"were" vs. "are" in a movie quote Quote from Die Hard     Joseph Takagi: You want money? What kind of terrorists are you?      Hans Gruber: Who said we were terrorists?   Why Hans used "were" instead of "are"?
Sequence of tenses for facts irrelevant of the moment of speech Let's consider two sentences:     (1) I suggested that the word zeitgeist was of German origin.   (2) The lecturer said the Pluto's orbital period is more than 200 years.   In both cases, the facts are always valid and  irrelevant of the moment of speech and context. I've heard sequence of tenses is not required in such cases. Are past and present tenses interchangeable in both of them? Would it be correct to say:     (1) I suggested that the word zeitgeist is of German origin.   (2) The lecturer said the Pluto's orbital period was more than 200 years.
Publishing a conference version of a journal paper at the same time ? (copyright issues) Is it possible with GEE to export all the images in an image collection? Inbox chops messages in the middle of an HTML character reference The messages in the inbox get chopped if they too long, and the chop can occur in the middle of an HTML character reference as can be seen in this screenshot:    The character being chopped is [ and it appears inside a code snippet, in case it makes a difference. Why shouldn't root be allowed to login via ssh? why should root access be disabled for ssh? I always hear that's for security reasons. But I don't get it. What's different to login as non-root and then sudo su -? What's the preferred way to handle tasks that need privileged permissions?  Thanks  Thomas Copy files from a list to a folder How do you interpret a significant but weak correlation? We work heavily with serialization and having to specify Serializable tag on every object we use is kind of a burden. Especially when it's a 3rd-party class that we can't really change.  The question is: since Serializable is an empty interface and Java provides robust serialization once you add  implements Serializable - why didn't they make everything serializable and that's it?    What am I missing? Do the laws of physics evolve? Hubble's constant $a(t)$ appears to be changing over time. The fine stucture constant $\alpha$, like many others in QFT, is a running constant that varies, proportional to energy being used to measure it. Therefore, it could be agued that all running constants have 'evolved' over time as the Universe has expanded and cooled. Both the local and global curvature of the Universe changes over time implying that so too does the numerical value of $\pi$. All these things are however constants (well, let's say parameters since they are not really 'constant'.)   In  with astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, Feynman said "what today, do we not consider to be part of physics, that may ultimately become part of physics?" He then goes on to say "..it's interesting that in many other sciences there's a historical question, like in geology - the question how did the Earth evolve into the present condition? In biology - how did the various species evolve to get to be the way they are? But the one field that hasn't admitted any evolutionary question - is physics."  So have the laws of physics remained form-invariant over the liftetime of the Universe? Does the recent understanding of the aforementioned not-so-constant constants somehow filter into the actual form of the equations being used? Has advances in astronomical observations, enabling us to peer back in time as far back as the CMB, given us any evidence to suggest that the laws of nature have evolved? If Feynman thinks that "It might turn out that they're not the same all the time and that there is a historical, evolutionary question." then this is surely a question worth asking.  NB/ To be clear: this is a question concerning purely physics, whether the equations therein change as the Universe ages, and whether there is any observational evidence for this. It is not intended as an oportunity for a philosophical discussion. I've always managed my iPhone/iPad/iPod Manually, I recently updated to iTunes 11 and now I can see no way to get my music onto my device.  I used to be able to just drag songs from my library to my device, now there is seemingly no way to do this.  I can view the music on my device by clicking on it on the top right corner of iTunes, but I can't seem to get to a state where I can drag music from my computer onto my device.  I'm using iTunes 11.0.1.12 for Windows if that makes a difference. Word: how to show hidden ribbon tabs? How can I control which tabs are available to be opened in the MS Word 2010 ribbon?  Under Word Options > Customize Ribbon > Main Tabs there are several groups checked (Blog Post, Insert (Blog Post), Outlining, Background Removal), but they don't appear on the ribbon even though there is space for them. How is one supposed to turn them on or get to them?  