This post has two parts: (a) a question and (b) a proposal.   (a) Often, particularly while writing technical papers or user's manuals, I have come across a situation where I need to say:      A user of this software may not need to use it from his personal computer. He can use it from a phone or even from his tablet.   I have seen many authors use female pronouns (i.e. “she” and “her”), but lately this trend seems to have ebbed somewhat.   I, and (I suspect) many other authors, do not want to use passive voice to avoid this.   Is there a gender-neutral way to describe the same situation?   (b) If there is none, I would like to propose using “ze” (for “he” or “she”) and “zir” (for “his” or “her”, rhyming with “fir”) as gender-neutral pronouns. I want to know how you feel about these words.
I know that one can use "they" / "them" / "their" in place of "he" / "him" / "his" or "she" / "her" / "hers" when the subject's / direct object's gender is not known; for instance, just looking at the default user's about me section on Stack Exchange sites:     Apparently, this user prefers to keep an air of mystery about them   My question is what happens when someone wants to reference the subject using a pronoun instead.  Should the verb be conjugated accordingly to the pronoun? E.g.:     Apparently, they prefer to keep an air of mystery about them   Or should the conjugation be retained? E.g.:     Apparently, they prefers to keep an air of mystery about them   The former looks unclear because it wouldn't allow the reader / listener to understand if the writer / speaker is talking about a single person or about a group of people, however the latter sounds very weird, at least just to the non-native speaker which I am.
rent a car, rent out a car, hire a car How do I restore the sources.list file? I accidentally removed my /etc/apt/sources.list file. Is it hosted by Canonical somewhere so I can re-add it to the system? It's a bit of an emergency, so I hope someone can provide a quick answer. Flag apron shows superfluous closing anchor tag I awoke this morning to a spam flag on a site I moderate, and noticed this when I went to read the post.    Notice answered&lt;/a&gt;, which I imagine isn't meant to have the &lt;/a&gt; there.  I also confirmed that this displays asked&lt;/a&gt; for other types of flags (namely, closed without comment).   I looked around for a duplicate of this but can't seem to find it, so maybe it's a recent change? Why is SQL Server consuming more server memory? Why is there conservation of kinetic energy in elastic collision and not in inelastic collision? Why does the volume of the unit sphere go to zero? The volume of a $d$ dimensional hypersphere of radius $r$ is given by:  $$V(r,d)=\frac{(\pi r^2)^{d/2}}{\Gamma\left(\frac{d}{2}+1\right)}$$  What intrigues me about this, is that $V\to 0$ as $d\to\infty$ for any fixed $r$.  How can this be?  For fixed $r$, I would have thought adding a dimension would make the volume bigger, but apparently it does not.  Anyone got a good explanation? Are The Lazarus Effect and Dune in the same universe? There are similar aspects between Dune, and the technology in The Lazarus Effect.   Noticeable similarities:   Lasguns - this weapon exists in both of the books, and has similar architecture in both books.   Merman and Ixians - are both technologically sophisticated in similar ways. Rely on mechanical technology as opposed to organics or similar.   Is this merely Herbert sticking to his original style? Question on the correlation between two dependent variables I'm working on this question and it's stumping me.     Let $S_n = X_1 + \ldots + X_n$ (with $n&gt;=1$) be a random walk with $X_1, \ldots, X_n$ be iid RV's.   $$ E(X_k)=\mu,\,{\rm Var}(X_k)=\sigma^2.  $$   Find the covariance of $S_n$ and $S_m$   Can anyone help out? I am trying to use the equation: $${\rm Cov}[S_n, S_m] = E[S_nS_m] - E[S_n]E[S_m]$$  but can't quite figure it out. How to add a class to a given element? I have an element that already has a class: &lt;div class=&quot;someclass&quot;&gt;     &lt;img ... id=&quot;image1&quot; name=&quot;image1&quot; /&gt; &lt;/div&gt;  Now, I want to create a JavaScript function that will add a class to the div (not replace, but add). How can I do that? Retrieve Voice Memos from device? iOS seems to refuse to allow me to email "long" voice memos, and I'm unaware of any way to extract them from iTunes backups of my phone. How can I retrieve entire voice memos that aren't really short? Do I need visa for UK visit if I have a work permit for Ireland? How to make a HTML Page in A4 paper size page(s)? We can apply l’Hôpital’s Rule to the indeterminate quotients $ \dfrac{0}{0} $ and $ \dfrac{\infty}{\infty} $, but why can’t we directly apply it to the indeterminate difference $ \infty - \infty $ or to the indeterminate product $ 0 \cdot \infty $?  Furthermore, why can’t we call $ \infty + \infty $ and $ \infty \cdot \infty $ indeterminate forms?  I’m new to calculus, so please clear up my concepts if you can. Thanks! How many different/unique $4$-letter arrangements are there of the letters in the word Mississauga?  I'm thinking we need permutations? I already tried finding each letter and still don't get it... any help?   So far I've broken it off to:-  $M=1$  $I=2$  $S=4$  $A=2$  $U=1$  $G=1$  However, I don't really know what to do next. How can swapoff be that slow? Somehow I happened to swap out 14 GB of memory. After having killed the culprit, I have tons of free memory again, so I thought I could  again. So with 5 GB out of 32 GB used and 14 GB of swap space used, I ran swapoff -a.... and 4 hours later about half of the work was finished.  This means less that 1 MB/s, while I can easily copy 200 MB/s. My swap is encrypted but so are all normal partitions and with  it leads to no noticeable CPU load (and filling the swap space took only a few minutes). I see that there's no special reason to optimize swapoff, however I wonder how it could get that slow?    