JediMaster

Congrats, I'm just 4 weeks behind you for my second girl!

Croatia's MiG-21s aren't the modern updated ones countries like Romania have. They COULD upgrade them, but they'd still have the same limitations on range and payload. Plus the list of RH missiles a 21 can carry is VERY short and doesn't include AMRAAMs.

However it started, there is no doubt that there are former and current military involved on what is blatantly called "the rebel side". This is most certainly a civil war, but the two sides are hardly balanced. The main difference is civilians not in the rebels' territory being killed. Sort of like if Sherman had burned Philadelphia because several thousand people there were sympathetic to the South.

I'll never understand why they bother. They have to know this won't accomplish anything significant. How many countries have ever been defeated by having a few dozen civilians killed? How about ZERO? They have no ideas on how to create anything, just destroy on a small scale, so they're going to do it for, well, ever I guess. Since they won't give up and they have to know they'll never accomplish what they say they will...

It sure beats the alternative of NOT having another one...

If Saddam Hussein had gone on the talk show circuit proclaiming the benefits of a diet higher in fish and vegetables with less red meat, it wouldn't have made him any more appealing. Just because you're capable of making sense doesn't mean you're someone people should listen to if the times when you do NOT make sense are so miserable.

Tough crowd? I have seen some other games that do the mandatory update thing, although usually it's because of MP reasons ie Sins of a Solar Empire you can leave at whatever patch level you like UNLESS you go online to play in which case it forces you to update or won't let you connect. Many RTS games are heavily MP-based now so perhaps that's what they've done here except it's at the start instead of waiting for you to go online. Oh, the aforementioned CoH will force an update as soon as you start the game I just remembered.

The USSR wouldn't have picked a foreign design for their trainers if it wasn't. However, I know the newer Czech designs haven't enjoyed a lot of export success compared to the old 39s, and to many countries the chicken vs egg situation is very important. "We'd like to buy it, but we see no one else has, and we aren't going to risk being the only ones other than you..." That happened to the F-20 Tigershark 25 years ago.

The difference is with communism you only have to approve it once and then you're stuck with it no matter how much you might hate it. Steam users can easily give it up, no one forces you to buy games there or keep using it! Bieber fans...um...they're not even going to understand what communism is, so I say just put the padded helmets on them so they don't hurt themselves and walk away. Of the 2 incidents I mentioned, one was an update pushed to Arma 2 just before I was ready to play MP one night with a group. I was stuck as the DL took a good 90 mins and once it starts it zeros-out the files it's replacing so you can't even cancel and play with the old version, once it starts you have to let it finish. I did know the patch was out, but I thought Steam was going to take longer to put it out there so I'd already patched it myself (the arma2 patches let you do that)...but I forgot to turn off auto update. I have never seen a game that pushed a patch anyway even though Steam's settings said do not update. Of course, I've never owned any of the Total War series, in Steam or otherwise, so I've no idea how it works. Generally speaking, Steam is best when the game itself has none of that stuff--no auto-updating, no DRM, no fuss. I know Company of Heroes on Steam is a bit of a pain because CoH has its own auto-updater built in, but since Steam does it for it instead there's a bit of a tug of war there.

The T-50 is probably the best, but I think it's also the most expensive. It's an F-16-lite. As such, I can't really say if it's the best fit for Poland's needs or not. I believe they have 2-seat F-16s anyway, so a trainer that is almost the same seems a bit redundant. However, if it's even easier to fly it might be the best idea. The Hawk has been around for a long time and has long since proven itself. It's certainly a safe bet. I suppose they could pick the M-346 or L-159, but I don't feel it. There's also the political angle to this. The only one with any US involvement is the T-50, the others are all Euro designs.

Seeing as there's no obvious flak or missile trail, the possibility that this was a poorly-maintained plane's engine exploding can not be discounted. Even planes in good shape have it happen (search for the F-14 supersonic flyby that had an engine let go).

If he's going to Iraq there's a good chance he won't be fighting anything. It's not 5 years ago. If he was going to Afghanistan, that would be something entirely different. Remember when we used to laugh at the Soviet Union for being stuck there for over 8 years? Sigh...

The only days that mean anything are things like equinoxes because they represent something actually happening on a regular schedule that we had no involvement with. Something like New Years on Y2K was a complete nothing.

I don't think it matters when there are cellphones or passengers they MUST converse with involved. Or drugs or alcohol.

As all the F-14s have been rendered unflyable or scrapped, we will not see them fight again.

I have close to 100 games on Steam and I've only had 2 incidents of trouble with it in almost 7 years of use. Can't say I have that success rate with any other form of DRM, disc checking, or what-have-you. Just remember, while YOU may have had issues with it, not all those other millions of people using it are or else it wouldn't have that many millions of users.

The most dangerous weapon in the US is the automobile. Unfortunately, the licensing program is wholly inadequate to weed out the offenders.

There's also over 6 BILLION people now living in the same size space, so a natural disaster will of course affect that many more people. Of course, whoever originally came up with the idea that increased numbers of wars, natural disasters, plagues, etc was a sign of the end times deserves to have someone invent a time machine, go back, and kill them before they opened their mouth. To take a bunch of unconnected events and then declare that "that will be the sign" took no talent, just someone looking to make themselves more important by instilling fear in the masses.

Great, so now that's finally done I predict all B-1Bs will be retired by the end of 2011.

Well, yes and no. For practical purposes you could easily. If you wanted to be accurate, though, the KC-46 will have a different wing. It's not a true adaptation of any one 767, it's got the fuselage from one, the wing from another, a cockpit from somewhere else...

Especially as the pilot you talk to has a southern accent! Of course, you could just assume in the backstory there was some international mobilization and transport planes wound up all over the globe, and some USAF guy is now "borrowing" said ROKAF plane. I guess they just liked their camo scheme more than standard USAF boring-gray.

Another MSE user here. Using it since I went to Win7 and no problems. Aside from the way it handles large archive files like zips, rars, etc...if you have the real-time scanner on it will scan the entire file when you click it, whether it's an installer or whatever, and that can make installing things a bit slow. If you don't install often, it's easily overlooked. If you do, you can just turn off the RT scanning before running it.

The issue perhaps is that people are overestimating a massive civilization's abilities. What's to say that after getting advanced enough to make it out into space they don't wind up dying off due to some natural disaster or disease they can't cure? If there's no way to travel faster than light, and the only way to cross the stars is in generational vessels, it's pretty obvious that almost no species would ever leave its home star. In short, there could have been lots of other civilizations out there over the eons, but we wouldn't have found any evidence of them yet if they're all dead in their home systems.

The problem was I think they only had an hour warning. Quite often planes and helos on a base that weren't scheduled for ops that day need a LOT more than 1 hour to get in the air. Also, the people that would be responsible for prepping them were most likely rushing to get their families to safety if possible, saving a bunch of planes was likely last on their minds.

That's what Constellation was. Ares I/Orion was a small "Apollo on steroids" capsule that could only carry 6 people to and from orbit. Ares V was the heavy lifter that would put cargo and eventually things like a lunar lander and transit stage in orbit. Of course, that was canceled because our brilliant administration thinks NASA can let commercial companies who to date have NEVER sent one person up there do it. So NASA has let too many people die but some company interested in only the bottom line will do it better?