I've read that the "Serialization is the conversion of an object to a series of bytes."  But, this definition is true for every Java object since all Java objects are represented as bytes in memory anyways.  What is the purpose of implementing "Serializable" interface if all java objects can be represented as bytes anyways?  My guess is that implementing "Serializable" interface acts as some flag (you don't even need to implement any methods), but doesn't it make more sense to have an interface called "NotSerializable"?  EDIT: I found that this question is a duplicate of previous question:   I also found a good documentation:   Thanks for the answers!
We work heavily with serialization and having to specify Serializable tag on every object we use is kind of a burden. Especially when it's a 3rd-party class that we can't really change.  The question is: since Serializable is an empty interface and Java provides robust serialization once you add  implements Serializable - why didn't they make everything serializable and that's it?    What am I missing?
Getting a domain name off of the blacklist I have a friend who purchased a domain name recently that he found out (after buying it) is apparently blocked by many corporate firewalls or proxies b/c it's been tagged as porn by the blacklist db they're using.    Are there any common agencies he can appeal to in order to get the domain name off the black lists?  It's not just one corporation, either, he's looking at marketing a subscription-based service to a certain industry, so any contacting a particular firewall/proxy admin and have them manually update the blacklist won't scale well.  Thanks in advance. Paul Difference between Simple Past and Past Perfect What is the difference in meaning between the two examples below?   When she returned home from office, she was shocked to see that her husband and daughter were missing. (Simple Past)  When she returned home from office, she was shocked to see that her husband and daughter had been missing. (Past Perfect)    FIRST QUESTION: For me example #1 gives only idea of Status of her missing husband and daughter and example #2 gives idea of completed action/situation of missing husband and daughter before she reached home. Is this right? SECOND QUESTION: Is example #2 past perfect or past perfect continuous? Boundary of Ball of radius R has zero measure Is there a way to take a screenshot of an Android device and save it as an image file? In a family with two children, what are the chances, if one of the children is a girl, that both children are girls?  I just dipped into a book, The Drunkard's Walk - How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow, Vintage Books, 2008. On p.107 Mlodinow says the chances are 1 in 3.   It seems obvious to me that the chances are 1 in 2. Am I correct? Is this not exactly analogous to having a bowl with an infinite number of marbles, half black and half red? Without looking I draw out a black marble. The probability of the second marble I draw being black is 1/2. I've seen this message several times whenever someone has a problem installing, upgrading or removing some piece of software, but I wonder, what does it mean, and more importantly, is possible to solve it?  (Reading database ... 81657 files and directories currently installed.)  Removing mongodb-10gen ...  arg: remove  invoke-rc.d: unknown initscript, /etc/init.d/mongodb not found.  dpkg: error processing mongodb-10gen (--remove):   subprocess installed pre-removal script returned error exit status 100  invoke-rc.d: unknown initscript, /etc/init.d/mongodb not found.  dpkg: error while cleaning up:   subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 100  Errors were encountered while processing:   mongodb-10gen  E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)   (the above is just an example, not my actual problem) The old advice used to be to double-quote any expression involving a $VARIABLE, at least if one wanted it to be interpreted by the shell as one single item, otherwise, any spaces in the content of $VARIABLE would throw off the shell.  I understand, however, that in more recent versions of shells, double-quoting is no longer always needed (at least for the purpose described above).  For instance, in bash:  % FOO='bar baz' % [ $FOO = 'bar baz' ] &amp;&amp; echo OK bash: [: too many arguments % [[ $FOO = 'bar baz' ]] &amp;&amp; echo OK OK % touch 'bar baz' % ls $FOO ls: cannot access bar: No such file or directory ls: cannot access baz: No such file or directory   In zsh, on the other hand, the same three commands succeed.  Therefore, based on this experiment, it seems that, in bash, one can omit the double quotes inside [[ ... ]], but not inside [ ... ] nor in command-line arguments, whereas, in zsh, the double quotes may be omitted in all these cases.  But inferring general rules from anecdotal examples like the above is a chancy proposition.  It would be nice to see a summary of when double-quoting is necessary.  