What are you supposed to do in the "find the bitizen(s)"? All the emperor says is "tipping is acceptable.  find the bitizen(s)."
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In tiny Death Star, Palpatine has given me the mission "Find the Bitizen" with the text "Working for tips is acceptable. Find 1 Bitizen(s)."  I assumed I had to wait for one of the events where you have to find a "rebel scum" and tap on it to get rid of. One of those events finally popped up but it did not complete the mission.   How do I complete this mission?
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So, I'll admit, I love point-and-click adventure games. The problem is, I'm terrible at them! I've been staring at this screen in Botanicula for close to half an hour, and I still have no idea what I'm supposed to do with these bouncy little cherry looking guys, and this cone.    What do I do in this area? (Or, have I been wasting my time staring at nothing?)
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I'm confused about the following examples, and I'm pretty sure I've seen both of them in books and white papers.   What I have to do is find her. What I have to do is to find her. What I would like to do is to buy it. What I would like to do is buy it   Can anyone please tell me which one is correct?  Many thanks
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I got this message today while trying to accept my answer on my own question.  Why must I wait this time, if I am sure that the answer I answered is the right one, just want to understand the point of view?  I faced that just today on Super user and didn't get this message before.
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"Give him a box that everyone knows what it contains."  Is this correct English? It sounds wrong to me.
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I can’t for the life of me figure out where to use a and where to use the — and where there is no article at all. Is there a simple rule of thumb to memorize?   The standard rule you always hear:     “If a person knows which item you are talking about then use "the"   . . . doesn’t clear things up for me, as I have no idea whether or not they know.
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I read with interest  and the comment . I also read  and  the infamous FAQ answer   With rare exceptions, such as , the MSO attitude seems to be that people responding to questions have a "right" to choose not to directly answer the question in favor of an answer which basically tells the OP they "shouldn't be doing it that way". The advice all focuses on the information the OP should provide to avoid this kind of response rather than suggesting that those providing answers should be respectful of questions and not make assumptions that there is some underlying problem that the OP is trying to solve that should be addressed instead.  In rationalizing the approach of not answering the question, two "carpenter" analogies were used, one involving a question about how to cut balsa wood and the other involving a question which of two non-tool household items is better to pound a nail. In both cases, they ask the rhetorical question of whether it's better to answer the question or challenge the question.  My MSO question here is: Why do so many seem to think they have to choose between these two ways of responding? Why don't folks consider answering the question and supplementing their answer as they wish with questions, challenges, additional information, editorial opinion, etc. Not only is that more respectful to the OP, it's more respectful to future readers who arrived at the answer based on the question asked. If I do a search about how to cut balsa wood, I don't want to land on an answer that just tells me what a bad idea it is to use balsa wood in house construction.  Update: While I don't want to focus on specific examples, in response to some of the answers/comments, here's a recent one where I was the one asking the question:      Although it would take me a while to uncover examples, the more common occurrences I run into are where someone shares some code and an error they are getting and ask why they are getting that error. Instead of explaining the error, the answers typically propose some other approach. Admittedly, the OP is often times satisfied with that answer and not knowing why the error occurred, but I would contend the community is the poorer for it and, as a rule, this practice unnecessarily runs the risk of offending.
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Concerned paragraph:  [Background: a master and his servant (a water tubewell technician) have been living happily for several years. The master owns seven farms spread across a large river. The master "became familiar with this ubiquitous man, who not only accompanied him on his tours of inspection, but morning and night could be found standing on the master bed rewiring the light fixture or in the bathroom poking at the water heater". Now, on this one day, the servant has hesitatingly said this to his master]  [i've redacted the proper nouns for these people's names with "the master" and "the servant" to avoid confusion]     “Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to the Indus, and on these lands are fully seventeen tube wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have earned these gray hairs”—here he bowed his head to show the gray—“and now I cannot fulfill my duties as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive me my weakness. Better a darkened house and proud hunger within than disgrace in the light of day. Release me, I ask you, I beg you.”   Question asked related to this quote     The servant's comments primarily serve to:    flatter the master by mentioning how vast his lands are. boast to the master about how competent and reliable the servant is. emphasize the servant's diligence and loyalty to his master. notify the master that the servant intends to quit his job tending the tube wells.     My question:  Notice the lines of the paragraph: "now I cannot fulfill my duties as I should" and "Release me". Don't they clearly indicate that the servant intends to quit his job? Hence, option 4 should clearly be correct.  However, option 3 has been given as correct by KhanAcademy, saying that option 4 is incorrect because "The servant doesn’t say he intends to quit his job, asking instead only for help doing it"  So, my question is:     Isn't the above a clear example of misinterpretation of the paragraph by KA?     All options with KhanAcademy's explanations - for reference   Even though it initially highlights the vastness of the master’s lands, it primarily focuses on the servant’s dedication and service to the master. This emphasizes not that the servant is competent and reliable but that the servant feels he is no longer able to adequately fulfill his duties. The main purpose of the servant’s comments is to highlight the labor and service he has provided for the master over the years. the servant says “there is but one man, me, your servant” to take care of the tube wells on all the master’s vast lands and that the extensive work has resulted in the servant earning gray hairs on his employer’s behalf. The servant doesn’t say he intends to quit his job, asking instead only for help doing it.
