Yeah, except, haven't other people's choices been shot down in the past? I ask earnestly, not rhetorically, as I can't remember if this has actually happened or not. I mean, if someone has been denied a channel before but this one goes through, it seems a little insulting, right? I should mention that I've had several beers, so I apologise if I'm not making any sense
>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Picking your own channel is one of the perks for being a long time, involved member of the site. This is a personal choice that the community should have no say in.

I voted 'Don't care,' because even though it will be a VERY small channel, it ain't hurting anything. But I do think other members who had their channel requests shot down for whatever reason should have their ideas seriously re-evaluated. It's only fair, IMHO.

That physical rigidity is the result of being shot down in a war zone, having his arms broken and the abuse he suffered for years in a POW camp.
I'm all for trouncing McCain and exposing the idiocy and hypocrisy of his politics, but making jokes referring to his physical ailments is pretty shitty imo.>> ^criticalthud:

McCain's thinking has become as rigid as his physicality would suggest

what is not clear about what I said ? If you are not in the area of attack then you are at absolutely no risk. I read some jack ass stuff up their by people who didnt accept this basic fact of what I am feeling. I hope this feeling of disgust is absorbed into your brains to clarify my position. guns arrow whatever, they can still shoot back at you. use a predator and it gets shot down, wow 250 thousand or whatever dollars are gone. shoot down a plane and you loose millions as well as the pilots life ( possibly.. which is the point ! )

Least ridiculous is clearly "pictures of dogfights above London, the Battle of Britain" because that footage EXISTS! See this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0-fVLCnsBs

These newsreels contain footage of German formations from the ground (1:00) as well as in air footage from the fighters as a German bomber is shot down (6:15).

Ok, to be pedantic, I don't know if it's above London, and it's not great quality. But gun cameras were widespread in World War 2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_camera

So it's not at all a ridiculous request.

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>> ^ryanbennitt:
So the mosquito loses its wings, big deal, now we've gotta watch our feet for the little critters and they won't even make a buzzing whining sound as they approach.


+ they'll be really fucking pissed at whoever burned their shit...

They get what they deserve. It does seem like the sort of thing a person who both doesn't understand tact (or their significant other) would do. I'm surprised people pulling these public proposals don't get shot down more often.

I know that one of those failures was caused by a pen that fell out of a crew chief's pocket and was sucked into the intake, completely fouling the engine. Foreign Object Debris(FOD) is a problem for all aircraft but I've seen lots of crap scraped out of an F-18 and some of it was probably a pen at one point. Most aircraft just chew that stuff up and you don't notice it until it's time for maintenance. This actually grounded the plane.

Also, I should point out that the F22 isn't really a "nimble dogfighter" in the traditional sense. If you're flying circles around other planes in one of these then you have failed as an F22 pilot. While it is in theory a decent dogfighter it's intended that it never be in a dogfight, having shot down the enemy aircraft long before establishing visual contact and ideally without them ever knowing where the missile came from.

*wings. and I think she said 30 hours of maintenance for each hour in flight(?) ^schmawy: b-2 and other stealth aircraft also had problems with radar absorbing surfaces... nobody really knows how the f117 over serbia was shot down, the serbs claim it was a modified sa-3 goa missile with the help of czech made tamara radar system which used some kind of ir recognition system... who knows. maybe it was a planning error - serbs had a spy in nato hq at the time and supposedly knew the routes and other operational details of us bomber missions over serbia

There is a rumor that the F117 shot down in Serbia was a result of the radar operators detecting the plane's path through the rain. I wonder if this is the "vulnerability to rain" she mentions.

^ Well, Lockheed is arguing that regardless of the per-airframe-cost, it will still be worth it because of the avoided logistics and overheads of instead dealing with 3 or 4 different UAV models. Not sure if that's true. This thing looks very expensive.

I think, in general, UAVs should be cheap and flexible, and this does not look cheap at all. I would think that cutting edge performance and stealth is not actually that relevant for UAVs -- if one of them gets shot down then there's no loss of life, minimum loss of money, and the enemy has revealed himself.

If you're near London, I suggest you hit the Imperial War Museum. They used to have the rudder of a Bf 110 on display the last time I was there (maybe 2004), don't know if they still do. It's not just any Bf 110 though, it's the plane of Major Heinz-Wolfgang Schnaufer with all the kills marked on it: 164 night sorties, at least 114 four-engined bombers destroyed (Halifax, Wellington, Stirling, Lancaster). On 02/21/45, between 20:44 and 21:03, he shot down 7 Lancasters.

Just to illustrate that at night, even the cumbersome Bf 110, He 219 and Ju 88 could slice through bomber squads like cheese. It's a good thing that neither Messerschmitt nor Focke-Wulff nor Henschel could build a proper two-engined fighter like the Mossie or P38 or else the losses would have been even more horrible than they were already.

>> ^bmacs27:
Ok... I'm a graduate student advised by a member of the national academy of sciences. You don't need to talk to me about belief without evidence. You assumed my belief.
What you may or may not understand about science is the concept of a prior probability. Any confirmation of a hypothesis involves first the assignment of a prior probability to that hypothesis. That's simply Bayes rule. That is, some hypotheses are more tenable than others prior to the collection of data. All I'm saying is that I'm more open to a "conspiracy theory" of the sort that involves a small number of actors, or willful inaction on the part of someone like Dick Cheney. Such a hypothesis is much more likely, and more deserving of testing, than hypotheses about magic shows that somehow duped thousands of witnesses. Ignoring that fact is as much a religion as persistent belief in detonation squads. Do I need to remind you of how the gulf of Tonkin incident dragged us into a quagmire in Vietnam?
Dick Cheney absolutely had the say as to whether or not that plane gets shot down, as he was the highest ranking official in Washington. He was in the presidential emergency operations bunker at the time. He could have made the call, and didn't. Frankly, because of him, our enemies world wide know that they can hit the epicenter of our military operations. No amount of water boarding or genital electrocution is going to reinstate the security compromised by that one fact.


If you really believe this nonsense, I can't have a real conversation with you. You really believe that Dick Cheney, knowing in advance (either on the day or having been part of the grand conspiracy) that Flight 77 was going to hit the Pentagon, sat back and did nothing, in order to further his political ends? How would you go about proving a hypothesis like that? Or is this just something you will believe no matter what because it is essentially unprovable?

Ok... I'm a graduate student advised by a member of the national academy of sciences. You don't need to talk to me about belief without evidence. You assumed my belief.

What you may or may not understand about science is the concept of a prior probability. Any confirmation of a hypothesis involves first the assignment of a prior probability to that hypothesis. That's simply Bayes rule. That is, some hypotheses are more tenable than others prior to the collection of data. All I'm saying is that I'm more open to a "conspiracy theory" of the sort that involves a small number of actors, or willful inaction on the part of someone like Dick Cheney. Such a hypothesis is much more likely, and more deserving of testing, than hypotheses about magic shows that somehow duped thousands of witnesses. Ignoring that fact is as much a religion as persistent belief in detonation squads. Do I need to remind you of how the gulf of Tonkin incident dragged us into a quagmire in Vietnam?

Dick Cheney absolutely had the say as to whether or not that plane gets shot down, as he was the highest ranking official in Washington. He was in the presidential emergency operations bunker at the time. He could have made the call, and didn't. Frankly, because of him, our enemies world wide know that they can hit the epicenter of our military operations. No amount of water boarding or genital electrocution is going to reinstate the security compromised by that one fact.