What should you do if you think an asker has evil intent?
Dealing with questions of nefarious intent
my 4 week old daughter will not stop crying. We've tried everything from sucking, both on pacifiers and fingers to breastfeeding, white noise, movement, diaper is clean she doesn't seem to have a fever.   We've tried everything we can read about and think of.  We are both a little bit ill, the common cold and the baby may have gotten it and be upset but we are just at the end of our nerves when nothing helps our poor little one!   Does anyone know anything we can do to help? Why MonadPlus and not Monad + Monoid? How do I check the integrity of a storage medium (hard disk or flash drive)? I've run across (personally or by proxy) a bunch of storage media that exhibited physical problems during their life. Hard disks, solid state drives and other flash storage media all fail after some time. The situation is worse with USB flash drives and flash cards because of the large amount of suppliers with inferior flash cell and flash controller quality.  How can I reliably detect if a storage drive suffers from physical damage?  Note that this question isn't about file system integrity (which can be checked with ). I might end up teaching philosophy in Finnish lukio/gymnasium. I will not get an opportunity to practice teaching it - I do get to practice teaching mathematics a fair deal, though. (The situation is somewhat unfortunate.) I have taken subject studies in philosophy at university. They amount to around 60 credits (ECTS).  Suppose I give the students an exam, which asks them to write an essay or two. After that my task is to grade the exams in a fair way and comment them in such a way that the students can learn from the feedback.  -  Suppose the task was to write an essay on the problem of universals - nominalism and realism, say. Let us say 6 points is the perfect score for this task.  I would expect the students to define nominalism and realism (2 points, maybe?) and explain the problem (2 points). Remaining two points for taking some stance and arguing for it - realism is more reasonable because so and so. Partial credits for demonstrating only partial understanding.  -  Am I missing some important aspects of philosophical thinking? Should I emphasize the different parts of an answer in a different way? I suspect my perspective is influenced by fairly extensive mathematics education - is there something particular I should watch out for? Scale Insetted Characters to Plot Is there a notification mechanism for when a dependency property has changed? I was about to reconfigure some of my code to use the newer Schema.describeSObjects(types) method that I had heard was faster than using a globalDescribe.   I made some code to quickly check this and I was dismayed to find that the newer technique is not only not faster, it's about twice as slow as using a global describe. Here's the code I used :  New DescribeSObjects() method  //each block was run separately for timing purposes String obj = 'Account'; String[] types = new String[]{obj}; System.debug('START DESCRIBE SOBJECTS');  for (Integer i = 0; i &lt; 50; i++) {   List&lt;Schema.DescribeSobjectResult&gt; results = Schema.describeSObjects(types);  } System.debug('FINISH DESCRIBE SOBJECTS');   Old getGlobalDescribe() method  String obj1 = 'Account'; System.debug('START DESCRIBE GLOBAL');  for (Integer i = 0; i &lt; 50; i++) {    Map&lt;String,Schema.SObjectType&gt; gd = Schema.getGlobalDescribe();    Schema.SObjectType sobjType = gd.get(obj1);    Schema.DescribeSObjectResult describeResult = sobjType.getDescribe();  } System.debug('FINISH DESCRIBE GLOBAL');   Over 5 runs of each, the getGlobalDescribe() method took an average of 337ms for 50 describes and the describeSObjects() method took and average of 658ms. This is basically twice as long.  Does anyone have any insight as to why this would be? Any improvements that will significantly improve the accuracy of the resulting data?  As this data stands, I'm sticking with the old method.  One final note: the old technique uses 3 times a much heap (67kb vs 27kb) I need help with this:  If a is an element of $\mathbb Z_n$ and $\gcd(a,n) &gt; 1$ , then a is not invertible.   First you show that if $a$ is an element of $\mathbb Z_n$ and $\gcd(a,n)&gt;1$, then there  is an element $b$ of $\mathbb Z_n$ and ($b$ is not equal to the zero element) from which $ab = 0$.   The second part I cant get. i.e. show if $b$ is not the zero element  and $ab=0$ then $a$ is not invertible. I would like to remove selected commit log entries from a linear commit tree, so that the entries do not show in the commit log.  