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Cpt. Obvious

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Posts posted by Cpt. Obvious

  2. Posted


     

    22 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:
    On den 26 april 2017 at 3:44 PM, partner555 said:
    On den 26 april 2017 at 3:00 PM, mlooney said:
    On den 26 april 2017 at 2:14 PM, Scotty said:

    Looks like Tedd zapped Grace with the Mall Girl form. The only real difference to the Mall Girl form though is the hair which given that Grace can mix and match features, wouldn't be surprising. The hairstyle looks more like Second Life Ellen's though, with Nanase's original color according to the commentary.

    The girl could be naked for all we know. And the guy only looks that way because arms have moved.

    That was my thought as well.



     

    Same here, but I wasn't absolutely sure.

    Grace has a double ponytail like Noah or Second Life Ellen. You can just see a bit of the other ponytail stage left of her waist.

    However, I did miss the possibly-nude-woman. Heresy!

    Darn, I have to start carrying a D20 wherever I go, for reasons...

     

    mlooney reacted to this

  4. Posted

    9 hours ago, hkmaly said:

    I suspect important according to the local tourism office. The buildings in city with most historical research papers written about them and so on.

    Yea, something like that. I remember that the block where the Japanese tourist office was located looked humongous on the map while the surrounding area was all squished up. I noticed as this was what they were looking for. Trying to estimate distances was just about impossible and all I could do was tell them to count crossings and tell them what stores and restaurants to look for at the corners where they had to turn.The more I think about it the more I question the sanity of whoever thought this was a good idea. And imagine the work they had to do squishing parts to make space for the "important" blocks, and still make it somewhat recognizable... Makes my head hurt...
     

  5. Posted

    On den 22 april 2017 at 4:31 PM, Tom Sewell said:

    And if Greg had binge-watched Battle Angel Alita, he'd be a beautiful and extremely deadly Martian cyborg catgirl assassin, and crying about how James Cameron reneged on his promise for a Battle Angel movie after years and years of leading us all on.

    Panzer kunst was developed to battle powerful cyborgs, so Greg might have found it a tad overpowered with a lack of suitably powerful opponents...
     

  6. Posted

    18 hours ago, Scotty said:

    Here's the thing, it used to be that my dad would drive, and my mom would try to read the map. Going someplace we'd never been before require several pull overs so that dad could go "we're here, let me know when we're about to get here."

    Once dad got a GPS, he could set the directions himself, and if there's a mistake he could only blame himself.

    Ah... Never had those problems. Mom always drove as she was a terrible backseat driver and the worst arguments were when my parents argued about lane changes. Usually dad claiming she was too cautious when driving in heavy traffic, telling her that sometimes you had to carefully bully your way into a lane when people didn't show any sign of wanting to let you in. (driving what looked like an old beater that barely held together helped when doing this)

    For some reason everyone in my family is remarkably good at reading maps. I don't know how much of this is genetic but for a long time I thought that everyone understood maps the way I do. It was a bit of a shock when I realized that a lot of people just can't visualize what they are looking at on a map, or that they have a problem matching a map to what they see around them. The one map I had some problems with was one some Japanese tourists had. First of all the text and names were in Japanese, and it used some funky projection where things considered important was shown in a more detailed scale while less important parts was shrunk. So trying to determine exactly where we were was quite hard before I started to understand just how that map projection was intended to work. Never seen anything like that since and I'm not sorry for that.
     

  7. Posted

    14 hours ago, Scotty said:

    Then again I find myself wishing GPS systems were more common when I was growing up, having to listen to parents arguing about map directions was not fun. Having that voice that said "turn left at one hundred meters" was mildly annoying but at least it cut down on the "are you sure we go this way?"

    In my experience having a GPS doesn't seem to cut down on those arguments much. If I'm going to drive somewhere with a number of people in the car and I use the GPS there seems to always be at least one of my passengers who claims to know a better way, though usually they can't describe it. However almost every turn instruction is accompanied by a "No, that's wrong, it's much better to..." type of comment. And whenever you map out alternative routes someone always knows that their favorite route is both much shorter and faster than any of the ones suggested by the gps, even if one of them is identical...
     

