One of those automated grammar checking tools pointed this out to me.  I have a sentence, "There are a boatload of other options."  The are in this sentence gets flagged as not agreeing with the form of boatload as singular.    boatload in this usage would seem to be plural, and saying is a boatload of other options sounds strange.  Which is the correct usage?
I've been having an argument with a colleague about this sentence, could you please let me know which one of us is correct:     There are no shortage of applications for our product in this   space.   She is convinced that are should be replaced by is, and I think it should stand as it is. Thanks for your help!
Not every open set in $\mathbb{R}^n$, for $n\geq2$, is a disjoint union of countable open balls. I know that every open set in $\mathbb{R}$ can be decomposed as the union of countably many disjoint open intervals and I'm trying to show that this property no longer holds in higher dimensions. For this I'm trying to show that there is no countable, pairwise disjoint open balls whose union is the open square $(0, 1)^2 ⊂ \mathbb{R}^2$. I know that it is because of the corners, but I don't know how to write this in mathematical terms. Thanks for any help. The SQL Server instance is accessible and seems to be fine.     Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (SP1-CU2) (KB4013106) - 13.0.4422.0 (X64)   Mar  6 2017 14:18:16   Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation  Enterprise   Edition (64-bit) on Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard 6.3  (Build   9600: ) (Hypervisor)   But what does the white question mark mean?  these icons dont go away when I refresh. I am sysadmin inside sql server and outside I am administrator on that box.      Another thing I noticed, you can see on the picture below. These are 2 different Management Studio sessions.  On the top one, I am logged in as myself, DBA and sysadmin,  on the second one I use Management Studio with run as a different user and I use a domain account that I use for the replication, which is not sysadmin.  The second one has the blue icon in this and other servers as well, whilst mine is the normal green one. Just need help understanding this question, as I don't really understand what a continuous random vector is. My limited understanding is that a continuous random vector must be completely continuous (so for continuous X and Y this is satisfied) and that to get the probability of the random vector occurring, we double integrate over the supports (of X and Y obviously). My guess is then, that the c.r.v (X,Y) IS a continuous random vector.  Also, what of the converse? If (X,Y) is a continuous random vector, then are X and Y continuous random variables? I also think this is correct, as the continuity of the vector MUST imply the continuity of X and Y, although I'm honestly not sure.  Thanks Sources missing in /etc/apt/sources.list, how do I get them back? There are many times when I'd like to jot a short note in my passport. For example, the business purpose of an entry into a country -- or for countries with automatic passport control and when I don't get a stamp, I'd like to notate my entry and departure.   Can one write in one's own passport? I wouldn't of course write over any stamps, but I might write near them. Or could I use a back page as entry and departure dates?  Yes, I could use a separate piece of paper or a computer file, but having them all in my passport would be handy -- especially when a border officer asks where I've been and why.   And if the laws vary by country, can you note this in your answer? Would it matter if my notations were in ink or pencil? These aren't doodles but business-like annotations and lists. Indirect return of all elements in an array The Bash man page describes use of ${!a} to return the contents of the variable whose name is the contents of a (a level of indirection).  I'd like to know how to return all elements in an array using this, i.e.,  a=(one two three) echo ${a[*]}   returns  one two three   I would like for:  b=a echo ${!b[*]}   to return the same.  Unfortunately, it doesn't, but returns 0 instead.  Update  Given the replies, I now realise that my example was too simple, since of course, something like:  b=("${a[@]}")   Will achieve exactly what I said I needed.  So, here's what I was trying to do:  LIST_lys=(lys1 lys2) LIST_diaspar=(diaspar1 diaspar2)  whichone=$1   # 'lys' or 'diaspar'  _LIST=LIST_$whichone LIST=${!_LIST[*]}   Of course, carefully reading the Bash man page shows that this won't work as expected because the last line simply returns the indices of the "array" $_LIST (not an array at all).  In any case, the following should do the job (as pointed out):  LIST=($(eval echo \${$_LIST[*]}))   or ... (the route that I went, eventually):  LIST_lys="lys1 lys2" ... LIST=(${!_LIST})   Assuming, of course, that elements don't contain whitespace. chpasswd apply changes in the chroot directory Orientation on $\mathbb{CP}^2$ Period detection of a generic time series Sort order issue I'm having an issue sorting data in ascending order.   