"the shuttle usually doesn't deal with such missions, and leaves them to things like Atlas and Delta rockets."
Thats true today but NOT when it was designed and sold to everyone. It WAS supposed to launch satelites and did, several at a time, on its early missions. Expendable boosters were to be abandoned. The DOD was arm twisted in to signing on to use it for all its launches, at which point they also dramaticly expanded the requirements and substantially increased the problems the Shuttle would have in development and operation.
The Challenger disaster is the point everyone came to their senses and realized it was silly to use a very expensive manned vehicle to launch satellites and do a lot of other things expendables did perfectly well. At this point expendable programs were given new life and a $6 billion dollar Shuttle launch pad at Vandenburgh was abandoned having never been used.
"4) fragile to the point of being delicate"
You can rationalize about how tough tiles are and what a great accompishment they are but that doesn't change the fact is its insane having a space vehicle that you can't launch if there are clouds, let alone rain near the launch pad. Especially in Florida where it rains pretty much every day. Its just as bad that the tiles can't stand ice strikes AND they are right next to a tank full of cryogenic fluids. The Saturn V was sheathed in ice when it lifted off and it fell all over but there wasn't much of anything for it to hit, not so with the flawed shuttle design.
On the server my chars are on there is about a 4-1 imbalance between Alliance and Horde. On the rare occassions you can even get in BG with an alliance character the Horde is usually still outnumbered, they got ticked off about it and boycotted the BG's most of the time making them completely usuless. BG's made PVP worse on that server. Before BG's you could always go to Tarren Mill or Xroads and get some PVP action. The horde were usually outnumbered but the gaurds made up for it. Now about the only PVP you get playing an alliance char is if you are willing to sit in a BG queue ALL DAY which is only for people with NO LIFE.
BG's would work if they had civil wars BG's where alliance could fight alliance to correct for the massive racial imbalance on many servers.
I thought BG's would be great too, when they came out, played them twice in the first couple days and then they slowly turned impossible to get in on this server. They will only work if you have balanced numbers on both sides.
Personally I suspect the introduction of WoW in to China is the first, long overdue, step in a U.S. counterattack against the imminent Chinese domination of the global economy.
If we can get a few hundred million people in Chinese spending all day everyday addicted to grinds their economic productivity will crater and it will level the playing field with the West where everyone has been wasting all day everyday playing FPS's and dungeon crawls for a while now, which is a key, albeit relatively new, component in why Western economic productiviy and education is cratering. It was due to TV originally but TV is boring, and doesn't have the Pavlovian grip on people games do, so now everyone squanders their lives playing games to no productive end (unless you are eeking out a living farming and selling gold on Ebay).
Fortunately there isn't any racism in the actual game, you know like the alliance and horde constantly trying to kill each other and if PVP is off giving each other rude gestures, etc.
So why is racism OK in the fantasy setting and you are totally hyper about it in the fantasy setting when its applied to meatspace races. Try subsistiting Horde for Chinese and vice versa and tell me whats the difference.
The more interesting Chinese angle to me is what happens if you create a "Freedom and Democracy" guild and you spend all your time in chat talking about "Freedom and Democracty" in guild chat, and advocating the overthrow of communists governments. Are the Chinese monitoring it, or did Blizzard add "Freedom" and Democracy" to the in game censorship list for all Chinese logins.
WOW was fun for a few months but it eventually starts to feel like a time wasting, repetitive grind like all dungeon crawls. The instances are the cool thing about WOW but once you've done them all a few times they get old, like all weak AI driven NPC dungeon. PVP would be cool but unless you have balance on the server between the number of Horde and Alliance playing PVP, which almost never happens, it sucks. In this case the racial split sucks.
You know your government is out of control... when it institutes daylight savings time in the first place, and you know its really out of control when it starts randomly changing when the arbitrary change occurs.
Time and time zones are kind of a creation of governments, especially the British empire, which is why GMT is where it is. Time zones are OK things, especially versus the chaos that they imposed order on.
But daylight savings time is a complete abomination. If the time when kids go to school or you go to work doesn't jive well with the Sun, then change the time you go to school or work and don't F**K with time itself. Politicians who sieze control of time are just engaging in the ultimate power grab, ita a... we are so powerful we can change time and if you ants don't like it you can stick it kind of attitude.
These are tiny showcase projects they are publicizing widely to distract suckers like yourself from reality. Everyone who knows China knows, in the rush to industrialize and acquire wealth, that they turned the place in to a toxic waste dump. Taiwan pretty much the same.
This is yet another example of how gullible people are to marketing. "Look how environmentally conscious we are over in this little place, please don't pay attention to the fact you can slice the air with a knife in all our cities and all of our rivers are toxic waste dumps".
U.S. oil companies do the same thing all the time, running imasge ads about how pro environment they are when they fight the EPA and pollution controls tooth and nail. They fought double hulled tankers tooth and nail until after a bunch of massive oil spills forced the issue.
Coal companies and the Bush adminstration run nonstop ads about "Clean Coal technology", and that its the answer to our future energy needs. It is some cleaner than it used to be but its still the dirtiest power there is, they aren't cutting CO2 at all and they still spew trace amounts of lead and mercury that are very bad.
Actually you are wrong. Nearly every big Chinese company is partly state owned or owned by sham subsidiaries that are owned by powerful party members, relatives of powerful party members or the state. The communists haven't given up any real control of their economy. China's economy is still massively control by the elite in the Communist party. They are just creating a facade of a free market to sucker the west in to pouring capital and IP in to their country. Its working great, you obviously fell for it.... sucker.
CNOOC which is the source of the latest controversy this week becasuse they are trying to buy Unocal, is a blatant case of this. They have a front company there to make it look like its a private company but it ISN'T. Its basicly the Chinese government with deep pockets bidding against a private American oil company and China would win were it not for all the alarm bells going off in the U.S.
It came out in divorce court that Neal Bush, the President's brother, was raking in $400K from a Chinese electronics company, Grace Semiconductor for next to no work. Grace is backed by Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin. It had the appearance the Chinese were buying influence with the Bush family with a blackmail edge since they sent free prostitutes to his hotel when he was in China.
