After my , I've now got a new suggestion: down votes should not have any side effect in meta.  By side effects, I mean something like banning me from asking questions due to too many down votes, which I am experiencing right now:     states that I am permanently banned unless I improve my standing by posting some quality answers.  Seriously, I'm new to the site, and thus I'm not capable of posting quality answers on Meta.  So my only refuge was to create a new account. I think this check for previously downvoted posts should be disabled on Meta.
appears to have been question banned because of two unpopular Meta suggestions. (He says so in )  Look at the two contributions that appear to have gotten him banned. Like those of many others, they may not be of perfect quality, but they are not actively harmful to the site, either. As it stands, you can get question blocked on Meta simply for asking questions that aren't popular with the Meta crowd.  Why does the team insist on keeping the question ban active on Meta?  Why can't real problem users be dealt with through manual moderator action? Don't tell me it's a problem of scale; as far as I can see, actually toxic users are very rare on Meta.  People will frequently complain that Meta actively discourages the expression of unpopular viewpoints and suggestions. With the threat of question bans in place, I find those complaints difficult to refute. I hate that.
How to make nautilus use file-roller in 17.10 like in 17.04? In Ubuntu 17.10 ubuntu upgraded Nautilus (File Browser) to version 3.26.0. New nautilus is not using file-roller anymore, it has  to an integrated compression mechanism.     This makes it complicated to create encrypted archives and/or different types compression archives that file-roller does provide.  How to make nautilus use file-roller as before?  Related question: Digonalizable Polynomial Matrix For any polynomial $p(x) = a_0 + a_1x + · · · + a^kx^k$ and any square matrix A, $p(A)$ is defined as $p(A) = a_0I + a_1A + · · · + a_kA^k$. Show that if v is any eigenvector of A and $χ_A(x)$ is the characteristic polynomial of A, then $χ_A(A)v = 0$, Deduce that if A is diagonalizable then $χ_A(A)$ is the zero matrix.  I got that $p(\lambda)$ is the eigenvalue of $p(A)$ and if A is diagonalizable then $χ_A(x)$ is the zero matrix since p(A) is similar to its diagonal matrix p(D)  $$p(D) = a_nD_n + · · · + a_1D + a_0I$$  =  $\begin{matrix} p(\lambda_1) &amp;0&amp;...&amp;0\\0&amp; p(\lambda_2)&amp;...&amp; 0 \\ ...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...\\0&amp;0&amp;... &amp; p(\lambda_n) \end{matrix}$ Programmatically obtain the phone number of the Android phone I have a query pattern that must be very common, but I don't know how to write an efficient query for it.  I want to look up the rows of a table that correspond to "the most recent date not after" the rows of another table.  I have a table, inventory say, which represents the inventory I hold on a certain day.  date       | good | quantity ------------------------------ 2013-08-09 | egg  | 5 2013-08-09 | pear | 7 2013-08-02 | egg  | 1 2013-08-02 | pear | 2   and a table, "price" say, which holds the price of a good on a given day  date       | good | price -------------------------- 2013-08-07 | egg  | 120 2013-08-06 | pear | 200 2013-08-01 | egg  | 110 2013-07-30 | pear | 220   How can I efficiently get the "most recent" price for each row of the inventory table, i.e.  date       | pricing date | good | quantity | price ---------------------------------------------------- 2013-08-09 | 2013-08-07   | egg  | 5        | 120 2013-08-09 | 2013-08-06   | pear | 7        | 200 2013-08-02 | 2013-08-01   | egg  | 1        | 110 2013-08-02 | 2013-07-30   | pear | 2        | 220   I know one way of doing this:  select inventory.date, max(price.date) as pricing_date, good from inventory, price where inventory.date &gt;= price.date and inventory.good = price.good group by inventory.date, good   and then join this query again to inventory. For large tables even doing the first query (without joining again to inventory) is very slow.  However, the same problem is quickly solved if I simply use my programming language to issue one max(price.date) ... where price.date &lt;= date_of_interest ... order by price.date desc limit 1 query for each date_of_interest from the inventory table, so I know there is no computational impediment.  I would, however, prefer to solve the whole problem with a single SQL query, because it would allow me to do further SQL processing on the result of the query.  Is there a standard way to do this efficiently? It feels like it must come up often and that there should be a way to write a fast query for it.  I'm using Postgres, but an SQL-generic answer would be appreciated. This is what I have come up with so far, but I am rather lost at lines 3-4...  $$\begin{align} (a,b)\in A\times (B\setminus C)\iff&amp; a\in A \land b\in (B\setminus C)\\ \iff&amp; a\in A \land (b\in B \land \lnot(b\in C))\\ \iff&amp; (a\in A \land b\in B) \land (a\in A \land b\notin C)\\ \iff&amp; (a\in A \land b\in B)\setminus (a\in A \land b\in C)\\ \iff&amp; (a,b)\in (A\times B)\setminus ((a,b)\in A\times C)\\ \iff&amp; (a,b)\in (A\times B)\setminus (A\times C) \end{align}$$ I am on a MacBook Pro 13 running latest Sierra. I have an external Seagate solid state hard drive that was working and out of the blue stopped working. The only thing on it was my Adobe Lightroom images/videos. Not the LR DB files. I'm sure you have all heard this woe before, so I won't dwell on that. And yes, I back up to the cloud. AWS S3 specifically. Though I am traveling South East Asia for the last year, and staying in cheap hostels. So good internet is hard to come by sometimes. I can't back it up after every export. While most of it is backed up, there is some that is not.  