Posts for Warp


Banned User
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Is it sad if you get friend-zoned by your iphone?
Banned User
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Location: Finland
A brony the kid at 3:50 ain't... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4a9CKgLprQ
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What I would like to do is spam the reply address with bogus (but plausible-looking) replies with spoofed sender IP addresses (so that the can't be filtered by sender IP). This not only would cause work to the scammers, but it might protect people who send their actual usernames and passwords, as they get buried under all the spam and are hard to distinguish from the fake ones. Ironically, doing that would probably be technically illegal.
Post subject: Re: How to make 10-bit encodes?
Banned User
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Ilari wrote:
Santiago wrote:
Is 10-bit 1024 shades for RGB?
No, video compression usually uses YCbCr instead of RGB.
AFAIK lossy video compression usually uses a color space in the form of a grayscale channel and separate color information because it's more lossy-friendly than the RGB color space (in other words, grayscale+color can be compressed more without the human brain noticing much difference than RGB). However, when dealing with lossless compression, does it make a difference?
Banned User
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Location: Finland
Then there's this type of naive confidence scam:
Scammer wrote:
Dear Web-mail User, Your Mail quota has reached limit, You might not be able to send or receive new mail until you re-validate your mailbox .To re-validate your mailbox reply to this mail and fill your { Email Address } { User-name } { Password }: Technical Support
The sad thing is that a good portion of people will really send their username and password to anybody who asks for it claiming to be someone of authority. What I do not understand is what do these scammers need people's email accounts for. There are approximately a million free email services out there, and they can create as many email accounts they want. What's the point in hijacking someone's account?
Banned User
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Location: Finland
Derakon wrote:
letting normal users report posts should in theory reduce response times.
Spamming and vandalism has never been a big problem in this forum, but there might come the situation where a speedy response may be desirable, in which case a moderator getting eg. an email notification of such an "emergency" would indeed speed up things a lot. OTOH such a system can also be prone to abuse.
Banned User
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Ferret Warlord wrote:
Hasbro finally releasing what can only be described as the Brony Set?
DJ Pon-3 but no Derpy? Bleh.
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
But real clowns are sad. It's other people who laugh at them.
No, clowns are scary. Nobody laughs at them. They scream in fear.
Banned User
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Location: Finland
p4wn3r wrote:
Or the problem is that you used the word "definition", because defining something is exactly saying what this thing is.
Yeah, "description" was probably the word I was looking for, rather than "definition".
Post subject: Re: Weird spam (and scam)
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Location: Finland
Bisqwit wrote:
Wow, this spam is really meta. "So we hear you were scammed. Good news: You can be reimbursed. Just fall into our scam which is exactly the same type of scam we are notifying you of."
I just received another version of such meta-scam. It's unusually upfront about you having to pay them $390.
Scammer wrote:
Greetings to you my dear friend I am Mrs. Gardenia Farley; I am a US citizen, 48 years Old. I reside Here in California. My residential address is as follows; 6369 Rathke Dr. Riverside California, 92509 USA. I am one of those that executed a Compensation in Nigeria, many years ago and they refused to pay me. I had paid over $40,000 while in the US trying to get my payment all to No avail. So I decided to travel down to Nigeria with all my compensation documents and I was directed to meet Barrister Mr. Robert Bandy, who is a member of COMPENSATION AWARD COMMITTEE and I contacted him of which he explained everything to me. He said whoever is contacting us through emails are fake. He took me to the paying bank for the claim of my Compensation payment. Right now I am the most happiest woman on earth so i decided to email you to stop dealing with those people, they are not with Your funds, they are only making money out of you. I will advise you to contact Barrister Robert Bandy immediately. You have to contact him direct on this information below. Barrister. Robert Bandy COMPENSATION HOUSE Name: Mr. Robert Bandy (Barrister) Email: (censored) Phone: (censored) Office Address: 24, Marnbolo Street Wuse, Zone 2, Abuja. You really have to Stop dealing with those people that is contacting you and telling you that Your fund is with them, it is not in anyway with them, they are only taking advantage of you and they will dry you up until you have nothing. The only money I paid was just $390usd, for the paper work take note of that. Once again stop contacting those people, I will advise you to contact Barr. Robert Bandy so that he can help you to deliver your fund instead of dealing With those liars that will be turning you around asking for different kind of money to complete your transaction. Thank You and Be Blessed. Mrs. Gardenia Farley.
