What is partition alignment and why? Does it have something to do with the 2048-sector gap between two logical partitions?
I am familiar with what partitions are, but I saw , and realised I didn't know what "aligned partitions" are.  So what does it mean to "align" partitions? What are the benefits, and the downsides?
Surjectivity implies injectivity and conversely Short, Politically Correct word for Native Americans No more than four syllables, more PC than Indians.  EDIT: I arbitrarily chose four syllables because any more seemed like a mouthful. I like to be PC and not have to stumble over 6+ syllables. If you are root, and you issue   rm -rf /    Then how far can the command go? Can you recover data from this kind of an action? Even after the binaries are gone, would the running processes still be active? What would it take to make the same physical machine boot again? What files would you need to restore to make this happen?  I could try this on a VM and see, but I want to know the rationale behind what to expect if I do this. What causes a java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException and how do I prevent it? What is the maximum number of Locations Discovered that one can achieve in Skyrim? Why doesn't "its" have an apostrophe? I know that its is the possessive and it's is the contraction, and know when to use them.  But why doesn't the possessive have an apostrophe?   "The bear's eating a fish." [contraction] "The bear's coat is brown." [possessive] "It's eating a fish." [contraction] "Its coat is brown." [possessive] "One's eating a fish." [contraction] "One's coat is brown." [possessive]    lists the etymology as "From  +‎ ", and  says that this is actually the original form:     Originally written it's, and still deliberately spelled thus by some writers until early 1800s.   So what happened to the apostrophe?  When did people stop using it, and why did they?  It seems that it's as the possessive is more natural, as most people do this until they're taught that it is wrong (or even after).  Update: Online Etymology Dictionary has been updated to include two potential explanations:     The apostrophe came to be omitted, perhaps because it's already was established as a contraction of it is, or by general habit of omitting apostrophes in personal pronouns (hers, yours, theirs, etc.).   Can anyone back up either of these arguments?  The possessive one's still has the apostrophe, despite these. I'm looking for a free RAW editor/converter on Windows. Can you tell me some strong/weak points of them comparing with Capture NX and/or Adobe Photoshop Elements?       - conversion &amp; EXIF  - white balance  - registration not possible anymore   EXIF editing would be a nice bonus.  Related: I use this command in the terminal to run the minecraft launcher with java 8:  /home/max/Java/jre1.8.0_25/bin/java -jar Minecraft.jar   I included the full java path because I installed it on /home as a normal user and i want to include it.   That command works, it opens the launcher with Java 8 but I want to make a bash file so I don't have to open the terminal. And, most important, I don't want the terminal to remain open when I click play in the Minecraft launcher and the game starts.  Now if i close manually the terminal when the game have started, the game is closed too. Electrostatic charge leakage What are the ways electrostatic charged objects leak charge in humid conditions?  Can airborne particles pick up charge by contact, then be repelled hence removing charge? If so would it be a significant factor? What is the difference between a predicate and function? I need to to understand the difference between predicates and functions in the context of Clasual Form Logic in order to define the Herbrand universe.  If I have p(x) :- q(f(x)) would I be right in saying that p and q are predicates while f is a function because it is "nested"?  By this thinking then if I have p(x) :- q(x) both p and q are predicates and I have no functions?  If this is incorrect then how can I tell the difference between a predicate and function? Modified Hamilton's Principle overconstraining a system by imposing too many boundary conditions In Hamiltonian Mechanics, a version of Hamilton's principle is shown to evolve a system according to the same equations of motion as the Lagrangian, and therefore Newtonian formalism. In particular, letting $\delta$ indicate a variation of the path through phase space, $$ \delta \int_{t_1}^{t_2} \big(p_i \dot{q}_i - H(p_i,q_i,t)\big)dt = 0 $$ is shown to generate the same motion equations as those found by the Legendre transform of the Lagrangian equations of motion. Essentially, when we calculate the Euler-Lagrange equations for the above integrand, we find $$ \dot{p}_i + \frac{\partial H}{\partial q_i} = 0\text{, } \dot{q}_i - \frac{\partial H}{\partial p_i} = 0. $$ Now, since these are both first-order equations of motion, we require $2n$ boundary conditions to obtain a solution, where $n$ is the number of particles. This is perfectly consistent with the Lagrangian formalism which had $2n$ boundary conditions due to its $n$ distinct second-order motion equations.   An important thing to note is that since $p_i\dot{q}_i - H(p_i,q_i,t)$ contains no $\dot{p}_i$ dependence, the variation in $p_i(t)$ need not be zero at the endpoints of the path. This is not the case with $q_i(t)$ because the $\dot{q}_i$ dependance results in the appearance of boundary terms that must be set to zero in order to obtain the motion equations.  Now, as far as the boundary conditions are concerned, this makes sense. For the path to be uniquely specified given Newtonian mechanics, we require $2n$ boundary conditions. These can either be the usual Newtonian choice of initial positions and velocities/momenta, or they can be the initial and final positions. Both are perfectly acceptable mathematically speaking. If we were required, in the modified Hamilton's principle variation, to enforce that the variations in the momenta also be zero at the initial and final times, this would mean $2n$ additional boundary conditions, which would generally over constrain a Newtonian system.   However, my confusion is this: when textbooks (Goldstein in particular) consider generating functions, they require that the integrand be invariant to the addition of a total time derivative of a function $F(q_i,p_i,t)$ of the phase space coordinates. However, adding such a function will in general add some $\dot{p}_i$ dependence to the integrand, which will then add boundary terms to the equations of motion unless we require that the $p_i(t)$ variations be zero at the boundaries. This is fine as far as it goes. We can always define the variation however we like. The point is just that it spits out the right motion equations at the end of the day. But my confusion lies in how this doesn't generally over constrain the system. If we specify all the positions and momenta at both the initial and the final times, might not the required path to connect those points in phase space be non-Newtonian? Does this only matter if you're actually trying to use the stationary action principle to find the paths, rather than just using it to find the motion equations? Grub menu at boot time... "holding shift" not working I read here at  that holding Shift during boot can bring up the GRUB menu. However I try holding one or the other Shift keys, tapping, tapping then holding, nothing works. Am I missing something? How does one access the GRUB menu during boot time?   No dual boot here, just standard Lubuntu 14.04 install. Is "of" instead of "have" correct? Is there a test to determine whether solder is leaded or lead-free? Perhaps conductivity/resistance? Scoping in assigning a derivative There are a few "automatically protect questions" requests out there, but I'd like to add another twist.  I'd like to request that questions that have three or more deleted answers by users with &lt;50 rep be automatically protected.  The reasoning behind this is that we have lots and lots of "not an answer" flags in the mod queue.  But we cannot protect a question from the mod queue, so we have to open each answer, evaluate if the question needs protecting, then protect it.    This process takes a long time, and can definitely be automated, as the only thing you really need to check is how many new users are posting non-answers or are spamming their awful products. Does SOQL join not respect OWD /sharing settings? How to split a string with any whitespace chars as delimiters What regex pattern would need I to pass to  java.lang.String.split()  to split a String into an Array of substrings using all whitespace characters (' ', '\t', '\n', etc.) as delimiters? Using Squeeze Theorem to show the following limits Consider a function f (x) defined on R satisfying:   for all x distinct 0.  Calculate: lim f(x) with x→∞ and limf(x) with x→−∞   Issue information:   if x → ∞ then we can consider | x | = x  if x → -∞ then we can consider | x | = -x  I can use x² = | x |? How to make an extension function for getting variable or property name like ToString()