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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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Story Monday March 26 2018

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37 minutes ago, hkmaly said:
10 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

As for knowing how a car works, how many of you could build a car from scratch?

4StrokeEngine_Ortho_3D_Small.gif

Basically everyone who looked at one of these images for minute would have the basics. It may take you few weeks to make it really running even with team preparing all the parts, but you simply can't say that the principle of car is hard to explain. It's not.

Even principle of computer is easy to explain. You can explain how to go from transistor to logic gates and simple calculator in less than hour (well, I could). Sure, this explanation won't help you make computer, because the hard part is how to get billions of transistors into space small enough ... but still, the principle is easy.

Assembling a car from scratch is not putting together parts manufactured by someone else. Scratch building means building from basic raw materials. In building models, it means no kit; you decide what you want to make and you craft the whole thing yourself, not assembling a kit. In furniture, it doesn't mean buying a flatpack from Ikea and assemblying it; it means gathering deadwood or cutting down trees and curing the wood, carving all the wooden pieces, obtaining fiber for any fabrics and making the fabrics, learning how to smelt durable metals from ore, learning how to smith that metal, smithing, inventing the Allen wrench...

The principal of the computer is easy to explain? Okay, what's the difference between a digital and an analog computer? How do you make a chip? What's a semiconductor? What is valence? Who was Boole? Why is Lord Byron's daughter considered the very first computer programmer?

Getting back to your diagram of a piston internal combustion engine, what's making those sparks? The ancient Greeks knew about static electricity, but it took over two millennia before Benjamin Franklin came up with the first practical use of electrical theory: The lightning rod. Wait, actually some Babylonean invented a battery thousands of years earlier; most likely it was a trade secret used for electroplating jewelry. But the secret got lost during some war or plague or some stupid forgotten law (protect our people from fake gold!)

Speaking of Ikea again, is there any doubt that those wordless assembly instructions weren't designed by the Will of Magic? They read like spellbooks...

 

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2 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

Assembling a car from scratch is not putting together parts manufactured by someone else. Scratch building means building from basic raw materials. In building models, it means no kit; you decide what you want to make and you craft the whole thing yourself, not assembling a kit. In furniture, it doesn't mean buying a flatpack from Ikea and assemblying it; it means gathering deadwood or cutting down trees and curing the wood, carving all the wooden pieces, obtaining fiber for any fabrics and making the fabrics, learning how to smelt durable metals from ore, learning how to smith that metal, smithing, inventing the Allen wrench...

The principal of the computer is easy to explain? Okay, what's the difference between a digital and an analog computer? How do you make a chip? What's a semiconductor? What is valence? Who was Boole? Why is Lord Byron's daughter considered the very first computer programmer?

Nobody knows. 

...as in "no single individual in the Real World knows how to build a recognizably current car from a pile of iron ore, tree sap, etc" To make a classic car (1940s - 60s, say) you first have to reinvent the Industrial Revolution.  To make a 2018 sort of car you also have to replicate the Information Revolution.  And iterate significantly on both technologies. 

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45 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

Nobody knows. 

...as in "no single individual in the Real World knows how to build a recognizably current car from a pile of iron ore, tree sap, etc" To make a classic car (1940s - 60s, say) you first have to reinvent the Industrial Revolution.  To make a 2018 sort of car you also have to replicate the Information Revolution.  And iterate significantly on both technologies. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s664NsLeFM

 

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6 hours ago, hkmaly said:

That would really be evil. However, I think even before his explanation to Ashley we could saw he's not that kind of person.

Oh I agree. Once again, he displayed what he was made of when he drew the line at murdering Abraham and framing Mr. Verres.

6 hours ago, Scotty said:

Problem here is, "victim" can be applied to more than just Elliot and Ellen. If we go right to the roots, when Magus was first sent to this world, he was a victim of whoever sabotaged the item he used, he was further victim to the hostility of Immortals. Pandora was also a victim of having lost her husband in a horrific werewolf attack.

Absolutely. Victimisation is often a cycle. This makes it especially important to break such cycles. The thing is, it is possible to be a victim without passing harm on to others. As Eli Wiesel said, victimhood does not ennoble nor confer special privileges. But it does make it important to help the victims. In this case, it also means that victims who in turn become victimisers (as noted, this is not all of them) must be helped but also brought to understand that what they did was wrong.

