I was writing , and it reminded me of a short story, which I can't recall the title.  Here is the pitch :   An astronaut is the only survivor of the crash of its ship on Mars, he only has some food rations and a bottle of water He finds an abandoned village The village is absolutely unfriendly with the astronaut There is a high-pitched sound playing from nowhere. Later in the story the astronaut realizes that it is some sort of music aliens would enjoy The sinks in the houses produces some sort of goo. When the character tries to eat it he becomes sick, even shower throw some sort of acid water The astronaut tries to sleep on the ground of a house but he sweats a lot He then realizes the village is learning from him to suit its needs, but the village is self destroying   This story was in a short story collection book, which was quite old so I suppose it was written before 1980.
I read this story 30+ years ago in grade school. A man crashes on an alien planet. He has a small amount of water and accidentally spills some, and the planet replicates it but it must destroy part of itself to do so.  The man then finds some stale crumbs in his pocket, puts them in a trough, and the planet replicates them as well, but it's disgusting to eat. The man eventually decides that his situation is hopeless, so he lays down to die on a table in a hot room and thinks he can at least give back to the planet some of the nutrients it sacrificed for him. He falls asleep, and when he awakens, he has been transformed into an alien creature that is perfectly suited and adapted to live on the planet without discomfort to himself or damage the planet.
How to handle client requests to violate copyrights? My machine can't play encrypted DVDs on a fresh install.  How do I add this capability?  Another useful bit of information would be what programs are best for playing DVDs, once I'm able to do so.  See the .  Will I be able to play DVD movies from ? Propose Newbie-Overflow site or section Because the perl section is looking like that right now. I believe that Stack Overflow is going out of it's charter in becoming a newbie FAQ when as far as the original reasoning it was meant to be something along the lines of an expert site.   is a good example of what I mean in Perl. It probably could be closed because it's a duplicate, or some other reason.   I would also like to indicate that I don't hold back answering newbie questions. It's just when I think of an obscure "stack overflow" error that's beating you some 3 am close to deadline, that's not "Howcum Perl print ..." and follows with something that causes a vast majority of Perl programmers to say oops, because they know exactly what's going on.   So the proposal is   A new site. "Move to Newbieville" A new "section" A new status somewhat similar to Closed ("Newbied") but still can be updated all the same as an open question.   I'm not against giving some newbies an assist, but I feel a FAQ for rank newbieism is not something that SO started out to be, based on the original concept of a Expert Site.   Including comment to Gnoupi:   I said nothing about making newbies unwelcome. Like I said. I answer them--heck, I think I've even answer homework questions. I've answered on the vague impressions that I can glean from posts that have 4 close votes. It can even lead to avoiding downvoting or yelling at newbies by more established curmudgeons if there is a special action you can do to gently inform newbies that this is a real newbie question.  However, you have to know that to some people newbies are already unwelcome. There is a site ethic, but the individual is also going to decide how much they welcome newbies. And people do post RTFM answers already.   Anyway, I'm one vote away from a peer pressure badge it seems. (Nope, nailed it.)    EDIT  For somebody jumping to the conclusion that I'm hostile to newbies:  just earlier $\mathbb{R}$ with the lower limit topology is not second-countable I am trying to prove that $\mathbb{R}$ with the lower limit topology is not second-countable.  To do this, I'm trying to form an uncountable union $A$ of disjoint, half-open intervals of the form $[a, b)$, $a &lt; b$. Is this possible? I think this would imply the $A$ is open but no countable union of basis elements could coincide with $A$ therefore making the real numbers with the lower limit topology not second-countable.  I think there must exist something like $A$ described above but I am having trouble visualizing it and coming up with a formula to represent it.  Maybe there is some other way to show it is not second-countable. How to find the reduced density matrix of a four-qubit system? I have the state vector $|p\rangle$ made up of 4 qubits. Say system A is made up of the first and second qubits while system B is made up of qubits 3 and 4. I want to find the reduced density matrix of system A.   I know I could separately extract qubits 1,2 and 3,4 into their own state vectors then find their density matrices and compute the reduced density matrix for system A.  I want to figure out how to do this without having to extract and separate the systems. First I would find the density matrix of $|p\rangle$ and then do a partial trace with respect to system B. I am not sure how to do the partial trace of system B since the system contains 2 qubits.  Can anyone help me figure this out? I am using Python and NumPy for reference. Converting bike from rim brakes to disc brakes I just bought a used  and it comes with regular rim brakes. I'm perfectly happy with them so far, but have been wondering if disc brakes would come handy when it rains.  What is involved in converting a bike from rim brakes to disc brakes (mechanical or hydraulic)?   Is this something that is feasible, or am I better off buying another bike that already has disc brakes? Basically I would like to use on website a "Norasi" font, that was bundled with Ubuntu, but I cannot find any license. Am I allowed to distribute that font through website? What is its license? How to find historical airfares? Is there a way to find out how much it would have cost to buy a particular airplane ticket at some point in the past?    