I'm looking for a short story that I believe was written by Asimov back in the 50's or 60's.  I read it in an anthology I checked out of the library back in the 80's or 90's.    The story is like a stone skipping across time.  At each point in time two characters play out the same situation of asking what is going to happen in the future.  In each instance one person leaves the encounter to further the human race.   In the last encounter as the last star in the universe is about to burn out the characters wonder what will happen next and then there is a big bang.
I am looking to identify a story that I read around 2001 (it is probably much older).  Someone showed me the story on pages printed from the internet, and it was attributed to Isaac Asimov (although I cannot state that is the true author).    The story is told in glimpses at different points of time in the future.  In each glimpse, humans are asking a more and more "intelligent" computer how to prevent the universe from collapsing into a singularity in the future, and the computer states it needs more computational power and resources to solve this problem.  At some point, man becomes one with the computer, and the computer exists in hyperspace (or subspace?).    In the final glimpse, it is the end of time and the universe is collapsing into a singularity.  At the instant the universe reaches the singularity, the computer figures out how to prevent it and says "Let there be light" and the universe begins to expand again.  Is anyone familiar with this story?
I am unable to open gnome-control-center due to an error stemming from pop repositories. Ubuntu 20.04 The conditions $a^2b^2=b^2a^2$ and $a^3b^3=b^3a^3$ make the group $G$ abelian? I'm using terminal-ide  which is basically a terminal for android with all sorts of utilities. One is able to create bash scripts for example. Is there a way to create an icon on the home screen that will launch one of these scripts? Need a matrix to seventh power which is the identity but the original is not or the negative identity The question on the homework wants a $2\times2$ matrix $R$, but $R$ not equal to positive or negative identity, that when you raise to seventh power you get the identity.  $R^7=\operatorname{Id}$.  I thought it would have to be some ones and negative ones,  it no luck, then tried some ones and some $.5$.  Just using an online matrix calculator to do brute force.  We just started talking about eigenvalues with visual example, so assuming wouldn't need that since we have not talked about how to find them yet.  Any hints or ideas to get me back on track? "The ones" or "those"? I recently corrected  &quot;ghettos, such as the ones found...&quot; to &quot;ghettos, such as those found...&quot;  Was I correct, or are both versions right? Is accessing a variable in C# an atomic operation? I've been raised to believe that if multiple threads can access a variable, then all reads from and writes to that variable must be protected by synchronization code, such as a "lock" statement, because the processor might switch to another thread halfway through a write.  However, I was looking through System.Web.Security.Membership using Reflector and found code like this:  public static class Membership {     private static bool s_Initialized = false;     private static object s_lock = new object();     private static MembershipProvider s_Provider;      public static MembershipProvider Provider     {         get         {             Initialize();             return s_Provider;         }     }      private static void Initialize()     {         if (s_Initialized)             return;          lock(s_lock)         {             if (s_Initialized)                 return;              // Perform initialization...             s_Initialized = true;         }     } }   Why is the s_Initialized field read outside of the lock? Couldn't another thread be trying to write to it at the same time? Are reads and writes of variables atomic? Getting arguments underneath \min in an align environment Could anyone give me an explanation of the meaning of "get one's finger in the air" and the usage of it? Can Ability Score increases caused by magic items qualify me for feats? As far as I know, only a player character's non-temporary ability scores are considered for taking feats, taking prestige classes, etc. Meanwhile, any ability bonus that comes from spells, or magic items that are in effect only while worn, is not counted (except tomes which increase abilities permanently).  So a Fighter with low Int who wants to qualify for Combat Expertise can't use spells or items that gives an Int bonus to raise it high enough to qualify. Is that right?  