This is a meta question and personally, I think the answer should be on the footer of EVERY PAGE.  What is the process I ought to follow if I feel a question is of a dubious or unethical nature?  I did a few quick searches and found nothing obvious.  Considering the content of this family of web sites; it might be good to sometimes to nominate questions some vetting and perhaps ask for the use-case or application.  Like what if I asked, "how to programmatically coordinate multiple helicopter drones to converge on the New York Twin Towers in 1998?"    I'd like to imagine that kind of question gets bumped to some kind of "use case review" meta-management role to just ask the errant quester:   "Why did you ask?" or  "What will you use it for?"   I'm naive perhaps, not yet dumb.
How should we treat questions that are, or have seeds of, evil or malicious purposes and actions, such as writing spambots and malware?    Should they be answered like regular "everybody keeps their pants on" questions? Or should there be some other type of response to this bad behaviour lot?
Suppose $$ab \equiv 0 \pmod n$$ and that $a$ and $b$ are positive integers both less than $ n$. Does it follow that either $a | n$ or $b | n$?  If it does follow, give a proof.  If it doesn’t, then give an example.   For this question is this a suitable answer: No it doesn't. $3$ and $4$ are both less than $6$. $$3 \times 4 \equiv 0 \pmod {6}$$ but $4 \not \mid 6$. I told my wolves to sit down and I accidentally forgot to tell them to stand up and I left them. Now I cannot find them, how do you get back to your wolves if they are lost? What are neutral density filters and how do I use them to create long exposures in daylight? I've seen a few related posts on the site but nothing specifically on this point:  I'd like to be able to take long exposure photos during daylight (like the examples in ). I'm told that you can do this by using a neutral density filter. So my question is: what is a neutral density filter exactly, and how is it used to achieve that smooth long exposure effect? Stack Overflow is a site of passers-by They says that Stack Overflow is a community-driven web-site. But, as a matter of fact, it is not.  There is no community at all. It's more like an imageboard, as a number of participants makes them pretty much like anonymous to each other despite of registration.   Stack Overflow is a site of passers-by.  Passers-by who want to solve their silly typo problem and passers-by who eager to share their vast knowledge in spotting silly typos. And - oh - sometimes to perform a civic duty and vote to close a question they have no idea what to answer to and thus calling it "not a real question".  So, as a funny consequence, whatever question can get   answered upvoted downvoted closed deleted   depends not on its quality but only on the fluctuation happened to "community" at the given moment, at a pretty random rate.  It is not only quite discouraging. It makes the very idea of collecting and improving knowledge quite impossible. TOC entries and labels for included PDF pages I am embedding full pages from another PDF document (using the pdfpages package), but I would like to be able to declare my own section headings before each embedded document (for e.g. hyperlinking / TOC purposes). pdfpages has an experimental feature which lets me do this, but the problem is that I want to put all of these embedded documents inside a section, so I need to insert a section heading and a subsection heading on the first document I embed. Unfortunately pdfpages doesn't seem to be able to do this. Is there a way for me to do this?  Edit: Thank you for the suggestions. I am also in need of something similar for general labels — at the moment I am abusing the addtolist option of \includePDF but the objects I'm labelling aren't really figures or tables. In  (ignoring Hawking radiation), why is a  black? Why nothing, not even light, can escape from inside a black hole? To make the question simpler, say, why is a  black hole black? Stripped out bottom bracket The bottom bracket of my bike was completely stripped to the point that when you push the left side crank arm, the right crank moves and you can see the bottom bracket lock move out the frame. The bike shop tried putting Teflon tape but it's temporary. It's a 26' xc hard tail. For all I know both sides of the bottom bracket(square tapered) are stripped clean hence the Teflon tape put by the previous owner. Can I fix the problem by changing into a hallow tech cranks because it works like a thread less bb, or should I just buy a thread less square tapered bb? Any suggestion on what to do? How do I easily rename multiple files using command line? Nilpotent matrix and basis for $F^n$ Checking for a file and whether it is readable and writable I'm trying to write a script that will look for a certain .txt file saved to my desktop.  I want the script to be able to check if this file exists and then check to see if it is readable and writable.  Any hints? 1.35 V RAM in a 1.5 V system - Will it fry or overclock? The general question is: When installing low voltage RAM in a board that outputs a higher voltage to the memory module, will this fry the RAM or will it be like overclocking it?  