  8. Posted

    I find it interesting that while Susan is still having a problem with touching,  even though she's been working on that, her faeries that are animated and controlled by her subconscious mind has no problem being affectionate with people she likes and feel safe with.

    Makes me wonder what will happen when she meet someone who makes her heart flutter...
     

  9. Posted

    On den 17 april 2017 at 4:36 PM, animalia said:

    Wouldn't it be interesting if he can exert a lot of influence on her behind the scenes? Basically he may not contradict her in public in order to avoid undermining her authority, but if he thinks she has gone to far he will call her out on it in private.

    Sounds like you are describing a marriage! :)

    There are many married couples who prefer to keep discussions over disagreement private or at least within the family and their closest friends. And not many marriages will survive long if they are not able to talk about things when opinions differ or they doesn't agree on decisions made without the other half being consulted.

    As for the speculations about Mr. Kitsune...

    Perhaps he's a squib? He might even be from some family known for their many and powerful wizards, and it was assumed that he would join the ranks as his parents are both top class wizards. And then he just never showed any sign of having any magical ability. He might or might not trip devices and spells like the magic detection wands, but whatever the case no one has been able to coax any sign of him being magically active. If Noriko let on that she looked down on him for being effectively a squib that might be the first crack in the sisters relationship. When Noriko then abandoned Edward and their son after learning that Tedd most probably never would be able to use magic that might have been the final blow.

    Something like this could also explain why the griffins assumed that Nanase was royalty, if on the other half of the world royalty is defined by their magical bloodlines.

    Speculation, but about as likely as as most other theories I've seen here.

    Curve ball: Mr. Kitsune isn't just a squib, he's originally from the other half of the world and was sent here as it was supposed to be a better place to live for someone who couldn't use magic in any form.
     

  10. Posted

    3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

    ... which seems like very weird choice of topic for being homophobic and misogynistic, but I only saw the movie. Maybe he somehow managed to display misogyny despite hardly any woman taking part in it and homophobia between Spartan soldiers, which are known for homosexual relationships in military.


     

    To be honest I'm not sure about how he expressed homophobia, but then I'm pretty dense when it comes to these subjects. The sexism I can see in Sin City, but I've not read or seen 300 so I have no idea about those. The only sequence where homophobia... No I take that back. Now that I think about it there are a few things in Sin City that can be labeled homophobic. The first is in The Hard Kill, where there are some indication that the Cardinal Roark and the serial killer Kevin might be lovers. The other instance is a pair of less than brilliant and hilariously unlucky thugs, Mr. Klump and Mr. Shlubb who are repeatedly used for light entertainment. I suspect they were modeled after Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, a pair of murderers from the James Bond novel and film, Diamonds are Forever. 
     

  11. Posted

    15 hours ago, hkmaly said:

    Based on the movie, some of those whores were very bad ass too.

    Yes they were, but the only one truly able to take the men on is Miho. The others may be tough as nails, but most all of them turn into victims at some point, either to motivate a man to search revenge (Marv, Dwight, John Hartigan), or to be rescued or protected. In Family Matters Gail is the one on the revenge path, but she uses Dwight to pave the way and Miho to sweep it. Every woman in the comics is also very sexualized and it appears that none of them own a single piece of clothing that doesn't look like it comes from Fredrick's of Hollywood or a high-end S&M boutique.
     

  12. Posted

    3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

    Important thing is who Dan is referring to. But this Frank Miller seems most likely. Despite wikipedia not mentioning any controversy and Sin City being mentioned as well received by audiences and critics.

    Sin City was well received, doesn't mean it wasn't blatantly sexist. As I wrote it is extremely beautiful and it's easy to loose yourself in the story, only to go "WTF?" when you later start thinking about how the women was portrayed. The Sin City yarns are seductive, beautiful and ugly at the same time.

