I remember reading a book back in the late 80s or early 90s about earth being invaded by aliens that looked a lot like insects.  I thought it was written by Gary Gygax but I can't figure out what they were called.  I think there were 3 books in the series.  The protagonist was a young man.   Sorry I can't remember any more than that.
Looking for a trilogy published around the early 80s.  Insect-like aliens are invading earth.  Humans' brains are placed in robotic bodies.  The protagonist is a child in one of these bodies.  He has to learn how to control the robot &amp; conserve his battery power.  Once train, he can fight back against the aliens using heat-guns + physical attacks.    The aliens are landing/spawning on sites all over the globe.  Part of the plot is discovering a method to disrupt their staging points.  It was probably young-adult oriented.  If anyone remembers this, thank you.
Can I register a retail boxed copy of a game with Steam? I personally do not like to purchase games digitally.  There's just something magical about going to the store, picking up a boxed game, staring at the amazing box art, bringing the game home and putting the disc in the drive.  That being said, I know that several game distribution companies are leaning more toward digital distribution, with[Steam holding a large chunk of that market.  Is it possible to buy a retail boxed copy of a game, but still get the benefits of Steam (automatic updates, install on multiple computers, etc.) ? Why isn't sizeof for a struct equal to the sum of sizeof of each member? Why does the sizeof operator return a size larger for a structure than the total sizes of the structure's members? Front suspension or full suspension mountain bike and is such interpretation the norm?  When something went from 4 units to 8 units, most authoritative sources seem to agree with the use of "a two-fold increase", even though what was actually increased is more like "one-fold", i.e. the original quantity.  But if the "two-fold increase" is the correct usage, why most people seem to interpret "a 100% increase" the same thing? I see this a lot, someone in a category of people attempts to shut down anyone with an opinion that is not from the same category. For example, people without children weighing in on parenting; the parent may say something like "well, since you don't have kids and I do, my position is of more validity than yours."  Another example: a drug user (of some kind) telling someone who has never done drugs and does not care to, "until you tried it, you have no right to judge me."  People frequently try to limit the consideration on opinions to those in their same group, while it is perfectly reasonable that the non-drug user, especially if they are a chemist or well read on the subject, may have an equally valid opinion, or even more valid. In fact some might even say that someone NOT in the category has a better chance of being objective and seeing the forest for the trees.  So what is the fallacy of trying to shut down opinions when the source of the opinion is not someone who has personally had the experience under discussion? How to rate philosophy essays? I might end up teaching philosophy in Finnish lukio/gymnasium. I will not get an opportunity to practice teaching it - I do get to practice teaching mathematics a fair deal, though. (The situation is somewhat unfortunate.) I have taken subject studies in philosophy at university. They amount to around 60 credits (ECTS).  Suppose I give the students an exam, which asks them to write an essay or two. After that my task is to grade the exams in a fair way and comment them in such a way that the students can learn from the feedback.  -  Suppose the task was to write an essay on the problem of universals - nominalism and realism, say. Let us say 6 points is the perfect score for this task.  I would expect the students to define nominalism and realism (2 points, maybe?) and explain the problem (2 points). Remaining two points for taking some stance and arguing for it - realism is more reasonable because so and so. Partial credits for demonstrating only partial understanding.  -  Am I missing some important aspects of philosophical thinking? Should I emphasize the different parts of an answer in a different way? I suspect my perspective is influenced by fairly extensive mathematics education - is there something particular I should watch out for? Image of the tensor product of strict maps of Banach spaces So what I'm looking for here is something like PHP's  function.  This is so I can debug my scripts by seeing what's the state of the object in question. Is there a guideline about when to end expressions with semicolons? What's better to use in PHP for appending an array member,  $array[] = $value;   or  array_push($array, $value);   ?  Though the manual says you're better off to avoid a function call, I've also read $array[] is much slower than array_push(). What are some clarifications or benchmarks? How to get Debian codename without lsb-release I am trying to create a script that requires me to print the debian codename so that I may echo it into the sources.list file.  