Moving on. The symptoms seems to change every time I plug it in. The first sign was it ejected on it's own. I plugged it in again, and it wouldn't mount. Disk Utility recognized it, so did the command line diskutil list but it wouldn't mount. I rebooted and it worked for a second. Then I could only get to it from the command line. Then trying to frantically back up to my local what was not backed up to the cloud, it all failed. Basically just a cp -R [directory] [local-directory] command.  After some more frantic unplugging and re-plugging plus some command line manual mounts, I finally got it to where the Disk Utility would be able to run first aid on it. It failed. I don't recall the error. So I put it in a freezer. After a few hours I tried again. It is not any better. It still will not mount. Now Disk Utility sees it, but with no partition. I can't even give me information about how much space is used on it.  I have also tried it from a Windows machine. It did not mount. I have tried other cables. No success. As well as tried my other USB port. I also have another working external hard drive exactly like the one giving me issues. It works on all cables and USB ports.  I do have Docker running with a Ubuntu container, I'm trying to think of a way to see if I can try to get to the USB from there. I also have a USB that I have thought about running a live Ubuntu on there to see if I can mount and retrieve the data or fix the HDD that way. But if it will not mount, I doubt these will work.  Can anyone else think of any other tricks I can try myself to see if I can repair this or at least retrieve the data without paying for a service or software? If not, those suggestions are also welcome.  Update   I made the mistake in original post that it was a Solid State Drive. This is my mistake, it is actually a spinning disk hard drive. I bought them long ago and have been traveling with them for so long I just forgot. Question is updated to reflect this. Now diskutil list does not show it at all. The Disk Utility app also does not see it. Based on suggestion from @Allen I seeked out the USB to SATA cable. I did not quite find it, as my options are extremely limited where I am at. Though a local expat on a facebook group was able to help me with a empty 2.5 casing that I was able to extract the drive from original casing and put it in his blank case. It now mounts. Though it has the "click of death" sound to it. And data is not really reachable. While I can ls the directories and Adobe Lightroom does not have the exclamation mark when it can not reach the actual external files. Right clicking on the images and clicking on "Show in Finder" or any other variation of trying to get to the files through Finder or terminal, I have no success. It usually hangs and I get the spinning wheel. Since Adobe Lightroom imports these images into directories named by date, I am going to send the drive off to a data recovery service and ask to recover just unbacked up directories i.e. dates. Next time I will make harder efforts to backup and probably get an actual SSD.   I think this can be closed, due to my low reputation points I can not close this myself. Whenever I startup from the LinuxLive USB, and try to install Ubuntu 12.04, it only gives me two options instead of the usual 3 or 4. My options are "Replace Windows 7 with Ubuntu" and "Something Else". Whenever I go into "Something else", it looks extremely confusing. How do I install it side-by-side while using the "Something else" section? These are my partitions.   /dev/sda /dev/sda1 ntfs (104Mb, System Required Partition) /dev/sda2 ntfs (1000097Mb, Windows 7 Partition)   Or should I try reinstalling my installer on a CD rather than USB and maybe then it will have the "Install alongside" function? Inspired by this Hagon Von Eitzen's answer( ) I started investigating how I could express natural numbers as differences of squares. Using the method explained in the solution, I investigated natural numbers up to $60$ manually. I observed the following:  There is no way to express numbers of the form $4k+2$ as a difference of two squares.  2.There is one and only one way to express prime numbers (except $2$) as a difference of two squares.  The smallest number that can be expressed as a difference of two squares in two different ways is $15$ and the smallest number that can be expressed as a difference of two squares in three different ways is $45$.  As, $15= 8^2-7^2=4^2-1^2$. $45=23^2-22^2=9^2-6^2=7^2-2^2$. I could prove point $2$ easily but could not prove point $1$. Also I am interested in knowing how I could find the smallest natural number that could be expressed as a difference of two squares in four different ways without manual calculation. Proof relation between Levi-Civita symbol and Kronecker deltas in Group Theory In order to prove the following identity: $$\sum_{k}\epsilon_{ijk}\epsilon_{lmk}=\delta_{il}\delta_{jm}-\delta_{im}\delta_{jl}$$ Instead of checking this by brute force, Landau writes thr product of Levi-Civita symbols as: $$\epsilon_{ijk}\epsilon_{lmn}=\det\left|    \begin{array}{cccc}       \delta_{il}   &amp; \delta_{im}  &amp; \delta_{in}   \\       \delta_{jl}   &amp; \delta_{jm}  &amp; \delta_{jn}   \\       \delta_{kl}   &amp; \delta_{km}  &amp; \delta_{kn}       \end{array} \right| $$  The proof that the equalty holds is quite straightforward if you consider what values the indices can take. But I've been told that there's a much more profound and elegant demonstration based on the representation of the symmetric group.  Does anybody know this approach based on group theory? Non constant analytic function from $\{z\in\mathbb{C}:z\neq 0\}$ to $\{z\in\mathbb{C}:|z|>1\}.