    In Sin City the women are helpless and stupid bimbo whores, cold calculating and backstabbing bitch whores, hardened whores, stupid and treacherous snitching whores, or Miho who is a 60 pound death machine who can  single handedly kill an entire mob family that's expecting to be stormed, all with her swords and throwing stars while rollerskating and playing with her victims trying to amuse herself. Oh and did I say that all women in these yarns are whores, even those who show a hint of caring for something other than money or drugs? Except for Miho of course, she's just there for the killing...

    Yep that's some nice portraits right there.

    To be honest the guys isn't particularly polished either, but they just tend to be ultimate bad asses, even when they are the bad guys. And if they're not bad asses then they are most probably cops on the take, corrupt politicians or priests that has discovered the joy of cannibalism of the literal kind.

    Having written all that I find myself wondering how I could read those books and not notice just how weird this shit is. But when reading or watching the movie you get sucked in and it all seems to make sense again.

    Yea I'm probably more than a bit damaged...

     

  13. Posted

    4 hours ago, ijuin said:

    I am unfamiliar with this Frank Miller, and my attempts at Googling have given me several dozen different men by that name. Does anybody have a reference that I could look up?

    I'm pretty sure CritterKeeper is referring to the comic book author and artist Frank Miller. One example of his comics is Sin City, which has been made into a movie. Sin City is both very beautiful and well written as well as disgustingly sexist. In the movie the sexism is toned down a bit, but the story is so full of it that it doesn't make much of a difference. It could be said that the sexism was a result of the neo-noir style, but that doesn't really explain it all.

    His work from the 80's and earlier, such as The Dark Knight Returns and Daredevil: Born Again, hasn't received much criticism for being sexist, but in the 90's something changed and much of his later works has been called both homophobic and misogynistic.





     

  15. Posted

    3 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

    Actually analog is still much more durable than digital. We can still read five thousand year old papyrus scrolls, but optical disks, hard drives, and flash drives all degrade in no more than a few years. Reliance on digital storage and communication makes our entire civilization vulnerable to electromagnetic pulse which could come from a few high-altitude nukes or a big solar flare. "The cloud" is just an abstract concept; it's really just a collection of physical media utterly dependent on electromagnetic communication, particularly satellites. If you haven't seen Gravity yet, the disaster that knocks out all of the satellites in it isn't a fantasy, it's a real worry. And it doesn't take nukes to cause it. There's so much junk floating in near-Earth space now, collisions aren't uncommon at all. We could lose the ability to keep satellites up for decades. No more GPS; say sayonara to Pokemon Go, Google Maps, and self-driving cars.

    Warning!

    Long rant ahead!

    I was writing a short answer to Tom and it turned into a wall of text. This is the cut down short version. You wouldn't want to see the original, trust me on this...

    We're actually less dependent on satellites for communication now than we were years back. The internet require both huge capacities and low latency that's impossible to achieve using satellite links. So suddenly the expensive transatlantic cables became viable again. And once the cables were in place telecommunications migrated back to cable, though now in IP form.

    The areas most affected by the loss of telecommunication satellites are probably third world countries where they never had a land based telecommunications network. The small island states are another area where it might be problematic to maintain communications. Radio link doesn't work beyond line of sight, and laying cables quickly becomes expensive.

    Most of what we would lose if all satellites became inoperable is TV distribution, weather data, satellite imagery of the earth, a lot of scientific instruments and navigation. The SR-71 and other nations old spy planes would quickly be brought back into service to keep the military happy, and the meteorologists would have to write new software to use old fashioned methods, hopefully more accurate than when they had to do it all by hand. I'm sure I forget something important, but those are what I think of first.

