What are the fundamentals of a tennis forehand?

Question: What should one consider when making a forehand stroke in tennis, and what should you look to avoid?
Answer: What to do

Use a proper grip. People have different tastes, but the most common one these days is called the semi-western grip.
Make a unit turn (take back) with the help of the non-hitting hand; this will coil your upper body well.
Take a good "power position" with the racket head pointing up, while stretching the non-hitting hand to the side at the height of the shoulder. The extended non-hitting hand helps you measure the distance from the ball.
Create a nice and relaxed racket lag by flipping the racket. Now the grip end is leading the racket head and you swing the racket forward.
When your hitting arm reaches the contact point, which is a little ahead of your body, the racket head accelerates and overtakes the grip end by the centrifugal force to hit the ball.
Still using the centrifugal force, direct the racket head by the pronation of the forearm to make so-called "wiper action" just about the time you hit the ball.
Keep your head pointing to the contact point while you finish the swing by a nice follow-through.

Not to do

Use a wrong grip. The continental grip is now considered outdated because it is not suitable to create good topspin.
Non-hitting arm just dangling down while at the power position (take back). You may not able to coil your upper body well. The balance of the body may not be good. You may struggle to measure the distance of a ball.
Too much take back. Even at the power position, the racket should still be on the side of your hitting arm. Too much take back takes your time without actually accelerating the racket head speed.
Force the racket lag. It has to be achieved in a nice and effortless way. Otherwise, you might hurt your elbow.
Holding the grip tightly when swinging and hitting a ball. You need to relax the grip and the wrist to accelerate the racket head speed by the centrifugal force.
Force the wiper action by muscular strength. This might hurt your elbow.
Answer: According to optimumtennis.net, you should make sure you have proper positioning. Some other tips are to avoid a closed racket, holding your racket with a closed grip upon contact. You should also make sure that your swing angle is correct, from low to high. The other tips for a forehand stroke is to follow through, and transfer your weight.
Answer: What to do:

Stand next to the ball
Make sure you are in the right grip
Make sure you have both hands on the racket (right hand at the bottom if right-handed) then turn, let your let hand go and swing
Make sure you follow through
Get back in your ready positio before it bounces on the other side

Not to do:

Stand in front of the ball
Hit with both hands
Not follow through
Not get back in the ready position afterwards


What is the appeal of not Re-incarnating?

Question: I understand that after death, the mind may move to a different plane of existance to be re-incarnated, but what is the appeal of moving to a different plane after death? Is it wrong to say that I'm satisfied with where I'm currently at?
Answer: The Buddha clearly rebuked the idea of consciousness/mind that runs and wanders on [from birth to birth] in Mahatanhasankhaya Sutta (MN 38).

"Exactly so, lord. As I understand the Dhamma taught by the Blessed One, it is just this consciousness that runs and wanders on, not another."
"Which consciousness, Sāti, is that?"
"This speaker, this knower, lord, that is sensitive here & there to the ripening of good & evil actions."
"And to whom, worthless man, do you understand me to have taught the Dhamma like that? Haven't I, in many ways, said of dependently co-arisen consciousness, 'Apart from a requisite condition, there is no coming-into-play of consciousness'? But you, through your own poor grasp, not only slander us but also dig yourself up [by the root] and produce much demerit for yourself. That will lead to your long-term harm & suffering."

Birth(Jati) is caused by becomming (bhava).

"Ananda, if there were no kamma ripening in the sensuality-property, would sensuality-becoming be discerned?"
"No, lord."
"Thus kamma is the field, consciousness the seed, and craving the moisture. The consciousness of living beings hindered by ignorance & fettered by craving is established in/tuned to a lower property. Thus there is the production of renewed becoming in the future.

Bhava Sutta: Becoming (AN 3.76)
Comment: good answer. i guess you could say that a mind is recreated, tho?
Answer: what wrong with being satisfied with current situations is that current situations don't stay with way.  They deteriorate and will break apart with 100% certainty.
If there was no death, there would be no Buddhism.
Just to be clear, Buddhism is not about leaving current situation to be in a better one.
Answer: You may be satisfied with where you are currently at, but sooner or later you are going to want something better. That's human nature. You may not want to die, but it is going to come your way sooner or later. That's life, @tuskiomi.
But there is a deathless happiness out there if you are willing to work towards it. For that firstly you need to get skillful in how you go about things in the present moment. It calls for a different kind of skillset. The problem is that most people in the world don't have a correct idea about their skills. They just do not know of their latent skills that are helpful in realizing life. That is why you and I are satisfied just by living their lives eating, drinking, and enjoying.
It never occur to us to see into these latent talents that can be developed in this very life. It is not our fault that things are such. The French would say "Ce La Vie" – such as the way life goes. That is why we are still in a journey of been born, getting sick, getting old, and dying again and again (Samsara).
Answer: "but what is the appeal of moving to a different plane after death?"
Reincarnation has a forced nature due to Twelve Nidanas.
I would recommend looking at the Tibetan Book of the Dead for further anecdotal information on how we are drawn to reincarnating into certain destinies and then get sucked into that life (pre-birth).
Buddhism has as its purpose to stop this forced birth-and-death and control the process like a Tibetan lama, Enlightened master, or bodhisattva is able to, going where he is most needed in the universe, not where his karma (attachments/fears) compels him.
"Is it wrong to say that I'm satisfied with where I'm currently at?"
It isn't wrong but don't think that it is possible to stay in an existence forever. Even if you live 100 thousand years as a golden immortal (one of the immortals that is discussed in Surangama Sutra) stretching out your existence for as long as possible through various health regimen, eventually it will end and when you reflect back on that time spent as an immortal, it will feel like a flash of lightning...
Do what you came here to do and be ready to go.
This is why it is best to become a Buddha... the end result is this: dwell in your dharmakaya nature and emanate a new body where you are needed for as long as needed, for the highest good of all... at this point you have no attachment to staying or going.


VPN SetUp, orbot android, do I check all boxes?

Question: When setting up Orbot / Android version, to utilize it's beta VPN. It takes me to a screen with my Apps and more, each check box is not checked. Is this telling me to check any App that I want it to go thru Orbot VPN, and if so, should I check all boxes or just items that use the web?
Answer: I'd suggest using it for apps you want to use behind Tor, there are problems with picking random apps and sending them over Tor because many apps are very insecure and will, for example, send data in plaintext exposing them to risks from any potentially malicious exit nodes.
The best option is to pick privacy preserving apps, or apps that are designed to work with Tor, and use the VPN mode with them to help enforce Tor use.
But some apps seem to do things like use the WebView browser, which means that even if you pick the app itself to behind the VPN, using WebView seems to result in the connections originating from another app which may not use the VPN, resulting in leaks.
In cases like that, you could put everything behind VPN mode to better enforce Tor usage but it's not the best solution to the problem because two apps, which you are using for two different identities, might use the same circuit and accidentally link the two identities together. Further, some apps might take issue with connections from Tor and it could result in your account being locked or closed.
So, which to choose very much depends on your situation.

If you have apps that are designed to work with Tor/Orbot like Orfox or ChatSecure, then you should use the VPN with them only.
If you have apps that aren't then you might be best to VPN everything but that comes with the potential issues I've summarized above.


Is the day-of-week variance in COVID-19 case numbers a well-established phenomenon?

Question: Right now (April 27), the JHU data on new COVID-19 cases in the US show a very distinct weekly rhythm; reports are lowest on the weekends and peak in mid-week. This isn't at all surprising — any number of social factors would contribute to lower reporting on weekends — but the fact that it's not flat across mid-week is a little surprising to me, and I've seen too many people (albeit few experts) taking weekend dips as signs that things are on the downswing.  Has this variance been studied in other medical reporting and is it worth compensating for or smoothing in situations like this where decisions are (rightly or wrongly) sometimes being made on a literal day-by-day basis?
Comment: It also needs a link.  Testing rates drop off in the weekend here and it may do elsewhere as well.
Comment: There's probably too much geographic variance in these reporting trends to easily account for it. It's a good question, though.
Comment: I think the CDC aggregates data weekly (e.g. fluNet) for a reason, probably something like that https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/questions/23275/what-is-the-delay-in-ilinet-case-reporting (Also the WH recommendations for reopening involve a two weeks window [of the same data].) I'm not sure [from your q] who decides on a day-by-day basis and what. EuroMOMO also aggregates weekly (they report all deaths, not covid).
Comment: @GrahamChiu When you say 'needs a link', can you be more specific?
Comment: A link to your claims.  We can't be expected to google your claims.
Comment: I too noticed these peaking in daily reported cases and in death cases. It is on all continents, all countries, some more pronounced then others. I am offering some of my reputation points as I want the question to be elevated.
Answer: Seasonal and cyclical effects have been studied prior to COVID-19, including day-of-week influences on Emergency Department visit volume.
For example, in a study of emergency departments in Western New York:

"The final ARMA (2,0) model indicated an autoregressive structure with
  up to a 2-day lag. ED volume is lower on weekends than on weekdays,
  and the highest volumes are on Mondays. Summer and fall seasons
  demonstrated higher volumes, whereas lower volume outliers were
  associated with holidays."

Source:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297746060_Medical_Mondays_ED_Utilization_for_Medicaid_Recipients_Depends_on_the_Day_of_the_Week_Season_and_Holidays
Factoring this effect is likely important to understanding the baseline expected volume, and its cyclicity.  Other methods include looking at visit volume for plausibly UN-related reasons, eg diarrheal illness, to understand a baseline cycle in ER visits even during a pandemic when care-seeking behavior may change from original cycles.
Comment: +1 Interesting that the highest volume on Monday (for ER) seems to jibe with the finding from the ILI paper I found.
Answer: I haven't seen a lot of research on these intra-weekly (reporting) trends on anything health-related, but there is one paper on such trend on ILI reporting, alas just in the military:

In this report, we describe and analyze a periodic pattern in influenza-like illness within active military populations, derived from the Defense Medical Surveillance System data set. We find that there is a well-defined pattern with peak incidence on Monday, decaying to Friday, and remaining roughly constant over the weekend. Moreover, we find that the pattern systematically changes in response to public holidays. We quantitatively describe the effect of this modulation, and show how these results may be used to detrend military and, by extension, civilian data sets. As medical data streams become more timely, these results may be used to infer near-real-time daily estimates of influenza-like illness incidence, which may form the basis of a forecasting tool for imminent outbreaks.