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This seems to happen every time I go to my local bagel shop. Everyone is waiting in a line, and when the cashier is ready to help the next person, he/she asks, "Can I help who's next?" or "May I help who's next?" This seems wrong to me, shouldn't it be "Can I help whomever is next?" or "May I help whomever is next?"
8804
This problem is from The Art and Craft of problem solving book:  Consider the following two player game. Each player takes turns placing a penny on the surface of a rectangular table. No penny can touch a penny which is already on the table. The table starts out with no pennies. The last player who makes a legal move wins. Does the first player have a winning strategy?  Now its not hard to see that the first player will always win if you place the coin in the center. But I have been thinking about what would happen If I also allow Quarter, Loonie and Twoonies. Does the first player have a strategy to always win? Could someone provide an explanation?
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In other words, they are asking a question which seems to them like the right question to ask ("How do I get to point B from point A?") when they are really at point A and are trying to get to point C.  They think they should just ask for directions to point B but if they asked how to get from point A to C, there may very well be a better answer thank first asking how to go A=>B (and eventually asking about B=>C).  I feel I read a 'fancy' name for this — a law, theorem, or fallacy of some sort and cannot find it again :(  Thanks in advance for you help!
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I see people putting these in emails, are they correct? My gut feeling says that please would have sounded a lot better.     Do let us know your thoughts.   Do let me know.   Do consider the proposal.
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I encounter the phrase "I will appreciate your help" from time to time and it doesn't sound too honest to me. To be more specific, I don't have a problem with this phrase coming from a friend, because he will appreciate my help by "owing me one". But a stranger from the Internet, that's different, methinks.  "How will you appreciate it?" pops in my mind every time I see it, because to me, appreciation equals reward and, well, you can't reward people over the internet much. It is quite possible that I am just wrong and this is a perfectly fine figure of speech.
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I don’t know how to describe this properly. I just translated what description to English that I use in my native language (Bangla/বাংলা) The situation is like this: Some people always need others’ help to do things. They seek help for every little step. If you aggregate the help, you'll find that they didn't do anything by themselves. They got someone to help them to do every small task. For example, Robert asks Andrew how to post question on . Then he asks where to type the title even though the Title input label is seen very clearly. After that Robert will ask “Hey Andrew, Could you tell me some good title sentences that I can put here?” It goes on. Robert is not actually asking questions. He is asking for so many details that it makes Andrew do the whole task. My question is how to tell Andrew, “I can not feed you every time by my own hand”? Is there any single word? Any idiom?
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I have a question about the following text:     Last week Alex Knapp at Forbes published an article criticizing my Nikola Tesla comic. I don't normally respond to these kinds of thing, but since it's' Forbes I figured a proper response was in order.    I would rather say "this kind of things" rather than the version in the text above.
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I came across  and at the time there were no suggested answers. After reading Mark Hubbart's comment (at the time with four upvotes), which was the correct answer, and seeing that it had been over 30 minutes since his comment, I figured I would provide that answer in my own words, which I did. My answer is longer, and I think more rounded and more useful, but the core of the answer came from the comment. I have no idea if I'd have thought up the answer on my own--a definite maybe to that.  Now had I tried to be "honorable" or something, such as instead of answering, suggesting to the commenter that he make his comment an answer, I would only have accomplished giving away easy rep to some other user not as into gratuitous self-denial.  The commenter had merely to enter his comment into an answer box instead of a comment box! It was his choice! Whether he was too lazy or didn't think his answer worthwhile or some other reason is not my responsibility. Must I bend over backward to help him earn points that he so carelessly left lying around for another person to take? It just took a tiny bit of non-laziness on my part to get my text typed into the box that would reward me instead of the box that wouldn't.  If my perspective is incorrect and the community would rather see such answers-as-comments rewarded and supported, I will gladly accept that. In the meantime, I just want to shake off the tiny bit of guilt my overly-nice and overly-concerned-with-propriety self is feeling. :)
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video is a debate about gun control after mass shootings in Florida. And I don’t understand the meaning of tip in this congressman Carlos Curbelo’s remarks ()     We also have to strengthen the background check because we know there have been failures there, and hold the FBI accountable and make sure that threat assessment teams are paying attention to the tips that they are getting, because this tragedy could have--it seems--could have been prevented had the FBI paid attention to two different tips they receive.   The definition of tip as a noun that I knew was "a useful piece of information, especially about how to do something or about the likely winner of a race or competition" (), so at first I understood this sentence as “threat assessment teams should pay attention to the useful information(such as list of names of people who’ve committed crimes before) they get" so that they are aware of the potential criminals, and thus take special care of them.   But then, he also says 2 different tips again, and it doesn’t make sense if I understand ‘tip’ here as a definition above. The only things I can guess as 2 tips in this video are "lifting minimum age to 21" and "strengthening background check" because after their conversation the woman also says      OK. It does sound like there are some common grounds here, ...... it seems like there's at least two points here.   So do "tips" and "points" mean the same here? But how can FBI receive("FBI paid attention to 2 different tips they receive.") two tips, which are just policy plan, or bill they are trying to introduce in the future ?