SayethWhaaaa

You expected something other than precision engineering from ze Germans?? lol!

Seems like she topped herself. I hate to think the pressure she was under after those douchebags pranked her. http://www.news.com.au/world/hospital-receptionist-duped-by-australian-radio-djs-dies-in-suspected-suicide/story-fndir2ev-1226532600709 What's worse, this isn't the first time that station has pulled crap pranks that resulted in bad things happening.

Yeah, this comes around every few years. Always a good read too.

Too quiet like this...?

Interesting article on how, in the days since the prank, the British tabloids have really opened up the throttle on the fury and hypocrisy and how barely anyone over there is scrutinising the hospital at all. http://www.news.com.au/national/right-royal-hypocrites-telling-it-like-it-is-or-witch-hunt/story-fndo4eg9-1226533660692

Jules and Roger are right. What the hosts did was nowhere near that level of asshattery, but it was still pretty dumb. Given the breach, I'd like to know what the hospital had said to the nurse. Given the breach and it involving the Royals, I'm sure they would have been pissed. But what did they say to the nurse? Did they threaten her with administrative punishment or a potential sacking because of the breach? Was she removed or demoted? What were the protocols in place and were they followed correctly? They've very vocal today in condemning the stunt, but they too have questions to answer about the behaviour towards their employee. I know for certain that they would have had words with her about this. They even said the day after they'd investigate this matter. They seem all too keen to shift the blame and the focus onto the hosts to divert the attention from any possible break down in protocol of theirs, and to blow the prank out of all proportion. I'd understand this British anger more if the prank had been them saying that someone in their family had died or if they'd made a death threat, but all they did was pretend to be the Queen and Prince Charles (very, very badly might I add. The impression was just awful!) to elicit the status of Kate and her morning sickness. Hardly a terrorist threat. On a side not, I noticed that on 2Day FM's FB page, the ragers even left a stack of offensive messages on the Daniel Morcombe tribute post. Daniel Morcombe was a kid who disappeared at a bust stop almost 10 years ago and recently his remains were discovered and it was established he was raped and killed by a pedophile who's since been arrested and charged. His funeral was held the day before this prank and yet, some really nasty crap from British Royal supporters/nationalist types had been posted there too. That's pretty disgusting. Much more so than the event that inspired them to post such nastiness, IMHO.

Right on. Who knows what was going on in her mind, or the pressure she was facing after the call. And there would have been a huge level of pressure on her after given the involvement of the Royals. This is all across the news this morning and there's pretty equal criticism here of the station and the seeming lack of (or lax?) protocols of the hospital too. Part of the reason a lot of people here are pissed with the station is their history of breaching the media guidelines here. They have several shock jocks who've pulled some pretty reprehensible stuff and they're currently on a 5yr probation for other breaches, yet, they still seem to get away with it...

You should see the hate mail the station's FB page is getting! Aside from the anti-Australia/convict/Erinsborough crap, it's totally justified. On the scale of things, what they did wasn't so bad per se, ie, Just pretending to be Lizzy and Phillip and asking about how Kate's doing. It's not like they faked a death to someone on air, or tried to get the staff to do something stupid, or breach security . But they shouldn't have even made the attempt. It was a simple mistake on the nurse/receptionist's part, something that could have happened to anyone, and she must have been mortified when she found out! What really sucks is that the station will wait until the heat dies down and go back to their usual shock jock crap (they have a guy on there, Kyle Sandilands who is the very definition of human filth, I think it's a pre-req for working there!). Here's hoping you Poms give them so much hell you cause some serious damage to them! Lord knows we've tried... and failed.

No, exactly right. It did grow from a large popular uprising, but the bulk of the Anti-Assad authority is ex-military. Yes there are Islamists and it is suspected Al Qaeda in Yemen is operating there (it would be to their disadvantage if they didn't), they're nowhere near being so influential or organised. Remember, Bin Laden was a unifying force for Al Qaeda, they're much more fractured and competitive since his death. The Islamists themselves are also fractured and isolated, more often than not stemming from a grass roots level (small towns, villages, etc) and they're different ideological creeds of Islam and they're small in number. But, it is these groups who're suspected of the bulk the crimes against humanity there in urban areas. This isn't to let the ex-military forces off the hook, it'd be hard keeping the paramilitaries in line.