Note that this is a very large data set (n > 1 million observations.)

A power spectrum of incidence measurements quantifies how the variance in the data is distributed over the frequency components into which that data can be decomposed. In other words, it is a measure of the energy per unit time falling within different frequency bins. For our purposes, it indicates where periodicities in the data may be found. The Nyquist frequency corresponds to 1/2 t, which because the data are daily averages, corresponds to 0.5 day−1. The four major peaks, which are marked by the dashed lines, correspond to periods of 1 year, 7 days, 3.5 days, and 2.33 days. The latter two frequencies are merely harmonics of the fundamental 7-day period.

So a weekly [reporting] pattern (for Covid-19) doesn't seem so unusual in this perspective.
The paper is a bit more complicated than this as they looked at the intra-week patterns for two different definitions of ILI. For the more strict definition, the was less intra-week variation.
They have some conclusions based on that:

It is also important to acknowledge that these data reflect attendance at the clinic and not onset of symptoms. It is unlikely that onset data would display any strong intra-weekly variations, although a modest modulation may be possible because of behavioral changes during a typical week. [...]
Our results illustrate that the renormalization kernel is data set specific. [...] because of the notable difference in the kernels on Sundays, we suggest that the disease too plays a role. The subset of ILI-large cases that we also identified as ILI-small represents a group who were displaying more severe respiratory problems. Therefore, it is likely that these individuals could not wait until Monday before seeing a medical professional. Moreover, with an average latency period of approximately 1.6 days, patients with influenza who became infected on Thursday or Friday would not recognize their symptoms as severe for another day, forcing them to seek treatment on Sunday.


Can I vent a bathroom fan through an attic window?

Question: Would venting a bathroom exhaust fan into the attic and through the attic window cause any problems?  I was thinking this would prevent cutting a hole in the roof or the soffit.  My thought was to insert the vent through a pane of glass.    The window is old and that attic is large(it could actually be a room).  Also, should the windows in an attic be well air tight?
Answer: This could be an option, as long as a few conditions are met.
There should be a damper
A damper will prevent outside air from entering the exhaust pipe, traveling down the length and entering the conditioned space. Most exhaust vent covers are designed in such a way, so that even on windy days the exhaust can still be exhausted.  If you just have a pipe pointing to the outside, it's possible the outside air pressure can overcome the exhaust air pressure preventing the exhaust from exhausting.
There shouldn't be a way for the exhaust to reenter the building
If you simply close the window on a pipe that does not completely fill the opening, it's very likely that air pressure differences will force the exhausted air right back in the window.  You'll want to devise a way to prevent the exhausted air from reentering the building. This other answer illustrates a way to install the vent, while blocking the entire window opening.
Comment: With the use of a damper this sounds like a possible solution.  Additional recommendations are also appreciated.  I didn't realize how tricky venting through the attic could be!


Is there any armed opposition within North Korea?

Question: North Korea has tight control on the civilian population and frequently executes political dissidents. It appears like it would be difficult to assemble and arm an opposition to the current regime due to the tight government control. Is there an armed opposition within North Korea that could be supported by an International coalition? If not is it possible to assemble one?
Comment: Isn't one based in Seoul?
Comment: If there were  (or was, it could have been active only for a part of the last 60 years), how should we have known ?  It is not like there are UN observers in every coffee place.
Comment: Even if there were an opposition, what could they be armed with, kitchen knives?
Answer: There have been some reports of organized resistance against the North-Korean regime, such as pamphlets being spread and black markets in goods and information. There also are some people who are trying to organize such movements from outside North-Korea. Of course, none of this is the same as "armed opposition", but this seems to be the entire extent of domestic organized opposition against the regime.
It's possible but unlikely that a significant armed rebellion escaped Western attention. North-Korea is secretive, but an armed rebellion is not easy to keep secret. There is (and always has been) a steady stream of North-Korean defectors providing information, tourism in North-Korea is also a thing, and many observers from South-Korea as well as the rest of the world are closely watching the country. An armed rebellion would not be easy to hide.

The big question is of course "why not?", and that seems to be a bit difficult to answer conclusively. It's not like there are polls we can reference for this ;-)
Opinions on this subject seem a bit divided, but the most common reasons given are (sources: 1 2 3, as well as many more):

repression due to an extremely oppressive and brutal police state;
harsh living conditions and social engineering which prevents a middle class-like population from arising which can organize opposition;
pervasive propaganda.

Note that recently some people have claimed that the North-Korean regime is crumbling, see the "black markets" link at the top. Time will tell if they're correct, but thus far the North-Korean regime has been remarkably effective at preventing any significant domestic opposition.
Answer: Yes, the N Korea Military in some real ways opposes the Communist Party apparatus.
According to A Study on the Party-Military Relations of the Kim Jong-Un Regime, a report commissioned by the S Korean government:

North Korean armed forces may demand for a military-centric government or reshape the current political order if the Kim Jong Un regime is unable to tackle the country's failing economy, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reported, citing a Seoul-commissioned report. Pyongyang has been hit with international sanctions following its nuclear and missile tests in January and February, leading to its crippling economy.


Replacing my chain

Question: My chain broke recently.  I fixed it by taking out a link with a chain break tool.  Now the it slips when I am in my smallest gear on the cassette.  I cannot find the stiff link in my chain and think I should replace it.  What type of chain do I have to use.  One designed for Shimano?  Attached is a picture of my cassette if that helps determine what type of chain I need.
Comment: The main thing you have to match is the chain width, which is determined by the number of rear cogs -- the more cogs, the narrower the chain.
Answer: 8 speed cassette
You need an 8 speed chain
7/8 is the same size

Replacing my chain


Why are remixes made? How are the decisions made about how to remix a song?

Question: As good as they sound, and as much we all love to hear them, I have been wondering why are remix songs made?  How do you know that making a certain song's remix will boost its popularity? What things are kept in mind when you remix songs?
Comment: Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't... you should be more specific.
Comment: More specific about the songs you are talking about... as I said, sometimes a remix boosts a song popularity, sometimes it doesn't.
Comment: Why are original songs made? Same reasons - artistic expression and money.
Answer: Yes it does boost a song popularity most times, artist/record labels do to give their songs an appeal to a wider audience.
It became popular from the 80s, as major artist and record labels began to see value in commissioning remixes of their music.
According to an article from Computer Music, Oct 2017. It list 6 types of remix.

Official remix
The bootleg
The mash-up
The VIP remix
The radio/club edit
The re-edit

https://www.musicradar.com/how-to/6-types-of-remix-explained
A typical example is from the list of mixes : Radio/club edit - usually for singles to appeal different markets and audiences.

The Daft Punk & Pharrell Williams smash Get Lucky is a great example - cutting down the full mix to a more focused four-minute radio edit distilled the very best sections of the song into a masterpiece that you couldn't get away from back in 2013.

A few times remixing has also led to alienating a fan base, e.g Rapper Wale's last album, Shine, which had so many dance hall remixes that the sounds were not widely accepted.
Comment: A typical example is from the list of mixes :
Radio/club edit - usually for singles to appeal different markets and audiences.
"The Daft Punk & Pharrell Williams smash Get Lucky is a great example - cutting down the full mix to a more focused four-minute radio edit distilled the very best sections of the song into a masterpiece that you couldn't get away from back in 2013."

A few times could lead to alienating fan base e.g
Rapper Wale last album: Shine had so much dance hall remixes and the sounds were not widely accepted.
Answer: Remixing is a way to drive additional sales, and gain a new audience for an already recorded song, usually by adding some element that is "missing" in the original.  There are several different types of remixes, and they have different purposes and audiences.

Dance remix - These are some of the most common and popular remixes.  Typically a pop artist will release a "club" mix that is longer and has a more typical dance club beat, so that their record will be played in dance clubs.  These remixes won't typically be played on radio, or bought by casual fans, but they can be very popular among DJs.  Madonna is an example of a pop star who maintains a large alternate audience with her frequent club remixes.
Forgotten songs - A remix can be a way to popularize an unknown song. For instance, Simon and Garfunkel only became famous after their producer remixed their first hit, "Sounds of Silence." Similarly, the song "Brimful of Asha" was only a hit after being remixed by Fatboy Slim.  A remix can also bring an old song new relevance, as in the hit 1993 remix of the old Four Seasons' "Oh What a Night" or "A Little More Conversation." by Elvis vs JXL.  Typically this kind of remix adds more current beats and production aspects.  There are even entire albums released this way --Bob Marley are Nina Simone are some of the more notable figures whose estates have released posthumous remix albums.
New Artist or Genre - A remix sometimes adds a new artist or even changes the genre of a song to reach new audiences.  Depacito and the Macarena were Spanish-language songs that became hits in the English-speaking world on the back of remixes with English-speaking artists, while Mariah Carey's Fantasy ft ODB gained the pop songstress a whole new audience, and launched an enduring crossover subgenre.
Just Having Fun - Some artists just like remixes, and offer their music up to be remixed in order to produce fun new versions of a song.  The Gorillaz and the Shins have released entire alternate versions of their albums with all remixed versions.  Remixes like this are also popular "bonus" items to drive the sales of singles.  If you wanted to be cynical, you could call this a way to wring every possible bit of profit out of your original work.
If That Was My Song - Sometimes remixes are produced by unknown producers looking to make a name for themselves by creating their own versions of hit songs.  This is especially common in hip-hop, where rappers will sometimes issue acapella versions of their songs, essentially as an open invitation to remixers.  Superstar producer Danger Mouse initially became famous this way, remixing Jay-Z's Black Album using samples from the Beatles' White Album to produce the Grey Album.
But Wait, There's More - Sometimes an artist isn't done with a song or concept and will remix it himself or herself.  R Kelly's "Remix to Ignition" was one of his biggest hits, far eclipsing the original song, while Wyclef Jean's "Cheated" single included "remixes" that were essentially completely new songs.
Comment: I just have to add to 2. Forgotten songs - Pet shop Boys cover of Elvis 'Always on my Mind' 1987 - a UK Christmas number 1 to boot!