6 hours ago, Scotty said:

I guess my question is, does a victim ever stop being a victim? Or does that get erased the moment a person makes an error in judgment or follows someone's instructions for getting out of whatever situation that made them a victim? Or do we wait for the moment the person goes from "I don't want to do this, but I have to" to "Ahh f^%$ it, I'll do whatever it takes" ?

That is a complex question and I have no ready answer. What I do know is that it is a bad idea to define a person by their victimhood. One does them no favours that way and they tend to find it supremely offensive. In short, remember that what you have is not a victim but rather a human being that was victimised.

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4 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

Assembling a car from scratch is not putting together parts manufactured by someone else. Scratch building means building from basic raw materials. In building models, it means no kit; you decide what you want to make and you craft the whole thing yourself, not assembling a kit. In furniture, it doesn't mean buying a flatpack from Ikea and assemblying it; it means gathering deadwood or cutting down trees and curing the wood, carving all the wooden pieces, obtaining fiber for any fabrics and making the fabrics, learning how to smelt durable metals from ore, learning how to smith that metal, smithing, inventing the Allen wrench...

That would obviously take more than weeks, yes. And I suppose there would be some steps which are harder than they seem. Still, in lot of cases just knowing something can be done helps a lot in re-researching that.

4 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

The principal of the computer is easy to explain? Okay, what's the difference between a digital and an analog computer? How do you make a chip? What's a semiconductor? What is valence? Who was Boole? Why is Lord Byron's daughter considered the very first computer programmer?

Digital computer uses only two states on wire, zero and one, while analog is using multiple voltage levels. Chips are done by painting silicon wafer with several layers of semiconductive material, putting some mask on them and then flashing them with UV light to remove the parts the mask was not covering ... ok, this part would take some time to recreate. Semiconductor is material which can make one-way junctions (borders between two semiconductors). Is usually silicon with some additive of element with 5 or 3 electrons in last layer, one example would be germanium. Valence is how many electrons are in outside layer of atom ... well, not really, but good enough for practical purposes where you don't care for anything heavier than uranium anyway. Boole no idea ... wait, does he has something to do with boolean algebra? Not really important who he was, just that algebra. Ada Adelaide, countess of Lovelace. She got the idea of conditional jump. The first computer she programmed was the one Babbage was building, although never finished it.

(Yes, that was from head.)

I could also explain von Neumann computer architecture - or Turing machine, if we want theory, although Turing machine is otherwise very impractical ... would take more than few minutes, so I'm not going to be proving it, but I can.

4 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

Getting back to your diagram of a piston internal combustion engine, what's making those sparks? The ancient Greeks knew about static electricity, but it took over two millennia before Benjamin Franklin came up with the first practical use of electrical theory: The lightning rod. Wait, actually some Babylonean invented a battery thousands of years earlier; most likely it was a trade secret used for electroplating jewelry. But the secret got lost during some war or plague or some stupid forgotten law (protect our people from fake gold!)

While obsolete now, for hand-made car lead-based battery would be good enough. That's like sulfuric acid and two lead electrodes isn't it? And I suppose I would be able to make dynamo, although it would take me long time to actually reel that wire ...

2 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

...as in "no single individual in the Real World knows how to build a recognizably current car from a pile of iron ore, tree sap, etc" To make a classic car (1940s - 60s, say) you first have to reinvent the Industrial Revolution.  To make a 2018 sort of car you also have to replicate the Information Revolution.  And iterate significantly on both technologies. 

Thing is, single individual WOULD be able to start Industrial Revolution in middle ages, or, say, in King Arthur's Court. It would take years, but the amount of information necessary for that is lower than how much you need to know for final exams for master title (and is actually part of those information on several schools).

Information revolution would be harder. You need quantum physic for some inventions there.

 

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1 minute ago, The Old Hack said:

Absolutely. Victimisation is often a cycle. This makes it especially important to break such cycles. The thing is, it is possible to be a victim without passing harm on to others. As Eli Wiesel said, victimhood does not ennoble nor confer special privileges. But it does make it important to help the victims. In this case, it also means that victims who in turn become victimisers (as noted, this is not all of them) must be helped but also brought to understand that what they did was wrong.

1 minute ago, The Old Hack said:

That is a complex question and I have no ready answer. What I do know is that it is a bad idea to define a person by their victimhood. One does them no favours that way and they tend to find it supremely offensive. In short, remember that what you have is not a victim but rather a human being that was victimised.

