Story in which a man gets executed because of a bureaucratic mix-up Trying to identify a story: I once read an anthologized short story in which a man is scheduled to be executed for a minor offence. I believe the narrative was conducted entirely in letters back and forth between people like his lawyer, relevant authorities, and other such figures. As the situation progresses his fate remains unavoidable for one absurd reason or other (holidays, rules, automatic mechanisms.) Does this ring a bell for anyone? Thanks!
Short Science Fiction story, told in a series of letters This was a short story told in a series of letters.  The protagonist starts by writing a letter to a utility company about an error in his bill.  By the last letter he is on death row trying to get his sentence commuted.  Each letter is slightly misunderstood.  I think it's from the late 60's and may have been in anthology like "Orbit".
Will upgrading Windows 8 to 8.1 affect Ubuntu? It's a rather simple question (I hope). I currently have Windows 8 and I am dual booting it with Ubuntu 13.04.   If I were to install the latest update for Windows 8, that being 8.1, will it affect Ubuntu or will there be any conflicts between the two? Right-click on Touchpad not working after update to 18.04 LTS I have a Lenovo Yoga 910-13IKB. I was running Ubuntu 17.10 with no issues. I upgraded to 18.04 LTS and now my right-click on my touchpad does not register. I can only left-click.  I already tried the steps listed , but they did not fix the issue.  Does anyone know how to fix this?  Thanks. I've tried to read and understand this:   As a test, since my layout is "Polish, programmer" in the /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pl file I played with remapping the 'q' character to 'x', and it worked just fine.  But what I want, is to remap LWIN (Left Super) to Left Control.   So I tried this: I started editing /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pc file, assuming this is the 'root' of all the other files. Commented out this line:  //key &lt;LWIN&gt; {  [ Super_L       ]   };   and added this one:  key &lt;LWIN&gt; {    [ Control_L     ]   };   and rebooted PC, with no success. I.e. LWIN + C, doesn't copy selected text in text editors to clipboard, instead it just produces the 'c' letter. In the terminal instead of stopping current programm it also just produces the 'c' letter.  Here is my config file:   When I try the xev command and then press the Left Control Key, I see this:  KeyPress event, serial 40, synthetic NO, window 0x5a00001,     root 0x7e, subw 0x0, time 1053321, (374,-259), root:(374,545),     state 0x0, keycode 133 (keysym 0xffe3, Control_L), same_screen YES,     XKeysymToKeycode returns keycode: 37     XLookupString gives 0 bytes:      XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:      XFilterEvent returns: False  KeyRelease event, serial 40, synthetic NO, window 0x5a00001,     root 0x7e, subw 0x0, time 1053425, (374,-259), root:(374,545),     state 0x0, keycode 133 (keysym 0xffe3, Control_L), same_screen YES,     XKeysymToKeycode returns keycode: 37     XLookupString gives 0 bytes:      XFilterEvent returns: False   BTW. Ask ubuntu suggests me two links to similar questions, but they are old, and suggest using xmodmap, and afaik it's no longer correct answer on Ubuntu >= 16.04 (Xenial) and this is precisely the version I have.  BTW2. I would really like to avoid using apps like Xbindkeys, considering there is a built in solution, which I guess I almost understand, and already spent some time on trying to understand it. How can I list all the printable ASCII characters in the terminal? Reason for the discreteness arising in quantum mechanics? What is the most essential reason that actually leads to the quantization. I am reading the book on quantum mechanics by Griffiths. The quanta in the infinite potential well for e.g. arise due to the boundary conditions, and the quanta in harmonic oscillator arise due to the commutation relations of the ladder operators, which give energy eigenvalues differing by a multiple of $\hbar$. But what actually is the reason for the discreteness in quantum theory? Which postulate is responsible for that. I tried going backwards, but for me it somehow seems to come magically out of the mathematics. SEO preference: does a site with WWW rank better than without WWW? I’m studying a PhD in Theoretical Physics (quantum field theory, to be specific), but I would like to learn more about black holes (and related areas. Does anyone have any suggestions for textbooks/available notes on these subjects for people without much background in them? Obviously I’m very comfortable with mathematics and physics in general so I’m not looking for “pop science” material. HTTP 401 twice before HTTP 200 when serving files iptables drop all incoming ICMP requests except from one IP Currently, I have something like:  iptables -A INPUT -p ICMP --icmp-type 8 -j DROP iptables -A INPUT -s x.x.x.x -p ICMP --icmp-type 8 -j ACCEPT   However, when I run the second command, it looks as if iptables just stops.  