Within the same calendar year: Current job does not offer a 401k. So I contributed to an IRA. Future job does. Can I still contribute to the new 401k?

Question: Current job does not offer a 401k account. So I contributed yearly maximum to a Traditional IRA. My new job does offer a 401k plan. Can I still contribute to the new 401k for the year?
Answer: You can always contribute to the 401(k) if allowed by the plan. The amount you can contribute to 401(k) is not affected by IRA contributions.
However, contributing to 401(k) for a given year may make Traditional IRA contributions for that year not deductible. If you contribute to a 401(k) in a given year, you count as being covered by an employer plan, which means you cannot deduct Traditional IRA contributions that year unless your income is below a certain level. (If neither your nor your spouse was covered by an employer plan, there is no income limit to deducting Traditional IRA contributions.)
So for example, if you have already made Traditional IRA contributions under year 2018 (which is unlikely, since most people wait until close to the last minute, which is April of the following year, to make IRA contributions, so most people would be still contributing to 2017; but it's possible that you decided to contribute very early), and you later contribute to 401(k) in 2018, and your income is above the income limit for deducting Traditional IRA contributions when you are covered by an employer plan, then you can no longer deduct those Traditional IRA contributions that you made under year 2018. (In that case, you could take out the contribution plus earnings by the tax filing deadline for 2018 and it would count as if you didn't contribute. Or you could recharacterize it to a Roth IRA contribution (if your income is eligible to contribute) or convert it to a Roth IRA.)
Comment: Define "very low".  According to https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/2017-ira-deduction-limits-effect-of-modified-agi-on-deduction-if-you-are-covered-by-a-retirement-plan-at-work the phase-out starts at $99K for Married Filing Joint, which is the 74th percentile for household income.  https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator-2016/
Comment: @RonJohn: Okay I linked to your link. Though people with 401ks usually have higher income. Also, if their income was that low, it would usually be better to contribute to Roth instead of Traditional anyway, but that is another topic.
Comment: @user102008 it may end up having that effect anyway if they are above income limits.  Even if not, they can characterize the IRA as a non-deductible IRA and then covert it to a Roth - the old Back Door Roth works at any income level.
Answer: I'm assuming you're eligible for a Traditional IRA deduction if you don't have a 401(k), but ineligible if you do. What matters is if your W-2 from any of your employers for that year has a check for 'Retirement plan' in Box 13. And what determines whether that box is checked or not for a 401(k) is not merely having access to one, but if "any contributions or forfeitures were allocated to your account for the plan year ending with or within the tax year" (IRS source). So if for example, you start a new job at the very end of the year and don't have time to contribute much to your 401(k), it might make sense to purposely not contribute the rest of the year to keep your Traditional IRA deduction.
As user102008 mentioned, if you end up becoming ineligible for a Traditional IRA deduction, you can possibly recharacterize your contribution to Roth (assuming you're under the income limits). Otherwise, it will become a non-deductible Traditional IRA contribution.


Move Windows 7 installation to Mac Boot Camp

Question: I'm thinking about getting a Mac, and wondering about my options for transferring my current Windows installation to a Boot Camp partition.
Are there any tools that will allow me to accomplish this?
Answer: I'm not aware of any good tool that does a physical-to-physical transfer like that. It can definitely be hacked to work, but it's technically pretty gory.
VMware Fusion and Parallels both have physical-to-virtual transfer tools. I have used the VMware one and it worked well. Unless you've got very custom peripherals you need to keep using (VMware supports USB 2.0 passthrough - nobody supports 1394), the power of either of those virtualization products may be enough, and you might not need Bootcamp.
Bootcamp is great if you need to make the absolute most of the Mac's hardware (gaming, video transcoding, etc) or keep using peripherals - but it's a nuisance in that you have to shut down one OS and reboot to the other to use it. My 2007 iMac no longer supports Bootcamp as of Snow Leopard/Win7 - while I was initially disappointed, the DirectX support of Fusion meant that I didn't really lose anything.
Answer: It's probably worth reinstalling as all of your drivers on your current machine will be left installed when they are not needed. From my experience I have reverted to XP on my mac to save battery life and once installed through boot camp I run using Parallels Desktop to run the same boot virtually.
Also, once you have installed your boot camp you can put the Mac OS X disc which comes with your mac in to install all the windows drivers you'll need.
Trying to hack a previous install onto your mac will only waste time and probably will run a lot slower than a fresh install. Saying that if you have a VM of windows 7 and wish to only run virtually this can be (obviously) done very quickly.


"Remember me" login functionality

Question: Is there any research available about the viability and use of "Remember Me" toggles/check boxes on login flows? I can't seem to find any information on whether or not they're used or not.
Comment: What do you mean by "viability" in this case? Are you looking for how people trust such a feature, how often they use it, or something different?
Answer: I did a super-informal hallway study about a week ago. So, obviously not something to cite, but may give you some ideas for your own study.
I asked 10 people if they found the 'remember me' feature useful in the context of a secure mobile app (context is likely key here).
7 out of 10 said they rarely use it namely because they forget to check it before they log in most of the time.
5 out of 10 said that when they need to remember a login, they use 3rd party password management software to handle it for them (like 1Password or the web browser itself).
My personal opinion: They don't hurt, but likely don't help as much as we think they do. I personally fall into that group of 7 in that I usually time in my credentials, hit submit, THEN see the 'remember me' checkbox too late.
Comment: _"They don't hurt, but likely don't help as much as we think they do."_ - That is a very good synopsis. I personally do not implement it on my websites, because people often use their web browers to remember their login credentials anyway.
Answer: I couldn't find any paper written on this subject. Perhaps you could start by looking at the following websites:
http://usabilitypost.com/2009/10/05/remember-me
http://www.siteflex.com.au/blog/n/remember-me-remember-me-not-140407
http://www.foresee.com/usability-perspective-5-financial-services-login-tips-better-customer-experience/
Remember Me in an enterprise application: What to remember?
Do we really need a "Remember me" option on a Login page?
http://www.sitepoint.com/3-rules-painless-account-ux-login-screens/
Good luck,
Antonio
Comment: Thanks. May consider that this answer would be more useful if it included a meta-analysis of the links provided.

"Remember me" login functionality


Microphone Evaluation Sessions

Question: I'm preparing for a mic shootout at a local store as I consider which one to buy. Besides bringing one reference mic of my own and my own recorder, I'm also planning on preparing a few spoken phrases and bringing a handful of props to test things like transient handling and frequency response: Finger cymbals, keyring with keys, small drum (open bottom). Is there anything specific that YOU'D bring to such a session to test-drive small-condenser mics for purchase?
Comment: If it were me, I'd just buy the CMIT 5 and call it a day :)
Answer: Dear Nathan,
Hey!
I've done many of these:
I've tested them on:
Glass bottle with a stick.
A small chain.
Crumpling up a newspaper or plastic bag, or even a small chip bag.
I'd also be ready to take them outside to see how their overall noise rejection sounds.
I'd also speak into the back of each of the mics to see how much coloration happens to the off-axis pickup.
I'd also bring a sibilance script - like "Sally sold sea-shells at the sea shore" to get an idea as to how sibilant or smooth it is relatively.
But, ultimately, I'd just play around with it and walk around and see how it sounds in the headphones and see what you think of it - it's weight, it's size, it's directionality. Just see how it reacts at different distances to the source and off-axis and choose what sounds the best to you!
Just some ideas.
Good luck!
Answer: Wine glasses. A simple hit/ting sound can give lots of information regarding the tone, clarity and transient handling. Plus you can also fill the glasses with water to get different pitches. And if you fancy, either have wine or break the glasses (as the final test) after all the tests are carried out.
Answer: transient response - a loud bell, and a loud non-resonant piece of wood or metal
axis response - a rain stick.  start on axis and move off while the beads flow.  good approximation of white noise.
other - a balloon.  lots of frequency expressions possible that could reveal interesting characteristics.
Generally I'd really just roll with your voice though.  speaking, whispering, etc.
Answer: i don't know what size the drum you're going to bring is, but you might want to bring something that will generate some low-end frequencies. maybe an empty water cooler jug?
Answer: Rubber bands are a favourite of mine when playing with friends' toys, especially stereo mics.  The big, fat, blue ones.  Stretch one out and pluck it against your chin, high-end snap + low end res.

Microphone Evaluation Sessions


How to interpret a regression coefficient for the reciprocal of an independent variable?

Question: Does anyone know how to interpret a coefficient when the variable in the model is the reciprocal of the original variable? I have an inverse equation, where $\text{time} = \beta_0 + \beta_1(1/\text{horsepower})$, where $\text{time}$ is how long it takes to accelerate a car. I need to hypothesize the sign of the variable $\text{horsepower}$. But to do that, I need to understand what it means.
Comment: I assume you want to know how long it takes to accelerate to a given speed?
Answer: The interpretation of a beta is the same whether the variable is in its original form or a reciprocal.  Specifically, holding all else equal, a one unit change in the variable (in whatever form it has been entered into the model), will correspond to $\beta_1$ units change in the response.
What you need to understand is the meaning of $1/\text{horsepower}$.  I'm not sure what the substantive meaning of this is for the potential acceleration of a car, but to the extent that more horsepower enables a car to accelerate faster, more horsepower means a smaller reciprocal horsepower, so the sign of $\beta_1$ would be negative.
Answer: When fitting a nonlinear relationship it is often better to create a plot showing the predicted relationship and interpret the plot than to try to interpret the slope directly (in this case it is not too hard, but the plot will probably still be more meaningful).
Choose a sequence of horsepower values within the meaningful range of the variable (and the range of the actual data you have), then find the predicted times for each based on the fitted model.  Now plot those values and interpret the plot, what happens with time as horsepower increases?


Exclude certain AD people in sharepoint 2010 search

Question: How can I exclude people from a Sharepoint 2010 search based on an AD group that they are a member of?  Can this be done?
Answer: As far as I can think, you would need to create a new profile field, which is populated from the AD sync. This would be their "Group". You can then filter the search with scopes.
There is as far as I know, no direct way of achieving this.


