1701

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Witcher 3 - Contains spoilers

« on: June 03, 2018, 04:21:13 PM »

Prude. Ok, fine. I hope they have as good a script. The Witcher was based on a series of books though (like a Polish Lord of the rings). Not sure where they'll get their inspiration for cyberpunk 2077, but I have confidence in them. They did such a good job on the Witcher they must have a lot of very talented writers on the payroll.

Well, the game is based on Cyberpunk 2020, so they have an established setting and lore to go on, but with the 50+ year gap they also have enough historical space to make it their own. They will probably also look to classic cyberpunk fiction writers like William Gibson and Philip K. Dick for inspiration.

I kind of wish they'd gone with a steampunk version instead. Set in some kind of dystopian Victorian era. The costumes would be epic, there would be all kinds of puzzles to solve regarding vast machines, crafting, blueprints, the fast travel could be ticket offices at train stations, there'd be urchins on the streets, people lighting gas lamps as it got dark, huge ornate clocks on the buildings, maybe an HG Wells inspired submarine and diving bells for the water quests ... futuristic RPGs / first person shooters have been done to death. I feel cyberpunk2077 will be more a cross between final fantasy and bioshock. I'd rather have a character with a nice set of crafted knuckle dusters and a one shot gun powder pistol as a last resort. Rapid fire lasers isn't really my bag. I'm thinking streets of London after dark, Jack the ripper, orphanages, debtors prisons, stunning wrought iron bridges, vast brick archways, a heavy smog of industrialisation setting the theme in major cities, cosplay freaks getting heavily into the game, goggles with magnification, night vision, heat vision etc to collect, robot extensions to your outfits to increase strength, automatons to defeat, rival inventors, muggers, henchmen, your own lab and factory. Meh, cyberpunk it is I guess.

1702

Flat Earth Theory / Re: 100% undebunkable

« on: June 03, 2018, 04:09:38 PM »

Why would the air have to "decelerate to a full stop" when moving north or south?

It would have to change velocity to match the spin speed at whatever circumference. That is a change of momentum. You need to add energy into a system to achieve that ... Newton's 1st law of motion.

...but why would it need to stop? And where would it stop?

At the North or South Pole, you'd have to be at velocity zero, with respect to earth's spin. So the speed varies from a max of 1040mph to a min of 0 in order for the air to keep up with the surface of the earth as it spins.

1703

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: New 'Blue Marble'

« on: June 03, 2018, 04:07:47 PM »

Using the stated distances of GOES-17 from Earth, and Moon from Earth, along with the radii of Earth and Moon, you can work out, from first principles, the angular size of each.

This will yield the comparative sizes of Earth and Moon as seen by GOES-17, and is intended as a follow-up to Bobby Shafto's question.

Do you want to work them out for yourself, or shall I outline the calcs for you?

I've been a flat earther on forums like this for a decade. I don't need to work out the numbers. I know them by heart. You aren't the first person in 10 years to ever bring this up.

However I don't agree with the theory from which you deduce the numbers in the first place. The earth is flat. Your starting numbers are all wrong. So the result is junk. Telling me the moon must be this size because YOUR theory states it is, isn't going to wow me when I get the numbers YOU expect.

1704

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: New 'Blue Marble'

« on: June 03, 2018, 03:57:12 PM »

something like this?

*snipped

Can you do geometry with right-angled triangles? Solving for one angle, given two side lengths, one of which is the hypotenuse?

No, I also struggle to breath through my nose and I have to read by running my finger under the words and mouthing them. Is there a point to your low-content slurs?

You haven't shown it to be in the same place, merely (roughly) the same distance/angle above the horizon...

When I'm convinced neither shot was taken from above the moon, why is the onus on me to show they are both taken from the same place on the moon? I'd guess both pictures where taken in a place like this ...

1705

Flat Earth Theory / Re: 100% undebunkable

« on: June 03, 2018, 03:53:59 PM »

Why would the air have to "decelerate to a full stop" when moving north or south?

It would have to change velocity to match the spin speed at whatever circumference. That is a change of momentum. You need to add energy into a system to achieve that ... Newton's 1st law of motion.

1706

Technology & Information / Re: GDPR

« on: June 03, 2018, 03:51:02 PM »

Still, the ray of sunshine is Brexit ... maybe we can turn it around but Teresa May probably needs removing first.

