Did you know that over 1400 earthquakes of magnitude 5 or higher are recorded each year?
Yes, in fact I did. Did you know that there were 3 6.0+ earthquakes in 1 day just a couple days ago around Japan? Did you know that 7.0+ don't happen extremely often, and to predict it 9 months in advance based on actual evidence and not guesswork is fairly impressive?
Did you know that earthquakes often happen in close succession? Having 3 major earthquakes around Japan within one day is not surprising at all. On the contrary, it's expected: If there's one big earthquake, it's expected for there to be many others soon after. The continental plates seldom settle up in one go.
There are thousands of significant earthquakes around the world every year. Hence predicting an earthquake on a specific day has a pretty high chance of being correct. Make enough predictions and some of them are bound to "predict" big earthquakes. Especially effective if you afterwards choose from the many predictions only those which happened to "predict" earthquakes which get in the news.
Since earthquakes happen almost every day, it's expected for them to happen also in days where there are planetary alignments. Correlation does not imply causation (in other words, just because planetary alignments happen at the same time as earthquakes doesn't necessarily mean one causes the other).
Think about it in the opposite direction: If planetary alignments cause earthquakes, then what causes earthquakes when there are no alignments? Couldn't a more reasonable explanation be that it's the same reason that causes all earthquakes, rather than some of them being caused by planetary alignments and the rest by something else?
to predict it 9 months in advance
I'm curious to know why you think the timeframe is of any significance. What does it matter if the earthquake was "predicted" the previous week or 20 years ago? What difference does that make? It's not like earthquakes become more and more certain (and hence easier to predict) the closer they are to happening. This is not weather forecasting.
I can see cyan right there in the Mario Paint palette. I think the algorithm that decides the gray is closer to cyan than cyan itself is not very well done.
I think it's logical that unhelpful or even disruptive/destructive reactions and behaviour is not accepted anywhere in the world... You know, I'm talking about communites like TASVideos that made up by several other people who registered here to the forum to get more informations about speedruns concerning the TAS area. The site is about being "nice" and "pedagogic", everybody can understand and learn what We, the TASVideos members make and do anytime anywhere.
So... I don't think anybody would afford more time for being nice to non helpful members... Okay, Warp?
I'm not exactly sure what you are asking.
I was not objecting to the ban or its reasoning. I was simply asking if he was personally warned before executing the ban, giving him an opportunity to change his misbehavior, which I think would have been fair.
That's not a personal warning given just prior to the ban. Does this mean the ban did come out of the blue, without warning?
Edit: Is this the official stance? If you misbehave long enough, you are banned without warning?
It seems that some scammers are cutting corners. This is the first scam I remember seeing where they are upfront about "we will give you x millions, but you'll have to give us some money first", rather than waiting a couple of emails and possible phone calls before doing that.
In this case they offer me the meager sum of $850,000 (which is unusually little), but they don't waste any time telling me that they want money from me. A representative quote:
Scammer wrote:
Note: Everything has been taken care of by the Federal Government of Nigeria, The United Nation and also the FBI and including taxes; custom paper and clearance duty so all you will ever need to pay is $155.
OTOH, curiously the email does not try to explain why the 155 dollars cannot be taken from the 850 thousand. Seems like they will have to explain that to repliers after all.
I assume xkeeper was warned before being banned, so that an opportunity to change his behavior was given to him... Or did the ban simply came out of the blue? (And by warning I mean a clear one, like "please stop this kind of behavior or you will be banned", rather than just "please stop this kind of behavior".)
I think that for fairness people should be given the opportunity to correct their behavior before punishing them.
I suppose it makes sense from a technical point of view that the end text is actually part of the world map, but it's still quite funny. It's a bit like a preview. "You'll get here eventually, but just not yet. You'll have to go left and trigger the ending first."
I'd suggest, if you'd like your own forum, to find a topic that isn't covered yet, that may interest people.
This made me try to think of something that nobody has ever tried. As a completely random (and ridiculous) idea the first thing that came to mind after thinking a bit was "speed knitting". You can imagine my surprise when I googled for those terms and discovered that it's an actual existing hobby. There are even youtube videos.
There's nothing new under the sun, it seems.
I couldn't tell if you already knew this, and your post was just meant to be funny.
It was meant to be funny. Well, at least half-serious.
As I commented, district heating is (AFAIK) currently the most energy-efficient and least-polluting solution to heat large amounts of homes and other buildings in cities (as well as having a virtually endless supply of hot shower water), so it is indeed a bit strange that so many so-called first-world countries have not adopted this technology. Heating water with electricity is a huge waste of energy.
TV inspectors also visit houses that do not pay the TV fee, and ask if they can inspect the house for a TV.