Yeah, it is really complex, actions need intent, and intent is fueled by any number of environmental, social, instinct, whatever. We're all a victims of something at some point, how we react to it and deal with the effects differs with not only the severity of victimization, but the type of person we are.

I had been thinking about this for much of the day, but Bad Tom and Ashley came to mind as good examples. Bad Tom was obviously looking out for his own wants, manipulating people into dating him and giving him stuff and such, Susan called him out on it and maybe he's been shown the error of his ways but we won't know for sure until we see him again  and how he acts. Ashley was a victim of Tom's manipulation, she saw that Tom was working Susan and decide he needed to be stopped before he hurt Susan the way she was hurt by him.

Problem is, she didn't go directly to Susan because she was afraid that Susan would think of her as the jealous ex-girlfriend and ignore her, so she decided to talk to Elliot in the hopes that Susan would listen to him instead. That whole plan could have backfired spectacularly and ended up not only ruining Susan's and Elliot's friendship, but if Susan did end up dating Tom and later realized he was being manipulative, that would likely have compounded on the negative feelings and distrust for men that she got when her father cheated. Ashley could be seen as being wrong in going behind Susan's back to recruit a friend into prevent her from having a potentially meaningful relationship despite how good the intentions were, but at the same time, if Ashley kept her nose out of Susan's business the potential for Susan to get badly hurt was still there. It was fortunate that Susan caught on to Bad Tom's game early enough that it rendered Ashley's actions unnecessary but still it could have been a very bad situation. And we know Ashley's goodness rivals that of Elliot's and yet because of something that happened to her, that goodness came very close to causing more harm than good I think.

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4 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

While obsolete now, for hand-made car lead-based battery would be good enough. That's like sulfuric acid and two lead electrodes isn't it? And I suppose I would be able to make dynamo, although it would take me long time to actually reel that wire ...

You need a precisely controlled voltage for any solid-state device,. This is why you should NEVER EVER hook up your solid state electronic devices to house current without using a surge protector. When I was in the U.S. Navy in the 1970s, I had a friend who was the sysop for the mainframe on a repair ship. He knew his stuff--but he was an enlisted man, not a commissioned officer. The dedicated power supply for the mainframe went down, and the division officer, who probably had an Anapolis ring but didn't know squat about electronics, ordered the computer to be hooked up to the regular ship's power. The computer was fried, and since it was a MILSPEC computer, it undoubtedly cost a lot more to replace than a commercially available computer.

Keep in mind this is in a world where the laws of physics don't really change, at least on the time scale of recorded human history; only our understanding of those laws has evolved. That isn't the case in Dan Shive's universe.

Anyway, it's just silly for Magus to be wearing a modern tie if his world doesn't resemble ours in most ways. And while Dan does silly well, he also puts an awful lot of thought in constructing his multiverse. One might even call it obsessive, or compulsive, or both. So I wouldn't be surprised at all if Dan explains that tie someday. Oh, Terra was wearing the same uniform. 

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20 minutes ago, Scotty said:

we know Ashley's goodness rivals that of Elliot's and yet because of something that happened to her, that goodness came very close to causing more harm than good I think.

Good Intentions can make for a very good pavement.

...

Depending on your destination.

1 minute ago, Tom Sewell said:

it's just silly for Magus to be wearing a modern tie if his world doesn't resemble ours in most ways.

I personally believe that the necktie is one of the silliest customs of our world.

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20 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:
41 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

While obsolete now, for hand-made car lead-based battery would be good enough. That's like sulfuric acid and two lead electrodes isn't it? And I suppose I would be able to make dynamo, although it would take me long time to actually reel that wire ...

You need a precisely controlled voltage for any solid-state device,.

For creating sparks however, not so much. And chemical bateries have voltage in quite narrow range depending only on structure/technology. For example, one cell of lead-acid battery is 2.1V (although I DID needed to look up this one). That doesn't depend on how big it is ; it's always 2.1V.

24 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

Keep in mind this is in a world where the laws of physics don't really change, at least on the time scale of recorded human history; only our understanding of those laws has evolved. That isn't the case in Dan Shive's universe.

As far as we know :) ... the "recorded human history" is not detailed enough to be sure about that.

 

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6 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

Why is Lord Byron's daughter considered the very first computer programmer?

Because she wrote an article for an early scientific journal which included a bit of instructions for programming Charles Babbage's (never-built) Analytic Engine. Said instructions were probably written by someone else.