Why am I getting a question ban?

Question: I have only asked 2 or 3 questions and got a ban without that warning. Is my status on other SE sites causing me to have a premature question ban here?
Comment: The answer [Here](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/309098/will-asking-a-really-good-question-get-you-more-chances-to-ask-more-questions) is some really good advice
Comment: It might be rate limiting, not a full question ban. What message do you get?
Comment: @BenN No longer accepting questions from this account.
Answer: You have asked a total of 10 questions on Super User, 8 of which have been closed and/or deleted.
Your deleted questions, from newest to oldest:

Can you see me? [closed]
Does SE have a webmaster? [closed]
What is the best way to change my IP? [closed]
Long distance with VR? [closed]
Laptop Supercomputer via bluetooth/Wifi?
PlayStation Super Computer
Add a video button like a picture button. Not a screen shot, but clip shot [closed]
How do I GIF a video clip easily? [duplicate]

I don't really see any way to salvage any of the latest ones to make them worth undeleting as they are almost completely off-topic here.
The only thing you can do is to read Why are questions no longer being accepted from my account? and follow the advice there.  You might be able to improve your latest question in order to get people to upvote it, which could help.
Comment: @Muze They are **bad** questions that are off-topic. They cannot be undeleted without making them entirely different questions. From the help page I linked: `At Stack Exchange, asking questions is a privilege, not a right.`
Comment: Ninja'd ..... :)
Comment: @DavidPostill  Can they be undeleted so I can improve on them? If they count why delete?
Answer: I have only asked 2 or 3 questions
You have asked 10 questions.

Is my status on other SE sites causing me to have a premature question ban here?
No. Your status on other SE sites makes no difference to your status on SuperUser.

On SuperUser you have asked 10 questions.
Those 10 questions have a total of 18 downvotes. Only 1 question has an upvote.
8 of those downvoted questions have been closed and deleted.

Please read Why are questions no longer being accepted from my account?
Answer: Reading your deleted questions you have the creativity of Wile E Coyote, but you don't appear to have done ANY of the homework necessary to begin to turn those crazy and creative ideas into good questions.
First, I suggest you read the Help section to learn the few rules that govern this place and the many suggestions for how to write good questions that will attract good feedback and good answers.
Second, read the questions that are NOT deleted from the site (it's easy right now: all you should be able to see are the questions that aren't deleted). Note what many of them do, especially the ones that have attracted upvotes: The writer has a problem with their basically normal computer, does some research and tries fixing things themselves a bit, but have come upon some point or issue they cannot figure out themselves. They communicate all this or are guided through doing so, and then answers usually come.
Now look at your question history: You hear about some cool idea that tickles your fancy, usually involving parallel computing or slaving gaming systems into advanced parallel processing systems. You don't realize that these systems have been engineered by people with depths of study and experience and expertise in their fields, and instead your questions communicate that you think this is a relatively simple sort of setup others have done frequently (when it isn't) and that there are plenty of us going around with PlayStation super-computers in our bedrooms and willing to share that knowledge with you in spite of your showing no real effort to gain that knowledge yourself.
You see a cool toy and you appear to think SuperUser is the place to get that cool toy.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what SuperUser is, and questions asked in that misunderstanding stand a high likelihood, as you have experienced, of being downvoted and closed, and their askers finding themselves with bans.
Comment: I didn't hear of some idea they are all mine

Why am I getting a question ban?


Is the root user on juniper switches useful?

Question: On juniper switches is something like root user. Are there any things that must be done from that user?
For what root user can be usefull? Or isn't  usefull, and can be safetly disabled?
Answer: Ryan is correct, you can do absolutely anything from root.  JUNOS is built on FreeBSD and inherits that behavior.  But to be honest, it's rarely used directly.
The biggest practical example I can think of offhand would be to collect core files from devices without another type of authentication, whether its due to a configuration issue or maybe you have redundant routing engines or a virtual chassis setup.  Non-master members don't authenticate with the network, so should you need to get into a member device to collect files, you could use root access in the shell to get those files.
When you first start up any Juniper device, you CANNOT commit your first configuration without root-authentication set, so you are forced to have a root password set.  I guess you could think of it as a failsafe, should everything break.
However, you can disable your users from starting a shell with root privileges with login classes.
https://www.juniper.net/techpubs/software/junos-es/junos-es93/junos-es-admin-guide/login-classes.html
There are a couple of ways to do it, but one example would be:
set system login class class_name deny-commands "(^start shell$)"
Another:
set system login class class_name permissions permission_bits_to_set
If you EXCLUDE "maintenance" as a permission bit, they will not be able to become the superuser (root).
Comment: In a day to day practical way that would require the user to get into a root shell, not really.  A large variety of the JUNOS commands may interact with root level permissions under the hood via the CLI, but the permissions per user stay intact.  The root user also manages the kernel and all major processes like RPD (routing protocol daemon).  You cannot, completely disable the root user, you just need to disable the ACCESS to it from other users.
Comment: i know what is root :-). But - in linux - there are things that must be done from root(uid==0) and it's impossible or very hard give regular user rights to do them. Question is - if there are things that must be done from root in junos - aftere initial startup. collecting core files is good example - are there other things like it where root user is useful?
Answer: The root user for any *nix platform is capable of performing any functions on the system they want - and I mean anything.  I'd suggest you look into a wiki article on this as it is a little beyond the scope of this SE.
It is good practice to disable root access to your juniper devices.  Most environments disable it in a few different ways.

blank out the root password
disable ssh root-login
disable root-login tampering on user-accounts
Comment: I think the question is really, "Is there anything that has to be done from root?"
Comment: yes. I want to know if there are any disadvantages of disable of root account. Or - there aren't any disadvantages, so disabling is the best solution - and after disabling i'll never have any need of restoring it.
Answer: There are a couple of things that you may require root access for from time-to-time - an example that comes to mind is that if you attach a USB storage device and need to mount it to copy files off, you will need root privelige to execute the mount_msdosfs command.
As others have suggested - the best method of dealing with the root account is the way good SysAdmins would - disable all remote access to root, limit access to shell via RBAC and login roles, and then only when absolutely necessary, use su from shell to elevate an authorised account.
Answer: To complete previous answers, I will point out two practical scenarios where I have to access as root to JunOS recently.

Collecting log items from multiple members in a Virtual Chassis. You have to access the shell to tar /var/log foldeer.
Recovering a switch from a zombie status. A couple of EX4200 got stuck in "Loading JunOS" so I have to access the shell for some maintenance process.

As you can see, this is not usual but sometimes you will need this shell access.


How to run python script on startup with sudo permission on Mac OS

Question: I have created a script with python that basically ping all servers found in my lists. I need this script to be run on startup with sudo permission.
So the question is, How do you run the script on startup with sudo permission
Answer: Check this: Creating Launch Daemons and Agents. These could be done with root privileges (launchd runs as root).
What I do is to put such scripts in /Library/StartupItems; check this: Startup Items. These are run by root authority (see Startup Item Permissions at the bottom). This however, is the old way to do such things. Still works in Lion, though.


Difference between l2 norm and L2 norm

Question: What is the difference between the $l^2$ norm and the $L^2$ norm.  I can not find a definitive reference.  Wikipedia uses them interchangeably.
Comment: Usually $\ell^2$ can be thought of as the discrete version $L^2$: $\ell^2$ is the norm for sequences, whereas $L^2$ is the norm for functions on the real line.
Comment: @S.B.'s comment is correct and should get turned into an answer.
Comment: Although you should consider that they might be think as similar thinks sometimes. You can find a mapping for functions to sequences. For example, a Fourier series of a function (and the sequence of its coefficients).
Answer: Both norms are similar in that they are induced by the scalar product of the respective Hilbert space, but they differ because the different spaces are endowed with different inner products:

For $\mathbb{R}^N$, the Euclidean norm of $v = (v_1,\dots,v_N)^T\in \mathbb{R}^N$ is defined by
$$\|v\|_{2}^2 = (v,v)_{2} = \sum_{i=1}^N v_i^2.$$
For $\ell^2$ (the space of real sequences for which the following norm is finite), the norm of $v = \{v_i\}_{i\in\mathbb{N}} \in \ell^2$ is defined by
$$\|v\|_{\ell^2}^2 = (v,v)_{\ell^2} = \sum_{i=1}^\infty v_i^2.$$
For $L^2(\Omega)$ (the space of Lebesgue measurable functions on a bounded domain $\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^d$ for which the following norm is finite), the norm of $u\in L^2(\Omega)$ is defined by
$$\|u\|_{L^2}^2 = (u,u)_{L^2} = \int_\Omega u(x)^2\,dx.$$

