Private Message Feature One thing that I will be very happy if added in Stack Overflow is a Private Message system like in forums, because there's some things that you want to be in private with your internet friends.
Any way to send a personal message to another user? There has been quite a few times that I wished I could send a message to another user on SO - not ask a question for everyone to see, but just a short message informing them of something or requesting them to do something.  Are there any plans to allow this to happen in the future?  Related:
Word for Party *Steward*? Is there a word that describes a person who is usually not too drunk and takes care of the rest of the folks at a party?  Typically, they're the ones who drag the sloshed ones back to beds, clean up the house and generally maintain a bit of sanity. Custom attributes - Yea or nay? Duplicate typeset index entries PostGIS nearest points with ST_Distance, kNN I need to obtain on each element on one table the closest point of another table. The first table contains traffic signs and the second one the Entrance Halls of the town. The thing is that I can't use ST_ClosestPoint function and I have to use ST_Distance function and get the min(ST_distance) record but I am quite stuck building the query.  CREATE TABLE traffic_signs (   id numeric(8,0) ),   "GEOMETRY" geometry,   CONSTRAINT traffic_signs_pkey PRIMARY KEY (id),   CONSTRAINT traffic_signs_id_key UNIQUE (id) ) WITH (   OIDS=TRUE );  CREATE TABLE entrance_halls (   id numeric(8,0) ),   "GEOMETRY" geometry,   CONSTRAINT entrance_halls_pkey PRIMARY KEY (id),   CONSTRAINT entrance_halls_id_key UNIQUE (id) ) WITH (   OIDS=TRUE );   I need to obtain the id of the closest entrnce_hall of every traffic_sign.  My query so far:  SELECT senal.id,port.id,ST_Distance(port."GEOMETRY",senal."GEOMETRY")  as dist     FROM traffic_signs As senal, entrance_halls As port        ORDER BY senal.id,port.id,ST_Distance(port."GEOMETRY",senal."GEOMETRY")   With this I am getting the distance from every traffic_sign to every entrance_hall. But how can I get only the minimun distance?  Regards, A case of optional “that”: “check the” vs. “check that the” Consider the following use case:   Please check the username and password are correct. Please check that the username and password are correct.   In this case, I would say that that is required because it feels more natural to me and so the flow is better. However, is the lack of that wrong in this case?  The question boils down to: when is that optional? See . A quick summary:   That is optional if the pronoun is the object. That is required if the pronoun is the subject.   I think that we fall into the second case: that is required because the relative pronoun is the subject. But I'm not sure if I'm interpreting these rules correctly. Can someone please advise? Windows is unable to detect disk partitions I installed Windows 8.1 Preview using the DVD yesterday after wiping off my HDD (I made a backup prior to that). While installing Windows I created only the partitions necessary to install Windows (System Reserved, C: shown in second screenshot). Further I installed Ubuntu 13.04. During Ubuntu installation I created necessary extended partitions (for OS, swap and home directory - all ext4 except swap). Later within Ubuntu I created a NTFS partition at the end (partition 4 in first screenshot). This was a primary partition. The objective behind this was that the partition must be accessible from Windows.  While Ubuntu disk utility reports the partitioning just fine (as below)  Windows disk management is showing all partitions as primary.   Thus within Windows I am able to access only C:! What puzzles me is one can't create so many primary partitions! How can I solve this issue? Mathematical journal for an undergraduate I want to make someone a present by subscribing for him to a mathematical journal. (It should appear every month or every two months). The contents should be comprehensible to an undergraduate in mathematics, and be about a broad selection of topics (for example not only analysis).   I expect the content to be something like proposing interesting problems and then giving solutions with some references for further study. Are there some famous journals you could suggest me? I would like to know if there is a word or phrase for a systematic campaign to annihilate every descendant of a particular ancestor.   We have the word 'genocide' for killing off an entire race, and plenty of words for killing people based on how they are related to you (fratricide, filicide, et. al.), but looking over the  and the , I couldn't find a term for systematically killing an entire bloodline.   My question is prompted by a US news story about the horrific murder of 8 members of the same family, but those murders are not an example of what I'm thinking of because the children of the victims were left alive, so the motive for the killings was not to kill off the bloodline. The sense that some group had coordinated an attack against just one family is what made me wonder what the "not an entire race, just one bloodline" version of 'genocide' would be called.   Searching the Internet for "kill off" and bloodline sends me straight into the land of vampires, Illuminati, reptilian overlords, and, naturally, Priory of Sion nonsense so I haven't had much luck finding a thread to pull.   It may be that there is no word for it in the sense of murdering a human bloodline, because we just don't attempt kill off our royals down to the last heir often enough to coin a term for it. Maybe there is a scientific term for culling a line from a test population as part of biological research? math fallacy problem: $-1= (-1)^3 = (-1)^{6/2} = \sqrt{(-1)^6}= 1$? I know there is something wrong with this but I don't know where. It's some kind of a math fallacy and it is driving me crazy. Here it is: $$-1= (-1)^3 = (-1)^{6/2} = \sqrt{(-1)^6}= 1?