alanschu

Then why is Burke still not letting it die? He's the one that keeps bringing up the Lowe drama from last season. Oilers and Kevin Lowe have moved on.

I prefer PC games so I am a "PC Gamer." But I can acknowledge good games on the consoles as well. I get sad that games like Force Unleashed won't be gracing my PC

Chicago's goalie situation is interesting right now, and they need to dump salary in a hurry.

Hellgate: London definitely could have been better. It was fun to play through it as a marksman, and it showed that you can have a neat, skill-based system ala diablo 2ish in a FPS environment.

Maybe something similar to Hellgate London?

Sins of a Solar Empire is fun!

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?artic...0866&page=1

Except that Escrow exists.

I still remember Otacon's weird diversion where he started babbling on about Otaku. You know, you'd think there'd be a bit more urgency.

Airplane is my favourite!

/me remembers the Naked Guns and Hot Shots movies. <3 Zucker Abrams Zucker

I enjoyed taking my merc (high marskmanship, night ops, and stealthy) combined with Shadow, and the two of us would go in with scoped laser sighted rifles and wipe out whole patrols by ourselves at night. "Too easy" Great for gaining levels and helping you get those precious interrupts.

By 1945, the Bismarck would have been refitted with extra layers of barnacles all over It would probably be a fairer comparison, if Bismarck (and it's often forgotten twin, the Tirpitz) were compared to the ships it was designed to go up against, those of The Royal Navy. The Yamato (and the Musashi and the Shinano, the last two were never finished and were not named) was designed to go toe to toe with the US Navy. I think if the Bismarck had made it out into the Atlantic, it would have been happy hunting season for it for quite some time. Enough for the RN to divert its resources from the Mediterranean and the Far East. The Bismarck did go up against a King George V (The Prince of Wales). Though I think it had pretty much just been commissioned.

My Oilers fanboism still feels Pisani should have won the Masterson trophy. Alas.

I disagree that telling students to "be concise" is a pointless thing. People feel compelled to add useless drivel to boost their word count, but rather than sounding impressive, it obfuscates the point and irritates any critical reader. Simply cutting down the wordiness of my essays moved my marks from 50-60% to 80%.

I'm a jerk and have never really had a hard time writing essays haha. Important things I find are to: Be concise. All that high school wordiness will kick your ass at the University level as profs can read through BS like nobody's business! Being concise also makes it easier to get to the point. Occasionally some lead in is required to ensure the reader understands the content that follows, but remember to take the time to acknowledge your audience. Take some time to review the rules of writing. When you're reading your own work, you know what you were thinking while writing it, so the point may seem obvious to you, but if you start having passive voice and comma splices, the point may become obfuscated. Usually I only need to do a single draft of an essay, with editing afterwards. Occasionally I'll have to rewrite some areas of my paper, or possibly cut content (which can be scary since you may feel it's necessary for future parts).

I primarily use firefox, and at home it's on WinXP, at work on some form of Linux.

I haven't seen Taxi Driver, but I think Apocolypse now is pretty entertaining.

Haha me too it was awesome!

I agree wholeheartedly with Torment being a grind. It's just I loved the story and the reading enough to get through it. I know I lot of people that couldn't get past the clunky gameplay though. And even though I love the game, I still stealth my way through Baator.

Go Lidstrom....I mean Detroit!

Yeah, Aircraft Carriers became the new Queens of the Sea. Force Projection of several hundred kilometers rather than much closer, and well....planes are cheaper to replace. Losing carriers is devastating though, as Midway demonstrated. 1000 lb bombs on vulnerable unprepared aircraft carrier decks can be quite devastating apparently haha. The US was smart with their modern BBs. They saw the advantage of the aircraft carrier, and made their Battleships have ridiculous amounts of Anti-Aircraft artillery, as well as effectual dual purpose cannons. Getting into bombing/torpedo range of the Yamato is meh.....getting there on an Iowa is scary, because there is just so much saturation of fire! Keeping in mind of course that there is also a picket of escort ships, likely other smaller capital ships, in addition to a likely CV in the area, with its own heavy air defenses. I think there were even some cruiser variatons that were specifically AA cruiisers, that only had the dual purpose artillery rather than a main battery, just to maximize saturation. CLAA I think.

Not to take toooo much away from it. Her speed was her greatest asset at the time though, as well as her armor (which is why she seemed unsinkable, even if the ship was pretty much a write off due to damage to the superstructure). The Hood was an "older" ship with refits and a face of the british navy, so losing it was a blow to the RN. But at the same time, if you can score a hit that can hit an ammo magazine that splits a ship in two, that's some pretty fortunate luck. Bismarck did make things unpleasant on PoW though. I remember reading an analysis between the flagship battleships for every nation here: http://www.combinedfleet.com/baddest.htm The Iowa seems pretty darn impressive! Powerful armaments, and the ability to make them hit with accuracy during even evasive manouvers! If you could get some better FC on the Bismarck, she'd still be pretty scary! But the Iowas were Carrier escort BBs, so they were hella fast too. I love the Iowas haha. The Yamato is cool for **** envy reasons, but it sounds like even the 18" guns were outclassed by the Iowa's 16" batteries. The link admits that Yamato and Bismarck are unfairly compared, since they wouldn't have received as many (or any) late war refits.

The Bismarck is vastly overrated as a battleship, because people recognize that the Brits focused so much on taking it out. By 1941, the submarine warfare was already annoying the crap out of the United Kingdom. However, to combat submarines, destroyer escort, frigate, and corvette production was ramped up (i.e. really small ships), with ASW equipment. The big thing about the Bismarck, is it could safely demolish entire convoys, and their escorts, which would be devastating to the fleets. The strength of the convoy system is that it kept ships together (and therefore harder to find ships), and you could protect them easier with escorts since they'd share them. However, if a big ship of death with 16" guns that outrange any escort by several orders of magnitude, well...then bad news! Submarines would take out the odd ship in a convoy. A fast battleship would annihilate the convoy, and speed away before the heavy artillery could counterattack, Then they'd have to ramp up escorts with capital ships, which is a waste of resources. With the Bismarck's speed, it could zip in, fire off a few rounds, and dart away. Plus, there is an added detriment to having capital ships as escorts to convoys. Transport ships are not fast, and the last thing the British Admiralty is going to want to do is provide slow moving capital ships as juicy targets to the submarine fleets. That's a target of opportunity that is going to get a full salvo of torpedoes fired at it. Bismarck had some creative armor, which made it really hard to sink, and it did score a great hit on Hood to send it down, but attributes wise battleship to battleship, it didn't have a huge advantage over other battleships, and some (like the Iowa class to come later) significantly outclass it.

Well part of the reason for naval awesomeness of Britain was the sheer size of its navy. Even the Germans recognized this as the lead up to Jutland demonstrated, with the Germans trying to cutoff parts of the British Grand Fleet. I would label it a tactical win for the Germans as they sunk more ships and killed more people, but a strategic defeat, since their presence in the North Sea was heavily compromised. It lead to a shift towards submarine warfare.