For example, how could I find out how much it would have cost to buy a one-way itinerary from airport A to airport B on October 1, 2011 for travel on November 1, 2011? I need to display attachments on a visual force page for the Case object.  This is the code I am using. I had it working for awhile, but it somehow broke down. It gets all the attachments, but it will not show the images.   &lt;apex:repeat value="{!Case.attachments}" var="att"&gt;             &lt;apex:panelgrid columns="1"&gt;                 &lt;h1&gt;Image/h1&gt;                 &lt;apex:image url="/servlet/servlet.FileDownload?file={!att.Id}"/&gt;             &lt;/apex:panelgrid&gt; &lt;/apex:repeat&gt; What is a "Nested Quantifier" and why is it causing my regex to fail? I have this regex I built and tested in regex buddy.  "_ [ 0-9]{10}+ {1}+[ 0-9]{10}+ {2}+[ 0-9]{6}+ {2}[ 0-9]{2}"   When I use this in .Net C#   I receive the exception  "parsing \"_ [ 0-9]{10}+ +[ 0-9]{10}+  +[ 0-9]{6}+  [ 0-9]{2}\" - Nested quantifier +."   What does this error mean? Apparently .net doesn't like the expression.  Here is the regex buddy so u can understand my intention with the regex...  _ [ 0-9]{10}+ {1}+[ 0-9]{10}+ {2}+[ 0-9]{6}+ {2}[ 0-9]{2}  Match the characters "_ " literally «_ » Match a single character present in the list below «[ 0-9]{10}+»    Exactly 10 times «{10}+»    The character " " « »    A character in the range between "0" and "9" «0-9» Match the character " " literally « {1}+»    Exactly 1 times «{1}+» Match a single character present in the list below «[ 0-9]{10}+»    Exactly 10 times «{10}+»    The character " " « »    A character in the range between "0" and "9" «0-9» Match the character " " literally « {2}+»    Exactly 2 times «{2}+» Match a single character present in the list below «[ 0-9]{6}+»    Exactly 6 times «{6}+»    The character " " « »    A character in the range between "0" and "9" «0-9» Match the character " " literally « {2}»    Exactly 2 times «{2}» Match a single character present in the list below «[ 0-9]{2}»    Exactly 2 times «{2}»    The character " " « »    A character in the range between "0" and "9" «0-9»   In short...  What is a Nested quantifier? What do people who are using a pensieve look like? As far as I remember from the books, there's no description of what a person using a Pensieve looks like. When Harry is using the Pensieve, he describes it as if he were falling into it, but it's never stated whether his body really enters the Pensieve, because the experience is just told from his point of view.   Now let's say Dumbledore enters his office while Harry was using the Pensieve -- what would Dumbledore see? Is there an answer in the books/canon? When is $f=\left(\frac{\sqrt{p+4}}{1-p}-1\right)x^5-3x+\ln5$ decreasing $\forall\; x$? When is $$f=\left(\frac{\sqrt{p+4}}{1-p}-1\right)x^5-3x+\ln5$$ decreasing $\forall\; x$?    Diffrentiating: $$f'=5\left(\frac{\sqrt{p+4}}{1-p}-1\right)x^4-3$$ If $f$ is decreasing, $f'&lt;0$: $$5\left(\frac{\sqrt{p+4}}{1-p}-1\right)x^4-3&lt;0\implies x^4&lt;\frac3{5\left(\frac{\sqrt{p+4}}{1-p}-1\right)}$$ Since if $\left(\frac{\sqrt{p+4}}{1-p}-1\right)\to0^+\implies x^4&lt;+\infty$, which holds forallx, So:$$p=\frac{3\pm\sqrt{21}}2$$which doesn't ply with textbook-answer, since it mentions an domain for p. I want to make an animation in time to a song so when I hit play on the timeline I need to be able to hear the song so I can finely tune the animations to start and end at the right time.  Is it possible to have sound play on an animation while it is playing in the 3d viewport before it has been rendered. Can Git hook scripts be managed along with the repository? We'd like to make a few basic hook scripts that we can all share -- for things like pre-formatting commit messages.  Git has hook scripts for that that are normally stored under &lt;project&gt;/.git/hooks/.  However, those scripts are not propagated when people do a clone and they are not version controlled.    Is there a good way to help everyone get the right hook scripts?  Can I just make those hook scripts point to version controlled scripts in my repo? I'd like to download automatically tons of papers listed on .bib file so I'm trying to find a way to facilitate the process by, e.g. I import or input to a tool a certain .bib file which contains a list of literature, the output is the literature's .pdf file. Any idea to do so? Who fired the shot and what is the symbolism in firing shot right next to Lucas at the end of the movie? At the end of , during the deer hunt, there’s a shot fired right next to Lucas (deliberately missing the shot).   Who fired the shot? Is it Theo's son? What is the meaning of that scene? Is someone warning Lucas that he made a mistake and definitely, Lucas will be punished in the future? Usage of :- (colon dash) in bash I try to initialize an array in bash-4.2 next way:  ring=() ls -las | tail -n +4 | while read line &gt; do &gt; ring+=("$line") &gt; echo ${ring[-1]} &gt; done 3924 -rw-r--r-- 1 username group 4015716 Mar 23 15:14 script.jar 4 -rw-r--r-- 1 username group 9 Feb 29 12:40 rec.lst 5541 -rw-r--r-- 1 username group 5674226917 Mar 28 15:25 debug.out 8 -rw-r--r-- 1 username group 6135 Mar 25 12:16 script.class 8 -rw-r--r-- 1 username group 6377 Mar 25 11:57 script.java 8 -rwxr-xr-x 1 username group 4930 Mar 8 15:21 script-0.0.0.sh 8 -rwxr-xr-x 1 username group 6361 Mar 28 15:27 script-0.0.1.sh echo ${ring[0]}  echo "${ring[0]}"  echo "${ring[@]}"   What is wrong, why i get empty array after the finish of the loop? In Python, what are metaclasses and what do we use them for? What are the most downvoted questions and answers on Stack Overflow, Server Fault, Meta, and Super User history to date?  Similarly, what are the most upvoted questions and answers on SO, SF, Meta, and SU to date?