In George R. R. Martin's A Game Of Thrones, there is a moment when one character says the following words:     “So the slaver has become a spy. I would rather he become a corpse.”   Now, I understand the general meaning of it: that the speaker would prefer that person to be dead rather than spying around. What I don't understand is the exact grammar behind the second sentence of the example below.  From what I know, rather is an adverb, so the main clause doesn't have a predicate and technically is incomplete. And since there is a common language structure "pronoun + would rather + verb1 (+ than + verb2)", like I would rather die (than do it), I assume that in my example is used some specific shortened form of a more verbose construction, like it's the case with would that i could. Am I correct? If so, then what is the full form of it?  Also, I'm not entirely sure in what tense become is used in the second sentence. Is it a subjunctive present form, or some shortened form of present perfect that was used in the first sentence, or maybe something else entirely?  And one more thing. When "would rather" is used like in the example above, does it imply some, I don't know how to say it, temporal reference, i.e. when the action described by the verb that follows it should happen or should have happened? In other words, in my example, does the speaker express a wish to see that person dead already or simply want him to die at any time in the future?  Thank you!
What is the difference between:   The company would rather each employee be provided with ID card.  The company would rather each employee were provided with ID card.
How Get Parent Field in Attachment? Please Help me...  Account sObject is Parent of Attachment. Now I want to bring Read-only Field Custom field (isReadOnly__c).  SELECT Id, Name, Account.isReadOnly__c FROM Attachment   How It Gets ?  Thanks in Advance  Manu Non-Root Package Managers From my research, I seem to notice that all package managers insist on being used as a privileged user and must be installed into /.  Typically, what I like to do is create a throwaway account, compile some software, and install to $HOME for that account. I can try a variety of setups and then when I'm done, just destroy the account.  However, compiling software becomes tedious.  My experience is really just limited to yum, but I don't understand why I wouldn't be able to drop a repo file into ~/etc/yum.repos.d and have yum install everything into a home account.  Is there any reason why package managers must be used as a privleged user to install software? I have done major updates to my website, and renamed all my URLs.  How can I tell Google that I have renamed these URLs and let Google refresh its index?  My website URL: http://www.pndmasr.com/  My sitemap: http://www.pndmasr.com/sitemap.xml  I have uploaded my sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools many times.  However, every time I search Google for "pndmasr", I still get results with old pages. I have waited more than 3 days but the problem remains. Any suggestions?  Is there a problem with my sitemap? Is there a way to show the console in a Windows application?  I want to do something like this:  static class Program {     [STAThread]     static void Main(string[] args) {         bool consoleMode = Boolean.Parse(args[0]);          if (consoleMode) {             Console.WriteLine("consolemode started");             // ...         } else {             Application.EnableVisualStyles();             Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);             Application.Run(new Form1());         }     } } Can ovulation and menstruation occur simultaneously? Is that possible that ovulation happens in the time of actual menstrual haemorrhage in human females - let say in a case that woman has 21 day cycle and her menstrual period is 7 days?   If yes, does it means that in this particular case the woman has lower chances to conceive? Is errno thread-safe? TeX capacity exceeded with glossary package My document contains many thousands of glossary items. When compiling with XeLaTeX, about 1/8 of the way through the document, it reports:  ! TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [main memory size=3000000]. \@glolist@ ...},{13586},{9406},{4539},{12811},{179                                                   51},{5831},{1047},{14948},    The numbers you see above are ones placed in #1 of \newglossaryentry{#1}{#2}. These unique numbers are assigned to each entry for convenience. I have successfully compiled short tests of the document, which only used 1% of the full content. The resulting .glo file is about 1 MB in size.   Could this be the result of some error on my part or am I giving TeX too much work to do?  Update:  I have followed the instructions below (edited texmf.cnf and running  fmtutil-sys --all. This has allowed me to compile an additional portion of the book, but no matter the settings I add, I can't go beyond 5/8 of the way through.  A compile with extra_mem_top.xelatex = 30000000 and extra_mem_top.xelatex = 50000000 both result in:  TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [pool size=3186676].   Update:  I have done the following:  $ kpsewhich texmf.cnf /usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf.cnf $ nano /usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf.cnf   To the texmf.cnf file, following instructions at , I added:  main_memory = 230000000 extra_mem_top = 10000000 extra_mem_bot = 10000000 save_size = 150000 stack_size = 150000  main_memory.xelatex = 30000000 extra_mem_top.xelatex = 30000000   After this, I tried: - fmtutil-sys --all, then compiling xelatex file.tex. - fmtutil --all, then compiling xelatex file.tex. - fmtutil-sys --byfmt xelatex, then compiling with xelatex file.tex. - texhash, then compiling with xelatex file.tex.  