I've just made a test few minutes ago, the scenario is the following:  There was a question with 7-8 answers (all of them were correct because the question was very easy), someone downvoted all of the answers and leaves no comment (I suppose it was the question author because his question was downvoted). This situation has bothered me since I think it is not very professional and also I've loose 2 rep points for a whim. So I tried to delete my answer and repost it as-was. The trick worked: I've my 2 points back and the answer has now 0 votes.  I think that this trick should be avoided in some ways, obviously it can't be a simple text-check between the 2 answers because it will be easilly bypassed, I think that a good way can be that: if you repost an answer after an answer deletion, the rep points don't turn back.
I haven't seen this behavior out in the wild much, but it happened again recently and I was wondering if a flag could be automatically raised when this happens:   User posts answer Answer is down voted User deletes answer User posts exact same text as a new answer User effectively ditched down votes   Got down voted again? Wash, rinse and repeat. Profit (perhaps after modifying the post, which is what you should have done to begin with)    I feel that this should raise a duplicate content flag, with slightly stronger wording. Would this be possible to implement? Or, perhaps, don't let users post new answers if they have a deleted answer to a question. Rather, force them to edit and restore the deleted answer instead, unless locked by a moderator.  I do have a link, but I don't want a lot of people to descend on it and create an even bigger disruption. It happened exactly as I described.
"Heard me [infinitive]" vs. "heard me [present participle]" Looking for story title - younger gen waters down age-slowing drink of older gen, crammed into small apartment I remember a short story in which multiple generations of people being crammed into a small apartment in a city. The magical drink that either reduced or completely stopped aging was something like a soda that came in a six pack. The story focused on visual aspects of the drink at some point. The younger family members complained that their elders were living too long and apparently decided to water down the soda, I think that conclusion was ultimately left up to the reader. Many thanks for any help tracking down this story, might be one of Kurt Vonnegut's perhaps? Can I store the .git folder outside the files I want tracked? I have an unusual idea to use git as a backup system. So let's say I have a directory ./backup/myfiles and I want to back that up using git. To keep things clean I don't want to have a .git directory in the myfiles folder, so I thought I could create ./backup/git_repos/myfiles. From looking at the git docs, I've tried doing this:  $ cd backup/myfiles $ mkdir ../git_repos/myfiles $ git --git-dir=../git_repos/myfiles init Initialized empty Git repository in backup/git_repos/myfiles/ $ git --git-dir="../git_repos/myfiles/" add foo fatal: pathspec 'foo' did not match any files   You can see the error message I get there. What am I doing wrong? Proving any number of the form $2^n$ can't be written as the sum of k consecutive numbers. I think i have proved that any number of the form $2^n$ can't be written as the sum of k consecutive positive integers, but i would be grateful if i could have some clarification as to whether this is a correct and valid proof or not.  Let $g=x+(x+1)+(x+2)+(x+3)+...+(x+(k-1))$, hence g is the sum of k consecutive positive integers.  $g=kx+\sum_{d=1}^{k-1}d$  Hence, $g=kx+\frac{k(k-1)}{2}$  Rearranging for x we find, $x=\frac{g}{k}-\frac{(k-1)}{2}$  So, for certain values of $k$, we can be sure that a positive integer value of $x$ can be found, and hence $g$ can be written as the sum of $k$ consecutive positive integers.There are two cases for $k$ to considor:  Case 1)  $k$ is odd. If $x$ exists, it must be the case $k$ | $g$, as for odd values of $k$, $\frac{(k-1)}{2}$ will alwyas be an integer, and hence $x$ will.  Case 2)  $k$ is even. $k$ does not divide $g$, but $\frac{g}{k}$ must be a multiple of $\frac{1}{2}$, and hence equals $\frac{h}{2}$, for some odd $h$.  Letting $j=2^n$, assume that we can write $j$ as the sum of $k$ consecutive positive integers.  If $k$ is odd, then if a $k$ exists, it must divide $j$, by Case 1. But, $j$ has no odd factors as it is a power of two, hence $k$ could not be odd.  