Lenovo the company that bought the IBM PC division had around 30% state ownership before the deal.
Haier's CEO, Zhang Ruimin, is a member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Haier is China's largest appliance maker and is bidding for Maytag.
Here is a good reference, see all the state and party ownership of their "free market" economy at the bottom.
Its also noteworthy how not a free market it is because it is impossible for an American or Europen company to just buy a Chinese company or open shop there. The government is mandating foreign companies partner with Chinese companies which is why IBM sold to Lenovo. In the process there is massive transfer of IP and market penetration from Western companies to Chinese companies.
The Chinese are totally suckering Western businessmen and politicians alike, "See our markets are free, come here and get rich" while they are really stealing them blind and most of the money is going in to the pockets of true blue errr... true red communists.
" Sometimes we need to be told/made to do things that we dont want to (Like polution and population control)"
Uh, China might have an advantage in population control now though they were way late in starting, but its my understanding China is a disaster on pollution control. Thanks to central planning and the desire to industrialize fast, they've massively overbuilt coal fired power plants and coal fired steel mills and put them next to pretty much every city. As they abandon sensible bicycles for cars in an effort to catch up to American's in wasting energy and pollution, I think some cities have air so bad its not just a long term health risk, it is an immediate health risk.
One reason they have so many mining disasters is they mine so much coal. They along with the U.S. are probably the two leaders at fueling CO2 buildup and global warming.
Problem with central planning is if the central planners make bad choices they can do a lot of damage fast. For example they have almost always opted for economic growth over environmental protection. Thanks to central planning they can grow their economy really fast and destory their environment really fast too. They can also insure no tree huggers get in their way, in contrast to the U.S. The fact enivornmentalist have clout in the U.S., though less then they did thanks to Republicans being in power, is one reason U.S. economic competitiveness is falling while our environment is improving some. Though environmental protection is just one of many, others being out of control health care costs, uncompetitively high wage rates, bad education, and workers lacking motivation.
The Saudi's had a conservative estimate of $700 billion invested worldwide in 2003 with about 60% in the U.S. and 30% in Europe. Wouldn't be suprised if the U.S. investment has gone down since the dollar has been a bad investment until recently.
Probably correct that it wouldn't create a calamity if Saudi money pulled out overnight though the stock market would take a serious beating. I think they are investing their oil wealth in a diversified way so they have something to fall back on when the oil runs out which it inevitably will so if their oil runs out they wont "collapse".
It is interesting to contemplate what would happen if the House of Saud and the Emir of Kuwait were toppled by Islamic fundementalists which is a much more realistic scenario. That would seriously roil oil and financial markets. Fact is they are both very corrupt family owned dictatorships, not well like by their subjects, and the lion's share of the oil wealth of their countries is going in to the pockets of family members not the population as a whole(though people are more affluent than most countries).
Always been an odd double standard for the Bush administration to preach "Freedom and Democracy" while they are close family friends with these two regimes who are the antithesis of "Free and Democractic", of course the fact they are rich and have lots of oil tends to color how the Bush family looks at things.
"This is why establishing a firm foothold in LEO (ISS) is pretty important."
You deserve a rant since you keep saying that somehow the ISS is important in going to the Moon or Mars. It simply isn't. Its not going to be used to assemble spacecraft in space, nor is it going to be used to refuel them. I REALLY doubt any mission to the Moon or Mars would ever waste the energy to rendevous with it.
Get over it the ISS was a waste of $100 billion dollars and you aren't going to be able to dream your way out of it. If all that time and money had gone in to affordable launch vehicles (and I would be way happy with just building updated Saturn V's) we would be on the Moon again already. Saturn V's were pricey in their day but versus the $1.3 billion total average cost of a Shuttle launch they are almost cheap.
"So you think dropping the nuke on Hiroshima was a good idea then?"
No, didn't say that, I just said the second was clearly questionable. The first bomb is just somewhat easier to defend than the second. Only thing about the first one is they should have probably picked military targets that weren't in the middle of cities. Cities smacked of revenge and terrorism.
I saw an interview with the daughter of Oppenheimer on Charlie Rose recently. She just wrote a book about that era. She claims most of the lead scientists, her dad in particular, were willing to except the necessity of Hiroshima but they were completely appalled when Nagasaki followed so quickly. For the scientists who were still fence sitters on the ethics of their weapon, the second one pushed many of them to be anti, Oppenheimer included. I imagine most of them felt it showed Truman was overly enamored with his new found power, and was showing it off at the expense of a hundred thousand dead, many women and children. In particular he probably sacrificed all those Japanese to send a message to Stalin more than Hirohito.
"Those were just facts -- I don't see any "back handing..."
"They never came close to staying within their designated airspace or on their planned flight path."
Well its a subject for debate but I don't think these are really the facts, you are bending facts to the point they are more mud slinging and back handing.
One of the last envelope expansion flights was of trajectory but that was only because the pilot was being conservative about a potential problem and delayed the burn.
The first flight in to space had a 22 mile departure from trajectory due to a pitch trim problem, which is no doubt the one you are fixated on, but they didn't violate any "air space" and they made it back to the runway with ease. Such is life in test flights, it was a big envelope expansion.
The first X prize had a roll departure, but it was in very thin air and Melville wasn't that concerned about it. They made their altitude goal and landed with no problem.
As best I remember the last X prize flight went great, its the one they broke the X-15 altitude record on and they landed with no problem. Probably the first flight that wasn't an envelope expansion and a test flight so you want it to go smoothly.
Considering most of their flights were envelope expansions and test flights except for the last two they did pretty good, especially considering the shoestring budget. Unlike the shuttle their missions are flown entirely by the pilot and not a computer. There are pros and cons to each, but the con to flight computers for Rutan was they would have cost a fortune to develop and would have blown the schedule. His design is so simple and robust it had no problem recovering from the pilot error induced problems. The pitch trim problem was dicey for a while. The feathered wing reentry was the ingenuity that made the fault tolerance possible. Both X-15 and Shuttle pilots need substantial automated help to not burn up on their hot reentries and they can't devitate much at all without catastrophe.
