I think you'll find that planetquake is merely copying that from John Carmack's own.plan file, as can be seen on bluesnews etc as well. If you have access to an interent-connecte UNX box, type 'finger johnc@idsoftware.com | more' and have a look for yourself.
I'm not sure if this is an attempt at humour or what, but just in case people take it seriously:
John Carmack has never suggested changing to using DirectX, and has always supported ports to other systems. (According to his.plans going back to last year sometime, Opengl is still used entirely and will be in future)
There will probably not be a retail box version of linux Doom3, but a binary port will be releasd as usual, as for the Mac.
It seems to be a generally favourable overview: "Mozilla is quick, stable, and virtually free of the default links to manufacturers' products that feature so prominently in commercial browsers". Also mentioned is the recent release of OpenOffice. Includes some quotes from Mitchell Baker of mozilla.org.
Actually, they weren't really marxists at all; just socialists who's nationalising programme etc would have threatened US. corperation's profits, hence the CIA involvement. The 'Marxist' bit was propaganda to drum up support for the Coup in the west.
Artists don't start their own because they either don't have the time/experience to start a business beyond their group, and because if they *do* go with a big label, they have a chance at britney-spearshood
Having said that, artists do sometimes successfully publish their own works and make it big; for example David Grey with White Ladder (in the UK), self-published (at least initially, not sure if still so).
MODERATORS: check maybe even the very basic facts before moding someone up?:-) though it'll be modded down by the time I post this I guess..
Software which runs on Linux does not have to be GPLed, never has been, and ws never meant to be. The GPL only covers software which either
1) Uses GPLed code within the actual product, or
2) Is statically linked into GPLed code.
It does not affect an independent program which happens to run on linux; there is no sourcecode used, nor is any code linked in. There are many many non-gpled bits of software for linux, including many opensource stuff under other licences (e.g. BSD, Artistic, MPL licences), plus much important Commercial 'closed' software; the nearest example to the above is Quake3, Unreal, etc which can be bought for linux.
1. Whoa, didn't realise that slashdot was a figment of my imagination before!:)
2. Nope. Not amongst most people I know anyway. However, they still buy many CDs, why I'm not sure. I think we just like to have something 'real' to hold on to, plus the higher quality of CD audio over most MP3s is significant, even if it's only in our heads!
3. Hmm, not too sure about Robbie Williams. I can recommend Dido though, along with Stereophonics, Coldplay, David Grey etc etc who're keeping up the good stuff.
Amusing post, but it gives a distorted image of what's happening. The point is that Africa is not being treated as an equal partner.
For example, if someone in New York sends an email to someone in Nairobi, the African ISP gets charged for the bandwidth.
If however someone in Nairobi sends an email to someone in New York, guess who gets the bill? Yep, still the African ISP.
The Western ISPs (possibly the US ones, not sure) are more-or-less using their dominance to take Africa for everything they can get.
Fair? I don't think so..
The.pak only contains the game code in byte-compiled form.
It is not easily modifiable on it's own, although there are utilities to convert it back into something like it's original source. ID released the actual QuakeC sourcecode a little later, along with a byte-compiler etc for it.
This is just the game code; it gives *no* access to networking/engine features beyond what the gameplay code needs; it's also what runs on the server. It cannot be used to make hacked clients at all.
This is just ID's normal release of code to make mods etc. The engine src won't be released for 3 years or so yet!
First off, Hawking's theories have sod-all to do with "God's existance or nonexistance", as the man himself says; he states that if you choose to call phsics 'god' then what the hell, but it won't change anything. ("We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God.")
With regard to the bit about other universes being untestible making it non-science, consider:
There is a (hypothetical, for now) theory which describes the universe as observed better than any other, and is mathematically sensible. You would surely agree that this is 'better science' than other less accurate theories.
If one of the side-effects of this theory is to predict the existance of other universes which we cannot prove, in what way does this make the theory a less useful desciption of our own? None, of course...
