I made some beef stew in my crock pot. I forgot to plug it in. It's been sitting for going on 5 hours. Is it dog food now or would the broth have saved it so I can still cook and eat it? Edit: I threw it out. Didn't want to chance it.
If I left food out of the refrigerator for some period of time, is it still safe? If I left it out too long, can I salvage it by cooking it more?
I'm trying to migrate a MySQL-based app over to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (not by choice, but that's life).  In the original app, we used almost entirely ANSI-SQL compliant statements, with one significant exception -- we used MySQL's group_concat function fairly frequently.  group_concat, by the way, does this: given a table of, say, employee names and projects...  SELECT empName, projID FROM project_members;   returns:  ANDY   |  A100 ANDY   |  B391 ANDY   |  X010 TOM    |  A100 TOM    |  A510   ... and here's what you get with group_concat:  SELECT      empName, group_concat(projID SEPARATOR ' / ')  FROM      project_members  GROUP BY      empName;   returns:  ANDY   |  A100 / B391 / X010 TOM    |  A100 / A510   So what I'd like to know is: Is it possible to write, say, a user-defined function in SQL Server which emulates the functionality of group_concat?   I have almost no experience using UDFs, stored procedures, or anything like that, just straight-up SQL, so please err on the side of too much explanation :) What are the various physical mechanisms for energy transfer to the photon during blackbody emission? By conservation of energy, the solid is left in a lower energy state following emission of a photon.  Clearly absorption and emission balance at thermal equilibrium, however, thermodynamic equilibrium is a statement of the mean behaviour of the system, not a statement that the internal energy is constant on arbitrarily short timescales.  The energy has to come from somewhere during emission, and go somewhere during absorption.  Energy in a solid can be stored as kinetic and potential energy of electrons and nuclei, either individually or in collective modes such as phonons and plasmons.  In thermal equilibrium energy will be stored more or less in various forms depending on the temperature and material.  However, even if most of the thermal energy in a particular solid at temperature $T$ is stored in the form of phonons, it could be that phonons primarily interact with light indirectly via electrons, e.g. a phonon excites an electron in a phonon-electron interaction, which can interact with light via the EM field.  Given that light is an EM field, it makes sense to me that it is emitted and absorbed by charged particles.  The electron-photon interaction is probably dominant for visible and ultraviolet light, given that metals are opaque, while semiconductors and insulators are transparent to (visible and UV) light with energy lower than their bandgap. However, once you get into energies in the IR and below, or X-rays and above, other mechanisms apparently take over.  For example, on the high-energy end of the spectrum I've heard that gamma rays can interact directly with nuclear degrees of freedom, which is reasonable considering that gamma rays are emitted during a lot of nuclear reactions.  A review of  might give clues to important light-matter interactions over a broad range of wavelengths.  Whether all of the these processes are involved in blackbody emission is a somewhat different question.  What physical processes mediate energy transfer during blackbody emission, and in which energy ranges are the various processes dominant? There is a hint to show that if there were points in $\mathbb{Q}$, then there would exist $r,s, t \in \mathbb{Z}$ with $\gcd(r, t) = 1$ such that $2s^2 = t^4 - 17r^4$ , and then show that any prime dividing $s$ is a quadratic residue modulo $17$.  I'm stuck on the first bit - if you suppose $\left(\frac{a}{b}, \frac{c}{d}\right)$ is a point on the curve in $\mathbb{Q}$ (so $a, b, c, d \in \mathbb{Z}$) then you get to $2a^2d^4 = b^2c^4 - 17b^2d^4$, but I'm not sure where to go from here since you don't know that $b$ is a square? How to close ports in Linux? I have some question in closing port, I think I got some strange things.  When I use execute  nmap --top-ports 10 192.168.1.1   it shows that 23/TCP port is open.  But when I execute  nmap --top-ports 10 localhost   it show that 23/tcp port is closed.  Which of them is true? I want to close this port on my whole system, how can I do it? Who uses Dual_EC_DRBG? Recent news articles have suggested that the NSA may be involved in trying to influence the cryptography in public standards or commercially deployed software, to enable the NSA to decrypt the encrypted traffic.  For example, .  The New York Times article specifically mentions a 2006 NIST standard, where two Microsoft engineers later discovered a serious problem in the scheme.  The New York Times article explains how the standard was written by the NSA, who pushed the scheme hard:     Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method.      Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States’ encryption standards body, and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.      Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”    After some sleuthing, I'm pretty certain this is a reference to the  pseudorandom number generator scheme described in NIST SP 800-90.  The weakness is that Dual_EC_DRBG appears to contain a backdoor, and anyone who knows the backdoor can totally break the PRNG.  The weakness was first described in  and was subsequently .  As a consequence, there are now good reasons to suspect that Dual_EC_DRBG contains a NSA backdoor, and the NSA might be able to spy on anyone who is using Dual_EC_DRBG.  My questions:   Who uses Dual_EC_DRBG? Do any commercial products use Dual_EC_DRBG? Does anyone use it? In Hitchcock's Vertigo, there is one part of the film that has never made sense to me and I believe that it was a cheap ploy to mislead the audience until the ultimate reveal (I won't spoil it here).    In this scene Jimmy Stewart watches Kim Novak enter a rooming house and afterwards sees her standing by the window on the 2nd floor.  When he enters the house and talks to the inn-keeper, she tells him that Kim Novaks's character positively never came in and even shows him her room key that is still behind the front desk.  They go up to the room and find it empty.   This scene seems to imply that the Kim Novak character may have had a ghost like quality. But given the reveal at the end she clearly does not and there was no way for her to enter the room without a key and without being seen by the inn-keeper.  