I'm primarily interested in zsh, bash, and /bin/sh. What's the difference between running a program as a daemon and forking it into background with '&'? What are the practical differences from a sysadmin point of view when deploying services on a unix based system? How to install MariaDB? Size commands do not work in mathmode MWE:  \documentclass{article} \begin{document} $\wedge{\small\wedge}{\tiny\wedge}$ \end{document}   All the \wedges have the same size... I need to learn basic optics for a high school academic competition. Does anyone know any good places, preferably free and online, to learn the basics of optics, like lenses, angles of incidence, etc.? I can't seem to find an MIT OpenCourseWare course addressing the issue. What rules govern forced removal from flights (due to overbooking)? I was recently surprised to see  because his flight was overbooked.  He was reportedly a doctor who needed to see patients the next morning, so he did not really want to get off, justifying the use of force.  I knew that airlines could overbook flights and deny boarding to some passengers, but I thought that kind of boarding denial would happen at the gate and that once folks had been let on, those denied boarding would be those arriving later to the gate.    Why or in what conditions is this kind of forcible removal considered OK?    Clarification following close votes from people who think this question is primarily opinion-based: By "OK" I mean the sense of "legally OK," "officially accepted," "instantiated as policy," "sanctioned by authorities," or "OK according to the regulations and policies and laws and whatever other formal rules govern forced removal from flights due to overbooking." Whether or not you personally consider it socially acceptable does not matter as an answer, unless you have formalized that into a citeable adopted form that governs what happens and want to explain the reasoning behind that rule. Closed form for the sequence defined by $a_0=1$ and $a_{n+1} = a_n + a_n^{-1}$ Today, we had a math class, where we had to show, that $a_{100} &gt; 14$ for  $$a_0 = 1;\qquad a_{n+1} = a_n + a_n^{-1}$$  Apart from this task, I asked myself: Is there a closed form for this sequence? Since I didn't find an answer by myself, can somebody tell me, whether such a closed form exists, and if yes what it is? Escape a string for a sed replace pattern Show that $a \star b=a \cdot b+a+b$ is binary operation for the group $\Bbb{ Q} \setminus \{-1\}$ The group $\left(\Bbb{ Q}\setminus\{-1\},\star\right)$ has as its underlying set the rational numbers different from $-1$ and the operation $\star$ is defined as $a \star b=a \cdot b+a+b$ where multiplication/addition are the usual operations with rational numbers.Show that this is a binary operation.  What I did (Please help verify):  identity element has to be 0 since $a\star 0 = a+0+a(0)$ so for $a\star b=0$ we have  $ab+a+b=0$ $$ab+a=-b \\ a(b+1)=-b \\ a=\frac{-b}{b+1}$$ so $b$ cant be $-1$ since that solution is not in $\Bbb{Q}$. Similar question might have been answered here. Is this operation true for all groups? I think so.  Thanks for the tips and help. What is the logic behind the timer of the Sojourner Badge? Does the 24 hours timer start:     when you hack a portal on a particular day     or     does it use the calendar days and check if you did hack a portal on a particular day   or     does it simply use a fixed international timezone to calculate the 24 hour cycle   or     does it use the agent's hacking cell's timezone to start it?   If it's the calendar days method than the explanation of the badge would be a little bit misguided because you could hack a portal on 00:01 on Saturday and then hack another one on 23:59 on Sunday and it would be practically two days between two hacks.  If it's based on the agent's last hack for a particular day then the explanation still would be problematic?  The third option would be a little bit unfair (or timezone racist) for the rest of the world.  The last option (the cell's timezone) would/could be both unfair for travellers and/or non-travellers.  Does anyone know any details about it? Best lens for taking pictures of surfers How does one find which files are taking up 80% of the space on a Linux webserver? The drive is constantly filling up. You've hunted down all the spare and random files you can. grep'd for coredump files and even removed some of the un-needed backups...  What would be your next move.  The actual server in question has 10GB of website files and the OS shouldn't take any more than 10GB so how do you track down what's filling a 50GB (virtual) drive? (Fitzpatrick Advanced Calculus 2e, Sec. 2.4 #12)  For $c \gt 0$, consider the quadratic equation $x^2 - x - c = 0, x &gt; 0$.  Define the sequence $\{x_n\}$ recursively by fixing $|x_1| \lt c$ and then, if $n$ is an index for which $x_n$ has been defined, defining  $$x_{n+1} = \sqrt{c+x_n}$$  Prove that the sequence $\{x_n\}$ converges monotonically to the solution of the above equation.  Note: The answers below might assume $x_1 \gt 0$, but they still work, as we have $x_3 \gt 0$.    This is being repurposed in an effort to cut down on duplicates, see here: .  and here: . No space following macro without argument With a macro such as:  \def\naive{na\"{\i}ve}   I find that the space which I would hope to follow it, is absent. So, with  the \naive approach   I get     the naïveapproach   in the output. How do I bring back the space?