I love Quake 3. Smooth, fast gameplay with bounce and launch pads. After this game released I just couldn't bring myself to play Counter Strike any more. Q3 is just so satisfying.

There was no such thing as a "Palestinian" before 1948. They are ragtag Arabs used as pawns by Middle East tyrants to antagonize Israel. The Arab nations will not allow these "Palstinians" to simply immigrate to their countries.

The most frightening thing to "Palestinians" would be the granting of statehood; they would then have to produce things and coexist with other nations, including Israel. But were that ever to happen, the "Palestinians" would simply use the new land as another launch pad for missiles.

For peace to work, both sides have to want it. When everyone wants Israel "wiped off the map" including the useful idiots in the West, there cannot be peace.

He was right to stress the fact that he really does not deserve it. The award seems like it's been given based on his aspirations rather than his accomplishments. If anything, he'd be most practically served by it by using it as a launching pad to lay out his plans on Israel/Palestine which he has been hesitant to do and to more definitively call for an end to settlement building in the West Bank. Then again with the Copenhagen summit on climate change looming and health care, it's unclear whether he'd be able to feasible accomplish anything with it.

That was the best speech Neville Chamberlain has given yet!

Muslim radicals are working for a better world, a world with no Jews, Israel or United States.

If so given, "Palestinians", a people that didn't exist before 1948, will turn their new State into a missile launch pad aimed at Israel.

>> ^demon_ix:
>> ^ridesallyridenc:
The power source for such a laser would probably be too heavy.

There are ways around that, and battery technologies are improving all the time.
Even the microwave-beaming satellite they mention near the end can be used, beaming energy at solar panels mounted on top of the craft.



Eventually, yes. Currently, no.

Every pound you add to a spacecraft increases the amount of power needed to accelerate it. Trying to integrate an onboard power system for this would greatly increase the cost and greatly decrease the acceptable cargo weight.

It certainly won't be impossible with future tech, but the concept here is that the power source doesn't have to be onboard. Why spend extra money building power systems for multiple ships when you can build one launch pad to service less expensive ships? It wouldn't work for every application, but it would work very well for something like the space elevator or a common-use launch facility.

By Aslan's (wasn't that the lion in "Narnia"?) logic the USA declaring war against Germany in WW2 "validated" Nazism, by saying we were "good" and the Nazis "evil". In other words: "Let me mix up some philosophy-quoting refrigerator magnets so I don't have to get a real job".

I would respect these moral relativists more if they were sincere. For example, they see Americans and/or Westerners as no greater than jihadist throat-cutters, who are no doubt merely expressing their unique belief system with honor killings and homicide bombings.

The only people who find no room at the table with relativists are individualists favoring free markets, free speech and limited government.

The first thing Palestinians will do if given their own state is turn it into one giant launch pad for rockets aimed at Israel.

Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us. --Golda Meir

The problem I see with using 3D interfaces is simply that the screen is 2D. I suspect it won't be a totally 3D interface, but an animated interface that uses limited 3D effects to make the connections between objects more obvious.

I've found that when something is "more powerful," ie. what most computer types want, it becomes much more difficult to understand for someone who isn't. Many old-timers still use a command-line interface because in many instances it is faster and more powerful. Maybe the future will come in marrying these things.

I get frustrated using a Mac because it makes doing some things more tedious, but you trade this ease of use. I hate the menu bar that's always on the top of the screen, for instance, but that makes it a lot easier to explain to someone how to do something. I hate the launch-pad because it uses an unnecessarily large amount of screen space, but that too is easier to understand for someone new to computers. Ditto with that flippy album view. (I'm not trying to turn this into a Mac vs. Windows things, just an illustration of their various approaches).

Anyways... I dunno where I'm going with this, but I wonder what things will be like in the future. Soon there aren't going to be a lot of people who have to learn how to use a computer from scratch and to necessarily have easy-to-use but slower interfaces.

How sad! It's obvious that Hamas has no regard for human life or dignity, using these peoples houses and neighborhoods as weapon-launching pads.

They are so fortunate that the IDF holds to a higher standard of humanity, and gives them warning to evacuate before the buildings are to be destroyed.

They are right to fear massing in the schools. Hamas continues to violate the neutrality of those areas also (in spite of the tragic bombing)
http://www.videosift.com/video/School-Hamas-is-STILL-using-Schools-to-launch-rocket-attacks

One would think that at last they would rise against the murderous gang which claims to fight on their behalf. With Hamas gone there would be no barrier to peace in Gaza. Blockades and checkpoints and shortages would be memories.

