Short story about an astronaut that has to harvest/collect the body fluids of an alien for a panacea
Short Story About Contact With An Alien Race That Extruded An Elixir
You can reach this IP address  (if my computer is online). I want to assign a domain to it so I wonder how is that possible when I have no DNS? I do own my domain which is ".com". My IP is static.  Thanks Have the guys from the show Impractical Jokers gotten into any major trouble because of the nature of their show?   Eg: have they been physically assaulted or has anyone thrown a law suit on them? How do I make the Messages that are sent to me stop going to my Mac? When there is a Personal Hotspot network available, it displays a chain link icon instead of the usual lock icon in the list of available networks on iOS and OS X.    My question is, how does OS X distinguish these networks? Is it specified in 802.11 how hotspots broadcast their SSID's differently? Suppose $\mu(X)&lt;\infty$. Show that if $\ f\in\ L^q(X,\mu)$ for some $1\le q&lt;\infty$ then $\ f\in\ L^r(X,\mu)$ for $1\le r&lt;q$   In the solution the assistant wrote this:  If $1\le r&lt;q$ then $q/r\ge 1$. Let p be the dual exponent to $q/r$ (i.e. $\frac{1}{q/r}+\frac{1}{p}=1)$  then by Hölder Inequality  $\int_{X}|f|^rd\mu\le\underbrace{(\int_{X}|f|^qd\mu)^{r/q}}_{??????}(\int_X1^pd\mu)^{1/p}&lt;\infty$  for me the middle part doesn't make sense (it is not the hölder inequality) can somebody show it ?  instead of this can't we say (only in this case) that   $\int_{X}|f|^rd\mu\le (\int_{X}|f|d\mu)^r$ then  $(\int_{X}|f|d\mu)^r\le ((\int_{X}|f|^qd\mu)^{1/q}(\int_X1^pd\mu)^{1/p})^r&lt;\infty$  ? new array.sty and colortbl.sty incompatibility? Contradiction between law of conservation of energy and law of conservation of momentum? Yesterday, while studying a simple question, a rather strange doubt hit my mind:     Consider a ball of mass $m$ moving with velocity $v$ that collides with a wall in a perfectly elastic collision and rebounds back with the same velocity. Taking the direction of initial motion of the ball as positive, the change in momentum of the ball is $-2mv$ and the wall is clearly at rest.   So, in order to obey the law of conservation of momentum, the wall must gain a momentum of $2mv$.  Now, this itself confused me a lot. I then applied the law of conservation of kinetic energy to this situation, and clearly the magnitudes of the initial and final velocities of the ball are equal, so kinetic energy of the ball is conserved and hence the final kinetic energy of the wall must be zero in order to conserve energy.  Now, this contradicts with the law of conservation of momentum, which says that the wall must gain momentum of $2mv$.  One more point: If we are talking about a wall then it is an important fact, which must be considered, that the wall is fixed on earth and so the mass of the wall is equivalent to that of earth, say $M$. If the law of conservation of momentum is applied now then we get velocity of the wall, say $V=2mv/M$ which is no doubt an extremely small value. But, the law of conservation of energy strictly says that the velocity of the wall must be exactly zero, not even the smallest value is allowed (theoretically speaking).   Please clarify this and correct me anywhere if I'm wrong. I have tried my best to make it clear what I want to ask :). Inversion in "only [adverb] have they" I have seen this construction quite often:      Online ads have been around since the dawn of the Web, but only in   recent years have they become the rapturous life dream of Silicon   Valley.   What is the rule there?. When your sentence doesn't start with pronoun + verb, invert them as verb + pronoun?. I know it sounds awkward but is it possible (grammatically correct) to use something similar to:      Online ads have been around since the dawn of the Web, but only in   recent years they have become...   