My commit tree looks something like:  R--A--B--C--D--E--HEAD   I would like to remove the B and C entries so that they do not show in the commit log, but changes from A to D should be preserved. Maybe by introducing a single commit, so that B and C become BC and the tree looks like.  R--A--BC--D--E--HEAD   Or, ideally, after A comes D directly. D' representing changes from A to B, B to C and C to D.  R--A--D'--E--HEAD   Is this possible? if yes, how?  This is a fairly new project so has no branches as of now, hence no merges as well. What is the formula for percent of frame filled at a specific distance and focal length? I am thinking about buying a new lens specifically to take photos of distant targets (birds, bears, etc). I currently own the Canon 70-300 IS USM, which is a nice lens, but I find that if I want to take a photo of anything further away than about 10 meters, the target does not fill a large amount of the frame (meaning I have to significantly crop in post production).  I am currently looking at the Canon prime 400mm, however I would like to determine at what distance an object will fill a reasonable proportion of the frame.  Is there a formula or rule of thumb I can apply that will help me in this situation? I realise the size of the target I am shooting will play a role here, so if we need to make an assumption about the size of the target please let me know. A (probably trivial) induction problem: $\sum_2^nk^{-2}\lt1$ How does password salt help against a rainbow table attack? I'm having some trouble understanding the purpose of a salt to a password.  It's my understanding that the primary use is to hamper a rainbow table attack.  However, the methods I've seen to implement this don't seem to really make the problem harder.  I've seen many tutorials suggesting that the salt be used as the following:  $hash =  md5($salt.$password)   The reasoning being that the hash now maps not to the original password, but a combination of the password and the salt.  But say $salt=foo and $password=bar and $hash=3858f62230ac3c915f300c664312c63f.  Now somebody with a rainbow table could reverse the hash and come up with the input "foobar".  They could then try all combinations of passwords (f, fo, foo, ... oobar, obar, bar, ar, ar).  It might take a few more milliseconds to get the password, but not much else.  The other use I've seen is on my linux system.  In the /etc/shadow the hashed passwords are actually stored with the salt.  For example, a salt of "foo" and password of "bar" would hash to this: $1$foo$te5SBM.7C25fFDu6bIRbX1.  If a hacker somehow were able to get his hands on this file, I don't see what purpose the salt serves, since the reverse hash of te5SBM.7C25fFDu6bIRbX is known to contain "foo".  Thanks for any light anybody can shed on this.  EDIT:  Thanks for the help.  To summarize what I understand, the salt makes the hashed password more complex, thus making it much less likely to exist in a precomputed rainbow table.  What I misunderstood before was that I was assuming a rainbow table existed for ALL hashes. Lost credit card replaced with new card and new numbers. Credit score affected? I recently left my credit card at a bar so I reported it as lost to my bank, and my bank said I will get a replacement within a few days. For what it's worth, I picked my card up from the bar a few days later and made sure to cut it up.  The new credit card has arrived and has new numbers. Will this negatively affect my credit score?  VISA, Chase Bank, USA. Free UML drawing library for .NET I'm looking for a high current DC switch (able to switch something like 5V@30A) and I've encountered several DPDT that might do what I need, however they are only rated for AC applications (3A@250VAC or 6A@125VAC). Are these rating convertible to DC? or is that something that only the facturarer would know? Switching baselayers as user zooms in to map in OpenLayers? I remember that a couple of years ago a friend showed me and some other people the following expression:  $$\lim_{n\to \infty}\frac{1^n+2^n+\cdots+(n-1)^n}{n^n}.$$  As shown below, I can prove that this limit exists by the monotone convergence theorem. I also remember that my friend gave a very dubious "proof" that the value of the limit is $\frac{1}{e-1}$. I cannot remember the details of the proof, but I am fairly certain that it made the common error of treating $n$ as a variable in some places at some times and as a constant in other places at other times. Nevertheless, numerical analysis suggests that the value my friend gave was correct, even if his methods were flawed. My question is then:  What is the value of this limit and how do we prove it rigorously?  (Also, for bonus points, What might my friend's original proof have been and what exactly was his error, if any?)  I give my convergence proof below in two parts. In both parts, I define the sequence $a_n$ by $a_n=\frac{1^n+2^n+\cdots+(n-1)^n}{n^n}$ for all integers $n\ge 2$. First, I prove that $a_n$ is bounded above by $1$. Second, I prove that $a_n$ is increasing.   (1) The sequence $a_n$ satisfies $a_n&lt;1$ for all $n\ge 2$.  Note that $a_n&lt;1$ is equivalent to $1^n+2^n+\cdots+(n-1)^n&lt;n^n$. I prove this second statement by induction. Observe that $1^2=1&lt;4=2^2$. Now suppose that $1^n+2^n+\cdots+(n-1)^n&lt;n^n$ for some integer $n\ge 2$. Then  $$1^{n+1}+2^{n+1}+\cdots+(n-1)^{n+1}+n^{n+1}\le(n-1)(1^n+2^n+\cdots+(n-1)^n)+n^{n+1}&lt;(n-1)n^n+n^{n+1}&lt;(n+1)n^n+n^{n+1}\le n^{n+1}+(n+1)n^n+\binom{n+1}{2}n^{n-1}+\cdots+1=(n+1)^{n+1}.$$  (2) The sequence $a_n$ is increasing for all $n\ge 2$.  We must first prove the following preliminary proposition. (I'm not sure if "lemma" is appropriate for this.)  (2a) For all integers $n\ge 2$ and $2\le k\le n$, $\left(\frac{k-1}{k}\right)^n\le\left(\frac{k}{k+1}\right)^{n+1}$.  We observe that $k^2-1\le kn$, so upon division by $k(k^2-1)$, we get $\frac{1}{k}\le\frac{n}{k^2-1}$. By , we may find:  $$\frac{k+1}{k}\le 1+\frac{n}{k^2-1}\le\left(1+\frac{1}{k^2-1}\right)^n=\left(\frac{k^2}{k^2-1}\right)^n.$$  A little multiplication and we arrive at $\left(\frac{k-1}{k}\right)^n\le\left(\frac{k}{k+1}\right)^{n+1}$.  We may now first apply this to see that $\left(\frac{n-1}{n}\right)^n\le\left(\frac{n}{n+1}\right)^{n+1}$. Then we suppose that for some integer $2\le k\le n$, we have $\left(\frac{k}{n}\right)^n\le\left(\frac{k+1}{n+1}\right)^{n+1}$. Then:  $$\left(\frac{k-1}{n}\right)^n=\left(\frac{k}{n}\right)^n\left(\frac{k-1}{k}\right)^n\le\left(\frac{k+1}{n+1}\right)^{n+1}\left(\frac{k}{k+1}\right)^{n+1}=\left(\frac{k}{n+1}\right)^{n+1}.$$  By backwards (finite) induction from $n$, we have that $\left(\frac{k}{n}\right)^n\le\left(\frac{k+1}{n+1}\right)^{n+1}$ for all integers $1\le k\le n$, so:  $$a_n=\left(\frac{1}{n}\right)^n+\left(\frac{2}{n}\right)^n+\cdots+\left(\frac{n-1}{n}\right)^n\le\left(\frac{2}{n+1}\right)^{n+1}+\left(\frac{3}{n+1}\right)^{n+1}+\cdots+\left(\frac{n}{n+1}\right)^{n+1}&lt;\left(\frac{1}{n+1}\right)^{n+1}+\left(\frac{2}{n+1}\right)^{n+1}+\left(\frac{3}{n+1}\right)^{n+1}+\cdots+\left(\frac{n}{n+1}\right)^{n+1}=a_{n+1}.$$  (In fact, this proves that $a_n$ is strictly increasing.) By the monotone convergence theorem, $a_n$ converges.  I should note that I am not especially well-practiced in proving these sorts of inequalities, so I may have given a significantly more complicated proof than necessary. If this is the case, feel free to explain in a comment or in your answer. I'd love to get a better grip on these inequalities in addition to finding out what the limit is.  Thanks! I have just updated (through Software Update) to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS from 15.10. There are random instances of screen flickering throughout usage. After noticing this issue, I installed Compiz Config Settings Manager, selecting Force fulls screen redraws (buffer swap) on repaint, which did nothing.   Is there any way this could be related to compiz settings or is this another issue?    EDIT: not fixed after clean install, upgrade to kernel 4.5.2, however screen flickering is reduced, it is every now and then (10 minutes apart). I will see if upgrading to kernel 4.6.0-994-generic will fix this.     EDIT: fixed as of kernel 4.6.2 generic,  currently running 4.7.2 without any issues. Injective functions also surjective? Is it true that for each set $M$ a given injective function $f: M \rightarrow M$ is surjective, too?  Can someone explain why it is true or not and give an example? Which close reason should I use for questions that do not demonstrate research effort? I regularily encounter questions on StackOverflow which are asked only because of the sole fact that the poster haven't made the effort to google for and the docs of a particular function/class/framework/whatever. My question is, to which category of the five proposed one should I vote when I vote to close the question? Is it: off-topic, not constructive, not a real question, exact dupe or too localized? I tend to be all for 'not a real question' - am I quite right?