If $k$ is even, by Case 2 it mut be the case $k$ does not divide $j$. Also, $\frac{j}{k}=\frac{h}{2}$, for some odd $h$.  But, this implies $2j$ has an odd factor, $h$. but, as $2j$ is a power of $2$, it can't have odd factors. So, $k$ can't be odd.  Hence, $k$ is neither odd or even, and this is a contradiction to our assumption. Hence no $x$ exists, and hence and number of the form $2^n$ can't be written as the sum of $k$ consecutive positive integers.  Any feedback on this proof would be appreciated. I've been trying to figure out how to change the chart from scientific notation to just show the 5 digit numbers. I've tried scale and scale ticks with not success.  How can I change the y-axis and data values to show the decimals not in scientific notation?  \begin{tikzpicture} \centering \begin{axis}[     width=300pt,     height=250pt,     axis lines*=left, % Don't display the top and right lines     ybar, % Display it as a bargraph     enlarge y limits={upper,value=0.2},     legend style={at={(0.5,-0.20)}, % -.20 y-axis     anchor=north,legend columns=-1},     ylabel={Densities},     nodes near coords,     every node near coord/.append style={ anchor=mid west, rotate=90},     symbolic x coords={Class1,Class3,Class5,Class7,Class9,Class11,Class13,Class15,Class17,Class19,Class21,Class23},     xtick=data,     xticklabel style={ inner sep=0pt, anchor=north east, rotate=70 },     nodes near coords align={vertical}, ] \addplot coordinates { (Class1,0.0968) (Class3,0.0887) (Class5,0.1452) (Class7,0.0726)     (Class9,0.0403) (Class11,0.0081) (Class13,0.0161) (Class15,0.0000)     (Class17,0.0161) (Class19,0.0081) (Class21,0.0000) (Class23,0.0081) }; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} Multiple AES Key Derivation from a master key I have a web service in C# and would like to have a nested inner class, that abstracts away the session collection, something like this:     public class Service : System.Web.Services.WebService {     [WebMethod]     public string Foo(string ticket)     {         SessionPool.getSession(ticket);     }      private class SessionPool      {         public static Session getSession(string ticket)         {             // this is what i want to do, but I can't access Context             return (Session)Context.Session[ticket];         }     } }    Is it possible to access the HTTP context of the WebService class via a nested class? If not, is there way I can store the reference to it? WordPress Installation Failed I am trying to install Wordpress on Lubuntu. I followed the instructions . Including PHP Apache and MySQL setups. Apache and MySQL appear to be running fine.  However, when I go to http://localhost/blog/, I get the following error:     Neither /etc/wordpress/config-localhost.php nor /etc/wordpress/config-localhost.php could be found.   Ensure one of them exists, is readable by the webserver and contains the right password/username. Why are cancer rates low in large animals? Large animals generally have more cells and live longer than smaller animals. For example,  live up to 200 years and weigh up to 100 tonnes, as opposed to humans (living ~ and weigh ~) and  (10–25 g, &lt;1 year in the wild). Hence, whales have an immense number of cells and those cells are subjected to environmental carcinogenic influences (chemicals, UV) for a longer period of time.   Cancer is caused by random mutations and those random mutations are basically stochastic processes. Given their long life span and larger number of cells, shouldn't larger animals have a substantially higher chance to develop cancer? In fact, story goes that bowhead whales in fact only , and less so compared to humans? I've ran out of chocolate bars and didn't realize I could enchant my giant spoon and knight's armor. Is there any way to get more reliably? Localization of a UFD that is a PID Preview on mobile page I suggest a preview on the mobile page. For questions, answers and edits to both, like on the desktop page.  I messed up formatting often enough to be annoyed that there is no preview on the mobile page and I'm surprised that noone suggested it before (at least I didn't find anything).  