And in any case, does this only work with have (or has)? Maybe it works fine with 'had' but I can't think of an example right now. Attacks of the MAC construction $\mathcal{H}(m\mathbin\|k)$ for common hashes $\mathcal{H}$? Consider a common practically-collision-resistant hash function $\mathcal{H}$ (e.g. , , , ), perhaps based on the  as are the first three. We define a  $\mathcal{C}$ $$(k,m) \mapsto \mathcal{C}(k,m)=\mathcal{H}(m\mathbin\|k)$$ where $\mathbin\|$ denotes concatenation, $k$ is a secret key (constant, or at least of fixed size), and $m$ is a message (possibly of variable length). Assume that an adversary can (iteratively) submit queries with $m_j$ and obtain $C(k,m_j)$, and wants to obtain $k$ or otherwise compute $C(k,m)$ for some $m\ne m_j$.  That MAC $\mathcal{C}$ is not trivially bad. In particular, if $\mathcal{H}$ was indistinguishable from a random function in the , $\mathcal{C}$ would be secure. And even though $\mathcal{H}$ may have the , it does not turn into a devastating attack on $\mathcal{C}$.  The less impractical generic attack that I see is that if a collision was known for $\mathcal{H}$ with the colliding messages of moderate identical length, it could be deduced countless collisions for $\mathcal{C}$. Hence security is demonstrably not better than collision-resistance of $\mathcal{H}$ (for identical-length messages). We could assume that $k$ is half the size of the result of $\mathcal{H}$, and hope that the security is about  or  or , 280, 2128, 2256 hash rounds for SHA-1, RIPEMD-160, SHA-256, SHA-512.   What are the known attacks against $\mathcal{C}$ (better than the above), and their cost, for each of these common hashes?  Is there hope for an argument that an attack against $\mathcal{C}$ would turn into an attack of similar cost against $\mathcal{H}$, or hint of the contrary?  Update: this  is of interest, but I fail to find that it really answers the present question.  Update 2: I am aware that the construction considered is weaker than , and in particular is vulnerable to collision on $\mathcal H$; I stated that, and that it is thus pointless to have the key wider hopeless to target security against some attacks better than half the hash's size. I'm asking exactly what cryptanalytic attack better than finding a collision on $\mathcal H$ there are. There is room for such an attack only by exploiting a weakness in the structure or/and the round function of a concrete $\mathcal H$. Skynet - were AI's actions evidence of Intelligence? How to fully backup non-rooted devices? I'm considering replacing an outdoor lighting fixture with an LED motion-sensitive fixture, but I'm not sure how to safely do the wiring.  The location is protected (under a porch) but still needs to be weatherproof. Here's the existing fixture and mount:    The obvious replacement would be another lamp that included its own box cover, so that its wiring would be covered and protected. But, the fixture I like doesn't include such a cover:    You can see it's meant to be screwed into the wall, but doesn't cover anything. The power cable ends with bare wires which are meant to be wire-nutted to the supply wiring, probably inside a junction box. But, how do I get the wire safely into the junction box while keeping things weatherproof?  One option would be to replace the lamp's power cable with one ending in a grounded plug, and install a weatherproof outlet box. But that's ugly and complex.  Are there weatherproof junction box covers that include provisions for sealed entry of cables? On one of my machines I have a process running called "whoopsie". I'm running 12.04 server and never specifically installed anything with this name.  Google seems to imply that it has something to with error logs but I'm not finding too much information. The fact that I didn't manually install it and the 3 other servers I checked did in fact have no such running process OR executable made me a bit confused.  Does anyone know what the "whoopsie" process is?  Does anyone know what packages might have installed it? The server is quite plain, it has a LAMP stack, Samba and print servers and the Nagios NRPE plugin, nothing more installed, just standing there being a nice backup-server.  Some more info:  $ whoopsie -h Usage:   whoopsie [OPTION...]  Help Options:   -h, --help           Show help options  Application Options:   -f, --foreground     Run in the foreground   and  USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND   whoopsie   913  0.0  0.4  24448  2092 ?        