Since the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies of the early 2000s I think there have been at least three different actors for the character? What was the reason for this?
Spider-Man is the one franchise that is on course to a third reboot in a span of 15 years.   My question is what was the reason for these numerous reboots of Spider-Man which pretty much follow the same origin story for the Marvel superhero.  Has the comic creator or studio ever spoken out about the reasoning behind the same?
Should I buy a Canon 55-250mm lens or 70-300mm for my Rebel T3i? I have the basic 18-55mm lens that came with my camera but I need a next step up that's not too expensive.   What are the most common types of photos shot with either lenses? Or what is each lens best for? Is spell level a character concept or a player concept? Is there anything in RAW that supports spell level as a character concept, or alternatively that supports it as solely a player concept?  On the one hand, I see nothing that explicitly states that a character knows that there are spell levels. On the other hand, I don't see how a spellcaster could manage spell slots without knowing about spell levels. Pros and Cons of a Decentralized Puppet Architecture We have around 300 RHEL servers that are currently connecting to a Puppetmaster server.  However, we have noticed some performance bottlenecks and it is the point of failure in our system.  I am fairly new to puppet in general and I am considering creating a decentralized puppet architecture instead of having Puppet clients connect to the Puppetmaster server.  Aside from what I would suspect to happen such as performance gain and lack of signing and exchanging SSL certs for new machines, what are other pros and cons to setting up a decentralized architecture? When your 10-year old boy says “It’s meta,” what does it mean? In what situation and of what sort of object they use this phrase? I asked about  a few days ago, quoting Maureen Dowd’s review of the movie, “J. Edgar” in New York Times.   I received six answers. But I still don’t get a clear idea of what “It’s meta” means because I don't understand (or have a total inability to comprehend) the concept of “self-referential.”   An answerer : “Meta in this fairly recent, casual context is supposed to mean self-referential, or recursive in some way. This is the sense in which my teenagers would use this term.”  So let me resubmit the question on “meta” in simpler format. When your teenager boy says “It’s (or this is) meta,” what does it mean? In what situation and of what sort of object they use this phrase?  I’m sorry for many users who lent me kind answers to my previous question. But I would like to get it fully on the meaning and usage of “it’s meta,” as a colloquial expression, not the meaning of meta as a prefix. Copying data over with rsync causes size discrepancies Can an Animagus take the form of any animal? Similar to my old question about  are there any limits to the animal forms an Animagus can be?     We know that the animal form can be much smaller than human (cat, rat, beetle) so I don't think size is a factor.   I'm not aware of any Animagus who transforms into a magical creature (e.g. unicorn or phoenix) so maybe those aren't possible.   Ultimately, what I'd like to know is whether there could be a T-Rex Animagus... (prompted by ) pass 1 environment variable using sudo Is this a correct way for passing an environment variable in sudo ?  sudo -u www-data -b env FOOBAR="foobar" /home/user/folder/daemon Why didn't Voldemort murder the Dursleys? Voldemort couldn't kill Harry as long as he called the Dursleys home. Why didn't he just murder the Dursleys? This would prevent Harry from being able to live there. Consider a text file with the following entries:  aaa bbb ccc ddd eee fff ggg hhh iii   Given a pattern (e.g. fff), I would like to grep the file above to get in the output:  all_lines except (pattern_matching_lines  U (B lines_before) U (A lines_after))   For example, if B = 2 and A = 1, the output with pattern = fff should be:  aaa bbb ccc hhh iii   How can I do this with grep or other command line tools?    Note, when I try:  grep -v 'fff'  -A1 -B2 file.txt   I don't get what I want. I instead get:  aaa bbb ccc ddd eee fff -- -- fff ggg hhh iii In the Wikipedia article on positive definite matrices they claim that if $M$ is positive definite, then the determinant of $M$ is bounded by the product of its diagonal entries. How might we show this?  