I am not certain but I believe this story was in an anthology with other stories about humans trading with alien civilizations.  The specific story I am looking for starts with an alien king waking up and his "god" reminds him its time to dredge the harbor. There's another scene where a tradesman consults with his "god" on a fair price for his goods.  Then there's a scene where the humans are sitting around talking and one of them says that the aliens are not actually sentient, that the "gods" they hear are actually some kind of highly advanced instinct.
I would have read this about 20-25 years ago.  I believe the subject was an alien individual, but it could have been a non-standard human instead.  The hook of the story was that the subject lacked an organ like the  that allows the halves of the brain to communicate efficiently, allowing the illusion of a single consciousness.  The subject is conscious, and has thoughts, but is subject to hearing commands like "Wash your hands!" "Fetch water!" within its head.  I recall the subject (and others like the subject) believing that the voices are their gods talking to them.  To the reader it becomes clear that this is a separate part of the subject's own mind that is responsible for long-term planning and simply can't communicate with the rest of the mind in the way a "normal" human is accustomed to.
I have installed the pimd service by means of apt. This comes with an upstream systemd unit file (/lib/systemd/system/pimd.service).  I want the service to be restarted when for some reason it gets killed, hence I wish to add the line Restart = always in the unit file.   However, I don’t want to modify the upstream unit file.  Is there any workaround for this? We often get questions on bicycles.stackexchange about fitting wider or narrower tires to bicycles. We have a large number of these with answers suiting the specific bike or style of bicycle in question, but I have been unable to find one that provides a generic answer covering off all things that need to be considered. For most bicycles, the answer is the same regardless of the specific style and sizes of tires in question.   This is intended as a canonical question that we can point closed questions to. How many ounces is a British "tin" of tomatoes? If I have a British recipe that lists "1 tin chopped plum tomatoes," how many ounces is that? In British English, does "tin" usually refer to a specific size? In the US, cans generally come in 14 and 28oz sizes - which one is likely closest to what the recipe means? reference variable In some text it is given that we can't assign constant values to a reference variable. When I executed such a program I could do it. Is there any condition we can't assign a constant value to a reference variable? Why do the planets' orbital distances fall on an exponential curve? Background: I was recently reading a book on the planets to my son and I noticed a pattern in the distributions of the planets.  The planets' distances roughly follow an exponential distribution.  Below is a plot of scaled, log orbital distances $$ \tilde{d_n} = \frac{\log(d_n/d_1)}{\log(d_2/d_1)} $$ with the line $an+b$:   Where $d_1$ corresponds to Mercury and so on. Ceres is included, Pluto is excluded.  By linear regression, $a = 0.90, b = -1.06$.  For the statistically minded, the data has a Pearson's correlation of 0.996.  Note that this is a well known phenomenon, see  and references.  The code used to generate the plot may be provided on request.  Question: What is the mechanism that leads to this distribution?  Aside: Is there a good introductory text on solar system formation for the mathematically inclined?  Update: This is also known as Titius–Bode law. Is there any way other than instanceof operator for object type comparison in java? I remember reading in some Java book about any operator other than 'instanceof' for comparing the type hierarchy between two objects.  instanceof is the most used and common. I am not able to recall clearly whether there is indeed another way of doing that or not. What is the difference between Clamav and Clamtk? I know that both of them are antivirus. Adding the consensus to review's history How to search for all questions with bounties across the network? I wanted to search for questions on all SE sites that had a bounty. I am not sure if it is possible, and if it is how can I?   I have seen other questions that show how to find questions on each individual site, but how can I find all of them in one search from the homepage stackexchange.com? If this has been asked already, please let me know.  It has been suggested that the question was already asked (click  for the question), but that question only showed how to find those questions on each separate site or some complex way to search. I am hoping to find a way to search for bountied questions easily or for someone to create a way to do this. Converting PostGIS point to text causing loss of data? I have a road network and want to test connectivity between the features.  I am having trouble with two specific features, the rest of the dataset is functioning just fine.  When I get those 2 links' start &amp; end locations using ST_StartPoint and ST_EndPoint, the result is that they are slightly different.  However, when I convert the result to text by wrapping it like so:  ST_AsText(ST_StartPoint(geom)) and ST_AsText(ST_EndPoint(geom))  then the results are exactly the same.  Is it possible they are actually off by a tiny amount like .000000001 and the ST_AsText loses a decimal point? I plan on building a computer with  which has no GPU:     Graphics Specifications      Processor Graphics:   None   on a  motherboard which has an onboard integrated graphics processor:     Integrated Graphics Processor:         1 x D-Sub port, supporting a maximum resolution of 1920x1200@60Hz   1 x DVI-D port, supporting a maximum resolution of 1920x1200@60Hz   1 x HDMI port, supporting a maximum resolution of 4096x2160@24Hz or 2560x1600@60Hz   Support for up to 3 displays at the same time   Maximum shared memory of 512 MB      I have asked  and know that even if the CPU has no GPU, I can still get video as long as the motherboard has onboard graphics. However, when I went to buy the parts at a computer center yesterday, the technician said motherboards nowadays use CPU's GPU to display, including this Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD5H motherboard (which he meant this board has no real onboard graphics).  So for Xeon E3 1231v3 + Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD5H to display, do I need a video card or not?  (I don't really care about the graphics quality. I use the computer mostly to write programs, web browsing, and Photoshop, and seldom play games or watch videos.) the verb in plural with one company Overcoming ~5000 File Document Library Limits Microsoft technet states that document libraries have a file limit of 30 million items:    In practice, numerous features seem to break once there are more than 5000 items in a Document library - not just in the initial directory listing - but as a recursive total. For example, you may be able to list folders, but setting permissions or deleting files is met with errors.  