Right now the sort order is: 1.0.0  10.0.0 10.0.1 11.0.0 2.0.0 2.0.1 3.0.0 3.0.1 3.1.0  What I want is: 1.0.0 2.0.0 2.0.1 3.0.0 3.0.1 3.1.0 10.0.0 10.0.1 11.0.0  How can I achieve this? The datatype can't be number or currency because of the 2 decimals, so I used text-field. How can I use the `--multi-dex` option? Is it possible to make LaTeX mark overfull boxes in the output? Is it possible to make LaTeX mark overfull boxes in the output, for example by drawing red rectangles in the PDF where the boxes overflow? The purpose -- to more easily "see" where the problems are in the output. WCF - Faults / Exceptions versus Messages We're currently having a debate whether it's better to throw faults over a WCF channel, versus passing a message indicating the status or the response from a service.  Faults come with built-in support from WCF where by you can use the built-in error handlers and react accordingly. This, however, carries overhead as throwing exceptions in .NET can be quite costly.  Messages can contain the necessary information to determine what happened with your service call without the overhead of throwing an exception. It does however need several lines of repetitive code to analyze the message and determine actions following its contents.  We took a stab at creating a generic message object we could utilize in our services, and this is what we came up with:  public class ReturnItemDTO&lt;T&gt; {     [DataMember]     public bool Success { get; set; }      [DataMember]     public string ErrorMessage { get; set; }      [DataMember]     public T Item { get; set; } }   If all my service calls return this item, I can consistently check the "Success" property to determine if all went well. I then have an error message string in the event indicating something went wrong, and a generic item containing a Dto if needed.  The exception information will have to be logged away to a central logging service and not passed back from the service.  Thoughts? Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?  Some further clarification on my question  An issue I'm having with fault contracts is communicating business rules.  Like, if someone logs in, and their account is locked, how do I communicate that? Their login obviously fails, but it fails due to the reason "Account Locked".  So do I:  A) use a boolean, throw Fault with message account locked  B) return AuthenticatedDTO with relevant information Are there any disadvantages to using your companions for transporting Power Armor Is it possible for information to be transmitted faster than light by using a rigid pole? Is it possible for information (like 1 and 0s) to be transmitted faster than light?   For instance, take a rigid pole of several AU in length. Now say you have a person on each end, and one of them starts pulling and pushing on his/her end.   The person on the opposite end should receive the pushes and pulls instantaneously as no particle is making the full journey.  Would this actually work? Old phone cannot connect to computer, the "computer connection" icon appears on phone I would like to get some pictures and audio out of an AT&amp;T SGH-a687 phone onto my Mac computer. I first tried connecting it to a New PC Studio on a PC, but there was a problem after transfer 2 photos, so I tried again. But the PC could no longer detect the phone, even though the "connected to computer" icon appears on the phone. I tried a different cable, different USB ports. No use.  So I downloaded the Samsung Kies on my Mac. Same thing, it tries to search for the phone once I connect the phone, but the computer doesn't detect anything. The phone still shows the "connected to computer" icon.  There is also Bluetooth (no internet on the phone) on the phone, but it failed to send the picture each time I tried.  What can I do at this point? Please also suggest data extraction software for either Mac or PC, if that's the easier route. What do 'real', 'user' and 'sys' mean in the output of time(1)? $ time foo real        0m0.003s user        0m0.000s sys         0m0.004s $   What do 'real', 'user' and 'sys' mean in the output of time?  Which one is meaningful when benchmarking my app? My distribution is normal; Kolmogorov-Smirnov test doesn't agree I have a problem with the normality of some data I have:  I've done a Kolmogorov test which says it isn't normal with p=.0000,  I don't understand: the skewness of my distribution =-.497, and the kurtosis =-0,024  Here is the plot of my distribution which looks very much normal ...  (I have three scores, and each one of this scores isn't normal with a significant p-value for the Kolmogorov test ... I really don't understand ) Deleting self-answered question gets "Delete this answered question" warning While attempting to delete a question which was answered by myself, and with no other answers, I got the following warning:     Delete this answered question?      We do not recommend deleting questions with answers because doing so   deprives future readers of this knowledge.      Repeated deletion of answered questions can result in your account   being blocked from asking. Are you sure you wish to delete?   I understand that deleting your question when someone else has answered it is effectively nullifying the effort that person put into that answer, which is bad. But is it bad if the only answer that's deleted along with your question is your own? How do I remove old kernel versions to clean up the boot menu? Every time I install a new Linux kernel, it gets left in the grub_config, making the boot menu longer each time.    I know I can manually search through the installed packages and remove them.  Does Ubuntu provide any easier way to clean them up or keep them from showing in the boot list?