Ideas: The sum of the diagonal entries of $M$ is the trace, which is also the sum of the eigenvalues. The product of the eigenvalues is the determinant. All the diagonal entries of $A$ must be real and strictly positive. Also we have $|m_{ij}|\leq \sqrt{m_{ii}m_{jj}}\leq \frac{m_{ii}+m_{jj}}{2}$. So far nothing is working...  We might try to write the Gram matrix $m_{ij} = \langle v_i, v_j \rangle$, and then $\prod_i m_{ii} = \prod_i \|v_i\|^2$. Now we'd need to show that the determinant, which is a polynomial in the entries of $v_i$, is less than $\prod_i \|v_i\|^2$ somehow. I've always wondered how to write the "A ? B : C" syntax in a C++ compatible language.  I think it works something like: (Pseudo code)  If A &gt; B    C = A Else    C = B   Will any veteran C++ programmer please help me out? Strange GET requests in logs I'm getting the following GET requests in my apache logs:  109.230.251.14 - - [29/Mar/2011:16:28:18 +0100] "GET http://209.191.92.114/config/pwtoken_get?login=jackmcphee232&amp;src=ygodgw&amp;passwd=e59e2240415e6f1aba3da72b8f189f4e&amp;challenge=9TbU_9yfZhKmzlHtK9X4OkQlesTH&amp;md5=1 HTTP/1.0" 404 1226 "-" "-"   Any idea what it could be and how is that possibly a get request? That IP address seems to point to Yahoo! I'm very confused. Parsing input with scanf in C I've been having a lot of problems trying to figure out how to use scanf().  It seems to work fine with integers, being fairly straight forward scanf("%d", &amp;i).  Where I am running into issues is using scanf() in loops trying to read input.  For example:  do {   printf("counter: %d: ", counter);   scanf("%c %c%d", &amp;command, &amp;prefix, &amp;input); } while (command != 'q');    When I enter in a validly structured input like c P101, it seems to loop again before prompting me.  This seems to happen even with a single:  scanf("%c", &amp;c)    in a while loop.  It'll do the loop twice before prompting me again.  What is making it loop twice, and how do I stop it? When I enter in less amount of input that programmatically wouldn't have another character or number such as q, pressing enter seems to prompt me to enter more.  How do I get scanf() to process both single and double character entries? I often read outputs in the terminal that get wrapped as they are too long. Since there is no way that I can modify the printed output, I need to let the Terminal allow for horizontal scrolling.  Is there a modification I can make to the default OS X Terminal to disable line wrapping and allow for horizontal scrolling?  Or do you know another alternative I can use? Height of colorbox How do I run Command & Conquer Gold on Windows 7 64-bit (in XP mode)? I downloaded the first Command &amp; Conquer game  and burnt some CDs. I couldn't get the Setup.exe program to run in Windows 7 64-bit, as it must need some old DLLs. So I ran up the Windows XP Mode virtual machine, and was able to install it fine.   However, when I try to run the program, I just get an empty message box with an "OK" button. I've set the compatibility to Windows 95, and checked all of the options in the Compatibility tab, but it's not running. I also downloaded the patch suggested by EA, which is an updated version of the THIPX32.DLL file (copied into the C&amp;C installation folder).  Has anyone managed to get this working? Why can't we initialize members inside a structure? How should ambiguous tags be dealt with? If tag "foo" refers to two or more different technologies or concepts is it better to retag the less common usages or is it better to add additional tags to disambiguate?  My particular issue is with the  tag which mostly refers to the  but could also refer to the  programming language &amp; software platform. Is it better to retag the Curl language questions as  (any other suggestions?) or add some other tag such as "language"? Are shell scripts sensitive to encoding and line endings? From :  Error propagation It was common to discuss the &quot;error propagation&quot; properties as a selection criterion for a mode of operation. It might be observed, for example, that a one-block error in the transmitted ciphertext would result in a one-block error in the reconstructed plaintext for ECB mode encryption, while in CBC mode such an error would affect two blocks.  I read  similar post before. And I can understand that in CBC decryption, only two blocks are affected due to error propagation (error in 1 block). But, for the same case in CBC encryption, why are still only two blocks affected? It looks like all the following blocks will be affected.