Reality is that lots of irredeemable questions get asked. There are lots of questions which can't be improved in order for them to become acceptable. The flag dialog should not have been changed to put everything under the heading of "needs improvement" when that is not true for many close reasons.  Please change it to something else. Perhaps "needs to be closed".  For example: in what way should this question be improved?
This week we rolled out a series of changes to  of the question close workflow.  You can read more about the details of these changes .    For context, the overall effort to improve the question close experience will be optimized for Stack Overflow. Given Stack Overflow’s scale, many of the pain points we hear about with question closing and reopening are unique to Stack Overflow and won’t make sense for other network sites. However some  changes are general improvements that should improve usability and guidance overall. Wherever possible, we plan to roll these changes out network wide as well. Any time we roll out a change network wide, we’ll make sure to cross-post here. This first phase is being rolled out to the network and is why I’m posting today.  Let us know if you run into any issues or have questions regarding the network here.
Probability brain teaser with infinite loop I found this problem and I've been stuck on how to solve it.     A miner is trapped in a mine containing 3 doors. The first door leads to a tunnel that will take him to safety after 3 hours of travel. The second door leads to a tunnel that will return him to the mine after 5 hours of travel. The third door leads to a tunnel that will return him to the mine after 7 hours. If we assume that the miner is at all times equally likely to choose any one of doors, what is the expected length of time until he reaches safety?   The fact that the miner could be stuck in an infinite loop has confused me. Any help is greatly appreciated. Will spoiled food always make you sick? I’m a big fan of ampersands (possibly too much …) and I’d like to replace all mentions of “et al.” (included in citations) by \&amp; al. – both in the main text (I use natbib citations of the form [Author1 et al., 1999]), and in the actual bibliography?  How can I do that, considering that BibTeX is inserting the words for me, and I have no control over the text? Preferably, I’d like to do this without creating my own bibliography style sheet (since I want to make this work regardless of the actual BibTeX style that is used), but if anyone can tell me how I need to edit the style sheet file, that would be fine as well (makebst doesn’t seem to offer an option for this …). How do I design a 2A or more power supply for my consumer USB devices? I understand that many of my consumer devices charged by USB ports can charge at higher rates than 0.5A.  However, in testing, I've found they don't consume more than this. Test Setup  I have a power supply that outputs between 0 and 30 volts, and 0 to 20 amps. I set the voltage to 5 volts, then connected up a female USB to the wires correctly. When I plug in a Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, it pulls around 0.44 amps. It is the same with a Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro. However, when I connect an iPad Air with an official lightning cable, it only pulls around 0.11 amps. Also, I tried connecting a ZGPAX S28 smartwatch and it was still about 0.44-0.45 amps.  The power supply is more than capable of outputting the maximum 2.1 amps, so why doesn't it to at least the tablets? What do I need to do in my test setup to convince the devices to consume their maximum charging current? Hartshorne Theorem 8.17 I am having trouble understanding the estimation of an AR process. In some textbooks, the AR(1) process is defined as follows: $y_{t}=\theta y_{t-1}+ϵ_t$ (which does not contain a constant). So the OLS estimator is biased. I am confused about the cause of the bias. It is explained that $y_{t-1}$ is dependent on $ϵ_{t-1}$ although it is independent of $ϵ_t$. However in linear regression, if the equation does not contain a constant, we cannot make sure the expectation of disturbance is zero. So the OLS estimator is bias without a constant. Does it mean that the OLS estimator is unbiased if I add a constant in AR process? raw data stationary but still can see trend and seaonality is stl Record Animation In BGE Random point uniform on a sphere I'm using Linux Mint. My login shell (cat /etc/passwd | grep myUserName) is bash.  After I start my graphical desktop environment and run a terminal emulator from it, I can see that .bash_profile is not sourced (environment vars that are exported in it are unset). But if I log in from a text console (ctrl+alt+F1) or manually run bash -l from the terminal emulator, .bash_profile works fine.  Am I wrong when I think that .bash_profile should be sourced when X starts and all export'ed vars should be available in the terminal, running from X?  P.S. Placing everything in .bashrc and sourcing it from .bash_profile is not good idea (): environment stuff should be sourced only once. Why do investors pay trillions for minority stakes in companies, when their only potential payback is modest uncertain dividends? I'm struggling to understand the core reason to invest in stocks as a minority shareholder. Majority shareholding makes more sense as you effectively control the company, so you can pay yourself dividends or even sell the entire company at will. You can guarantee your own payback.  However, as a minority shareholder, you don't get to make any of these decisions. You're basically just hoping to eventually, some day get paid, if the majority holders decide so.  Why do so many investors agree to pay now huge sums of money (trillions in total) for something that may eventually pay dividends, and even in the best case, these dividends are only a fraction of the price you paid to acquire these stocks?  The average annual dividend rate for the US stock market is 2%. That means if you bought 100 million worth of shares, you'd have to wait 50 years to recover your investment.  Of course, the most probable way you'd eventually get liquidity for these shares is by selling them to some other starry-eyed investor - which makes the whole thing seem like a giant Ponzi scheme.  Given all that, it's unclear to me why the public is willing to spend so much money to acquire minority shares in companies. What programming languages can I use in Blender? What version of Python does Blender use and are other languages available? Also, does Python work the same in Blender as when you write console applications or when working with Pygame or are there any differences? If so, what are the main differences? Function whose inverse is also its derivative? Are there any clones/alternatives for running a Stack Exchange style Q&A site? how to get the selected date in jquery Find all files that are NOT of a specific type/extension in folder? By "hand cipher", I mean a symmetric cipher for which encryption and decryption can can both be performed with a pencil on graph paper, consuming about 10-20 seconds per character by a proficient user. Additional simple tools, e.g. a deck of cards or a multiplication table, may be used to expedite the process. No mathematical proficiency is required other than mental addition, subtraction, and maybe multiplication.  Basically, it should be a cipher that someone of average mathematical abilities can master, and it should require no digital technology or cryptographic tools that cannot be constructed out of paper.  For example, four-square in CBC mode seems secure to me because CBC is a well established mode of operation and four-square seems to be a good block cipher as it accommodates large keys and seems to produce a random-looking output. However, the fact that four-square in CBC was never widely adopted before digital encryption became a consumer technology leads me to believe that someone broke the cipher and thus discouraged people from using it.  So is there any hand cipher that the best supercomputers would take years to cryptanalyze? If not, then for which hand cipher is the best known attack the most complex? How accurate is approximating the Earth as a sphere? What level of error do I encounter when approximating the earth as a sphere? Specifically, when dealing with the location of points and, for example, the great circle distances between them.  Are there any studies on the average and worst case error compared to an ellipsoid? I'm wondering how much accuracy I'd be sacrificing if I go with a sphere for the sake of easier calculations.  My particular scenario involves directly mapping WGS84 coordinates as if they were coordinates on a perfect sphere (with the  defined by the IUGG) without any transformation. I need to periodically run a command that ensures that some text files are kept in Linux mode. Unfortunately dos2unix always modifies the file, which would mess file's and folder's timestamps and cause unnecessary writes.   The script I write is in Bash, so  I'd prefer answers based on Bash. Find the slope of tangent line to the curve at the point $(1, \pi/2)$  the equation is  $$\sin(xy) = x$$  The right answer was = Slope is infinite   My answer was taking the derivative and I end up in this equation   $$ (1-y\cos(xy))/ x\cos(xy)  $$  I substitute with the points and the calculator showed an error, Does the error means infinite ?