Weak attempt to rationalize Threeep. Classic American targeting, well there was a military target in there, pay no attention to the hundreds of thousands of women and children, homes and schools in the bomb sight.
I think I was proposing a military target that wasn't in the middle of a hundred thousand civilians, and if two military targets didn't work, do 3 or 4, they would have gotten the hint and American hands would be slightly less historicly bloody. As obsessed as Americans are over Pearl Harbor and Bataan, at least those were military targets.
"You are really engaging in some revisionist history with your viewpoint."
This statement makes absolutely no sense applying it to what I just said, though I guess you thought using the the term "revisionist" made you sound intelligent.
"Looking back at my post, I struggle to see where any "bashing" occurred..."
Uh lets see other than veering off in to a tangent questioning my sexual preference in a feeble attempt to wound and influence anyone stupid enough to be reading this thread, I cant think of a thing. Apparently this was the only avenue you had left since you apparently can't win a straight up arguement.
Rove and company do exactly the same thing. They blatantly exploit homophobia to win votes and then pretend like there "is nothing wrong with that".
You seem to be getting more and more pathetic with each new post I read. I'm torn, should I just start ignoring you because you are pathetic, or should I keep piling it on because you are such an easy and entertaining target. Your like shooting fish in a barrel.
Nice, instead of admitting how stupid your post was, just change the subject.
"I'm still waiting for you to point to a vehicle (not a dream) that does 1/2 of what the shuttle can do."
Thats easy Saturn V. It did ten times more than the Shuttle has. Thank you Richard Nixon and you assholes at NASA for scrapping it and turning the last one in to a rusting lawn ornament. If we had stuck with that stack and made incremental improvements we would be way ahead of where we are today. CEV is going to take years, and billions of dollars just to get back there and I'm not sure they will even come close.
In the future all my money is on Kliper and who knows what China might do now that they are raking in all of Americas money.
Maybe NASA, Boeing and Lockheed will pull a miracle out of CEV, but their culture is so disfunctional it would take a miracle. There are certainly good people there but the disfunctional organization is the thing that needs scrapped even more than the Shuttle and the ISS.
I'll grant you the Shuttle had some promise before Challenger. After Challenger and especially now after Columia the shuttle can't do ANYTHING except fly to the ISS and back. It has been completely crippled by safety constraints. Get it in to your head Threeep, stick a fork in it, the Shuttle is done.
I would say you are the one living on the dream, a dream of what the Shuttle might have been if it hadn't failed, a dream based on what was promised not wasn't delivered.
Stop shedding the crocodile tears, you back hand Rutan, SpaceShipOne and Scaled Composites in every post you mention them, right after you say how much you really like them, like you just did AGAIN.
Well that is a sick calculus, to debate whether it was better to kill women and children with burns or suffocation from a fire storm or slow death by radiation poisoning or burns from a nuke. Yes the ones that were close enough to be vaporized by the nuke could be considered lucky in the minds of a sick f**k like yourself. You are a poster child for how sick some Americans have become after 50 years of empire and militarism, kind of like the Japanese were in the first half of the 20th centurt.
The key point is the U.S. could have easily forced Japan into capitulation by nuking military targets, or at least stopping after Hiroshima. Nuking Nagasaki was purely blood thirsty "terrorism", it was designed to terrorize the Japanese and the Russians. Its history but its real hard for the U.S. to be all holier than though about "terrorist" killing civians when American hands are as bloody as just about anyone.
Bottomline not many of the women and children of Hiroshima had a chance to experience your better life after the Emporer, they are dead.
"Your post is in reference to the higher education system in America -- one that is universally known as the best in the world. If you were referring to the primary or secondary systems, I might give you some credit, but the University system in the US is sought out worldwide."
If you followed what I was saying which you obviously didn't....AGAIN, primary and secondary eduction in the U.S. sucks so U.S. universities are extremely dependent on a big influx of people educated in other countries, especially for graduate studies and professors. The visa hurdles, rising hostility to foreigners in the U.S. are drying up that inflow, it will take a while but it will eventually severly damage the U.S. economy and higher education. Of course election statistics show most well educated people can't stand the people who are know running the U.S. so most of the best and brightest in the world don't want anything to do with the U.S at this point whatever the Visa hurdles.
Of course most companies are moving their R&D centers to China and India to circumvent the problem anyway. I recently heard the number 700+ western companies have opened R&D centers in China in the last couple years. Saves the U.S. visa hassles, wage rates are low. good education all the way through at least for the best and brightest in those two countries. Oppressive government leads to obedient workers. Only down side is there is a vast transfer of IP, expertise and knowledge to China at the same time.
India and China actually value academics and academic performers versus the U.S. where we value jocks, soldiers, sales, marketing and cheerleaders. For Indians cricket is about the only sport they care about it.
"When was the last time we had a suicide bomber in the US?"
I think you missed the point again, it wasn't that Al Qaeda is exploiting that avenue, its that there is absolutely nothing stopping them. While the U.S. is massively hasseling affluent and well educated who want to come to the U.S. legally ANYBODY can get in to the U.S. illegally and thousands do everyday.
"Karl didn't "leak" this -- he was told it by Novak himself."
You have no clue who leaked what to whom so stop making definitive statements and acting like you know. At least I couched my post as hypothesis.
"I do find it amazing that there exists someone in the world (the parent poster) that without fail has the exact opposite opinion I have on pretty much every issue though! I wonder if demachina is gay?"
Pretty lame attack Threeep. I guess you've given up trying to make coherent arguements and are just delving in to the gutter at this point, you and Rove have a lot in common, he bashes gays too. But please try to be more creative than using an attack which is most often heard among 12 year olds on the playground.
"Human physiology -- while Mir cosmonauts hold the record for duration on Mir, they did very little for furthering human physiology studies. Not so on ISS.'
