What happens if a Muggle-born wizard/witch receives a Hogwarts acceptance letter but their family is very poor and doesn't have money to buy the school things on the shopping list? Would Hogwarts give them some kind of financial help?
We know that you can't transfigure food, so you have to grow it or buy it. Ditto money.  I'm sure that aside from some medicinal plants Herbology Professor had there were no farmlands at Hogwarts. So they must have bought food (as well as potions ingredients for Snape etc...). And they needed to pay the teacher salaries.  Where did all that money come from according to canon?  Ministry funding?  Tuition?  Patent money on Dumbledore's inventions?  Philanthropic donations by Malfoys and co?  Other?
Solution af a system of 2 quadratic equations I have a system of two quadratic equations with unknowns $x$ and $y$:  $$a_{1 1} x y + a_{1 2} x^2 + a_{1 3} y^2 + a_{1 4} x + a_{1 5} y + a_{1 6} = 0,\\ a_{2 1} x y + a_{2 2} x^2 + a_{2 3} y^2 + a_{2 4} x + a_{2 5} y + a_{2 6} = 0,$$  where $a_{i j}$ are arbitrary scalars.  Is there an algebraic solution of the above system? Do you use "a" or "an" before acronyms / initialisms? 99% of the time, I'm clear on when I should use "a" versus "an." There's one case, though, where people &amp; references I respect disagree.  Which of the following would you precede with "a" or "an," and why?   FAQ FUBAR SCUBA   [Note: I've read the questions  and , but the rules given there don't necessarily apply here.]    [Edited to add]  Here's a shorter (and hopefully clearer) version of the question…  In written English, which is correct (and why): "a FAQ" or "an FAQ"?  Some references with differing opinions:   an: the  and  a: the Microsoft Manual of Style for Tech Publications, 3e either: the  and Send urgent mail in Gmail Is it possible to set the "urgent" flag in Gmail for outgoing mail? I'd like to be able to flag time-sensitive emails as such. Does the intersection of two finite index subgroups have finite index? Cross-site AJAX requests I need to make an AJAX request from a website to a REST web service hosted in another domain.  Although this is works just fine in Internet Explorer, other browsers such as Mozilla and Google Chrome impose far stricter security restrictions, which prohibit cross-site AJAX requests.  The problem is that I have no control over the domain nor the web server where the site is hosted. This means that my REST web service must run somewhere else, and I can't put in place any redirection mechanism.  Here is the JavaScript code that makes the asynchronous call:  var serviceUrl = "http://myservicedomain"; var payload = "&lt;myRequest&gt;&lt;content&gt;Some content&lt;/content&gt;&lt;/myRequest&gt;"; var request = new XMLHttpRequest(); request.open("POST", serviceUrl, true); // &lt;-- This fails in Mozilla Firefox amongst other browsers request.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "text/xml"); request.send(payload);   How can I have this work in other browsers beside Internet Explorer? The various modern revolutions in physics, in psychology, in politics, even in literary style, have not escaped his intelligent notice, but they can scarcely be said to have influenced him deeply.    Could you please explain the following?  They can scarcely be said to have influenced him deeply.  Or, I can not understand such a structure like the following:  In contrast, prices set by a central planner are necessarily arbitrary, since there is no standard against which they can be said to be correct or incorrect. d'oh! Tenure and tenure denial rates by universities Is there a way or website to find the tenure and tenure denial rates by universities and departments? I heard from some faculty that the tenure rate at X university is Y%, so I wonder if there is a way to find the statistics for all universities. What's the best way to deal with hot/stuck pixels in long exposure night photographs? I discovered red/blue/white pixels on my night photographs tonight. Trying to confirm this, I took a black image with the lens on and indeed I saw a whole lot of them (I didn't count them but at least a good fifty on the whole picture).   I'm not exactly sure if they are hot pixels, stuck pixels or anything else.  I quickly gave a check to my last exported JPEG files (I get RAW out of the camera) and couldn't find anything. After a quick search, I've seen that Lightroom is caring about those pixels after RAW conversion.  I've read that, with Canon DSLRs, there is a software process that could take care of that directly on my camera. I don't know if I can use it without getting things even more messy.   My question is: Considering my crazy pixels are not visible on my pictures, should I get too emotional about them? My camera is under warranty but is it really worth it to return it to Canon? If it's only to receive it back 1 month later after Canon just used the very same menu to map out the pixels, it's a bit ridiculous. Could this be a sign that my camera has a bigger problem?  It seems related to shutter speed. When shooting a black image at 1/250s I get nothing. When shooting the same setup but 1s, I get a few of them. The more I increase the shutter speed, the more crazy pixels I get. If a Windows shop moves "everything" to the cloud, does it still need Active Directory? Taking a spin off of this question:  in a new direction for 2014.  