According to , Gandalf and Saruman are amongst the named Maiar.  Again, a quote from Wiki:     Maiar, like Valar, do not array themselves in a fixed form, but can   freely change their form.   Sauron was also a Maia (named ), which he used his ability to reshape, and called himself Annatar, "the Lord of Gifts".  So, if Gandalf could do the same, why didn't he just transform into a flying creature and escape when he was captured by Saruman and imprisoned on the top of Orthanc?
I understand that the Istari - the only other Maiar besides the Balrog to come into close proximity to the Ring - are constrained within a mortal body and subject to its mortal weaknesses, which renders them vulnerable to the Ring's domination and corruption. However, what is to stop Gandalf from returning to his true form, picking up the Ring, and just walking all the way to Mount Doom? Sauron is too weak at the time; he would have been able to do nothing but watch helplessly and pray his mortal armies can defeat a Ring-bearing Gandalf.  Is Gandalf's decision to abide by the Valar's will to the end the only thing holding him back from this particular option? Are there enchantments in place to disable his ability to revert to Maia form, such that the option was never there to begin with? Or would he, even in Maia form and free of mortal weaknesses, still be vulnerable to domination and corruption by the Ring?  The One Ring is forged with the essence of Sauron to dominate and rule the minds of lesser beings. However, Sauron is only a Maia - albeit the highest-ranking in Morgoth's following. Fellow Maiar would be his equal (at least in rank), while the Valar are certainly superior in power to him. If an Ainu becomes a Ringbearer, will he/she eventually fall to Sauron's will too, or at least succumb to the corruption of the Ring's dark power?
Distribution of number of Bernoulli trials to a given number of successes How to typeset the symbol “^” (caret/circumflex/hat) I need to display the symbol '^'  d &lt;- dist(fascores, method = "euclidean")^2   How do I do that? Do you pluralize the singular possessions of / items or people associated with individual members of a plural group? Writing string at the same position using Console.Write in C# 2.0 I have a console application project in C# 2.0 that needs to write something to the screen in a while loop. I do not want the screen to scroll because using Console.Write or Console.Writeline method will keep displaying text on console screen incremently and thus it starts scrolling.  I want to have the string written at the same position. How can i do this?  Thanks I am a computer scientist, and one of my professors today used the symbol $\propto$. I tried to search that using google, but it returns no results, and I do not even know its name.  So, I would like to ask, what does the operator $\propto$ mean? What is its name, and how is it used? Omitting "is", like in "I think it strange" What is the grammar behind the construction "I think it strange/necessary that ...", and when can and cannot this apparent omission of the copula be used? Do we always need the "that" clause?  Also, this seems to be only allowed when the object is a pronoun (it in the above example). That is, we don't say "I think this method strange", correct? Considering phrases of the form "I left [the] X", what causes some words to need a "the" before them, while it sounds awkward with others?  Needs "the":   I left the office I left the bank I left the house I left the courthouse   Awkward with "the":   I left work I left social media I left New York   Either way works:   I left [the] school I left [the] church Sometimes when I am running a development version of Ubuntu, the Software Updater will tell me that a partial upgrade is needed when I check for updates.  What is a partial upgrade, and why are they necessary? Sometimes users run into problems when doing them, so when should I run a partial upgrade, if ever? I currently have a masters degree in an engineering field and I don't currently have any PhD degrees (I may study for a doctorate degree in future). It happens that when I go to conferences or scientific occasions, even in the emails I receive from people; they use a doctor prefix for my name; but I do not have a PhD degree.  What is a good etiquette to deal with such thing? Should I directly tell them that I do not have a doctorate degree? Or should I neglect such a mistake by them and don't do anything?  I think it is unethical not to correct such thing, because the person may still think that I have a PhD degree; and such wrong usage of title should be corrected some way. Once a person used doctor title for my name in an email and I just added a line in my reply to his email, stating that I have a masters degree. How is acceleration measured if there is change only in the direction of velocity & not magnitude? The formal definition of acceleration is      It is the measure of how fast the velocity changes with respect to time.   Now, when the magnitude of velocity changes, acceleration $$\vec{a} = \frac{d \vec{v}}{dt}$$ and its unit is $m.s^{-2}$ .  But what about the case where the velocity only changes its direction keeping its magnitude constant? The definition can then be      Acceleration is the measure of how fast the velocity changes its direction with respect to time.   But how can I calculate the acceleration then?? What should be the unit then??? Please help. Where Is Shadeless Material Option For Blender 2.8? just trying to use shadeless lighting for a material, but cant find where it is in 2.8 This is how it looked in the older versions:    Any help is appreciated, thank you! I am using Ubuntu 16.04, with Gnome 3.18. Using extensions I have gotten rid of the dash panel and only use the Applications Menu in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. (I don't have Unity.) What I can't figure out is how do you add a new program, move software around to different categories, and create new categories?  