Just adding some more data: My main memory is 32 GB and I have 32 GB swap space on each of 4 harddisks (surely an overkill, but who cares?). The whole swap space can be  (decrypted and) read in less than 5 minutes:  time -p sudo sh -c 'for i in /dev/mapper/cryptswap?; do md5sum $i &amp; done; wait' 014a2b7ef300e11094134785e1d882af  /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 a6d8ef09203c1d8d459109ff93b6627c  /dev/mapper/cryptswap4 05aff81f8d276ddf07cf26619726a405  /dev/mapper/cryptswap3 e7f606449327b9a016e88d46049c0c9a  /dev/mapper/cryptswap2 real 264.27   Reading a part of a partition can't be slower than reading it all. Yet reading about 1/10th of it takes about 100 times longer.  I observed that during swapoff both the CPU was mostly idle (maybe 10% of one core) and so were the disks ("measured" by the LEDs). I also saw that the swap spaces were turned off one after the other. What is wrong with code snippets/blocks on Stack Overflow? I wasn't following Meta Stack Overflow too closely so maybe something was changed that I'm not aware of. But each time I paste a snippet from a Python console I'm getting wrong formatting. What I'm doing wrong? It seems that &gt;&gt;&gt; is confusing for Stack Overflow. I've tried to escape it with backslashes, and it was working fine in preview but doesn't work after the question is rendered.  I was able to observe that problem on: recent Chrome (Windows, Mac), Safari 4 (Mac).  Here is  I wasn't able to make right.  Funny, I think the snippets are rendered just fine on Meta Stack Overflow. Here is one:  &gt;&gt;&gt; def throw(): raise Exception()  ...  &gt;&gt;&gt; a=1 &gt;&gt;&gt; a=throw() Traceback (most recent call last):   File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;   File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in throw Exception &gt;&gt;&gt; a 1 What security systems and processes are in place to prevent malicious third parties from hacking/compromising the security of code in the Debian mirrors, or to verify that the packages we get are in fact the ones the maintainers think they are? koma-script/scrlayer-scrpage: How to get rid of the rulers at the page edge when enabling the draft class option? Is it possible to get rid of these rulers when enabling draft class option?  \RequirePackage{luatex85} \documentclass[draft]{scrreprt}  \usepackage{scrlayer-scrpage}  \usepackage[tuenc]{fontspec} \usepackage{graphicx,mwe}  \begin{document}  \begin{figure}[h]     \centering     \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{example-image} \end{figure}  \end{document} Is it possible to conditionally format a cell if the cell contains formula (to alert myself and other users when updating the cell)? Aligned equation which can break through pages I'm writing long sequences of aligned math equations, and LaTeX interprete them as single, unbreakable objects... which is Ok if the equation is nowhere near the end of the page.  Q: Is there a way to (automatically) break the align equation through pages?  In the code below,  \documentclass{report}                                                           \usepackage{amsmath}                                                             \usepackage{lipsum}                                                               \begin{document}                                                                 \lipsum[1-4]                                                                     \begin{align*}                                                                   FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF &amp;= \partial_t(p)\\                                                               &amp;= \partial_t(m v)\\                                                             &amp;= m a\\                                                                         &amp;= m \dot{v}\\                                                                   &amp;= m \ddot{x}\\                                                                  &amp;= \partial_t(p)\\                                                               &amp;= \partial_t(m v)\\                                                             &amp;= ma\\                                                                         &amp;= m \dot{v}\\                                                                   &amp;= m \ddot{x}                                                                  \end{align*}                                                                     \end{document}      all of the equation goes to the second page. I do not want that  If I break manually, by closing the align and open another, I lose the alignment with the previous part.   \documentclass{report}                                                           \usepackage{amsmath}                                                             \usepackage{lipsum}                                                               \begin{document}                                                                 \lipsum[1-4]                                                                     \begin{align*}                                                                   FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF &amp;= \partial_t(p)\\                                                               &amp;= \partial_t(m v)\\                                                             &amp;= m a\\                                                                         &amp;= m \dot{v}\\                                                                   &amp;= m \ddot{x}\\                                                                \end{align*}                                                                     \begin{align*}                                                                     &amp;= \partial_t(p)\\                                                               &amp;= \partial_t(m v)\\                                                             &amp;= m a\\                                                                         &amp;= m \dot{v}\\                                                                   &amp;= m \ddot{x}                                                                  \end{align*}                                                                     \end{document}   I do not want that either.  So far I read about breqn packages, but it seems not to do what I would like.  Any Suggestion?? Thx.