3DGeek, I want you to know you're a genius. This eradicates any doubt for anyone in their right mind.
No, sadly - I'm no genius. I just follow the FET argument toward it's logical conclusion until it reached breaking point...then I back-track to where their theory is broken and try to find evidence to back it up.
In my job, I make 3D graphical representations of the world for flight simulation - so I know a lot about geometry and a lot about aircraft, spacecraft, etc.
Computer graphics chips are not really designed for round earth - hardly any video games have round earth geometry in them...it's just easier to make everything flat.
But in "serious" flight simulators, the errors that are showing up in FET would be insanely obvious. Pilots need round-earth simulations in order to be able to fly from point A to point B in the simulator. Many simulators actually use real-world aircraft parts (because it's expensive to re-engineer a "fake" that would function exactly the same). So (for example) the 747 simulators we built for Qantas (and many others) use the actual navigation computer from a real 747 of the same model number. We have to use our software to feed it position, compass, air-speed, GPS and accelerometer data so that the instrument 'believes' it's really flying around the world. Therefore I know for 100% certain that if you feed a 747's navigation system with flat earth data - it'll get severely screwed up and produce utter garbage for your position, speed, etc. It would literally be "unflyable". So our simulator has to provide an accurate representation of the shape of the world.
We don't treat the world as a sphere - or even an "oblate spheroid" because neither is a sufficiently accurate description to make things like the 747's nav computer behave. We use a mathematical description of the shape called "WGS-84" which derives from the "World Geophysical Survey of 1984" (which has subsequently been confirmed in several other WGS reports).
The true shape of the planet is very *VERY* close to being a perfect sphere - but not close enough to actually work for airlines and military aircraft. If you shrunk the world to the size of a pool/billiards ball, it would be sufficiently close to a perfect sphere to be acceptable for competition pool/billards under their rules!
Anyway - I know the Earth is round - it truly can't be any other shape. The enormous mountain of nonsense put out by the likes of Tom Bishop don't hold water. They are vague to the point of stupidity - these theories of how various things happen are inconsistent - there is no viable map (and now we've proved that there can't ever BE such a map) - gravity doesn't work, the motion and appearance of sun, moon, planets and stars don't work...really it's an untenable hypothesis.
But it is rather amusing to come up with ideas like this thread that pile on the evidence layer upon layer - forcing the likes of Tom into more and more bizarre suppositions.
Now we're supposed to believe that the makers of passenger airplanes don't know how fast they can really fly and the pilots of them are mistakenly flying them faster than the speed of sound without knowing it!
Please...
NOBODY believes that Tom...just nobody...you're making an idiot of yourself if that's your claim.
Anyway - onward. I have some more ideas for proofs along these lines. Right now I'm trying to get a group of people who'll take a photo of the moon at some particular date and time from at least three places with the same longitude and different latitudes. It turns out that this isn't easy because photos of the moon taken with cellphones are crap - so I need to find three or more people with decent SLR cameras.