Gollum (Smeagol) was once a Hobbit. His life was extended over 500 years while he had the Ring.  Eventually Gollum lost the Ring to Bilbo, who I think had it around 50-60 years (?).   At the end of the movie "The Return of the King" Bilbo has only been without the Ring for a year, but looks completely aged, wrinkled, suffers from poor memory, seems to lack energy (falls asleep on Frodo) and appears to be near death. On the other hand Gollum had gone without the Ring for 50-60 years, but despite his incredibly old age, he still had smooth, wrinkle-free skin and more energy than either of the 2 young Hobbits (Frodo or Sam).  Is this a result of the longer amount of time that Gollum spent with the Ring before losing it?  I'm basing my question on the 6 semi-recent movies; I haven't read the books but feel free to use them to answer this.
In the LoTR movies (not sure if the books are the same) but when Gollum lost the ring to Bilbo decades ago in The Hobbit, he appeared to look the same and even move the same in The Fellowship of the Ring. Bilbo on the other hand, seemed to have aged very rapidly when he passed the ring to Frodo. When Frodo met up with Bilbo in Rivendell shortly after his quest began, Bilbo appeared much older and even more much slower.  I realize that Gollum had the ring for much longer than Bilbo, but wouldn't him losing the ring have the same effect as it had on Bilbo?
Which languages was Gandalf proficient in? I had always kind of wondered why we didn't see interference in things like windows -- we were taught that the condition is that the thickness of the film/slab/medium just has to be an integral number of wavelengths, $d=m\lambda$. My logic was, if visible light has wavelengths ~400-780nm, any window pane has got to be an integral number of wavelengths (or close to integral) for some of the wavelengths in the visible.  For example, if a window is, $6mm = 6\times10^6nm$ thick, then you should see interference for wavelengths (and some range around them) 200nm, 250nm, 300nm, 400nm, 500nm, 600nm... Because 6mm is an integral number of each of those.  Obviously that would be really annoying and isn't the case. I found  (warning: PDF) source that seems to explain it and I was wondering if what they're saying is sound. On the 10th page (p171 for them), it says that the reason we don't see this interference is that no window is that smooth, it has a variance in the thickness of at least several wavelengths, so the interference effect is effectively average out among all those thicknesses, which usually gets rid of it. They do the math and show that.  Is that the reason?  If so, that leads me to two questions: Could we, if we were really careful and used something like MBE, make a glass window with that sort of accuracy, and then see interference effects in the optical range? I know that quartz crystal monitors can easily give you nanometer accuracy for evaporators and sputterers, but they also have pretty limited growth rates.  My second question is, then, do we see interference effects in glass windows with electromagnetic radiation of a comparable wavelength, like microwaves?  Thanks! I couldn't find anything about Ubuntu acting as a  receiver or sender.   Can it work at all? Are there hardware prerequisites? Is WiFi a requirement or can it work over LAN or another kind of network connection? WiFi direct seems to be a necessary requirement, is it a sufficient one? (i.e. if a system supports WiFi direct does that mean it supports Miracast?) Are there differences in support between receiving/sending? How is the latency? (compared to the competition, i.e. VNC, commercial Miracast devices, etc.) How do I actually use it, if it's difficult?   Specifically, I plan to use it together with an Android phone (4.x Jelly Bean). I made a skin by using Skincraft and I exported it to minecraft.net. I chose my skin and uploaded it. At the top it says,      "Your skin has been changed! Please wait a few seconds for it to   update."   I went to Minecraft, clicked singleplayer and chose a random world at the top. I looked at my character, but it's still default. Multiplayer won't load for some reason. I don't know what I've done wrong! Binary classification with strongly unbalanced classes Why are votes anonymous? Let's make with the transparency and have them publicly attributed How to alter touchpad settings on Ubuntu GNOME 16.04? After upgrading to Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 with GNOME 3.20 I have found that if I tap my touchpad it clicks which is something I do not want due to a faulty touchpad, previously I was able to disable this through the gnome-control-center, but seemingly there is no way to do this any more through there, so how do I do it? Also, even though it is set to false in gsettings and the dconf-editor seemingly for some reason somewhere in the system it is also set to true as it is behaving as such. I am also unable to set natural scrolling or any of the other touchpad settings seemingly, why not? On what systems is //foo/bar different from /foo/bar? Throughout the POSIX specification, there's provision (, , ...) to allow implementations to treat a path starting with two / specially.  A POSIX application (an application written to the POSIX specification to be portable to all POSIX compliant systems) cannot assume that //foo/bar is the same as /foo/bar (though they can assume that ///foo/bar is the same as /foo/bar).  