station, or if you have ever given thumbs up to a song from that artist.
Comment: Hmm. That may be the case but I do not ever recall giving thumbs up to an Incubus song. Strange!
Answer: Look at what station you are listening to. If it is a band or song really similar to Incubus, delete it and replace it with something else.
Also, you can look at your whole thumbs-up/thumbs-down history if you go to the station menu and click "Edit Station Details." That might give you an idea of why Pandora thinks you like Incubus.
Amendment:
If you REALLY don't like them, get rid of any and all thumbs-up you may have done in the past for their songs.
Comment: Is there a way to tell why it decided to play incubus? I've had this station for a few years and I've upvoted and downvoted a few thousand songs probably.
Answer: When it plays an Incubus song, click on the "Menu" button and select "Why was this song selected." That's probably as good as you are going to get. The songs by Incubus probably have qualities which are similar enough to the songs that you have Thumbed up.
I've noticed that Pandora sometimes takes the wrong path.
I've voted on well over 300 songs for one of my stations (No, really! See here), and I still find that Pandora plays the wrong kids of music. When this happens, I simply Refresh my browser and start over.
For some of my smaller stations, I will start over. Clear all songs which have been thumbed up or down, and try again. I usually have better luck the second time through because I'm more careful with which songs I select.
Answer: I've read of people pranking others in the office (or at home, perhaps?) by going by their computer and giving a thumbs-up to artists they know the person hates.  Check your station details and make sure there isn't an Incubus thumbs-up hiding in there somewhere.  Based on my experience with Pandora, it appears that one thumbs-up for an artist on any station makes that artist more likely to appear on any other station, if the style fits reasonably well.
Giving an artist thumbs-down twice on a given station bans that artist from that station.  But it's something you have to do separately on every station, and it only works if that artist isn't already listed in that station's seed songs or thumbed-up songs.  If you have a seed song or thumbs-up song by that artist, the two-thumbs-down ban won't work until you remove those seed/thumbs-up songs.
One final tip, if you're on a PC running Windows: Windows + L.  This key combination locks your computer. If there is someone pranking you, Windows + L will prevent that person from messing with your computer while you're away.


How much louder can a singer go safely above the conversation voice ?

Question: It seems that some increase in loudness is inevitable when going to higher notes. Is there any widely known  recommendation or rule of thumb from the voice experts as to how many decibels can a singer go above his ordinary conversation voice without risking damage to vocal cords ?
Answer: As you practice, you will find a point where, to get more volume, you stop feeding air through your vocal chords with the diaphragm, and start using the ribcage and other muscles in the chest to force air through your throat. The feeling of this, and the sound produced, may be described as feeling or sounding "overblown" compared to proper technique, similar to the same thing done to a brass or wind instrument. This border is your "red-line"; just to the "safe" side of it is your natural fortissimo; it's loud, but you could do it all night, or most of it anyway. Using subtle variations of technique to "focus" the tone at this volume level can make a VERY high-volume tone.
Beyond that line, where you start forcing air out of your throat any way you can, is your triple- or quadruple-forte. It's akin to a fighter pilot hitting the afterburner; it gets more speed out of the jet, but actually not as much extra as you might think, and it goes through the jet's fuel at 10 to 20 times the full non-afterburner setting. If you ever sing at this level at all, it should only be used for a few seconds, only once or twice a night, to give a big finish to a piece or for the specific effect of sounding overblown. Overuse of this vocal level, even with proper technique everywhere else, will very quickly fatigue your chords, reduce your range, swell your larynx and generally blow out your voice for the night (and at least a few nights thereafter).
Answer: Although singers may go louder on higher notes, as you've noticed, they don't have to - higher notes can be sung more quietly if using solid technique.
I can't give you a figure, but it is possible for singers to create a VERY loud sound without harming themselves, and a good example of this are opera singers, who manipulate various aspects such as larynx position to create greater resonance, one which specifically enhances the frequencies of the pitch they're singing. This is sometimes called the 'singer's formant' and creates a 'louder' sound. As I understand it, the changes they make do not risk their vocal cords.
Singing 'loudly' is not inherently dangerous, it's rather that singing with poor technique (whether that's quietly or loudly) is more likely to damage your vocal cords. So for example if you are pushing the sound from the throat, rather than supporting the sound from the diaphragm or making helpful use of resonance when singing higher, then you are more likely to hurt yourself. Yelling or screaming (as Tom says) can cause damage, but so can a 'normal' speaking voice if it uses excessive tension or pushing.
So in summary, it's not volume, it's technique. As long as you are having good training, I wouldn't worry about whether you're singing 'too loud'!
Answer: The three things you surely shouldn't be doing are yelling, screaming or cheering; the increase in loudness when going to higher notes is however just fine. Just never do more than you need to be doing...
If you want an idea of the loudness where it starts to become unsafe, opera singers risk their voice.
They do their best to maintain their voice which allows them to counter the effects of singing so loud.
Comment: I don't believe that the volume that opera singers sing at is inherently dangerous. In fact, because they know how to sing at a louder volume safely (by supporting the sound properly and avoiding inappropriate/inefficient muscle tension), they are less likely to damage their voice than someone who is singing less loudly but is not supporting the sound.
Comment: @MichSampson: Thus, apart from your contradiction that just summarizes to the point where opera singers are singing at such volume level that they risk their voice over time or by doing it improperly. I haven't specified anything about the difference in supporting sound, which doesn't necessarily mean you can go and growl at such a high volume...


What should I pack behind a cast iron fireplace?

Question: I have a cast iron open fireplace which is (loosely) attached to the chimney breast in my living room by the mantle piece.  There is a small but significant gap behind it where the bricks have been hacked out so it will fit.  What should I fill this gap with?  Currently any soot which forms can fall down behind the fireplace.
Comment: Can you add a picture?
Answer: a picture would help, but i sense that no matter what i will recommend you to use cob - that is, building with earth. i didn't understood exactly what gap you need to fill but cob can fill everything, it's cheap (cost nothing!) it's fixable, and it can stand the heat (with guaranty - in the past i have built some ovens with it).


Do people hear differently at different times of the day?

Question: Do people hear differently at different times of the day?
Thinking about it, I think I do.  When I wake up, I'm not hearing as clearly as later on say 5 or 6 hours later.  I wonder why?
Maybe, when we dream, or are asleep, we are hearing things a lot differently.
Answer: Part of it may have to do with the sound propagation through air - the colder the temperature, the further sound travels (hence, we hear things at night more clearly, like traffic drone, that otherwise are nearly masked during the day).
Answer: What you hear is normally judged against the background. Early morning and late at night ambient sound levels are lower so sounds tend to stick out. Also the air is cooler and sounds propagate more easily so you start hearing distant trains and such. So things sound different, and they're easier to hear.. When I'm just about to wake up, my hearing is the first to start up so all of a sudden everything sounds incredibly loud. It's just how my brain is wired I think..
Answer: I'd say when we sleep our hearing would be more sensitive, acting as a 'defence mechanism' in order to wake us up if our sub-concious detects 'danger'. I'd say something similar is likely to happen generally at night when light levels are lower as your brain processing power will shift to focus on other senses, and less on sight (if you're in a dark place), and hence our hearing would seem heightened.
Other than wave-propagation in air in areas with significant night-day temperature changes as @georgi.m and @Stavrosound mentioned, all other differences in hearing will be purely psychoacoustic. If you don't hear as clearly at the start of the day, that's likely to be related to how awake and alert you are at that time, and hence how your brain handles the information it's receiving at that time.
Answer: Great question! I have rather sensitive ears (we probably all do in here!) and I respond differently throughout the day. Around 11 o'clock everything seems to sound best to me.
I don't have any explanation for it, besides the psychoacoustic tricks my brain pull.
There's one lesson learned at Art School about sound that i never forget: Bass sounds get 'softer' to the ear/brain  the evening. When i was working on projects back then most of them where late nighter's, to get everything to sound 'perfect'. Well needless to say, everything sounded horrible the next morning, too much bass and muddy mixes :)
Nowadays when under time constraints and rapidly approaching deadlines I avoid mixing in the evening exactly for this reason.
Would love to hear some scientific evidence for this behaviour!
Answer: the weirdest thing for me has been working on music mixes from the early morning til early the next morning: my perception of speed changes ----- as I get tired in the wee hours a slow slow track can start to sound quite pacey.
and then back to normal the next day. I wonder if it's something as simple as the brain slowing down as you get tired.
Answer: I guess lying down, brings a lot of blood to the head and definitely creates a kind of rhythm.


How do big companies of software developers check for bugs in their programs?

Question: I was wondering how big companies of software developers check for bugs in their programs.
Do they just test it on several computers?
Comment: **Releasing them.**  *(judging by the buggy piles of .... that come out from the major institutions)*
Comment: They have very aggressive sales and marketing campaign, outsource development to other countries and get away with whatever bugs they can ... until they "unexpectedly" lose a huge market share.
Comment: Why do you think it is any different for big companies than small ones?
Answer: Here are some of the techniques that Google uses.

Hire good developers who are likely to produce reliable code.
Unit test heavily.
Use code review.
Set up a continuous build to catch integration issues.
Have dedicated QA departments.  Meaning both people testing, and automated programs (for instance using Selenium) that simulate end users.
Have monitoring in production to catch evidence of things misbehaving.