This topic was fueled by the fact that we can't read information from a laser disk that was made in 1986. So, evidently, we won't convert _everything_ to new mediums.
Err, care to re-read? My point was that the useful stuff will be converted; the fact that the laser-discs weren't copied is more an indication of their lack of value; noone really cares enough to be bothered.
Once the station keeping fuels ran out, their orbits would decay and they would reenter the atmosphere.
True, but only of low-earth-orbit satelletes; IIRC, sats in high orbits, beyond geostationary, will stay up a v long time indeed; thus they should still be around if any previous civilisation put any there.
The point about other ancint scholars is fair, but it could be argued that the extremely apparent lack of any high-technology remains of any kind would imply that they did not in fact have high technology levels; therefore they probably did not have the agricultural/industrial excess production to support a comparable academic community to our own (or indeed a population significant compared with the billion-odd that live in developed countries today); They may indeed have been a 'few hundred' scholars as you say, but to take an example, I'm sitting in Cambridge University, England at the moment. How many academics, scientists and philosophers has it alone contributed to our civilisation? (think Newton, for example) How many other universities, companies, research institutes and private individuals have similarly contributed, to a greater or lesser extent? All the great works of literature, philosphy, all the achievements in art, science, technology and engineering.
As you say, we could indeed lose the lot very quicky, therefore it would be a good idea to build your roseatta-stone idea. However, it's unrealistic to pretend that previous civilisations reached the levels that it now has. There's just nothing to support it. Not only is there no evidence at all, the sheer lack of evidence is pretty damning.
It doesn't really matter that DVDs won't last 1000 years or however long you care to pick as being 'ancient' timescales; the data that people are interested in will just be converted to new formats, and will echo down time, changing medium as and when people desire.
Consider 'Caseblanca'; how many of you have viewed it on it's original medium? The medium has become irrelevant today, precisely because, as the RIAA/MPAA have discovered to their cost, it's trivial to convert to whatever format you want to use. This ensures the continuity of data, at least as long as technological civilisation lasts.
As to the idea that there have been many civilisations that have been "just as advanced as our own": err, where? In material terms, it's all very one-sided; It's interesting to note the lack of, for eg, non biodegradable rubbish, remains of deep mines, advanced alloys; even if you suppose these have all been decayed by time, there's one critical hallmark of how advanced our civilisations: where are the Ancient satellites?:)
In intellectual terms, it's also a one-horse race; sure the greeks and romans had great minds, people weren't stupider then. But the total intellectual output of our civilisation is just phenomonal; it takes a lifetime of study to become expert at a tiny corner of our total knowledge. An additional point is that clearly if Plato invented a concept, then it's not a question of whether our civilisation can replicate this; it's already there for us to use!
All in all, what we know will not get lost unless everything is lost; and there's never before been a time like now. Just wait til you see next millenium!:)
Yup. This is most definately against natural selection. This is engineered selection. Rather than waiting for 'nature' to randomly kill off bad genes, we can now kill them off immediately - and noone has to get killed to do so.
In my opinion, this makes natural selection redundant; we can do it better. (with due care and research of course, but that's another question altogether). TBH, natural selection, while simple and effective in the long term, never was real pretty for those actually in the grinder, as-it-were; what's wrong with fixing it when we have the capibility?
This is of curse what our civilisation has always been; a way to cheat at natural selection!
The short answer is 'no.' In order to launch an ICBM you'll need several km of track at least, which is more-or-less the same as a huge 'Shoot Me Please' sign to the opposing side's counter-force weapons; once the launch track's gone you just lost your launch capabitlity.
This system isn't going to be militarily useful unless you can bury the launch rail deep; for a multiple-km rail that's going to be *very* expensive.
I've done a bit of a summary of who-won-what for handiness and bragging rights; the results are quite interesting.