Now what are those POSIX systems (historical and still maintained) that treat //foo specially? I believed (I've now ) that POSIX provision was pushed by Microsoft for their Unix variant (XENIX) and possibly Windows POSIX layer (can anyone confirm that?).  It is used by Cygwin which also is a POSIX-like layer for Microsoft Windows. Are there any non-Microsoft Windows systems? OpenVMS?  On systems where //foo/bar is special, what is it used for? //host/path for network file systems access? Virtual file systems?  Do some applications running on Unix-likes —if not the system's API— treat //foo/bar paths specially (in contexts where they otherwise treat /foo/bar as the path on the filesystem)?    Edit, I've since  about the origin of //foo/bar handling in the spec, and the discussion is an interesting read (from an archaeology point of view at least). What processing is done on RAW files in the camera? Recently I came across a debate about whether it's fair to call RAW 'unprocessed' or 'unaltered' sensor data of a DSLR. As far as I know, the analog sensor data is processed into a digital RAW file using the ISO setting, a process during which the Bayer-sensor data is demosaiced as well. However, those are just the necessary steps for saving a digital file while maintaining maximum quality.  Are those assumptions correct? If so, are there any additional steps that need to be performed between the sensor receiving light and the saving of the RAW file? And can those be reasonably be described as an 'alteration' of the sensor data, or is it fair to say that a RAW file holds the unaltered sensor data? Why Inox Steel doesn't interact with magnets? My dad has a HUGE magnet on his workshop.  I love magnets, and when I saw it, I asked him what it was for.  His reply was: "I don't know why, but inox steel bolts don't get attracted to it, so I use it to identify them."  Thus I got curious, why a magnet don't attract  bolts? Steel, even if a inox variation is still mostly iron, no? Does an Animagus's animal form change along with their Patronus? In the two examples shown of an Animagus capable of casting a corporeal Patronus (Minerva McGonagall and James Potter) both had the same animal as their Patronus and as their Animagus animal.  Now, it is also shown that extreme circumstances can change one's Patronus. I think the only example of this was Tonks, which turned from a jackrabbit into a wolf in response for her love of Lupin.  If Tonks (or any other wizard who had their Patronus change) had been an animagus, would her animagus have changed as well? What is accountsd and why does it want to use the "login" keychain? Is there any way to ensure that a specific USB key always gets the same drive letter? Combinatorics Question Asking How Many Integer Solutions Given Different Restrictions How many integer solutions of $x_1 + x_2 + x_3 + x_4 = 28$ are there with:  (a) $0 ≤ x_i ≤ 12$?  (b) $−10 ≤ x_i ≤ 20$?  (c) $0 ≤ x_i, x_1 ≤ 6, x_2 ≤ 10, x_3 ≤ 15, x_4 ≤ 21$?  \ \  My attempts (I was really only able to solve part (a) but I would appreciate if you could check my work for this one as well):  (a) First I took the total number of integer solutions with no restrictions: There would be ${28+3\choose 3}$ = ${31\choose 3}$ total solutions with no restrictions.   Then I used the inclusion exclusion principle and knew I would have to subtract [P(A) + P(B) + P(C) + P(D)] where A --> $x_1$ is greater than or equal to 13, ..., D--> $x_4$ is greater than or equal to 13. The probabilities of all these cases would equal ${15+3\choose 3}$ = ${18\choose 3}$ because once we assign 13 to one of the $x_i$ there would be $28 - 13 = 15$ remaining to distribute among the $x_i$ values. We would also need to choose which of the $x_i$ to give the 13 to so we would multiply the ${18\choose 3}$ by ${4\choose 1}$ = ${4\choose 1}{18\choose 3}$  We would then have to add back, since we "oversubtracted", the case in which there is an intersection between two of the $x_i$ or in other words two of the $x_i$ receive 13 or more. P$(A\bigcap B)$ = $28-2(13) = 2$ remaining to distribute among the $x_i$ values. So we would also have to choose which of the $x_i$ to give the 13 to so we would have ${4\choose 2}$ ways to choose them. So there would be ${4\choose 2}{2+3\choose 3}$ = ${4\choose 2}{5\choose 3}$ solutions in this case.   Thus the number of solutions would be: ${31\choose 3} - {4\choose 1}{18\choose 3} + {4\choose 2}{5\choose 3}$.  I'm not sure if this is correct and I'm really stuck on b and c so I would appreciate any help or feedback. Thank you! Is it possible to find out reason of suspension for another user? A user on Stack Overflow was recently temporarily suspended.  Out of curiosity I read through their posts (both questions and answers) and found them to be of decent quality.  They answer far more than they ask (about a 10 to 1 ratio) and always provides lots of sample code in their replies.  They're polite too.  I can't see a reason for suspension.  So, now I'm curious, and maybe I can even learn something from their experience.  Can I find out why they were suspended or is that strictly between the moderator and the user? Can I override the Javascript Function object to log all function calls? Help center still has the guidance about old Favorite tags Your Mileage May Vary In the United States we have a saying, "your mileage may vary", which means "your experience may be different".  In English-speaking countries that don't use Imperial miles, is there an equivalent expression? Colors in Photoshop CS6/CC look different than in browser? Why are all of my appliances becoming energized when ground wire is excluded?