I have to break out of it to get back to terminal.  Perhaps I am doing it all wrong, but some insight would be helpful. Finding an Inverse Function and Composition of Functions? Egg replacer for bread dough? I've been reading (most) questions and answers (here) about baking bread (which I love) and how to replace eggs in many recipes (which I wish I didn't need). Turns out, I too have egg allergy (not too severe) and a few of my favorite breads require one or more eggs.  So far I've seen two options, in many threads, that look promising: Ener-G egg replacer and replacing eggs with flax. However, not a single use case I've seen here is about bread. I'm looking for an option to replace 1-3 eggs in a bread dough with: 500 g of white wheat flour, 200 ml of milk, 50-80 g of butter, a variable amount of sugar (5-50 g) and 20-30 g of fresh yeast.  Examples of this dough are the , the  and a similar recipe from Galicia (northwest Spain) with even more eggs. And so many other breads, but these are my favorite ones :)  Has anyone tried flax or ener-g on a similar bread dough? I want to put a link to my SO profile on my homepage. I remember a codesnippet i saw somewhere that would basically display my Username and my reputation. Where was that? Is it possible to get the progress of an XMLHttpRequest (bytes uploaded, bytes downloaded)?   This would be useful to show a progress bar when the user is uploading a large file. The standard API doesn't seem to support it, but maybe there's some non-standard extension in any of the browsers out there? It seems like a pretty obvious feature to have after all, since the client knows how many bytes were uploaded/downloaded.  note: I'm aware of the "poll the server for progress" alternative (it's what I'm doing right now). the main problem with this (other than the complicated server-side code) is that typically, while uploading a big file, the user's connection is completely hosed, because most ISPs offer poor upstream. So making extra requests is not as responsive as I'd hoped. I was hoping there'd be a way (maybe non-standard) to get this information, which the browser has at all times. How to create and animate the water reflection (Caustics) on an object? What is the best method to create this kind of reflection and how to animate it? How can I create launchers on my desktop? In older versions it was easy to create a launcher on my desktop. All I had to do is right click on my desktop and select the "create launcher" option.  How can I create such launchers now? Controlling colors of points in ListPlot I unintentionally and stupidly wiped my Clash of Clans game data. I went to Application Manager on my Android and clicked 'Clear data'. (I used this for fixes before and it never started a new game.)   Now, my level 60 or so base has been wiped as if was to start a new game. Have I doomed myself to starting again or is there a way in which I can retrieve my old game save? Maybe by contacting Supercell? I have a snapshot of my base. How do I compute the normalisation of $A=k[X,Y]/(Y^3 - X^5)$? I'm trying to solve exercise 4.7 in Reid's UCA:  "Find the normalisation of $A=k[X,Y]/(Y^3 - X^5)$."  I can easily show $A$ is not normal: let $x$ and $y$ denote the images of $X$ and $Y$ in $A$. Thus $y^3 = x^5$. So there exists $t=y/x\in\operatorname{Frac} (A)$ which is a root of the monic polynomial $T^3 - x^2 \in A[T]$. But since $t\notin A$, $A$ is not normal.  However, I don't know how to compute the normalisation of $A$; I have not seen dimension theory developed, so  to a similar question doesn't really help me. Similarly I cannot try and apply something like  to a related question, because in this case the map $k[X,Y]\rightarrow k[t]$ sending $X\mapsto t^3, Y\mapsto t^5$ is injective so the image isn't isomorphic to $A$  UCA never really gives a good explanation on how to actually compute normalisations, so I'd be grateful if anyone could walk me through it. Frequently loaded packages: Differences between pdfLaTeX and XeLaTeX Until now, I have been compiling my LaTeX documents with pdfLaTeX. My standard document preamble includes the "usual suspects" for non-English speakers (, , ) and a bunch of other packages. Assuming I were to convert to XeLaTeX, what modifications of my preamble are advisable? I'm aware that the expansion=true option of the  package is not (yet) available for XeLaTeX, and that  is sort of a default package for OpenType fonts. What other packages (and package options) should be removed and, vice versa, incorporated when switching from pdfLaTeX to XeLaTeX? How to convert milliseconds into human readable form?