Banned User
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p4wn3r wrote:
Well, I don't think anybody said that entropy can't be used to determine how much work a system can do. What we said is just that entropy and energy available are different things.
And I never said they are the same thing. Let me quote my original text:
Warp wrote:
Isn't a more modern, semi-informal definition that entropy describes how much energy there is available for useful work in a system
"Entropy describes" != "entropy is". (Granted, perhaps "describes" is a bit vague, and a better expression would be "can be used to express/measure" or "is directly correlated to".)
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zaphod77 wrote:
This puts save corruption under the category of abuse of programming errors.
Except in the consoles where it cannot be done.
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Bobo the King wrote:
Surely you bear your own prejudices. Hunting? Political rallies? Religious service of certain denominations?
They key point is in the "harmless" part of "harmless hobby". If, for example, excessive hunting is destroying the ecosystem (and thus everybody who lives in that ecosystem), then it's not harmless. If a political rally causes, eg. hatred and violence towards some groups of people, that's not harmless. Some people cosplaying for an anime convention does not harm anybody. (Please let's not go into excessive pedantry about what constitutes "harm" and what doesn't. I think everybody knows what I'm referring to.)
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If we have a closed system that does some thermodynamic work, over time it will be able to do less and less work as entropy inside the system increases (until at some point it will not be able to do any work at all because entropy is too large). If we have two such closed systems, identical in all other aspects except that in one of them entropy is significantly larger than in the other, and both of them are put to do the same work, then the one with the larger entropy will be able to do less work than the one with the lower entropy. Hence there's a strong correlation between entropy and the amount of work that a closed system can do. What's the catch? I still don't quite understand why describing entropy as "a thermodynamic property that can be used to determine the amount of energy available for useful work" is so wrong. What exactly is wrong about it?
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Ferret Warlord wrote:
To briefly go back to a previous topic, if someone wants to spend a week of their life sitting in front of a theater, okay, sure, more power to them. Not gonna stop me from thinking, "Good grief, life is too precious to waste doing nothing in front of a theater! Go home and do something, y'know, useful!"
They are not doing nothing. They are having social interactions with like-minded people, they are bonding, they are forming new friends, they are having fun. Not everything has to be "useful". Watching MLP episodes is not "useful", nor is watching TAS videos (or even making them). Going to a week-long camping trip is not "useful". However, it isn't necessarily a waste of life either. Each person should use their free time to do what they like, not what others think they should do, according to some uptight preconceived norms.
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I think part of the confusion here is that, it seems, there are two ways of interpreting entropy, the classical viewpoint and the statistical viewpoint.
Wikipedia wrote:
Thermodynamic entropy is more generally defined from a statistical thermodynamics viewpoint, in which the molecular nature of matter is explicitly considered. Alternatively entropy can be defined from a classical thermodynamics viewpoint, in which the molecular interactions are not considered and instead the system is viewed from perspective of the gross motion of very large masses of molecules and the behavior of individual molecules is averaged and obscured. (...) From a macroscopic perspective, in classical thermodynamics the entropy is interpreted as a state function of a thermodynamic system: that is, a property depending only on the current state of the system, independent of how that state came to be achieved. The state function has the important property that, when multiplied by a reference temperature, it can be understood as a measure of the amount of energy in a physical system that cannot be used to do thermodynamic work; i.e., work mediated by thermal energy.