If this was done by some other director I probably wouldn't have given this much thought but Hitchcock was a perfectionist (especially for this film) so I never understood the significance of this scene other than to mislead the audience (with a cheap ploy IMO).  Does anyone who is familiar with this film have a different explanation/perspective about this scene in an otherwise brilliant movie. Here's a situation that came up during a back lot league softball game a few weeks ago. (Note: While our league has some of its own rules we try to defer to MLB rules in all causes that aren't specifically addressed.)  There is a runner on second (R2) and a runner on first, with no outs. A ground ball is hit to the third baseman (3B) who cleanly fields the ball away from third base. Seeing that R2 is running toward him, 3B does not go to third and instead waits to tag the incoming R2. R2, in an attempt to buy some time for the other runners, stops advancing to third base. As soon as R2 stops, 3B declares R2 is out (without making a tag) and throws the ball to first to make a play.  During the discussion after the play, the 3B claimed that any player advancing on a force cannot stop moving toward their next bag or they are automatically out (the same way a runner leaving the baseline to avoid a tag is considered out). Our rules don't have a specific clause that addresses this situation and I couldn't find anything in official MLB rules (though it's possible I missed something, as 3B claims it is an MLB rule).  So, is 3B’s claim correct? That if a runner who is forced to advance to their next base stops (in particular to avoid/delay a tag) they are automatically out? Is there a size of rectangle that retains its ratio when it's folded in half? A hypothetical (and maybe practical) question has been nagging at me.  If you had a piece of paper with dimensions 4 and 3 (4:3), folding it in half along the long side (once) would result in 2 inches and 3 inches (2:3), which wouldn't retain its ratio. For example, here is a piece of paper that doesn't retain its ratio when folded:   Is retaining the ratio technically possible? If so, what is the side length and ratio that fulfills this requirement? Any help would be appreciated.  Update:  I added "once" because I got an answer saying that any recectangle would work, as any rectangle folded twice has the original ratio. Nice answer, but not quite what I was looking for. As for the other answers, I got 3x as much information as I needed! Thanks! My processor is 64-bit - does that mean I need the amd64 image? My processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 (2.40GHz). As far as I know that's a 64-bit processor - I'm a bit confused as the architecture is called AMD 64, is this a generic name given to 64-bit architectures? I've heard of x64 but can't see a release labelled with this. Return row only if value doesn't exist Is it possible to assign numbers generated in an Error-Message? Is there a way of setting culture for a whole application? All current threads and new threads? Is there a way of setting culture for a whole application? All current threads and new threads?  We have the name of the culture stored in a database, and when our application starts, we do   CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo(theCultureString); Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = ci; Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = ci;   But, of course, this gets "lost" when we want to do something in a new thread. Is there a way of setting that CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture for the whole application? So that new threads also gets that culture? Or is it some event fired whenever a new thread is created that I can hook up to? Ubuntu 16.04 VIM without python support! Although Ubuntu 16.04 release notes mention that:  The default VIM package has been built against python3 instead of python2.  Yet after I installed vim with the following command:  sudo apt-get install vim   And checked:  vim --version   It showed:  -python -python3   Is it a bug? How do I get vim with Python support? I'm testing something in Oracle and populated a table with some sample data, but in the process I accidentally loaded duplicate records, so now I can't create a primary key using some of the columns.  How can I delete all duplicate rows and leave only one of them? Equivalent of cURL for Ruby? I would like to create a half-turn staircase without a landing. Is there an easy way to accomplish this without having to manually calculate and create each step individually?  Here’s an image similar to what I would like to achive:    I have found the Archimesh add-on including . While I can bend the created stairs, I haven’t found any way to get anywhere close to the image above. My stairs just always look out of shape and I don’t know how to get the outline of the staircase into a square.  I should mention that I only have very little experience with Blender modeling, so it’s well possible that I’m just missing some curve modification basics. Perhaps Archimesh is also the wrong approach for this in the first place? Deleted user's posts showing in 'First Posts' queue On Scifi.SE, a user had their account deleted this morning.  Also this morning, about half a dozen of "their" posts were in the First Posts queue.  The posts were all roughly a month old, and they all had the same disassociated user#.   one of them.  Why'd this person's posts show up in the First Posts queue?  Why do a deleted user's posts ever show up in that queue, when it's purpose is to help the community provide feedback to new users?  A deleted user is no longer a member of the community, and they're not even going to be able to act on any feedback. Bound for the correlation of three random variables I was trying to change my username and also my home directory (/home/username) and my system started to crash. I deleted the passwd file but I had a backup named passwd_bkp. I tried to rename this passwd_bkp as passwd and it did not work. No commands were being executed... I was in a terminal window.   I restarted my system and now I cannot log in. GRUB gives two options: Linux and recovery mode.   I tried to open a sessions as root but it says the filesystem is corrupted. I cannot access my files.  Did I lose all my files? How fill face between irregular curves? Hello Blender Stack Exchange,  I am trying to fill a face between 4 surfaces. Two are straight edges and two are a curved line made up of short vertices that came from a SketchUp export.  The problem: I select the vertices on the top and bottom and fill the hole. It creates a strange face that ruins the curve. I would prefer it create some sort of complex curve. I want it to be smooth.  Images attached to better explain.