@hichris123 evidently not - care to post to any official Stack usage guidelines? (and not some anally retentive meta argument) - It's not the correction that bothers me - it's just a little pathetic that this is what mods are spending time on! — Emissary9 mins ago
@ManofSnow, no, I'd say that you can be gifted at a subset without being gifted in the superset, but in reality you probably just don't have the interest in theoretical math and thrive better in the more practical hands-on world of programming.
@Emissary Uhm, meta is the guidelines. And if you don't want to have our mods spend their time fixing wrong formatting, don't use it in the first place! — Doorknob of Snow2 mins ago
@Emissary Here's the funny thing about a volunteer site -- people volunteer to do whatever suits them at the moment. If someone is volunteering to make a webpage for their church, it doesn't do much good to tell them 'you could better use your time volunteering to make a webpage to help runaways' or something.
Now I understand that with the immense amount of intellect sitting in this room we could probably solve world hunger and develop sustainable electricity from nuclear fusion. Unfortunately, we prefer making quips about unicorns and posts about programming and spam here. So, y'know, at least we're making the world a better place.
I get it - was just my two cents. in any case the <kbd> tag ultimately seems redundant on a site for programming - if it bothers people so much would it not be better to remove it?
@Emissary It ain't a battle. If you want good content, we're all on the same side. That's all it's about. Good content sometimes means editing posts here and there, and sometimes it means working on close queues, and sometimes it means making massive meta posts discussing various issues facing the community.
@Emissary If you truly want to help out the quality of the site and direct our attention as appropriately as possible, my suggestion would be to let whatever it is that the issue is slide, so that we focus on improvement rather than explaining to you why we improve stuff (which is also an improvement)
I have a small electric motor that is designed to have 4 AA batteries. If I added one or two more batteries, would the motor go faster? How much more could I add without burning up the motor, if at all? We are designing small derby type cars that will culminate in a speed race across the gym f...
So, I noticed we have a new multicollider design:
But then I scrolled down and I saw this:
Isn't "More Stack Exchange Communities" misleading? "More" means that they're different than the previous ones, but clearly they aren't.
I suggest that it simply be "All Stack Exchange Commun...
I feel reassured about the youth of America. I was worried you were mixing them. Everyone knows that mixing milk and water is like mixing ammonia and bleach. (Note to impressionable youths: do not mix ammonia and bleach, you will die)
I was about to post an answer, when a weird box that said 'This question has been' appeared. I think it means to say 'This question has been deleted' or 'This question has been closed'. Is this a bug or does it mean what it says? It might be a bug with FireFox, though.
I have some questions, including some very behind in the past, where I had to explain lots of project or even personal stuff to convince people to answer it...
Sometimes the question is very clear, simple, and have only one answer, and the context does not matter, yet people keep nagging me with...
I remember the sysadmin at the Election Commission laughed at me because I filed a bug report for a divide-by-zero error when all of your tasks have been completed.
@hichris123 Yeah, I think it may map out canonical questions (questions which have the most questions closed as a duplicate of), and post the ones with the most dupes up there
I've been helping in the Great Ask Ubuntu Spam War recently, and one thing I've noticed is that 10-20 flags usually isn't enough during a wave. It feels, quite frankly, terrible to have to sit out during a spam wave.
Therefore, I propose the following: If there is currently a spam wave (i.e. pos...
During spam attacks we, as a community, are happily flagging posts as spam. On most sites spam posts are not long-lived. However on sites with low traffic it can take a while before spam posts reach their 6 required flags, more often than not by community members that call out for help in chatroo...
I should point out that I thought for a while that the use of a ring of sock puppets to spam-flag something into oblivion was a purely theoretical exploit. Then we had two separate people do this last year, and others try over the last couple of months. So it is possible, although really rare. Needless to say, we come down like a ton of bricks on anyone we find doing this. — Brad LarsonJan 20 at 18:27
I think gui should be its own tag, because according to What is the difference between GUI and UI?, 'UI can include non-graphical interfaces such as screen readers or command line interfaces which aren't considered GUI'. So let's say I want to ask a question on gui, and when the user clicks on i...
@DoorknobofSnow: we are not liable for any damages whatsoever caused by events that we cannot or do not control, including but not limited to acts of God, ponies, unicorns and love problem spammers.
@Braiam because anyone who is in the tavern at this time is either on the proper side of the world, or could probably use the support of a love problem solution specialist!
@hichris123 The moderator agreement has a very strict clause stating that any attempt to compete with the Stack Exchange Network will have you tossed out the nearest airlock at Shog's earliest convenience.
..had the same problem too. The reason for the empty $_SESSION-vars were the incorrect rights in the /var/lib/php/session directory: 755 owner + group the user which runs the http (apache, www-data or cherokee)
@JanDvorak It's been edited twice, so I don't think it's someone trolling or otherwise being unpleasant, it would seem to be someone who has a very thin skin or is super-easily offended, and really boggles the mind it does.
It actually got better as I was doing something else. That is incredible.
