SayethWhaaaa

Is this TMF's Mig-29K? Don't they have 4 wing hardpoints?

D'oh, I meant Y-20, not J-20... Yeah, that head on is the one I'm talking about. As for the Y-20, it's nothing outside of some very grainy, low-rez shots or CG renditions.

So in the last couple of weeks, the Chinese have supposedly flown their new STOVL aircraft, the J-18 Red Eagle. And in the Last few days, they flown their new heavy lifter, the J-20. The J-20 has much the same configuration as the C-17, although with very small power plants (similar to the C-141), but it's the J-18 that intrigues me. I've heard different sources say it's general layout is similar to the Su-33/J-15, which would make the STOVL aspect pretty difficult to achieve without some major redesigning. But then, I've heard other sources say and show what is apparently the J-18 from head, and it looks much like the J-31/F-35 layout. Does anyone have anything close to reliable info on these two aircraft?

...give it some time. You'll experience the monumental suck that is AC:AH. After seeing the 'enhanced' version on Steam, it made me feel better knowing that I only wasted $14 on The War Z, rather than $35 on the CoD-iest, and worst, version of AC yet. It kills me because I loved it before the Xbox release.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG3g8Saea5E It's a fantastic film!

She's a pitbull! Those blackhawks looked awesome too! Fantastic film.

Yes, experiment, it's the best way to becoming more adept at modding! But be careful though, and whatever you do, don't cross the streams...

Ugh... Cold War era F-15s kitted out with AIM-9Xs. Hate it when they cut corners like that. Looks good though. Cold War Crisis and World in Conflict laid the ground work for this a long time ago. Had either continued (or been allowed to continue) this would have been the natural progression of the RTT genre. Good to see someone's furthering it!

Holy crap... It's Neon Genesis Evangelion! ...Kinda.

Yeah, if you're going to target objects that way, you're limited to the range of your aircraft's ground radar. If you do as Roger says, you can cycle through ground targets that may not necessarily be within your aircraft's detection range, using F7. If you're just targeting the primary target in a strike mission, then 'e' will bring that target up straight away. I know I've launched Tomahawk cruise missiles from more than 500kms away and nailed the target, it definitely can be done. That said, you can't use these methods against shipping anyways since the target ships in anti-ship missions don't spawn until you reach the final way point at the target zone. As for SF2: NA, I don't know. I assume that, in the anti-ship role, the 2 battle groups are already spawned into the map once you appear on the runway. I don't have it yet, so I can't confirm it. If you play any terrains where there are static ship targets (such as the Wings Over Timor mod, for example), you can find them and target them, although you won't be able to cycle through them using F7, you'll have to do it manually. ie, Ctrl F12 and zoom around in First person mode until you find them. Clear as mud?

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

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.

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.

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.