    Navigation would be hit hard, as the millions upon millions of devices that are using GPS would be unusable. It is however possible to fire up the old navigation systems such as LORAN and DECCA. In the short term shipping and airplanes could have functional navigation very quickly, but it would probably take several years before we had something in place that could replace GPS in daily use. e-LORAN will apparently allow for accuracy in the +-10 meter range, which would be good enough for car navigation, but not good enough for robotic combine harvesters…

    Self driving cars would probably be affected less than what most might think. Sure they use GPS and street maps, but it’s not what they rely on to keep on the road. All versions of self driving cars I've seen use several sensors such as cameras, laser range finders and even versions of radar to keep track of things like lane delimiters, the road shoulder, street signs, curbs, other vehicles and pedestrians. Even if we would end up with e-LORAN or LORAN-C the accuracy would probably be good enough for self driving cars.

    One thing I'm not sure about is just how small an e-LORAN navigator can be made. It's possible that the physical requirements of the receiving antenna makes it too large to be built into mobile devices such as phones or smart watches, but I'm certain we'll find a solution to get Pokemon Go working again...


     

  16. Posted

    19 hours ago, Scotty said:

    I'm half expecting the being before Pandora to turn out to be Noah Wyle or John Larroquette.

    Though I totally wouldn't be surprised if it was another Immortal and this form is something they like to use to greet visitors. This does go back to the theory that some Immortals vowed to maintain all knowledge in some form or another.

    I'd put my money on Drew Powell... I can totally see this being Ray in full Library mode. The next thing you see being Ray going: Was that to much? It was to much right? I've been trying different greetings to find something dignified and impressive but this isn't it, right?
     

  17. Posted

    14 hours ago, hkmaly said:

    Compiled languages are and must be always faster than interpreted ones. The JiT was an attempt to compromise which ended surprisingly well ... in some cases, JiT can get better performance than compiled code because it has access to performance data normal compiler doesn't. It can never be as good as hand-optimized code of course, but hand-optimized code is extremely hard to make and even in "state-of-the-art" programs, only the parts which consumes most CPU are really hand-optimized.

    (Was different when the whole program fit into 64KB with data of course, but that wasn't case of Quake. Also today, you can't optimize so much as in past, simply because the CPUs got more complicated and less deterministic.)
     

    The most satisfying language I've used is Forth. I'm not claiming that it's "the best" or anything, just that for some reason I find it so satisfying writing the code. Back when memory was at premium it was also known to generate extremely small executables while still being very fast. It did however suffer from the same weaknesses all compiled languages suffer from, most notably portability.

    When a program has been compiled the resulting executable is not portable to other computer architectures. If the program uses anything other than basic console, file or stream input and output porting a program between platforms is likely to require some work. This is where interpreted languages can have an advantage, and Java using it's own virtual machine is theoretically portable between both operating systems and computer architectures. I remember that back when Java was new and hot there were talk about creating processors able to run Java p-code natively. I have no idea if any of these were ever released, but the idea was interesting.

    I used to follow the demo scene, but that was way back. In my opinion the most impressive class was the 4 KB demo. I remember one competition where a group managed to write a simple 3D engine that they used to create a scene with a ship flying through a labyrinth. Once it reached the exit it seamlessly transited to flying through a simple city where three other crafts were dogfighting. And all of this was able to fit in a executable that was 4 KB. They were however disqualified as they had included a music track and the rules said that for this class music wasn't allowed...
     

  18. Posted

    On den 1 april 2017 at 4:25 PM, mlooney said:

    ObGeek:

    I find the idea that Java is a performance enhancer laughable. The only reason Java is a reasonable language for application development today is the invention of JiT compilers and CPU speeds being way much faster.
     

    And never having written a single line of Java I'm not claiming to know any better. I do however remember an interesting, experiment I guess you could call it.

    Someone ported the Quake II engine to Java. This was after ID published the source for it so people could play around with it. The interesting part were that when benchmark-ed the Java version was shown to be almost as fast, and occasionally faster than the original version which was written in C.

    I can only assume that there were extensive optimization done, but it still shows that Java can achieve quite impressive performance. Remember that while the Quake engine is very light weight by today's standards it was once state of the art, and it was considered quite well optimized. And it had to be as the computational power of the average PC just wasn’t anywhere near what we take for granted today.

