I've started getting downvoted, for some reason, on a 2-3 year old question here:    It is 2 years later, and I now agree that the question sucks. However, I can't remove the question because it has answers. While I understand that we want to prevent question askers from nuking things in the general case, is there any recourse for the asker if they're randomly getting downvoted 2 years later?
I wrote a question about blocking certain characters in passwords. It became tremendously unpopular, and it seemed like everyone wanted to rain on my parade every day.  Eventually, I "got it," agreed completely with what people were saying to me, and just wanted to withdraw my question so that my reputation didn't slide even further downhill.  Unfortunately, the system is designed such that I can't withdraw my question or redeem myself. Instead, I just get daily reputation attacks. That's a terrible system, and it needs to be changed.
Is the intersection of a closed set and a compact set always compact? Integration by partial fractions; how and why does it work? Could someone take me through the steps of decomposing  $$\frac{2x^2+11x}{x^2+11x+30}$$ into partial fractions?   More generally, how does one use partial fractions to compute integrals $$\int\frac{P(x)}{Q(x)}\,dx$$ of rational functions ($P(x)$ and $Q(x)$ are polynomials) ?    This question is asked in an effort to cut down on duplicates. See .  Also see . "Abusing" bounties for unlimited profit Six days ago I put a +50 bounty on  which wasn't asked by me, but to which I'd previously posted a pretty decent answer. Since then I've earned 130 reputation from upvotes on my answer, netting me +80 reputation and a bronze badge from no work.  It seems possible to slowly generate free reputation by "investing" in your answers like this. I expect I could repeat this perpetually and continue to profit from it.  This strikes me as an abuse of the bounty system. Should anything be done to prevent it?  EDIT: For more concrete questions:   If I put another bounty on this question after this one expired, would that be considered abuse? What if I did it several times? ( the answer was  "yes", but the author was doing so to promote his own project.) What if I didn't do it to the same question, but was constantly promoting questions I'd answered, in order to promote my answers? When polynomials f(x) and f'(x) are relatively prime, f(x) has no repeated roots. Why? The problem is to show that a polynomial $f(x) \in F[x]$ (F is a field) has no repeated roots if and only if f(x) and f'(x) (the derivative of f(x)) are relatively prime. I've managed to prove one direction of this equivalence (if there are no repeated roots, f(x) and f'(x) are relatively prime), but the other one gives me headaches... can anyone help out? I've been looking for this feature in Blender, either upon the time of creation using Edge Cut and Slide or afterwards, in just editing the mesh. I'd like to know if it's possible to evenly slide two edges away from one another in Blender?  Here's a picture of what I'd like to be able to do:    Thanks upfront!! Autosegmental Representation in tikz-qtree This is what I want to achieve    and this:    But all I've been able to make with tikz-qtree is the following:  \documentclass[12pt,a4]{article} \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \usepackage{tipa,tikz,tikz-qtree} \begin{document}  \begin{tikzpicture} [baseline] \tikzset{frontier/.style={distance from root=90pt}} \Tree [.$\sigma$ [.O [ p ] ] [.R [.$\mu$ a ] [.$\mu$ : ] ] ] \end{tikzpicture} \begin{tikzpicture} [baseline] \tikzset{frontier/.style={distance from root=90pt}} \Tree [.$\sigma$ [.O [ p ] ] [.R [.$\mu$ a ]  ] ] \end{tikzpicture}   And this:  \begin{tikzpicture}[baseline] \tikzset{frontier/.style={distance from root=90pt}} \Tree [.$\sigma$ [.O [ l ] ] [.R [.$\mu$ a ] [.$\mu$ l ] ] ] \end{tikzpicture} \begin{tikzpicture} [baseline] \tikzset{frontier/.style={distance from root=90pt}} \Tree [.$\sigma$ [.O [ : ] ] [.R [.$\mu$ a ] [ l ] ] ] \end{tikzpicture} \end{document}   Which renders:    and    The important part here is the linking from the leaves to more than one parent (it would be nice if I had the option of making the line dashed too). Now, pst-asr doesn't quite achieve what I want it to. It's important that I have the moras ('mu's). (Also it's a pstricks package, which means I must typeset it in DVIPSPDF.) I have tried a bit of the forest-package (especially forest-GP1), but I can't make that work as I want either. Lastly, some have recommended xyling, but I find that package very difficult to use.  