If it's too performance heavy to have a live preview update after every change in the text box, there could be a preview button next to the save button which leads to a page with only the preview, a back button and a save button (and the title bar and so on). Is there a way to create synchronization profiles for Google Chrome? For example I want to tag some of my browsers as "home browser"s and others as "work browser"s and I want:   my bookmarks to be synced with all browsers, my extensions to be synced only within browsers of the same type (home with home, work with work) Find the solution of following differential equation:     $$\frac{dy}{dx}=\frac{1}{xy(x^2 \sin (y^2)+1)}$$   Could someone hint me something to get through this problem? Would someone give a thorough explanation of 1.14 Minecraft's /data modify? Okay, so I've been searching all over the internet for an explanation of data modify ever since I heard Sethbling passively mention it in one of his videos. The only  thing I could find on it was the wiki and the update log for the 1.14 snapshot. So, I checked these, and they hardly explained it at all. I can get /data modify block 123 20 123... and that's as far as I get.  Minecraft wiki does not at all define clearly what  is (the thing meant to go after coords), nor does it specify what each operation does to what. Operations include (without explanation, and excluding set (which it does explain)): append, insert, merge, and prepend. Then, it has from|value as the next option, which aren't explained either. After this, it just has block/entity and coords/id. So, I know the format (mostly), but I haven't the slightest idea what any of it means. And nothing I've seen on the internet even mentions the command save for Minecraft wiki itself.  Please explain if you know what data modify is. Thanks! create a .deb Package from scripts or binaries I searched for a simple way to create .deb Packages for things which have no source code to compile (configs, shellscripts, proprietary software). This was quite a problem because most of the package tutorials are assuming you have a source tarball you want to compile. Then I've found  short tutorial (german).  Afterwards, I created a small script to create a simple repository. Like this:  rm /export/my-repository/repository/* cd /home/tdeutsch/deb-pkg for i in $(ls | grep my); do dpkg -b ./$i /export/my-repository/repository/$i.deb; done cd /export/avanon-repository/repository gpg --armor --export "My Package Signing Key" &gt; PublicKey apt-ftparchive packages ./ | gzip &gt; Packages.gz apt-ftparchive packages ./ &gt; Packages apt-ftparchive release ./ &gt; /tmp/Release.tmp; mv /tmp/Release.tmp Release gpg --output Release.gpg -ba Release   I added the key to the apt keyring and included the source like this:  deb http://my.default.com/my-repository/ ./   It looks like the repo itself is working well (I ran into some problems, to fix them I needed to add the Packages twice and make the temp-file workaround for the Release file). I also put some downloaded .deb into the repo, it looks like they are also working without problems. But my self created packages didn't... Wenn i do sudo apt-get update, they are causing errors like this:  E: Problem parsing dependency Depends E: Error occurred while processing my-printerconf (NewVersion2) E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/my.default.com_my-repository_._Packages E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.   Has anyone an idea what I did wrong?  UPDATE 2012-03-06: Just a a hint for another person who is searching for a easy way to create DEBs: Take a look at . The title of  of  is, "Is it posible [sic]?"  This doesn't provide any information at all. It should be mandatory for everyone asking questions on the Internet to read , which says:     Help your community learn from the question. When you field a good question, ask yourself "How would the relevant documentation or FAQ have to change so that nobody has to answer this again?" Performance difference between dot notation versus method call in Objective-C When I want to edit a tag of a question I get following message:     Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.      We welcome all constructive edits, but please make them substantial. Avoid trivial, tiny one-letter edits unless absolutely necessary.   Now the question is: are tag edits (adding a needed tag to an under-untagged, replacing a mis-used tag) substantial enough?  For example the proc-tag-wiki is just about a Ruby feature called proc - but currenlty some questions about Oracle Pro*C (a embedded SQL preprocessor) or the Linux /proc filesystem are also tagged with proc. Btw, what tag should be used for /proc?  Say I come across a Pro*C Question which is tagged with proc - is a change to proc-sql considered substantial or not? SR Flip-Flop: NOR or NAND?