No. of wins - No. of finalists --- Pop. in millions
USA : 12.5 - 60 --- 263
UK : 2 - 12 --- 58
Japan : 0 - 7 --- 125
India : 1 - 4 --- 936
France : 1 - 3 --- 58
Brazil : 1 - 2 --- 156
Germany : 0 - 3 --- 82
Switzerland : 0 - 2 --- 7
Finland : 1 - 1 --- 5
Netherlands : 0 - 2 --- 15
South Africa : 0.5 - 1 --- 41
Italy : 1 - 0 --- 57
Australia : 1 - 0 --- 18
Indonesia : 1 - 0 --- 195
Iceland : 0 - 1 --- 0.27
Taiwan : 0 - 1 --- 21
Canada : 0 - 1 --- 30
Russia : 0 - 1 --- 148
Kenya : 0 - 1 --- 31
For pure weight-of-numbers there's no competition; the USA is miles ahead, with the UK and Japan fairly entranched in 2nd and 3rd places. More intersting is to compare this with their population.
When you do this, the USA is still very successful, with the UK only marginally ahead (probably due to it's univeristy system). Iceland however steals the show; although they only got a finalist, their population is a tiny fraction of most of the countries' major cities. *
It's also clear that many countries are majorly underachieving; Sweden, Belgium and Sapin spring to mind as non-appearers, and Russia, Canada Austrialia and the Netherlands didn't do spectiacularly well.
How much of this is due to the innate bias in the selection process is debatable, but then doing an analysis on these figures is pretty random anyway, so what the hell.
* Yes I know, one isn't a very good sample size:)
Brown
PS. If anyone's wondering, I considered a win to be a bit better than a finalist, but not that much.
PPS. The/. lameness filter sucks when you're trying to do a graph.
Bad comparison with structual engineering
on
The Evolution of Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
When discussing the need for proper 'scientific' design, Alan Cox said: "Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works."
To me, this seems to be a very poor analogy. The fact is that before the widespread use of maths and materials science in structual engineering ('building a good wall'), structual engineering didn't really exist at all - there were just builders and designers. 'Engineering' only really began when the science was added; before it was an art or trade. As for building a 'perfectly good wall', yes, the walls did indeed usually stand up; but:
a) Not always. Take the case of medaeval cathedrals. In order to stop the weight of the roof pushing the walls apart, the walls had flying buttresses built for support; however in some cases the buttresses actually were so big that they collapsed the wall in the other direction! b) Not very efficiently. Due to the builders being unable to optimise their design, buildings were often very wasteful of materials in design. c) How many medaeval skyscrapers were there? You just can't build many of todays huge structures without 'sciencey' engineering.
All in all, I think Alan would have been better advised not to compare it to building a wall; the problem is more that an operating system has such wide scope and enormous complexity (due to different areas of code affecting each other), as well as being flexible enough to change over time, that it isn't feasible to desgin the whole system as you would a dam or skyscraper.
The point is that ATI weren't just optimising their code to run faster in Quake3, they were forcing quake3 to use low-quality textures etc in order to make it run faster. This impacts the user's experience and makes things dificult for developers.
Imagine an inexperienced user with an ATI card, loading up quake3 and say UT. In UT he/she gets smooth high-quality textures, and in Quake3 shabby low-quality stuff. Who gets the blame? Not ATI.
It also makes it more difficult to develop in general when driver writers don't stick to standards.
It'd have been fine to allow the low-quality/high-performance setting as an option; it's not fine to force users to use it.
It's possible to bring down Linux with an errant display driver? And, if that's the case, how much different is this from Windows (NT-style)?
The difference is that the Linux machine isn't crashed - just X. All the services such as the web server, mail server are still running fine, without noticing a problem. It's only a problem if you can't use ssh or telnet to access the computer remotely and regain control.
Thus for buiness use, where services uptime is the important bit when comparing linux and WinNT, there's quite a big difference:)
The Russian Mig-33 is capable of outflying anything we have in the sky (including the F-22!) and while it isn't in production, the possibility remains that other nations could fund the production of those planes (china anyone?!).