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Bobo the King wrote:
So I have a much simpler answer that should satisfy everyone: "No."
I got the notion from wikipedia, where it's described exactly like that. If it's incorrect, then what would be a more correct description, in layman terms? (I'm honestly asking because I want to know.) A more common (and probably older) description is that entropy describes the amount of "chaos" in the system, but AFAIK that's an even more vague and inaccurate description. In some sense it might be equivalent to "amount of energy available for useful work" (if we understand that as some kind of ordering, and hence the less ordered the system, the less able it is to perform useful work). Also, equating entropy with chaos leads to tons of confusion.
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Bobo the King wrote:
As for You Gotta Share, You Gotta Care, I excluded the Pinkie Pie songs because they're on a whole other level (and YGS, YGC is by far my favorite Pinkie Pie song).
What I really admire in that song is its pure genius: It's a believably awful song (in other words, it does not break willing suspension of disbelief that the characters listening to the performance think that it's just awful), yet it's still very catchy and well-made.
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IronSlayer wrote:
The stuff about degrees, "experts", and accusing me of caring about you personally is all meaningless BS. Besides the point. And as Bobo noted, I've humored your silly ramblings long enough.
I must admit you are a master at trolling. I tried to lighten the mood with my last post with some humor, and start an actual discussion, to no avail. You still keep belittling and insulting me, and presenting claims with no arguments whatsoever, and succeed it doing it in the most annoying way possible. If you were trying to get on my nerves, then congratulations, you succeeded.
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The youtube encode was annoying to watch because of the lack of a flicker-fixing filter. Nevertheless, yes vote. A good improvement on the existing run. (The x-scope glitch is still boring, but well, there's nothing that can be done to it.)
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For some reason I cannot help but think that the spoken intro text is incomplete, and that the whole thing goes like: The last metroid is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace. Your life, as it has been, is over. From this time forward, you will service us. Resistance is futile.
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Bobo the King wrote:
Pinkie Pie's Smile Song? It really just tells us what we already know: Pinkie Pie is friendly to everyone and likes spreading cheer. Sure, that point ended up being the focus of the episode, but the song seemed like pure fluff.
I'd say that if the song caused emotions on someone, it succeeded in its goal perfectly. What more could a song wish for? (And no love for "you gotta share, you gotta care"?-) )
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IronSlayer wrote:
I have a bachelor's degree in math
Then I outrank you because I have a master's degree, so my authority is bigger than yours, ha! ;) Seriously, though (and honestly not to attack or belittle you), arguing that you object to someone's definition of entropy "as a scientist" is not very honest if what you have is an education and minor degree in math. (That's not to say that you are not competent in physics. It's just that using the label "scientist" is dishonest if you are not really a scientist in the correct field of science.)
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zaphod77 wrote:
So the reset button qualifies as input, but the power switch does not.
Not to resurrect the old discussion on the subject, but my original point was not about determinism, but about what can be considered input to the game (rather than input to the CPU). It might be a different story if the game could hook to the reset interrupt and eg. disable it during saves or do something else (such as jump to the main menu).
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IronSlayer wrote:
I'm a scientist by work and education, so I was interested in the confusion surrounding the concept of entropy.
Then perhaps Mr Scientist would be so nice and go and fix the Wikipedia page on entropy because it's so plain wrong. May I ask in which field of science you have a degree, and which degree? Personally I have a degree in computing science, but that doesn't make me an expert on physics (much less thermodynamics), nor do I pretend to have such expertise (I have clearly stated that the definition I quoted is an informal one, most probably not the most accurate and exact one). Saying "I'm a scientist, hence you should believe me" isn't a very convincing argument in itself.
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IronSlayer wrote:
To be fair, anyone who does this suffers from a mental disorder. And should probably get a freaking job or education, instead.
Warp wrote:
and then some moron commenting that what a bunch of nerds, they should get a life. That kind of person is an idiot.
I couldn't have said it better myself.