And some arbitrary commenter seems to have made an oddly eloquent comment to his parody:
so it is indeed commentary and not a question. rather than creating a new question, I think you should comment directly on the post that offended you. This is not a question. I am offended that you passed this commentary off as a question, allowing this subtle lie to flourish on this site is a disgrace! — JoeT13 mins ago
Offense breeds offense breeds offense! The vicious cycle!
Said commenter has now answered in protest! This is the highlight of my afternoon so far.
@JanDvorak Thanks, I really have no idea what the dickens was going on there. That just kind of came out of nowhere. And it's a month old. How does someone find that, in January, and then get so upset over it? People are incredible!
Now I'm going to waste 10 minutes learning about moon phases.
Is it the same phase of the moon at all places on earth? Or does that change with side? Trying to rotate and orbit 3d spheres in my brain, and I assume that yes, it is the same. But now I have to look it up and make sure.
Yeah, the phase is determined by the earth's shadow which shouldn't change in 12 hours or whatever the gap is between two parts of the earth. That part makes sense. But now I have a dozen follow-up questions.
So I'm in Japan, 14 hours removed from the East Coast of the US, but a similar latitude. The face of the moon we see is the same each day though, no? From both places? Or is that me making stuff up?
Does the moon just not rotate, or rotate at such a pace it always looks the same?
Tidal locking always makes me think of a sci-fi short story I read a long time ago. Not sure if it was famous or not. In it, the Earth was in tidal lock relative to the sun, so humans had mostly evolved into two groups. Those who lived on the dark side had huge eyes, pale skin and a lot of hair; the others had tiny eyes and dark skin. A narrow belt of people on the border served as traders.
Not the most interesting bit of story, but I've always found it useful as a memory device when the topic of tidal locking comes up. More useful than that equation, anyways, @jmac.
I will give it a thought, no promises though! I just wish that the people who wrote wikipedia articles considered their audience more. The geniuses who write the stuff don't need a dumbed down explanation, but us mere mortals usually do.
@Manishearth Simple wikipedia just uses 'simple English' and rarely actually explains the concept in a simple way. I have hoped so many times for things to be explained well there, but they rarely are (I work with many engineers, and I think it may just be the nature of the beast)
Fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) is one of the most important conversion processes used in petroleum refineries. It is widely used to convert the high-boiling, high-molecular weight hydrocarbon fractions of petroleum crude oils to more valuable gasoline, olefinic gases, and other products. Cracking of petroleum hydrocarbons was originally done by thermal cracking, which has been almost completely replaced by catalytic cracking because it produces more gasoline with a higher octane rating. It also produces byproduct gases that are more olefinic, and hence more valuable, than those produced ...
I think that many of the more-technical wikipedia articles start with the assumption that the person reading has a good fundamental grasp of the topic to begin with. As a result, they often lack links to explain the more basic concepts, and you can end up reading through dozens of articles on the internet to try to piece together the basic concept. Case in point:
The whole issue with this article is that it assumes you know what the heck oil refining is actually doing, but most people don't. So you go read the oil refinery article and end up with the question, "Well why isn't crude oil useful?"
So then you start reading up on crude oil and it doesn't actually ever give you the explanation.
That's what drives me nuts about wikipedia -- the most important concepts are never explained anywhere. You need to piece together a bunch of random trivia, prioritize it, and then figure out what the heck the real point is so that you could explain it to someone non-technical.
@Manishearth When I was a kid, whenever I didn't understand something, the first thing I'd do is read the article in the encyclopedia. They were generally a lot shorter than a wikipedia article, but because of the editing they gave a good explanation of the basics.
The nature of wikipedia attracts content experts (good), but those content experts usually start at a higher level than the audience who wants to learn about the topic.
@Manishearth (and I'm not intimidated by complex formulas -- I don't generally need to understand how to calculate them, so it bothers me when the formula is given without an explanation of why the formula is important)
I think that an encyclopedia should be the source to give you a brief overview of the topic so that someone can grasp the basics through a quick summary. Real understanding should come from something more than that if you ask me. Reference resources lose their effectiveness if you constantly have to shift from article to article and then do additional searches to understand their contents.
Compare the previous articles on oil refining to the article on Martin Luther King, Jr.. If you read the first paragraph alone, you get a great overview of what it is he did, with a link to the civil rights movement if you aren't familiar with it.
[SE-spam-detector-izer-er] SPAM - Bad keyword: stackoverflow.com/questions/21165915/… (ClassNotFoundException: junit.framework.TestCase cannot be found by org.eclipse.xtext.junit_2.4.3.v201309030823)
[SE-spam-detector-izer-er] SPAM - Bad keyword: stackoverflow.com/questions/21165915/… (ClassNotFoundException: junit.framework.TestCase cannot be found by org.eclipse.xtext.junit_2.4.3.v201309030823)
@DoorknobofSnow Would you mind adding in some way that we can respond to your spam alert with a fixed phrase like "Candy Canes" to get you to stop reporting it to chat if it isn't actually spam? That'd be awesome.
Also, regarding synonyms, should we be encouraging synonyms that create a tag for no reason? Take for instance stackoverflow.com/tags/maven/synonyms, in which the tag mvn is essentially being created for no reason.