Fat chance of that happening. No one should delude themselves into thinking the Syrians will be grateful to the West for any reason. The Syrian Anti-Assad supporters feel like they've been left to fend for themselves by the West, and to some extent this is true. The West might, I say might have been doing something behind the scenes, but the Syrian people have F-all in the way of direct support from the West, definitely from the region-- arms and humanitarian aid from regional neighbours, definitely, but having a word in the ear of an ambassador or state official to encourage regional neighbours to do something they were going to do anyways, means nothing to the people on the ground. They're trying to survive, and to claim credit for it, is just claiming credit by proxy. You put in the hard yards, you get to take the credit. Libya, case in point. Sometime between the Cold War and now, symbolic support has gone from providing humanitarian support to any thing short of actual support through the medium of 'Sending messages to (insert tyrant's name here'). Bollocks. You want to send a message, send a message! Send aid, visibly organise humanitarian support, take in refugees, that kind of thing. Don't do something that is support in name only with no tangible effect for the people in the war zone something that can be interpreted in 100 different ways. And I don't know it this is an American thing or not, but there's a huge overestimation of support amongst the Lebanese for the Syrians. You forget that the Syrians had their boots on the necks of the Lebanese for a couple of decades, not to mention they way they ransacked the place upon the withdrawal of their occupation forces. There's not a lot of love for Syria, and what there is, is coming from small bastions or rich folk who benefited from the occupation. Two guesses as to how these people are perceived in Lebanon. If you want en eaxample of this, have a look at how some Lebanese have been gouging Syrian refugees who've been coming across the border to avoid the fighting. As for the WMDs... Personally, I've always felt that Syria was a much more credible threat, given accepted awareness of their possession of Chemical weapons compared to Iraq's alleged possession-- that was just a justification to speed up the agenda for taking down Saddam IMHO. Intelligence agencies around the planet agreed on that assessment and when a government has to shop around for officials to go on the record to make the claim about Iraqi WMDs (I'm talking just about the nuclear related ones as such a big deal was made of it), you 're clutching at straws. In the time before Gaddafi's monumental freak out, when he was opening up to the West again, he released all (or so they claimed) of their info on their WMD programs to the French and they were seen as much more credible programs than anything the Iraqi's had. Will Syria use chemical weapons on it's own populace to maintain it's power? There's a consensus in the IR community that Syria understands the gravity of deploying and using chemical weapons, but, Assad's forces have committed a great many unholy acts against their own people already that were unexpected or considered out of character. And since there are reports of chemical weapons being deployed to troops in the field... well, no one breaks out weapons if they don't intend to use them in some kind of scenario. Assad's a difficult character. His back's increasingly against the wall and over the last year, he's been increasingly difficult to predict... And after the Brotherhood's blatant grab for power in Egypt through that colossal dick, Muhammad Morsi, many in the region are very apprehensive about them gaining a foothold in post Assad Syria.

My wife and I are looking at getting a pair of pups real soon and I'll definitely get them from Animal Welfare again. The last dog I had was a rescue (a whole litter, just dumped by some a$$hole), of the few who survived was my pup, the runt no less. My sister nursed her back to health initially, then when she moved back home about 18 months after getting her and she was the best thing that happened to us. She lived for 16 years, looking out for us, taking me for walks (seriously, you went where she wanted to go), watching over and protecting my nephew like a Samurai after he was born and making sure he didn't get into trouble by following him around the yard when he learned to run, making sure I was okay and keeping me company or chewing my shoe laces after I would fall asleep on what passed for my porch after a big night out.on the sauce in my youth. She was incredible! She never did get the concept of bringing the ball back to you though. You'd always have to chase her down, tackle her and fight her for it... I won sometimes. So it absolutely gutted us when she died after a short battle with an aggressive tumor, on 1 Jan 2010. I stayed with her though the end, she needed a friend to be with her on the way out. It was a truly... awful experience. Nevertheless, I'd go through it all again without a second's hesitation, because animals are awesome and you are, without question, better for having had them in your life! These people who think they can treat them like an appliance and discard them for stupid reasons, or just treat them inhumanely make me sick. They have no soul. The animals I've had were better at being human than these filth and it really bums me out that we keep going through this again at Christmas. Widowmaker, your Shopenhauer quote is bang on. Truer words...

I do disagree, but only because my sources say otherwise, which is kinda my point. Getting legit stats on PRC's platforms is difficult because sources in the West vary so wildly. I questioned Global Security because I've read quite a few governmental discussion papers from agencies I've worked with and their work disputes the veracity of a lot GS's research. We were pretty much told not to included them as, academically, it would be akin to dropping a link to Wiki. I'll drop it, because we're in the realm of arguing about the length of a piece of string, but I was interested to see this article only today on Defence News. While primarily a US source, they've had their finger on the pulse with Asia-Pac research and reporting of recent times. http://www.defensenews.com/article/20121201/DEFREG03/312010002/Are-U-S-Defense-Experts-Getting-China-Wrong-?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE Take it easy.

