What is the reason for having rep on Meta?  Why bother having up- or down-votes on meta? Isn't this a place to express your opinions? Why penalize people for expressing their opinions on this site?  Rep has nothing to do with expressing what peoples' ideas are, so why have it? For example, I, as a single-rep user can't comment, so this is penalizing me for my opinions.  The system also warns me that "you are about to be banned". So, because meta is about peoples' opinions and the community does not like that opinion, you should be banned?   This is a fault in the system IMO. Isn't a good site able to encourage opinions to make the site better? A good site is where there's the ability to discuss and have a back-and-forth discussion between users so as the site can become better. Obviously Jeff Atwood isn't working here anymore. If he did then maybe things could've gotten better.    EDIT: So from the comments, rep shows what your stance is in the community. If you have none then you have no say. Is that the site you want, especially on meta?  And anyone who thinks that this is perfect is wrong. Anything can get better, no matter how good it is.
I realize I am taking a risk by reopening what seems to be an old, hoary, and thorny discussion. However, it seems that in all the long discussions about Meta Stack Exchange reputation, what it means, and why it's separate from reputation on other sites, I have never seen a complete answer to this question:  If reputation on Meta Stack Exchange is used by the community to indicate agreement with an opinion instead of the quality of a post, why is it still tied to site privileges?  The association between reputation and privileges makes sense on other Stack Exchange sites, where reputation is a measure of your participation in the site and the quality of your questions and answers. If you contribute positively to the community your reward is increased privileges, whereas your punishment for "polluting" the site with bad questions or unhelpful answers is a loss of privileges.  However, on Meta Stack Exchange, reputation is a measure of the popularity, not the quality, of your contributions. Tying reputation to privileges means that losing privileges on the site is a punishment for expressing an unpopular opinion, and gaining them is a reward for agreeing with the majority.   My opinion:  I don't think that tying privileges to popularity makes sense as a feedback system. It doesn't really encourage quality contributions, and even worse, acts to suppress minority opinions through the threat of losing privileges. As a user with fairly low reputation, I am afraid of asking a question that may be controversial, because if enough other members disagree with me I will be stripped of the ability to vote and chat. Even if I had higher reputation, I would still be concerned that expressing a controversial opinion would cause me to lose helpful privileges like editing and viewing close votes.   The FAQ tells new users "not to be concerned" by downvotes because all it means is that the community disagrees with them. However, I think new users have every right to be concerned about downvotes, because they still mean the loss of privileges.
What can I expect from a Skype interview for PhD admissions? Why was the switch statement designed to need a break? Given a simple switch statement  switch (int) {     case 1 :     {         printf("1\n");         break;     }      case 2 :      {         printf("2\n");     }      case 3 :      {         printf("3\n");     } }   The absence of a break statement in case 2, implies that execution will continue inside the code for case 3. This is not an accident; it was designed that way. Why was this decisions made? What benefit does this provide vs. having an automatic break semantic for the blocks? What was the rationale? iOS App stuck in 'Loading...' I tried downloading Tumblr yesterday but it never completed. At the moment I have an App icon stuck at 'Loading...'.  I have tried restarting the iPhone (holding down both home and side buttons at the same time) and I have also tried shutting down the iPhone (holding the side button and swiping).  I have also tried deleting it as usual (holding the icon down and choosing delete but it doesn't go away).  Any ideas on what I can do to get rid of this icon? How to test whether a file uses CRLF or LF without modifying it? I need to periodically run a command that ensures that some text files are kept in Linux mode. Unfortunately dos2unix always modifies the file, which would mess file's and folder's timestamps and cause unnecessary writes.   