I have ranked these in what I suspect is descending order of effectiveness in catching bugs.
Comment: +1 - Actually that is a pretty good order (1-> 6) of when it is BEST (ie. cheapest, in time and complexity) to catch bugs as well.
Comment: While not a bad answer, you use lots of terminology like "QA", "unit test", and "continuous build" that are likely to be unknown to the sort of person who would ask a question like this. It would be better if you linked to or gave definitions.
Comment: maybe also usability testing, before the ribbon 90% of word feature requests were for features word already had, users just couldn't find them
Comment: @gabe: I've added pointers to the terminology used.
Comment: @jk: whose statistic is that? citation please.
Comment: I wonder how useful 3. is without 1.
Comment: Just one from where I work - performance regression testing: we keep a constant metric on the performance of our system against a known an constant environment. We have a unique problem where we only started recently (2-3 years back) doing unit tests (our LOC was about 200-500K at that point) - so we also have triage: "how likely is that by fixing this we introduce another problem," not ideal but if you 'CC' the right people you usually get a pretty accurate answer.
Answer: Bigger companies usually have whole entire Q/A departments which are responsible for testing code and making sure it works the way it is supposed to.  Its usually just as you described-- a bunch of people testing lots of machines.  Sometimes the tests are automated, sometimes they aren't.  See Quality Assurance - Wikipedia
Many times, the developers themselves will find bugs during the development process.  Also, customers are frequently the first to find a bug.
Smaller companies, like one I am currently working for, use the Agile Testing practice
Comment: Yup, and the QA folks make up test plans.
Comment: +1: This is exactly how we do it, the test team (which I'm on) writes the test plans and writes all of the test code with the exception the trivial unit tests (devs write those, some of which practice TDD but it's not mandated). We focus on acceptance, integration and regressions. When devs find bugs, they'll log it, fix it and we'll test it and write automation for it.
Answer: I would say its about the maturity of a company and not the size :) There are large companies that have poor development practices and small companies that are on the bleeding edge.
In general a mature development team will engage in the following activities to 1; minimize introducing new bugs to the system and 2; find bugs in the existing system.
Unit testing: These are 'mini drivers' for individual methods to ensure that a method does what it says it does. These are always automated tests.
Integration testing: These tests aim to check that a larger unit of functionality works within the system. This might involve testing database integration or integration with third party libraries. These are automated tests as well.
Acceptance testing: Acceptance tests are written to test user requirements. These usually just test the 'happy path'. In my team, these tests are designed to show that if the user uses the functionality as it was designed to be used, they will have no trouble. Can be manual or automated.
Functional testing: These tests are similar to acceptance tests, but they also test the 'unhappy path'. These tests mean to test the not so obvious scenarios. Can be manual or automated.
Regression testing: We use this term to do a 'full testing' of the system before its released to the customers. Manual or automated.
Gorilla testing: (Manual only). This is the kind of testing when very smart humans intentionally try to break the application.
Performance testing Aims to make sure that performance is acceptable and does not degrade over time. Usually automated.
Stability testing: These tests are designed to make sure the system remains stable over time. Automated.
Continuous Integration: This is a system that automatically checks out your code, compiles it and runs your automated tests. Your faster tests (unit, integration) will run each time a dev commits code. Some other ones run nightly (acceptance, functional) or weekly (performance, stability).
Code coverage reports: Shows you how much of your code is tested. Code that has no test coverage is more likely to break.
Different tools that analyze the code: These usually show where the code needs to be re-factored to make it less prone to potential bugs.
Pair programming: Two developers working together to deliver functionality.
"A cohesive pair is better than the sum of its parts."
The most important to take away is: automation and continuous integration.
Comment: @JBRWilkinson: I guess we can start talking about what it means for a company to be 'mature'. I did not mean to suggest it has to do with age, more like 'wisdom'. A startup can be mature/wise even though it is only a year or two old.
Comment: Disagree about maturity of the company - it is entirely possible that the head of software development cares about quality in a small/young company too, and that message is driven top-down. Maturity of the engineers, yes, that's possible.
Answer: It depends on the company and on the products it develops.
First, many companies enforce coding practices like code reviews and mandatory linting (automated bug detection tools) to reduce the amount of errors going in to the repository. Many companies also adopted unit testing. This is the case where I work (Google). When code is checked in, the tests are run against everything, to make sure no new errors are introduced.
Second, many companies have QA departments that are responsible for validating behavior. This is particularly common in Finance (where mistakes can be expensive and validation rules are complex), but also exists in companies that sell products to users where recalls can be expensive (e.g., Intel, Microsoft, etc.).
Third, whenever possible companies do Dogfooding (have their own users use the product internally) and then release limited betas. Many errors are caught at this stage. For example, folks working at Microsoft use newer internal versions of Office and Windows and DevStudio than what you have outside. Then limited groups of users or contracted companies get to sample it. Similarly, at Google we use internal versions of GMail and Docs prior to release. Game companies organize open betas to test their products and the load on the servers,etc.
Answer: Of course the answer is "It dpends", but I will give a sample from my largest project so far, which had at peak time around 50 developers involved.
The basic setup: A backend software for processing large amounts of data with BizTalk.
The first line of defense are the unit tests. In our case these got executed daily for everything checked into source control and usually some of them were executed manually by the developer before check-in. The unit tests were mainly written by the developers but sometimes amended with additional tests by the testers.
Next step was a weekly Virtual PC build, where the testers ran a series of mainly automated end-to-end tests on the data-flow based on the specification documents for each component.
After that the same Virtual PC was enriched with some business data quite close to the real thing and tested again with some specific use cases.
Then the Virtual PC was put together with other system components (also mostly virtual) from other departments to an integration test cycle based on end-to-end testing from the user entering the data to the end of the data flow.
On another track the installation packets were tested by the systems provider to see if they installed correctly on a production-like environment and if they could be rolled back if something failed.
After the installation on the production-like environment we ran load and stress tests there to test the overall stability (not something to be taken lightly when you run on 10 BizTalk servers, 8 SQL Servers and a bunch of other specialized hardware like an XML accelerator and a dedicated Archive - all clustered of course).
When we were satisfied with all the tests, the code was put into production. You get a pretty big latency to fix bugs in the code (like 4-6 weeks for the whole test cycle), and it's expensive to do all these tests, but the overall stability was pretty good. In fact the best I have seen so far. Again that's quite important on a system that processes several million dollars worth each day. Your requirements may vary, but that's how we have done it and it worked.
Answer: The original question seems more conceptually generic, than most of the highly detailed answers that were provided.
Let´s look it from a higher level (less detailed).
Software is developed to attend to specific needs from someone (person, company, whatever).
Those needs need to be mapped into the individual stories/requirements that would be lately (in a construction phase) be implemented in source code.
Having the stories/requirements well defined is essential for the Quality Assurance (QA) team (the actual software testers) to validate the final code, when executed, attends to the demands of those stories and requirements. So for that purposee, the QA team creates "testcases" to do that validation.
The code, once released to the QA team, will then be tested and bugs will be identified. Bugs of differente types and severities. Those bugs are tracked and developers get them assigned to finally get them fixed.
The usage of virtual machines, nowadays, allows for one tester to run different environments in one same real hardware. But sometimes you end up needing some computers dedicated to the QA phase.
I hope that helps you understanding (roughly) the overall process.
Answer: Well, I hate to be cynical, but with the number of open bugs in a certain 'device' operating system it seems that the bigger and richer the company, the more bugs they are capable of creating and delivering to the end user. If the software kinda works and looks cool then they just release it anyway. If the managers think its ready, then its ready. That's when the really nasty bugs start coming out of the woodwork, and the end users get to be guinea pigs. Ten or so years later, most of the bugs will have been worked out (and a few added for good measure) and the company will be ready to move on to the next big idea.


How should I plan for an international urban vacation with a toddler?

Question: Looking for all types of advice from whether to bring a stroller, how to eat out, manage jetlag, travel within the city -- in this case Paris, but I'm sure some of the ideas would apply to other places as well.  Please share any tips and recommendations!
Answer: We have taken our child under 4 years three times to China and it all went quite smoothly.
Entertainment:
In Australia we have shops called $2 shops which sells lots of cheap things. I just bought a few different cheap toys from there and brought them in a bag. This included some craft type things like coloured pipe cleaners. It's an 11 hour trip from Sydney so we had to keep him occupied.
Last time we went I bought a small box of Lego which he played with for several hours.
Sleep and jetlag:
Also our return trip from China is always overnight. This has implications. My son sleeps all the way back, but because he needs to stretch out I barely get any sleep. The other thing is, toddlers and babies seem to cope a lot better with jet lag. Considering they sleep at least twice a day, they just sleep when they are tired and my son just sleeps a couple of extra hours on the first day and then he's ready to go.
Travelling:
Take a light-weight stroller, don't take something bulky like a pram. The second time we went my son was uncomfortable with the idea of walking around the strange city by himself, so we were lucky we packed his stroller. Strollers don't block people walking in a restaurant either, so you can just collapse it and leave it under the table.
Familiarity:
Bring a toy that your child is familiar with and attached to. Whether it is a stuffed toy or a blankie. I suggest it is something that they sleep with regularly, even if it is there slippers. My son has a plush panda that he carries everywhere and this panda has been to China three times.
Food:
Adults like to try exotic foods, but children only like to try them in small doses. Keeping your child full will help them feel more comfortable and likely reduce tantrums. Find something simple that your child likes that you can find anywhere. My son likes fried eggs, tomatoes and rice. So if we are looking for a quick meal when we are out we ask before sitting down if they can cook an egg and some rice for my son, even if that's not what we eventually order. It means if there is nothing else at least he has something to eat.
Also my son likes a type of biscuit you can only get in China. This means he has something he enjoys snacking on in our bag at all times. If you want to do some shopping or you are in an art gallery and he is bored, just give him a biscuit.
Answer: Definitely bring a kangaroo backpack (to carry your kid on your back).
Paris has hardly any lifts on the subways (if you are planning on using their great public transport), and when I was there with my son it was always painful to go up and down the stairs with the stroller.
Check on the restaurants before you go in if they are ok with feeding your own food to the baby (how old?). I had some difficulties in one place because they would not allow me to give yoghurt to my son (even though there were 4 adults, and 2 other children eating there).
Answer: Things aren't that different. We brought a small $30 umbrella stroller that would get stowed at boarding time and would wait at the gate when we got off - because they're light and foldable they're great if you plan to take public transport and they stow away easily when eating out.
Jetleg was pretty much unmanageable... That said, getting him to fall asleep there was easier than preventing him from waking up back home (when you get back, he will wake up in the middle of the night and not go back to bed), but over the course of a few days our son had taken to the new rhythm. We just tried to adjust bedtime somewhat gradually (we were at a six rather than a nine hour time difference - yours may be more challenging).
City travel, eating out, museums, shopping etc was no different than it was in NYC.
Should you be so lucky to have family there, see if they'll take him a bit here and there so you can enjoy the city without child for a bit as well.
Answer: We flew from DK to the US the first time when my son was 8 months.  The flight TO the US was uneventful - a little complaining during takeoff/landing but that was it.  He was awake and happy and we had toys and munchies there for him when he needed it.
The flight FROM the US to DK was awful.  He would NOT sleep on the flight back.  The minute there was a noise in the cabin, he was awake.  We spent 8 hours walking up and down the aisles with him to stop him from screaming (to the disgust of many passengers - but what else can you do?)
We went back this past Christmas, and things went MUCH smoother. He was bigger, so could color and talk and listen to the music, play with the tv in the headrest, etc. He was also more amenable to sleeping in the seat on the way back (YAY!) and we had no issues with him at all.
We used a cheap umbrella stroller as well through the airports and if we were touring, brought his sockmonkey and blanket and he was good to go!


