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Toxn

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Everything posted by Toxn

  1. Toxn
    'Addresses' is putting it a bit strongly. 'Regurgitates the standard arguments and then simply claims that they are correct' maybe.
  2. Toxn
    If the technology needed to be developed anyway, and has now been developed, why would it be an issue to simply transfer it to a new airframe? In any case, my argument (see the same thread cited above) is for limiting an existing project (F-35) in favour of expanding/accelerating another existing project (LRSB), so your argument doesn't apply here. As I said; I can disagree both with you and with the folks arguing for keeping the A10, F16 et al around for the foreseeable future.
  3. Toxn
    I keep having to say this, but I can disagree with both statements 1 and 2. The Malal line wasn't entirely random, in other words.
  4. Toxn
    Just to explain my point, I'm going to cross-post a quote from Colli: Note second and third paragraphs. Again, the arguments here are more along the lines of 'no better options' and 'could be worse' rather than anything superlative. Which, as I said, is how military procurement tends to work. But, again, not exactly something that's going to convince many folk that all is well with the bird.
  5. Toxn
    I'm not denying that the reportage on this thing has been dumb. But the central issues that the reporters have raised; that the project tried to shove all the eggs in the same basket and essentially got too big to kill; is perfectly valid. It doesn't matter at this point whether the F-35 works as advertised, or that it was flawed in its very conception (imo, of course). Because the US and partners are getting it anyway and there are no better options on the table. You can be thankful that it isn't bad, I guess. But it certainly isn't perfect, and it has sucked up all the other options which might have lead to something better. In the end, this is just how military procurement works. It tends to be very large, very political and very inefficient in terms of resource use. But I hold that we should treat it as a sad fact of life, not a feature of the program or a reason to defend it.
  6. Toxn
    The irony is that, by potentially introducing a habitat-destroying invasive species into a new environment, this may be the most destructive round ever conceived: http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2016/02/08/flower-shell-turns-12-gauge-shotgun-gardening-implement/
  7. Toxn
    Since I've basically turned into Malal now, I feel the need to be contrarian regarding your F-35 contrarianism. To whit: doesn't it bother you a bit that so many of the arguments for the program boil down to 'this is what was chosen, no going back now'. Or 'all the money is spent, no better options are possible'. The fix being in doesn't say too much about the merits, after all.
  8. Toxn
    That man is very much a beneficiary of the high standards used in metal castings and formings. If he ever gets a dud piece of pipe he's going to lose a hand.
  9. Toxn
    This doesn't quite fit then topic ("today I realised"? "today I will learn" ?) but anyway. Today I realised that we are going to see our first verifiable case of gene doping within the next few years (I'd put money on 5-10). Expect a promising athlete to develop a mystery medical condition and have to train in an isolated facility for a while (including a sterile living/training room) before returning to the sport with a noticeable increase in performance. The trick here will be to use a gene drive in combination with aggressively knocking down the immune system. Post-treatment, the drive will work it's way throughout the body and edit pretty much the whole cellular population, while the immune system will be prevented from killing the patient via targeting of transformed cells or initiating an anaphylactic response to the drive components. Once the patient is fully edited, a second drive may be used to erase the drive machinery itself. Alternatively, the drive might be cleverly engineered to self-excise when given a particular stimulus. Your athlete now has a totally edited genome providing greater muscle mass, oxygen carrying capacity, or whatever else you can stuff into an adult human. The edit, meanwhile, would be completely invisible unless you had access to prior genetic material from the athlete or the design of the drive was sloppy enough to leave behind a recognisable insert site.
  10. Toxn
    There were no survivors.
  11. Toxn
    Viewing imgur on a phone, on the other hand, is awful.
  12. Toxn
    Because I apparently share Tied's urge to get banned: http://m.9gag.com/gag/aX9ggrg
  13. Toxn
    The wisdom of the masses: http://m.9gag.com/gag/a3BRDd3
  14. Toxn
    Reviewer analyses Coen brothers movie as retelling of the new testament through the lens of the Hollywood film industry.
  15. Toxn
    "We're sorry that your womenfolk totally volunteered to prostitute themselves for our brave lads"
  16. Toxn
    You simply cannot make this stuff up: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2016/02/the_coen_brothers_hail_caesar_reviewed.html I swear that Slate's movie review wankers are having some sort of competition to see when their editor blinks. The editor is winning.
  17. Toxn
    Were I a Murkan, I'd vote in favour of cancelling F-35 for LRSB. F-22 is dead (nobody wants to restart production), the rest are old (although still plenty good by any metric). Or make a stretched F-35 variant and leave the C model for the marines to wank over.* Long range stealth boat with large internal capacity seems to be where things are headed for the moment. Well, that and drones. * Also, I'd cancel the marines and give the army their name for brand recognition purposes. I promise that nobody would even notice.
  18. Toxn
    I hate arcade with a passion for some reason (yet loved WoWP, go figure), so I get to see all of the RB bullshit. It got fixed pretty quickly at least, so things went back to normal: being BnZ'ed by Laggs, Yaks, 109s and 190s.
  19. Toxn
    Played some WT last night. All the matches were made that much more interesting by the fact that Gaijin had screwed the thermodynamics model. So about a third of the players were getting off the runway, trying to climb and then blowing their engines up. As someone fond of turnfights, it was very fun to see all the remaining aircraft akwardly tooling around at under 2000 metres.
  20. Toxn
    This Victor fellow sounds like a real piece of work. Probably a commie to boot.
  21. Toxn
    The depressing thing is that I now have family in Japan. I guess I have to hope that the country doesn't repeat the mistakes of the 20th for a few decades at least.
  22. Toxn
    Stay classy, Japan.
  23. Toxn
    It's like a proto-tachikoma. Which is to say, a few spider-legs away from being adorable...
  24. Toxn
    Looking back on it, I think we can all agree that 'time to get Randy' just wasn't the right campaign slogan for this election.
  25. Toxn
    This being the same EU where the rule got ignored the whole damn time?
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