I'm sure there must be some examples what exactly have we discovered about physiology on the ISS or Shuttle that justifies the $100 billion price tag. If there was some discovery big enough to justify the price tag, I'm shocked I haven't heard about it. Was it, "its a good idea to exercise if in zero G"? I could have figured that out for a lot less money.
"Assembly of large components"
The question was what have the Shuttle and ISS done that was groundbreaking. They've assembled some things that weren't small, YAY! Next.
"Robotics"
I will grant you Canadarm 1 and 2 were groundbreaking but you have one problem touting them as a sign of NASA's success, they were designed and built in Canada.
"Orbital power systems -- see my previous post."
I don't think there is anything revolutionary here. All they did was scale up solar panels. Its an achievement, not a big one. Worst problem with all that power is most of its going to waste because the BIGGEST failure of the ISS is it only has 2 people on it, not the full crew compliment, and the 2 spend most of their time repairing it. ISS is a categorical failure until it has a full crew on it and I haven't heard anyone propose a near term fix for the emergency escape requirement. Not sure why they dont add a docking port and hang two soyuz on it. But of course the second problem, due to the unreliability of the Shuttle, NASA can't supply the two people that are there let alone a full crew, Russia is doing it at their expense.
" Why not support the team that's on the field?"
Because its not doing the job, and neither the shuttle or ISS is going to do ANYTHING to help you get out of LEO. In fact they are going to do the opposite, they are frustrating getting launch costs to LEO down and slowing CEV, going to the Moon or Mars. They are draining NASA's coffers as they have throughout their history so NASA can't afford to start a manned space program that works. If the current Shuttle army just switches over to Shuttle CEV is going to end up as expensive and screwed up as the Shuttle is. Its a completely disfunctional team.
For someone who keeps telling us how superior your knowledge and intellect is you sure aren't very bright.
The shuttles were grounded from Jan 28,1986 until Sept 28, 1988 after the Challenger explosion
5 = 2 1/2 after Columbia + 2 1/2 after Challenger
Of course the Challenger grounding is more like 2 3/4 years. Of course the Shuttles are still grounded now, and if NASA misses this window they are going to be headed for 2 3/4 years and counting again, so it could be 5 1/2 years.
"And the X-15 did what SS1 did a half a century ago!"
Thats a pretty petty way to dismiss a great accomplishment. Again the key thing SS1 accomplised was it succeeded at what it was designed to do, on a budget and and a schedule and that is something NASA is completely incapable of at this point.
The feathered wing is a very innovative approach that was a vast improvement over the X-15. X-15 reentry was very hot and very dangerous. The SS1 reentry is cool enough they can use composites instead of Titanium. It will be interesting to see if Rutan can use a derivative of the concept at the higher energy of reentry from orbit. Bottomline is SS1 adheres to KISS which is usually good engineering. Shuttle is antithesis of KISS which is why it never launches on schedule and has had to fatal accidents.
"Regarding the sensor problem, you really don't have a clue"
Actually you seem to be the one that missed the whole point...again. Wasn't argueing about the instrumentation methodology used to measure the liquids. I was pointing out that I heard in a NASA teleconference that they've had this same glitch in the past and they never got to the bottom of it. Sounds a lot like the O rings and the ice damages to tiles. If two of the fuel sensors failed after launch they would have risked another catastrophic failure. Problem with the Shuttle is it so glitch prone it can't launch on schedule and when it does you better cross your fingers....
"That's right -- the Shuttle provides unique capability."
I'm at a loss to know what it offers at this point. Its mission capability has been reduced to flying to the ISS and back. Yes it is necessary to finish the ISS but that is because the ISS was designed to be built using the Shuttle and of course no one can tell you what the ISS offers that justifies the price tag. I can't think of much the Shuttle has done that will win it any esteem in the anals of space history. Servicing the Hubble was the only one that comes close.
In this instance you are being stalked by your own off the wall posts. I could see how that would bug you, heh.
One of you more offense ones happens to be on topic here since its about Hiroshima and you seem to think nuking Hiroshima was a gift from the U.S. to the people who lived there.
"As soon as MS decides to show up to this party, Firefox will follow the likes of Mosaic."
Excepting you gloss over what really happened back then. Mosaic was never a widely used browser and Microsoft didn't crush it. It was only really used by the early adopter geeks who used the Internet and the WWW before anyone else had heard about it.
Netscape was the browser that Microsoft crushed. The way they crushed it was easy.
A. Netscape tried to pressure people in to paying them for their browser. When Microsoft came along IE was free. They were leveraging their monopoly income from Windows to fund its development and crush a competitor that didn't have a monoply to fund their browser development Netscape simply couldn't compete with free because they needed revenue from their browser.
B. Microsoft bundled IE with the OS while people had to download Netscape unless the company that built their computer preinstalled it. Give people the choice between bundled with the OS and a long download over a slow modem people took bundled. Also Microsoft made IE the default browser that launched from all their other apps and it was hard to impossible for most people to switch to Netscape. People being lazy they just gave up.
Firefox has one obvious advantage over Netscape, its already free so Microsoft can't undercut the price.
8% and climbing is pretty amazing considering Firefox still has the bundling disadvantage, its not on the computer when people buy it, they have to download it and install it, and for people still on modems, which is a lot of people, its still a pain to download. Its a tribute to how bad IE is by comparison that people are going out of their way to get Firefox at the rate they are.
One other interesting aspect of this contest, Netscape and IE are both closed source and Netscape didn't have the manpower and money to go head to head with Microsoft in closed source R&D. It will be interesting if open source developers and Firefox can compete against vast sums of monopoly money Microsoft can throw at something when it feels like it.
P.S.
Once again Threeep backs big and obnoxious over small and lovable. He is a huge fanboy for NASA and trashes Scale Composites every chance he gets too. He is also big on America can do no wrong and everyone else can do no right. He was an easy pick for my Foes list and probably should be on the foes list of everyone who prefers small and lovable geekdom over big business, big bureaucracy and American empire. Not sure why he posts on/. other than to troll.
Slashdot Mirror
"the shuttle usually doesn't deal with such missions, and leaves them to things like Atlas and Delta rockets."