Also, any keyboard shortcut to access the Applications Menu? Per   I did the following:  ec2run ami-3c994355 --region us-east-1 -n 1 -t m1.large -z us-east-1d   On the machine:  sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get -y -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confdef" -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confold" dist-upgrade   I still get a prompt asking me which config file I want to use. These are the lines that come before the prompt:  Setting up grub-pc (1.99-21ubuntu3.1) ...   then:                           ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ Configuring grub-pc ├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐                                                        │ A new version of configuration file /etc/default/grub is available, but the version installed currently has been locally modified.  │                                                        │                                                                                                                                     │                                                        │ What do you want to do about modified configuration file grub?                                                                      │                                                        │                                                                                                                                     │                                                        │                                     install the package maintainer's version                                                        │ Separate labels in cases As much as I have tried, it doesn't seem possible to use separate labels when using a casesconstruction (from the amsmath package).  Ideally, I would like to be able to write something like  \documentclass{article} \usepackage{amsmath} \begin{document} \begin{equation} f(x)=\begin{cases}   1&amp;x\geq0\label{positive}\\   0&amp;x&lt;0\label{negative} \end{cases} \end{equation} \end{document}   and later refer to both cases at different places. What would be the best way to achieve this result? How does chain fishing work? How to extend my root (/) partition? Till today I was using ubuntu 13.04 in my windows7/ubuntu dual boot. Just now I have upgraded to ubuntu 14.04. My software updater showed an updates available message. I proceeded with  Install Now . Soon I got the following window.    Then I tried sudo apt-get clean as recommended. Nothing happened! Not even a window opened. Teach me deleting the temporary packages.   Deleting temporary files may not be highly helpful in case of further updates and installs for I don't have too much space left in my /. I wanna extend my / partition with the help of the unallocated space in my HD. The following is my Gparted window.       I got an answer . But it wasn't useful for me. I had two choices. But the answer wasn't working for both my chioces.  Choice 1: I may use the 4.25 GiB unallocated space to extend my /dev/sda10. To do so, I must need to move my linux-swap partition. But my Resize/Move option is disabled for the linux-swap partition. Choice 1 failed!   Choice 2: I may use the 14.35 GiB unallocated space instead. In this case I must move more than one partition. /dev/sda4  partition is the first on the list. Even that partition has the same problem. Resize/Move option is disabled. Choice 2 failed!  I am out of choices now.  What shall I do? Help me to extend my / with Gparted. I would like to use the sentence     He was 'over-eager' to implement his plan, leading to failure.   I am looking for a single word which expresses over-eagerness in a negative sense.  TIA It was either a short story or a novel. I read it about 20 years ago, and some vague memory of it stuck.  It's set in a future where everyone's allotted role is decided by a series of tests once they reach a certain age. They are then classified into a group which decides what jobs they will do.  Our hero rather controversially gets a perfect score in the tests. Nobody had done that in a long time. and at first he worries about what this might mean. He is sent to work for the mysterious scientists who maintain the computer that runs society. Most people don't know they exist. He is disappointed to learn he has to be their tea boy, and learn a tea making ceremony perfectly.  In the process he learns how to fool the machine, and eventually to circumvent the controls society has placed on him. He makes several visits to an area outside the control of the machine - where people are living in poverty and lawlessness.  Can't remember the author, or the name, just that basic idea, and the fact that early in the book is a very grand "tea ceremony" where he must make the tea perfectly. For my own understanding, I am interested in manually replicating the calculation of the standard errors of estimated coefficients as, for example, come with the output of the lm() function in R, but haven't been able to pin it down. What is the formula / implementation used? An excited electron loses energy in the form of radiation. The radiation constitutes photons which move at a speed $c$. But is the process of conversion of the energy of the electron into the kinetic energy of the photon instantaneous? Is there a a simple way to visualize this process rather than math?