Are Melkor's dead Maiar imprisoned with him?
What happens to spirits/souls of other creatues than Elves and Men after their death?
What it says on the tin, a foreign friend of mine has asked and I can't tell him; apart from it sounding horrible.  For example:  "Why is it raining today?"   Instead of:  "Why it is raining today?" Given a Java InputStream, how can I determine the current offset in the stream? I am trying to create something similar to this in Tikz:    I have been looking at using the \shadedraw macro, but have not found a way to create the color spectrum.  It seems possible if I stack multiple gradient-shaded rectangles on top of each other, but I would rather not use such a lengthy and ugly solution.  Is there a way to recreate this PH-scale image in Tikz, ideally using few rectangles?  (Note: the number labels are not necessary, as they will be replaced with horizontal lines anyway.) save as a video as .mp4 So I made an intro using animation and it saves it as a .blend and I want it so save as a video like .mp4 or something like that. I've tried changing the codec because I tried opening the intro with windows media instead of blend. I didn't try all the codec's but I tried some of them. How To Get Command Blocks Talking in Chat I'm totally new to Ubuntu/Linux, using Ubuntu Server at the moment. Just trying to  figure out something basic.   How can you tell where you are installing a program. For example I just installed Sphinx search engine by placing the tarball that I downloaded from their site to my:  /home/sphinx   directory. I created the sphinx directory to place that tarball in. Then I ran these commands:  tar xvzf sphinx-0.9.8.1.tar.gz cd sphinx-0.9.8.1/ ./configure --with-mysql-includes=/usr/include/mysql --with-mysql-libs=/usr/lib/mysql   and then these:  make sudo make install   Now I have a lot of files sitting in the directory where I ran these commands. Is this my Spynx installation or did it install somewhere else?  In windows if you run an installer (.exe file) anywhere the program will still install in your C:\Program Files directory. Does something similar apply to linux where all programs are installed in a central place, or can you install programs anywhere on the system.  Questions   I would prefer to keep all my installed programs in one place so what is the right place for this in terms of best practice. In other words what is the Linux equivalent of C:\Program Files? And how does one always install at this location, is it just a matter of placing the tarball and running the install commands from this location? What about if I use sudo apt-get to install a package. How can I point to this location to tell apt-get to always install there? I know that the product of two Gaussians is a Gaussian, and I know that the convolution of two Gaussians is also a Gaussian. I guess I was just wondering if there's a proof out there to show that the convolution of two Gaussians is a Gaussian. How does the momentum operator act on state kets? How can I prevent my Wi-Fi connection from glitching? Cauchy principle value of $\int_{-\infty}^{\infty}\sin(x)/(x-a)dx$ Is it possible to fail an ability check on purpose? Here are the general guidelines regarding ability checks:     The GM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results.   In some cases, you could want to fail an ability check. If you are climbing a wall an want to drop off, you fail simply because you stop attempting to climb, but in other cases, success and failure are both tied to the actual action and may both have desirable outcomes.  Example 1: Spell scrolls  An evil adversary wants you to cast a spell scroll for him, but you have him figured out and want to destroy his spell scroll instead, seemingly by accident. The rules on spell scrolls read:     If the spell is on your class’s spell list but of a higher level than you can normally cast, you must make an ability check using your spellcasting ability to determine whether you cast it successfully. The DC equals 10 + the spell’s level. On a failed check, the spell disappears from the scroll with no other effect.   A failure means that you successfully destroy the spell scroll.  Example 2: Amulet of the Planes  You are in possesion of the Amulet of the Planes. Your party is being overrun by terrible monsters, and the only way to save your party is to sacrifice yourself by sending yourself and the monsters to another plane of existence.     While wearing this Amulet, you can use an action to name a location that you are familiar with on another plane of existence. Then make a DC 15 Intelligence check. On a successful check, you cast the Plane Shift spell. On a failure, you and each creature and object within 15 feet of you travel to a random destination. Roll a d100. On a 1-60, you travel to a random location on the plane you named. On a 61-100, you travel to a randomly determined plane of existence.   By walking up to the monsters and failing the check, you and the monsters would be sent to another plane of existence.  The question  The rules seem to assume that you always want to succeed when you perform an ability check. Sometimes, however, you could want to fail on purpose. A sensible DM would rule that if you are skilled enough to succeed the check, then you would undoubtly be able to fail it on purpose as well. What does the rules as written say -- if anything -- about this circumstance?  According to RAW, is it possible to attempt an ability check and intentionally fail? How do I get the UTC time of "midnight" for a given timezone? The best I can come up with for now is this monstrosity:  &gt;&gt;&gt; datetime.utcnow() \ ...   .replace(tzinfo=pytz.UTC) \ ...   .astimezone(pytz.timezone("Australia/Melbourne")) \ ...   .replace(hour=0,minute=0,second=0,microsecond=0) \ ...   .astimezone(pytz.UTC) \ ...   .replace(tzinfo=None) datetime.datetime(2008, 12, 16, 13, 0)   I.e., in English, get the current time (in UTC), convert it to some other timezone, set the time to midnight, then convert back to UTC.  I'm not just using now() or localtime() as that would use the server's timezone, not the user's timezone.  I can't help feeling I'm missing something, any ideas? Xcode 6.1 won't let me create a new project I'm running Xcode 6.1 on OS X Yosemite and I'm unable to create a new project, as you can see below it just says 'loading'.  I've removed the product and org name for the purpose of this image. I have tried uninstalling but that didn't work. I am new to Xcode and coding in general so I would appreciate it if any solution could be given in lay terms. How to resolve Google "Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt" Do you get to use the additional attack from the Extra Attack feature as well when you Ready an Attack action?  One of my players, a monk, decided to Ready an action as an earth elemental was about to attack. The trigger was the elemental moving within five feet of him. When this occurred, he took his Attack action, and then proceeded to take the extra attack as well.  I was unsure at the time whether or not the extra attack would also happen, and I haven't had much luck figuring it out. Here there is my proof (quite short and easy) of a rather straightforward result. The text of this question comes from a previous question of mine, where I ended up working on a wrong inequality. Here things are fixed. Still, I would like to know:  if it is sound, because absolute value always creates me some problem, and if there is a shorter (neater) way to get the result (maybe without using contradiction).    Proposition: $|d(x,y)-d(y,z)| \leq d(x,z)$. Proof: We proceed by cases.  Case 1: $d(x,y)-d(y,z) \geq 0$. Assume by contradiction that $d(x,y)-d(y,z) &gt; d(x,z)$. Hence, $d(x,y)&gt; d(y,z) + d(x,z)$, contradicting the triangle inequality.  Case 2: $d(x,y)-d(y,z) &lt; 0$. Assume by contradiction that $ - d(x,y) + d(y,z) &gt; d(x,z)$. Hence, $d(x,y) &lt; d(y,z) - d(x,z)$. By applying the triangle inequality, we have that $d(y,x) \geq d(y,z) + d(x,z)$, which is by symmetry equivalent to  $d(x,y) \geq d(y,z) + d(x,z)$, obtaining the desired contradiction. $\square$     As always, any feedback is welcome. Thank you for your time. Is there a way to indicate to  how/where to find (paths to)  tools such as python, nmap, php and so on?  I ask this because when I schedule a job using crontab -e, I always need to specify the full path of python, nmap and whatever other tool I want to use. Windows 10 has an extensive collection of lock screen photos, many of which have  here on Travel.SE.  Is there a website which lists the location of all of these photos? I imagine Microsoft has purchased an official license, so they should have a record about the photographer and the place where the photo was taken. My linear algebra professor proved that      Diagonalizable matrices with complex values are dense in set of $n \times n$ complex matrices.   He defined a metric (I believe) that was somehow related to the usual metric on $\mathbb{R}^{n^2}$.  Then somehow proved that diagonalizable matrices were dense because for any matrix $A$ if $\det(A - \lambda I) = 0$ on an open subset, then $\det(A - \lambda I)$ was the zero polynomial.  I Googled around a bit and found some stuff talking about the Zariski topology, and I am not sure this is what I want. Most of what I have found on this topology is much more general than what he was doing.  Does anyone know any resources that would explain how to go about proving this statement?  Edit: I found out how to prove this the way my professor did.  We define the norm of a matrix by $$ |A| = \max\{|Ax| : |x| = 1 \}.$$ Now we have a distance $d(A, B) &lt; \epsilon$. You can prove that if $(A - B)_{ij} &lt; \epsilon/n$, then $|A - B| &lt; \epsilon$.  Let $p(x)$ be the characteristic polynomial of $A$, an $n \times n$ matrix.  $$p(x) = \prod_1^n (x - x_i) = x^n + (-1)\sigma_1 x^{n - 1} + \cdots + (-1)^n\sigma_n$$ where $\sigma_1, \ldots, \sigma_n$ are the elementary symmetric polynomials of $x_1, \ldots, x_n$ which are the eigenvalues.  The discriminant of the characteristic polynomial is a symmetric polynomial, therefore it can be written in terms of the elementary symmetric polynomials, which in turn can be written in terms of the entries of the matrix.  But since the discriminant is a polynomial, it only has finitely many roots. Therefore for $\epsilon &gt; 0$, by changing the entries of the matrix less than $\epsilon / n$ we can find a new matrix $B$ such that $|B - A| &lt; \epsilon$ and the discriminant is not zero.   The discriminant being not zero means $B$ has distinct eigenvalues, thus has a basis of eigenvectors. Therefore, it is diagonalizable.  Thus the set of diagonalizable matrices is dense in the set of matrices with respect to that metric. During graduate studies online application submission period, is there any preference given for an applicant if he/she submits his application at the beginning of that period compared with someone who submits his/her application couple of hours before the deadline?  Or as long as the applications are complete there is absolutely no difference!