Thats true today but NOT when it was designed and sold to everyone. It WAS supposed to launch satelites and did, several at a time, on its early missions. Expendable boosters were to be abandoned. The DOD was arm twisted in to signing on to use it for all its launches, at which point they also dramaticly expanded the requirements and substantially increased the problems the Shuttle would have in development and operation.
The Challenger disaster is the point everyone came to their senses and realized it was silly to use a very expensive manned vehicle to launch satellites and do a lot of other things expendables did perfectly well. At this point expendable programs were given new life and a $6 billion dollar Shuttle launch pad at Vandenburgh was abandoned having never been used.
"4) fragile to the point of being delicate"
You can rationalize about how tough tiles are and what a great accompishment they are but that doesn't change the fact is its insane having a space vehicle that you can't launch if there are clouds, let alone rain near the launch pad. Especially in Florida where it rains pretty much every day. Its just as bad that the tiles can't stand ice strikes AND they are right next to a tank full of cryogenic fluids. The Saturn V was sheathed in ice when it lifted off and it fell all over but there wasn't much of anything for it to hit, not so with the flawed shuttle design.
On the server my chars are on there is about a 4-1 imbalance between Alliance and Horde. On the rare occassions you can even get in BG with an alliance character the Horde is usually still outnumbered, they got ticked off about it and boycotted the BG's most of the time making them completely usuless. BG's made PVP worse on that server. Before BG's you could always go to Tarren Mill or Xroads and get some PVP action. The horde were usually outnumbered but the gaurds made up for it. Now about the only PVP you get playing an alliance char is if you are willing to sit in a BG queue ALL DAY which is only for people with NO LIFE.
BG's would work if they had civil wars BG's where alliance could fight alliance to correct for the massive racial imbalance on many servers.
I thought BG's would be great too, when they came out, played them twice in the first couple days and then they slowly turned impossible to get in on this server. They will only work if you have balanced numbers on both sides.
Personally I suspect the introduction of WoW in to China is the first, long overdue, step in a U.S. counterattack against the imminent Chinese domination of the global economy.
If we can get a few hundred million people in Chinese spending all day everyday addicted to grinds their economic productivity will crater and it will level the playing field with the West where everyone has been wasting all day everyday playing FPS's and dungeon crawls for a while now, which is a key, albeit relatively new, component in why Western economic productiviy and education is cratering. It was due to TV originally but TV is boring, and doesn't have the Pavlovian grip on people games do, so now everyone squanders their lives playing games to no productive end (unless you are eeking out a living farming and selling gold on Ebay).
Fortunately there isn't any racism in the actual game, you know like the alliance and horde constantly trying to kill each other and if PVP is off giving each other rude gestures, etc.
So why is racism OK in the fantasy setting and you are totally hyper about it in the fantasy setting when its applied to meatspace races. Try subsistiting Horde for Chinese and vice versa and tell me whats the difference.
The more interesting Chinese angle to me is what happens if you create a "Freedom and Democracy" guild and you spend all your time in chat talking about "Freedom and Democracty" in guild chat, and advocating the overthrow of communists governments. Are the Chinese monitoring it, or did Blizzard add "Freedom" and Democracy" to the in game censorship list for all Chinese logins.
WOW was fun for a few months but it eventually starts to feel like a time wasting, repetitive grind like all dungeon crawls. The instances are the cool thing about WOW but once you've done them all a few times they get old, like all weak AI driven NPC dungeon. PVP would be cool but unless you have balance on the server between the number of Horde and Alliance playing PVP, which almost never happens, it sucks. In this case the racial split sucks.
You know your government is out of control... when it institutes daylight savings time in the first place, and you know its really out of control when it starts randomly changing when the arbitrary change occurs.
... we are so powerful we can change time and if you ants don't like it you can stick it kind of attitude.
Time and time zones are kind of a creation of governments, especially the British empire, which is why GMT is where it is. Time zones are OK things, especially versus the chaos that they imposed order on.
But daylight savings time is a complete abomination. If the time when kids go to school or you go to work doesn't jive well with the Sun, then change the time you go to school or work and don't F**K with time itself. Politicians who sieze control of time are just engaging in the ultimate power grab, ita a
These are tiny showcase projects they are publicizing widely to distract suckers like yourself from reality. Everyone who knows China knows, in the rush to industrialize and acquire wealth, that they turned the place in to a toxic waste dump. Taiwan pretty much the same.
This is yet another example of how gullible people are to marketing. "Look how environmentally conscious we are over in this little place, please don't pay attention to the fact you can slice the air with a knife in all our cities and all of our rivers are toxic waste dumps".
U.S. oil companies do the same thing all the time, running imasge ads about how pro environment they are when they fight the EPA and pollution controls tooth and nail. They fought double hulled tankers tooth and nail until after a bunch of massive oil spills forced the issue.
Coal companies and the Bush adminstration run nonstop ads about "Clean Coal technology", and that its the answer to our future energy needs. It is some cleaner than it used to be but its still the dirtiest power there is, they aren't cutting CO2 at all and they still spew trace amounts of lead and mercury that are very bad.
Actually you are wrong. Nearly every big Chinese company is partly state owned or owned by sham subsidiaries that are owned by powerful party members, relatives of powerful party members or the state. The communists haven't given up any real control of their economy. China's economy is still massively control by the elite in the Communist party. They are just creating a facade of a free market to sucker the west in to pouring capital and IP in to their country. Its working great, you obviously fell for it .... sucker.
CNOOC which is the source of the latest controversy this week becasuse they are trying to buy Unocal, is a blatant case of this. They have a front company there to make it look like its a private company but it ISN'T. Its basicly the Chinese government with deep pockets bidding against a private American oil company and China would win were it not for all the alarm bells going off in the U.S.
It came out in divorce court that Neal Bush, the President's brother, was raking in $400K from a Chinese electronics company, Grace Semiconductor for next to no work. Grace is backed by Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin. It had the appearance the Chinese were buying influence with the Bush family with a blackmail edge since they sent free prostitutes to his hotel when he was in China.