Actually they don't (well, at least not anymore, AFAIK). The inspectors, while often members of the police force, do not have any legal right to search people's homes (because they are not acting in the role of a police officer), and they usually don't even ask that. They simply ask if you own a TV. (In fact, even if you invited them in they usually will refuse. Personal experience.) It could depend on the individual, though.
What does make them obnoxious though, is that they don't actually ask if you own a TV like I claimed above. They just offer you the fee form as if accusing you of owning a TV without having reported it. If you deny having a TV they will insist for a while before giving up. It's like they were door-to-door salesmen instead of inspectors. That's really obnoxious.
As the fee has become more and more expensive lately, more and more people are getting rid of their TV so they also don't need to pay the fee. This has spawned a lobbyist motion that the TV fee should be made mandatory, like a tax, on everyone, regardless of whether they have a TV or not. It would be somewhat cheaper than the current fee (which gains it some support from people who already pay it), while still quite expensive (obviously, present non-subscribers vehemently object to it). They also want to extend it to cover Internet connection ownership (because of Internet TV, so that if you possess Internet connection, you must also pay the TV fee), cellphones and whatnot.
Yet downloading TV series and movies from the internet would still be illegal even if that law passes. Go figure. You have to pay for something you can't do legally anyways. In that sense it isn't even a fee, but a fine (on an assumed crime).
The fee in question is also very unfair. Effectively low-income people have to pay significantly more than high-income people (because the fee eats a higher portion of their income in the former case). Also people living alone effectively pay double compared to couples who live in the same household (assuming both have a source of income), as the fee is not personal, but per-household. And naturally people who don't own a TV or any other form of receiving TV programs would pay for nothing.
"My hot water run out in the shower"? In a first-world country? Seriously?
Maybe I'm just living in a "first-first-world country", as that doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
(If someone doesn't know what I'm talking about, see this, which is something that all modern cities should employ, especially nowadays with the climate change and all. Also, you never run out of hot water.)
On the other hand:
Dacicus wrote:
Wow, do you really have to wait 6 months to see a dentist in Finland?
AFAIK nowadays it can be even up to a year!
I think that in the 70's and 80's you could get to a dentist in a week or two. Then an economic crisis hit Finland really hard in the 90's. Now we (and the rest of the world) are struggling with a second economic crisis. Although I'm not exactly sure this is the cause, but for some reason the demand/supply ratio on dentistry (and many other specialized medical services) has gone through the roof, and if you reserve an appointment to a dentist today, you are lucky if you get there in 6 months. The situation is completely ridiculous and everybody is complaining about it, but for some reason the government seems to be unable to come up with a solution to the problem.
At least it's still free. Let's see if they change that (which wouldn't surprise me).
I made the mistake of thinking that reducing the framerate to 30fps would reduce the filesize, but another encode showed that the 60fps size is almost identical (100 KB more).
It's the encoding bitrate that counts (or whatever amounts to the effective bitrate with the more advanced encoding options), not the framerate. A higher framerate (while keeping the same bitrate) might or might not reduce the visual quality of the encode (because you are effectively compressing more data into the same space; however, if it does reduce the quality, it's not by much; the correlation is certainly not linear).
In the end I decided to vote yes. This is technically a good improvement on the existing run, and a lot of work has been done to end up with this. However, you all know my personal distaste about the savegame corruption technique, so be it noted once again. But please let's not discuss about that anymore (at least not in this thread), as it has been discussed to death already.
First off: is there any reason that this game should not be TAS'd?
In general, it's impossible to say without trying. You should make a WIP of the first few levels, post it in the SNES games group and request comments and opinions.
How about flying near the speed of light as a form of traveling to the future? That could have less to no bad consequences (except maybe being extremely expensive).
As you approach the speed of light your mass (weight) becomes infinite. That may be a drawback.
What is the mysterious 152th pokemon?
Anyways, I'm not sure what I should vote. I know this is just an improvement to an already-published run, and it's definitely not worse than it (taking into account the goal), so the obvious vote would be yes.
However, since I personally detest savegame corruption as a technique (if a password were used to jump right to the end of the game, this would be rejected, but because it's achieved with savegame corruption, it becomes ok; I'm not sure I agree that there's such a relevant difference) I find it hard to vote "yes" on good conscience. It would feel like letting a criminal go based on a minute technicality. You know he's guilty, but you have to let him go because of the law.
That being said, there actually might be a few games where using a password (as early as possible) to jump as far as possible in the game might be desirable. Most usually if the game consists of an endless stream of almost-identical levels, and playing only the last level can be of any interest. OTOH such games are extremely rare. (Dr. Mario might be an example, but I don't remember if a password is used to skip to the final level, or whether it's selectable as-is.)
