I'm not personally interested in such a feature, but I just want to put forth the idea of an optional, possibly monetize-able,  romantic relationship matching feature for SE users. Is this a bad idea? If so, why not?
No, not like this:    Hear me out!  As Stack Overflow grows, it becomes increasingly ridden with extremely newbie and mediocre questions. It's just natural. The team are fighting hard to keep the crap out, but there are many very basic questions that are okay on their own. They don't deserve to be kicked out* - they are just very, very, very basic and/or localized.   Too much basicness tires users who are interested in discussing more advanced topics.  As has been discussed many times over, the voting system is not suited to identify advanced questions due to what is known as the . A group of people will vote on what they understand, which puts truly expert questions at a natural disadvantage that a democratic voting system can't overcome.  Now, there is a small number of users on Stack Overflow who I, as a user, know share my basic values (like, teaching a man to fish rather than fishing for them); I also know they are experts in their fields. It is safe to assume that what these users regard an interesting question worthy of attention, is likely to be interesting to me as well.      The idea is to introduce an opt-in "follow" mechanism that allows followed users to share what they find interesting, with very little fuss and on a purely opt-in basis.   Allow every SO user to follow any other SO user with a certain minimum rep, say 3000.   To every user who is being followed (or every user), display a new link underneath every question, "Recommend".    Introduce a new filtered view somewhere, named "Recommended". The view will show me all questions that my followed users are recommending.   Whenever I browse a list of questions, highlight those questions that have been recommended by my followed users. (I haven't put much thought into how to implement this graphically - you get the drift.)      I'm not especially fond of social networking, and I think most of it doesn't have a place on SO. But I'm starting to think this specific thing could be the right way to go in order to tell apart expert content from the 10000th dreary "how do I upload a file" question.  This is an entirely opt-in feature - unless I actively follow some users, I will never notice this.   Maybe for a bit of ego-stroking, the profile page can show how many users follow you. Or even who. Everything else would simply be kept under wraps - no publication of follower data in the data dump, no follower leagues or anything like that.      * At least not under current SO rules. Maybe those rules need to be changed - but that is a different discussion.
How to take a screenshot of a whole desktop with app menu selection? Probably a basic issue, but still something that irks me and I can't find an answer online. I want to change the default folder for saving new shapes/processing outputs from &quot;last used folder&quot; to &quot;project folder&quot; or &quot;something in relation to project folder&quot; - is this possible? If so, how can I achieve this? Adapt BibTeX style to give all initials I'm using a modification of the plainyr BibTeX style. Although my bib-file contains all initials for some authors (e.g. B.D. McKay), I end up with just the first initial in my document (e.g. B. McKay). I thought about editing the BibTeX style myself, but after seeing the code, I decided against it. Maybe there are some people who are more knowledgeable in this area of expertise.  I want my final document to include the initials for all the names, and not just those of the first name.  This is the relevant code of the BibTeX style, or at least, I think it is the relevant code.  FUNCTION {format.names} { 's :=   #1 'nameptr :=   s num.names$ 'numnames :=   numnames 'namesleft :=     { namesleft #0 &gt; }     { s nameptr "{f.~}{vv~}{ll}{, jj}" format.name$ 't :=       nameptr #1 &gt;         { namesleft #1 &gt;             { ", " * t * }             { numnames #2 &gt;                 { "," * }                 'skip$               if$               t "others" =                 { " et~al." * }                 { " and " * t * }               if$             }           if$         }         't       if$       nameptr #1 + 'nameptr :=       namesleft #1 - 'namesleft :=     }   while$ } I recently upgraded Windows 7 to Windows 10. The biggest issue I have now is that the Windows Search service no longer works, making the Start menu mostly unusable.  If I go to Indexing Options in the control panel I see that Indexing is not running and the list of paths to index is empty.  Going to advanced options, the current index path is empty, and the new path is empty too. This is true even if I try to use the "New Index" button.  