AdSense vs personal advertising system

Question: I have a website that gets +10,000 hits a month. I currently have AdSense running on it but I am finding that I am barely getting any clicks or ad revenue at all. I was wondering if I would do any better if I started my own advertising system, where users can buy ad space on my website, instead of Google AdSense? I also wouldn't mind knowing what type (ie: PPC, CPI) of advertising system I should use?
Answer: Run both AdSense and offer to sell ad space. Patch.com's network of websites includes both Google text and display ads along with their privately sold ad blocks sold to advertisers. Come up with a rate card for the ads which you will offer your advertisers, they typically include the location of the ad, duration, price per click or impression etc.
If you're website has an international audience you may want to look at http://buysellads.com/ to manage your ad space which is popular on many web related sites and blogs. Otherwise start contacting local companies to advertise given you have 10,000 hits a month, though I assume you mean Visits as a hit to your server can mean each and every graphic loading from a single visit.
Answer: The site I used to run had similar traffic, I found that running my own adverts along with Adsense and Amazon and iTunes Affiliate programs was the most successful mix.
Amazon is very useful as you're credited for anything the user buys after the click through no matter which item they clicked.

AdSense vs personal advertising system


Power rack safety bars are either too high or too low

Question: The guards are either too high or too low. When I put them too low the bar still touches my neck if I was to bail out of a lift. When they are 1 hole up the bar doesn't touch my chest (even when I arch my back a bit and inhale, I just started lifting again).
Answer: Here's a video illustrating benching in the power cage. He has a pretty high arch but that's the only alternative if the lower safety is indeed too low.
Another option is to do the pin press. It's not a full range movement or a substitute for regular bench press, but it is a nice supplemental exercise which you can rotate with regular bench.
Finally, dumbbell bench press is comparable to barbell and is a lot safer when training by yourself. Also as @MaedeRubenstein mentioned, make sure to keep the bar/dumbbells over your chest. Even when you start failing, just let it come down to your chest. Attempting to throw it back into the hooks might cause you to miss and end up with the bar crushing your neck. If it lands on your chest one technique is just to roll it down to your thighs, and just sit up.
Answer: It sounds like the too-low position is right - just touching your neck. I'm assuming that in that spot you can still slide out if you needed to. (In other words, that just touching is not the same as crushing.) With so many different body sizes you're not going to find a 'perfect' fit - as long as the bar doesn't 'crush' your neck you're fine. (And keep the bar over your chest - not neck - when lifting.)
Answer: You could try putting a towel or other padding underneath you.


How do I create a sequential workflow in visual studio to update a list column?

Question: I have list in SharePoint with a field that I want to auto-populate based on values of other fields in the row.  I would normally use a calculated field but the calculated field doesn't have everything I need to do that.  Therefore, instead I would like to use a workflow on the list that is triggered when an item is created/changed and that will set the value of my calculated field.  I've already done this by creating the workflow through the SharePoint UI but I would now like to do this using visual studio for ease of deployment.
Answer: The event receiver is much better suited for your task. You need to create an event receiver and handle ItemAdding/ItemUpdating or ItemAdded/ItemUpdated events in synchronous mode. Workflow is more useful for long-running operations whti often some people interaction involved.
Comment: Thanks.  That worked great for me and did not require much code.
Answer: I'm assuming this is for SharePoint 2010.
Using SharePoint Designer 2010 you can create workflows and then export them for ease of deployment. A workflow this simple will be easier in SPD vs Visual Studio.
If you want to do it in VS, you'll need VS2010, installed on a box with SharePoint installed. You can then create a SharePoint workflow project, then create some actions and using custom code you can modify the columns accordingly. There are a load of great tutorials to walk you through this process online.
Answer: I personally would recommend doing this in an event receiver instead of a workflow. Visual Studio 2010 has a nice project template you can use if you have SharePoint 2010 - otherwise look into a VS plugin tool called WSP Builder. This link can provide you some insight on how to create the event receiver.


What is the largest performed/possible bruteforce attack to date?

Question: I've read that cracking 128-bit key is currently out of reach of all humanity. However, I can't seem to find any information on what scope of brute force attacks have been performed or are possible at the current time. Can someone provide some information on this subject with quotable reference?
Comment: Do you need sentences/phrases to quote, or could you quote [this](http://stats.distributed.net/projects.php?project_id=8)?
Comment: @RickyDemer Some paper would be ideal, but probably the website will do.
Answer: The last major effort I know of for cracking keys was the Distributed.net effort.
You can find the project page at http://www.distributed.net/RC5/en. In 2002, they cracked a 64-bit RC5 key using at total of 331,252 computers over 1,757 days. Their maximum throughput was "equivalent to 32,504 800MHz Apple PowerBook G4 laptops or 45,998 2GHz AMD Athlon XP machines or (to use some rc5-56 numbers) nearly a half million Pentium Pro 200s." as it said in their press release.
At the time, they moved on to doing a 72-bit key, which would be 256 times harder.
If we do some Moore-Law-type hand waving, we'd see a $2^7$ (128×) increase in compute power in ten years. That means that if you started today, it would only be twice as hard as breaking 64-bits was a decade ago. Doable, but not many people would actually want to bother.
Even if you're a government, buying a zero-day exploit and tailoring your own malware would be cheaper.
Answer: Any symmetric crypto with key length of 64 bits or less can be brute forced with the relatively cheap copacobana hardware.
If a major player built special purpose hardware like this filling racks with $256$ copacobanas in parallel, they would in theory be able to brute force keys of $2 ^ {64 + 8} = 2 ^ {72}$ bits. But that is still a long way from 128 bits. To brute force 128 bits, you would have to connect $2 ^ {128-64} = 2 ^{64}$ copacobanas. That is just too many to be practically doable. Maybe it will be possible in 10 to 20 years or so, who knows. By then everybody has surely switched to 256 bit keys or longer anyway.
Answer: I am currently enrolled in an online course of cryptography by Prof. Dan Boneh of Stanford University. In one of the lectures, he told that currently algorithms where the brute force attack requires less than $2^{90}$ trials are weak and anything above that is safe. So, 128-bit is currently out of reach of the fastest machine present on earth, as it requires $2^{128}$ trials to crack it.
Answer: For RSA, the factoring challenge for 768 bit RSA modulus was met in December 2009. Authors published their procedure here. What this means is that if you have a RSA private key of 768 bit, you are potentially vulnerable to practical factoring attack with hardware available today.


Why are planetary systems so rare?

Question: According to this site there are 258 know planetary systems and 302 planets. Mostly each of the listed system has only 1 planet of Mercury's or Mars' size, while our system has up to 8 planets. From what I know our sun is not a "big" star, so theoretically other bigger stars probably threw out more planetary material, so they should have many more planets.
Humans know about billions of stars and since planets are made from what remained from star's birth then why aren't there billions and billions of planets?
Comment: http://xkcd.com/1071/
Answer: Planets aren't very easy to spot - 258 known planets doesn't mean 258 planets out there.
There is a strong selection effect. Detecting planets based on the movement of a star could only detect very massive planets very close to the star which had a significant gravitational effect. Newer techniques based on a planet blocking some of the stars light are more sensitive to planets closer to the star - it would be very hard to spot pluto's effect at blocking the sun's ligth if we were a long way away
Comment: Not yet, but [New Horizons](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html) is on its way with the bad news.
Comment: Yeah, but Pluto isn't a planet anyway. 8-)}
Comment: @KeithThompson - has anyone told it ?
Answer: There may well be billions of planets in our Galaxy.
All stars in our Galaxy are in relative motion and occasionally a star passes very close to the line between observers on Earth and a background star. The light from the background star is deflected by the gravitational field in a phenomenon called gravitational microlensing. The gravity of a planet orbiting the host star can also deflect the light from the background star and thus the planet's presence known.
There has been a recent discovery by gravitational microlensing of a large population of "free-floating" jupiter-mass planets, or "nomads". These are planets which do not orbit a host star. The research suggests that there could be almost two jupiter-mass nomad planets for every star in the Galaxy. See http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3544v1.   Other work suggests that there could be as many as 100,000 nomad planets (of masses ranging all the way down to almost Pluto's mass) per main sequence star, see http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012MNRAS.423.1856S.
Answer: That website hasn't been updated in over 2 years, and exoplanet discovery rates are always increasing. There are regularly updated repositories out there, for instance exoplanets.org, which is even used by professionals for getting quick access to whatever data has been published to date. (There are smart phone apps that draw on such sites, too, if you are interested). Note that there are at least 600 planets listed there.
In fact, there are likely to be many more planets in the data obtained by Kepler. Even though most of these have yet to be confirmed with followup observations, this article discusses how we do not expect many false positives.
And, as alluded to in @Martin's answer, there are biases in our methods of detection. The two most common methods today are transits and radial velocity, which are better at detecting close-in, large planets and close-in, massive planets, respectively. The various methods are summarized on Wikipedia. Exoplanet detection is still very much in the stage where the lack of a detection does not mean there is nothing there.

