Bah-weep-Graaaaagnah wheep ni ni bong.

Playing devil’s advocate here: both lines are consistent with them owning the games. We just rent them for a while, and own nothing. But pirating is taking what they own without paying - i.e. stealing.

Thanks for the info! I am indeed playing the EE. I quite liked Neera in BG1, but we’ll see how it goes. And yeah Nalia is a bit grating already.

As for Yoshimo, I kind of messed him up by putting all points in traps, which meant he sucked at opening locks. After Imoen was taken I had no-one to open harder locks. Although with the amount of mages I could go for Knock… Jan’s burping is annoying me already.

Just one mod, to add more portraits to speaking NPCs.

I’m a sorcerer (dragon disciple) and I’ve got Minsc, Jaheira, Jan (just picked him up to replace Yoshimo), Aerie, and Nalia.

In BG1 I had two rules: no evil or lawful characters, and no male characters. I did that just for fun after I noticed 5/6 were female and I had a certain belt.

I don’t think I’ll be able to follow the same rules now if I need a good thief and a warrior. Besides, Aerie is lawful but too cute to let go. I do seem to have a surplus of wizards though.

Baldur’s Gate 2 Shadows of Amn. I’ve been agonising about there being so many interesting companions and only five slots.

I suspect that’ll be my answer for many months to come.

Some of the star puzzles are absolutely devious.

No, only the password is.

Correct house stapler battery

I would agree if not for the flagrant grammatical error. That is a huge turnoff.

There is a paper titled “What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic” by David Goldberg. It’s a bit theoretical, but IMO it’s a must-read for any programmer doing more than the occasional floating point calculation. It goes beyond just limited precision and rounding errors.

Randall Munroe. You may know him from such gems as xkcd 3472 and 6548.

Ah Lemmy, downvoting an honest question. Daddy Reddit would be proud.

Upvoted to offset the stupidity.

I finished the Siege of Dragonspear and even Black Pits expansions of Baldur’s Gate 1, and have now started Baldur’s Gate 2 Shadows of Amn.

I’m not far in yet (chapter two) but already get the feeling this is much deeper and has many more options than the first game - which was already quite good. I think I’m going to like this one.

I finished the Siege of Dragonspear and even Black Pits expansions of Baldur’s Gate 1, and have now started Baldur’s Gate 2 Shadows of Amn.

I’m not far in yet (chapter two) but already get the feeling this is much deeper and has many more options than the first game - which was already quite good. I think I’m going to like this one.

“And while Spectral JPEG XL dramatically reduces file sizes, its lossy approach may pose drawbacks for some scientific applications.”

This is the part that confuses me. First of all, many applications that need spectral data need it to be as accurate as possible. Lossy compression in that might not be acceptable.

More interestingly (and I’ll read the actual paper for this): which data will be more compressed? Simply put, JPEG achieves its best compression by keeping the brightness but discarding colour. Which dimension in which spectral space do the researchers think can be more compressed than others? In this case there is no human visual system to base the decision on.

Kind of, but JPEG converts image data to its own internal 3 came channel colour space before applying DCT. It is not compressing the R, G and B channels of most images. So a multichannel compression is not just compressing each channel separately.

JPEG 2000 supports lossless mode.

It’s also a very good introduction to programming, and just a good read. Probably the best book about programming I’ve ever read.

I’m no expert, but as I understand it, there are several things that can go wrong just by clicking. This depends somewhat on your browser settings and how you use it.

Visiting a compromised site may allow the attacker to access data from other tabs and windows in the same browser session. Some sites warn you to close the whole browser when logging out because of this.

Sometimes bugs in a browser can allow a site to run arbitrary code on your machine. These hopefully get patched quickly.

I can’t comment on the others, but PDF to JPEG should be easy enough. ImageMagick, which another commenter suggested, is possible but not user friendly. However you can just open the PDF in many applications and export it as an image. Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop can do it. GIMP probably too.

I’m a last ditch effort you can even just open the file and screenshot it.