Using the troubleshooter won't help since the service doesn't start. If I try to manually start the "Windows Search" service, I get the error  "Error 3: Unable to find specified path" (this is the rough translation, the original message is in my language).  What can I do to find out which path/file is missing ? I tried to check with Process Monitor, but the only file (beside system libraries) the SearchIndexer.exe try to access seem to be c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Application (everytime the service is started the whole folder c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search is deleted and recreated) and C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile (which exists).  Edit: all available updates are installed, and issuing      SFC /scannow   Doesn't reveal any issue Why is the MacTeX distribution so large? Is there anything smaller for OS X? I would like to know how to install LaTeX on Mac 10.6 or higher.  But the MacTeX is some 1.28 GB file! Is there a smaller distribution I could install?  What exactly is TeX Live? What are the system requirements for each flavour of Ubuntu Desktop? I'm thinking about installing Ubuntu Desktop, but I don't know what flavor is the best for my system. What are the minimum and recommended hardware requirements? What kind of CPU? How much memory? Should I have Hardware Acceleration? What flavor should I use?  This is an attempt of a canonical answer. My answers have the &quot;official  requirements&quot;, the recommended are a mix of official sources and opinion based (along with the answer it's told the source). You can comment or edit if you feel that the information is obsolete or incomplete. It is a good rule of thumb that any system capable of running Windows Vista, 7, 8, x86 (Intel) OS X will almost always be a lot faster with any Ubuntu flavor even if they are lower-spec than described below. I recently installed Ubuntu 14.04, then I installed lamp-server and placed my webpages in /var/www directory, but when I opened localhost in the browser there was nothing. I think that happened because Zend updated Apache.  Whatever the reason may be, I want to know where to keep my php files so that I can access them from my browser. Time Manager (QGIS) date format I've been through associated answers but cannot quite seem to find something which works!  I'm having trouble getting TimeManager to recognise a simple data field (this is in QGIS2 - but I've had this error in earlier versions). I have these fields formatted in what appears to be one of the acceptable formats:    ... here is a screenshot of the field properties:    The format appears to be recognised in QGIS as I've worked out days difference between two dates (the "Time on Market" field shown in the image).  However ... I always end up with:   The Twitter.shp file works fine as a test, so I don't think this is an issue with the install / phyton conflict.  Any thoughts welcome! In the current era of cricket, we see batsmen using switch hits to play a ball. That is, while playing a ball they change their batting side (left to right handed and vice versa) just before the ball comes to them.  My question is, can a bowler bowl a switch ball? Meaning, can a left hand bowler bowl right handed to a batsman? If it is not permitted, then is it not unfair to the bowlers that batsmen can change their batting style but not the bowlers? Or are there are any rules against a switch hit? function customization_form_user_register_form_alter(&amp;$form, &amp;$form_state, $form_id) {  $form['account']['pass']['#attributes']['placeholder'] = t('Password'); }   I am trying to set placeholder on password field in registration form.  I seted placeholder on username and email, but on password field won't work...  Any help? Thank you! The symmetric cryptosystem one-time pad (OTP) seems to be very beautiful since it is perfectly secret according to Shannon. Many books, however, point out the main drawback: one must create a secret key the same length as the plaintext. For this reason, the concept of perfect secrecy has these days been abandoned, and we prefer other cryptosystems.   Now, for example, suppose I want to encode my text message with the ASCII scheme, and moreover suppose that this plaintext is 10 gigabytes long, therefore (using an OTP) the key must be the same length, 10 gigabytes. I think, however, this is a ''sustainable price'' because I'm sure that the ciphertext can't be attacked.  Practically, I don't understand why having such long keys with an OTP is a big disadvantage if we reach "the dream"-- namely, perfect secrecy. Nowadays the storage of information is very easy, so what is the real problem? I can, for example, share the "long key" in person. What does high credit utilization really mean? Simple animation using C#/Windows Forms I need to knock out a quick animation in C#/Windows Forms for a Halloween display.  Just some 2D shapes moving about on a solid background.  Since this is just a quick one-off project I really don't want to install and learn an entire new set of tools for this.  (DirectX dev kits, Silverlight, Flash, etc..)  I also have to install this on multiple computers so anything beyond the basic .Net framework (2.0) would be a pain in the arse.  For tools I've got VS2k8, 25 years of development experience, a wheelbarrow, holocaust cloak, and about 2 days to knock this out.  I haven't done animation since using assembler on my Atari 130XE (hooray for page flipping and player/missile graphics!)  Advice?  Here's some of the things I'd like to know:   I can draw on any empty widget (like a panel) by fiddling with it's OnPaint handler, right?  That's how I'd draw a custom widget.  Is there a better technique than this? Is there a page-flipping technique for this kind of thing in Windows Forms?  I'm not looking for a high frame rate, just as little flicker/drawing as necessary.   Thanks.  Post Mortem Edit ... "a couple of coding days later"  Well, the project is done.  The links below came in handy although a couple of them were 404.  (I wish SO would allow more than one reply to be marked "correct").  The biggest problem I had to overcome was flickering, and a persistent bug when I tried to draw on the form directly.   Using the OnPaint event for the Form: bad idea.  I never got that to work; lots of mysterious errors (stack overflows, or ArgumentNullExceptions).  I wound up using a panel sized to fill the form and that worked fine. Using the OnPaint method is slow anyway.  Somewhere online I read that building the PaintEventArgs was slow, and they weren't kidding.  Lots of flickering went away when I abandoned this.  Skip the OnPaint/Invalidate() and just paint it yourself.  Setting all of the "double buffering" options on the form still left some flicker that had to be fixed.  (And I found conflicting docs that said "set them on the control" and "set them on the form".  Well controls don't have a .SetStyle() method.)  I haven't tested without them, so they might be doing something (this is the form):      this.SetStyle(ControlStyles.UserPaint, true);     this.SetStyle(ControlStyles.OptimizedDoubleBuffer, true);     this.SetStyle(ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint, true);    So the workhorse of the code wound up looking like (pf is the panel control):      void PaintPlayField()     {         Bitmap bufl = new Bitmap(pf.Width, pf.Height);         using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(bufl))         {             g.FillRectangle(Brushes.Black, new Rectangle(0, 0, pf.Width, pf.Height));             DrawItems(g);             DrawMoreItems(g);             pf.CreateGraphics().DrawImageUnscaled(bufl, 0, 0);         }     }   And I just called PaintPlayField from the inside of my Timer loop.  No flicker at all. What is the most concise and efficient way to find out if a JavaScript array contains a value? This is the only way I know to do it: function contains(a, obj) {     for (var i = 0; i &lt; a.length; i++) {         if (a[i] === obj) {             return true;         }     }     return false; }  Is there a better and more concise way to accomplish this? What is the angle at which water is splashed when a vehicle tyre rides in water on the road? I would like to know the following:   What is the angle at which water gets splashed when I ride my vehicle through a water on the road? How does angle of water varies with speed? What is the relation between the distance the water goes with the speed of the vehicle?   Thanks! Do I add quotes around my thoughts? He staggered in, late as usual, his hair this way and his collar the other. His socks were as mismatched as were his principles. I thought to myself, here comes yet another disastrous sales meeting.  It seems to me too much to write :     I thought to myself 'Here comes yet another disastrous sales meeting'.   The Authorised Version deliberately did away with punctuated speech, retaining only the capital to indicate the beginning of a quote but leaving out quotation marks.  Can I therefore do the same in common writing, for my thoughts ?     I thought to myself, Here comes yet another disastrous sales meeting.   I cannot find another question on EL&amp;U which covers this. Foo* set = new Foo[100]; // ... delete [] set;   You don't pass the array's boundaries to delete[]. But where is that information stored? Is it standardised? Can there be no 'a' between such and a noun? When it comes to losing weight, a quick fix to would be nice, but we   know there’s no such [a] thing. ()   It sounds like there isn’t ‘a’ in the news. So I wonder if it be right when there is no ‘a’ after ‘such.’ Would it be okay? I would like to restore LightDM to its default state, because for some reason /etc/lightdm/unity-greeter.conf is now an empty file.  Deleting /etc/lightdm/unity-greeter.conf and then running sudo apt-get install --reinstall unity-greeter doesn't create a new config file as you might expect.   How can I restore a missing config file? Including the interaction but not the main effects in a model