On the other hand, available evidence suggests that Lady Lovelace was the first - even ahead of Babbage himself - to realize that the Analytic Engine could be used to manipulate symbols, as well as numbers. Babbage envisioned it as an automated calculating machine. And while modern computers are of course very good calculating machines, I strongly suspect that a lot fewer processor cycles are put into calculating than are put into indexing things, looking things up, and word processing - all of which are symbol-manipulation.

2 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

What I do know is that it is a bad idea to define a person by their victimhood.

And particularly a bad idea to define a person by their assumed victimhood based on their being part of some group that isn't defined by actual, personal victimhood.

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25 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

And while modern computers are of course very good calculating machines, I strongly suspect that a lot fewer processor cycles are put into calculating than are put into indexing things, looking things up, and word processing - all of which are symbol-manipulation.

There is lot of calculation in word processing, especially if you use variable-width font. There is even more calculation in drawing computer graphics, which modern computers spend lot of time doing - although mostly it's GPU doing that, not CPU.

Of course that doesn't change that the symbol manipulation is important. Measuring importance by processor cycles would be weird anyway.

I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at the rate
of 40,000 or even 4,000 per hour ...
        -- F. H. Wales (1936)

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2 hours ago, Scotty said:

And we know Ashley's goodness rivals that of Elliot's and yet because of something that happened to her, that goodness came very close to causing more harm than good I think.

Hrm. I do not really see what you mean but that may be due to me being very tired. At any rate I am glad we came to some level of understanding.

4 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at the rate
of 40,000 or even 4,000 per hour ...
        -- F. H. Wales (1936)

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

          -- Bill Gates (1981)

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Anyway, to summarize: Magus's note about how Sirleck can't explain how the car works is WEIRD. We can argue about why that might be true about magic, but it's definitely not true about technology - Sirleck may be unable to rebuild the car from scratch, but his answer that he does know how car works in NORMAL for technology in technology-based civilization.

After all, it's not rocket science nor brain surgery.

17 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:
23 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at the rate
of 40,000 or even 4,000 per hour ...
        -- F. H. Wales (1936)

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

          -- Bill Gates (1981)

I went to my first computer conference at the New York Hilton about 20
years ago.  When somebody there predicted the market for microprocessors
would eventually be in the millions, someone else said, "Where are they
all going to go? It's not like you need a computer in every doorknob!"
       
Years later, I went back to the same hotel.  I noticed the room keys had
been replaced by electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors.

There was a computer in every doorknob.
        -- Danny Hillis, cca 1999

 

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1 minute ago, The Old Hack said:

Hrm. I do not really see what you mean but that may be due to me being very tired. At any rate I am glad we came to some level of understanding.

Basically, Ashley thought she was doing the right thing by trying to warn Susan about Tom being manipulative, but it had the potential of causing harm because of the way she went about doing it.

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4 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

I personally believe that the necktie is one of the silliest customs of our world.

Cary Grant would have agreed with you. If you haven't watched Father Goose yet, watch it, and if you have, watch it again. Either way, remember as you are watching that the character Grant played in this movie Grant said later was more like himself as he really was than any other role. A necktie is a critical plot point.

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6 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

I personally believe that the necktie is one of the silliest customs of our world.

Neckties prove that women are smarter than men.

The fact that high-heeled shoes were invented for a man, but we foisted them off on women, proves that men are smarter than women.

(Which of those two proven things is true, varies from moment to moment and person to person.)

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My ex-wife wore high heels so much her tendons got shorter. It hurt her to walk without high heels for very long.

There were actually laws in France before the Revolution against wearing high heels if you weren't a noble.

However, Catherine de' Medici, Queen of France under Henry II and mother of three more kings of France, and mother-in-law of Mary Queen of Scots and mother-in-law of Henry of Navarre who later became king of France and Louis XIV's grandfather, is also credited with putting high heels in fashion. She was very short (but her family was very long in cash.)

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9 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Thing is, single individual WOULD be able to start Industrial Revolution in middle ages, or, say, in King Arthur's Court. It would take years, but the amount of information necessary for that is lower than how much you need to know for final exams for master title (and is actually part of those information on several schools).

That only works if you are a Connecticut Yankee. :D

7 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Hrm. I do not really see what you mean but that may be due to me being very tired. At any rate I am glad we came to some level of understanding.

