I work for a company who, for sake of argument, are called Scottish Chickens.  When writing to our customers, should we write that "Scottish Chickens is planning to carry out work to improve the situation." OR should we write that "Scottish Chickens are planning to carry out work to improve the situation?   I prefer the latter but would appreciate your view on this.   Regards, GRL
I'd say Microsoft have a way of bending the rules and I know that McLaren have won the championship. While this sounds strange, I believe it is correct English (sorry, I'm not native).   But when it's a small company, would you still use it this way? Is a company always plural, or are small companies singular? I.e., would you say Bakery Johnson makes fine bread or Bakery Johnson make fine bread? Is it My book seller, Woody's, have moved or is it has moved?
Should one create slides similar to those that one uses in a good powerpoint presentation? Or are there things that a poster should include that a powerpoint should not include? (and vice versa) Did the verb “fire a weapon” exist before the actual introduction of firearms on battlefields?  More specifically, does it make sense for a creative work to have archers (or whatever ranged weaponry) be told to “fire!”, when the world they live in has not yet seen firearms?  It seems some kind of an anachronism to me, since before firearms, “fire” would never propel any projectile...  I've seen several movies do it; I can't remember them all, but for instance I verified it in The Lord of the Rings trilogy (left), Kingdom of Heaven (top right), and more recently Frozen (bottom right):    The first two do it several times (with Kingdom of Heaven also using it on ballistae, and The Return of the King even having Aragorn ask Legolas to ), whereas firearms never appear on the battlefields they feature (Kingdom of Heaven is set in the 12th century; as for The Lord of the Rings, apart from one occurrence of a witchcraft-ish bomb, it's archery and medieval siege engines all the way).  Frozen may be debatable, happening probably somewhere in the 18th or 19th century, but since we only see swords, spears and the like, it made me flinch to hear crossbowmen use “fire!”.  I've also noticed other movies avoiding this, using “loose!” instead, such as Troy (left) and Gladiator (right):    This makes me think it would be the right thing to say instead... although I'm still wondering why not use “shoot”, which seems simpler to me. Do trees really get a large share of their mass from the carbon in the air? I remember hearing that trees and other plants actually obtain a large amount of their mass from the carbon floating in the air, not the ground beneath them. Does the makeup of air actually contain enough carbon to support this theory, and is a tree's surface area actually large enough to obtain the amount of carbon it needs directly from the air? Non in front of hyphenated adjective "It really doesn't matter" v "It doesn't really matter" How to detect the Internet connection is offline in JavaScript? What's a word for knowing something from experience? I'm trying to figure out a word that describes subconsciously knowing something from experience. My initial attempt was "instinct", but that has more gifted and primal connotations.  The use case I had in mind was as follows:     "If we assume that the model is applicable, it tells us what we've ________ known for a while [...]"     Update:  The word that fits best for my use case seems to be intuitively.  Another good one was empirically, but it tends to imply there were some experiments carried out to glean the knowledge, which wasn't the case. Prove that $||x|-|y||\le |x-y|$ I've seen the full proof of the Triangle Inequality  \begin{equation*} |x+y|\le|x|+|y|.  \end{equation*} However, I haven't seen the proof of the reverse triangle inequality:  \begin{equation*} ||x|-|y||\le|x-y|. \end{equation*} Would you please prove this using only the Triangle Inequality above?  Thank you very much. Invalid variance: The type parameter 'T' must be contravariantly valid on 'UserQuery.IItem.ItemList'. 'T' is covariant So I'm in Linux and I want to have a program accept arguments when you execute it from the command line.  For example,   ./myprogram 42 -b -s  So then the program would store that number 42 as an int and execute certain parts of code depending on what arguments it gets like -b or -s. why is nautilus slow? I'm wondering why Nautilus is very slow when opening a directory containing lots of files. My /usr/lib dir for example has 1900 files and it takes approximately 5+ seconds to show everything. It has been like this since I installed Ubuntu few months ago and it's really quite annoying sometimes. I don't have powerful hardware but I know that Windows Explorer is so much faster than this.   Is there anything that can be done to speed it up?  Ubuntu 10.04 Events triggered by dynamically generated element are not captured by event handler UK Visa has been refused for false document I applied for a marriage visitor visa, to get married to my boyfriend of 2 years.   