I'm searching for a science fiction book, with the twist that I haven't actually read this book. I have only heard the outline of the plot of it. But I'm fairly certain that it is indeed a book, and not some plot I dreamt up myself.  It goes like this:   Due to some silly oversight, humankind has never discovered anti-gravity and faster-than-light travel, something other species usually discover around their corresponding stone age. Somewhere around the modern day, an alien fleet lands on Earth, armed with spears and shields, and demand that humans surrender and become their slaves. Obviously, the aliens get steamrolled by cruise missiles and tanks and electronic communication, which humans were forced to develop due to being stuck on their own planet without knowledge of anti-gravity. Humans steal the alien technology and go into space.   Additional info: I read the plot description in English (but that doesn't say much) in an English speaking online forum which is long defunct. I read it somewhere between 2000 and 2005.
I read a short story (I think, but it might have been a novel), where most races discover a very easy way to travel faster than light at a certain point in their technological development.   What I remember:   The guys in wooden ships bounced around subjugating the people without FTL travel. Earth had never figured out the FTL, and so had poured its effort in a different path, achieving present day technology. The aliens were freaking out about handing the humans FTL travel. The story was told from the point of view of the aliens. I read it in the last 10 years, but there is no telling how old it actually was, although I do remember them mentioning F-18s or F-14s.
Why does this excerpt say that unbiased estimation of standard deviation usually isn't relevant? Why was Dumbledore worried by the cut in Harry's arm? Will the Windows 10 Free Upgrade stay in the Professional channel? How can I propose a new site? I have an idea or subject that should have a Q&amp;A, and want to propose a new site. How can I do this?  Related: In addition to showing reputation scores, SO should rank users. In the users section, users are ordered by the reputations they have.  Each user should also have a unique rank, since many users can have the same reputation score.  Rank must follow the order laid out by reputation, but for those having similar reputation, an additional formula should be defined which can rank users based on tags, time since registration, frequency of activity and/or helpfulness of their answers.  What are your thoughts on this? What's the term for using the wrong word because it sounds the same? I was reading about various terms for incorrect words, but they didn't seem to fit.  I saw a post where someone said "what do you like to do when you're board?".  That kind of thing.  Also, would that be considered a mistake in grammar?  I didn't think so, but my friend insists it is.  I'm not sure if there even is a word for that kind of mistake, but was just curious about it.  Thanks! I have an internet connection that I'd like to be enabled only during the day. With multiple household internet devices, this would need to be something disabled at the level of the router.  I don't believe the router offers this sort of functionality, but I'm reasonably familiar with setting up web servers and the like, and I'm wondering if I can set up some sort of proxy server on the internet that the router must go through and have that proxy only active at certain times of day.  It's a bit vague I know, but is something like this even possible?  If not, are there other solutions to the problem? When should you use a class vs a struct in C++? In what scenarios is it better to use a struct vs a class in C++? Splitting a semicolon-separated string to a dictionary, in Python What is the number of strings at size $n$ that is constructed from ${a,b,c,d}$ and there is an even num of $a$ $n &gt; 2$ and $n$ is a prime number then $n$ is odd.  Prove by contradiction assume $n$ is even then there is some $k\in\Bbb N, n = 2k$ then $n &gt;2, 2k &gt; 2 , k &gt; 1$  Is this  a sufficient proof? Why do the less than symbol () appear wrong as upside down exclamation (¡) or question mark (¿)? When typing &lt; or &gt; in LaTeX and compiling with pdflatex, the less than and greater than symbols appear at upside down exclamation points. I'm not in math mode. What is (meant by) a non-compact $U(1)$ Lie group? In John Preskill's  of monopoles he states on p. 471     Nowadays, we have another way of understanding why electric charge is quantized. Charge is quantized if the electromagnetic $U(l)_{\rm em}$ gauge group is compact. But $U(l)_{\rm em}$ is automatically compact in a unified gauge theory in which $U(l)_{\rm em}$ is embedded in a nonabelian semisimple   group. [Note that the standard Weinberg-Salam-Glashow (35) model is   not "unified" according to this criterion.]   The implication of the third sentence is that, in some circumstances, the $U(1)_{\rm em}$ gauge group may not be compact.  How could this be?  Since $U(1)$ as a differentiable manifold is diffeomorphic to $S^1$ isn't it automatically always compact?  The following paragraph:     In other words, in a unified gauge theory, the electric charge operator obeys nontrivial commutation relations with other operators in the theory. Just as the angular momentum algebra requires the eigenvalues of $J_z$ to be integer multiples of $\frac{\hbar}{2}$, the commutation relations satisfied by the electric charge operator require its   eigenvalues to be integer multiples of a fundamental unit. This   conclusion holds even if the symmetries generated by the charges that   fail to commute with electric charge are spontaneously broken.   is OK, but I don't follow what that has to do with the compactness of $U(1)$. How can I take screenshots of YouTube videos in full screen? I am trying to take a screenshot of a YouTube video in fullscreen.  When I pause the video and wait a moment, only the bottom UI bar (play/pause/seek) disappears. The top UI bar (Like/Share/More Info) stays there.  So when I press PrintScreen on the keyboard, the screenshot is polluted by this top UI bar. Is there any way to remove it while the video is on pause? 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(Here $k$ is a field.)    Thanks for any help. How do I remove code duplication between similar const and non-const member functions? alias fo rm command ( cp comand issue ) How to convert light activated switch Can anyone teach me how to convert a light activated switch into  dark activated switch vice versa. I have a third-party library which consists mainly of a large number of static (.a) library files.  I can compile this into a single .a library file, but I really need it to be a single .so shared library file.  Is there any way to convert a static .a file into a shared .so file?  Or more generally is there a good way to combine a huge number of static .a files with a few .o object files into a single .so file?