I'm not really sure when I read this book (or series of books), but it was definitely when I was a kid, so I'd say at least 10 years ago.  It's about a maze which when successfully navigated, gives the person great power. One of the powers that I remember was that a singer who had navigated through the maze was able to use her voice eventually to kill people. Eventually you find out that the maze was created long ago by some race known as the illuminati. It's set in a civilization that is less advanced than it previously was (some kind of downfall event occurred) but they still are able to travel between worlds. I specifically remember some threat that travels between solar systems and destroys the stars (by entering the stars and devouring it from the inside out). Sometime during the course of the plot the male protagonist gains the ability to travel through time and he witnesses the more advanced civilization in the past. There's a part where he is imprisoned with energy cuffs but he actually is able to escape but chooses not to and he plays with the energy cuffs by willfully changing the color of it using his mind as hes escorted away. You also find out that the star destroyer/devourer/whatever is actually a person specifically a woman (that got corrupted by the maze?).  This was read many years ago so some of the plot I listed might be slightly wrong. Sorry if I rambled...
I'm looking for the name of a series of space opera novels I read some time ago, probably between 2003 and 2010.    It may have been published quite a few years before I read it, I don't think it was new at the time. I borrowed the novels from the local library, but I can't find them in its catalogue. I think the covers were fairly dark and plain, though there may have been some artwork on them. There was a totalitarian empire that controlled most planets, possibly ruled by a queen. There was no mention of Earth, the solar system or other real planets, the setting was completely fictional. There were people with psychic/psionic powers, referred to as something like "psi". These people were second-class citizens or slaves. Spaceships were used to travel between worlds. I'm not sure what kind of FTL technology they had, if any. Beyond the edge of the empire was some kind of "dark space", where there was no light. There were some horror themes: When travelling in dark space in one of the novels, a ships crew experienced strange thoughts and hallucinations. I remember finding this quite scary at the time.   Does anyone know which series this could be?  This isn't a duplicate of , since the two questions are about different parts of the same series (the first and second episodes).
Minecraft Inventory Saving I am making an RPG map, and was wondering how to "save" the game.  If you die, you would revert back to a save that happens automatically or manually, and I was wondering how to have it so that you will have all the items you had then, and none of the items you got after you saved (so /gamerule keepInventory won't work).  The only way I can think of doing this is having this long, long, annoying set of command blocks to test for all the items in the game, and then have another 64 command blocks for each of those items, testing for the amount of the item. Xmonad with Unity / HUD I want to use xmonad and still use the HUD from Unity.  Is this possible? Could Xmonad be using while using Unity?  is there a way to use the HUD inside of Xmonad?  I'm in 12.04, soon to be 12.10. Finding files by only knowing extension? I'm somewhat disorganized in my file saving habits, so I wind up using the Search function in Windows Explorer more often than one should. I was wondering, is it possible to have Windows find all files of a certain extension ( like, say for example all .rar files) if it is, how? Does Earth really have two high-tide bulges on opposite sides? The bit that makes sense – tidal forces My physics teacher explained that most tidal effect is caused by the Moon rotating around the Earth, and some also by the Sun. They said that in the Earth and Moon system, the bodies are in freefall about each other. But that points on the surface of Earth, not being at Earth's centre of gravity, experience a slightly different pulls towards the Moon. The pull is a little greater if they are on the Moon's side, and slightly lesser if they are on the side away from the Moon. Once freefall is removed, on the Moon side this feels like a pull towards the Moon and on the the opposite side it feels like a repulsion from the Moon. This makes sense to me, and is backed up by other questions and answers here, like  and also  Phys.SE question. The bit that doesn't make sense – tidal bulges They also said that there are &quot;tidal bulges&quot; on opposite sides of the Earth caused by these forces. The bulges stay still relative to the Moon and Earth rotating through the bulges explains why we get two tides a day. They drew a picture like this one…  An image search for  finds hundreds of similar examples, and  from a scientist on Twitter. …But, if there is a tidal bulge on both sides of Earth, like a big wave with two peaks going round and around, how can an island, like Great Britain where I live, simultaneously have a high tide on one side and a low tide on the other? For example:   on the West coast  on the East  Two ports with tides 6 hours, or 180º apart. It's high tide at one while low tide at the other. But they are only  by road. Great Britain is much smaller than Earth. It's probably not even as big as the letter &quot;A&quot; in the word &quot;TIDAL&quot; in that picture.  