We met while we were students in the UK and have had vacations together in the two years but not in the U.K.   With the application I had attached an offer letter from a company stating that I have a job offer open starting 3 months later.   This however has been tagged as non genuine, although the company is registered and is run by someone I know.  How can I appeal to this? I'm currently building a sitemap for my web app.  Note: my app is a single page app built with React and Firebase.  Basically I wan to index blogPost and product pages. So I intend to generate my sitemap dynamically (on server). It's a small website (around 500 pages).  I want to build something like this:  &lt;urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"&gt;   &lt;url&gt;     &lt;loc&gt;       https://www.myproject.org/blog/some-blog-post-slug     &lt;/loc&gt;     &lt;lastmod&gt;2019-11-14T20:22:43.502+00:00&lt;/lastmod&gt;     &lt;changefreq&gt;weekly&lt;/changefreq&gt;     &lt;priority&gt;0.8&lt;/priority&gt;   &lt;/url&gt;   &lt;url&gt;     &lt;loc&gt;       https://www.myproject.org/dp/some-product-slug     &lt;/loc&gt;     &lt;lastmod&gt;2019-11-15T13:08:52.127+00:00&lt;/lastmod&gt;     &lt;changefreq&gt;weekly&lt;/changefreq&gt;     &lt;priority&gt;0.8&lt;/priority&gt;   &lt;/url&gt; &lt;/urlset&gt;   And I keep the following properties in my database, both for blogPosts and products:  createdAt: &lt;Timestamp&gt; lastModifiedAt: &lt;Timestamp&gt;  // UPDATED EVERYTIME I UPDATE THE RECORD   And I'm thinking about using my lastModifiedAt value as the &lt;lastmod&gt; tag for the sitemap.  So far, so good! Everytime I update my blogPost or product objects in my database. The next time the sitemap is requested, the new modifiedDate will show on those that have been changed.  QUESTION  But what if I make a change not in the database itself, but in the way I render all the product pages, for example.  Imagine that I've added some structured data tags to display rich results on google, with price, reviews etc. So my product info is the same, but from that point on, all of my product pages will render those extra tags that I need to be re-indexed.  Example (add a structured data tag with the product price):   &lt;div property="schema:price" content="119.99"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;   In that situation, will I have to update all &lt;lastmod&gt; for all the products? How Google will know that it needs to re-crawl those pages and be able to see the structured data tags?  What if I change only the styles for the productPages? Do I have to update the &lt;lastmod&gt; for every product in this case? Do rogues get sneak attack damage added to attacks made outside their turn? Why is it impossible to override a getter-only property and add a setter? Why is the following C# code not allowed:  public abstract class BaseClass {     public abstract int Bar { get;} }  public class ConcreteClass : BaseClass {     public override int Bar     {         get { return 0; }         set {}     } }      CS0546 'ConcreteClass.Bar.set': cannot override because 'BaseClass.Bar' does not have an overridable set accessor How to define orbital angular momentum in other than three dimensions? What's the best way to build a string of delimited items in Java? While working in a Java app, I recently needed to assemble a comma-delimited list of values to pass to another web service without knowing how many elements there would be in advance. The best I could come up with off the top of my head was something like this:  public String appendWithDelimiter( String original, String addition, String delimiter ) {     if ( original.equals( "" ) ) {         return addition;     } else {         return original + delimiter + addition;     } }  String parameterString = ""; if ( condition ) parameterString = appendWithDelimiter( parameterString, "elementName", "," ); if ( anotherCondition ) parameterString = appendWithDelimiter( parameterString, "anotherElementName", "," );   I realize this isn't particularly efficient, since there are strings being created all over the place, but I was going for clarity more than optimization.  In Ruby, I can do something like this instead, which feels much more elegant:  parameterArray = []; parameterArray &lt;&lt; "elementName" if condition; parameterArray &lt;&lt; "anotherElementName" if anotherCondition; parameterString = parameterArray.join(",");   But since Java lacks a join command, I couldn't figure out anything equivalent.  So, what's the best way to do this in Java? Solve the functional equation $f(xy) = f(x)f(y) - f(x + y) + 1$ and $f(1) = 2$ I'm working on this problem already, the domain and co-domain are the set of Rational Numbers. we see that setting $x = 1$ and $y = n$, we obtain $f(n + 1) = f(n) + 1$  But I'm trying to prove that $f(n) = n + 1$ for all $n$, the case when $n = 1, 2$ is obviously true, how do I approach this via induction? $C^2 $embedded in holder space? I have a question on Holder space.Is the space $C^2(\mathbb{R}^n)$ embedded in $C^{1,\alpha}(\mathbb{R}^n)$? I think in the bounded domain case, this should be true. But what if in the case where the domain is not bounded? Thanks for any hint!