JediMaster

Yes. With 2 Firefly vets I kept looking for Joss Whedon's name in the credits... They made some interesting changes to the original concept, but overall I'll say the jury's still out on whether this will be good or not. I'll watch the eps that air this month and then I'll decide if I keep watching when they return in the spring post-Olympics.

Yes, and when you consider mods like ODS that basically give you a totally new game, with tons of planes and terrain and campaigns, is it really too much to ask for a few dollars? We're not saying any particular amount, but certainly if you took the time to DL and use it you can give something.

I must admit I have NEVER seen a claim before that the reason pilots walked away from a helo crash uninjured was their training. Unless it's an engine-out failure requiring auto-rotation, most helo crash survival is due more to the crashworthiness of the helo's cabin and its seat construction. If it was poor, the pilots would die. Period. Now the important point is if someone says something is "poor", they don't mean EVERY aspect must be poor. To be a poor helo doesn't mean it must have poor engines, a poor transmission, a poor cockpit, etc etc etc. Only one of those can be bad and it can ruin someone's perception. Don't ask me how many times I've heard someone tell me a PC is "totally broken" when all that's wrong is they can't get IE to run!! So you could have a problem with engine reliability, transmission, avionics, etc and still be very strong and survivable in a crash.

LOL, yeah, sure, I buy that... More like they weren't willing to spend more on a console port to up the detail level. This is another way of saying while it may rock on the 360, don't expect much on a PC beyond something that looks 2 years old!

LOL, I still have my 19" 5:4 monitor and don't foresee dumping it anytime soon. A bigger monitor is a luxury...TIR is a necessity if you're a cyber pilot!

Seeing as I have no taste for that kind of MP anymore, paying that much is ludicrous for the SP side. I still haven't bought CoD4 or WaW yet because I'm only interested in the (very short) SP side and anything over $25 is too much for less than 10 hours.

I've had my TIR 4 since right after its release and I can't fly without it. I still don't use it with racing or Arma just because I'm still not used to that, but for flying it's so natural...

Many Bothans died to bring us this information...

Well, 10 years ago I was quite happy with my FLCS/TQS/RCS setup! Sadly, I'm still using those same RCS today...

I played the L4D2 demo last night for the first time, and amazingly the multicore rendering = stuttering/lockups bug from L4D is still there?? Not that the game needs it to run fast and smooth, no idea what purpose it serves, but having it default to "on" always screws me up. That said, the new melee weapons are great--machete FTW!!--but I've yet to try the new grenades like boomer bile or the adrenaline. The new special infected are good, and the larger variety of weapons is also good. I'm awaiting the release in 2 weeks!

With the 'ween this weekend I didn't get a chance to look at my 2 sticks, but I can confirm that Cougar's hats/buttons/knobs/dials are all metal.

Well, to be fair the stresses and dangers of a short suborbital flight like that is nothing like an orbital insertion/reentry. I think SS2 won't break Mach 3, while orbital reentry is at Mach 12, or higher if you come back from the Moon or Mars.

Uh, does that mean however expensive I expect it to be, they're going to blow way past that??!?

The ` key cycles you thru different airfields when you're in RTB mode, not waypoints.

That's the problem...installing XP onto another partition with Vista already loaded on the PC generally leads to a dead Vista! There is a way to fix it, though, if you have the bootable Vista DVD (not everyone gets one with a new PC) by using the Windows RE Command Prompt and running bcdedit.exe /default id

The paddles are definitely different to look at, and they don't feel the same using them (after all one is metal and the other plastic), but the actual interface might be the same. I'd have to look at both of mine more closely to see if I can tell, but I'm no engineer and I'm not going to disassemble either stick to get in there!

I know the Dhruv is a very recent design, so its crew crash safety features should be very modern and capable...as this proved. I'll bet in an old Huey or Aerospatiale the headline would've read "both crew killed".

That sounds about par for the course.

No, although SS usually does it by default as it renders the entire screen and then downsizes it while MS is just the edges. Objects like fences, leaves, powerlines, girders, etc that are rendered as a solid polygon but then have a clear texture in it that lets you see through it won't be affected by MS because they're not polygon edges. Both ATI and nvidia have this in their drivers now. It's called transparency FSAA in one and I forget what it's called in the other. In nvidia, you have 3 choices for it--off, SS, or MS. This is independent of the main FSAA setting, but I believe the main FSAA does have to be at least activated. You can do MS on everything but those textures and then set them to SS, for example.

Yeah, I have to figure out when I want to take the plunge and upgrade myself.

I'd like to see commercial space travel to the moon made affordable before I die, but I doubt it will happen soon enough.

On the plus side, that F-15E was passed over and the other F-15E's firstborn were slain in their sleep...

If you have FSAA turned on, try turning it off. If you have transparency/alpha texture FSAA on, turn that off first. I get a similar effect in Arma 2 if I turn on transparency FSAA with the trees/foliage. It seems to be a driver/shader bug with some drivers and programs.

Actually, that is what the Ares plan is for. The Ares I will carry the "Apollo on steroids" 6-man semi-reusable capsule to orbit/the space station. I say semi because apparently they will use them for a few missions, but not dozens. The problem with the shuttle (ok, one of many!) is that to be reusable requires the structure be built stronger and heavier than if it was only meant to take one ascent/reentry. Again, more dead weight. The metric of maintenance man hours/flight hour on the shuttle is literally the worst in history. That is what was miscalculated. The Ares V will be the unmanned heavy lifter that will take cargo and later things like landers and Mars cruise vehicles to orbit. It will be bigger and heavier than Saturn V...if it's ever built. The original NASA plan, if you look it up from the late 70s, is 50 missions/yr with a fleet of 4 shuttles! That's 1 flight/orbiter/month! I don't recall what the fastest turnaround for a shuttle has been, but it's well over 4 weeks. There was also this idea that frequent flights = cheap flights, which was totally wrong. Each flight (now) costs roughly $500m, so if you fly 6 times in a year that's $3b spent purely for flying. While the dollar amount was lower in the 80s, I don't know what the inflation adjusted figures are, so I've no idea if it's more or less expensive in real terms now. Is Ares I a step backwards technologically from the shuttle? Yes. However, after Columbia NASA wasn't given the mandate "go design something better, here's the money to do it", it was told "go make something safer using the same money you've always had WHILE still flying the shuttle." NASA has been eager to retire the shuttle solely because they want to put that money towards Ares, but according to the report that's still not enough. NASA needs just over $3b more/year to get us to the Moon in another decade or so. They may not get it. Maybe NASA should've changed its name to AIG? Then it would've had the equivalent of FIVE YEARS of its current budget thrown at it for nothing, instead of having to argue why HUMAN BEINGS LEAVING EARTH is worth the kind of money they throw at Cash for Clunkers with a week of deliberation!

Are you guys who're talking about the advanced shaders thing using Vista? I ask because I'm still running XP and didn't see and real differences in speed that I noticed, not that SF2 has ever run poorly.