For example:  Say our fighter has Str 12, so he can not take the Power Attack feat. Suppose he asks for a spell from the wizard to make his Str 16, or to borrow a ring which provides +4 Str from another character. (Or any other method that will provide him a non-permanent bonus). His Str is now 16. Can he take Power Attack with that non-permanent bonus now? Because after the spell duration ends or he takes off the ring, his Str score will be to low again to qualify for Power Attack. How to change plot style or other options after it was created To translate a vector by 10 unit in the X direction, why do we have to use a matrix?    We can just add 10 to the mat[0][0], and we got the same result too. Why won't vertical-align: middle work?  And yet, vertical-align: top does work.   span{   vertical-align: middle; } &lt;div&gt;   &lt;img src="https://via.placeholder.com/30" alt="small img" /&gt;   &lt;span&gt;Doesn't work.&lt;/span&gt; &lt;/div&gt; Can I mix monk traditions? I'm wanting to mix archetypes (traditions) for my monk. I'm wanting specifically the 3rd and 17th level feats from Way of the Open Fist and the 6th and 11th level feats from the Way of the Shadows. I know we can't multiclass into the same class to gain both but in the PHB page 79 2nd column "Monastic Traditions" reads "Three traditions of monastic pursuit are in common in the monasteries scattered across the multiverse." I'm fine with that but where I question is "Most monasteries practice one tradition exclusively, but a few honor the three traditions and instruct each monk according to his or her aptitude and interest."   So my question would be can I build a monk that is split like that without homebrewing to much? Why is my iPhone screen stuck on the 'connect to iTunes' screen? I need help with my iPhone. It's stuck on the 'connect to iTunes' screen.   iTunes does recognize the iPhone, but when I select 'restore', it goes through a few progress bars, then errors again. I've already tried to hard reset the phone, but that doesn't work either. Is it possible to search every field of every table for a particular value in Oracle?  There are hundreds of tables with thousands of rows in some tables so I know this could take a very long time to query. But the only thing I know is that a value for the field I would like to query against is 1/22/2008P09RR8. &lt;  I've tried using this statement below to find an appropriate column based on what I think it should be named but it returned no results.  SELECT * from dba_objects  WHERE object_name like '%DTN%'   There is absolutely no documentation on this database and I have no idea where this field is being pulled from.  Any thoughts? So I'm trying to prove the following two inequalities: $$\frac{\sqrt{n}}{2} \leq \phi(n) \leq n.$$ The upper bound we get from simply noting that $\phi(n) = n \prod_{p | n}\left( 1 - \frac{1}{p}\right)$ and the fact that $(1 - \frac{1}{p}) \leq 1$. But how can we get the lower bound? I tried using the same expression for $\phi(n)$ but it seems to not really give me the inequality. Can you help? Limit $\lim_{n\to \infty} \frac{1}{2n} \log{2n\choose n}$ How to get Lookup ID from Search API with REST VirtualBox 5.0.40 crashes the whole host since update to kernel 4.13.0-26-generic I received the updates through normal Software Updater, 10-Jan-2018. After this VirtualBox would not start any VM, complaining about dkms and asking to make modprobe vboxdrv. Following the advice I reinstalled virtualbox-dkms with:  sudo apt-get --reinstall install virtualbox-dkms   After this and a reboot I tried to start a VM which freezed the whole machine and a hard reboot was necessary.  Is there a way to make VirtualBox work with the latest kernels?  EDIT:  As suggested by N0rbert, the command:  apt-cache policy `dpkg -S VirtualBox | head -n1 | sed -e 's/://g' | awk '{print $1}'`  gives:   virtualbox-qt:   Installed: 5.0.40-dfsg-0ubuntu1.16.04.2   Candidate: 5.0.40-dfsg-0ubuntu1.16.04.2   Version table:  *** 5.0.40-dfsg-0ubuntu1.16.04.2 500         500 http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/multiverse amd64 Packages         100 /var/lib/dpkg/status      5.0.18-dfsg-2build1 500         500 http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/multiverse amd64 Packages   EDIT (on 29-Mar-2018): Issue is resolved for me, with the Ubuntu Ubdate from today. I have seen that it had some virtualbox-updates, therefore I tried to boot with the most recent kernel again. Then I had to run  sudo apt-get --reinstall install virtualbox-dkms  And after this my virtual machines in VirtualBox started working without crashing the whole computer. Finally! A general question asked from time to time on stack exchange is question of trigger bulkification.  Therefore I have 2 questions:   Which best practices are you using? What is the best way to handle updates of more than 200 records? (In case of more than 200 records the trigger is executed more than once.)