$$ Why does Boolean.ToString output "True" and not "true" true.ToString()  false.toString();  Output: True False   Is there a valid reason for it being "True" and not "true"? It breaks when writing XML as XML's boolean type is lower case, and also isn't compatible with C#'s true/false (not sure about CLS though).  Update  Here is my very hacky way of getting around it in C# (for use with XML)  internal static string ToXmlString(this bool b) {     return b.ToString().ToLower(); }   Of course that adds 1 more method to the stack, but removes ToLowers() everywhere. Footnotes layout in multicols environment I am using the package multicol to typeset a one-column (spanning the entire text width) heading and a two-column main text block. In order to do so, I begin the multicols environment along with the start of the text block. The one-column heading spans a small fraction of the text height in the front page and I need to set a footnote there, before starting the two-column environment. I'd like to have that footnote typeset under the first column in the two-column running text. How could I possibly do this?   Moreover, I'd like to have the footnotes typeset in a single column under one of the text columns -- I don't even mind having them as two-column footnotes, but what I do not want is a footnotes layout spanning the entire text width. I have tried with the command \twocolumnfootnotes from the class memoir, with the packages ledmac, dblfnote, and even with ftnright (the latter complains about its being used in a single-column document, due to that one-column heading). None has proved useful in this setting. As a less than MWE, just to convey a more concrete depiction of my scenario, let us consider:  \documentclass{memoir}  \usepackage{multicol}  \begin{document}  A single-column heading\footnote{Here I have my footnote.}  \begin{multicols}{2} Here I am in the two-column environment, and I want my footnotes being set in accordance with the document's ``columnwidth''.\footnote{A footnote in the two-column environment.} \end{multicols}   \end{document} Mammals, reptiles, arachnids, insects, etc are all as far as I am aware symmetrical in appearance.  Take a human for instance, make a line from the top of our head right down the middle. However, internally it is not the same. Our organs excluding the kidneys, lungs, reproductive organs, etc are not symmetrically placed in our body.   Why do we not have an even number of each organ so it can be placed symmetrically? If we have a single organ why is it not placed in the middle like the brain or bladder is for instance? Is there some evolutionary advantage that led to this setup? Pass An Instantiated System.Type as a Type Parameter for a Generic Class The title is kind of obscure. What I want to know is if this is possible:  string typeName = &lt;read type name from somwhere&gt;; Type myType = Type.GetType(typeName);  MyGenericClass&lt;myType&gt; myGenericClass = new MyGenericClass&lt;myType&gt;();   Obviously, MyGenericClass is described as:  public class MyGenericClass&lt;T&gt;   Right now, the compiler complains that 'The type or namespace 'myType' could not be found." There has got to be a way to do this. How can I make my microSD card writable? Why Java needs Serializable interface? 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? Where do I put item tags on items inside a chest or your inventory? Intersecting overlapping polylines using ArcGIS for Desktop? I have 4 multipart polyline shapefiles (download a sample dataset ).   The geometries are identical, except for the length of segments in each shapefile. They represent 4 variables describing an identical shoreline. From these 4 overlapping polylines, I would like to create a resulting polyline that has segments for each unique set of the 4 input lines.    My approach was to use an intersect. This, however, breaks down when I try to run it on 4 huge feature classes.  My question is whether there is a more efficient way to combine polyline attributes stored in separate layers. I thought a union would be good, but it only works on polygons. Spatial Join seems inefficient, as I would end up with many to many joins for a single segment. Turning the segment end points into a point layer, then splitting the line at those points?  I have access to arcpy, PostGIS, and shapely.  Has anyone had experience doing this before on large datasets? Is there a more efficient way to store these variables? How do I save the output of a command to a file?  Is there a way without using any software? I would like to know how. Why have a letter in a word when it’s silent in pronunciation, like the b in debt?  Can anyone please clarify my uncertainty here? Are there any free/open source alternatives to Adobe After Effects? I've been a illustrator and graphic designer for a number of years and now I'm looking to go more into motion graphics and visual effects. Is there anything that is open source/free (not a demo, education version or trial) that is as complex and feature-rich as Adobe After Effects but for Linux? I've tried Cinlerra, kdenlive, openshot and Blender and whilst they are good at video editing (and 3d modelling in Blender's case) they fall short in effects and compositing features.  I've also tried , but the project recently closed and the last update was quite buggy.  Also,  doesn't work and hasn't been updated in many many years, so don't mention it ;-)