I have an anecdote about how vigilante justice once worked, so now it's a good way to solve a completely unrelated problem.
Firstly vigilanteism punishes unpopular rather than illegal and immoral acts. While they sometimes coincide, they are not always going to.
Also there is nothing to stop viglantes going bad, while there are some fallbacks and protective measures in most control structures.
Your idea relies on what I presume is a benevolent group who only have the best interests of the majority at hand and are only called in when all normal attempts have been exhausted. This is not really a good idea for the real world.
But of course the internet is not the real world, an immediate punitive system like this is possible, because the consequences for a bad decision aren't very great. I've lost my internet access, it's like losing your TV aerial - it's prefereable not to lose, but if your life depends on it - it's time to lose it anyway.
The other issues still exist, but the internet is not important, it's not (yet) real life, you won't die or lose an arm if you make an error. Of course unpopular things will still be punished, wonder how an upstart, free, unpopular with the major players OS would go in such an environment?
I'll give you the right answer here. A convergent sequence is an infinite list of numbers that gets arbitrarily closer together, ie 1/n, this gets as close as you want it to to zero. Similairly with the digits of pie, if you create a sequence with the first term being 3, second 3.1, 3.14,.... and keep going you get a converging sequence towards pie. Can I recommend Spivaks book, "Calculus", by Publish or Perish. This has got everything being discussed re this message, the transcendental nature of pie and e, ifninite sums, the construction of the number line, etc.
a couple of the other answers are wrong, they discuss summable sequences, which are an entirely different thing. They must be convergent, yes, but they also must converge to zero and converge quickly enough (1/n is not summable, but it does converege to zero).
This is really off topic though, but if you want more help, I'd be more than willing if you emailed me.
Slashdot Mirror
Well done
I have an anecdote about how vigilante justice once worked, so now it's a good way to solve a completely unrelated problem. Firstly vigilanteism punishes unpopular rather than illegal and immoral acts. While they sometimes coincide, they are not always going to. Also there is nothing to stop viglantes going bad, while there are some fallbacks and protective measures in most control structures. Your idea relies on what I presume is a benevolent group who only have the best interests of the majority at hand and are only called in when all normal attempts have been exhausted. This is not really a good idea for the real world. But of course the internet is not the real world, an immediate punitive system like this is possible, because the consequences for a bad decision aren't very great. I've lost my internet access, it's like losing your TV aerial - it's prefereable not to lose, but if your life depends on it - it's time to lose it anyway. The other issues still exist, but the internet is not important, it's not (yet) real life, you won't die or lose an arm if you make an error. Of course unpopular things will still be punished, wonder how an upstart, free, unpopular with the major players OS would go in such an environment?
I'll give you the right answer here. A convergent sequence is an infinite list of numbers that gets arbitrarily closer together, ie 1/n, this gets as close as you want it to to zero. Similairly with the digits of pie, if you create a sequence with the first term being 3, second 3.1, 3.14,.... and keep going you get a converging sequence towards pie. Can I recommend Spivaks book, "Calculus", by Publish or Perish. This has got everything being discussed re this message, the transcendental nature of pie and e, ifninite sums, the construction of the number line, etc. a couple of the other answers are wrong, they discuss summable sequences, which are an entirely different thing. They must be convergent, yes, but they also must converge to zero and converge quickly enough (1/n is not summable, but it does converege to zero). This is really off topic though, but if you want more help, I'd be more than willing if you emailed me.