Ssl  May07   0:00 whoopsie   and  $ sudo cat /etc/passwd | grep whoop whoopsie:x:107:118::/nonexistent:/bin/false As stated above, I can't connect to my home wi-fi with natty but can with Windows 7. The strange thing is I that I have gotten it to connect to other password protected networks with natty, it's just mine that it dosn't like.   I am using a WPA2 pass-code with AES Encryption and all other devises work fine on my network. Laptop used is a Dell Latitude D430. Arbitrary intersection of closed, connected subsets of a compact space connected? Let $(B_i)_{i\in I}$ be an indexed family of closed, connected sets in a compact space X. Suppose $I$ is ordered, sucht that $i &lt; j \implies B_i \supset B_j$.  Is $B = \bigcap_i B_i$ necessarily connected?  I can prove it, if I assume $X$ to be Hausdorff as well: If $B$ is not connected, then there are two disjoint, closed, nonempty sets $C$, $D$ in $B$, such that $C \cup D = B$. Now these sets are also closed in $X$, hence by normality there exist open disjoint neighborhoods $U$, $V$ of $C$ and $D$, respectively.  Then for all $i$: $B_i \cap U^c \cap V^c \ne \emptyset$, since $B$ is contained in $B_i$ and $B_i$ is connected. Thus we must also have  $$ B \cap U^c \cap V^c = \bigcap_i B_i \cap U^c \cap V^c \ne \emptyset $$  by compactness and the fact that the $B_i$ satisfy the finite intersection property. This is a contradiction to the choice of $U$ and $V$.  I can neither see a counterexample for the general case, nor a proof. Any hints would be greatly appreciated!  Thanks,  S. L. Is there a function or method to give the last day of a month? For example if the date is 27 feb 2013, the last date should be 28 feb 2013 , it become 29 if its a leap year. if the date was 2 jan then it should return 31 Jan.  If there is no function then any ideas on how we can get this?  Thanks In many countries an application for a PhD position includes a written research proposal, so my questions is what are some advises/strategies to come up with a good topic/idea for a PhD research proposal and how can one assess the quality/fruitfulness of an idea? As an undergraduate student one just doesn't have the experience to foresee which ideas might have promising research results and which probably won't have. (And I doubt that potential supervisors have the time to comment on every idea of every potential applicant in cases where it is possible to establish some kind of contact before the actual application.) Why can a discontinuous function not be differentiable? Is the product of two Gaussian random variables also a Gaussian? Say I have $X \sim \mathcal N(a, b)$ and $Y\sim \mathcal N(c, d)$.  Is $XY$ also normally distributed?  Is the answer any different if we know that $X$ and $Y$ are independent? I'm using Ubuntu 13.04 and I have ASUS X550V laptop. This is my rfkill list:  0: asus-wlan: Wireless LAN     Soft blocked: no     Hard blocked: no 1: asus-bluetooth: Bluetooth     Soft blocked: no     Hard blocked: no 2: phy0: Wireless LAN     Soft blocked: no     Hard blocked: yes 3: hci0: Bluetooth     Soft blocked: no     Hard blocked: no   Before you start going: Hey, just turn on your hardware switch, dummy... my hardware switch is Fn + F2 and it works perfectly fine on my Windows boot. But, on my Ubuntu boot it does nothing... All the other Fn + F_ combos work (turn off the touchpad, screen turn off, screen brightness, sound) and they give some kind of visual indicator when I press it.  My lshw log:  *-network DISABLED                 description: Wireless interface                 product: AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter                 vendor: Atheros Communications Inc.                 physical id: 0                 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0                 logical name: wlan0                 version: 01                 serial: 24:0a:64:28:b4:25                 width: 64 bits                 clock: 33MHz                 capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical wireless                 configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k driverversion=3.8.0-19-generic firmware=N/A latency=0 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn                 resources: irq:17 memory:f7900000-f797ffff memory:f7980000-f798ffff