Lenovo the company that bought the IBM PC division had around 30% state ownership before the deal.
Haier's CEO, Zhang Ruimin, is a member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Haier is China's largest appliance maker and is bidding for Maytag.
Here is a good reference, see all the state and party ownership of their "free market" economy at the bottom.
Its also noteworthy how not a free market it is because it is impossible for an American or Europen company to just buy a Chinese company or open shop there. The government is mandating foreign companies partner with Chinese companies which is why IBM sold to Lenovo. In the process there is massive transfer of IP and market penetration from Western companies to Chinese companies.
The Chinese are totally suckering Western businessmen and politicians alike, "See our markets are free, come here and get rich" while they are really stealing them blind and most of the money is going in to the pockets of true blue errr... true red communists.
" Sometimes we need to be told/made to do things that we dont want to (Like polution and population control)"
Uh, China might have an advantage in population control now though they were way late in starting, but its my understanding China is a disaster on pollution control. Thanks to central planning and the desire to industrialize fast, they've massively overbuilt coal fired power plants and coal fired steel mills and put them next to pretty much every city. As they abandon sensible bicycles for cars in an effort to catch up to American's in wasting energy and pollution, I think some cities have air so bad its not just a long term health risk, it is an immediate health risk.
One reason they have so many mining disasters is they mine so much coal. They along with the U.S. are probably the two leaders at fueling CO2 buildup and global warming.
Problem with central planning is if the central planners make bad choices they can do a lot of damage fast. For example they have almost always opted for economic growth over environmental protection. Thanks to central planning they can grow their economy really fast and destory their environment really fast too. They can also insure no tree huggers get in their way, in contrast to the U.S. The fact enivornmentalist have clout in the U.S., though less then they did thanks to Republicans being in power, is one reason U.S. economic competitiveness is falling while our environment is improving some. Though environmental protection is just one of many, others being out of control health care costs, uncompetitively high wage rates, bad education, and workers lacking motivation.
The Saudi's had a conservative estimate of $700 billion invested worldwide in 2003 with about 60% in the U.S. and 30% in Europe. Wouldn't be suprised if the U.S. investment has gone down since the dollar has been a bad investment until recently.
Probably correct that it wouldn't create a calamity if Saudi money pulled out overnight though the stock market would take a serious beating. I think they are investing their oil wealth in a diversified way so they have something to fall back on when the oil runs out which it inevitably will so if their oil runs out they wont "collapse".
It is interesting to contemplate what would happen if the House of Saud and the Emir of Kuwait were toppled by Islamic fundementalists which is a much more realistic scenario. That would seriously roil oil and financial markets. Fact is they are both very corrupt family owned dictatorships, not well like by their subjects, and the lion's share of the oil wealth of their countries is going in to the pockets of family members not the population as a whole(though people are more affluent than most countries).
Always been an odd double standard for the Bush administration to preach "Freedom and Democracy" while they are close family friends with these two regimes who are the antithesis of "Free and Democractic", of course the fact they are rich and have lots of oil tends to color how the Bush family looks at things.
"This is why establishing a firm foothold in LEO (ISS) is pretty important."
You deserve a rant since you keep saying that somehow the ISS is important in going to the Moon or Mars. It simply isn't. Its not going to be used to assemble spacecraft in space, nor is it going to be used to refuel them. I REALLY doubt any mission to the Moon or Mars would ever waste the energy to rendevous with it.
Get over it the ISS was a waste of $100 billion dollars and you aren't going to be able to dream your way out of it. If all that time and money had gone in to affordable launch vehicles (and I would be way happy with just building updated Saturn V's) we would be on the Moon again already. Saturn V's were pricey in their day but versus the $1.3 billion total average cost of a Shuttle launch they are almost cheap.
Whomever modded this as troll, you are on drugs and I hope you pay for it in meta-moderation. You can't be trused with mod points.
"So you think dropping the nuke on Hiroshima was a good idea then?"
No, didn't say that, I just said the second was clearly questionable. The first bomb is just somewhat easier to defend than the second. Only thing about the first one is they should have probably picked military targets that weren't in the middle of cities. Cities smacked of revenge and terrorism.
I saw an interview with the daughter of Oppenheimer on Charlie Rose recently. She just wrote a book about that era. She claims most of the lead scientists, her dad in particular, were willing to except the necessity of Hiroshima but they were completely appalled when Nagasaki followed so quickly. For the scientists who were still fence sitters on the ethics of their weapon, the second one pushed many of them to be anti, Oppenheimer included. I imagine most of them felt it showed Truman was overly enamored with his new found power, and was showing it off at the expense of a hundred thousand dead, many women and children. In particular he probably sacrificed all those Japanese to send a message to Stalin more than Hirohito.
"Those were just facts -- I don't see any "back handing..."
"They never came close to staying within their designated airspace or on their planned flight path."
Well its a subject for debate but I don't think these are really the facts, you are bending facts to the point they are more mud slinging and back handing.
One of the last envelope expansion flights was of trajectory but that was only because the pilot was being conservative about a potential problem and delayed the burn.
The first flight in to space had a 22 mile departure from trajectory due to a pitch trim problem, which is no doubt the one you are fixated on, but they didn't violate any "air space" and they made it back to the runway with ease. Such is life in test flights, it was a big envelope expansion.
The first X prize had a roll departure, but it was in very thin air and Melville wasn't that concerned about it. They made their altitude goal and landed with no problem.
As best I remember the last X prize flight went great, its the one they broke the X-15 altitude record on and they landed with no problem. Probably the first flight that wasn't an envelope expansion and a test flight so you want it to go smoothly.
Considering most of their flights were envelope expansions and test flights except for the last two they did pretty good, especially considering the shoestring budget. Unlike the shuttle their missions are flown entirely by the pilot and not a computer. There are pros and cons to each, but the con to flight computers for Rutan was they would have cost a fortune to develop and would have blown the schedule. His design is so simple and robust it had no problem recovering from the pilot error induced problems. The pitch trim problem was dicey for a while. The feathered wing reentry was the ingenuity that made the fault tolerance possible. Both X-15 and Shuttle pilots need substantial automated help to not burn up on their hot reentries and they can't devitate much at all without catastrophe.