The one in particular I'm after today is the Blog Post tab, which I know I can get to in a round about way via File > New > Blog Post Template. However I don't want a new post, rather an old one, which means File > New > Blog Post Template > Open existing > [select from list] > [close new blog post window] > [slap No I don't to save darn it]. Extra work for nothing is irritating; how do I get Blog Post (or Outlining or ...) to show up in that nice empty space next to AddIns? Help with proof that $\mathbb Z[i]/\langle 1 - i \rangle$ is a field. I have been having a lot of trouble teaching myself rings, so much so that even "simple" proofs are really difficult for me. I think I am finally starting to get it, but just to be sure could some one please check this proof that $\mathbb Z[i]/\langle 1 - i \rangle$ is a field. Thank you.  Proof: Notice that $$\langle 1 - i \rangle\\  \Rightarrow 1 = i\\  \Rightarrow 2 = 0.$$ Thus all elements of the form $a+ bi + \langle 1 - i \rangle$ can be rewritten as $a+ b + \langle 1 - i \rangle$. But since $2=0$ this implies that the elements that are left can be written as $1 + \langle 1 - i \rangle$ or $0 + \langle 1 - i \rangle$. Thus  $$ \mathbb Z[i]/ \langle 1 - i \rangle = \{ 0+ \langle 1 - i \rangle , 1 + \langle 1 - i \rangle\}. $$  This is obviously a commutative ring with unity and no zero-divisors, thus it is a finite integral domain, and hence is a field. $\square$ As the title says. How do I get from  $\frac{n}{\varphi(n)}$ to $\sum\limits_{d \mid n} \frac{\mu^2(d)}{\varphi(d)}$?  I know that $$\frac{n}{\varphi(n)}=\frac{\sum\limits_{d \mid n} \varphi(d)}{\sum\limits_{d \mid n} \mu(d)\frac{n}{d}},$$ and I suspect it is down this road I should go. But I get totally confused by the sums and I have no clue on how to divide them and "combine" them into one again. Any hints or advice would be much appreciated. Does more reflective aluminum foil make a room cooler compared to less reflective foil? Aluminum foil is said to be not absorbing light at all. It reflects light. So, does it mean that a more shiny aluminum foil will reflect more light and thus make the room more cooler as compared to less shiny foil?  If yes, then where does unreflected light go in case of less shiny aluminum foil?  Does less shiny and more shiny actually make a difference? Why?  In order to keep whole room cool will it help if I stick the foil to the outside of wooden door (exposed to the sunlight) too? Similar matrices and field extensions This is a summary of the excerpt:  Given that we have:  *$10^9$ people  *each person has a chance of 0.01 of going to a hotel  *we have $10^5$ hotels, each hotel holds 100 people  *Thus, $P(2 \text{ persons meet on the same hotel in any given day}) = 0.01 \cdot 0.01 \cdot 10^{-5}$  *and $P(2\text{ persons on the same hotel in $2$ day}) = P(2 \text{ persons on the same hotel in any given days})^2 = 10^{-18}$  the book "Mining of Massive Dataset" said that the expected number of pairs who stay in the same hotel for 2 days is:  $P(2 \text{ persons on the same hotel in $2$ days}) \cdot ( \text{number of pairs of people} ) \cdot (\text{number of pairs of days})$  this is the part where I got stuck. Can't understand how it come to this derivation. Can anybody explain it in more elaborate detail.  You can find the content on page 6 of this link:  (it is freely available) How to output string completions to stdout? This question is about why we have a universal speed limit (the speed of light in vacuum). Is there a more fundamental law that tells us why this is? I'm not asking why the speed limit is equal to $c$ and not something else, but why there is a limit at all. EDIT: Answers like &quot;if it was not..&quot; and answers explaining the consequences of having or not having a speed limit are not--in my opinion-- giving an answer to whether there is a more fundamental way to derive it from a law to explain this limit. Is there anything canon in the Terminator Universe that picks up where Terminator: The Sarah Connors Chronicles leaves off? So, Terminator canon is pretty twisted, given all that time-travel stuff.  But in the canon that includes the T:SCC, does anything pick up where the show left off that is considered canon? How can I read inputs as numbers? I want the very latest version of Python, but I don't want to bypass the apt package manager: I don't want to do an old-school source install because that can make it harder to uninstall when the official packages come out.  Python3.5 is not currently featured in any of Canonical's package repositories, which means I cannot just "apt-get install python3.5".  Is there a way to get Python3.5 installed on my PC in the meantime?