Why are planetary systems so rare?


Script for ssh Agent Management: Is this adequate? Any bugs?

Question: The following is something I use to manage my ssh agent settings.
#!/bin/echo "Must source this:"
## Ensure that ~/.ssh/env contains valid values

unset SSH_AGENT_PID SSH_ENV_REFRESH

[ -r ~/.ssh/env ] && . ~/.ssh/env
[ -n "$SSH_AGENT_PID" ]  || {
    # No env file (or it's badly corrupted:
    eval $(ssh-agent &>/dev/null) &> /dev/null
    SSH_ENV_REFRESH=1
    }

# Ping the agent process:
kill -0 "$SSH_AGENT_PID" >& /dev/null || {
    # No process, so start a new one:
    eval $(ssh-agent &>/dev/null) &> /dev/null
    SSH_ENV_REFRESH=1
    }

ssh-add -l &> /dev/null
[ "$?" -gt 1 ] && {
    # Process alive but unable to be contacted
    # for some reason (wedged/defunct process,
    # or damaged/corrupt UNIX domain socket node?)

    # So kill it:
    kill "$SSH_AGENT_PID" >& /dev/null
    # ... with extreme prejudice if necessary:
    kill -0 "$SSH_AGENT_PID" >& /dev/null \
    || kill kill -9 "$SSH_AGENT_PID" >& /dev/null

    # ... and start a new one
    eval $(ssh-agent &>/dev/null) &> /dev/null
    SSH_ENV_REFRESH=1
    }

[ -z "$SSH_ENV_REFRESH" ] || {
    # Over-write old env file:
    printenv | grep "^SSH_A" > ~/.ssh/env
    # Append export command:
    echo "export SSH_AGENT_PID SSH_AUTH_SOCK" >> ~/.ssh/env

    # Load the (null-passphrase) identites into the agent:
    ssh-add  < /dev/null &> /dev/null
    }

It's intended to be sourced (. ~/lib/sshagent.sh) from ~/.bashrc or other login or
shell start-up files ... or even cron jobs.  It works for me but I'm hoping folks here will review it and offer suggestions about any corner cases that I'm missing.
I used to only run it from ~/.bash_login ... but then I'd find that, in some cases, my shells
wouldn't pick up the settings (X display manager and I think remote ssh non-login sessions ... cases where ssh is called with a command).  In some other cases the old settings would persist and not updated when an agent process was restarted (for whatever reason).  So I run it in ~/.bashrc and try to avoid any stray output ... as is recommended for ~/.bashrc in general.
So, are there any evident corner cases or bugs? Would this make sense for something like /etc/bashrc?  Is it reasonably portable to other shells?
Answer: One portability issue in your script is the use of &> /dev/null to redirect both stdout and stderr.  This is a bashism and won't necessarily work on other shells. (I was recently bitten by this one.)  The more portable way is to use > /dev/null 2>&1.
Answer: Why are you writing your own? why not use a handy dandy little product called keychain?
Here's Gentoo's Keychain Guide (possibly newer version of same article on Funtoo)
It's basically a  little program that allows you to use password protected keys, without typing the password all the time. (It should be available on whatever distro you're using)
You may also be interested in Gentoo's Open SSH Key Management series: part 1, part 2, and part 3. Which looks like it includes some things that you're trying to do.


Böotes Void and Dark Galxies

Question: Wouldn't it be possible that Böotes Void, a space we generally consider to be "empty" be filled with a number of undetectable dark galaxies?
Answer: Voids are not completely empty, but merely under-dense regions. They were thought to be completely empty at the beginning, but afterwards some galaxies were found inside, specially dwarf blue galaxies. The so-called Local Void, for example, is crossed by wispy filaments with galaxies.
The so-called voids are detected in surveys like SDSS. We are talking about mapping very distant regions Mpc away, so part of its 'emptiness' is simply due to the limiting magnitude of the surveys, but very probably a certain number of fainter dwarf galaxies might be found inside them in the future.
You may want to visit Brent Tully's personal webpage. He is a leading expert in voids. As additional material for his paper 'Our Motion Away from the Local Void' 2008, ApJ, 676, 184, he did some very nice animations: http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~tully/
And that is a very good example, since in that paper I think he gave an estimate of the size of the Local Void, based upon the proper motion of a galaxy that is inside.

Böotes Void and Dark Galxies


How dangerous is it to carry oil/gasoil/gas at the back of one's car?

Question: Does it present incredible risks in case of accident ?
Answer: Carry the fuel in an approved container, some local laws require color coded tanks for gasoline, diesel, alcohol etc. If you must carry fuel in the interior of the vehicle use common sense. Don't smoke, and open the windows to avoid a build up of fumes/vapors. If you are using the fuel to power a lawnmower, generator, etc carry as little as possible for the shortest distance you can. An alternative is to fill the fuel contaner from your vehicle using an approved siphoning devise. Do not insert a hose in the tank and suck on it with your mouth. If the situation requires carry a portable container, position it in the vehicle so that is unlikely to tip over or slide while the vehicle is moving. If the fuel must be carried due to the distance between fuel supplies then empty it into the tank as soon as possible.If it is 350 miles between supplies and the vehicle range is 300 miles add the carried fuel as soon as you can. Don't carry the fuel in a portable container any longer than needed.
Comment: Siphoning fuel from your tank to power another device may not be such a good idea, as many modern cars now include an anti-siphon device in the fuel filler to reduce fuel theft. I'll agree with the rest of mike's comments though. Most filling stations (at least round here) sell approved containers for around the price of a gallon of fuel.
Answer: When going on long trips or out of the way trips where you know you may not see a gas station for a while, it's worth bringing along extra fuel in a safe and approved container (ie, don't put fuel in a plastic soda bottle and call it a day).
However, the safest policy, if you're just going about town, is to keep your eye on the fuel gauge and plan accordingly. Things I always maintain in the back though, are antifreeze/coolant, synthetic engine oil, and hose repair tape.


Bokken and Jo restoration

Question: I have an old jo and bokken that are quiet damaged after repeating hitting other fast flying pieces of wood.  Is there a way to bring those back to life from an aesthetic point of view as they are find from a structural point of view.  They just look fairly well worn.
Answer: Usually, it's enough to give a light sanding with fine grit sandpaper and a rub down with boiled linseed oil. It's important to use boiled linseed oil, as it will properly permeate the wood.
If they were meant more for decoration or a trophy after years of service, and no longer intended to be used, a light varnish will give them a beautiful luster. Typically, it's this sort of varnish that's put on inexpensive and poorly made bokken, and tends to crack and chip away after little use.
Answer: If you have mechanical dents in the wood -- not broken fibers/splintering -- there's a wood working trick you can use to raise the dents: Get an iron, put it on highest heat setting. Take a clean rag wet, but not dripping. Fold the rag so a wet corner of the rag covers the dent -- touch the iron to the rag. The idea is to flash the water into steam with that part of rag against the wood. THe steam goes into the wood a little bit and you'll be left with -- usually -- a little bump where the wood is now 'proud' (above the rest of the surface height.) Then just a touch of sanding or planing. I suggest making dents in something else and experimenting a little.
Answer: There is also a small glass rod type tool that you can find at better billiard/pool stores. It's designed to be rubbed along the pool cue to raise the dents that can occur through normal play. It will also work if the wood is already lacquered, where the steam trick (Which is quite useful) won't work on sealed wood.

Bokken and Jo restoration


Maintaining regression results on web server or locally

Question: I have a set of test cases which are run on every release of the compiler. The regression logs have to be in readable format. I already have a script to extract information from the logs which gives the name of test and pass-fail result. Now I need to format these result so that they can viewed in version based manner, use the bug tracking system to insert bug numbers, filter. I'm planning to host a server for doing this. Is there a html template or a software which can make my life easier?
Answer: Jenkins might be useful for you.  You can use it to run a test suite against a build and then display the test results in a variety of ways.  Jenkins can preserve the test results for each build so that you can look at the results of previous builds.


Can't get group without Destroyer's End achievement, advice

Question: I am not in a raiding guild but have achieved an ilvl of 390 on my rogue. I would like to do Dragon Soul runs outside of LFR to get higher ilvl gear. The problem is, no one will take a toon without the Destroyer's End achievement. What are some things I can do to get through a normal DS run to get this achievement and get into subsequent groups? I'm sure it'll be much easier to get in, but every time I ask a group leader to make an exception (I assure them I will not roll on items just to get the achievement), I get blown off because of no achievement.
Answer: Other than continuing to hunt for that first group that will take you regardless of your achievement, which will then let you get your achievement, your other option is to use an addon like Underachiever which lets you "fake" achievement links to chat.
I can't really recommend that, but given I've been in that situation (high ilvl, plenty of experience and achievement but on a different character) I can understand the frustration.
Answer: Make your own group, set your own rules.
However if you do not understand the encounters or have the ability to lead a group, this will not work out well for you.


My account is disabled on Facebook, will a second copy of it be kept on the server?

Question: My account is stated as disabled, will my account still be able to  be re-enabled with existing information when I reach 13 this year June or do I need to re-create a new Facebook account?
Answer: Are you sure Facebook disabled your account for being less than 13 years old. Hmm, they should have sent a notification on your email, if you have got one they will provide links to pages where you might get further help.
And as for keeping a copy on server, it depends on why they disabled your account. Most of the accounts get disabled for posting spams and their profile is kept on their server for a very short time, they would delete it once they review the case and found the profile to be  violating. But Facebook handle accounts very carelessly, so you can only hope to regain access to your account, but you may try once, if they decline the request, create a new account, it's free at last !