My specific case is: I have the Alienware m17xR3 laptop with a 2630QM Sandy Bridge board. Currently, I have the stock 1.5 V modules and when I check the overclocking options in my bios, the RAM voltage option ranges from 1.5 - 1.65 V. Is this simply because the bios recognizes that these are the values which my current RAM support and thus they will change when I install 1.35 V RAM or will I have to run the 1.35 V sticks at minimum 1.5 V?  If the case is the latter, would I fry my 1.35 V sticks? Or would they become automatically overclocked and get tighter timings with a higher voltage? Or both? Or neither? I'm a bit lost :p Smallest Width for Galaxy S and Galaxy S2 What is the difference between a relative phase and a global phase? In particular, what is a phase? I know that $re^{i\theta} = x + iy$ for any complex number $x + iy$ by Euler's formula. How do you calculate relative and global phase? Web designer's link back to own website (rel="designer" / rel="nofollow") Everybody knows :-) that in Windows plain text files lines are terminated with CR+LF, and in Unix&amp;Linux - with LF only. How can I quickly convert all my source code files from one format to another and back? Alternative definition of hyperbolic cosine without relying on exponential function We are always introduced to magnets by pictures illustrating a parallepiped magnet, a horseshoe magnet, etc... Anyway the first time we actually calculate a magnetic field is for eelectromagnets. Indeed I've rarely seen explaining or calculating the magnetic field of a permanent magnet. I know formulas for the magnetic field of a moving charge, around a conductive wire, inside a solenoid, but I don't have idea on how to go about calcualting the filed of a simple permanent magnet. It's like that without the help of electricity I'm stuck. I'd guess it would be heavily dependent on the magnetic material, its shape and the medium in which is placed. I hope that someone would provide me some insights on why such formulas are  never introduced in most physics courses and lay down some examples of a permanent magnet field caluclation. Chance of objects going against greater entropy? My book uses the argument that the multiplicities of a few macrostates in a macroscopic object take up an extraordinarily large share of all possible microstates, such that even over the entire lifetime of the universe, if each microstate had an equal chance of being accessed, fluctuations away from equilibrium would never occur.  My question to this statistical proof is this: In the real world, is there really an infinitesimal but nonzero chance that macroscopic systems could access some of the more unlikely macrostates (e.g. heat transfer from a cold object to a hot object)? So light travels slower in glass (for example) than in a vacuum. What causes light to slow down? Or: How does it slow down? If light passes through the medium, is it not essentially traveling in the "vacuum" between the atoms? What's the added value of SD line over regression line when examining association between 2 variables? I'm trying to incorporate different practices to use when exploring a new data set. Especially, how to examine the association between two variables.  Steps for example (not necessarily by order):   plot a y-by-x scatter plot of the raw data to see the relationship visually. compute summary statistics for each variable (mean and sd) compute correlation coefficient r draw the OLS regression line, compute its slope and intercept etc....   I've come across the "SD line" in Freedman's Statistics book, which is defined as:     "the line that goes through the point of averages and climbs at the rate of one vertical SD for each horizontal SD" Freedman, D., Pisani, R., &amp; Purves, R. (2007). Statistics (4th edn).   Since this book ("Statistics") is a canonical textbook, I consider its choice to discuss the SD line as an indication for the line's importance. However, a simple google search for the term "SD line" doesn't yield as many independent results. Most of them come directly from Freedman's book. This tells me it's not a central concept in bivariate analyses in general.  When comparing the SD with the OLS regression line, it seems like the regression line is more informative (than the SD line) for predicting y from x. Therefore, I'm wondering if bothering to plot the SD line has any benefit or added value that I would not already have when plotting the regression line.  Example using mtcars dataset, focusing on association between weight and mpg  data(mtcars)  ## calculate means mean_wt &lt;- mean(mtcars$wt) mean_mpg &lt;- mean(mtcars$mpg)  ## calculate standard deviations sd_wt &lt;- sd(mtcars$wt) sd_mpg &lt;- sd(mtcars$mpg)  ## scatter plot plot(x = mtcars$wt, y = mtcars$mpg)  ## add the "point of averages" points(mean_wt, mean_mpg, col = "red", cex = 1.5, pch = 16)  ## calculate the slope of the sd line slope &lt;- -1*sd_mpg/sd_wt  ## plot the sd line curve(expr = x*slope + (mean_mpg - slope*mean_wt), add = TRUE, col = 'blue', lwd = 2, type = "l", lty = 2)  ## plot the regression line model &lt;- lm(mpg ~ wt, data = mtcars) abline(model, col = "orange", lwd = 2)  ## legend legend("topright",        legend = c("Regression line", "SD line"),        col = c("orange", "blue"),        lty = c(1, 2),        lwd = c(2, 2))     Thus, my question: how can the SD line increase one's understanding about the relationship between two variables, in a way that's either adding or complementing on what the regression line already tells?