Taking into account a basic Windows infrastructure:   domain controllers Exchange 2007/2010/2013 Sharepoint SQL File Servers / Print Servers AD Integrated DNS AD authenticated 3rd party devices (let's say 802.1X for networking and maybe some content-filtering, etc.) AD/LDAP authenticated "administrative" functions on IT apps/hardware/etc. perhaps some KMS stuff throw in a CA if you'd like home grown apps 3rd party in-house apps   Now, let's rip it all out and decide we are going to the cloud.  We've contracted to move Exchange/Sharepoint/File Services to Office 365.  SQL will now be hosted as well on  something like Azure.  We've gotten away from the need for AD-DNS and simply run everything via a simple Windows DNS server.  We still need 802.1X and would like SSO if possible to our various cloud apps.  Home grown and 3rd party in-house apps would likely stay, but have the ability to use internal user databases instead of AD authentication  The question is...do we really need Active Directory at all?  Or more to the point, AD on-premise or even hosted via Azure or similar (ADFS) or running ADDS on a hosted VM through Azure or similar.  Could/Should we look to something else like a 3rd party SSO option such as  or similar that can provide SSO functionality even if it is as simple as LastPass or similar for each user?  What kind of legitimate needs does AD fulfill if everything else in the cloud?  Could a MS-centric infrastructure get away with not having AD at all if they move everything that previously relied on AD to SaaS offerings that didn't rely on AD authentication? Why does the co-efficent of kinetic friction of a block on an inclined plane not change when you increase the angle of the plane? Number of Homomorphisms from $\Bbb{Z}_m$ to $\Bbb{Z}_n$ Mid-2017  started publishing monthly updates. This post will continue that effort into 2018. (.)  Updates are posted at the beginning of the month. They cover what was done last month, what is still in progress and new work that will be started in the current month.  Updates:      (CoC, nav, OpenID, responsive design, bugs, campaigns)  (CoC, comment flags, nav, OpenID)  (question wizard, nav, user survey, OpenID)  (tag watching, GDPR)  (responsive design, tags, teams)  (responsive design, OpenID, teams, sponsorship)  (responsive design, facebook auth, question lists, teams)  (newsletter, sign up, Documentation reputation, channels)  (top bar issues, hats, question template) I am trying to understand how to see the total size of my hard drive &amp; how much is left. It was recommended on various searches to use the command below   df -h Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on udev            7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev tmpfs           1.6G  9.6M  1.6G   1% /run /dev/sda1       219G   29G  180G  14% / tmpfs           7.8G   18M  7.8G   1% /dev/shm tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock tmpfs           7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup cgmfs           100K     0  100K   0% /run/cgmanager/fs tmpfs           1.6G   64K  1.6G   1% /run/user/1000   However I don't understand any of these directories. I mean what are they, are these all directories or partitions or what? And why do they appear under "mounted on"? How does that bit work. I assume the /dev/sda1 is my solid state drive? So now if I install applications, which one of these directories does my software get installed  into? I assume it just gets installs in the / directory (I haven't even got a clue what the / directory is). Can someone explain what the other directories are and what they are used for? Is there a way to have two copies of  app in Ubuntu each with a different account?  It seems copying the app in another folder does not work. How do I get a list of installed files from a package? Is there a system in place to prevent new users asking, answering and accepting answers to each others' off-topic questions? Normally new users are not allowed to up-vote until they gain a bit of reputation by receiving up-votes or accepts from the community of a site.  But this has a weak point that is being exploited:     A number of new users post, answer, and accept each others'    off-topic questions before we can close them (in less than 5 min).    Accepting each others' answers gains them enough reputation to    start up-vote each others' posts.   We are closing them and the moderators clean up afterwards but  this keeps happening over and over again and becoming frustrating  to the extent that I think a systematic solution might be required. Is there a system to prevent this kind of circumvention of  the reputation requirements using accepts by new users?  One possible solution might be to change the system so accepts from users who do not have enough reputation to up-vote  do not give any reputation (at least until the answer gets an up-vote). How should I structure my URLs for both SEO and localization? Attaching event handlers in Visual Basic .NET Do you think there is a big difference in for...in and for loops? What kind of "for" do you prefer to use and why?  Let's say we have an array of associative arrays:  var myArray = [{'key': 'value'}, {'key': 'value1'}];   So we can iterate:  for (var i = 0; i &lt; myArray.length; i++)   And:  for (var i in myArray)   I don't see a big difference. Are there any performance issues? Word to describe someone who goes to all the events in town!