To prove this isn't just Britain being a crazy anomaly, here is another example from New Zealand:     Two ports that are 180º (6 hours) apart, but separated by  through a national park. New Zealand, unlike the UK, is in fairly open ocean. I can copy, move, create, and delete them. I can rename them using the REN command from a command prompt. I cannot rename folders through Windows Explorer anywhere on my machine, including on other drives.   When I try to do so, I receive an error titled "Rename Folder" that says "Can't find the specified file. Make sure you specify the correct path and file name." Then when I click Try Again or Cancel, I get another error titled "Rename" that says "The file or folder does not exist."  As far as I can tell, nothing else is wrong with my computer, but I'm pulling my hair out trying to fix this problem. I don't know for sure if superuser is the right place to ask this question, but feel free to redirect me.  Summary of Failed Attempts:   Booted into Safe Mode  Made a New User Account System Restore Point (two days ago, 9 days ago)  Deleting / Restoring / Modifying FolderDescriptions registry entries SFC /scannow  Removing windows update KB2984006  Scanned for viruses using Nod32  Scanned for malware using MalwareBytes   Details:  Tried rolling back to two different system restore points, both immediately before I observed the problem and one release prior to that.  Tried restoring FolderDescriptions registry entries as found here:   Booting in safe mode as suggested here:   SFC /scannow as suggested here:   Tried removing registry keys and windows update KB2984006 as suggested here:   Tried exporting folderdescriptions from other machine and importing as suggested here:   Compared my exported registry with other machine's exported registry for both:  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions   My FolderDescriptions branch of the registry in both cases are binary equal to those exported from my wife's Windows 8.1 laptop which works fine. Raster calculator reclass 0 as 0 QGIS I want to process a raster with values 0-16. I want to set all values between 1 and 15 as 1, a value of 16 as 0 and cells with a value of 0 as 0.   How do I maintain a cell value of 0?  I have tried the following:  ("raster_name@1" !=0 AND "raster_name@1" &lt;= 15*1)+("raster_name@1" = 16*0)   Results in: Values of 16 as 0, values 1-15 as 1, values 0 also = 1  I also tried:  ("raster_name@1" !=0 AND "raster_name@1" &lt;= 15*1)+("raster_name@1" 16*0)+("raster_name@1" = 0*0)   Results in: Values of 16 as 0, values 1-15 as 1, values 0 = 2  Please, can you explain how to retain cells with a 0 value as 0? In The Witness, I was walking along the coast, and I came upon this:    Now, since I've learned      that mazes can be embedded in the environment,   I see the puzzle here, but I just can't get the pieces to line up well enough.  Standing on the couch and walking all around it doesn't seem to get me a       functional maze.   Where do I need to stand to activate the puzzle successfully? Let $Z_i,Z_2,\ldots$ be IID Random Variables with density $f$. Suppose that $P(Z_i&gt;0)=1$ and that $\lambda=\lim_{x \to 0+} f(x)&gt;0$. How can I show that $X_n=n \times \min\{Z_i\}$ has a limiting exponential distribution with mean$1/\lambda$?  I know that the CDF of the first order Statistic is for $t&gt;0$  $$F_{min \{ Z_i \}} (t)= 1- \left[ 1-F(t) \right]^{n}$$  Convergence in distribution requires that $F_n (t) \to F(t)$ for some distribution function $F$ but I cannot quite take the limit of the above, with $t$ replaced by $x/n$, as the distribution is not known. I guess I have to insert the second piece of information somewhere but I do not recognise where.  Could you please give me a hint or two?  Thank you. What does this notification icon mean? Samsung s7 I often hear about subatomic particles having a property called "spin" but also that it doesn't actually relate to spinning about an axis like you would think. Which particles have spin? What does spin mean if not an actual spinning motion? I am on a Mac with MacTex 2020 and ran into a strange problem with Biber. Working on a document all was fine, I did not change the bibliography (says my git) and only fixing typos (not even adding cites) and suddenly latexmk stopped working after a Biber run, while that looked like  INFO - This is Biber 2.14 INFO - Logfile is 'doc.blg' INFO - Reading 'doc.bcf' INFO - Found 31 citekeys in bib section 0 INFO - Processing section 0 INFO - Globbing data source 'literature.bib' INFO - Globbed data source 'literature.bib' to literature.bib INFO - Looking for bibtex format file 'literature.bib' for section 0 INFO - LaTeX decoding ... INFO - Found BibTeX data source 'literature.bib'   so harmless in my view. Then with --debug I additionally get in the end.  INFO - LaTeX decoding ... warning: overriding existing definition of macro "jun" warning: overriding existing definition of macro "jul" warning: overriding existing definition of macro "sep" warning: overriding existing definition of macro "jan" [...] warning: overriding existing definition of macro "nov" INFO - Found BibTeX data source 'literature.bib' Unicode::UCD: failed to find unicore/version in /var/folders/hm/gt63cn0j2r7bwbzw7c1hww1r0000gn/T/par-626572676d616e6e/cache-2f8a664c3c933a44d096bcc8d018a5e92bced897/inc/lib /var/folders/hm/gt63cn0j2r7bwbzw7c1hww1r0000gn/T/par-626572676d616e6e/cache-2f8a664c3c933a44d096bcc8d018a5e92bced897/inc CODE(0x7fd026aeb5a8) CODE(0x7fd026aebb90) at /var/folders/hm/gt63cn0j2r7bwbzw7c1hww1r0000gn/T/par-626572676d616e6e/cache-2f8a664c3c933a44d096bcc8d018a5e92bced897/inc/lib/Biber/Input/file/bibtex.pm line 1011.   