Brain, what's the name of that book? I've got different stats from my sources, just curious.

Yes and no. The J-7C did have improvements over the Mig-21MF's avionics, but they were very limited improvements (somewhat increased fuel capacity, new hud and some new avionics). Most of it was based around the JL-7 fire-control radar, but it's reliability was very poor and required significant down time between jaunts to recalibrate. Also, it was significantly heavier than the previous radar (something like 107kgs), had an operational range of 29kms and suffered poorly from background clutter when attempting to target low flying aircraft. It also used the same engine, the WP-13 that was used on the J-7A/B variants. So the added weight of the fuel and the newer radar restricted it's agility to being less than that of previous versions. The first variant to resemble the early model F-16As didn't appear until the J-7E and that didn't go into production until 1992. There's a great article in Combat Aircraft monthly on the J-7, J-8, J-10 and J-11 that covers their historical development in the June 2010 issue.

Has anyone seen this yet? I have a chance to go see this on the weekend and I'm tossing up whether or not to go because I'm getting the creeping feeling it's not so much a remake of Red Dawn, but a film of that lame, just godawful game Home Front. I mean, it hasn't helped that the story is about a North Korean invasion and that it takes place in probably the furthest, most difficult spot for them to invade, the East coast. I mean, logistically alone, it makes no sense and the Russians are supposed to have funded it...? Wha...? I hope I've read wrong, because the original was a brilliant, cold war paranoia classic!

*ahem*, blown out dude. This is a flight simming site! We should know about these things! So LeT and the Pakistani Taliban have already arced up for some attention about this. Even Imran Khan has been calling for a retaliatory execution of Sarabjit Singh in response to this. Sandesh, remember when this guy used to be a decent cricketer, before he became a political opportunist, media whore and hypocrite? Is he aware he's a joke, or are they too embarrassed to tell him in Pakistan?

Oh yeah, big time! The deer scene was kinda funny though. I think the only thing I liked about it was seeing Adrianne Palicki kick some ass and look good doing it. Check out this review: http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=19923&reviewer=389 It's bang on, especially about the Subway store scene.

I don't think Stary is telling us the whole star-- story. I think the situation played out a little more like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6iW-8xPw3k

You can't fly the built-in B-52D per se, but with a little modding (ie, adding a cockpit), you can. But there's a sweet B-52 superpack for both gen 1 and gen 2 that has a very nice B-52D. Have a look in the download section, it shouldn't be too hard to find. As for the bombing practice, have a look in the Knowledge Base, I think, otherwise, if you do a search for 'bombing accuracy', 'level bombing' or 'learning to bomb', there should be a thread or two dedicated to it. I know there have definitely been some guides made about level bombing, I'm just not sure where specifically. Also, you can't destroy runways with gunfire of any kind, so that rules out gunships... Such a shame!

Finally! 9 games deep into the series and they're finally introducing features introduced in other FPS from more than 8 years ago. On that basis I might check it out, but I don't want to support the blatant Activision money grab, so I'm going to grab it on the cheap.

Yeah, had a chance to see it with a buddy. MY GOD it was bad, so much so that it made Home Front actually look okay by comparison. So stoked neither of us spent any money on it! But it was definitely a waste of free passes and 90+ minutes of my life I'll never get back...

You can find one in the Yankee Air Pirates mod for gen 1. It's payware though.

I though I read somewhere that you can customise your loadout before starting a level, similar to GRAW 2 and Vietcong. Is this true? I hope so, it's a feature I've desperately missed since those aforementioned games.

