I read a book somewhere around 1981 or 82 at our local library. It was the first book in a series. I can almost remember the entire book just not the title nor the author.  I would love to find out if the author continued the series.   It starts out that there is a planet of mercenaries who hire out their services to other planets. There is a planetary distress call which recalls all the warriors back to the home planet. One warrior whose starship malfunctions, is left in orbit as the rest of the warriors enter the planets atmosphere and are immediately killed by a extremely lethal radiation weapon that has killed the entire planet.    He was close enough to the planet to become terminally ill, and ends up going out into the universe seeking who sent the bomb in the grain supply and killed his people and to try and find another warrior.  On the way, he meets up with a scientist who knows what is going on. They replace his bones through some process to keep him alive.   There is also a creature that reminded me of a ghost. That is all that I remember.
I remember that the main character is trying to find the group that destroyed his home planet while he was on a mission. His planet was very difficult to live on and the people became expert in martial arts and were the best soldiers in the galaxy. They were mercenaries and often helped against tyrants. There was a very memorable section in at least one book about an initiation task that the main character had to do in that he had to survive in their wilderness for days. He was at some point surrounded in a old building by thousands of poisonous worm/snake creatures that he managed to survive until rescued by the leaders.
Why cast an unused function parameter value to void? Want to copy the file name quickly in Windows. I always use rename, copy , but feel it is quite slow. Any better way? Fibonacci addition law $F_{n+m} = F_{n-1}F_m + F_n F_{m+1}$ Tractatus 3.333 and Russell's paradox Can anyone explain to a non-logician how Tractatus 3.333 refutes (or fails to refute) Russell's Paradox? Please explain his use of symbols! Children's fantasy series with a symbol consisting of a circle divided into quarters I read this book series as a kid back in the late 1970s, so it's an old series - and my memories are similarly old, and vague.   I know it's a fantasy series. I think there are 4 books in the series. Or perhaps 7.  There's a central boy character who has to get a collection of magical objects (every fantasy needs a quest!), each of which represents a different magical 'element': wood, stone, fire, etc. I definitely remember there was a wooden object. He lives in our normal world. The whole series takes place "here &amp; now". I have a feeling he's a "chosen" person of some kind... But, the strongest memory I have is of a symbol: a circle which is divided into quarters (a vertical bar and a horizontal bar).  I know it's vague, but does anyone recognise this? How do I hide javascript code in a webpage? If you have an array of Java objects which have a primitive type (for example Byte, Integer, Char, etc).  Is there a neat way I can convert it into an array of the primitive type?  In particular can this be done without having to create a new array and loop through the contents.  So for example, given  Integer[] array   what is the neatest way to convert this into  int[] intArray   Unfortunately, this is something we have to do quite frequently when interfacing between Hibernate and some third party libraries over which we have no control.  It seems this would be a quite common operation so I would be surprised if there's no shortcut.  Thanks for your help! Retrieve Voice Memos from device? iOS seems to refuse to allow me to email "long" voice memos, and I'm unaware of any way to extract them from iTunes backups of my phone. How can I retrieve entire voice memos that aren't really short? Consider the partial sum of the divergent Harmonic series $H_n = \sum\limits_{k = 1}^{n}\frac{1}{k}$. I recently saw a question which required finding out the asymptotic bounds of $H_n$. Now, I could not find any bound closer than $O(n)$. So I looked up the series and found  Wikipedia article which says that $H_n - \ln n$ approaches a constant (the ). This clearly shows that $H_n = \Theta(\log n)$.  However, considering the question was in an beginners undergraduate algorithms course in CS, I was wondering if there is a simpler proof of this? Is there some clever proof requiring elementary mathematics to show $H_n = \Theta(\log n)$?  PS: This is not homework in the sense that it is not my homework, and the actual question does not ask for a proof, but rather asks a lot of functions to be arranged asymptotically. Placing math environments inside math environments I have a macro which appears throughout my document in various places:  \newcommand{\placefraction}[2]{     $\frac{#1}{#2}$ }   Sometimes it is placed with regular text. Sometimes it is placed within other math modes. However, the document won't compile if it is placed inside another math mode.  None of my math ever appears in displayed formulas, it is always part of the paragraph.   How can I have a macro which sometimes appears inside math mode, sometimes outside, but itself contains math mode? system() has been disabled error message Arrow keys, Home, End, tab-complete keys not working in shell I have installed ubuntu minimal(mini.iso) on my vm. I then used recovery mode to login as root and create an account with useradd -m admin and then set a password with passwd admin.  When I login on the new account, instead of the normal prompt I only see a $ sign. If I try to tab-complete a command or file name it prints a normal tab. If I try to use the arrow keys it prints ^[[A, ^[[B, ^[[C or ^[[D. Also, ls no longer adds colors.  