There are a lot of blatantly off-topic posts put here on Meta. These are apparently people who somehow got to this site without realizing their questions about things like programming aren't supposed to be here.  I think we should have something like the  on Stack Overflow that new users are forced into that tells them what this site is for and sends them away based on a few choices. For example:      I want to ask a question about the software that powers the Stack Exchange Network   going to the normal asking interface.    I want to ask a question about programming   going to Stack Overflow or a submenu with a list of applicable sites.    I have a question that doesn't fit into these categories   going to the full list of sites.
tl;dr  Due to the special nature of Meta and the high rate of "lost souls", should we try out the Ask a Question Wizard here on Meta Stack Exchange too?  General idea  In case anyone doesn't know yet, . It guides new users towards writing better questions.  I think that such a question wizard would be useful on Meta Stack Exchange too, for three main reasons:   . There are four types of questions on Meta, each represented by the different required tags: , ,  and . Especially bug reports can often be split into a certain structure (what's wrong, how to reproduce, why I think it's wrong, examples). The same holds true for feature requests. Such a structure is ideal for a question wizard. Quite a few users  and . While the Meta community is well prepared to deal with these posts quickly, they lead to an less-than-ideal first impression by the new users and they distract the community from more important issues. Site-specific questions are often off-topic. This  since nowhere is it hinted at in the help pages (and there are a lot of old, not-yet-closed SO-specific questions from a prior era of this site) and can lead to unnecessary drama. If we add an honeypot into the wizard to catch this case (and ideally redirect them to the proper meta site), we could prevent this.   As Sonic said, there's an  new users need to read and confirm. However this doesn't really prove effective right now and we might need to try stronger tools (e.g. question wizard).  Therefore I think that we should test the Ask Question Wizard here on Meta too.  Implementation details (help welcome)  I think the wizard should have six main entry points:   I want to discuss a specific post or action from any Stack Exchange site. (-> honeypot, redirects to the appropriate per-site meta) I have a question regarding the use of Stack Exchange sites (-> support mode) I think I found a bug while using the Stack Exchange sites  (-> bug mode) I have an idea for improving the Stack Exchange sites  (-> feature request mode) I have a discussion I want to start about Stack Exchange communities or their rules  (-> discussion mode) I have some other (e.g. programming) question  (-> honeypot, redirects to )   Coming from these choices, the user would either be redirected to a landing page explaining, why this is not the right community and offering some alternative choices or they would follow the guided assistant.  For 1. the user might be asked on which site the post/action is. Maybe the system could show the three sites where the user was recently active/has the highest reputation on.  support mode would ask the user for these details:   what do you want to achieve? what have you tried? what is your current problem?   bug mode would ask the user for these details:   bug description how to reproduce the problem why do you think that this is wrong? (possibly) examples   feature request mode would ask the user for these details:   what is your goal? how do you think could this be achieved? why will the community benefit from this change? (possibly) details   discussion mode would ask the user for these details:   which rule do you want to propose/clarify (optionally) examples/why is this rule required?   Note: the above implementation details probably require some revision. Feel free to edit/suggest improvements for both wording and details.