All this is standard, can be found in any introductory textbook on functional analysis, and is probably already known to you. Since the question is tagged error-estimation, you are likely interested in the practical difference in using one or the other, for example for finite element discretization. Let's say you have a finite-dimensional subspace $V_h\subset L^2(\Omega)$ which is the span of a finite number of basis functions $\{\varphi_1,\dots,\varphi_N\}$. Then any $u_h\in V_h$ can be written as
$$u_h = \sum_{i=1}^N u_i \varphi_i. \tag{1}$$
Since $V_h\subset L^2(\Omega)$, you can of course measure $u_h$ by the $L^2$ norm.
Alternatively, you can identify $u_h$ with the vector $\vec u:=(u_1,\dots,u_N)^T\in\mathbb{R}^N$ (sometimes called coordinate isomorphism) and measure $u_h$ by the Euclidean norm of $\vec u$.
How do the two ways of measuring $u_h$ compare? Plugging in the definition $(1)$ yields
$$ \|u_h\|_{L^2}^2 = (u_h,u_h)_{L^2} = \sum_{i=1}^N\sum_{j=1}^N u_iu_j \int_\Omega \varphi_i(x)\varphi_j(x)\,dx = \vec u^T M_h \vec u,$$
where $M_h\in \mathbb{R}^{N\times N}$ is the mass matrix with entries $M_{ij} = \int_\Omega \varphi_i(x)\varphi_j(x)\,dx$. By comparison, we have
$$ \|u_h\|_{\ell^2}^2 := \|\vec u\|_2^2 = \vec u^T \vec u.$$
Both norms are therefore equivalent, i.e., there exist constants $c_1,c_2>0$ such that
$$ c_1\|u_h\|_{\ell^2}\leq \|u_h\|_{L^2} \leq c_2 \|u\|_{\ell^2}\qquad\text{for all }u_h\in V_h.$$
So in principle, you could use both norms interchangeably -- if the error goes to zero in one norm, it also goes to zero in the other norm, and with the same rate.
However, note that while the constants $c_1$ and $c_2$ are independent of $u_h$, they do depend on $V_h$, and in particular on $N$. This is important if you want to compare discretization errors for different spaces $V_h$ with (say) $N_1<N_2$, in which case you should use a norm that does not itself depend on $N_1$ or $N_2$, i.e., the $L^2$ norm.
(You can see this by taking $u_h$ as the constant function $u_h=1$ and compare $\|u_h\|_{\ell^2}$ for different $N$ with $\|u_h\|_{L^2}$ -- the former scales as $\sqrt{N}$, while the latter has the same value for every $N$, since the mass matrix compensates for the scaling.)
There's also a third -- intermediate -- alternative, where the mass matrix is approximated by a diagonal matrix $D_h$ (e.g., by taking as diagonal elements of $D_h$ the sum of the corresponding row of $M_h$), and the norm is taken as $\|u_h\|_{D}^2:=\vec u^T D_h\vec u = \sum_{i=1}^N (D_h)_{ii} u_i^2$; this is usually referred to as mass lumping. This norm is also equivalent with both the $\ell^2$ and the $L^2$ norm -- and in this case, the constants $c_1$ and $c_2$ when comparing $L^2$ and mass lumping norm do not depend on $N$.
Answer: The 2-norm for sequences is denoted by $\ell^2$. For functions on the real line $L^2$ is the standard notation of the 2-norm.
Comment: I would suggest

- Erwin Kreyszig. Introductory Functional Analysis with Applications, Wiley.
Comment: Is there a definitive reference I can look at?
Comment: I don't know any specific reference, but I suppose you can find more about these definitions in standard real analysis textbooks.
Comment: @nicoguaro Thanks. That is what I was looking for.

Difference between l2 norm and L2 norm


Why does the D string in a guitar breaks so often?

Question: Well... that's about it. D strings (on acoustic nylon guitars at least) break way more often than the others.
I guess there's a physical explanation but I wasn't able to found anything on the Internet. Do you guys know why this happens?
Comment: Um, I don't think this is generally true.  It depends what you play, how you play, what kind of strings you have ... maybe you're just extra rough on your D string?
Comment: how about why does the `D` string never break, in the last 25 years I have never broken one and neither have anyone I know. **Causation does not equal Causality**
Comment: The most common string to break for me, before I learned to tune, was the E because I overtighten it. Once I got better at tuning, I started first grinding then popping the G string, but that was because I was swinging hard and using a brass pick which was sharpening against the strings, which is not a common case.

I only break the low E when there's a problem with the string manufacturer. Which can and does happen.

If the D string breaks often for you, talk to your repair guy.
Comment: I'm not sure, I've been playing for several years and know many amateur players and we all think this is common. Now I'm not so sure this is true :S
Comment: I think I've broken all strings before, with a bias to the higher (thinner) ones breaking more often.  Who knows, maybe *I'm* the weird one :P.
Comment: hehe, let's wait for a few more opinions or else we can just close this :P
Comment: Never broken a D in over 24 years gigging, only B and E.
Comment: Edit: Read the last answer. I'm talking about nylon strings. Does this change the panorama for you guys? Thanks
Comment: @ign - You might want to edit that into the question; some people never read the comments.
Comment: I've only ever broken my high E string
Answer: First, I agree with the question, when talking about nylon-stringed guitars - in nearly a half-century of playing classical and flamenco instruments, I find that the D string, the poor thing, breaking more frequently than any the others (other answers and comments are probably based on steel-stringed experience). I've asked luthiers, and even one of the D'Addario sons   :-) about this, and there are a number of causes (besides flaws in the guitar itself):

The D is a wrapped string, and more likely to break than a solid string
It has thinner wire than the other two bass strings
It is under the highest tension of the three bass strings
It gets more wear than the other three (think about melodies you've played on that string - it's the brass section of the guitar).

Of course, replacing your basses frequently will usually save you the embarrassment of changing strings on stage (I had to do it twice with a D string recently, because I botched the first stringing job - oh well). The goal is to keep them from breaking, until they finally "wear out" - the basses start to sound like rubber bands. So what can you do about that?

As I said, change the basses before one breaks. Besides the sound going bad, look for the finish wearing off. And here's a trick - if you take them off before they get really worn, you can put them back on again later, and they will not only sound great for a short while, but because they are "pre-stretched", they will settle in tune much more quickly. It's very helpful to have a "rested" set of basses like this to put on just before a gig (or, gulp, during one...).
Make sure that the loop at the bridge is as close as possible to the wood - look at the bass strings in the picture below, note how snug against the wood the loop is. Push it back and down with your nail as you tighten the new string. If you leave it floating half-way between the wood and the ivory, it is putting a lot of pressure on the middle of that short stretch of string, essentially trying to cut it in half. My D's would often break right there, until the luthier/engineer John Gilbert told me what's what.

If the D string still tends to break at that spot before it wears out - perhaps because of the construction of the bridge, or because you are using very high tension basses - you can do what I do on a particular instrument, and protect the D string with a very short piece of narrow rubber tubing that can cover the D between the wood and the ivory - the loop cuts into the rubber, but not the string. And where does one find such a thing? Why, strip the insulation off some wiring that's slightly thicker than your D!

Good luck, and may your bass strings always maintain their composure when you are playing for people...
Comment: This is also assuming it's always breaking at the string, could be up at the nut and the break angle of the D-string nut slot/tuning peg.  In my experience, most string breakage on my classical guitars are up at the nut, not always on the bridge.
Answer: IMO frequently broken strings indicate a mechanical problem. I never break strings and I haven'tt broken one for maybe 30 years.
Causes include:

Too-sharp edge on nut or saddle.
burr or sharp edge on a tuning post, or the hole though same.
Nut slots cut too wide (or maybe you installed lighter strings) allowing the string too much side-to-side movement.

etc, etc...
Of course, if you really flail away at the strings while strumming...
Comment: +1 this is pretty much what I would have answered, I also never break strings. Technique is a factor, however - poorly built/cheap guitars often have such problems out of the factory.
Answer: From m practice, This is definitely true for nylon strings and this happens because of structure of D-string. The first 3 (E,B,G) are solid, and next 3 (D,A,E) consist of thin nylon fibers wrapped around one more think string. For the D-string the number of fibers is much less then for A and E (because it needs to vibrate in certain range) and this makes it the weakest.
When I would buy strings, I'd always buy couple of spare D-strings...
Comment: @ign, it really depends on where the breakage occurs. If it's at the nut or bridge then I'd blame the guitar. If it's breaking in the middle then it might be the fiber thing (especially if it's the core that breaks, leaving the wrapper connected like a slinky). But if it's a total snap in the middle, I'd look for a rough fret.
Comment: OMG, thank you! Yeah, I'm talking also about nylon strings, I'm not sure if that was clear now :S
How does everybody think of this answer?
Answer: How often is "often"?  If you find that your D string is breaking a lot, there could be an issue with the guitar. Does it break near the tuning post? If so, there could be an issue with the nut slot.  If it is near the bridge, it could be something in that area - something sharp that is compromising the integrity of the string.
I think most guitarists would say the 1st and 2nd strings are the most common strings to break in the course of regular playing.
Comment: Notoriously more often than other strings. Like... _always_ the first string to bust. Maybe I change only that string and when I have the chance I re-string. Man, I thought this was _really_ common.
Answer: A couple of things could be at issue.
Since it's always the same string, my guess is that there's some tiny discontinuity at either the nut or the bridge (whereever it's breaking) where the string is snagging (unless it's a "locking" system, the string should slide freely). Fix: Whenever you change a string, take a pencil and scribble all over the path of the string (at the nut, bridge, and tuning post. NOT the fretboard or the top!). The graphite will work like a permanent lubricant.
Tuning issues. It may not seem relevant, but have you ever taken a steel spoon at school or camp and bent it back and forth until you can snap the head off? Little mistreatments of the strings can add up quickly.

Always tune up into the note. So if you're tuning the D string to a tempered fourth above the A string, tke it to a perfect fourth and nudge up for the temper. But to tune the low E to a tempered fourth below the A string, you need to scoop in from D# and stop short of perfect, obtaining the temper by "subtractive geometry".
Always tune to the same pitch standard. If your friends use A-440, use A-440. But if you also want to play regularly with your friend's A-435 piano, you really need a second guitar for that. The strings won't know where their "home" is.

One more thing. There could be something in the atmosphere that interacts badly with the metal of the string. Trying a different metal (bronze, steel, nickel) or a different alloy (the ratio of metals) might help.


What happens if an individual exceeds the maximum to be donated to a presidential candidate?

Question: For 2020, the maximum donation is $2800. What trouble will someone be in if they break that rule, either on accident or purposely?
Answer: They can be ordered to pay a civil penalty, fined, or imprisoned.
52 USC 30116 (a) (1) (A):

Except as provided in subsection (i) and section 30117 of this title, no person shall make contributions— to any candidate and his authorized political committees with respect to any election for Federal office which, in the aggregate, exceed $2,000;

(The amount adjusts for inflation and I believe this corresponds to the figure that is now $2800.)
Enforcement and penalties for violation are described in 52 USC 30109.