heh, let me my soapbox. I see where you went wrong there. GlobalSecurity is hardly the place to go for stats as some of those numbers have barely changed since 2K9 or, in some instances, earlier and a lot of this information is a bit of a cut and paste job from other websites. There are a lot of generalisations in those stats too. For example, counting all variants of the J-8 as 3rd gen aircraft for example. Later model J-8s (F,G,H) use modern avionics, the last 2 modern variants entered service in the early 2000s and are in production or conversion now. The J-11 is counted as a 'third gen' aircraft too (gimme a break, same era as the F-4?? lol!) and there is no distinction between it and the much more modern J-11A (multi-role, pgm capable, glass cockpit, etc). There's no distinction between the variants of the Q-5A and it's later, pgm capable, EFIS variants, the H-6 and it's variants, the J-7... and on and on... Well, duh. You're the United States! You have more aircraft in your combined services than most of the top ten militaries combined! One aircraft carrier has more aircraft than 70% of the countries in the world! One USN has more punching power than my nations air force! But that also doesn't mean they can be moved into a single AO to face a potential enemy given their dispersal and operational commitments. This statement has as much credibility as any youtube argument. Competitors influence (or 'steal') ideas from each other all the time! One nation will always claim it's done "the hard yards" in developing something, but the truth is, you don't need to reinvent the wheel each time you want to build or expand on something. Because one air force uses bolt on designator kits and a competitor starts doing the same, it just proves there's validity and practicality in the concept. This isn't defending China's woeful record on hacking and copyright infringement. You can find as much evidence about that at wiki leaks as you can satisfy yourself with. These arguments are silly. I heard it when people compared the Mig-29 and Su-27 to the F-15. When they compared the A-10 to the Su-25 (a bit of a stretch), jeez, even the Il-76 to the C-141! East and West are perpetually playing the game of "Match, exceed and overcome" with military hardware and things that work well often share similar characteristics. Remember when a lot of people here said the Sukhoi T-50 resembled a YF-23? That's a "some people say..." argument. Like, "Some people say the F-14's maintenance per flight hour was prohibitively high for modern combat operations", Yeah? So what? Doesn't mean it wasn't good at what it did. I hear this constantly about the F-22 and B-2 and their plethora maintenance issues. Mig-29s built in the 70s and 80s required herculean maintenance efforts, but successive version, specifically, through each generation, they are redesigned to minimise maintenance requirements, though i don't think you'll ever see simplicity levels like SAAB's Viggen these days. Comparatively. That's a relative statement. What are they carrying for what mission? And so on. Yeah, the Russians had/have issues with this with their Su-33s, but the big difference between them and the PLAN with the J-15s is that the J-15 is based on the J-11B and heavily indebted to the Sukhoi T-10M-3 for navalisation, but not the Su-33. It's avionics, engines, weapons systems, etc are much more modern and the weapons systems it's designed to carry are lighter and much more capable that those of 25ish years ago. Yeah, it certainly won't be lifting off with loads like the F-4 did during Vietnam, but it's not expected to just yet. And as for the refueling situation, it's common practice in many navies to 'tank up' after take off. The PLAN and Russian navy aircraft might need it more than the USN, but the practice and it's operational benefits are enough to make that a moot point. I find finding accurate details, or up to date ones at least, difficult to find outside of individual magazine articles. Jane's always has it's finger on the pulse, but often, much of it is hidden behind a pay wall if you're not willing to cough up the 2K(ish) yearly subscription fee. Key publishing had an okay site, but it was far too much like wiki (even porting articles directly from there but adding more technical info at one point) fo it's 1200 pound yearly subscription. Two sites that offer great strategic analysis are (and these are just Oz ones since I'm not too sure about other Western organisations) The Lowy Institute http://www.lowyinstitute.org/ and ASPI http://www.aspi.org.au/default.aspx Both are independent think tanks and both are amazing at what they do. There are some great papers on each of those sites. Definitely worth having a read through. Avoid sites like these: http://www.asianmilitaryreview.com/directories/ http://www.ausairpower.net/ As the information lacks detail or is often compromised...

...or the Spanish navy, of the Italian navy, or the Thai navy, or the Brazilian navy, or the Indian navy, or the Russian navy, or the French navy or any navy that has to put aircraft of any kind onto something flat that's being blown around by wind or kicked around by waves. Bang on the money! This needed saying as a lot of people here seem to greatly underestimate China's abilities, be it military, economic or otherwise. If you want to underestimate them due some left over cold war attitude, go for it, but do so at your own peril. That was last century after all. Don't forget, this isn't the only experience they've had with aircraft carriers. For the past... roughly 26 years, they've had the HMAS Melbourne to dissect, practice with and learn from, rather than breaking it up as they were paid to do so in '85. They've built land based carrier runways to gain an understanding of what's required to stop tonnes of aircraft in short distances. Remember, many in the US were saying they couldn't field decent 4th generation aircraft not too long ago. And they have. Then it was about how they couldn't built stealth aircraft. That's changed too. They'll get there with naval aviation and they'll overcome problems with training and/or technology like many other nations have. There's nothing so inherently superior about the USN that means only they alone can do this, just as there nothing so inherently inferior about the PLAN that's going to preclude them from achieving these abilities. I mean, the RN hasn't had a CATOBAR carrier for 30+ years, but I don't see anyone doubting their ability to relearn it, despite the loss of their skills base.