Any recommendations?  Thanks. What is a field, really? "I couldn't but laugh" - correct or not? Every once in a while I see users having issues to update due to errors like this:  E:Type 'ain' is not known on line 1 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/some-ppa.list'   with varying types/line numbers/source list files (often after removing a PPA).  How can such an error be fixed? pgfpages and section I'm making a Beamer presentation. I need to show some notes on a second screen, so I'm using pgfpages.  Whereas, when I put a section, it appears 2 times :/ Here, it's a minimal code with the problem. Have you any idea ?  \documentclass{beamer} \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage[francais]{babel}  \usepackage{pgfpages} \setbeameroption{show notes on second screen=right}    \begin{document} \begin{frame} \tableofcontents \end{frame}  \begin{frame} \section{test} toto \end{frame}  \end{document}   Thanks ! How do I put an image texture on a material in Cycles? Let's say we have a Python script my_script.py that does some data processing with Blender. This script accepts some arguments (e.g. arg1 arg2). How can I forward arguments to the script when using it with the CLI?  blender --background --python my_script.py   The only trick I could find was :  echo "arg1 arg2" &gt; my_input.txt &amp;&amp; blender --background --python my_script.py   Is this really the only way to do that?  Update  I found a  on Stack Overflow. let a,b be real  numbers and $\varepsilon&gt;0$. prove the above inequality. I dont know how to even start. please, I need your help. Preprocess categorical variables with many values I have a dataset that consists of only categorical variables and a target variable. I want to predict the (binary) target variable with the categorical variables.  I am trying to do this in Python and sklearn.  The categorical variables have many different values. I was thinking to create dummy variables for each value in all the categorical variables. However, in the end this results in a sparse data set with thousands of variables.  How would you go about to reduce the number of dummy variables? Would you use Chi2 to select useful features?  Or would you not make dummy variables at all? Clone Ubuntu system to a pendrive and make it bootable? I have Ubuntu 14.04 installed on my laptop. Can I clone the entire system with apps, settings, etc on a USB 3 pendrive, and then boot from that on other computers as a portable Ubuntu installation to take around with me?  I am trying a function that Timeshift has that's called "Clone the current system on another device". I've selected the pendrive as the target device. Timeshift was talking about this being bootable. But is it going to bootable on only this laptop, or on any system? For example, on an Intel Mac, or a Windows computer without the grub bootloader? Is that Timeshift function what I am looking for, or do I have to do something else?  Edit: The Timeshift clone failed to boot on the first system I tested it on. (A Dell Hackintosh that usually boots from USB just fine.) Effective Refractive Index in Paper I am reading the paper, entitled "Artificial uniaxial and biaxial dielectrics with use of two-dimensional subwavelength binary gratings" by Eric B. Grann, M. G. Moharam, and Drew A. Pommet.   In the paper they mention this formula:        Do you know how it can be derived and where it comes from ? Event binding on dynamically created elements? No hair theorem for black holes and the baryon number Local file access with JavaScript Find the center of the symmetry group $S_n$.   Attempt:  By definition, the center is $Z(S_n) = \{ a \in S_n : ag = ga \forall\  g \in S_n\}$. Then we know the identity $e$ is in $S_n$ since there is always the trivial permutation. Suppose $a$ is in $S_n$, but not equal to identity. Now we can imagine the permutation as bijective function that maps from $\{1,2,\dotsc,n\}$ to $\{1,2,\dotsc,n\}$.  So suppose $p$ is a permutation map. Then $p$ maps from a location $i$ to a location $j$. Take $p(i) = j$ where $i\neq j$. Let $k$ be in $\{1,2,\dotsc,n\}$, where $k$, $i$ and $j$ are all different elements. The cycle $r = (jk)$, then we will see if this commutes.  $rp(i) = rj$    Can someone please help me, I am stuck?  Thank you.