Render issue - Model doesn't appear to be on any layers and won't render Really odd on this... using Blender 2.75... I started modelling and lost the objects from the 3d view, but they were still showing in the object lists on the outlier... I was able to copy them and continued working... when I did a test render I discovered that only the original lost objects were rendering and nothing that I had modelled over the previous 2/3hrs was showing up...  I have no idea what I did but I created another 3d view and the original bits showed up along with the layer buttons which had been missing from the screen which I thought was just a new feature from  2.75...!  Picture to show the 2 screens, top one doesn't render but bottom one does    Any idea's what I've done? This is almost a duplicate of the following questions (but, read further):      But, I wasn't able to apply the proof to my case of a group of order 10 and an element of order 5.  In my case, if I try a proof by contradiction, I'm left with the fact that every element in $G$ is of order 2, but if I divide them into subgroups, every subgroup is of order 2, and has one unique element.  I also tried other methods to prove the theorem, but couldn't come up with anything meaningful.  I'm a beginner in the field, and am not familiar with theorems such as Cauchy's or Sylow's theorem (I'm aware of Lagrange's theorem). Therefore, please try to provide a simple answer, thanks! I understand that the alphabet for the English language is not strictly English as languages such as French, Dutch and many more use the same alphabet, with few additions in other languages. Is Roman alphabet the common term to refer to this set of symbols for writing texts? How to run a complete GUI as root? My wife is an Indian national with an Indian passport. She holds an indefinite leave to remain in the UK (permanent residence card). Does she need to apply for a Schengen visa before travelling to France or any other Schengen countries? Server login attempts NOT blocked after configuring fail2ban So, I installed (and configured) fail2ban on three Ubuntu VPS servers. I configured (imo) a maximum of 3 failed login attempts (via Putty as root) within 2 minutes. Then I restarted the fail2ban service (according to ).    But when I look at my auth.log files in /var/log/ I still see 4, 5 or more failed attempts from certain IP's. So obviously I did something wrong as the IP is not blocked after 3 failed attempts.   It might have to do something with iptables, but that's where it gets a bit "foggy" for me..   Not sure how to setup a max-three-failed-login-attempts rule..  Additional: I see that the login attempts mostly have different ports for every attempt. Does that influence the count to max-three?  Because I see a port being "poked" twice and then no more attempts. Then the IP tries a different port (again 2 times). (all bots of course) Atheros AR9485 wifi disconnects randomly ''More than one row returned by a subquery used as an expression'' postgres error I am trying to realize a postgres request :   select distinct nom_reg_12  from region_15,repartition  where st_intersects(region_15.geom,                    (select geom                     from repartition                     where id_espece='Tetrarti'))=true;    but i get the following error :      More than one row returned by a subquery used as an expression   in the first time I tried this and it work fine :   select distinct nom_reg_12  from region_15,repartition  where st_intersects(region_15.geom,repartition.geom)=true;   and then I tried this a part to get the geometry I want :   select geom from repartition where id_espece='Tetrarti' shorter proof of generalized mediant inequality? Why don't self-closing script elements work? What is the reason browsers do not correctly recognize:  &lt;script src="foobar.js" /&gt; &lt;!-- self-closing script element --&gt;   Only this is recognized:  &lt;script src="foobar.js"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;   Does this break the concept of XHTML support?  Note: This statement is correct at least for all IE (6-8 beta 2). How is Gauss' Law (integral form) arrived at from Coulomb's Law, and how is the differential form arrived at from that? Been trying to find graphic novel for decades - at least I think it's a graphic novel When I was a kid I had a book that I loved, as I think about it I'm pretty sure it would be characterized as a graphic novel although I was unfamiliar with that term at the time. It was a large hardcover comic book but a full-length story, probably a few hundred pages long.  This would have been about 25-30 years ago.  I recall a little about the plot: It starts with a spaceship crashing somewhere, I remember one of the first panels had the phrase that the ship "yawed wildly". I always remembered that because I had to look up the word "yawed".   The rest of the story is told in flashback form, with the rise of an empire, and I'm pretty sure there's a guy who's a slave or otherwise in the lower strata of society who rises to be the ruler of the world or something like that.    I thought that the title had the word "titan" or "empire" in it (Empire of the Titans, or Rise of the Titans, or something similar), but Google searches have been unfruitful. Using Mosfet with seperate Logic Converter and Arduino Why don't languages raise errors on integer overflow by default? In several modern programming languages (including C++, Java, and C#), the language allows  to occur at runtime without raising any kind of error condition.  