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

          -- Bill Gates (1981)

Well 640k would definitely have been enough for anybody who was using any desktop machine that was on the market in 1981. By the PC-AT era (286-based), it was definitely limiting.

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15 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Anyway, to summarize: Magus's note about how Sirleck can't explain how the car works is WEIRD. We can argue about why that might be true about magic, but it's definitely not true about technology - Sirleck may be unable to rebuild the car from scratch, but his answer that he does know how car works in NORMAL for technology in technology-based civilization.

Not everyone in a technology-based civilization knows how a given piece of technology works. That is dependent on education and potentially the availability of reference material. There are people in the world whose knowledge of cars is basic function knowledge. Fuel goes in the fuel hole, key turns it on, pedals make it go and stop, steering wheel makes it turn, stuff like that. An internal combustion engine might be a fairly simple concept to explain, but not everyone has the knowledge needed to explain it.

(Though it's likely Magus was just comparing an esoteric subject with what he thought was an esoteric subject, not realizing that car internals are not really that esoteric)

15 hours ago, hkmaly said:

it's not rocket science

The principals of rocket science are fairly easy to explain: Fuel and oxidizer mix in a controlled fashion to provide thrust out the rocket nozzle. Once thrust exceeds the force of gravity, the rocket begins accelerating upward. The rocket can be steered with multiple different methods depending on the design: gimbaled(rotatable) nozzle (though I don't think gimbals are used on the large main rockets), maneuvering jets, adjustable fins, or shifting the weight with a gyroscope. Multistage systems are used to shed weight/mass from the system as fuel/oxidizer is spent from previous stages, allowing for more acceleration with a given amount of thrust (or the same amount of acceleration with less thrust, if the rocket is designed in that manner). Orbit is achieved when velocity parallel to the planet's surface is great enough that gravity causes the rocket to fall around the planet instead of plummeting into the planet, but not so great that it achieves escape velocity.

The hard part about rocket science is detail work. If you want the rocket to do more than go up, you need to calculate a lot of numbers to figure out how to get it exactly where you want it (or at least close enough for whatever work you're doing). Even simply achieving orbit require calculating what velocity you need to achieve the desired orbit, and then calculating when burns need to be made to reach the needed velocity. If a person wants a rocket to reach another planet or moon or such, then even more calculations have to be made along with proper timing of the rocket's launch(Something I still have trouble with in Kerbal Space Program). Even if a person just wants the rocket to go up and then come down, calculations have to be made in order to get the rocket to come down at the right spot. 

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1 hour ago, Drasvin said:

Even if a person just wants the rocket to go up and then come down, calculations have to be made in order to get the rocket to come down at the right spot. 

I recently encountered a genius on Facebook who said that there was nothing impressive about the space program, that we had had rockets for centuries. I guess he didn't hold with the work of Sir Isaac Newton (the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space), astrophysics and the development of the maths needed to handle the interactions of multiple planetary bodies orbiting the same system.

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12 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

I recently encountered a genius on Facebook who said that there was nothing impressive about the space program.

Was that the same genius who created a steam rocket to prove the world was flat? I believe his only sane comment would be " This thing wants to kill you 10 different ways … This thing will kill you in a heartbeat." in regards to the rocket.

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6 minutes ago, Scotty said:

Was that the same genius who created a steam rocket to prove the world was flat? I believe his only sane comment would be " This thing wants to kill you 10 different ways … This thing will kill you in a heartbeat." in regards to the rocket.

Nah, I think it was just a common naysayer. You know, the kind that insists nothing is new. Like, a space station is really just a cave someone put in orbit and the cavemen inside it wear space suits instead of fur.

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19 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

Nah, I think it was just a common naysayer. You know, the kind that insists nothing is new. Like, a space station is really just a cave someone put in orbit and the cavemen inside it wear space suits instead of fur.

I'm not sure I'd go that far back, but one could easily compare a space station to a submarine, both are vessels designed to withstand extreme pressures (although subs deal with pressure pushing on it, while space stations deal with pressure pulling on it). but caves... I don't see it.

The one thing to note though, is there are technologies that you can look at and, they really haven't changed since they were first invented. Take the wheel for instance, one of the oldest pieces of technology, and despite the fact that materials used and the methods of creating them have changed over the millennia, the wheel is still a wheel and it's purpose has remained unchanged, and we'll probably continue to use it for centuries more.

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