    As it was something like ten years ago I saw this the JVM used was less efficient than what we have today, and yet they managed this level of performance.

    A quick google search found me Jake 2 and the sourceforge page.


     

  19. Posted

    14 hours ago, mlooney said:

    Another reason may be that I left that post in edit mode, for reasons I'm sure made sense at the time, or I forgot to push the save button. 

    <grammarly-btn>
<div class="_e725ae-textarea_btn _e725ae-not_focused" data-grammarly-reactid=".9" style="visibility: hidden; z-index: 2;">
<div class="_e725ae-transform_wrap" data-grammarly-reactid=".9.0">
<div class="_e725ae-status" data-grammarly-reactid=".9.0.0" title="Protected by Grammarly">
</div>
</div>
</grammarly-btn>

    This seems to be the offending code. It appears to render weirdly in several browsers. I haven't seen anything really bad, but it's a bit distracting.


     


     

  20. Posted

    1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

    The left one might be a Dalek. I am not sure. I have no idea about the right one.

    It looks a bit like a cylon from the 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica. The eye slit and the "mohawk " is about right, but I think the chin is to round, though there might be some model of cylon, or some angle where it would look like that...

    YHkgzk6.png




     

  21. Posted · Edited by Cpt. Obvious
    Spleling

    On den 18 mars 2017 at 2:49 AM, ijuin said:

    Long before it gets near sonic speed in water, any solid body will start to cavitate--that is, the pressure behind it will drop so low that vapor bubbles will spontaneously form. These bubbles would seriously interfere with the formation and spread of the shock waves that would result from supersonic movement.

    The fastest submersible thing we've managed to create, AFAIK, are the supercavitating torpedoes. Back in the 70's the Soviet Union started working on a torpedo called squall. It is actually rocket powered and "flies" through the water inside a bubble created byt the shape of the nose cone and exhaust gases that's bled off from the rocket engine. This way it can reach about  370 km/h; 230 mph. As the speed of sound in water is about 5,213 km/h or 3,239 mph they are currently not anywhere near breaking the sound barrier under water.

    It's been claimed that it's theoretically possible to create a submersible capable of reaching more than 5,000 mph, but I doubt anything like that will ever be built.

     

  22. Posted

    17 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

    Don't even ask about their "owners".  Dolphins are evolved to head-butt sharks and win.

    And as if that wasn't enough I think I remember that at least one of the "dolphins" in the books actually was an orca, or a orca / dolphin mix that one of the human scientists had secretly brought on board.
     

  24. Posted

    3 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

    Take heart. This will soon become the norm in first world countries, too. As more and more superresistant strains develop while our governments fritter away what antibiotics still do work through such strokes of genius as cutting funding for hospital hygiene, we are a mere decade or two away from living in the happy times of the early twentieth century where the surest way of getting rid of an infection was through amputation.

    This and the way doctors are worn down by all the people who feel they deserve to have antibiotics every time they sneeze. Eventually it all gets to much and they will write out that prescription just to get rid of the bellyaching parents with their coughing kids, even though they all know that antibiotics does absolutely nothing for the common cold.

    And don't even start talking about large scale chicken, pork and beef production. So much antibiotics used preventively and so much money spent to stop people from researching this.

    Greed and stupidity is going to ruin our current antibiotics for everyone. And unfortunately it seems like it will be hard to find good replacements. It used to be that antibiotics resistance wasn't seen as a problem. After all they just had to make a new one, right? But we're quickly running out of new and easily researched antibiotics, and the cost of development is rising.
     

  25. Posted

    Something I thought was interesting was the claim that in case there is constant rain and full cloud cover it will still sterilize the water, but it can take up two weeks to do it. But if it rains constantly for two weeks then you should be able to collect quite a lot rainwater that most likely is way cleaner than the water you are trying to sterilize.

    SODIS is not something that will solve the worlds water problems all on it's own, but it is extremely cheap and simple.