(a) (5) The FEC can try to encourage you to enter into a "conciliation agreement" which may include you paying a civil penalty equal to the amount of your illegal contribution, or, if your violation was "knowing and willful", 200% of the amount.
(a) (6) If they can't reach an agreement with you, they can sue you and ask a court to impose the civil penalty.
(d) (1) (A) For a knowing and willful violation, you can be fined or imprisoned for one year (if the amount is between $2,000 and $25,000), or for five years (if the amount is over $25,000)
Answer: The donor will not be "in trouble" (see below), the campaign would be if they accepted more than permitted.
In the past some campaigns have had to refund excessive individual contributions, and frankly it is easier just not accept donations that exceed the limit than to have to handle all the refunding process. So, many campaigns in the past have (particularly with online donations) won't process donations that are in excess.
RE: "in trouble" - While a donation that exceeds the limit is technically a violation of 52 USC 30116, actual prosecution of a donor under that statute almost never happens except where the donation is grossly excessive. (10$ over the limit is excusable, whereas $1 million is obviously excessive) Federal Statues have any number of examples where an action maybe a technical violation but there are literally no actual repercussions (aka "in trouble") for violations. Take for example misstating (lying about) a persons age on the US Census - clearly a violation of 13 USC sec 221, but actually not likely to be prosecuted. Peanut vendors who won't declared the number of peanuts in their possession.  -- Well you get the idea.
Additionally: The FEC said donors would be able to give up to $2,800 per election — including both the primary and the general election contests — in the new cycle,
Additional Note: "The FEC said donors would be able to give up to $2,800 per election — including both the primary and the general election contests — in the new cycle." So if you want to donate up to 5600, you can do so, however one donation for the primary and one donation for the general -
Comment: *The donor will not be "in trouble"*: I don't think this is right. In my answer, I quote statutes by which it appears the donor may be liable for civil penalties or criminal prosecution, including up to 5 years in prison.  I could not say whether those laws are actually enforced, but they are on the books.
Comment: @Nate that is why I put the phrase in quotes - I will edit my answer to reflect that


What's the difference between 差異 and 差別?

Question: Do both of them mean "difference?" Not sure if they are the same part of speech or if they are interchangeable.
Comment: some answers seem to come up with questionable distinctions, see dictionary examples,   **差异**  #3436 difference; divergence; discrepancy; diversity:
能力(年龄)方面的差异 discrepancy in ability (age)
方言上的差异 dialectic difference
这两个地区气候差异很大。 These two regions differ greatly in climate.这对孪生姐妹性格差异很大。 The twin sisters are very different in character.
1) 差别,不同。
2) 奇异,反常。
**差别**  #4396 difference
distinction
disparity dissimilarity; distinction; unlikeness:年龄差别 disparity in age
数(质)量上的差别 quantitative (qualitative) difference
仅是口味差别 dissimilar in tastes only
社会结构上的差别
Comment: unlikeness in social structure 男女差别 disparity between men and women 毫无差别。 There is no difference at all. 二者之间差别很大。 There is a world of difference between the two. 实际上并无差别。 There is practically no difference. 二者之间差别很大。
Answer: Both 差異 and 差別 mean "difference"

差異 = (physical) difference
差別 = (physical or metaphorical) difference

Example:
这两张牌全无差異/这两张牌全无差別  (these two cards have no difference)
the two cards are physically the same
对我而言,有机食品和普通食品之间並无差别  (to me, there's no difference between organic foods and common foods)
the two products have the same food value to me

you cannot replace 差别 with 差異 here because the difference between them is not physical but of value in your opinion.

One more example for 差别 used to describe metaphorical difference:
输给彼得或输给保罗是一样的,没有什么差别 (lose to Peter or lose to Paul are the same, there's no difference)
the main point is you lose

Again, you cannot use 差異 instead of 差别 here because the focus is not on the physical difference between 'lose to Peter' and 'lose to Paul' . The focus is on the win or lose result)
Answer: In addition to Tang Ho's answer, one of the major difference between these 2 words is:
差異 is usually used when measurement is involved.
Say if you're comparing the weather between 2 countries:

The weather between Canada and Africa differ greatly
加拿大和非洲之間的天氣差別很大
The temperature between Canada and Africa differ greatly
加拿大與非洲之間的氣溫差異很大

Note that some of the metaphorical differences (as mentioned from Tang) might not be as 'measurable', such as culture, knowledge, etc.
Answer: simple to say
差異 = difference; divergence; discrepancy; diversity; odds; variation
e.g:
气候差异
difference in climate
文化差异
cultural diversity
看法上的差异
difference of opinion
refer:https://www.jayxun.com/what/7AHT

差別 = difference; division; distinction
e.g:
缩小城乡差别
narrow the gap between town and country
年龄差别
difference in age
质量与数量上的差别
qualitative and quantitative differences
你去不去没什么差别。
It makes little difference whether you go or not.
refer dict: https://www.jayxun.com/what/7AJv


Is the IBM 5153 color display compatible with the Tandy 1000 16 color modes?

Question: Is it possible to view games made for Tandy Graphics (TGA, etc) on an IBM 5153 color display connected to an original Tandy 1000 (or 1000/A) in 16 colors?
Answer: The Tandy 1000 CGA output was essentially like the IBM CGA electrically, and graphics modes were compatible.  There was, however, an important difference in text mode.  In text mode, the CGA used the middle 200 scan lines of a 262-line frame to display 25 rows of 8 scan lines each, with generous borders on the top and bottom.  Using 8 lines per character meant that the bottom row of letters like "g" and "y" would touch the top row of letters like "E" and "T", which was less than ideal for legibility.
The Tandy 1000 shrinks the top and bottom borders by roughly 12-13 pixels, allowing the text portion of the screen to be expanded from 200 lines to 225 (9 scan lines per row).  This substantially improves legibility on screens whose "vertical height" adjustment was set to leave at least 15 or so lines of border visible on the top and bottom.  On screens which are adjusted to crop the border more closely to the text, the top and bottom of the Tandy text screen will get cut off.
I don't recall if the Tandy provided any way to use an 8-dot high font, but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't.  The "extra" line was added above the row of text, which meant that an inverse-video "E" would show one line of background above the text and one line below.  That would also, however, mean that programming the CRT controller to use 8 dots instead of 9 would cause the bottom scan line of characters like "g" and "y" to be cut off entirely.  Avoiding that would have required having a character set ROM which contained two character sets, and would also have required including a means of switching between them.
Answer: Basically yes. TGA (1000EX or similar) signal output (colour/intensity and sync signals) and connector pinout is upward compatible to CGA, thus compatible with CGA monitors. Both produce the very same RGBI signal using the same timing and encoding. TGA just employs more memory, thus being able to supply more colours at higher resolutions.
After all, TGA is basically a CGA with double the memory (32 KiB) and modes resulting from that - much like the IBM PCjr, which the Tandy 1000 was set against. The TGA II (Tandy 1000 SL/TL/RL and later) doubled that again to 64 KiB, finally enabling 640x200 in full 16 colours.
At least as long as colour mode is used. Text mode, when used in monochrome setup, is not. The monochrome setting is unique to TGA. Here a single B&W output signal is provided on pin 7, unused by CGA.
Comment: Thanks for your answer. Maybe I'm not making myself very clear. I'm specifically asking about the 1000 or 1000/A, and not just about compatibility, but if the IBM CGA display will show the full 16 colors
Comment: @Quasi_Stomach I'm a bit confused, what should compatibility mean else? CGA and Tandy graphics both use the same encoding.
Comment: @Quasi_Stomach I had a similar setup, an EGA card connected to a CGA monitor. 16 colors was no problem but it only supported  a resolution up to 640x200.
Comment: @Raffzahn Compatibility can mean a lot to a lot of different people, but I never assume it means the same for me and someone else.  Are you saying that for a Tandy 1000 or 1000/A, the IBM 5153 can display the 16 color graphic modes up to and including 640x200 16-color mode?
Comment: @Quasi_Stomach I get the feeling I do not understand what the issue is you ask for. TGA outputs a TTL RGBI signal and the IBM 5153 takes a exactly the same signal. Tandy 1000s are meant to work with CGA compatible screens. For all practical purpose regarding colour displays, there is no difference between CGA and TGA output. Differences between CGA and TGA are about the signal generation, not the signal itself.
Comment: @Quasi_Stomach On a side note, 640x200 in 16 colours is not supported by TGA, but needs a TGA II. Not available on a Tandy 1000, only on way later Tandy 1000 SL/TL/RL.
Comment: @Raffzahn Okay, so maybe that's my confusion.  I might be misunderstanding what the Tandy 1000 and 1000/A actually support. I've seen many videos on Youtube of people playing video games on "Tandy 1000" computers that look substantially similar to the EGA version of the same game.  I assumed these were Tandy 1000 computers, but maybe they meant Tandy 1000 SL or such.  Do you know what resolutions are available with 16 colors on the original Tandy 1000?
Comment: @Quasi_Stomach 320x200 in 16 colours. 640x200 was 4 colours. After all, it's basically a CGA with double the memory - much like the IBM-PCjr the Tandy 1000 was set against. The SL and later models doubled that again to 64 KiB, enabling 16 colours at 640x200.
Answer: CGA 40-column text mode is 320x200 16-colors and 80-column text mode is 640x200 16 colors. Those are a completely standard feature of CGA and therefore a completely normal thing for a CGA monitor to display. But because they're text mode, you can't set arbitrary pixels to arbitrary colors, you have to use the character cells.
Tandy and PCjr advanced graphics use the identical output resolutions, only with more freedom — the 2-color and 4-color modes allow any combination of 2 or 4 colors from the 16-color palette (unlike the CGA with its very limited palettes), and the 320x200 and (on the later TGA) 640x200 modes are available as full bitmapped graphics modes, meaning any pixel can be any color. Programmers care about this, but the monitor doesn't. It sees the same kind of signal that it would get from a CGA. Therefore any CGA RGBI monitor should be perfectly happy with Tandy graphics.
Comment: Note that the Tandy 1000/A/SX/TX use a 640x225 text mode by default (one extra line of the background colour per row of text). CGA was always 200 lines. Some monitors don't like the 225-line mode (for example, some that could display both composite and TTL RGBI), so you could disable it with `MODE 200` from a Tandy release of DOS. But I suspect the 5153 probably works fine with it.


what are these brown spots on my potato plant?