The MIG-33 is an updated version of the MIG-29, which first flew in 1977 - quite a while ago. The MIG-29M (redesignated to MIG-33) first flew on 25 April 1986.
I think you could safely say that while the MIG 33 isn't terrible, it isn't anything I'd like to fly against an F22 or eurofighter in - it has an elderly design history, and is also in itself older and less advanced.
> The US got rocket technology from the Germans, as did the Brits and Russians.
> However...US jet technology was initially jointly developed with the British.
Britain developed turbojet technology during the war, parallel with germany - the Gloster Meteor was the only allied jet aircraft to see comat in the war (though it never met the Me262, it's german counterpart). The XP59 Airacomet, the USA's first jet, used a modified (british) Whittle gas turbine. The prototype P80 was also powered by a british engine, the de Havilland H.1B turbojet. Production models used the Allison 33-A-35 turbojet.
> If the fuckin' limeys butted-out of Northern Ireland, there'd be no trouble there
Maybe you're forgetting the fact that 60% of Northern Ireland's population is Unionist, not Nationalist. Most people consider themselves a part of the UK. Suggesting that the 'limeys' leave is sortof like suggesting that the USA should give California to Mexico. In addition, if the 'limeys' were to leave, do you think the loyalist terrorist groups would just sit and watch? So much for 'no trouble there'.
I don't quite follow your agument about Kuwait either.The only problem Kuwait has is the robber living next door in Baghdad, and I can't quite see how that's the UK's fault. Care to enlighten us?
That would be better written:
The British Library is making the Gutenberg Bible, the first major bible printed in the West, available online. (note the comma added)
As in, it was the first major bible printed in the West, and it is now availible online.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you'll find that planetquake is merely copying that from John Carmack's own .plan file, as can be seen on bluesnews etc as well. If you have access to an interent-connecte UNX box, type 'finger johnc@idsoftware.com | more' and have a look for yourself.
I'm not sure if this is an attempt at humour or what, but just in case people take it seriously:
.plans going back to last year sometime, Opengl is still used entirely and will be in future)
John Carmack has never suggested changing to using DirectX, and has always supported ports to other systems.
(According to his
There will probably not be a retail box version of linux Doom3, but a binary port will be releasd as usual, as for the Mac.
The BBC has a story on the 1.0 release of mozilla, including the background of Mozilla and the principles of OpenSource.
It seems to be a generally favourable overview: "Mozilla is quick, stable, and virtually free of the default links to manufacturers' products that feature so prominently in commercial browsers". Also mentioned is the recent release of OpenOffice. Includes some quotes from Mitchell Baker of mozilla.org.
Chris
OK this has got to be the most confusing post ever made on /., and that's against some stiff competition:
- you dirty pinko fascist communist liberal.
Someone with a remarkably broad mind then!
(and yes, I know it's sarcasm.)
Actually, they weren't really marxists at all; just socialists who's nationalising programme etc would have threatened US. corperation's profits, hence the CIA involvement. The 'Marxist' bit was propaganda to drum up support for the Coup in the west.
Artists don't start their own because they either don't have the time/experience to start a business beyond their group, and because if they *do* go with a big label, they have a chance at britney-spearshood
Having said that, artists do sometimes successfully publish their own works and make it big; for example David Grey with White Ladder (in the UK), self-published (at least initially, not sure if still so).
MODERATORS: check maybe even the very basic facts before moding someone up? :-) though it'll be modded down by the time I post this I guess..
Software which runs on Linux does not have to be GPLed, never has been, and ws never meant to be. The GPL only covers software which either
1) Uses GPLed code within the actual product, or
2) Is statically linked into GPLed code.
It does not affect an independent program which happens to run on linux; there is no sourcecode used, nor is any code linked in.
There are many many non-gpled bits of software for linux, including many opensource stuff under other licences (e.g. BSD, Artistic, MPL licences), plus much important Commercial 'closed' software; the nearest example to the above is Quake3, Unreal, etc which can be bought for linux.
