Why would the Sorting Hat consider Slytherin as an option for Harry?
Why exactly did the Sorting Hat originally want to put Harry in Slytherin?
Is the humanoid appearance of most alien species in the Star Trek universe ever canonically addressed? The vast majority of intelligent species in the Star Trek universe are bipedal, humanoid creatures.  From the lot I've seen of TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, and the movies, it seems that this coincidence goes largely unquestioned.  Metaknowledge grants that it is much easier to have human actors portray human-like beings, and so this was probably done due to budgetary/technological limitations.  However, I'm wondering if an in-universe reason for this was ever given or explored? Is there a more accurate way to create a Javascript timer than setTimeout? Seeking Symbology for Interactive Mapping? When a user clicks on a map what should they expect to see?   I would say a symbol for where they clicked.  A pushpin seems to be the most accepted icon for generic data. Google has pushed the upside down tear drop.   What are other ideas/options and is there a place for finding professional gis oriented icon packs?  I ended up creating this,     This just popped up from the guys at map box. Clean I want to know how to get the X and Y position of HTML elements such as img and div in JavaScript relative to the browser window. Stop the Ubuntu updater from nagging about Firefox English Language pack even after uninstalling Firefox I have run sudo apt purge firefox, and I have gone through all of the /.config files, etc., and Software Updater is still asking me daily if I want to install the &quot;English Language Pack for Firefox&quot;. I don't have Firefox installed. How can I stop the updater from asking to update something on a program that doesn't exist? Output of dpkg -l | grep firefox: ii  firefox-locale-en                          88.0+build2-0ubuntu0.18.04.2        amd64        English language pack for Firefox Situation: when a user self-marks their post as a duplicate, it shows as closed by "community" rather than the original poster.  Problems: this is not clear at all to most users of SE what has happened. It looks like the question was "mod closed" as a duplicate against the asker's wishes.    Suggestion: instead of the community user "closing" the post, have the final close user be the asker (or make it "Community &amp; Asker"). This will help clear up confusion and streamline the process for understanding what happens. Why doesn't the frequency of light change during refraction? I keep having to re-install Ubuntu after trying advice.  This is very frustrating.  All I want is to boot to a Linux command prompt.  Please help! A question about eigenvalues of $5\times5$ matrix How do I make the Messages that are sent to me stop going to my Mac? every planar graph can be expressed as a union of five edge-disjoint forests How can I prove that every planar graph can be expressed as a union of (maximum) five edge-disjoint forests?  Only thing I can think about is going somehow like the $5$ color theorem but I get stuck in the middle. Or with induction, but still something doesn't fit. Can you help? Give users a way to see their "Positive Question Record" score There's a new popup helping you with searching, but one of the hints is wrong:    Searching for  will return answers as well as questions, and it's not the number of (up/down)votes which counts, it's the score. Better would be "posts with a score of 3 or higher" or "questions and answers with a score of 3 or higher". Why are we in love "with" someone? I have a Nexus 7 (2013) and a Moto X (2014) running Lollipop. On both of these, if I get a heads-up notification (i.e., those that show up on top of the screen when the device is unlocked) and swipe down on it with 2 fingers, it 'breaks' further heads-up notifications:   I can't tap on them to open the responsible app For, e.g., an incoming phone call with 'answer' and 'dismiss' buttons, tapping the buttons does nothing. I can't answer phone calls anymore!   I can still swipe to the side to dismiss the notifications, and they still disappear on their own after a few seconds. I haven't been able to find a way to get the correct behavior back aside from a restart.  Yeah, the obvious workaround is to not two-finger swipe on them, but it's second nature as that same gesture expands notifications in other contexts.  I'm guessing the problem is generic, but I've triggered it on Hangouts and Phone notifications.  Do others experience the same thing? Any known 'fixes' aside from restarting? I have a cryptography workshop question I'm having trouble with as follows;  Person A creates a cipher $E_k(m)$ which produces a ciphertext from message $m$ using key $k$. The function inside $E$ is kept secret but the length of $E_k(m)$ is known.  Person B recommends "increasing" security of the cipher by instead doing :   $(E_k(m) \oplus m)\ ||\ (E_k(m) \oplus 1111...11)$      Does this in fact increase security of the cipher or increase new problems.  My thinking is, depending on the function within $E$, xoring the output of the cipher with the plaintext message $m$ could expose the key $k$, meaning the extra complexity is for nothing. Am I on the right track, or am I missing something?  I have tried searching for examples of similar schemes and found nothing (which probably means it's not a good scheme) but I need to justify my answer.   Any steers in the right direction would be greatly appreciated, I'm more than happy to do the research myself just unsure what specifically to look for.   Unfortunately the above context is all I have been provided for this question. How do I fix this "E: Type '*' is not known on line * in source list ..." update error? Every once in a while I see users having issues to update due to errors like this:  E:Type 'ain' is not known on line 1 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/some-ppa.list'   with varying types/line numbers/source list files (often after removing a PPA).  How can such an error be fixed? In Peter Jackson's film The Fellowship of the Ring, when the Council of Elrond takes place it shows a total of 22 members:    We all know the names of the ones who were part of the Fellowship, but I want to know who are the rest of the people in the council. Who are the elves that came with Legolas? The men next to the dwarves? The three old men sitting next to Boromir? Or the two elves next to Aragorn?  Starting from left to right:   Frodo Gandalf Elf Elf Legolas Elf Old Man Old Man Dwalin Gloin Gimli Nori Old Man Boromir Old Man Old Man Elf Elf Aragorn Elladan Elrond Elrohir Why Session object destruction failed How to trigger a check for updates in Firefox programatically or from a command line? Is there a command line switch for firefox.exe or an "about:" URL that will either force an update check or at least display the Help/About dialog, which checks for updates and tells if you're running the latest version?    One site claimed that the "about:" URL was the same as menu Help -> About, but it's not.  I built a program to automate the updating of various programs on my machine, and most programs have command line tools for checking for updates. Windows update has wuauclt.exe, Java has jucheck.exe. For some applications, I can even automate the interface, but it's difficult in Firefox, because the main window title is unpredictable (it depends on which web page is active), and all Firefox windows seem to use the exact same window class name.