Would you think that Stack&nbsp;Exchange and other related sites should remove downvote function from their default?  If someone gives the worse answer they can provide another function to remove the bad answer. Can you suggest some functions if you're asked by Stack&nbsp;Exchange admin?   Does downvote imply your personality?   Do you feel really negative when we receive some downvotes?
As far as I can tell downvoting is mostly useless.     For questions the only people who get downvoted are lower rep users, or incredibly stupid questions    most questions that are downvoted get closed anyway which should be sufficient downvoting doesn't have too much affect on your rep anyway a negative comment is more useful and more of a push too change or delete the question  For answers downvoting is often used incorrectly as well   people commonly competitively downvote (downvoting another answer to a question that you also answered) obviously not a good behavior downvoting (and upvoting) are contagious, meaning one downvote leads to a bunch of others even though downvotes don't effect rep that much they create a negative environment, no one wants their post downvoted, on the other hand criticizing comments, I think, are far more welcome      So basically in a nutshell a downvote serves no real purpose even if a post deserves it. Flagging, closing and commenting are much more useful to everyone including the poster than downvoting so why have it.    I now see from the answers and comments that downvotes do serve a purpose and would like to retract my request.
Basic mathematical induction regarding inequalities Is every metric space a subspace of some connected metric space? Is every metric space a subspace of some connected metric space? If the space itself is connected then we're done, but if not then I think we can extend our metric space to make it connected.  I'm not sure whether this will work or not, but intuitively I think the answer is yes. Non-hidden directory doesn't show in Explorer, but the program that made it can access it Random integer in VB.NET I need to generate a random integer between 1 and n (where n is a positive whole number) to use for a unit test. I don't need something overly complicated to ensure true randomness - just an old-fashioned random number.  How would I do that? Choosing GeoCoding service? I'm looking for a web service providing a full address based on coordinates (and reverse).  I'm ready to pay for that service.  I don't want to use Google's API. The question is about the encryption equation in asymmetric encryption.  For $c\equiv m^e\bmod n$, prove that for every unique $m$ there is a unique $c$.  Here $n=pq$ where $p$ and $q$ are primes larger than $m$ and the exponent $e$, is $\geq3$ and coprime with $p-1$ and $q-1$.  Thanks! How come I can't give more than 500 rep? Why can't I give more than 500 reputation as a bounty at a time? The system won't let me choose an option more than 500.  Also, how were some users able to do so? On  the OP has given a single bounty worth 550 rep, but at the moment I have 844 rep and I can't give any more than 500 rep on a bounty.  Can you please tell us if this is a bug or not? Get Age of a person in MySQL How to buy plane tickets for job interviews? I am currently on the academic job market, and scheduling on-campus interviews with institutions that might want to hire me.  Suppose I am invited to an on-campus interview at the University of X, and must travel there by air.  They handle travel on a reimbursement basis: I buy the plane ticket, and then they reimburse me.  However, the interview is a few weeks away.  Since the job market sometimes moves fast, there is a chance that by the time of the scheduled interview, I may have already accepted another offer (say from the University of Y).  Of course I should then decline the interview at X, but I would have already bought the plane ticket.  How should I plan for this contingency?   I could buy a refundable ticket to X.  However, these are normally several times the price of a non-refundable ticket, and if I do end up traveling to X, they might balk at reimbursing me for such an expensive fare. I could buy a non-refundable ticket to X.  If I end up not going there, I could ask X to reimburse me for the cost of the ticket (or at least the "change fee" charged by the airline to let me use the ticket's value for a future flight).  However, I suspect they will be reluctant to reimburse me for a trip I'm not making, and might refuse to do so altogether, in which case I am out-of-pocket. I could wait until the last minute to buy a non-refundable ticket for X.  But it may still be expensive for them (or may exceed their limits), and the most convenient flights may be sold out. I could contact University of X and ask them for guidance.  I'm a bit hesitant to do this, as I am afraid that if I bring up the possibility that I might accept another position, they might think I am not seriously interested in theirs.   Is there a standard way to handle this situation?  This is in the United States, if it matters. How does find -name work? Which versions of C++ redistributables can I remove? I have a number of Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 and 2008 Redistributable and I would like to know which ones are safe to remove, because there are actually more than 10 installed on my computers.   Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 ATL Update kb973923 - x64 8.0.50727.4053 Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 (x64) Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 ATL Update kb973924 - x64 9.0.30729.4148 Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable - x64 9.0.30729.17 Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable - x86 9.0.30729.17 Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable - x86 9.0.30729.4148 Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable - x86 9.0.30729.4974 Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x64 Runtime - 10.0.30319   It could be that these versions are all different, but a confirmation of that is fine for me as well. Thanks in advance.  PS. I'm using an x64 machine one windows 7. Here is an interesting piece of code that my fellow team members were just having a slightly heated discussion about...    Dim fred As Integer    If True Then fred = 5 : fred = 3 : fred = 6 Else fred = 4 : fred = 2 : fred = 1   After executing the above code snippet, what is the value of fred?  Try not to cheat and debug the code.  This is a highly contrived code example that started out as an example of using the colon with an If statement, but then someone decided to take it upon themselves to proffer a result for fred.  UPDATE: I would not normally write code like this and this snippet only serves as an example. As it so happens, this question originated from a discussion involving the creation of a coding standards document for our team. Why not make it mandatory to leave a reason or at least a remark of some sort whenever down voting?  You see more and more often questions being down voted while many times they are simply perfectly legitimate, as questions/as people being unable to achieve some desirable result. I am not talking about "Hey, please do this and that for me, thanks :D " posts.  I would like to know what reasons there are for not making it mandatory to leave a reason for a down vote. a) Determine the number of ways to colour a 1 by n grid using the colours red and white if an even number of squares are to be coloured red.   Note that n is greater than or equal to 1 and the number of red squares could be 0.  I know I must consider the cases of n being even and odd, and determine the sum, from zero to n of the squares being red, where the number of red squares is even. But I just want to make sure I haven’t missed any arrangements by saying a) is $2^{n-1}$ when n is even and $2^{n-1}-1$ when n is odd.  b) Determine the number of ways to colour the squares using red, white and blue if an even number of squares are to be coloured red.  For this case, I can have arrangements including red only, white only, blue only, white and blue only, red and white only, red and blue only, and finally all three colours.  Thank you for any help provided. I hope to receive my PhD in Mathematics in May of 2015, so I am currently applying for jobs.  Due to life circumstances, I'm fairly certain that I will only be staying at my next position for about 2 years.  Does this mean I shouldn't even try to apply for tenure-track positions?  Will a hiring committee not even consider me for the position if I'm not willing to commit to staying with them for a certain amount of time?  I would love to get a teaching/lecturing position at any institute of higher education (4-year research university, liberal arts school, community college), but as I look for openings, a lot of them are tenure-track assistant professor positions.  Should I go through the effort of sending in an application, or will that be a waste of my, and the committee's, time?  Thanks for any advice you have!  Edit (to address Nate's comment):  My wife is currently applying for 2 year graduate degree programs in various cities in the US, so I'm applying for jobs in the same cities.  When she finishes her program, we plan to move outside of the US (Africa or Southeast Asia), where I do hope to remain in academia, teaching mathematics to college-aged students. Query Activity for ORDER BY xxx DESC LIMIT Url rewriting in Amazon S3 I have a webapp hosted in Amazon S3, the webapp is build with jQuery Mobile and I use changePage lo navigate between pages, I'm not using the hash operator(#) when I change the page.  I'm having problems when the user copy the url and paste it in a new tab  For example:    loads the page page1.html that is in amazon s3 with only the jquery page structure...  The behavior that I want is that load index.html and with js read the url, detect the page and load the correct page.  With Apache I solve this with URL Rewriting... but for Amazon S3 I didn't find any similar...  NOTE: I know that if I activate the hash operator (#) in my urls the problem is solved but I need clean urls without #. How can I distinguish between words which have the -ing in a sentence that are nouns, verbs, or adjectives?    For example sometimes -ing come with word to give us a noun, and sometimes a verb or an adjective.       That interesting snake.   That crawling snake.   That barking dog keeps everyone awake.     Is there any rule to determine whether a word with -ing is a noun, verb, or adjective? Generalized Euler sum $\sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{H_n}{n^q}$ What type of path in shebang is more preferable?