I want to ask a question politely to the client. What is the best way to say it?     Could you please let me know when you want to go to a bus station?   Do you think it is a correct way to say it?
I heard using 'could' is for politeness. When I request something, should I say "Can you please" or "Could you please"? Does the latter sound over-polite and pretentious?
Option to contact moderators Due to some "recent issues", I think the following is necessary:  Users need a way to contact moderators through the StackOverflow website.  This is especially important for suspensions, where there is no way to appeal or discuss the suspension from within SO itself.  Basically, there would be some kind of a box on the user's page that allows them to mention something to the moderators and some way to read the replies. (Or they could just go to the user's email.) Bounded in Probability and smaller order in probability Is there a "best practice" or standard to make a few iptables rules permanent? I mean: automatically applied upon a system reboot?  I am using a VPS with Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx).  Thank you.  BIG EDIT: I don't want ANY rule to be persisted (like iptables-persistent package does). I want only my own specific set to be reloaded... if other rules are eventually added by running iptables, these should be discarded... How do you tell what brand/make/model of bike I have? When drawing a line between two nodes in TikZ, you can specify the anchors on the beginning and end nodes in order to control how the line is drawn.  I would like to specify the anchor on the beginning node, and the angle at which the line is drawn, and let TikZ figure out where it will intercept the end node.  The usual use case is when I'm connecting to a "big node" and I would like the lines to be vertical.  I can cheat by placing a coordinate behind the big node, drawing a line to the coordinate instead, and then drawing the big node so that it covers things up.  However this won't work if I need to put an arrow on the end.  I could try to calculate the intercept coordinate on the edge of the big node manually, but that seems against the TikZ spirit.  |- doesn't work in this case.  \documentclass[10pt]{minimal} \usepackage[active,tightpage,pdftex]{preview} \usepackage{tikz}  \begin{document} \begin{preview}  \tikzstyle{RectObject}=[rectangle,fill=white,draw,line width=0.5mm] \tikzstyle{line}=[draw] \tikzstyle{arrow}=[draw, -latex]   \begin{tikzpicture}   %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%   %%  LEFT SIDE   %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%   \draw (1,0) node[RectObject] (Small1A) {A};   \draw (3,0) node[RectObject] (Small1B) {B};   \coordinate (Cheat1A) at (1,2);   \coordinate (Cheat1B) at (3,2);   \path [line] (Small1A.north) -- (Cheat1A);   \path [line] (Small1B.north) -- (Cheat1B);    % need to draw Big Node last to cover up our cheating   \draw (2,2) node[RectObject, inner xsep=1cm] (Big1) {Big Node};    \draw (2,4) node[text width=4cm] (text1) {L: Cheating to control line orientation. Arrows would be hard.};    %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%   %%  RIGHT SIDE   %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%   \draw (7,2) node[RectObject, inner xsep=1cm] (Big2) {Big Node};   \draw (6,0) node[RectObject] (Small2A) {A};   \draw (8,0) node[RectObject] (Small2B) {B};   \path [arrow] (Small2A) -- (Big2);   \path [arrow] (Small2B) -- (Big2);    \draw (7,4) node[text width=4cm] (text2) {R: No cheating. Arrows easy. Can't control line orientation.}; \end{tikzpicture} \end{preview} \end{document}   Here's a side-by-side example of "cheating", which shows what I want to be able to do, and "not cheating", which does not do what I want.    The left side of this example shows what I want to be able to do, except I want to do it without cheating, and I'd like to put arrows on the end of the lines. Illustrator Vector Graphics Appearing Pixellated Can I set max_retries for requests.request? I want to automatically split all lines in a QGIS layer at their vertices (). I've done a Google search and found , which is quite close but the workflow is complicated. Because I'll have to train my co-workers (who are unfamiliar with GIS) to use this tool, I want something as simple as a plugin or something that doesn't require GRASS. Since it's been a long time from 2010 - the time of , I wonder if there is any better way to achieve the same result? Is there an easy way to log all commands executed, including command line arguments? I am trying to find how to log a specific instantiation of rrdtool to see whether the path it is receiving is incorrect.  I know I could wrap the executable in a shell script that would log the parameters, but I was wondering if there was a more kernel-specific way to monitor for that, perhaps a filesystem callback that sees when a particular /proc/pid/exe matches a given binary? If $A=\left( \begin{array}{ccc} 0 &amp; 1 &amp; 0 \\ 0 &amp; 0 &amp; 1 \\ 1 &amp; 0 &amp; 0 \end{array} \right)$, find the rank of $A+A^2+A^3$  We have $\rho(A+A^2+A^3)\leq\rho(A)+\rho(A^2)+\rho(A^3) $ where $\rho(A)$ means rank of A.  Here $\rho(A)=3.$ Also $\rho(A^2)=3$ and $\rho(A^3)=3$  as $\det A\neq 0$ and $\det(A^2)=\det(A)\det(A)\neq 0$ and so on.   But how to get the desired result. is a light side power that many Jedi, including  are capable of. In Episode I, Qui-Gon uses it twice (once to outrun droids and once on Jar Jar's tongue), Obi-Wan uses it once and Anakin uses high speed reflexes for the entire duration of the pod race with no formal training.  