Where can I post 'helpful ideas' that are not being asked directly, but are being asked indirectly?  I see some of the vigilant members being very vigilant with innocuous comments or requests for more information or generally helpful but not specific enough comments which get pinged for being 'off topic'.  As a classroom teacher of some 25 years I do notice when someone needs help but may not be articulate enough or skilled enough to know exactly what to ask or how to ask it. I find these sites unnecessarily exacting and frustrating and I'm sure others do, too.
I showed up here to write a perfectly normal rant about misaligned pixels, and there's a big fat checkbox cluttering up the "Ask" page:    WHAT THE EEEEK IS THIS NEW ABOMINATION?
I'm trying to install Windows 8 on my pc via Microsoft Virtual PC.  However I get this annoying, non-descriptive error:    I'm looking to find out if Microsoft Virtual PC supports Windows 8, and if so how do I solve this issue?  NOTE: I'm NOT trying to ask for alternatives to Virtual PC, but rather trying to figure out if it's possible, and if so how, to use Virtual PC. How to pronounce $\mathcal{E}$? Who are the users that work for Stack Overflow? GLR Test for 2 samples from exponential distributions Low Quality Posts you Have Already Flagged I just discovered that it is possible to get a post in the Low Quality Posts review queue that you have already flagged for closing, making reviewing that item impossible. Obviously, I don't want to 'Looks Good' something that I know should be closed, but at the same time I cannot 'Recommend Close' something I have already flagged leaving the only option being to skip the post.  Can the queue be changed so that it does not show posts which you have already flagged? No matter what I do I'm stuck with &gt;. How can I enter a new command?  $ chmod -R 600 `/ .ssh &gt;  &gt; chmod &gt; id_rsa.pub &gt;  &gt; sudo chmod 600 ~/ssh/id_rsa     I was trying to sync the master and slave by following a youtube video when I encountered the "permission denied" issue. While trying to resolve it I got stuck with &gt;. Now I can't enter any new command.   Please guide me. I'm a Linux/AWS newbie. How do I check if a number is a palindrome?  Any language. Any algorithm. (except the algorithm of making the number a string and then reversing the string). Is there a command for large middle delimiters consistent with \bigl and \bigr? After browsing through related threads, I am now of the understanding (please correct me if I am wrong) that the rule of thumb is to use the \bigl,\bigr pair with brackets, parentheses, etc. for operators like sums, products, and integrals, and \left,\right in all other cases.  I only recently found out about \middle , which has solved what had been a vexing problem for me: delimiters for function arguments (slashes, bars) not scaling properly. Leafing through my cheatsheet has not been of much help, so I wish to ask: is there an equivalent of \middle for \bigl and \bigr, or would the use of \middle along with that pair not be gauche? I process all my photos to black and white. Although I use a polariser where possible, I often find myself wanting to drop the luminance of the sky further which I do using a Black and White adjustment layer (in Photoshop). This usually results in a lighter halo following the line of the horizon, where the blues of the sky meet whatever the colour of the land is.  My current solution to this problem is to run a brush along this margin with a colour set to the same as the sky and the blend-mode set to Darken. This effectively paints in the lighter band with the sky colour while not laying down the colour on top of the darker horizon. Whilst this is effective, it is very time consuming.  Is there a better approach to dealing with these halos?  Here is a video that illustrated the Darken solution that I mention: Inheritance of static members in PHP In PHP, if a static attribute is defined in the parent class, it cannot be overridden in a child class. But I'm wondering if there's any way around this.   I'm trying to write a wrapper for someone else's (somewhat clunky) function. The function in question can be applied to lots of different data types but requires different flags and options for each. But 99% of the time, a default for each type would suffice.  It would be nice if this could be done with inheritance, without having to write new functions each time. For example:  class Foo {     public static $default = 'DEFAULT';      public static function doSomething ($param = FALSE ) {         $param = ($param === FALSE) ? self::$default : $param;         return $param;     } }  class Bar extends Foo {     public static $default = 'NEW DEFAULT FOR CHILD CLASS'; }  echo Foo::doSomething() . "\n";  // echoes 'DEFAULT'  echo Bar::doSomething() . "\n";  // echoes 'DEFAULT' not 'NEW DEFAULT FOR CHILD CLASS'  // because it references $default in the parent class :( Inequality ${n \choose k} \leq \left(\frac{en}{ k}\right)^k$ Don't replicators make the Ferengi rather pointless? Ferengis are all about acquisition and making a profit. But, in the age of replicators, where everything you want can be produced instantly, what would be the point of their lifestyle? Recording iPad screen using QuickTime I need to record a demo on my iPad's screen where I narrate what's going on but I also want the sounds from the iPad to be in the video. It seems that choosing the Mac Built-in Mic option causes only my voice to be in the video while choosing the iPad Mic option cause only the sounds from the iPad to be in the video. What can I do to put both in the video? How to parseInt a string with leading 0 Is there a way to set up a default folder for Windows Explorer? I often use Win + E to pop up Windows Explorer, and then I usually have to navigate down into a few network folders to find my primary directory. Is there a way to set this folder as the default so that Windows Explorer always opens to this folder? I feel uncomfortable saying sentences like the following:    "I've a car" instead of "I have a car" "They've a great time" instead of "They have a great time" "He's a pen" instead of "He has a pen" etc   I ask this because I read this sort of thing in a book.  Are they correct? And what is the rule? Can you use such forms in a formal setting? Displaying two XML listings side by side. I have two XML outputs from a program that I would like to include in a LaTeX document. I would like them to appear side-by-side each in its own box. So that a reader can compare the two outputs while reading the document. Can't seem to find a way to do this, without making images for each output and adding both as images/graphics. Could there be a better option? Searching through ODT documents without opening them? Let's say I have 2000 .ODT files. Their names are random numbers. How do I go about searching for, let's say, "pricing list"? How do I find the document I need without opening all of them one by one and checking to see if it's the right one?  Is there some program to search through the words in the documents without opening them? Variance (different definitions) I'm new to statistics and reading stats books I found different definitions for Variance.  Definition1: $ s^2 = \frac{1}{n-1} \sum_{i=1}^n (x_i - \bar{x})^2 $  Definition2: $ s^2 = \frac{1}{n} \sum_{i=1}^n (x_i - \bar{x})^2 $  I would like to know why is used different definition for same thing? If I create a file and then change its permissions to 444 (read-only), how come rm can remove it?  If I do this:  echo test &gt; test.txt chmod 444 test.txt rm test.txt   ...rm will ask if I want to remove the write-protected file test.txt. I would have expected that rm can not remove such a file and that I would have to do a chmod +w test.txt first. If I do rm -f test.txt then rm will remove the file without even asking, even though it's read-only.   Can anyone clarify? I'm using Ubuntu 12.04/bash.