Israel GAVE the primitives Gaza and the West Bank; instead of creating anything, they used the real estate as a launch pad to attack Israel.

If the primitives are given their own country they'll use it as a launch pad to attack Israel.

Israel owes the primitives nothing and has every right to defend itself.

>> ^bcglorf:
It isn't a surprise of course that Hamas militants are using schools to launch attacks from. The bastards WANT Israel to fire back on that position. Condemn Hamas in the strongest terms for it, but IMHO that doesn't take Israel off the hook either. Israel still shouldn't be blowing up schools, Hamas' "forcing" of the issue just makes them BOTH guilty. I'll even accept Hamas is 'more' guilty, but when we are talking about blowing up a school I don't think being 'less' guilty is really much of a commendation.


Here is the problem. If this was a Hamas launching pad, then why didn't they destroy the SCHOOL at night or when children were not in it? And if they bombed it to take out Hamas rocket launchers, then why were there no Hamas bodies found in the aftermath?

No Hamas body were found among the 43 children and local residents killed at the UN school compound in Jabaliya.

So keep telling yourself these awful creep were using children to hide behind, but even Israel has stopped calling for any investigation. They have declared case closed and that no one should investigate. There isn't anything odd about the 43 bodies and not one of them is Hamas????

>> ^spoco2:
You do all know that aeroplanes are designed to easily take lightning strikes? Because of their metal bodies, the lighting just runs around the outside on its way to ground.
By way of further explanation:

A handful of jets have been blown up by lightning, including a Pan American flight in 1963 that killed 83 people. But scientists have since figured out how to mostly harness Nature's fury. In the early 1980s, NASA (whose shuttle launch pad was struck by lightning the other day) flew a jet into a thunderstorm at 38,000 feet. It was hit 72 times in 45 minutes, and much was learned. Commerical planes are still hit about once a year, by some estimates. A strike typically starts at a wingtip, nose or tail and courses through the skin, which is often made of aluminum—a good conductor. The plane's lights might flicker, but most of the energy just heads back into the sky if there are no gaps in the skin. Modern jets often employ advanced composite materials, which are not so conductive, so metal has to be added to the composites to carry the lightning.

You do all know that aeroplanes are designed to easily take lightning strikes? Because of their metal bodies, the lighting just runs around the outside on its way to ground.

By way of further explanation:

A handful of jets have been blown up by lightning, including a Pan American flight in 1963 that killed 83 people. But scientists have since figured out how to mostly harness Nature's fury. In the early 1980s, NASA (whose shuttle launch pad was struck by lightning the other day) flew a jet into a thunderstorm at 38,000 feet. It was hit 72 times in 45 minutes, and much was learned. Commerical planes are still hit about once a year, by some estimates. A strike typically starts at a wingtip, nose or tail and courses through the skin, which is often made of aluminum—a good conductor. The plane's lights might flicker, but most of the energy just heads back into the sky if there are no gaps in the skin. Modern jets often employ advanced composite materials, which are not so conductive, so metal has to be added to the composites to carry the lightning.

They are only small nuclear bombs, so I doubt the viewing distance is hundreds of miles. Many people looked at the nuclear tests of history from much closer ranges. Goggles are probably advised. The launch pad would also be made from metal to greatly reduce nuclear fallout and special nuclear bombs would reduce fallout even more. Most nuclear fallout comes from the irradiated earth that spews out from a nuclear blast.
This project is one of the only feasible current options of reaching other stars. It can reach 0.1c meaning a trip of slightly more than 40 years to our nearest star.

The best John Pilger documentary I've seen, detailing the legacy of imperial power held by the UK government (and Royalty, to some degree). It documents the horrifying use of England's empiric past to 'acquire' an island ideal to the US government in order to further it's international bombing range. From the Google Video post comment:

STEALING A NATION (2004) is an extraordinary film about the plight of people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean - secretly and brutally expelled from their homeland by British governments in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to make way for an American military base. The base, on the main island of Diego Garcia, was a launch pad for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Stealing a Nation has won both the Royal Television Society's top award as Britain's best documentary in 2004-5, and a 'Chris Award' at the Columbus International Film and Video Festival.

A brochure of the film is available at www.bullfrogfilms.com/guides/stealguide.pdf.

looks to me like it fell through the launchpad.


update: http://www.spaceflightnow.com/sealaunch/nss8/

SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: January 30, 2007

A commercial Sea Launch Zenit 3SL rocket disintegrated in a fiery catastrophe aboard its oceangoing platform Tuesday, destroying a sophisticated telecommunications satellite payload in a dramatic launch pad explosion reminiscent of the space program's early days.