Free will in the face of determinism? If an entity existed such as Laplace's demon, that could know with precision the current state of the universe and - using the laws of physics - could tell you your future with certainty, would you then be able to change it?
Can the Universe be deterministic and still allow free will? Possible Duplicate:             As asked in the title, can a Universe which is deterministic at its fundamental level still allow free will?
Whenever I read about the curvature of spacetime as an explanation for gravity, I see pictures of a sheet (spacetime) with various masses indenting the sheet to form &quot;gravity wells.&quot; Objects which are gravitationally attracted are said to roll down the curved sheet of spacetime into the gravity well. This is troubling to me, because, in order for objects on the locally slanted spacetime sheet to accelerate, gravity must be assumed. Therefore I ask; does the explanation of gravity as the curvature of spacetime assume gravity? If yes, what is the point of the theory? If No, what am I missing? I want to use jQuery to parse RSS feeds. Can this be done with the base jQuery library out of the box or will I need to use a plugin? I wanted to discuss my intuition of why we formulate the concept of continuity in terms of pre-image of open set is open instead of images for example if we consider $f(x) = c$ where $c$ is some constant, then that should be continuous, but if we formulated continuity in terms of images it won't be continuous. Is the reason we do it that way, because pre-images will always guarantee that function in the domain can only have $1$ value? How can I tell if a DOM element is visible in the current viewport? Is there an efficient way to tell if a DOM element (in an HTML document) is currently visible (appears in the viewport)?  (The question refers to Firefox.) How to insert HTML to PHP DOMNode? Is there a word for colloquial forms of address? On approving an edit, I just get this pop up since morning. At first I thought there might be some internet connection issue, but this is now the 3rd to 4th time I got the same error; also, the review is accepted because on refresh I can see my name with approved text beside, but it still throws this error.    I am on a Windows 7 machine, running Firefox 24 (Icognito/Private Mode)    Also, this happens only when edit(1) is written on an question/answer, I don't go to review queue and approve, these reviews were directly loaded from the notification beneath the question/answer.  Martijn Pieters reproduced the problem from the review queue three times; each time the improve option was picked, accepting the suggested edit but editing the post some more. The network console shows that posting to https://stackoverflow.com/review/task-reviewed fails, the server responds with a 404 error:  Request headers: POST /review/task-reviewed HTTP/1.1 Host: stackoverflow.com Connection: keep-alive Content-Length: 137 Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01 Origin: http://stackoverflow.com X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.63 Safari/537.36 Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded DNT: 1 Referer: https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/3575396 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language: en,en-US;q=0.8,nl;q=0.6,nb;q=0.4,no;q=0.2,de;q=0.2,fr;q=0.2 Cookie: &lt;redacted&gt;  POST data: taskTypeId=1&amp;reviewTaskId=3575396&amp;taskResultTypeId=5&amp;fkey=f8791a329b445b658876f4d3afe7961e&amp;postCommentId=null&amp;taskResultSubtypeFlags=null  Response headers: HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Cache-Control: private Pragma: no-cache Content-Type: application/json X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2013 12:04:53 GMT Content-Length: 0   On the  itself, no record is made of the accept; instead the suggested edit is recorded as approved by 3 people not including Martijn Pieters. In this case the improve review arrived too late.  In , improve again resulted in the error, but the Community account is shown rejecting the edit. Different batteries connected in parallel If we have 2 batteries one of emf x and the other is of emf y and we connect them in series we get an effective emf of x+y.  But what if we connect them in parallel, how to calculate the emf now? There are n letters addressed to n eople at different addresses. The n addresses are typed on n envelopes.  A disgruntled secretary shuffles the letters and puts them in the envelopes in random order, one letter per envelope.  Find the probability that at least one letter is put in a correctly addressed envelope. [Hint: use the inclusion-exclusion formula.] What is the probability approximately, for large n ?    My attempt at a solution:  P(all correct) = $\frac{1}{n!}$  P(n-1 correct) = ${n \choose n-1} \frac{1}{n!} = \frac{1}{1!(n-1)!}$  ${n \choose n-1}$ ways of selecting n-1 correct letters.  P(n-2 correct) = ${n \choose n-2} \frac{1}{n!} = \frac{1}{2!(n-2)!}$  ...  P(n-n correct) = ${n \choose n-n} \frac{1}{n!} = \frac{1}{n!(n-n)!} = \frac{1}{n!}$  This all looks ok to me, but I tested this for a case of 4 people, (I think the theoretical value should be $\frac{9}{24}$ but obviously that is not what I got. Can someone correct my logic please? Also, with regards to the hint about inclusion/exclusion - where would that come in?  I read about derangements on Wikipedia but it did not make total sense to me (the derivation).  I would appreciate any advice whatsoever including references to other material. Accessing AWS S3 via a REST API (Apex callout with a Named Credential) Sum of closed spaces is not closed What are the visa (or any other crucial) requirements of Bhutan for tourists? I heard that access to Bhutan is quite restricted for all people of outside South-Asian countries?  Can I have the details on that? 4 fast cores or 6 slower ones? Scientists have found mammoth blood, and are planning to   How does one go from having its blood to a full blown living mammoth? Is it possible?    Why does it matter if the blood is frozen or not? Suppose one found dinosaur blood, could one clone a dinsosaur (as in say 'Jurassic Park')? How can I get a history of running processes Do I need to have antivirus software installed? A "friends list" on Stack Overflow would be nice I think it would be nice to have a "friends list" on Stack Overflow. This would allow us to be able to follow the questions and answers that are posted by users that we want to watch/monitor.  I suggest it be implemented in the same fashion as DotNetKicks.com; where you can add someone to your "friends list" without them needing to approve you the way that other social networks do it. It should be completely open for us to add anyone to our "friends list" that we like. Why did the snake wink at Harry at the zoo? This is mostly a memory question - I'm having a hard time remembering this and I can't read the book right now.  On the first book, a snake at the zoo winks at Harry. For the sake of the question, we'll assume that snakes can in fact wink.  I have a fuzzy memory here - I think that it winked before Harry had any kind of interaction with the snake (was this before or after Harry broke the glass?)  So, why did the snake wink at Harry? Given that they had not met ever before.  I suppose that the only reason it would wink at Harry would be because it knows Harry can communicate with it. But this would imply that snakes are capable of sensing such ability on wizards - is there (other) evidence that this is true? Strange problem with BibTeX sorting Go to  Add a few photos to a photo album Go back to All Photos   See all of the photos there, even ones you copied to the Album. No problem here, per se. At least not yet.  What if you want to delete photos that you did not copy to that album?  Where is the selector or filter that filters those "in an album already" photos from this main view?  Or is there a way to create such a filtered view such that I can then cherry-pick photos for deletion?