Unlikely. The GDPR was championed and vehemently supported by the UK's very own ICO. If anything, the common criticism in the UK is that the GDPR is not going far enough. Naturally, we can't know whether or not Tessie will make a sudden u-turn, but the current consensus is that it's very unlikely.

I suspect once the effects of closing effective advertising channels hits the economy as companies take a profit bath, the rules will be somewhat loosened. I don't think they comprehend the impact on lead gen and customer retention that GDPR has.

GDPR is aimed squarely at tech giants. Facebook, Apple, Google. They are looting European countries. They give you nothing (nothing physical) and you give them money ... and then they find ways to pay zero tax on those sales. Europe doesn't have a single large tech company.

Ummm...

(in the interest of not spamming, Apple has one of the biggest, most efficient supply chains in the world..)

thinking more of the app store in their case, updating iOS to obsolete paid apps, built in obsolesce of the device itself to leave you with nothing in a few short years, that sort of thing.

1707

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Time Dilation?

« on: June 03, 2018, 12:37:55 AM »

For those flat earthers that believe in Universal Acceleration, Special Relativity and consequently time dilation are essential. They explain how the the earth can keep accelerating at 9.81m/s^2 and yet never reach the speed of light.

https://wiki.tfes.org/Universal_Acceleration

I suspect your follow up questions will relate to gravity and you'll show me some awful hotch potch shoe horned thing like this ...



But scroll up from the image on that page and you'll see it is a misleading diagram.
https://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/general_relativity_massive/index.html#Misleading

You may then be tempted to bring in the bending of light, but I'll give you fair warning on that one, bendy light is something that goes in FE's favour. I'll refer you to our resident bendy light expert 'Parsifal' for a better explanation of that one. In case you are wondering, Pete Svarrior is our resident bendy darkness expert, but that is advanced FE mechanics.

1708

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: New 'Blue Marble'

« on: June 02, 2018, 11:24:20 PM »

That's interesting. I wonder what an image of the moon in the background of an earth shot would look like?

Let's each try to composite what we'd expect it to look like, either from a geostationary satellite or from that DISCOVR satellite parked at the L1 Lagrangian point (which captured that near moon transit pic.)

something like this?




*I'm a flat earther. You asked for that. 

1709

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: New 'Blue Marble'

« on: June 02, 2018, 11:09:25 PM »

In fact, lets have a closer look at the original Lunar Orbiter One image from 1958 ...


Weird how the moon is all segmented, yet the earth (the bit added in the photo below), is perfect.



Same shot, same suspicions.

It is very nice of the moon to make sure it is always in the same place at the time of every survey so the shot can always include both.

1710

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: New 'Blue Marble'

« on: June 02, 2018, 10:56:20 PM »

Hardly. The above photo only has a bit of the moon.

I'd wager you can only see a bit of the moon and a bit of the earth in the voyager image.

Would you take a photo of your garden and say it was "a photo of the Earth"?

I certainly wouldn't claim it was taken from a spacecraft.

READ the caption!

... to include
both earth .... check
and moon  .... check
in a single frame .... check
by a spacecraft ... check

The Apollo one was taken by an astronaut who was IN a spacecraft.

I think those are semantics we can live without.

How about this one? Lunar Orbiter 1 - 1966
https://explorer1.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/earth-from-space/#gallery-7
Are you going to tell me a scientific hamster took that one? Also look familiar? It is as if ... NASA were working towards some kind of space money shot. The same photo over and over, just better quality each time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_1
(Unmanned)

1711

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: New 'Blue Marble'

« on: June 02, 2018, 10:33:09 PM »

Voyager took this photo of the earth and moon

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/voyager-1-takes-the-first-image-of-the-earth-moon-system-in-a-single-frame/

It says on that image on that NASA site ...

Voyager 1 snapped this picture from a distance of 7.25 million miles. It was the first to include both the Earth and the Moon in a single frame taken by a spacecraft.

So what about this image supposedly eight years earlier?

Awkward 

1712

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Witcher 3 - Contains spoilers

« on: June 02, 2018, 08:06:30 PM »

She's his adopted daughter, you fucking weirdo! And the game makes it very, very clear what kind of relationship they have! This is really fucking creepy, even for you.

You know what, let's just talk about their upcoming game. It's gonna be great.

Does cyberpunk 2077 have release date?