The script I write is in Bash, so  I'd prefer answers based on Bash. I have noticed that some questions get a lot of responses quickly, and the cool fact is that most of the time these initial responses are correct.  I see users are motivated to accept answers. Because many questions take less than 24h to get an acceptable response, I'm unsure what to do when I have a question that takes more than 24h to get a response that I feel is complete enough to warrant being marked as accepted.  And even for acceptable responses, I often hesitate to accept them out of concern that posters will pass my question by if it already has an accepted answer (unless it has lots of upvotes). Does this really deter the higher-quality posters, though? Proving that the general linear group is a differentiable manifold We know that the the general linear group is defined as the set $\{A\in M_n(R): \det A \neq 0\}$. I have a homework on how to prove that it is a smooth manifold. So far my only idea is that we can think of each matrix, say $A$, in that group as an $n^2-$dimensional vector. So i guess that every neighborhood of $A$ is homeomorphic to an open ball in $\mathbb{R}^{n^2}$ (However, i don't know how to prove this.)  Now, I'm asking for help if anyone could give me a hint on how to prove that the general linear group is a smooth manifold since I really don't have an idea on how to do this. (By the way, honestly, I don't really understand what a $C^{\infty}-$smooth structure means which is essential to the definition of a smooth manifold.) Your help will be greatly appreciated. :) What is the value of $i^{i^{i^\ldots}}$? What is the value of $i^{i^{i^\ldots}}$?   My effort is the following: If $z, \alpha \in \mathbb{C}$ with $z \neq 0$ then we can write $z^{\alpha}=e^{\alpha \log z} = e^{\alpha [ \log |z|+i \text{ Arg z} + 2 \pi i m]}$ where $ m=0, \pm 1, \pm 2, \ldots$  and Arg z is the principle argument of the complex number $z$. But in above expression we don't have the finite no of exponents, so I am not sure how should I use this formula to the solve above problem. Thanks and Regards! How to run grep on a single column? Subfields of finite fields How to perform a true GIS clip of polygons layer using a polygon layer in R? I would like to do a true GIS Clip in R of soils polygons using a series of single boundary polygons, but I cannot find an R function to properly do it. It should work just like the clip function in ESRI's ArcMap. I've tried the over method in sp package but it doesn't seem to work for polys over polys.   One suggestion was to use the gIntersection in rgeos package as a clip using the following code:  #------------------------------------ library(rgeos) library(maptools)  #Read layers as SpatialPolygonsDataFrame (both the same Albers projection) Soils_poly = readShapePoly("Soils_polygons")  #Note - Has 400 polygons clipper_poly = readShapePoly("clipper_polygon")  #Note - Has 1 polygon  #Try gintersection as clip  Clipped_polys = gIntersection(Clipper_Tile_poly, Soils_poly)  #-----------------------------------   This takes 5 minutes to run (way too slow) and errors with this:     Error in RGEOSBinTopoFunc(spgeom1, spgeom2, byid, id, drop_not_poly, "rgeos_intersection") :      TopologyException: no outgoing dirEdge found at -721459.77681285271 2009506.5980877089   I also tried this code to check for overlap:  gIntersects(Clipper_Tile_poly, Soils_poly)   and the result was TRUE. clip function in ESRI ArcMap works fine for this data.   Anyone knows of an R function to properly do a clip on spatial polygons using spatial polygons? How to remap an existing keybinding in Zathura How can I make sure texts from friends with iPhones don't go to iMessage instead of my Android phone? I have always used an Android phone, but text messages from certain friends get hijacked by iMessage. How do I prevent iPhones and MacOS Messages from sending me iMessages? I need all messages to be SMS or MMS. Some friends with iPhones will text me, but I don't receive the message. Today I noticed the Message app on my Mac had notifications. I never open this app since I don't use iMessage, but I looked today, and found multiple &quot;lost&quot; messages from several weeks ago. Please note that this is NOT the same question as . My Android phone is not, and has never been, registered with iMessage, and I have already followed those instructions. Another poster () had the same question as me----but it was closed, being deemed as the same as the Removing phone number question. It's actually fairly different. I have tried:  Leaving my Messages app closed on my Mac. But somehow messages from these people get hijacked. Deregistering my mobile number using Apple's online Deregister iMessage tool. When I attempted this, I got the message &quot;Your phone number is not registered with iMessage.