Check your facts.
1. Whoa, didn't realise that slashdot was a figment of my imagination before! :)
2. Nope. Not amongst most people I know anyway. However, they still buy many CDs, why I'm not sure. I think we just like to have something 'real' to hold on to, plus the higher quality of CD audio over most MP3s is significant, even if it's only in our heads!
3. Hmm, not too sure about Robbie Williams. I can recommend Dido though, along with Stereophonics, Coldplay, David Grey etc etc who're keeping up the good stuff.
Amusing post, but it gives a distorted image of what's happening. The point is that Africa is not being treated as an equal partner.
For example, if someone in New York sends an email to someone in Nairobi, the African ISP gets charged for the bandwidth.
If however someone in Nairobi sends an email to someone in New York, guess who gets the bill? Yep, still the African ISP.
The Western ISPs (possibly the US ones, not sure) are more-or-less using their dominance to take Africa for everything they can get.
Fair? I don't think so..
The .pak only contains the game code in byte-compiled form.
It is not easily modifiable on it's own, although there are utilities to convert it back into something like it's original source. ID released the actual QuakeC sourcecode a little later, along with a byte-compiler etc for it.
Umm, wrong-o.
This is just the game code; it gives *no* access to networking/engine features beyond what the gameplay code needs; it's also what runs on the server. It cannot be used to make hacked clients at all.
This is just ID's normal release of code to make mods etc. The engine src won't be released for 3 years or so yet!
First off, Hawking's theories have sod-all to do with "God's existance or nonexistance", as the man himself says; he states that if you choose to call phsics 'god' then what the hell, but it won't change anything. ("We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God.")
With regard to the bit about other universes being untestible making it non-science, consider:
There is a (hypothetical, for now) theory which describes the universe as observed better than any other, and is mathematically sensible. You would surely agree that this is 'better science' than other less accurate theories.
If one of the side-effects of this theory is to predict the existance of other universes which we cannot prove, in what way does this make the theory a less useful desciption of our own? None, of course...
This topic was fueled by the fact that we can't read information from a laser disk that was made in 1986. So, evidently, we won't convert _everything_ to new mediums.
Err, care to re-read? My point was that the useful stuff will be converted; the fact that the laser-discs weren't copied is more an indication of their lack of value; noone really cares enough to be bothered.
Once the station keeping fuels ran out, their orbits would decay and they would reenter the atmosphere.
True, but only of low-earth-orbit satelletes; IIRC, sats in high orbits, beyond geostationary, will stay up a v long time indeed; thus they should still be around if any previous civilisation put any there.
The point about other ancint scholars is fair, but it could be argued that the extremely apparent lack of any high-technology remains of any kind would imply that they did not in fact have high technology levels; therefore they probably did not have the agricultural/industrial excess production to support a comparable academic community to our own (or indeed a population significant compared with the billion-odd that live in developed countries today); They may indeed have been a 'few hundred' scholars as you say, but to take an example, I'm sitting in Cambridge University, England at the moment. How many academics, scientists and philosophers has it alone contributed to our civilisation? (think Newton, for example) How many other universities, companies, research institutes and private individuals have similarly contributed, to a greater or lesser extent? All the great works of literature, philosphy, all the achievements in art, science, technology and engineering.
As you say, we could indeed lose the lot very quicky, therefore it would be a good idea to build your roseatta-stone idea. However, it's unrealistic to pretend that previous civilisations reached the levels that it now has. There's just nothing to support it. Not only is there no evidence at all, the sheer lack of evidence is pretty damning.
It doesn't really matter that DVDs won't last 1000 years or however long you care to pick as being 'ancient' timescales; the data that people are interested in will just be converted to new formats, and will echo down time, changing medium as and when people desire.