I am trying to make this script work across any version of Debian, so I had hoped to set a bash variable of the release codename. This would be simple to do (with lsb_release -c), however our deployment images do not contain lsb_release by default - and with this script being required to fix the sources.list, installing lsb-release with apt-get would not be an option.  I have found numerous ways to get the release number and other info about the system, but cannot find a reliable place to get the codename.  Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!  (OS I am testing this with is Debian Squeeze) What physical properties of materials trigger the capacitive touch screen? I have watched some youtube videos about capacitive touch screen      The videos show that a conductor(finger), in which charges can be induced, can be used to trigger the capacitive touch screen. However, I tried to wear a plastic glove to hold a metal rod to touch the screen and no detection is triggered.  I really want to know the physics theory about the capacitive sensing.  Can someone tell me what physical properties or shape trigger the capacitive touch screen?  Is there any examples that something WITHOUT conducting to human body can trigger the screen?  (P.S. I have read other posts about capacitive touch screen here and do not find a good answer so this is not a duplicate) What are the differences between proofs based on simulation and proofs based on games? How useful is that rule and how many times we can use that in one game?  Under what conditions can the en passant rule be used?  How often does it come up and is it a good idea to use it? Why is the last digit of $n^5$ equal to the last digit of $n$? I was wondering why the last digit of $n^5$ is that of $n$? What's the proof and logic behind the statement? I have no idea where to start. Can someone please provide a simple proof or some general ideas about how I can figure out the proof myself? Thanks. I want to show for $x\in\mathbb{R}$, the following inequality holds. $$ \left|\sin x\right|+\left|\sin (x+1)\right|+\left|\sin (x+2)\right|&gt;8/5. $$ This trigonometric inequality has been verified by Mathematica using the Plot commend. However, using the sum formula for the sine function seems doesn't work, and I cannot give a rigorous proof of it. Any suggestion, idea, or comment is welcome, thanks! I'm a Sri Lankan passport holder. I'm planning to travel to China in January and have to transit in Malaysia. I wonder whether I can obtain a Malaysian transit visa in KLIA 2 when I'm flying back to Sri Lanka. Can I travel to UK with my Italian national daughter and husband with my permesso di soggiorno? I have an Italian permesso di soggiorno and I want to join my husband in the UK. My baby and my husband are Italian nationals. Can I travel with them with only the permesso di soggiorno? A secretary with ____ good knowledge of English: "a" or no article? I'm trying to pass a test on "Articles exercise" as they call it . Reviewing my answers I got stuck about the two I posted on the picture below.  As I understand both words are uncountable (according to the ), so it looks like (or said for example ) I can't say a/an with an uncountable noun.  But this test says the opposite. Is there some trick? Or am I just dumb? Please help me to understand why I need to use "a" article in these cases?        We need a secretary with ____ good knowledge of English.          a  (marked as the correct answer)   the     a / the     no article is needed (the answer I think is correct)        We're having ____ terrible weather.         a (marked as the correct answer)     the     a / the     no article is needed (the answer I think is correct) How to Deserialize XML document How do I Deserialize this XML document:  &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?&gt; &lt;Cars&gt;   &lt;Car&gt;     &lt;StockNumber&gt;1020&lt;/StockNumber&gt;     &lt;Make&gt;Nissan&lt;/Make&gt;     &lt;Model&gt;Sentra&lt;/Model&gt;   &lt;/Car&gt;   &lt;Car&gt;     &lt;StockNumber&gt;1010&lt;/StockNumber&gt;     &lt;Make&gt;Toyota&lt;/Make&gt;     &lt;Model&gt;Corolla&lt;/Model&gt;   &lt;/Car&gt;   &lt;Car&gt;     &lt;StockNumber&gt;1111&lt;/StockNumber&gt;     &lt;Make&gt;Honda&lt;/Make&gt;     &lt;Model&gt;Accord&lt;/Model&gt;   &lt;/Car&gt; &lt;/Cars&gt;   I have this:  [Serializable()] public class Car {     [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("StockNumber")]     public string StockNumber{ get; set; }      [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("Make")]     public string Make{ get; set; }      [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("Model")]     public string Model{ get; set; } }   .  [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlRootAttribute("Cars", Namespace = "", IsNullable = false)] public class Cars {     [XmlArrayItem(typeof(Car))]     public Car[] Car { get; set; }  }   .  public class CarSerializer {     public Cars Deserialize()     {         Cars[] cars = null;         string path = HttpContext.Current.ApplicationInstance.Server.MapPath("~/App_Data/") + "cars.xml";          XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Cars[]));          StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(path);         reader.ReadToEnd();         cars = (Cars[])serializer.Deserialize(reader);         reader.Close();          return cars;     } }   that don't seem to work :-(