None of these problems were in recovery mode. How can I fix this? SSH access to office host behind NAT router I would like to access the ssh port of my office linux host from home. Unfortunately the host is located behind a NAT router. So, the IP address is not publicly available. There is however access to another internet host (Server) which is unfortunately only non-root access. After a while of searching I do not find a suitable solution.  Following setup:   Office PC (linux, root access) behind NAT (IP not public) but full Internet access. Server PC (linux, no root access) static and public IP and full Internet access. Home PC (linux, root access) behind NAT (IP not public) but full Internet access.   Possible connections: Office PC --> Server &lt;-- Home PC  Not possible: Office PC &lt;-X- Server -X-> Home PC  Neither the Home PC, nor the Server can initiate access to the Office PC. But both the Office PC and the Home PC can initiate connections to the Server.  Reverse SSH tunnel not possible: I tried a method called reverse ssh-tunnel. Unfortunately this requires GatewayPorts on Server set to "yes" in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, where I have no root access.  In principle it should be possible:   0) On the Server I start a userspace program which listens on 2 ports (1 incoming, 1 outgoing)  1) On my office PC I run a another program which keeps a TCP connection open to the outgoing port on the server.  2) From home I connect to Server's incoming port.  There should be a standard solution for this out there.  What is the quickest and cleanest solution to solve this?  Frank Reduce Classification Probability Threshold I have a question regarding classification in general. Let $f$ be a classifier, which outputs a set of probabilities given some data D. Normally, one would say: well, if $P(c|D) &gt; 0.5$, we will assign a class 1, otherwise 0 (let this be a binary classification).   My question is, what if I find out, that if I classify the class as 1 also when the probabilities are larger than, for instance 0.2, and the classifier performs better. Is it legitimate to then use this new threshold when doing classification?  I would interpret the necessity for lower classification bound in the context of the data emitting a smaller signal; yet still significant for the classification problem.  I realize this is one way to do it. However, if this is not correct thinking of reducing the threshold, what would be some data transformations, which emphasize individual features in a similar manner, so that the threshold can remain at 0.5? Illogical GTK theme behaviour on Ubuntu 18.04 I have scene that looks like this:   And I want to add volumetric lighting to it so that light forms a rays of light when it go through the trees like on this example that I found in youtube:   But the problem is that all of these tutorials show how to make this lighting coming from windows, but when I try to replicate it in my forest scene it looks like big ugly fog with cubical shape. Also the light is coming from the back of the camera (as you can see) and there are some spots that needs this special lighting (like places where light goes through trees) and some that don't (like big bright are on the bottom left corner) so I can't just add a giant cube to all of the scene. jQuery autocomplete tagging plug-in like StackOverflow's input tags? Why does "touch -a" also set the ctime? Is it touch(1) from coreutils-8.4-37.el6.x86_64 or my brain which is broken?  $ touch abc $ LANG=C stat abc   File: `abc'   Size: 0               Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   regular empty file Device: fd04h/64772d    Inode: 10485773    Links: 1 Access: (0664/-rw-rw-r--)  Uid: (3060399/ nodakai)   Gid: (  418/   quant) Access: 2016-10-14 18:42:06.189751847 +0800 Modify: 2016-10-14 18:42:06.189751847 +0800 Change: 2016-10-14 18:42:06.189751847 +0800 $ touch -a abc $ LANG=C stat abc   File: `abc'   Size: 0               Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   regular empty file Device: fd04h/64772d    Inode: 10485773    Links: 1 Access: (0664/-rw-rw-r--)  Uid: (3060399/ nodakai)   Gid: (  418/   quant) Access: 2016-10-14 18:42:17.374235446 +0800 Modify: 2016-10-14 18:42:06.189751847 +0800 Change: 2016-10-14 18:42:17.374235446 +0800 $ touch --help | grep 'access time'   -a                     change only the access time   As you see, it was not only atime but also ctime which was updated by touch -a !?!?  The filesystem is ext4 over LVM if that makes any differences. I haven't had the chance to take any serious low-level programming courses in school. (I know I really should get going on learning the "behind-the-scenes" to be a better programmer.) I appreciate the conveniences of Java, including the ability to stick anything into a System.out.print statement. However, is there any reason why you would want to use System.out.printf instead?   Also, should I avoid print calls like this in "real applications"?  It's probably better to  to print messages to the client's display using some kind of UI function, right? I've been looking at the python code loging of Blender. But in there things get loged as mouse clicks.  What i like to do is combine a few images into a larger one using compositor, but i need control over compositor by python script. The problem seams to me that it is a bit hard to "spawn" a few nodes, set their values and connect them.  I need an micture of:  image, scale, source image location, mix nodes, output nodes  I have no Code samples other then the log of blender python which in this case is of no big help.