Weak attempt to rationalize Threeep. Classic American targeting, well there was a military target in there, pay no attention to the hundreds of thousands of women and children, homes and schools in the bomb sight.
I think I was proposing a military target that wasn't in the middle of a hundred thousand civilians, and if two military targets didn't work, do 3 or 4, they would have gotten the hint and American hands would be slightly less historicly bloody. As obsessed as Americans are over Pearl Harbor and Bataan, at least those were military targets.
"You are really engaging in some revisionist history with your viewpoint."
This statement makes absolutely no sense applying it to what I just said, though I guess you thought using the the term "revisionist" made you sound intelligent.
"Looking back at my post, I struggle to see where any "bashing" occurred..."
Uh lets see other than veering off in to a tangent questioning my sexual preference in a feeble attempt to wound and influence anyone stupid enough to be reading this thread, I cant think of a thing. Apparently this was the only avenue you had left since you apparently can't win a straight up arguement.
Rove and company do exactly the same thing. They blatantly exploit homophobia to win votes and then pretend like there "is nothing wrong with that".
You seem to be getting more and more pathetic with each new post I read. I'm torn, should I just start ignoring you because you are pathetic, or should I keep piling it on because you are such an easy and entertaining target. Your like shooting fish in a barrel.
Nice, instead of admitting how stupid your post was, just change the subject.
"I'm still waiting for you to point to a vehicle (not a dream) that does 1/2 of what the shuttle can do."
Thats easy Saturn V. It did ten times more than the Shuttle has. Thank you Richard Nixon and you assholes at NASA for scrapping it and turning the last one in to a rusting lawn ornament. If we had stuck with that stack and made incremental improvements we would be way ahead of where we are today. CEV is going to take years, and billions of dollars just to get back there and I'm not sure they will even come close.
In the future all my money is on Kliper and who knows what China might do now that they are raking in all of Americas money.
Maybe NASA, Boeing and Lockheed will pull a miracle out of CEV, but their culture is so disfunctional it would take a miracle. There are certainly good people there but the disfunctional organization is the thing that needs scrapped even more than the Shuttle and the ISS.
I'll grant you the Shuttle had some promise before Challenger. After Challenger and especially now after Columia the shuttle can't do ANYTHING except fly to the ISS and back. It has been completely crippled by safety constraints. Get it in to your head Threeep, stick a fork in it, the Shuttle is done.
I would say you are the one living on the dream, a dream of what the Shuttle might have been if it hadn't failed, a dream based on what was promised not wasn't delivered.
Stop shedding the crocodile tears, you back hand Rutan, SpaceShipOne and Scaled Composites in every post you mention them, right after you say how much you really like them, like you just did AGAIN.
Well that is a sick calculus, to debate whether it was better to kill women and children with burns or suffocation from a fire storm or slow death by radiation poisoning or burns from a nuke. Yes the ones that were close enough to be vaporized by the nuke could be considered lucky in the minds of a sick f**k like yourself. You are a poster child for how sick some Americans have become after 50 years of empire and militarism, kind of like the Japanese were in the first half of the 20th centurt.
The key point is the U.S. could have easily forced Japan into capitulation by nuking military targets, or at least stopping after Hiroshima. Nuking Nagasaki was purely blood thirsty "terrorism", it was designed to terrorize the Japanese and the Russians. Its history but its real hard for the U.S. to be all holier than though about "terrorist" killing civians when American hands are as bloody as just about anyone.
Bottomline not many of the women and children of Hiroshima had a chance to experience your better life after the Emporer, they are dead.
You wouldn't be "stalking" me would you Threeep :)
"Your post is in reference to the higher education system in America -- one that is universally known as the best in the world. If you were referring to the primary or secondary systems, I might give you some credit, but the University system in the US is sought out worldwide."
If you followed what I was saying which you obviously didn't....AGAIN, primary and secondary eduction in the U.S. sucks so U.S. universities are extremely dependent on a big influx of people educated in other countries, especially for graduate studies and professors. The visa hurdles, rising hostility to foreigners in the U.S. are drying up that inflow, it will take a while but it will eventually severly damage the U.S. economy and higher education. Of course election statistics show most well educated people can't stand the people who are know running the U.S. so most of the best and brightest in the world don't want anything to do with the U.S at this point whatever the Visa hurdles.
Of course most companies are moving their R&D centers to China and India to circumvent the problem anyway. I recently heard the number 700+ western companies have opened R&D centers in China in the last couple years. Saves the U.S. visa hassles, wage rates are low. good education all the way through at least for the best and brightest in those two countries. Oppressive government leads to obedient workers. Only down side is there is a vast transfer of IP, expertise and knowledge to China at the same time.
India and China actually value academics and academic performers versus the U.S. where we value jocks, soldiers, sales, marketing and cheerleaders. For Indians cricket is about the only sport they care about it.
"When was the last time we had a suicide bomber in the US?"
I think you missed the point again, it wasn't that Al Qaeda is exploiting that avenue, its that there is absolutely nothing stopping them. While the U.S. is massively hasseling affluent and well educated who want to come to the U.S. legally ANYBODY can get in to the U.S. illegally and thousands do everyday.
"Karl didn't "leak" this -- he was told it by Novak himself."
You have no clue who leaked what to whom so stop making definitive statements and acting like you know. At least I couched my post as hypothesis.
"I do find it amazing that there exists someone in the world (the parent poster) that without fail has the exact opposite opinion I have on pretty much every issue though! I wonder if demachina is gay?"
Pretty lame attack Threeep. I guess you've given up trying to make coherent arguements and are just delving in to the gutter at this point, you and Rove have a lot in common, he bashes gays too. But please try to be more creative than using an attack which is most often heard among 12 year olds on the playground.
"Human physiology -- while Mir cosmonauts hold the record for duration on Mir, they did very little for furthering human physiology studies. Not so on ISS.'