:)
:)
Consider 'Caseblanca'; how many of you have viewed it on it's original medium? The medium has become irrelevant today, precisely because, as the RIAA/MPAA have discovered to their cost, it's trivial to convert to whatever format you want to use. This ensures the continuity of data, at least as long as technological civilisation lasts.
As to the idea that there have been many civilisations that have been "just as advanced as our own": err, where? In material terms, it's all very one-sided; It's interesting to note the lack of, for eg, non biodegradable rubbish, remains of deep mines, advanced alloys; even if you suppose these have all been decayed by time, there's one critical hallmark of how advanced our civilisations: where are the Ancient satellites?
In intellectual terms, it's also a one-horse race; sure the greeks and romans had great minds, people weren't stupider then. But the total intellectual output of our civilisation is just phenomonal; it takes a lifetime of study to become expert at a tiny corner of our total knowledge. An additional point is that clearly if Plato invented a concept, then it's not a question of whether our civilisation can replicate this; it's already there for us to use!
All in all, what we know will not get lost unless everything is lost; and there's never before been a time like now. Just wait til you see next millenium!
Well, IMO, this goes against natural selection.
Yup. This is most definately against natural selection. This is engineered selection. Rather than waiting for 'nature' to randomly kill off bad genes, we can now kill them off immediately - and noone has to get killed to do so.
In my opinion, this makes natural selection redundant; we can do it better. (with due care and research of course, but that's another question altogether). TBH, natural selection, while simple and effective in the long term, never was real pretty for those actually in the grinder, as-it-were; what's wrong with fixing it when we have the capibility?
This is of curse what our civilisation has always been; a way to cheat at natural selection!
The short answer is 'no.' In order to launch an ICBM you'll need several km of track at least, which is more-or-less the same as a huge 'Shoot Me Please' sign to the opposing side's counter-force weapons; once the launch track's gone you just lost your launch capabitlity.
This system isn't going to be militarily useful unless you can bury the launch rail deep; for a multiple-km rail that's going to be *very* expensive.
I've done a bit of a summary of who-won-what for handiness and bragging rights; the results are quite interesting.
:)
/. lameness filter sucks when you're trying to do a graph.
No. of wins - No. of finalists --- Pop. in millions
USA : 12.5 - 60 --- 263
UK : 2 - 12 --- 58
Japan : 0 - 7 --- 125
India : 1 - 4 --- 936
France : 1 - 3 --- 58
Brazil : 1 - 2 --- 156
Germany : 0 - 3 --- 82
Switzerland : 0 - 2 --- 7
Finland : 1 - 1 --- 5
Netherlands : 0 - 2 --- 15
South Africa : 0.5 - 1 --- 41
Italy : 1 - 0 --- 57
Australia : 1 - 0 --- 18
Indonesia : 1 - 0 --- 195
Iceland : 0 - 1 --- 0.27
Taiwan : 0 - 1 --- 21
Canada : 0 - 1 --- 30
Russia : 0 - 1 --- 148
Kenya : 0 - 1 --- 31
For pure weight-of-numbers there's no competition; the USA is miles ahead, with the UK and Japan fairly entranched in 2nd and 3rd places. More intersting is to compare this with their population.
When you do this, the USA is still very successful, with the UK only marginally ahead (probably due to it's univeristy system). Iceland however steals the show; although they only got a finalist, their population is a tiny fraction of most of the countries' major cities. *
It's also clear that many countries are majorly underachieving; Sweden, Belgium and Sapin spring to mind as non-appearers, and Russia, Canada Austrialia and the Netherlands didn't do spectiacularly well.
How much of this is due to the innate bias in the selection process is debatable, but then doing an analysis on these figures is pretty random anyway, so what the hell.
* Yes I know, one isn't a very good sample size
Brown
PS. If anyone's wondering, I considered a win to be a bit better than a finalist, but not that much.
PPS. The
When discussing the need for proper 'scientific' design, Alan Cox said:
"Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works."