It seems unrelated to the library itself since deleting a few entries (going through deleting one half, then the other), the problem persists. It does not happen for an empty literature, but as soon as a first entry is added (just author/journal/title/year/volume/pages - no utf8-only chars) this error message appears.  what does this last error message mean?  How can I solve this? What type of path in shebang is more preferable? In scripts, first line should specify the path to interpreter. But on different servers Linux, Unix, or BSD this path could be different.  What is more preferable?  #!/usr/bin/env bash    or  #!/bin/bash right now when I connect to my VPN, my internet is served from my home router, but any requests for xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx i.e. my works ip range are served via the vpn connection I believe.  How can I force all traffic to the vpn? Improving Review Queues - Design overview II: Changing review bans and other new features Setting Low Disk Space Alerts on Windows Server 2008 Reload activity in Android Why is BigDecimal returning a weird value? The Wikipedia  has a derivation of the Klein-Gordon equation.  It gets to this step:  $$\sqrt{\textbf{p}^2 c^2 + m^2 c^4} = E$$  and inserts the QM operators to get  $$\left( \sqrt{ (-i \hbar \nabla)^2 c^2 + m^2 c^4 } \right) \psi = i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t} \psi$$  The article then says     This, however, is a cumbersome expression to work with because the differential operator cannot be evaluated while under the square root sign. In addition, this equation, as it stands, is nonlocal.   To fix this, the first equation is squared instead to get  $$\textbf{p}^2 c^2 + m^2 c^4 = E^2$$  after which the QM operators are inserted and the expression is simplified to get  $$-\hbar^2 c^2 \nabla^2 \psi + m^2 c^4 \psi = -\hbar^2 \frac{\partial^2}{\partial t^2} \psi$$  A couple things I don't understand.  First, are the solutions to this differential equation not exactly the same as the solutions to the first differential equation?  Both sides of the starting equation were squared, so it seems to me that regardless of the particular form of the resulting differential equation, both of them should have the exact same set of solutions.  Secondly, why is the first differential equation cumbersome to work with?  It seems like it would in fact be easier to work with, since the operator under the square root could be expanded in terms of a Taylor series and then you have an equation that is first order in time.  And finally, can someone elaborate on what nonlocal means? The linked article on the Wikipedia page didn't entirely help me understand it. Filtering questions by multiple tags I know you can select a tag and then click on unanswered to view the unanswered questions for that tag.  But is there a way to view questions only for a certain set of tags > 1 tag?  Mainly I'd like the union of tag1 with tag2 with tag3 with tag4. But also the intersection of tags would be nice as well. How should "do my homework" questions be closed? (Missing "demonstrate minimal understanding") Just recently,  question was posted. Here's the body of the question:     Write a function called highlight() that prompts the user for a string. Your code should ensure that the string is all lower case. Next, prompt the user for a smaller 'substring' of one or more characters. Then replace every occurrence of the substring in the first string with an upper case. Finally, report to the user how many changes were made (i.e., how many occurrences of the substring there were).      What would a script for this be?   This is basically a "do my homework for me" style question. In the past, I would have voted to close this question for lacking minimal understanding and moved on. However, it looks like this close reason was removed, and I'm having difficulty figuring out which alternative to use (if at all).  Here were some of the close reasons I was considering, and ultimately decided against since they didn't seem to precisely match:   Duplicate of    I sort of doubt there exists a precise duplicate of this question -- the question is a fairly specific request for some code. I could maybe link to a duplicate question that answers a part of the original (for example, checking if the string is lowercase), but it wouldn't answer every aspect of the problem. Problem that can't be reproduced/typographical error    This sort of matches, since it asks the user to produce a SSCCEE, but doesn't really match since there isn't even a problem to begin with (and closing a question because I couldn't "reproduce" a non-existent problem feels a bit silly to me) Unclear what you're asking    It's pretty obvious what the user is asking -- I could produce a 5 line script in about 20 seconds that precisely matches his spec. Too broad    The text for "Too broad" states that "There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format". This doesn't apply to this question -- once again, the answer I could give would be fairly short and would closely resemble solutions other people would give.   So, what should I do here? Am I misunderstanding how the close reasons should now be used? Should I use the "other" close reason and explain that the OP should have put in more effort? Should I simply downvote, perhaps leave a comment, and move on? Or is the new policy to embrace these kinds of questions and just post an answer?