Can I use a dark cocoa candy bar in place of bakers chocolate?

Question: I am making this new gluten free brownie mix and am wondering if I can substitute the Baker's chocolate squares called for in the recipe, with 70% or higher cocoa bars that I keep on hand. Are there any characteristics that the Baker's chocolate has that a bar wouldn't or couldn't be worked around?
Comment: Do you need to melt the chocolate, or otherwise how is it used in the recipe?
Answer: I would say yes. However, depending on what kind of squares it calls for it may change the taste of the brownie or how rich the chocolate flavor is. 70% cocoa bars would be more similar to what Baker's Chocolate sells as Bittersweet (67% cacao) so if the recipe is calling for Unsweetened squares (100% cacao) then you'll have less chocolate flavor (and perhaps a slightly sweeter brownie). If the recipe is calling for Semi-Sweet squares (54% cacao) then you'll have more chocolate flavor (and perhaps a slightly less sweet brownie).
Answer: I always use 'normal' chocolate bars in place of Baker's chocolate. The important thing to remember is that you use good quality chocolate with a high percentage of cacao.
That said, there are different kinds of Baker's chocolate, so it is important that you use chocolate that is similar. For example, if a recipe calls for Baker's chocolate with a high percentage of cacao, I would really substitute it for a chocolate bar with high percentage of cacao. However, if they use it as chocolate chucks in the recipe, you can take chocolate with the same amount of cacao (or chocolate with less cacao if that is the taste you prefer).
Every chocolate tastes slightly different, so maybe you have to make the recipe a couple of time before you have the exact flavor you want. High percentage chocolate bars are cheaper and taste very good, so using them will give you a delicious result.


How do I Set Up my Edimax BR-6428nS Wireless Router

Question: I have looked into Ask Ubuntu but I can't find an answer of the Edimax BR-6428nS model.  You can download a source code in a zip file but I do not know how to open the source code file or how to run the source code once I've opened it.
Answer: I'll assume you have just bought the router and are trying to set it up. You do not need the source code you downloaded, it is already installed on the router. They just make it available so that they are complying with the open source licensing.

Connect your computer to the router using an ethernet cable, you should have got one in the box.
Open a web browser. Probably firefox.
Type '192.168.2.1' in the address bar and press enter.
The user is 'admin' and the password is '1234'. Click enter.

You are now connected to the router and need to enter all the correct settings depending on your ISP and connection type. The best thing to do is (on a computer with a working internet connection) google something like 'ISP router settings' where ISP is the name of your ISP. When you have the details you can follow this guide from page 24.
Answer: To unzip any <code>.zip</code> file in Ubuntu, right click the file and select 'Extract here'.
Please, do not download the source code. You don't need it.
For setting up, just read the manual, and if you have any specific questions, do not hesitate to ask.
User Manual
Quick setup guide
Answer: I was able to get the mac address and everything but the computer itself could not detect the wireless connection.  I even lost the the wired connection and had to phone Virgin Media to get back online.  Wi-Fi does work on my notebook so the problem is the setup.
My Gmail email account defaults sometimes to my Google Mail account which has caused Ask Ubuntu create a second account. This is because Virgin Media use Google Mail and Google have linked these two account together (My Virgin Media email account and my Gmail Account)


What does the 'seen' status tell about users in chat?

Question: I've noticed that the "seen" in chat is different from the "seen" in user profiles which changes when the user refreshes the page. How does it work for chat?
Answer: A user is marked as having been "seen" every time a chat window open in their browser polls the chat server. This is a bit misleading, since oftentimes the user has not actually interacted with that browser window for a very long time. Having been "seen" essentially just indicates that the user's client is connected - it has very little use for determining if a user is around. To figure out if a user is available, the "last talked" time is much more useful.
Answer: There are two different servers for chat and for Q&A . When you come to chat room whether you talk or not but server gets ping that you came for chat and your time to come to chat is stored. So it indicates that you were active before  time.
Same with Q&A server; It stores your ping time and shows you your active time for the current Q&A site.


How do baby animals that primarily subsist on cellulose get their initial gut flora?

Question: In the case of mammals like giraffes and koalas, is that bacteria common on the plants they eat so when a baby starts to try to stick something besides its mother's milk in its mouth, it can't digest the cellulose at all the first time, but along with the cellulose, into its mouth went some cellulose-digesting flora that then begins a lifelong colony in the animal's gut? Is that about how it happens?
Answer: I would not expect this to be any different than other animals - they get the flora from the environment. Key components of the environment for newborns are:

Birth canal
Den / living quarters
Skin / fur of mother, especially near the teats
Diet
Feces of family members (animals sniff this and aren't so clean)
Answer: I don't know about ruminants, but baby rabbits (and presumably other lagomorphs) apparently acquire the necessary intestinal flora by consuming their mother's cecotropes.[1]
[1] Johnson-Delaney, C.A. (2006), "Anatomy and Physiology of the Rabbit and Rodent
Gastrointestinal System" (PDF)
Answer: We now know that humans acquire not only their initial gut flora but also that of the skin from swallowing and touching mother's vaginal mucus. This doesn't apply to Caesarean birth, however.
For reference, see my answer at skeptics: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9994/do-c-section-born-babies-have-worse-immune-systems/10078#10078


How to deal with broken combos?

Question: Based on Rob Schwalb's article Stuck in the Middle:
How do you, as a player or DM, deal with choosing or forbidding broken combos in your character, group, and system?
Comment: I find it interesting that broken is only in reference to powerful, while nobody ever says that something that conceptually should be good ends up totally nerfed is broken. Probably not a question for stack exchange though.
Comment: Nope, there are broken in other direction listings as well. Broken/underpowered: http://community.wizards.com/charop/wiki/Broken/Underpowered Mind you, it requires a different mindspace, but it is worth thikning about them...
Comment: This feels like way too broad of a question. Could you perhaps narrow it a bit? In my experience, "broken" mechanics should be evaluated on a case by case basis specifically because no two cases are exactly the same.
Comment: VTC as too broad: this appears to be one of our "what's your approach?" collection questions that seem to have been pretty common on this site in its first year, but which is basically a poll.
Answer: Generally I try to define, with my players, what "broken" really means. If everyone in the party goes with a fairly optimized build my PCs may be more powerful than average, but it isn't hard to create a positive roleplaying experience by simply writing stories that put them up against more powerful antagonists.
Usually though, there are a few abilities that seem completely out of whack to most members of the group. These sorts of powers have a few common characteristics:

Universal or near universal applicability - these are the sorts of abilities that are almost always the best way to spend your action in a round
Inexpensive to use - Some abilities are regulated by a number of activations per day, or some other cost that balances them out. However, an overpowered ability is just always there.
Available too early - If a PC is extremely high-level, or experienced they are normally expected to have access to abilities that are extremely good. However, when there are significantly lower level powers extremely effective, that is where you start to see problems.