Early 2019. The Polish government gave CD Projekt Red a grant of $5million to ensure they make the release on time, so they are under the gun, else apparently they have to give it back. Shame Star Shitizen isn't under a similar edict. 

1713

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: New 'Blue Marble'

« on: June 02, 2018, 08:03:59 PM »

Wow. They made a right mess of that. The Atlantic between South America and Africa appears to be smaller than the Gulf of Mexico. They've also managed to find a way to make sure both the arctic and Antarctica aren't visible.  at the same time.

That's what happens when you photograph it from 22k miles out. I'll take a photo of my desktop globe from an equivalent scale distance for you....

They managed to pick a day when there wasn't a single storm on the entire one half side of the planet

Why would you expect to see a storm in a still photo?

It was nice of the moon to move out of the way for this latest shot ...

The satellite is 22k miles out, the Moon at 240k ... so the Moon is farther away.

Yes, I get that but it could be in the background. It never is though. Never ever ever in any of NASAs images unless it is front and centre to show the thing they want to show. Accidental cosmology never occurs. Its almost as though someone composes every shot and makes sure they are perfect.

1714

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: New 'Blue Marble'

« on: June 02, 2018, 06:04:38 PM »

Wow. They made a right mess of that. The Atlantic between South America and Africa appears to be smaller than the Gulf of Mexico. They've also managed to find a way to make sure both the arctic and Antarctica aren't visible.  at the same time.

Light blue coral used to be a thing .... now its gone.


Atmospheres are no longer a thing in 2018

Aurora Borealis is having a day off


They managed to pick a day when there wasn't a single storm on the entire one half side of the planet


It was nice of the moon to move out of the way for this latest shot ... and the stars


The everglades is green again.
Must be warm in the Rockies ... no snow. Same with the Andes.
The presense of cloud over the Atacama desert is a little suspicious.
Storms are out, no little round storms at all now.
Clouds in general now have a new shape and texture from before. A new stipple tool perhaps?

The infrared sensors aren't cooling properly, meaning they won't work when the satellite is on the night side of the Earth and directly exposed to the sun's rays.

This is gibberish but I'll put that down to the journalist.

1715

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Witcher 3 - Contains spoilers

« on: June 02, 2018, 05:00:07 PM »

She's his adopted daughter, you fucking weirdo! And the game makes it very, very clear what kind of relationship they have! This is really fucking creepy, even for you.

It isn't against the law. Who are you to impose your twisted sense of morality upon me? If your step daughter grows up to be hot and she is a consenting adult ... you can bang her. In the UK you have to wait until she is 18 (instead of 16 ... but then its a green light. Curiously you aren't allowed to marry her but that wasn't a thing I wanted to do anyway). Why are you making up rules that don't exist? I think Ciri is probably the hottest woman in the game, I want to bang her. Its my game, I paid good money for it, I demand satisfaction! In grand theft auto I can run over prostitutes and open fire in busy public places. I don't see you condemning people for doing that in-game. In the witcher 3 I steal from every house I enter and just wander in anywhere that isn't locked, I chop people in half, I slaughter their livestock, I set fire to their cats to stop that awful hissing sound and harvest the cat meat, I necromance the dead, attack state garrisons, kill kings, ... and you're worried that same guy wouldn't bonk his hot step adult daughter given half the chance? Where do you think the expression 'daddy' comes from in sex role play? Why do people even use that word? Cos its wrong, and everybody like to do a little bit of wrong sometimes.

Thork literally believes that the only requirement for two people to bang is that they are not actually related to each other.

Hey, its taboo, but it isn't forbidden.

You know what, let's just talk about their upcoming game. It's gonna be great.

Prude. Ok, fine. I hope they have as good a script. The Witcher was based on a series of books though (like a Polish Lord of the rings). Not sure where they'll get their inspiration for cyberpunk 2077, but I have confidence in them. They did such a good job on the Witcher they must have a lot of very talented writers on the payroll.

1716

Technology & Information / Re: GDPR

« on: June 02, 2018, 12:39:05 PM »

Basically you need to go a long way down the list before you find a decent tech company in Europe.

Seimens is still the biggest EU tech company ... how do they compare to the likes of the Apple, Alphabet or Amazon?

1717

Technology & Information / Re: GDPR

« on: June 02, 2018, 12:06:50 PM »

Split this rant off to somewhere more appropriate than S&C. Now to business...

