Humor Random Comments Thread

[Urwumpe]

We had a major heist in Germany last night, with some invaluable pieces of the state treasure of Saxony being stolen from the Green Vault in Dresden. The burglars stole at least three sets of jewelry, altogether estimated in value up to one billion Euro. They stole three out of ten sets in the collection made of diamonds.

They had been noticed by security, but managed to escape with the jewelry before the police arrived. The security workers had been unarmed and did not try to arrest the invaders themselves. The burglars possibly also set fire to a power supply station near the vault, the fire fighters had been called to it and it at least turned off the street lighting. The possible escape car of them was found burnt later today.

Trying to sell the jewelry should be impossible to extremely hard, but even destroying the jewelry to sell individual gems could be worth it. Which would be a major loss, since most pieces in that state treasure are not just unique, but also often of an exceptional artistic quality. All pieces of the collection are known in the world and thus very hard to sell without getting caught.

The most valuable piece of the collection is on display in New York right now, with a rare 41 karat green diamond (green diamonds are already rare themselves).

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50545003

 

[Notebook]

On the news here, looks like they are more concerned about its history than its value. Sort of an odd threat that if anyone is convicted and the jewels are destroyed they get 10 times the usual sentence?
Not sure if that is legal or even a threat.

Better off trying a reward, not sure the cops would like that.

 

[Notebook]

Missed it by a month, but always worth a reminder...

 

[Urwumpe]

On the news here, looks like they are more concerned about its history than its value. Sort of an odd threat that if anyone is convicted and the jewels are destroyed they get 10 times the usual sentence?
Not sure if that is legal or even a threat.

Actually, that could make sense.


First of all, they will be punished for "heavy burglary (§245 StGB)" in any case, just for reaching into a building they had no entrance to after using violence to open it. Thats already up to 5 years in prison, unless they would have stolen something really worthless.


Next, it would be a especially heavy case of theft (§243 StGB), punished from 3 months to up to ten years for stealing an important historic artifact from a public exhibition.


Next, §244a would apply, since they did it as a team. Could mean another 1 - 10 years.



Would they destroy the artifacts, §304 would apply... another 3 years.


Now, the German system is quite complex to calculate the final full punishment. Essentially, you take the most severe punishment and add a fraction of each other punishment, until you reach 10 years. No summed up punishment is permitted to reach the realms of lifelong punishment.

Just returning the artifacts intact could mean just a few months in prison, which would likely be turned into a long probation period, if its the first such crime of the criminals.

Not returning them and destroying the artifacts, including the arson, and they could even face something along 7-8 years in prison.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Missed it by a month, but always worth a reminder...

Henry V (1989) - Kenneth Branagh - Battle of Agincourt - YouTube

Did you see the Tom Hiddleston version? Much more personal and less Gilderoy Lockhart

Seriously though, my kiddo asked me if I'd known Gilderoy Lockhart had done a Shakespeare play (I think she was only 10 at the time) I just told her it was a wizard thing.

 

[Notebook]

I had to look up the Gilderoy reference, not been to cinema for about 20 years!
So, Tom Hiddleston either.

I'm not a big Branagh fan, he was all over the place with his then wife and I thought he'd turn into another Olivier.

Peter Ustinov tells a nice tale of him rehearsing for Spartacus!

About eight minutes in, though its all worth watching.

 

[Notebook]

We do have music playing in some milking-parlours here. This is a bit over the top though.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50571010

I wonder they get anxious about?

 

[jjpp]

my random thought today: the further we see in space, the more we go back in time...

 

[Urwumpe]

Random thought of the day: There are people in the world, who don't know how a floorgasm feels like.

 

[Linguofreak]

my random thought today: the further we see in space, the more we go back in time...

Kinda-sorta.

The light we see doesn't experience any time in getting to us, so in some sense we see it in the same instant that it was emitted. But at the same time, if someone flashes light signal at you, and you respond as soon as you receive it, the sender receives your response a non-zero time after he sent it, so in another sense light takes time to go places.

 

[jedidia]

Random thought of the day: There are people in the world, who don't know how a floorgasm feels like.

Hell, I don't even know what that is. Unless it's the obvious. In which case it's not super comfortable.

 

[RisingFury]

Kinda-sorta.

The light we see doesn't experience any time in getting to us, so in some sense we see it in the same instant that it was emitted. But at the same time, if someone flashes light signal at you, and you respond as soon as you receive it, the sender receives your response a non-zero time after he sent it, so in another sense light takes time to go places.

By that logic, because distances contract in the direction of travel, at the speed of light, from light's perspective, the universe seems a flat plane. And the movement of light is perpendicular to it.

 

[Urwumpe]

Hell, I don't even know what that is. Unless it's the obvious. In which case it's not super comfortable.

I am absolutely sure, you know the feeling. Its all about the wife of the drummer of Sabaton.

 

[jedidia]

With that bit of extra information on my hand, I have risked eternal damnation and fumbled together a google query, and... Oh! Ohhhh, *that* Floor! Okay, yes, I'm down with that.

---------- Post added 11-29-19 at 02:53 PM ---------- Previous post was 11-28-19 at 08:02 PM ----------

Misadventures in procedural plot generation, part 3:

After solving several issues, I could finally attempt to run my prototype on a small testworld for a longer timespan to see how things would develop. There's still several issues with that, but one of them was rather unexpected and crashed the whole thing after a couple of years.

The reason was because some plot points required people that had at least a certain wealth. The whole set of test data is set up so that persons like that are around, so no problem, right?
Well, wrong. Too many plots were generated that had a detrimental effect, and as a result, everybody ended up dirt poor after a decade or so... :lol:

 

[Urwumpe]

Now this is the story all about how
My life got flipped, turned upside down
And I'd like to take a minute just sit right there
I'll tell you how I became the ...

...expert on Systems Engineering in my workplace? :blink:

This is getting more and more surreal.

 

[Notebook]

I think I tried this once, with much the same result...

Simpsons explanation is better!
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dhHrg-KbJ0"]e to the pi i for dummies - YouTube[/ame]

 

[Notebook]

Just in case we forget it was only 40 years ago...

 

[Notebook]

I'm just getting the "Ok Boomer" reference now on another thread. Didn't realise it was a trope? or meme? or all the other references it has.

I think I get it now.

Gentle riposte:
3:20 in, bad language.

 

[jedidia]

Misadventures in procedural plot generation, part 4:

Somebody wrote an article about how he wrote the article. Not just any article. *The* article he was writing at the time. :facepalm:
Was doing proper research and even an interview about it too. At least he didn't have the interview with himself, but that's more luck than anything else.

Needs a lot more checking for edge cases, it seems.

 

[Artlav]

Misadventures in procedural plot generation, part 4:

So...
What are you working on?