According to  the power has a high drain and requires a longer recovery period than other powers. And then of course there are hilarious drawbacks such as .  But why wasn't this power used in the following scenarios (and many, many others):   The Redshirt Jedi who accompanied Windu to arrest Palpatine, before they were summarily dispatched to the Nether. Qui-Gonn, to avoid a lightsaber through his gut. Yoda, to avoid flying senate seats. By Windu, who is supposedly a notable practitioner. How to remove old device from Safari iCloud Tabs? I returned a MacBook to Apple Store, however apparently I forgot to sign out of iCloud and the latest tabs I was browsing still appear in Safari iCloud Tabs of my new MacBook and existing iPad.  I removed the device from icloud.com -> Find My iPhone but it didn't work. Tabs list from my old computer is still there and I am trying to remove it from my devices list. I appreciate any ideas. Prove that $J^+AJ$ has positive eigenvalues Let $J \in \mathbb{R}$ be a $m \times n$ matrix of rank $n$ and a $A \in \mathbb{R}$ be a $m \times m$ diagonal positive definite matrix. Denote by $J^+$ a  of $J$.   As was shown  $J^+AJ$ is not positive definite in general.   However, I was wondering whether one can prove or disprove that $J^+AJ$ has real and positive eigenvalues. Dependency error while installing WINE Every time I try to install "WINE" VIA the Software Center on Ubuntu 12.10, I get this error:  The following packages have unmet dependencies:  wine1.4: PreDepends: dpkg (&gt;= 1.15.7.2~) but 1.16.7ubuntu6 is to be installed          Depends: libc6 (&gt;= 2.14) but 2.15-0ubuntu20 is to be installed          Depends: wine1.4-amd64 (= 1.4.1-0ubuntu1) but 1.4.1-0ubuntu1 is to be installed          Depends: wine1.4-i386 (= 1.4.1-0ubuntu1) but it is not going to be installed   When I try installing it VIA the terminal, this is what I get:  Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree        Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation:  The following packages have unmet dependencies:  wine1.4 : Depends: wine1.4-i386 (= 1.4.1-0ubuntu1) but it is not installable            Recommends: gnome-exe-thumbnailer but it is not going to be installed or                        kde-runtime but it is not going to be installed            Recommends: ttf-droid            Recommends: ttf-mscorefonts-installer but it is not going to be installed            Recommends: ttf-umefont but it is not going to be installed            Recommends: ttf-unfonts-core but it is not going to be installed            Recommends: winbind but it is not going to be installed            Recommends: winetricks but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.   how do I fix this? I know what anti-matter is and how when it collides with matter both are annihilated. However, what about anti-photons? Are there such things as anti-photons?  I initially thought the idea preposterous. However I am curious because, if anti-photons don't exist, then anti-matter could theoretically transfer its energy to normal matter - through the mechanism of light. Is it right? I have 4 time series. One of them is stationary and rest of them are not. I need to find relation between them. I will use AIC to decide lag length.   Should I use VAR or VECM to find relation between them?  Will VAR or VECM give me relation in terms of equation which can be used for forecasting?  Do I need to perform Johansen's test of cointegration?  What good would it do? Raster generalization - buffers in rasters, expand pixels? Is it possible to create buffers for pixels of raster files? Actually I need to expand the pixels classified as 1 (in white in the figure) with a spatial range of 1 or 2 pixels, in order to perform some generalization.  I'm using QGIS, is this possible with gdal or something? I noticed that the these two commands to list files below 5 GiB produce different results:  find . -type f -size -5368709120c find . -type f -size -5G   Specifically the one that uses kilobyte unit (5368709120c) returns additional files that are larger than the maximum file size returned by the one that uses the GiB unit (5G).  From the find manual page I read the following:  -size n[cwbkMG]           File uses n units of space.  The following suffixes can be used:           `b'    for 512-byte blocks (this is the default if no suffix is used)           `c'    for bytes           `w'    for two-byte words           `k'    for Kilobytes (units of 1024 bytes)           `M'    for Megabytes (units of 1048576 bytes)           `G'    for Gigabytes (units of 1073741824 bytes)  The size does not count indirect blocks, but it does count blocks  in sparse files that are not actually allocated.  Bear in mind that the `%k' and `%b' format specifiers of -printf handle sparse files differently.   The  `b'  suffix always denotes 512-byte blocks and never 1 Kilobyte blocks,  which is different to the behaviour of -ls.   So, given that the unit of G is 1073741824, 5G should be 5368709120c. Is the issue due to how sparse or indirect blocks are counted?  Thanks in advance for the help. $\Bbb Z^\ast$ What is this notation? What does $\Bbb Z^\ast$ mean? I would think some subset of the integers but I cannot find a definition. Thank you. Many-worlds: how often is the split how many are the universes? (And how do you model this mathematically.)