Esh (ʃ ) as S in English language? I was reading a book, "" which, I think, was published in the middle of 1856, and I see "S" was replaced by the "ʃ" symbol (in small letter s, it looks more like "f'). Or perhaps it is not ʃ.  Very curious about the reason behinds it, but can't find any info from google search.
Use of “f ” instead of “s” in historic, printed English documents I was at a museum in London yesterday, and one of the items on exhibit is a document from the eighteenth century. It uses the letter f a lot where s should be used—for example, in Majefty.     Did the letter f once have the same sound as s today, or were some of those words actually spoken with an f ?
Escape velocity from Earth How (and why) use stderr for both reading and writing? According to , less reads navigation commands from stderr if it's not able to open /dev/tty.  This seems puzzling, since I've never seen anything write to another program's stderr stream, and I don't know how I would even accomplish that.  What is the purpose of stderr being open for both reading and writing? And if this is useful, how do I make use of it on modern systems? (Is there some arcane syntax to pipe something into stderr instead of stdin, for instance?) I am trying get an unused server up and running, it booted fine but i was greeted with the login window and none of the known passwords seem to work. The server I am trying to get to work is not a Domain Controller and has not been used in a long time.  OS: Windows 2003 Server R2 Enterprise Edition  I tried Ophcrack XP (there is no WinServer version of Ophcrack) - it couldn't locate the partitions with hashes. I tried mounting the partitions myself (#mount /dev/hda*x* /mnt/ntfs), but it gave me an error saying /dev/hda*x* didn't exist.  Next I tried booting into a Ubuntu 10.04.3 LiveCD so that I could install and use chntpw - no go, Ubuntu Live wouldn't boot.  Based on what I've read up the following tools may be of help:   Windows Password recovery Petter Nordahl-Hagen's Offline NT Password &amp; Registry Editor Openwall's John the Ripper EBCD – Emergency Boot CD - Bootable CD (R)ecovery (I)s (P)ossible Linux rescue system   I am hoping that someone here has prior experience with Win2k3 Administrator password resets so that I don't end up having to try all of the above to find out which one works. How to prove that $d \sin(x)/dx = \cos(x)$ without circular logic such as L'Hôpital's rule? What's an intuitive way to think about the determinant? In my linear algebra class, we just talked about determinants. So far I’ve been understanding the material okay, but now I’m very confused. I get that when the determinant is zero, the matrix doesn’t have an inverse. I can find the determinant of a $2\times 2$ matrix by the formula. Our teacher showed us how to compute the determinant of an $n \times n$ matrix by breaking it up into the determinants of smaller matrices. Apparently there is a way by summing over a bunch of permutations. But the notation is really hard for me and I don’t really know what’s going on with them anymore. Can someone help me figure out what a determinant is, intuitively, and how all those definitions of it are related? My friend installed Windows 7 on his computer (upgrading from XP).  He wasn't sure if his processor supported x64 or not, so he installed the x86 version, just to be on the safe side.  After I looked it up, it turns out his processor does support x64, and now we want to upgrade.  The question is: is it possible to upgrade without completely re-installing the OS?  Can I? Or do I have to format the C: partition again? How do I fix the GPG error "NO_PUBKEY"? How to display citations in text grouped as [1-3] in stead of [1,2,3] Is an empty set equal to another empty set? I have a definition that claims that two sets are equal A = B, if and only if:  $\forall x ( x \in A \leftrightarrow x \in B)$  An empty set contains no elements. If I define the sets:  A = $\emptyset$  B = $\emptyset$  then can I conclude that A $\neq$ B? Since they contain no elements? Or would I have to show that an elements exists in one but not the other? To me it seems that these are not equal, but I'm struggling to wrap my head around this.  Thanks, Paul I'm trying to find the name of a lower-budget science fiction film that was available for viewing on demands on MIT student cable in the late 1990s.  I suspect the film was made earlier in that decade, and it definitely seemed to have been influenced by RoboCop.  The plot involves characters is a somewhat dystopian near future.  One of the characters (named Hawkins, I think) is initially in a wheelchair, and that is interfering with his relationship with the woman he loves.  (He watches virtual reality simulations of himself having sex with her when he's alone at home.)  Maybe halfway through the movie, he decides there's no hope for their relationship, so he lets the bad guys turn him into a RoboCop-like cyborg.  I think he ends up fighting the other main characters, but I don't remember how the movie ends.  The film was clearly shot cheaply but competently.  The color palette was rather drab, I think, and there were few indoor sets.  It's possible that the film never got a normal release of any kind, since I don't know where the students at MIT cable got ahold of it.  So does anybody know what this film was? Prove that $(p+q)^m \leq p^m+q^m$ If $p,q$ are positive quantities and $0 \leq m\leq 1$ then Prove that $$(p+q)^m \leq p^m+q^m$$    Trial: For $m=0$, $(p+q)^0=1 &lt; 2= p^0+q^0$  and for $m=1$, $(p+q)^1=p+q =p^1+q^1$.   So, For $m=0,1$ the inequality is true.How I show that the inequality is also true for $0 &lt; m &lt; 1$.   Please help. Unity smooth local rotation around one Axis, oriented toward a target When I check for updates, I get a "Failed To Download Repository Information" error.   This is what comes up under details:   W: Failed to fetch gzip:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_natty_main_source_Sources  Hash Sum mismatch,  E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead. I am struggling with this question from Halmos's text, please ignore the imperative language.  "Suppose that $L, M$  and $N$ are subspaces of a vector space. Show that the equation    $$L \cap (M + N) = (L \cap M) + (L \cap N)$$   is not necessarily true.  Since each of these subspaces has origin in them, clearly there intersections could not be empty. I wasn't able to formulate an example where this result did n't hold. Any help would be highly appreciated. Details on how the Yearling badge works Jawa asked me this  and I didn't know the answer. So I present it to the meta SO community:     [To get the Yearling badge] Do you need to earn the 200 rep within that one year or is it enough to get 200 at some point after being a member for a year? And does 'a year' mean the very first 12 months or the last (sliding window of) 12 months?    I would assume that if you hit 200 reputation after you've already been around for a year, then you would get the Yearling badge. But I don't know. How to show that any separable space is CCC What part of speech is "back" in "put the book back on the table"? Put the book back on the table.   I'm having trouble. I think it is a preposition. Which one of these two statements is correct?     Our staff do ...      Our staff does ...   And is staffs ever correct? How are self-replicating mines supposed to work? Can we make a Vpn server run on Android. Can applications do this? If yes, which protocols are supported and is this a good idea to use such apps? If not, what are some issues that we may face?