All of these resulted in no changes in results. I still get:  TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [pool size=3186676]. Is there a way to view the "printable view" (.xls) in Mac Numbers (version 2.3+) rather than Excel? I am using OS X (Maverick), Numbers (V3.0) and both Safari and Firefox.  When I save a Salesforce report using the "printable view" button, it saves it as an .xls file but when I open it in Numbers I get what looks like the XML code behind it, for example the first cell in the first three rows contains:  &lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"&gt; &lt;html&gt; &lt;head&gt; How to simulate data that satisfy specific constraints such as having specific mean and standard deviation? How to derive the conjugate prior of an exponential family distribution I am trying to derive the conjugate prior of the univariate Gaussian distribution over both the mean and the precision. I know that the prior I'm looking for is the normal-gamma distribution, but the idea is to derive this result.  It seems that you can write down the conjugate prior of an exponential family distribution immediately if you represent it in the canonical exponential family form.  suggests a way to do just that. So far I have written the Gaussian probability function in this form and equated the following, but I don't see how the form of the conjugate prior is immediately obvious.  $$p(\mu, \lambda | D) \propto p(\mu,\lambda)p(D | \mu, \lambda)$$ Estimator for $\theta$ using the method of moments Exercise :     Using the method of moments, find the estimator for $\theta$ for a random sample $X_1, \dots, X_n$ that follows the distribution with pdf $f(x) = \theta x^{-2}, \; 0 &lt; \theta \leq x &lt; \infty$, where $\theta$ is the unknown parameter.   Attempt :  $$m_1' = \bar{X}$$  $$μ_1' = \int_\theta^xu\theta u^{-2}\mathrm{d}u=\int_\theta^x\theta u^{-1}\mathrm{d}u=\big[\theta \ln u\big]_\theta^x =\theta\ln x - \theta\ln\theta$$  Thus, the estimator is given by :  $$m_1' = μ_1' \Rightarrow \theta\ln x - \theta\ln\theta = \bar{X}$$  But we cannot solve that equation with respect to $\theta$, so we'll take the moments of bigger order :  $$m_2' = \frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^nX_i^2$$ $$μ_2' = \int_\theta^x u^2 \theta u^{-2} \mathrm{d}u = \int_\theta^x \theta \mathrm{d}u = \big[\theta u\big]_\theta^x =\theta x - \theta ^2 $$  Thus the solution of the following quadratic equation for $\theta &gt;0$, gives as the estimator of $\theta$ :  $$\theta^2-x\theta +\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^nX_i^2$$  Question : Is my solution correct ? Shall the upper bound be $x$ or $\infty$ ? The Earth in all of its varieties has wide ranging climates. At the top level it has tropical, dry, temperate, continental, and polar climates. And yet often the planets depicted in science fiction are often single climate planets.    The forest moon of Endor The desert planet of Dune The desert planet of Tatooine The desert planet of Vulcan The outer planets in Firefly all appeared to be mostly desert (supiciously like Calfornia desert).  The inner planets in Firefly were all temperate or tropical.  The icy Breen homeworld The icy Andorian homeworld The icy Frost Giant planet   I'm not suggesting there are no Earth-like planets in science fiction, but it feels like it is less common than it should be. Considering the only planet we have as an example is our own, it seems like planets should be just as varied in the cosmos. Regular expression to extract text between square brackets Is there a way to have a 64 bit enum in C++?  Whilst refactoring some code I came across bunch of #defines which would be better as an enum, but being greater than 32 bit causes the compiler to error.  For some reason I thought the following might work:  enum MY_ENUM : unsigned __int64   {       LARGE_VALUE = 0x1000000000000000,   }; Find the equation of the plane knowing that it passes through 3 points How can I start a process over SSH such that it will continue to run after I disconnect? Is it possible to load some package from a .sty file only if some option is selected?  (Naive approach \DeclareOption{something}{\RequirePackage{something}} doesn't work.) Rigid body simulation not interacting with objects that have an array modifier polyglossia or bidi bug: [\d\.] gets inverted to [\.\d] After bidi was updated to v. 19.6 (2016-05-23), using at least one RTL language with polyglossia leads to number and following dot being inverted. Cf.  \documentclass{book} \usepackage{polyglossia} \setotherlanguage{hebrew} \begin{document} 6. \end{document}   with and without \setotherlanguage{hebrew}. Note that it is not necessary to actually use that language.  I do not know whether this is a bug in bidi or an incompatible change which polyglossia needs to adapt to. Because of this I have not opened an issue on polyglossia's github page. Sadly, bidi's contact information are outdated – the sourceforge referred to on CTAN is unused and the github page that is mentioned in the package's readme and PDF does not seem to exist any more either.  The problem might be something along the lines of     Does anybody have the previous version of bidi at hand?  TIA, Dario Prove that the expression cannot be a power of 2