Best case is I know the system well enough that I can resolve some of these problems before we even start. I just let the players know when making characters that some abilities are not allowed or that I've reduced their effectiveness.
For example: The Exalted Twilight Caste power decreases damage taken at high anima levels. I've found this to be unbalacing in the past and so when folks are making characters I just let them know I've revised the rules.
Occasionally a broken combo arises in game and catches me by surprise. Usually though, this is pretty obvious to the entire group. When the session is winding down I've had a lot of success bringing up broken combo as a discussion point and then asking the group what they think about it, particularly in the framework of the points enumerated above. Most players want a balanced game and usually by group consensus we can tweak the rules so that it is less effective, or has new restrictions.
This answer basically boils down to "Talk to your players", but you'll want to frame the discussion in a way that doesn't make the player with the combo feel unfairly targeted.
Comment: Yep, I was just letting you know that they finally got around to fixing it.
Comment: You should have a look at the Scroll of Errata, they changed the Twilight cast power to make it far less breaky.
Comment: Thanks, I'll take a look. As an example it still works, we changed it right when 2nd Ed came out.
Comment: For a genre where interacting with each other (or roleplaying) is encouraged, it's amazing how many problems occur because people DON'T talk to each other about little things.
Comment: The stuff in bold does not reinforce what is brought up in the first paragraph.  It could be read to assume an absolute standard of balance.  Although it's duplication of information, adding a 4th point, 'is more powerful than other characters blah', would stop that.
Answer: I avoid the issue.  I invite players who play characters rather than builds.  I run stories designed to entertain characters rather than builds.  If somebody shows up with a combat monster, they're probably going to be bored in my games.  I also make sure to tell the players this upfront when I invite them to the game.  It helps them get into the mindset of playing a person instead of a set of statistics.
Comment: Seconded. If they want to hack-n-slash they can stay home and re-install Diablo 2 ;)
Comment: I agree, whole-heartedly with the sentiment of this response, but I think the question was actually getting at how this is done when discovering a broken element of the rules in play, or when rules additions/revisions/etc create such problems with earlier material. Exerting influence over the play group like your comment suggests you do is a learned skill that the questioner seems to want to bring into the spotlight.
Comment: This is a very poor answer to the question.  It assumes any powerful tactic is the result of a 'build', and invokes the Stormwind Fallacy.  That's neither accurate nor helpful.  Very poor answer, -1.
Comment: I don't actually think Stormwind applies here.  I said nothing about characters with personalities and strong mechanics.  Only about excluding the ones who skip out on personality.  If you want to fault my comment for leaving out that type of character fine, but your assumption about my assumptions is flat out wrong.
Answer: This is only a partial answer, but sometimes, just sometimes, I do nothing if the effectiveness is logical.
For example, suppose players realize that if they build huge stone walls in a rectangle with a single gate with boiling oil over the top, and place archers on top of the walls, they're extraordinarily well-defended from almost all ground-based threats, even those that would wipe them out in a flash if they were in some other structure like a house.  Instead of coming up with massive hordes of stone-chewing giant beetles, or critical-fault tables for stone walls, I would probably say, "Yes, actually, that's a castle, and was very effective throughout the middle ages.  Good show!  But you have to come outside to do many interesting things."
If it's a single power that's broken, then I'm more inclined to fix it.  But if it's a combination--and the player is not being a jerk about it, and each of the pieces makes sense--I usually try hard to let it be and shift the nature of encounters to reduce the magnitude of the problem.
For example, if a necromancer has good life-drain powers, but they don't drain fast enough to really keep the necromancer alive against a tough opponent, and a mesmerizer has good dazzle and slow powers, but can't take enough hits to survive a tough opponent, you might consider a necromancer/mesmerizer broken, as they can slow the opponent enough so that life-draining allows the n/m to toe-to-toe with quite powerful opponents (one on one) forever.
Personally, I'd react to this by making sure that most powerful opponents have enough friends, not by saying that necromancers can't learn mesmerizing, or by saying that life drain can't work on slowed opponents, or anything like that.
Answer: You can:
Play a game that is not as mechanics dependent.  There's a reason that discussions about "broken" only really appear around D&D 3e/4e, Rifts, Exalted, and other games that have published enough rules content to choke a horse with. There are literally hundreds of RPGs where the phrase "that is a broken combo!" have never been uttered about.
Simply exert your authority as GM. Say "that power makes encounter design and/or being another player at the table a pain in the ass, so I'm going to have to disallow it."
Find an in-game world response to the problem. If grappling is the ultimate anti-wizard tactic in your game system, aren't all wizards going to know that?  And aren't magic items or other countermeasures going to be highly prioritized and commonplace? Duh. If it's not something general but specific to a character, it'll work more but any well informed foe of your PCs will prioritize counteracting it.
Example: In my current Pathfinder game, our druid got a big ol' snake companion. He convinced me to let it take some feat it didn't qualify for, forget exactly which one, that made it an even worse grapple monster than usual. The thing slithers up, bites, autoconstricts, does 30 points of damage in a round easy. They're only fifth level so that's one round kills for a good percentage of their foes.
I considered taking the feat away, but that might or might not have actually solved the problem in this case; instead I decided to just make sure and continue (I had already begun) to enforce a certain sense of realism on his animal companion - it's not a killbot that will just leap from foe to foe every round and crush them, regardless of how tasty a thing it has in its coils already, whether the foe is a demon or on fire or spiky or otherwise unpleasant.  It'll reliably go for someone at start, but then requires Animal Handling checks as standard actions from the druid to do anything an Int 1 snake wouldn't normally be doing. It tends to attack someone hitting it and ignore anyone not hitting it, especially if it has something in its coils already, and thinks very dimly of attacking anything that doesn't fit its definition of readily edible.
It has worked out well.  He still loves his snake, and it is very effective in certain situations, but also ends up being "left behind" in some cases or not participating effectively in some combats. So not broken, but he also doesn't regret his choice. Voila, balance.
Comment: I particularly love that solution for the snake. It appropriately moderates the ability, without having to put in some arbitrary restriction or essentially force the character to hold an idiot ball.
Answer:
Check the errata, if appropriate to your game.
Have a discussion as a group. If powers or some combination thereof are ruining the fun of the game, ask what can be done about it—anything from change the rules, disallowing certain a power, or changing how certain combinations chain or are triggered.
If a consensus can't be reached, then something else needs to change. Ultimately, this could escalate to switching out the game system, dropping players, or making a new group.
Answer: There are basically two kinds of broken.
The easiest to correct is the kind that is always broken. Whether a combo or just a strong move it will be something that is easy to notice and so a quick talk with the player and you should be able to either drop it or house rule it into being fixed. If the player does not want to just let it be fixed you may have to be a little heavy handed but that's part of running a game. If the whole party is using it then warn them that you can use it just as easily as them if they don't want it fixed. Generally the thought of their craftily created combo used against themselves will make them see the light and if not the actual use of it should.
The other type is the situational type of broken. This is harder to correct but easy to fix. What do I mean? Correction is where you actually change the rules and requires the players in some form while a fix is just something you can do without going through the players. An example would be an ability that knocks out a large number of humanoids. All that requires is that you include more non-humanoids and the problem is solved, this would mean if you happened to roll bandits for a random encounter you include some attack dogs in the mix. Now don't go and over correct with this though. If you never again include any humanoids the player will complain about it and rightfully so, you just ruined an aspect of their character. It gets harder to fix the more broad the ability is but after a point its not in this category anyway. If a character is amazing at fighting throw in a number of role-play type encounters or a bunch of low powered enemies so that while the guy may be able to power through them the rest of the group still gets some action.
In the end though what matters the most is that everyone has fun. What you see as broken may be seen as quite amusing by everyone else or it may be in reaction to you making the game so hard that they needed to look for such combos and moves. Something may seem to be a fact to you could just be your opinion so the input of everyone is import, after-all its not just you playing the game.
Comment: 2 decent pieces of advice (use encounters to disarm potentially broken tactics but not 100% of the time, players might be reacting to tough encounters), but incredibly poor formatting.  +0.

How to deal with broken combos?


Carbon 700c Wheels: What does 33/50/60/88 mm refer to?

Question: I've been browsing 700c carbon rims on ebay, and noticed most are listed with the 33/50/60/88/etc mm in the title.  What does this represent?  It doesn't appear to be spoke/nipple holes.
Additionally, what's the general life span of a carbon rim?
Comment: Width is more or less obvious.  "Depth" is the distance from the outside diameter of the rim to the inside diameter of the rim -- if it got up to 300-odd then you'd have a solid wheel with no spokes.
Comment: That is curious.  Normally the second number after 700c is the rim width, but for the aero carbons it appears to be (just guessing) rim depth.
Comment: @DanielRHicks: What are the implications of rim width vs depth?  Does it mean tubeless vs tubes?
Answer: That dimension refers to the depth of the rim.  See this article on some particular carbon rims, that includes a cross-sectional diagram.  Deeper wheels tend to be more aerodynamic, though they are heavier, and handle worse in crosswinds.  Thus, different rim depths are more suitable for different types of races.  88mm rims are almost exclusively used in time trials and triathlons, while shallow rims will be more popular for races with lots of climbing.  For riders without the luxury of multiple wheelsets, 38-60mm seems to be the standard depth.
The life span of carbon rims (or any rim, for that matter) depends greatly on the type of riding done.  Typically, a wheel will need to be replaced because the braking surface has worn down.  This means that the wheel's longevity is dependent on the type of riding done.  Long descents with lots of braking will accelerate the wear.  Riding in the rain will accelerate the wear.  Keeping the brake pads and rims clean will increase the longevity.  Also, some carbon wheels have carbon braking surfaces, which are more sensitive, while others have aluminum braking surfaces, which are more durable.
So I am hesitant to give an exact number, but I'd say a reasonably-well maintained wheelset should probably last 10,000-20,000 miles.
Comment: When it's raining, a lot of grit and debris from the road will stick to the rim, and result in a more abrasive braking action.
Comment: Rain?  Sunlight I understand, what UV will do.
Answer: These 38/50/60/88 numbers are the 'depth' of the wheel's aerodynamic rim, in millimeters. Let's take 38 for example. This means that from where the tire meets the wheel, the rim extends an additional 38 millimeters towards the hub. When you see 88, that means the rim extends 88 millimeters from the tire.
Why does that matter? One of the biggest benefits of carbon wheels is the aerodynamics. They play a major role in how fast, and how efficiently a cyclist can ride. Think back to when you were on a ride with your buddies, and drafted behind another rider. It's much easier to keep up with them, because of the better aerodynamics when you are drafting.
Your spinning wheels are the biggest source of slow aerodynamic turbulence. To improve this, we build wheels with aerodynamic advantage as a top priority. The way we do this is to increase the 'depth' of the rim. The deeper the rim, the more aerodynamic the wheel will be and the more efficiently and faster you'll be able to cut through the wind. An 88mm deep rim is more aerodynamic than a 38mm rim, and will be faster in situations where aerodynamics are very important, like long fast solo riding and triathlons.
Why would anyone choose 38mm rims, if 88mm rims are more aerodynamic? The more a wheel becomes aerodynamic for going forward, the more it can be negatively affected by cross-winds, or winds coming from the side. Let's imagine you are riding with an 88mm deep front and rear rim. You will be able to go very fast because of the aerodynamics of deep wheels, but if a gust of wind comes from the side, that wind will push sideways against the large rims and push the whole bike sideways. This isn't such a big deal if you're riding alone, such as in a triathlon, but if you are riding in a group of cyclists, this sideways push could cause an impact with other riders, or at the very least it would require extra concentration from you.
What's the solution? A wheel with a 'shallower' rim depth, like a 38mm, will be less affected by crosswinds, but will also have less aerodynamic advantage.
If that wasn't enough, you must also consider weight. A 38mm deep wheel will be lighter than an 88mm deep one, because less carbon is used. A lighter wheel will accelerate faster and will be much easier to ride up hills. This means that if you are sprinting and hill climbing a lot, a shallower rim, like a 38 will be best.
Why do I see some riders with different front and rear wheels? Due to the fact that the front wheel can turn for steering, its more susceptible to cross-wind interference. The rear wheel is fixed in a straight line with the bike, so if a cross-wind hits it, the impact on the bike won't be as much. This means that you can use a deeper rim on your rear wheel without impacting handling as much as that same rim would affect the front wheel.  Wheelsets such as the 38-50 to take advantage of this fact. This wheelset uses a 38mm front rim, and a 50mm rear rim. This way you can get more aerodynamic advantage without sacrificing as much stability in windy conditions.
How do I choose? This is the most difficult choice for riders looking to purchase new carbon bicycle wheels. You must think about the situations you ride in. If you ride mostly hills you will want to choose a 38mm wheelset, if you are an all around rider choose a 50mm wheelset, if you are an all around rider looking for more aerodynamic advantage choose a 60mm wheelset, and if you are a solo rider, or a triathlete choose an 88mm wheelset.
Comment: Welcome to bicycles.SX.com and thanks for that very comprehensive answer. However, the "promotional" part towards the end might be frowned upon by some people. Maybe you should have a look at this [help page](https://bicycles.stackexchange.com/help/behavior) could be helpful for you.