Question: I have noticed brown spots on my potato plant but cannot figure out what it could be. Do you might have an idea?
Answer: Assuming you mean the little brown patches at the edge of the leaves, not in the middle, it looks like mechanical damage, probably due to either wind or someone walking through the potato patch with rough trousers. Potato leaves are quite soft even in maturity (compare to other plants like a rubber plant with tough mature leaf), and particularly when first expanding. In a heavy wind the haulms flap back and forth quite a bit hitting anything within reach and a little damage is to be expected. Mostly it will be at the leaf edge extremities. The cells are easily damaged when they rub against other things. There is an inbuilt protective mechanism that allows the cells in a damaged area to die back a bit and then seal off that part of the leaf to avoid exposure to pests and diseases.
Some varieties of potato like Yukon Gold are more erect in habit than others like Russet. If you have both erect and floppy varieties try to do a comparison of the leaf edge phenomenon and see if there is a difference. Also choose a leaf or two, give it a little scrape at the edge and come back in a day or two, compare the deliberate damage to the existing.
Comment: thank you very much! I did the experiment and mechanical damage resulted in the same leaf damage as the other ones. I think it might be from wind because they get very much of it some days, standing alone in the open.


What is difference between architecture and microarchitecture?

Question: I am studying computer architecture.  I would like to know the difference between the terms "computer architecture" and "microarchitecture".
Comment: What material do you study and where have you looked for definitions? (I.e. where do answerers *not* have to look?)
Answer: The term architecture was popularized by the paper "Architecture of the IBM System/360", IBM Journal of Research and Development, 8(2):87-101, April 1964 by Gene M Amdahl, Gerrit A Blaauw, and Frederick P Brooks, Jr.  They say,

The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i.e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation.

According to the Wikipedia page on computer architecture the terminology was probably introduced inside IBM in 1959.
Today we would use the term instruction set architecture to describe the syntax and semantics of the interface of a computer, including the type and size of the operands, programmer visible register state, the memory model, how interrupts and exceptions are handled, the available instructions and the meaning of each instruction.  The instruction set architecture is the boundary between software and hardware, and is the contract between the programmer and the hardware designer.
The term microarchitecture is used to refer to the organization, or highest level of implementation, of a particular processor.  The study of microarchitecture would include topics like pipelining, instruction-level parallelism, out-of-order execution, speculative execution, branch prediction and caching.
I'm not sure about the etymology of microarchitecture.  I can find it used as early as 1975 (in the title of the EUROMICRO Workshop on the Microarchitecture of Computer Systems), but it could certainly be older than that.
Currently the term computer architecture or just architecture typically encompasses both instruction set architecture and microarchitecture, as well as broader system-level issues like network connectivity on multiprocessors.
Comment: Brooks and Blaauw in their _Computer Architecture_ are also using _implementation_ for what is usually called _micro-architecture_ and _realization_ when the same _implementation_ is done several times (a process shrink for instance).  It's a nomemclature I'ven't seen elsewhere and I've no clue if the choice of words is more tied to the place (IBMspeak?) or the time.
Answer: Computer architecture is the combination of microarchitecture and instruction set.
Microarchitecture, also called computer organization and sometimes abbreviated as µarch or uarch, is the way a given instruction set architecture (ISA), is implemented in a particular processor.A given ISA may be implemented with different microarchitectures;implementations may vary due to different goals of a given design or due to shifts in technology.
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microarchitecture
Comment: This is just copied from Wikipedia verbatim. It is better to rephrase this in your own words, and perhaps to include some examples.


Is there a pet which eats flies

Question: Is there any pet which I can hold indoors in Central European household and which eats flies (and any other insects) flying around my house? I got plenty of them because my neighbor has a pig farm next door.
Comment: If you're in the habit of killing or relocating spiders in your house, I suggest you stop (at least for now). The spiders will help control the fly population, and when the flies (and other bugs) are gone, the spiders will vanish. Non-toxic pest control FTW!
Comment: Can you clarify your question to indicate the potential for the insects to come in contact with poison. Also the related question [Can I use a gecko to get rid of a cockroach infestation?](http://pets.stackexchange.com/questions/1788) may give you cause to further fine tune your question.
Comment: I'd suggest venus flytraps or sundew plants before any animals. Also, plants wouldn't leave poo all over your house.
Comment: If you have any neighbors who use insect relent or poison, and the flying insect goes from their house to your house, before the poison has killed the insect, then your new fly eating pet will be poisoned...
Comment: @jmusser FTW = For The Win. Sorry about the acronym.
Comment: Do you want it to be a pet that both eats flies and can roam free around the house without coming to harm?
Comment: @starsplusplus yes please :), the best it would be to have a nice murmuring cat who wanders around the house and does it's job
Comment: @JamesJenkins I don't understand what do you mean by contact with poison
Comment: @mhwombat What does ftw mean? Backwards of wtf?
Comment: @mhwombat - Now look what you made me do! [On the domestication of native web building spiders in North America](http://pets.stackexchange.com/questions/5919)
Answer: My answer's going to be the same as one I've previously given. I would avoid getting an animal and expect it to take care of any insect problems.

If the flies can get in, the animal that's going to eat the flies can get out. Then you're not only back where you started, but possibly responsible for introducing an invasive species into your area.
If you let an animal loose around your house to eat the flies, you're also letting them loose to defecate in your house.
Wild insects can come into contact with pesticides and parasites. Which could in turn, infect, make ill, or even kill the animal eating them.

You're also going to want to consider the needs of the animals you're considering. The first animals that come to mind are amphibians and reptiles, but amphibians need constant moisture otherwise you're going to find some nasty surprises around your house. Reptiles need certain temperatures and UV light in order to digest their food, so you'd be living in a tanning bed.
My cats have been effective at chasing down and killing flies, but they also have been effective at "killing" everything else that's been in their way. Fly on the good china? Not anymore. Of course you have'll want to consider the responsibilities of taking care of a cat if you go that route (they're not going to survive off of bugs).
If it's just a matter of not wanting to put fly traps around the house (I get it, they're gross), I'd suggest a plant that eats insects. The only downside to a plant is the amount of sunlight it needs, and making sure that it gets enough water.
There's the classic venus fly trap, the sundew plant, and various types of pitcher plants. I would ask gardening.se about the specific care for the plants though.
Otherwise if it's just about getting rid of the flies, I'd suggest one of the bag fly traps. They work in the same way that the pitcher plants do, in that the flies go in, get stuck, and drown.
Comment: On top of all this, I can't think of any pet that would reduce the fly problem effectively *and* be cheaper or less work than straightforward pest control.
Comment: *If the flies can get in, the animal that's going to eat the flies can get out.* Not necessarily, if it can't fly.
Answer: If you're looking for a pet, I would probably suggest guinea fowl. They eat insects and rodents and don't really require much to take care of other than making sure they have water. The downside though is that they make a lot of noise when they discover something new, but it sounds like that wouldn't matter much.
Comment: Guinea fowl are bigger eaters of ground bugs like fleas and ticks, in my experience. Don't think I have ever seen one catch a fly.
Answer: Absolutely, get a pet 'Venus Flytrap'.

Venus Flytraps grow in wild in my state, so I just leave mine outside during the summer and winterize them as they need the cool down period, but from what I understand you can grow them inside well enough. They may need a container of some sort, like the one pictured, to keep the humidity high. You'll also need a good grow light.
From recent research I've been doing to provide some good light to tropical that are outside during the summer and in, in the winter, I think you could buy a 4-pack each of 60w-100w equivalent CFL light bulbs (the spirally ones), in both the 6500k and 2700k range. It'll say which it is, somewhere on the pack, like so:

You can put them in the little metal shades with the spring clamps. It looks a little gaudy, but you can buy a socket splitter and put one of each bulb in one of the big reflectors. These two ranges do different things. If you pick one, I'd go with the 6500k, but it's easy enough to do both. Look online for how to set it up and the correct distance above the plant.
These plants have been pretty easy for me to care for, though. I'd tried in the past, with no luck, doing all kinds of complicated care. However, I found a book called, "The Savage Garden" by Peter D'Amato
The Savage Garden
For the 'Venus Flytrap', the book told me a ratio to sphagnum peat moss (super cheap for a bale) and sand (super cheap play sand), to plant it in. It then said to just set it in a tray of water and keep water in the tray. The mix wicks up the proper moisture. They like to sit in water. Then you simply wait and it starts feeding.
I now have several carnivorous plants. I have some of the 'Venus Flytraps', so 'Sarracenia', and I bought my first 'Nepenthes' (Lady Luck) recently and it's supposed to do well in a regular indoor environment. Any of these will eat up your local fly population and will actually attract them to themselves so you won't have to move them around much to catch them. It won't run away on you and requires minimal care, but they're very reminiscent of a pet since they move and you can feed them. They grow light will also help attract the flys in the evenings and morning when it's the brightest light around. Good luck.
Comment: Not sure  'Venus Flytrap' qualifies as a pet.  Might as well get a [pet rock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock) or [pet fly tape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_tape)
Comment: pet1: adjective

1.
denoting a thing that one devotes special attention to or feels particularly strongly about.  *I thought it was close enough and solved the askers problem neatly. You guys, of course, have the right to disagree with my assessment, but I felt like I was fulfilling the spirit of the question. I think people who aren't good with animals can count a plant as a pet, the same way people count pets a people/family members.  PS - A pet rock would be an awesome way to deal with a fly problem. Just you and your pet rock, smash'in flys. :))
Answer: I've found one funny pet: a bat. Those were sold once for £25 in Italian supermarkets.
Comment: Actually the reference is selling bat houses, not bats.  Not sure a bat qualifies as a pet.  But it does appear [they eat flies](http://www.housesforbats.com/)
Comment: Ah, I didn't notice they were selling bat houses without bat inside! Thanks.

Is there a pet which eats flies


Does smartermail store the parsed email messages in a sql database I could access directly?

Question: Does smartermail store the parsed email messages in a sql database I could access directly?
Answer: The way SmarterMail doesn't store it in database will make the life easier when it comes to a per domain migration. You will see this really save you a lot of hassle! If you would like to access to the email data directly, you could actually open up the grp file via a notepad and you should be able to see the content inside.
Answer: The short answer is no, Smartermail, certainly on my install, doesn't use a SQL database at all.  The mails are stored under the domain folder as separate files and indexed by custom grp and cfg files.
I'm sure the Smartermail forums can provide a more comprehensive answer if you want to try there


Are perceptions of beauty and the ideal partner mostly determined by mass media?