Are there any configuration options or optimizations that can be used to relax these limits?  A workaround would be to split folders into separate document libraries, but in our case, with over 5 million files, this would result in a minimum of 1000, 5000 file document libraries and likely many more. At that point we're likely shifting the problem into the library view.    A major showstopper is the effect this has on Sharing - a user trying to share a folder with more than 5000 aggregate items simply fails. I'm investigating the effect (if any) the resource throttling suggestion below has on this. To tell about a guess about a case in the past, why use "would+have+past participle" instead of "must+have+past participle? I have seen this sentence in an article on bbc, which is about how people lived thousands of years ago. &quot;When this Neolithic home was built, it would have had a cosy roof of turf..&quot; When I read it, I got confused. Because the fact seems as a simple past situation or guessing/assumption about something in the past. it simply gives information about a past event, eg &quot;when I was a child, I had a blue toy car. I have been making a lot of research on whether or not this structure &quot;would+have+past participle&quot; could be used instead of the simple past or &quot;must+have+past participle&quot;, but I could not find any satisfying explanation. Almost all grammer contents cover this structure is used when we imagine the opposite of what actually happened in the past eg. &quot;referring to a missed opportunity&quot; (eg. &quot;if you had come to the party, you would have seen Tom.&quot;), But, in this case of this sentence, &quot;type 3 conditional&quot; is irrelevant. It is not an if sentence,  It simply gives information about how this house was like or was probably like when it was built long ago. Just like it would be If and old lady would want to tell about &quot;how she was like when she was a child years ago. she would simply say &quot;when I was a child, I had long curly hair.**. So &quot;when I was a child, I would have had long curly hair.&quot; would be wrong. So, my question is: 1-Does this structure &quot;would+have+past participle&quot; completely replace simple past sentences? or can be it be used instead of simple past? 2- If this structure was simply used because the author was not %100 sure about the fact as it was a long long time ago -so he wanted to make a guess or assumption, why did he not simply use &quot;must+have+past participle&quot; or &quot;it was likely that blah blah&quot; which must be used for guessing or assumptions about past happenings. Would it not have made more sense if it was like: &quot;When this Neolithic home was built, it must have had a cosy roof of turf. How to run grep on a single column? Is Dyson Sphere a stable construction? Suppose that a star is encompassed by a . Do we need a position control system for the Dyson Sphere to keep its origin always aligned with the center of the star? Will it stay aligned itself and automatically neutralize small perturbational forces? Or will a small perturbation remove it out of the orbit of the star, so that it will be eventually destroyed and swallowed by the star? Is there a way of maintaining malleability in a homomorphic encryption system while making it infeasible to perform chosen ciphertext attacks?   I have been reading about homomorphic encryption and malleable cryptosystems lately and have found it fascinating. I still have a lot of reading to do, however, I came across a statement in my reading that suggested malleability is inherently counter to security against chosen ciphertext attacks.  While I read up more about this relationship, I am curious to learn if there a way to maintain malleability while making a chosen ciphertext attack computationally infeasible? Why or why not? Recently I answered two questions on SO: The  is a completely trivial answer to a really basic question (kind of "read the manual and follow the one liner example there"). On the other hand, my  is a much more complicated answer that requires much more specialized knowledge of a very specific domain (happens to be related to my PhD research).  Clearly, the first answer could have been given by many SO users - I just happened to be the first to pick up the glove on this question. However, this is not the case for the second answer.  In contrast, when it comes to reputation - the first answer instantly got upvoted (everyone can relate to a simple question/answer), while the second one - I don't believe it will get much upvotes...  So, life isn't fair: for the one answer that really very few people could provide (the second answer) and is much harder to find and get -- is not rewarded, while the trivial answer is rewarded fast and strong...  How can we amend this? How can we encourage rare and specialized answers for difficult and deep questions?  Do we want SO to turn into a pool of trivial and superficial questions?    Update: Thanks to many meta-users who took the time to read through this question and ponder its implication, both answers I used as examples got exposed far beyond their fair-share. So, despite the fact that my original claim that the specialized answer get less reps is no longer valid, this does not change fact that in general my claim is stil valid: specialized answers requiring expert knowledge will recieve less attention at first.    Bottom line: (following my wish to have some sort of ). Indeed it sometimes seems like life isn't fair, but this is only in the short term. In the long run high quality answers do get their proper credit and exposure and their fair share of reputation. The reputation system of SO works quite well balancing and accounting for many factors and parameters. It would require a really strong argument backed up with serious research to change this mechanism.   Thank you all for the lively discussion and for showing me that life is fair after all. Is there any way to tinker with the iPhone SDK on a Windows machine? Are there plans for an iPhone SDK version for Windows?  The only other way I can think of doing this is to run a Mac VM image on a VMWare server running on Windows, although I'm not too sure how legal this is. I'm using Ubuntu 11.10.  The python 2.7.2 provided has a bug that has been corrected in the latest 2.7.2 sources from the python repository.  What is the recommended way to replace the ubuntu provided python with the python from source? Or put another way, how do I "update" the ubuntu-provided one?  Ideally, I would just be able to create new .deb(s) that "update" the python2.7/python2.7-dev provided by Ubuntu.