$ I am monitoring the number of pages indexed by Googlebot for one of my websites .  I noticed that since last week, the number of pages has dropped by about 60 or so. Now to be fair, I have not added that much over the last week. (Actually I don't think I added any new content.) But at the very least, I would have thought that the number of indexed pages would be static (if I was not adding anything new.)  I don't understand why the numbers have dropped.  Does anyone have an official explanation for this?. I have checked the Google Webmaster Tools, and have not come across anything that addresses this issue directly. How to recursively download a folder via FTP on Linux I'm trying to ftp a folder using the command line ftp client, but so far I've only been able to use 'get' to get individual files. How long can you store used cooking oil How long can you store used cooking oil then re-use it? I deep fried a turkey one year ago and have had it refrigerated since. Time ordering operator if commutator is $c$-number function Currently my spouse and I rent a small apartment.  Eventually we'd like to expand the family, and a one bedroom rental won't cut it forever - even if we continue renting we'll be expanding to a detached single family home eventually.  In our area the rent ratios work out to about 16, which is under the cut for buying being a better financial decision over the long haul - i. e. I don't think it'd be economically an awful decision to buy (NYT calculator shows 10 years at the current prices and rents for buying to make sense).  I've also read enough of the rental propagandists to know that home ownership isn't the best way to grow my money.  My reasons for wanting to own are the intangibles: knowing we aren't going to have to move due to a landlord, being able to modify the place to our own liking, and that intangible sense of "this is mine" (even when it's the bank's for a while).  The things we do have:   Around (at or over) a 30% down payment depending on purchase price, and we won't be under 30% Closing costs separate from that fund Around 1% of the home value in reserve for emergency repairs separate from those funds A six month emergency fund separate A fund to replace an ailing car that will probably die before we can save up after this expense   At some point in the year or so after the purchase we plan to have enough saved up to pay down the principal and change our monthly payment somewhat, but not significantly.  So it seems like we've got the financial ducks in a row.  We can continue to fully fund our retirement accounts and make the monthly payments (PITI).  The only hesitation we have is that we can't make our payments comfortably on one income alone - it'd be over 30% of one income to do so, by just a bit.  So neither of us can completely stop working, although the second income does not need to be large.  Are we missing any important financial data about this step?  Should we be concerned about job loss (even though no signs of it are imminent for either of us)? Can a sum of a finite number of square roots of integers be an integer? If yes can a sum of two square roots of integers be an integer?  The square roots need to be irrational. Named Credentials - Merge Fields not Resolving How do I emphasize role-playing during combat? Right now, the group that I GM for is very, very tactical-combat focused. To some extent, we may as well be playing a dungeon crawl board game for all the role-play we manage.  Now, in and of itself that's not bad, and I enjoy progressing the story that we're telling, but I would like more "theatre of the mind" than we're achieving right now.  The one bit of advice that I always seem to come across is to have the villains and other NPCs in the fight invite role-play by taunting and otherwise engaging in banter with the PCs, but unfortunately I've tried and failed at that - largely because quick witted banter is not my forte, and so it comes across as strained and less than engaging.  What I would like are other play-proven tactics that I as a GM can employ to lead my players towards more role-play during combat, without taking them away from their (and my) roll-play comfort zone. Proving $\gcd \left(\frac{a}{\gcd (a,b)},\frac{b}{\gcd (a,b)}\right)=1$ How would you go about proving that $$\gcd \left(\frac{a}{\gcd (a,b)},\frac{b}{\gcd (a,b)}\right)=1$$  for any two integers $a$ and $b$?  Intuitively it is true because when you divide $a$ and $b$ by $\gcd(a,b)$ you cancel out any common factors between them resulting in them becoming coprime. However, how would you prove this rigorously and mathematically? My players have been scheming with rapid entry tactics for the megadungeon I've recently started running. Unfortunately, the monsters are aware of the adventurers, and this has lead to a weird question of priority. Given the following situation (which I'm pretty sure is going to happen next session in some form or another) what happens?     Alice the adventurer readies an action; if her teammate Carlos opens   the door, she's going to throw the alchemists fire through the door,   which should do enough damage to kill any goblins hiding there.      Meanwhile, on the other side of the door, Bob the goblin is lying in   wait. He readies an action; if the door opens, he's going to hit the   switch to open the trapdoor in the next room, which should drop any    pesky adventurers into a pit with spikes at the bottom.      Carlos opens the door.   I know what happens when , but what happens when multiple readied actions get triggered at the same time? My guess would be an opposed reflex save or initiative check of some kind to see who goes first, but that's entirely just intuition speaking. The rulebook doesn't seem to speak to the issue.