Question: Mass-media marketing seems to strongly influence people's beliefs.
Are perceptions of beauty and the ideal partner mostly determined by what mass media proposes?
Comment: Question seemed to be asking two questions at very different levels of generality. Given there were no answers, I've edited to focus on just one. Feel free to ask the more general question as a separate question if you wish.
Answer: Sexual attraction has mostly but not only a biological roots.
Can this particular woman bear healthy children for me? Do I want this man? Can he be a good father? In a few seconds, someone can evaluate this simply in his/her mind
(evaluate such factors as: height, weight, balance, hips, hair, smell, voice, how healthy the person looks, etc.)
Also, social factors have an influence on our expectations.  Mass media is part of our life, we live in its circle, it forms our culture, makes trends, and influences the path we are making and choices in our life.
The power of influence depends on few factors: the place someone lives (open/close to mass media), the family (all we are from our childhood), and some basic physiological factors we were born with, etc.
Locus of control defines the orientation of a person (internal/external) while choosing the way of living. For some it's more important that their partners are good from the society view (from mass-media view); for others it's not so important.
From Wiki, not very close, but interesting:

Consumer research
Locus of control has also been applied to the field of consumer research. For example, Martin, Veer and Pervan (2007) examined how the weight locus of control of women (i.e., beliefs about the control of body weight) influence how they react to female models in advertising of different body shapes. They found that women who believe they can control their weight ("internals"), respond most favorably to slim models in advertising, and this favorable response is mediated by self-referencing. In contrast, women who feel powerless about their weight ("externals"), self-reference larger-sized models, but only prefer larger-sized models when the advertisement is for a non-fattening product. For fattening products, they exhibit a similar preference for larger-sized models and slim models. The weight locus of control measure was also found to be correlated with measures for weight control beliefs and willpower"

Also there is a good test: Locus of Control .
Your question can be answered simply; it has deep roots and looks interesting for me too. I'll try to find some more modern research to post here.
Comment: Thanks! Can you explain me the meaning of "self-referencing"?
Comment: "Self-referencing", internal/external frame of reference mostly is using in NLP (meta programs). Its in some way close to Locus of control. As i dont really a fan of NLP, i cant say you good links to follow.
Answer: The 'hardwired' things we value in partners include not only physical and psychological suitability for  procreating, but also social status. Thus, any visible indicators that we associate with high status are also perceived as sexy even if they don't have no direct match to anything else, and mass media can affect what properties indicators are perceived this way, by associating them with 'high social status' celebrities.
I believe the classic example used to illustrate this phenomenon is sun tan - a few centuries ago lack of sun tan used to illustrate high status (possibly because it demonstrated that you don't have to do physical work outdoors) and was perceived as attractive; and in 20th century sun tan used to illustrate high status (possibly because it demonstrated that you can spend your time vacationing in sunny climates) and was perceived as attractive.  Nowadays tan is much less informative, but this shows how preferences can switch to opposite effects.


Should seemingly hard-to-answer questions be downvoted (and closed)?

Question: I have posted a couple of questions on this website. Based on this small dataset, there seem to be a trend that hard-to-answer questions get downvoted, and even closed for some random reason (too broad, opinion-based, etc.). Even though from time to time there actually exists a good answer, which is hard to share when the question is closed or roomba-removed. Voters are free to do whatever, except serial serial voting, but I'd encourage genuine voters to think twice about whether they are downvoting/closing a question because it seems difficult or impossible to answer.
Comment: The down vote here is a reflection of meta voting where -1 means "no".
Comment: related: http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/q/2209/10643
Answer: I am not sure if this answers your question in general, but it is related to the questions you tend to ask on the main site.
While I do not tend to down vote your questions,when reading your questions I often struggle with how they fit with our don't ask "policy":

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.

While your questions tend to be practical and answerable, I don't always see how they could be about actual problems you face.
As a side note, I am not sure "actual problems" should be a requirement.
Comment: @FranckDernoncourt the issue I see, and it is not a big issue to me but might be why people down vote your questions, is that I fail to see the problem that your questions are about. For example, I do not see why anyone needs to know how much it costs publishers to "process" books.
Comment: @FranckDernoncourt As somebody who thinks this rule ("actual problems that you face") makes sense, let me explain myself. This rule aims at making sure that SE remains useful for readers, by preventing questions on purely rhetorical or philosophical topics or clearly unrealistic scenarios. In this light, I would say that most of your questions have been ok for me personally, but I am sure there were a few that I also downvoted. This would have been because they asked for "data on this and that" more than for a concrete, useful *information*.
Comment: @FranckDernoncourt To be concrete, a downvote is not a close vote. A close vote means that the question is out of scope or otherwise not well-formed and should be removed. A downvote may sometimes just mean that the question is likely not particularly interesting.
Comment: I think that "actual problems that you face" is copy-pasted on all SE [without thinking too much about it](http://meta.law.stackexchange.com/q/373/31), and the "problems that you face" is anyway [not averrable](http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/a/630/452).
Comment: Ah, I see. I fail to understand why people would downvote on that basis, but you're probably right.
Comment: @xLeitix I guess dataset requests are a (large) subset of reference request. I typically use them to orient my opinions on some academic-related questions or decisions. Sometimes I post them on http://opendata.stackexchange.com/ when it's really data-heavy. Downvoting is not a close vote, but may cause the question to be automatically deleted (even if a question has a score of 0). That's my only issue with downvotes. I've had dozens of questions deleted because of that, so that's for sure an actual problem that I face :/ I can't even back them up on Quora anymore since they became Twitter.
Answer: The voting rules aren't very strict (as opposed to closing for example) but I don't think the fact that a question is hard to answer is a reason to down-vote. A question should "show research effort be useful and clear" to warrant an up-vote but it's also a matter of personal interests.
I don't think that the issue with the questions you mention is that they are "hard" but rather that they look very much like advertisement for your opinions and pet peeves* that you tried too hard to make look like questions.
My guess is that some users doubt that you genuinely think there are possible answers that would fit this site's format but rather hope for extended discussions in comments supporting your opinion.
Sometimes the click-bait works and you gather many votes, sometimes it's too obnoxious and the opinionated undertone triggers down-votes.

*Ok, so you dislike that some people pay to read articles. We get it.
Ps. Many of your other questions are fine in my opinion.
Comment: Thanks, I guess you're right, that could explain some/most downvotes. I do try to ask unbiased questions though, but in case I fail, you're most welcome to improve it, I'd appreciate it. When I am looking for references (using the reference request tag), I actually prefer not to get opinion-based comments or unreferenced answer, as it clutters the page. I try not to express my opinions on the education or research systems on this website, as I want to concentrate on facts. When debates start in comments, I don't participate, unless to add facts or to point a logical fault in a reasoning.


Can you cleanse out of knock-up's or knocked-backs?

Question: For champions like Alistar, Orianna, Lee Sin, Gragas etc can you cleanse out of their ultimate's/skills?
Answer: All displacement type spells (knock-back, knock-up, pulls, etc) cannot be prevented or ended by the use of Cleanse. Additionally, these type of spells are not affected by Tenacity. The only other form of Crowd Control that is not effected by tenacity or cleanse is Suppression, such as Warwick and Malzahar's ultimates.
However, it is worth noting that there are ways to prevent these types of spells, such as Sivir or Nocturn's shield, Morgana's Black shield, or Banshee's veil.
A lot of information about the varying effects and counters of Crowd Control types can be found here:
http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Crowd_control
Comment: It's worth noting that, while you CANNOT Cleanse out of displacement abilities((Via Cleanse or Quicksilver Sash)), through quicksilver sash you can cleanse out of the STUN portion of them, allowing you to flash DURING the displacement. I'm unfortunately at work so I can't link it, but the Quicksilver Sash article on the same wiki has this information.
Answer: No you cannot, they are nearly instantaneous and are displacement abilities. It would be like asking if you can cleanse out of Janna's ultimate. It just pushes you or pops you up, knockups require the champ to be next to you/very close making it difficult to land them - so easily manageable.
Answer: Yes, you can. However, this does not prevent the knock-up animation from completing. It only allows you to cast mobility abilities during the animation, like Flash or Vayne's Tumble, which allows you to escape the knock-up.
Here's a Reddit thread covering this mechanic.
Here's a video showcasing this mechanic.
Here's an instructional video describing how to perform this mechanic.
Answer: You can only cleanse Debuff´s, Knock-Backs and other´s of the kind are not considered Debuff´s, but environment events!


How to fix Windows 7 device removal notification loop

Question: Bit of an odd one this. One of our PCs is getting caught in a loop some time after being turned on, usually after a USB storage device has been attached - sometimes an iPod, sometimes a GPS.
Specifically, Windows Explorer starts showing a drive icon and letter (E:, as of right now) for the System partition (the small hidden one at the start of the boot drive). Then, the icon disappears. Then it reappears again. And disappears. It does this very quickly, at what looks like maybe 50 times a second.
CPU usage in this loop is also very high; averages about 66%. This machine has an i7 920 CPU, which is quad core with hyperthreading; so this usage rate works out to about 5 100% busy threads, along with whatever normal idle load is (particularly Task Manager itself).
Inspecting with Process Explorer shows that the device removal notification infrastructure has gone berserk. The threads in system service processes (i.e. apart from Windows Explorer) which are using all the CPU power relate to device notification. The Disk Management MMC snap-in also fails to run when the loop starts.
The only way to break the loop, it seems, is to reboot the machine.
Anyone seen anything similar to this, and know of a way to fix it?
Machine details:

Windows 7 x64, fully patched
i7 920, 12GB RAM
Intel SSD 80GB (X25-M, I believe; not G2)
2TB 5.2K disk for bulk storage
AMD HD 5870

Further hardware details await. I'm going to go through and update all drivers I can find.
Comment: Does it matter which USB slot you plug it into?
Answer: For now attempt going to the services that the process will lead to and deducing which one would be controlling that function and disabling it, this should serve as a temporary fix to your problem.