Linux doesn't make money like Android

I can't stop laughing at this. You know that Android is Linux, right?

Google is a huge tech company using Android and paying no one to use it. It makes a fortune from its app store. Linus Torvald is a peasant when compared with the likes of Sergey Brin or Bill Gates. Linux is not owned by a successful global tech giant that makes squillions of money.

1718

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Debate Club: Non-Technical Forums Execution

« on: June 02, 2018, 11:58:05 AM »

So, how is this coming along? I've had no internet for a week, I was kind of hoping to see new boards on my return or at least a finalised agreement on what the future holds. 

1719

Technology & Information / GDPR

« on: June 02, 2018, 11:53:13 AM »

Thanks Pete. Tbh, my board is so tiny and under the radar I don't think in practice I need to do anything.

To be honest, I don't think GDPR is even meant for small companies. I think it is part of a bigger EU/US trade war. The EU is very protectionist and getting worse by the day. The squealing about tariffs on steel is ridiculous. Why shouldn't America put tariffs on something it doesn't need? The point of trade is you trade the things you have a surplus of, for the things you need. America doesn't need steel. It can make enough of its own. Iron ore is very common, America has no shortage of labour.

GDPR is aimed squarely at tech giants. Facebook, Apple, Google. They are looting European countries. They give you nothing (nothing physical) and you give them money ... and then they find ways to pay zero tax on those sales. Europe doesn't have a single large tech company.

No EU search engine, no mainstream OS (Linux doesn't make money like Android, iOS or Windows), not a single large social media platform, no massive cloud companies like Amazon or Cloudflare or Microsoft, no massive online shops like Amazon, no huge streaming websites like youTube, Netflix or Twitch ... they've f'all. Hammering Tech doesn't hurt them at all, because there is no industry to hurt. The EU already killed every single tech company in Europe through over regulation over the last 30 years.

Phillips no longer make TVs, Siemens and Vodaphone don't make phones, ARM was the only silicon chip interest but that's been sold abroad, software companies like Amstrad, Sinclair, Atari ... all gone. Since the EU was formed and started legislating, the entire continent has regressed from being an Quaternary economy to a tertiary/secondary economy. We only do services (tertiary) like banking, but even lots of manufacturing and things like call centres have all gone abroad.

Rather than take a hard look at themselves and realise their protectionist policies have been utterly destructive to their own high tech businesses, the EU (arrogant unelected technocrats that they are) are digging their heels in even further. In trying to reduce the US and East Asian influence by regulating, they're going to make it impossible for pretty much anyone to have a global tech company in the EU.

Still, the ray of sunshine is Brexit ... maybe we can turn it around but Teresa May probably needs removing first.

1720

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Witcher 3 - Contains spoilers

« on: June 02, 2018, 11:32:42 AM »

Oh, just now seeing this but one of my favorite topics.

1. Doesn't surprise me you got the bad ending, Thork. I got the good one without even trying because I never even went back to the Emperor.
2. I'm deeply disturbed you wanted Geralt to have sex with Ciri, but again, I guess I'm not surprised.

Why are you surprised? They aren't related, and she's hot. She clearly has daddy issues with her real father being a bit of an asshat, and she can call me daddy. It would have been great.

I've been without internet all week. A bolt of lightning hit my house and fried the router. I didn't realise how loud thunder can be when you are in a building that gets hit. The whole house shook. Only damage was the internet though.  It smelt awful, the whole of upstairs stunk of burning circuit board.

The upshot is I have had lots of offline time and as I only own one game, I've finished Hearts of Stone (I chose to let Olgierd die and chose unlimited food - no regrets, he looked like David Beckham and so I just stood there and watched him die without a flicker of remorse.), I've done most of the bits I missed from the original game and I'm about half way through Blood and Wine, I think. I did manage to woo some student called Shani in this version, but she left me as well.  I tried really hard not to mess that one up, but she decided she'd rather go to front line of a raging war than be with me ... as put downs go, that's hard to beat.

I've had a few other small things that have annoyed me. I never got Geralt or Ciri in the Gwent decks. Looking on the internet I just didn't do all the quests in the order necessary so didn't get the opportunity. That's just a tough break I guess.

Also at no point have I managed to have sex with any elves. I like the ears. I haven't even seen an elf prostitute in the game.

Next year the developers are releasing a futuristic version called Cyberpunk 2077. The story telling is so good by this dev company, I'll probably buy it.