I'm sure there must be some examples what exactly have we discovered about physiology on the ISS or Shuttle that justifies the $100 billion price tag. If there was some discovery big enough to justify the price tag, I'm shocked I haven't heard about it. Was it, "its a good idea to exercise if in zero G"? I could have figured that out for a lot less money.
"Assembly of large components"
The question was what have the Shuttle and ISS done that was groundbreaking. They've assembled some things that weren't small, YAY! Next.
"Robotics"
I will grant you Canadarm 1 and 2 were groundbreaking but you have one problem touting them as a sign of NASA's success, they were designed and built in Canada.
"Orbital power systems -- see my previous post."
I don't think there is anything revolutionary here. All they did was scale up solar panels. Its an achievement, not a big one. Worst problem with all that power is most of its going to waste because the BIGGEST failure of the ISS is it only has 2 people on it, not the full crew compliment, and the 2 spend most of their time repairing it. ISS is a categorical failure until it has a full crew on it and I haven't heard anyone propose a near term fix for the emergency escape requirement. Not sure why they dont add a docking port and hang two soyuz on it. But of course the second problem, due to the unreliability of the Shuttle, NASA can't supply the two people that are there let alone a full crew, Russia is doing it at their expense.
" Why not support the team that's on the field?"
Because its not doing the job, and neither the shuttle or ISS is going to do ANYTHING to help you get out of LEO. In fact they are going to do the opposite, they are frustrating getting launch costs to LEO down and slowing CEV, going to the Moon or Mars. They are draining NASA's coffers as they have throughout their history so NASA can't afford to start a manned space program that works. If the current Shuttle army just switches over to Shuttle CEV is going to end up as expensive and screwed up as the Shuttle is. Its a completely disfunctional team.
"How does 2 1/2 years become 5?"
For someone who keeps telling us how superior your knowledge and intellect is you sure aren't very bright.
The shuttles were grounded from Jan 28,1986 until Sept 28, 1988 after the Challenger explosion
5 = 2 1/2 after Columbia + 2 1/2 after Challenger
Of course the Challenger grounding is more like 2 3/4 years. Of course the Shuttles are still grounded now, and if NASA misses this window they are going to be headed for 2 3/4 years and counting again, so it could be 5 1/2 years.
"And the X-15 did what SS1 did a half a century ago!"
Thats a pretty petty way to dismiss a great accomplishment. Again the key thing SS1 accomplised was it succeeded at what it was designed to do, on a budget and and a schedule and that is something NASA is completely incapable of at this point.
The feathered wing is a very innovative approach that was a vast improvement over the X-15. X-15 reentry was very hot and very dangerous. The SS1 reentry is cool enough they can use composites instead of Titanium. It will be interesting to see if Rutan can use a derivative of the concept at the higher energy of reentry from orbit. Bottomline is SS1 adheres to KISS which is usually good engineering. Shuttle is antithesis of KISS which is why it never launches on schedule and has had to fatal accidents.
"Regarding the sensor problem, you really don't have a clue"
Actually you seem to be the one that missed the whole point...again. Wasn't argueing about the instrumentation methodology used to measure the liquids. I was pointing out that I heard in a NASA teleconference that they've had this same glitch in the past and they never got to the bottom of it. Sounds a lot like the O rings and the ice damages to tiles. If two of the fuel sensors failed after launch they would have risked another catastrophic failure. Problem with the Shuttle is it so glitch prone it can't launch on schedule and when it does you better cross your fingers....
"That's right -- the Shuttle provides unique capability."
I'm at a loss to know what it offers at this point. Its mission capability has been reduced to flying to the ISS and back. Yes it is necessary to finish the ISS but that is because the ISS was designed to be built using the Shuttle and of course no one can tell you what the ISS offers that justifies the price tag. I can't think of much the Shuttle has done that will win it any esteem in the anals of space history. Servicing the Hubble was the only one that comes close.
In this instance you are being stalked by your own off the wall posts. I could see how that would bug you, heh.
One of you more offense ones happens to be on topic here since its about Hiroshima and you seem to think nuking Hiroshima was a gift from the U.S. to the people who lived there.
"As soon as MS decides to show up to this party, Firefox will follow the likes of Mosaic."
/. other than to troll.
Excepting you gloss over what really happened back then. Mosaic was never a widely used browser and Microsoft didn't crush it. It was only really used by the early adopter geeks who used the Internet and the WWW before anyone else had heard about it.
Netscape was the browser that Microsoft crushed. The way they crushed it was easy.
A. Netscape tried to pressure people in to paying them for their browser. When Microsoft came along IE was free. They were leveraging their monopoly income from Windows to fund its development and crush a competitor that didn't have a monoply to fund their browser development Netscape simply couldn't compete with free because they needed revenue from their browser.
B. Microsoft bundled IE with the OS while people had to download Netscape unless the company that built their computer preinstalled it. Give people the choice between bundled with the OS and a long download over a slow modem people took bundled. Also Microsoft made IE the default browser that launched from all their other apps and it was hard to impossible for most people to switch to Netscape. People being lazy they just gave up.
Firefox has one obvious advantage over Netscape, its already free so Microsoft can't undercut the price.
8% and climbing is pretty amazing considering Firefox still has the bundling disadvantage, its not on the computer when people buy it, they have to download it and install it, and for people still on modems, which is a lot of people, its still a pain to download. Its a tribute to how bad IE is by comparison that people are going out of their way to get Firefox at the rate they are.
One other interesting aspect of this contest, Netscape and IE are both closed source and Netscape didn't have the manpower and money to go head to head with Microsoft in closed source R&D. It will be interesting if open source developers and Firefox can compete against vast sums of monopoly money Microsoft can throw at something when it feels like it.
P.S.
Once again Threeep backs big and obnoxious over small and lovable. He is a huge fanboy for NASA and trashes Scale Composites every chance he gets too. He is also big on America can do no wrong and everyone else can do no right. He was an easy pick for my Foes list and probably should be on the foes list of everyone who prefers small and lovable geekdom over big business, big bureaucracy and American empire. Not sure why he posts on