For example, consider this (contrived) C# method, which does not account for the possibility of overflow/underflow.  (For brevity, the method also doesn't handle the case where the specified list is a null reference.)    //Returns the sum of the values in the specified list. private static int sumList(List&lt;int&gt; list) {     int sum = 0;     foreach (int listItem in list)     {         sum += listItem;     }     return sum; }   If this method is called as follows:  List&lt;int&gt; list = new List&lt;int&gt;(); list.Add(2000000000); list.Add(2000000000); int sum = sumList(list);   An overflow will occur in the sumList() method (because the int type in C# is a 32-bit signed integer, and the sum of the values in the list exceeds the value of the maximum 32-bit signed integer). The sum variable will have a value of -294967296 (not a value of 4000000000); this most likely is not what the (hypothetical) developer of the sumList method intended.  Obviously, there are various techniques that can be used by developers to avoid the possibility of integer overflow, such as using a type like Java's , or the  keyword and  compiler switch in C#.  However, the question that I'm interested in is why these languages were designed to by default allow integer overflows to happen in the first place, instead of, for example, raising an exception when an operation is performed at runtime that would result in an overflow.  It seems like such behavior would help avoid bugs in cases where a developer neglects to account for the possibility of overflow when writing code that performs an arithmetic operation that could result in overflow.  (These languages could have included something like an "unchecked" keyword that could designate a block where integer overflow is permitted to occur without an exception being raised, in those cases where that behavior is explicitly intended by the developer; C# actually .)  Does the answer simply boil down to performance -- the language designers didn't want their respective languages to default to having "slow" arithmetic integer operations where the runtime would need to do extra work to check whether an overflow occurred, on every applicable arithmetic operation -- and this performance consideration outweighed the value of avoiding "silent" failures in the case that an inadvertent overflow occurs?  Are there other reasons for this language design decision as well, other than performance considerations? Problem aligning overlapping corner points in Illustrator I am drawing some overlapping paths in Illustrator. However, some anchor points of different paths do not align correctly, they create some rugged corners. I tried to manually adjust the points with the direct selection tool but it is difficult to handle the corners.  Can anyone help me to fix the corners in the red circles? Is there a way to opt out of Alexa rankings or prevent them from gathering data about my site? My competitor is using Alexa to see what I am doing. I need to get stop Alexa from including my sites in their rankings. How can I do so?   Is it possible to deny access to any visitor with the Alexa toolbar and deny access to Alexa bot requests? How to number and cross-reference \subsubsection-level headers Array slices in C# How do you do it? Given a byte array:  byte[] foo = new byte[4096];   How would I get the first x bytes of the array as a separate array? (Specifically, I need it as an IEnumerable&lt;byte&gt;)  This is for working with Sockets. I figure the easiest way would be array slicing, similar to Perls syntax:  @bar = @foo[0..40];   Which would return the first 41 elements into the @bar array. Is there something in C# that I'm just missing, or is there some other thing I should be doing?  LINQ is an option for me (.NET 3.5), if that helps any. Is temperature in vacuum zero? From      The temperature of an ideal monatomic gas is a measure of the average kinetic energy of its atoms.    Now if I remove all the particles from the box shown below will the temperature be zero? I have some conditions for some background job to run:  condition-command &amp;&amp; condition-command &amp;&amp; background-job &amp;   The problem is: I want the conditions to block until the job runs, as if I had run:  condition-command; condition-command; background-job &amp;   But it isn't a condition, if previous command fails I do not want the job to run.  I realised it is asynchronous, but it should not, in my mind the both following scripts should be the same, but they do not:  sleep 2; echo foo &amp; sleep 1; echo bar; wait   # prints foo, then bar: correct sleep 2 &amp;&amp; echo foo &amp; sleep 1; echo bar; wait # prints bar, then foo: bug   I know if I test $? variable it would work, or if I put the last one inside a subshell (but then I would lost job controls, I want to avoid daemons), but I want to know why bash make it this way, where is it documented? Is there any way to prevent this behaviour?  Edit: Chained ifs is disgusting, that is why I will not accept it as a alternative way. Edit 2: I know a subshell is possible, but it will not work for me, let us imagine I want to run a bunch of commands then wait in the end. It will be possible if i check the existence of /proc/$PID directory, but it would be a pain in the neck if there are several jobs. Edit 3: The main question is WHY bash does it, where is it documented? Whether or not it has a solution is a bonus!