How can I keep my saved Skyrim game off other Windows user accounts?

Question: We have Skyrim on our PC and 4 of us play the game at different times on our own Windows accounts. We have noticed within the last few months that all saved games are now showing up on all user accounts. If I'm logged in to my Windows account and I launch the game then go to load my saved game, I will see every saved game for every person that has played on our computer. Perhaps I just wasn't paying attention in the beginning and didn't notice before, but I'm pretty sure that this was not happening before a few months ago. I installed the game the day it came out in Nov. so we've been playing it for awhile and we did not notice this issue until a few months ago. Forgive me if this has already been addressed, but I tried several different ways of phrasing this issue in Google search and got nothing.
Answer: It's due to Steam Cloud.  It places all saved games in the cloud and loads them when you start the game.  If you turn off the cloud in the steam settings then individual windows users can keep their own saved games again.
Answer: It's very strange that even though you all have different windows accounts you are still experiencing this problem.
Anyway, the simplest solution is that while saving the game each of you just add your initials to the starting of the name. So it would be something of this sort:
AH - save 1
X - save 2
Y - save 3
AH - save 4
AH - save 5
and so on.
Alternatively, each of you can create your own save game locations of your choice. You can then make Skyrim use each of these different location for different people.
*1. Create 4 different folders (such as d:\saveAH, d:\saveX, d:\saveY).
*2. You will now need to tell windows to redirect the folder requests to your new folder for different people. This can easily be done via a batch script. You will have to use mklink to accomplish this.
<code> mklink /d "c:\users\\My Documents\my games\skyrim\saves\" "D:\saves"</code>
*3. Basically create 4 batch files with the above code (just replace the "d:\saves" with a different folders in each batch file).
*4. Now each of you just run your batch file and play the game. Voila! Different save locations for all of you. More detailed step-by-step instructions are given here.
Happy gaming!


Projective transformation between polygons.

Question: Extending my earlier question about linear transformations, what's the easiest way to test if there exists a projective linear transformation that takes one polygon to another (in $\mathbb{R}\mathbb{P}^2$)?
Answer: The answer Tim Gowers and Will Jagy gave you in response to your earlier question can be extended straightforwardly. A homogeneous linear transformation on R^3 has 3x3 - 1 = 4x2 degrees of freedom, so there is a unique projective-linear transformation between any given pair of non-degenerate quadrilaterals. Thus do with quadrilaterals what was done in the previous question with triangles.
Answer: A hacky way would be, enumerate the points of the two polygons (with adjacent points adjacent in the enumerations), as in $P_1 = [p_{1,1}, p_{1,2}, \ldots, p_{1,n}]$ and $P_2 = [p_{2,1}, \ldots, P_{2,n}]$, build N systems of linear equations, in the form $\forall i, \mathbf{T} p_{1,i} = p_{2,i+j}$ (indexed by $j$). There will be only N such systems, and if any one of them can be satistied (that is, it there is a $\mathbf{T}$ that takes all points $p_{1,i}$ into $p_{2,i+j}$ for some $j$) you have an answer.


How low can an electron go?

Question: Title says it all - recently I encountered a strange homework exercise on de Broglie dual theory with an electron wavelength of few millimeters - which implies the velocity lower than 1 m/s. I personally considered the problem very artificial and unrealistic, but it made me wonder - what is the smallest electron velocity recorded in experiments? What does the theory on the other hand say?
Comment: I think the original title was clearer...
Comment: Actually, Zwitterbewegung means "hermaphrodites' movement" :-)
Comment: Right, but it was so inviting....:=)
Comment: This would allow us to actually test quantum gravity effects in the from of zwitterbewegung, the 21st century equivalent of Millikan's oil drop experiment ... (insert "perhaps", "but" and "maybe" wherever required ;)
Comment: @Deepak: Nitpick, it's [Zitterbewegung](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zitterbewegung).
Answer: If you define the speed of your electron in a de Broglie way and just set $v = \frac{h}{m\cdot \lambda}$, you can rewrite that expression to involve the wavenumber $k$, i.e.
$v = \frac{\hbar k}{m}$.
$k$ is constrained by the boundary conditions of the electron. In a large solid with periodic boundary conditions, $k$ can be arbitrarily small, so the particular electron would be arbitrarily slow.
However, you don't see these electrons, as, due to the Pauli principle, when you start filling up your solid with electrons, you have to go to ever larger values of $k$. The largest of them is called the Fermi wavenumber $k_F$, which then defines you a Fermi velocity $v_F$ which can be quite large. In experiments, you typically interact with electrons at, or close to, the Fermi level, since these are the ones with the highest energy and hence the ones you can remove the easiest. Therefore, you will not really see the slow electrons.
If, on the other hand, you don't consider electrons, which are Fermions and thus subject to the Pauli exclusion principle, but Bosons (such as ${}^{85}Rb$ atoms), you don't have to put them all in different quantum states. You are then free to put them all into the $k = 0$ state. Indeed, this happens at very low temperatures. Such a state is called a Bose-Einstein condensate. In time-of-flight experiments, it is then indeed observed that they all (or, at finite temperature, at least most of them) have essentially a velocity of $0$.
Comment: I hope you mean Rb! (I'm no nuclear physicist, but I imagine $^{85}$Ru is not an easy thing to work with...)
Comment: Yep, I meant Rb. Sorry for the mix-up
Answer: Smallest recorded in experiments?  The experiment that comes to my mind is the work done in the Gabrielse lab at Harvard, where they've trapped a single in a Penning trap, and cooled it down to less than a tenth of a Kelvin (which pretty much puts the electron in the ground state of the trap).
The electron has fast cyclotron motion, but I'd estimate that in one direction it should have a velocity around 1000 m/s.
To get a bare electron with a velocity of 1 m/s would require cooling the thing down below a microkelvin (if I'm doing my arithmetic right).  As far as I know, that's never been done experimentally.
Answer: If this surprises you it means you need to understand the role of Special Relativity!
The wavelength of a free electron is infinite in its rest frame. Furthermore, the direction of the wavefront of an electron depends on the reference frame. Whatever direction you choose, there is a reference frame in which the wavefront of the electron has that particular direction.
Believe me, it all makes sense.
1) The wavefront is about the phase, not the magnitude. So the density of the electron is the same at all places of the wavefront.
2) Think of the phase as a local clock. In the rest frame all clocks show the same time. If you choose a different reference frame then some clocks in a certain direction show a later time while the clocks in the opposite direction show an earlier time. This direction is the same direction as that of the wavefront.
There are images in my book which illustrate this.
http://physics-quest.org/Book_Chapter_Klein_Gordon.pdf
Look for instance at figure 9.2 and 9.3 to start with. For the rotation of the wavefront you can look at 9.4 and 9.5.
Regards, Hans
Answer: I turns out that when you find the expectation value of free electrons speed that tend to always get c, when interpreted by the dirac equation!
This phenomenon is known as zitterbewegung, The idea being that you have an electron moving at c, but around a path with a low drift velocity.
That probably didn't help but I think it is nice.
Comment: There is nothing nice in it but a confusion.
Answer: Electrons in a white dwarf star should be static as atoms in a condensed matter.
Answer: The minimum electron velocity depends on the external potential and can be as low as zero m/s.
Consider, for example an electron bouncing on a horizontal mirror in the gravitational field. Such a system has a minimal energy $E_0$ and therefore a minimal non-zero velocity.

How low can an electron go?


Why doesn't Lightroom offer conversion from RGB to CMYK?

Question: I have never fully understood why Lightroom works exclusively in the RGB colour space. I would assume that a large number of Lightroom users use the software to prepare their photos for print. Yet, I have to import my RGB images into Photoshop just to convert to CMYK. Is this limitation by design or just a feature that hasn't been added yet?
Answer: Lightroom was never intended to be an all in one image editing solution. In the beginning it was limited to just raw conversion and slowly more Photoshop like features, such as local corrections have been added. I wouldn't be surprised if CMYK was added somewhere down the line.
Although a large number of users print images from Lightroom, doing your own CYMK conversion is a fairly advanced step that you only need to perform if you need total control over the conversion process, or if you need to use a specific black mix for magazine work. It is assumed that advanced users will have access to tools such as Photoshop to perform these steps.
Answer: Lightroom operates in the ProPhoto color space and has built-in exporting to sRGB and AdobeRGB.  You can also export to any other ICC profile (for a home printer or other device).  Most photo labs require files to be in sRGB or AdobeRGB and sRGB is the color space of the web.
I would imagine that if you need to convert to CMYK for printing, Lightroom would be only the first stop in your process.  You would likely finish in another tool like Illustrator or Photoshop.
Comment: To "any other ICC profile"? How?
Comment: @SandroFranchi when you export, there is a section for 'File Settings' with a drop down for 'Color Space'.  Choose the 'Other' option and select the ICC profile of your choice.