&quot; Finding a setting on my Android phone that addresses this. The problem is apparently (and logically seems to be) on the Apple end.  Things  says he tried:   Closing Messages.app. I still get macOS notifications of messages. In Messages &gt; Preferences… &gt; Accounts &gt; [my email address], untick &quot;Enable this account&quot;. Then my friends messages disappear and I never see them at all, at least until I reenable in Messages.app. Looking in System Preferences and on icloud.com and appleid.apple.com    to see if there is some setting I can disable—but I've not found    anything relevant. Using Apple's Deregister iMessage tool to unregister my mobile    number. When I attempted this it gave me the message &quot;Your phone number is not registered with iMessage.&quot; sed : Ignore line starting whitespace for match I want to replace the default listening port of httpd to 9090. I can edit the line in httpd.conf file using below  sed -i "/^Listen/c\Listen 9090" /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf   But the line   Listen 80   may have white space before it.  How do I ignore this white space to match this line? Why pass parameters to CSS and JavaScript link files like src="../cnt.js?ver=4.0"? How to read dash files How can I read a dash file from the terminal other than delimiting it with ./  For example to read a - file we can read it by   cat ./-file_name  Q: Is there an alternative way to achieve the same thing? If $f'(x)\le g'(x)$, prove $f(x)\le g(x)$ I have to do the following exercise:     Let $f$ and $g$ two differentiable functions such that $f(0)=g(0)$ and $f'(x)\leq g'(x)$ for all $x$ in $\mathbb{R}$. Prove that $f(x)\leq g(x)$ for any $x\geq0$.   Now, I know this is true because the first derivative of a function is the angular coefficient of the function in a point $x$. So, $f'(x)\leq g'(x)$ means, in other words, that the function $g(x)$ grows faster than $f(x)$. I think this is the base for a more formal proof, could someone help me to figure out a more formal proof? How to set system-wide environment variables on OS X Mavericks Example to prove that $ C^1[0,1] $ is not a Banach space for the uniform norm? The space $ C^1[0,1] $- the space of all continuously differentiable functions on $ [0,1]$ is not a Banach space with respect to the sup norm,$ \|.\|_{\infty} $ since the uniform limit of a continuously differentiable function need not be differentiable.  How can I illustate this statement using a counter example? Can I use $ f_{n}=\frac1 n \sin nx $ as a counter example?  Also, is $ C^1[0,1] $ is same as the space given by $ X=\{f\in C^1[0,1]:f(0)=0 \}$. Can I use the same example to show that this is not a Banach space?  More help is appreciated! Thanks! How do I remove any Ubuntu brand and trademark from my Ubuntu install? I am running Ubuntu 17.10 and I would like to build a completely de-branded ISO of it. This means not just dropping the Ubuntu name from /etc/lsb_release but also deleting references in the text of the installation program, in the "about this computer" screen and so on.  I've already checked other questions but I do not consider them duplicate because:    is very old and it just turned into a bunch of "try this tool" suggestions  is also old and suggests a tool called relinux that hasn't seen updates in years  does mention APT packages (and I know how this works) but not trademarks   Therefore my questions are:   Starting from a stock Ubuntu 17.10 (or an official derivative), how can I remove references to the Ubuntu trademark and logo? What exact packages do I need to uninstall? Are there images I need to replace? Are there files I need to edit other than /etc/lsb_release?   Please note that I am not interested in removing other names such as Firefox. I am only interested in the name of the distro. I really read many tutorials, but crontab doesn't start notify send.  What I've tried:   etc/crontab  added at the end:  15 * * * * notify-send 'crontab' 'test'  with crontab interface:  crontab -e   added at the end:  15 * * * * notify-send 'crontab' 'test'