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Agiel

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Everything posted by Agiel

  1. Been re-reading "The Plot Against America" by Philip Roth, which tells an alternate history story of Charles Lindbergh, a purported self-made man catapulting to the top of the Republican Party presidential ticket, winning the election after a two-term President who built his platform on increased benefits for all, comes to admire a fascist with paranoid delusions and delusions of grandeur who is running roughshod over Europe, allowing said fascist to carve out his sphere of influence and in the process throwing the United States' European allies under the bus, and advocates mass persecution of a minority under the pretext that they were all complacent in undermining American security. By no means Roth's best material (though it has one of my favourite passages he's written), but, you know, totally has no relevance to today's going-ons. Said favourite line:
  2. On another note, heard this on another forum: "EU now has 1GB of hard drive space freed up". And: ------ The British are frantically Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it
  3. God forbid there are those of us who like what is made possible when European countries come together and pool their talent and resources. Speaking from an aviation enthusiast's perspective: -AgustaWestland -SEPECAT Jaguar -Alpha Jet -Concorde -Panavia Tornado -MBDA -Eurofighter Typhoon -Eurocopter Tiger -AĆ©rospatiale Gazelle -Harrier (keep in mind that the original concept originated from a French engineer, Michel Wibault) -Airbus and its long partnership with Rolls Royce In fact in the long run Rolls-Royce could suffer an irreparable blow to jet engine market share as a result of this mess. Say hello to Pratt & Whitney and General Electric duopoly for wide bodies!
  4. First results in from Gibraltar, overwhelmingly for "remain". I guess that makes Nigel Farage "Herr Kaleun" here:
  5. Fact checking both sides' claim: https://medium.com/im-trying-to-fact-check-brexit/fact-checking-brexit-the-conclusion-c1f56ba4cb70#.4d3ij8ytk In any case, last word from polls reported 8 point lead for remain. I guess my recent purchase of General Electric, United Technologies, and Raytheon stock wasn't quite the master stroke I was envisioning.
  6. Excellent description of nuclear launch procedures... and considering how he struggled with the concept of the nuclear triad and expressed a penchant for carpet bombing, single biggest reason I fall under #NeverTrump:
  7. Looked at our weather forecast, which shows us at a temperate 73 Fahrenheit high tomorrow... somehow jumping to 96 degrees on Monday. Really should get a window unit for my bedroom.
  8. Most intriguing was the inclusion of the Mako. While those segments in Mass Effect 1 weren't great (or even _good_, for that matter), the wholesale write-off of that mechanic seemed like overkill to me (as Yahtzee put it, it at least gave the game world a feeling of _bigness_). And its replacement with the "Oh-god-how-did-this-make-it-through-QA?" planet scanning made the decision even more egregious.
  9. Your furnishings also suggest you have a pretty sweet pad as well.
  10. The former Govenator and his animatronic double in Terminator 2:
  11. People are too cheap to pay the maintenance costs I guess. As for Trump's statement, heh, who the **** knows. I suppose he "future" never had much use for sound economics.
  12. I am very fond of TLJ but this gave me a giggle. I made a small improvement to that original post which makes it ever so slightly succinct yet that much more loquacious
  13. In Vietnam prohibitive ROE and the fact that the VPAF chose when they would go up (basically waiting for un-escorted Thuds) played some part in skewing kill ratios in the early part of the war. In a stand-up fight, they got trounced. I'd also advise you do a little serious reading for youself: http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/25312/if-all-fighter-jets-become-stealthy-how-will-they-fight-each-other-in-the-futur/25327#25327 Older long wave radars like that of the SA-3 perform better against certain kinds of stealth aircraft like the Stinkbug (which was optimised for hi-frequency threats like the new double-digit SAMs that were coming online during its introduction) since the wavelengths were roughly the size of a fighter-sized aircraft, which produced resonances that gave better returns by an order of magnitude. Larger aircraft with all-aspect stealth qualities like the F-22 and the B-2 (because it's big, it's actually even stealthier than smaller stealth aircraft) had been designed in response to this. Long wave radars are also very susceptible to ECM jamming, which the Air Force and Navy have also invested heavily in recent years. That on top of a complex threat environment of air launched decoys, HARM shooters, and cruise missiles coming in low over the horizon when the gloves are off. As for the S-500, I think it should be remembered that the VKS in 2012 (in the golden age of oil, no less)claimed that it would be ready in the year 2013.
  14. Winner! Winner! Chicken Din... errr... MRE!
  15. Throneworld, part of the "The Beast Arises" Warhammer 40000 book series. Awesome to read about my favourite space elf ninja clowns in this one, and see them mop the floor with the Adeptus Custodes and almost come out on top of a Callidus Assassin.
  16. As if high-alpha turns and other departure from controlled flight maneuvers haven't been a thing since the 1950s : And in an age of continuously computed impact point gun sights, high-off boresight missiles, and intra-flight datalinks, conducting such maneuvers in a modern "knife-fight in a phone booth" are highly inadvisable : And US fighters can keep up just fine: 3 points to anyone who can tell what aircraft that HUD belongs to.
  17. Other than the cat puzzle, what other ones? Every game has one awkward one for me (I still hate a few from The Dig), but for the most part they are all pretty easy. Granted there are just bad adventure games, where the puzzles are just bad - see AlternativA. I could name _quite a few_ in The Longest Journey off the top of my head: 1. The rubber ducky puzzle. 2. The "give the cop the candy that was dipped in radioactive goo" puzzle. 3. The "arrange the items in the alleyway so that the silhouette looks like a man aiming a gun" puzzle. 4. The "make aloe vera to temporarily cure the guy who was turned to stone" puzzle. 5. The "take the can of soda to the other side of the city to a power tool that can shake it up so that it sprays into the face of a cop you give it to" puzzle. Seriously, it's as if they make April Ryan out to be Eldrad Ulthran that she's able to unravel the skeins of causality to effect such serendipitous outcomes to her plight. For all I know, there might well be many, many more puzzles that are equally egregious as these (if not more so) since eventually I just gave it double middle fingers and uninstalled it half-way through the story.
  18. Environment puzzles in RPGs. Hell, I'd go as far as to say that the actual puzzle parts of point and click adventure games are terribad as well.
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