Scene management for 3D editor

Question: I need a scene graph/management method for a 3D editor (brute force rendering is not really a possibility), where lots of data (geometry) are constantly being modified, it also would need to work great for picking (casting rays from the camera to select objects). Octrees seem to be a great solution, but i'm not quite sure.
Answer: OcTree (or portals) + Batching + LODs + Culling.
You might want to have several rendering modes, one at top quality and some with reduced quality but improved performance (simplified lighting and shading, lower resolution textures, no particles, etc).
Comment: I think LOD would be overkill because the data is being changed continuously. Batching is a really great option.
Comment: Without detail description of your application bottlenecks it's hard to be more specific than that.
Answer: Think only just one part of the data will be edited at the time, so that makes it easier. Do all just as normal and pick out the one that is editted to use a differend rendering method such as wireframe, coloured or whatever you need.
Brute force is actually never a good possibility unless you have only one checkersboard or such.
Two optimazations can be a vertex and texture cache. Collect objects that share the same vertex data and texture data. Then render all of those in one time. This saves a lot of gpu time as you only set the texture data once and then render 10 objects for instance. This is in addition too octree and frustum culling. Firstly check the distance from the camera, if further then the farplane, do not bother doing anything. Use bounding spheres, that's the cheapest way to determine if something is in view or not, then check the axis aligned bounding box (aabb). For higher precision you could do a boundingbox check.
EDIT: For ray picking I would create a new class. As I go through all objects on the next render I only pass in that ray instance so it can be filled. This means I have in the object class a method for a ray picking check where the ray class is being passed to. It will cost almost nothing.
Regards,
Comment: Right now i'm doing backface + frustum culling with AABBs, although I hate how inconstant the framerate is.

Scene management for 3D editor


Is importing to Aperture then editing in iMovie a viable workflow?

Question: I'm primarily a still photographer, but necessity is pushing me into learning video editing. I'm in the habit of dumping my camera data to Aperture, using the rating & stacking system there to sort out favorite pictures, and finally exporting those for final touches in PhotoShop.
Will a similar workflow work for iMovie and editing there? iMovie automatically picks up the videos I dump into Aperture, but at first glance I don't see the precious, precious metadata I've taken the time to mark them up with there: No ratings!
Is there a way to get ratings/sorting from Aperture showing up in iMovie? If not, what's your favorite workflow for picking clips to use in iMovie?
Answer: I usually manually drop my files into the iMovie Drop Box for safe keeping until I want to use/edit them and do all my managing of videos (personal ones, at least) in iMovie.


When do stability and semistability coincide?

Question: Let $S$ be a $K3$ surface and $H$ an ample line bundle on it. Fix a Mukai vector $v\in H^*(S,\mathbb Z)$. If $v$ is primitive, it turns out that Gieseker stability w.r.t.$H$ coincides with Gieseker semistability w.r.t. $H$. Does the same hold for $\mu_H$-stability, too?
Answer: If the rank and degree (wrt $H$) are coprime, then $\mu$-stability and $\mu$-semistability coincide. The argument is the same as for Gieseker-stability, but simpler.
Answer: The answer is no, as $\mu_H$-stability only sees the rank and the first Chern class: if there are two Mukai vectors $v_1, v_2$ with $rk(v_1) + rk(v_2) = rk(v)$ and $H . c_1(v_1) + H.c_1(v_2) = H.c_1(v)$, then a short exact sequence $0 \to E_1 \to E \to E_2 \to 0$ where each $E, E_i$ has the corresponding Mukai vector $v, v_i$ will make $E$ strictly semistable.


Question on OIS and fed funds rate

Question: If i am considering the 0-5 year irs spread for the USD market, would it be more accurate to use the fed funds rate or the OIS rate? I believe the OIS rate is calculated based on the fed funds rate, but am not sure how the dynamics of the relation work.
Answer: The OIS rate is simply the price of an interest rate swap where you're swapping the fed funds rate (paid daily) for a fixed rate. For example if a 3 month OIS pays 2%, and the fed funds rate is currently 0.5% then what we're saying is you can enter into a swap (at zero price) where you will receive 2% and pay fed funds. If the fed funds rate goes up you pay more, if it goes down you pay less.
The fed funds rate is quoted only as an overnight rate; if you're looking for a USD overnight rate you should use that. If you want a longer rate then you should look at OIS rates, which are quoted all the way out to 50 years (although I doubt there's much liquidity out there, it does appear on Bloomberg).

Question on OIS and fed funds rate


how to attach windows workflows to infopath

Question: I am having infopath form . i have to attach the windows workflow to infopath. any body helps.
Answer: In addition to attaching the workflow to a list, you must also tell it when to fire.  By default, SharePoint Designer workflows are set to be started manually by a user.  If you want it to fire when a form is added or changed, you must check those check boxes on the workflow properties page in SharePoint Designer.
Answer: I think a little more information may be required.
If this InfoPath form lives in a SharePoint document library, then you attach the workflow to the document library, which is then triggered when an InfoPath form is saved in it.
Are you using a SharePoint Designer Workflow or Visual Studio workflow?


Users vs. Active Directory Users

Question: What's the difference between users and active directory users in Windows Small Business Server 2003?  Which should I use to manage user accounts under which circumstances?
Answer: An SBS 2003 server is a domain controller and therefore cannot have local user accounts, they are removed when the server is promoted to a DC.
SBS stores the user accounts you create, in the Users page, in a specific OU in AD. The users area in the SBS console just takes you straight to that OU and presents some wizards for creating users. Using AD Users and Computers would still get you to the same user information, but you would need to go the the SBS OU.
Its best to use the User option in the SBS console as it will ensure all your users will end up in the right area of AD, and give you wizards to do so, but you can use AD users and computers if you want.
SBS 2003 servers, do not have local user accounts, despite what the other answers say.
Answer: A user has a local account on the server; an Active Directory user has an account through Active Directory. You can manage local accounts from the server.
Answer: The difference is the source of their authentication.

AD users are authenticated by a domain controller
Local users are authenticated locally

As far as which to use, it depends. See Do I really need MS Active Directory?
Answer: If you have at least one small business server you should probably be using Active Directory users.  I say this because having a small business server implies hosting shared data of some kind as well as running a domain.  To expand on what aardvark and bofe have already said:

A local user account is stored entirely on a machine.  If UserA needs to log onto 3 different machines then you have to set up a local user account and manage permissions on all 3 machines.  This could get cumbersome quickly with more than a handful of machines in your organization.
An Active Directory account is used in a domain environment.  A user can log onto any machine on the domain using the same username and password and you only have to create one account - the Active Directory account.  Your usernames, passwords and permissions are largely centralized in this environment.

Using Active Directory also brings up all kinds of new possibilities, such as using Roaming Profiles, Group Policy, etc.  You should read the article that bofe posted in his reply, but I would say that since you already paid for a Small Business Server, go ahead and create the domain and Active Directory user accounts.  It will be easier in almost all circumstances in the long run.
Answer: When using Small Business Server 2003, keep in mind that only users that are stored in Active Directory will be able to gain all the benefits, such as an Exchange mailbox.
Comment: You can only store use in AD in an SBS server, there are no local accounts on a domain controller

Users vs. Active Directory Users


Plugin to display weekly schedule that can be edited via admin panel

Question: I am working on a simple wordpress site for a fitness club. They require a simple wordpress plugin that displays a static weekly schedule for their theater.
They need to be able to specify what plays on what day of the week and what time.
A full blown calender/event scheduler plugin is probably overkill for this as it just needs to display Day of Week, Event Title, Event time.
Any ideas on what plugin I can use for this?
Answer: Cant get any simpler than this (and without using a plugin) Display Events should be easy to bend it to do what you want it to do


Determining which contacts use Facetime

Question: In either the iOS app or the Mac app for Facetime, you are given the option of selecting any contact listed in the corresponding device's Contacts app, regardless of whether they are capable of using Facetime (they own an iPhone or a Mac with the app). Are there any methods of determining this besides manually keeping a register of it or guessing?
Answer: To get around this I have added the letters FT to a contacts last name eg "Surname FT"  then all I need to do is search for  "FT" and there I have a list in alphabetical order of all contacts I can FaceTime!
So, create a new message, add all contacts, take note of which ones are blue, and add FT to the end of their surname eg. "Surname FT".  Now when you want to FaceTime someone Type FT into the search bar and presto! You have your list. Hope this is helpful, enjoy :-)
Answer: Unfortunately, the Contacts and FaceTime apps won't display a list of FaceTime-capable contacts, I think you need to just keep a record. You can try doing FaceTime with someone, and if they don't have an Apple device, it will just say that they're not available for FaceTime.
However, if you have FaceTimed with someone, then in my experience FaceTime will (sometimes?) show a camera icon next to their phone number or email address after you click their name.
Also, if you open Messages and start typing in a message to someone, the name at top should be highlighted in blue if they are iMessage-capable, and if that's the case, there's a pretty good chance they can FaceTime too, with the iPhone 3GS being the main exception as it doesn't have a front camera but can be iMessage compatible.

Determining which contacts use Facetime


Secure communication between Flash and PHP script

Question: I have little knowledge of Flash but for a little Flash game I have to store score and successful tries of users in a database using PHP. Now the Flash runs locally on the users computer and connects to a remote server. How can I secure against manipulation of game scores. Is there any best practice for this use case?
Answer: You might want to check these other questions:

Q46415 Passing untampered data from Flash app to server?
Q73947 What is the best way to stop people hacking the PHP-based highscore table of a Flash game.
Q25999 Secure Online Highscore Lists for Non-Web Games
Answer: What you are asking is inherently impossible. The game runs on the client and is therefore completely at the user's mercy. Only way to be sure is running a real time simulation of the game on the server based on user's input (mouse movement, keypresses), which is absolutely ridiculous.
Answer: This topic has been covered here @ stackoverflow, at least in part
What is the best way to stop people hacking the PHP-based highscore table of a Flash game
Answer: As ssddw pointed out, this is fundamentally impossible.  The code to send the score is running on the user's computer, and they have control over it and everything that runs there.
The best you can do is to periodically alter the encryption mechanism so that it takes score-manipulators a while to figure it out again.  You can only minimize the damage, never eliminate it, but on a site like the one I work for, if we've got only a hundred people sending fake scores, out of the hundreds of thousands we see every day, we consider that well within the realm of acceptable. (We still crush those we catch cheating, but we don't consider it much of a problem.)
Answer: You could at least throw out scores that are above some threshold that you would deem legitimate. It still leaves room for more subtle maniputaion of a high scores list, but will at least help relieve the obvious frustration of seeing an impossible to achieve score topping the charts.