To me, this seems to be a very poor analogy. The fact is that before the widespread use of maths and materials science in structual engineering ('building a good wall'), structual engineering didn't really exist at all - there were just builders and designers. 'Engineering' only really began when the science was added; before it was an art or trade. As for building a 'perfectly good wall', yes, the walls did indeed usually stand up; but:
a) Not always. Take the case of medaeval cathedrals. In order to stop the weight of the roof pushing the walls apart, the walls had flying buttresses built for support; however in some cases the buttresses actually were so big that they collapsed the wall in the other direction!
b) Not very efficiently. Due to the builders being unable to optimise their design, buildings were often very wasteful of materials in design.
c) How many medaeval skyscrapers were there? You just can't build many of todays huge structures without 'sciencey' engineering.
All in all, I think Alan would have been better advised not to compare it to building a wall; the problem is more that an operating system has such wide scope and enormous complexity (due to different areas of code affecting each other), as well as being flexible enough to change over time, that it isn't feasible to desgin the whole system as you would a dam or skyscraper.
Chris Cunningham
The point is that ATI weren't just optimising their code to run faster in Quake3, they were forcing quake3 to use low-quality textures etc in order to make it run faster. This impacts the user's experience and makes things dificult for developers.
Imagine an inexperienced user with an ATI card, loading up quake3 and say UT. In UT he/she gets smooth high-quality textures, and in Quake3 shabby low-quality stuff. Who gets the blame? Not ATI.
It also makes it more difficult to develop in general when driver writers don't stick to standards.
It'd have been fine to allow the low-quality/high-performance setting as an option; it's not fine to force users to use it.
It's possible to bring down Linux with an errant display driver? And, if that's the case, how much different is this from Windows (NT-style)?
:)
The difference is that the Linux machine isn't crashed - just X. All the services such as the web server, mail server are still running fine, without noticing a problem. It's only a problem if you can't use ssh or telnet to access the computer remotely and regain control.
Thus for buiness use, where services uptime is the important bit when comparing linux and WinNT, there's quite a big difference
The Russian Mig-33 is capable of outflying anything we have in the sky (including the F-22!) and while it isn't in production, the possibility remains that other nations could fund the production of those planes (china anyone?!).
The MIG-33 is an updated version of the MIG-29, which first flew in 1977 - quite a while ago. The MIG-29M (redesignated to MIG-33) first flew on 25 April 1986.
I think you could safely say that while the MIG 33 isn't terrible, it isn't anything I'd like to fly against an F22 or eurofighter in - it has an elderly design history, and is also in itself older and less advanced.
> The US got rocket technology from the Germans, as did the Brits and Russians.
> However...US jet technology was initially jointly developed with the British.
Britain developed turbojet technology during the war, parallel with germany - the Gloster Meteor was the only allied jet aircraft to see comat in the war (though it never met the Me262, it's german counterpart). The XP59 Airacomet, the USA's first jet, used a modified (british) Whittle gas turbine. The prototype P80 was also powered by a british engine, the de Havilland H.1B turbojet. Production models used the Allison 33-A-35 turbojet.
> If the fuckin' limeys butted-out of Northern Ireland, there'd be no trouble there
Maybe you're forgetting the fact that 60% of Northern Ireland's population is Unionist, not Nationalist. Most people consider themselves a part of the UK. Suggesting that the 'limeys' leave is sortof like suggesting that the USA should give California to Mexico. In addition, if the 'limeys' were to leave, do you think the loyalist terrorist groups would just sit and watch? So much for 'no trouble there'.
I don't quite follow your agument about Kuwait either.The only problem Kuwait has is the robber living next door in Baghdad, and I can't quite see how that's the UK's fault. Care to enlighten us?
Who moderated this guy up anyway?
That would be better written:
The British Library is making the Gutenberg Bible, the first major bible printed in the West, available online.
(note the comma added)
As in, it was the first major bible printed in the West, and it is now availible online.
> Cool it will learn us something...
:)
Some grammar, maybe?