raja_indy14

i'd say the rampant american nationalism being shown in this thread is both mildly humorous and somewhat worrying; the attitude of 'america rules all' and complete disregard of the national interest of a country like russia is a bit disquieting - from my experience americans seem rather paranoid of countries like iraq, china, and russia for a country that is so strong militarily. after the fall of the soviet union the US has had almost two decades of unrivalled power, but now there are several emerging countries - china and russia expecially - which have goals very different and frequently opposed to those of the US; and increasingly are having the military power to back up their policies. of course the process is still ongoing, but the US is going to have to get used to a world where it can no longer act as a unilateral and unhindered superpower - fighting countries like china and russia is simply not something that can be allowed to happen. my impression of this incident is not that russia is threatening to invade poland if they allow the interceptor bases to be established, but that if poland carries through with the plan they are making themselves a target should there be a general conflict between russia and NATO/EU - a subtle, but crucial, difference. they aren't trying to prevent their installation through a military invasion, but reminding poland that by carrying out this action they will be targeted by the reduced but still significant russian armed forces. additionally, poland is opening itself up to an array of non-military attacks; russia seems to like cyber-warfare attacks, and its natural gas supplies to europe are crucial - what do you think would happen if the russians threatened to cut-off the supply to the EU in the middle of winter? russia has many more cards to play here than the military ones, and these are the hardest for the US and NATO to respond to. and as for the US coming to the aid of allies, i wonder where they were when their trusting ally georgia was invaded? where was the cry for war (i'll ignore the absolutely rediculous claim that the US would draft 50 million people to fight russia...)? now the country has de facto lost Abkhazia and S Ossetia, and the standing of the US in the eyes of all their allies within the russian sphere has gone down considerably. they would have been in quite a bind if georgia had been accepted into NATO earlier... also, people have claimed that russia stole all it's technologies from the US - which isn't even true - and yet have ignored that the US confiscated $100 billion worth in patents and intellectual property rights from germany after the war, not to mention the hundreds of scientists that were brought over and given protection...

hehe, hell will freeze over when the french let the EU use german as an official language in the major EU institutions

Here's a fun fact... In the U.S there was a vote when the country had just won independence to change the langauge from English to German.quote> actually, that's an urban legend. the US doesn't have an official language, and just uses english as a de facto one. and in fact it was just a petition petition to have some laws translated into german. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhlenberg_legend hmmm ? to a lesser degree? How so? 20+ million dead Russians and numerous gulag concentration camps, how is that lesser?quote> well, the second world war in europe killed 30-40 million people. and while the collective farm system killed millions - at least in part due to gross incompetence - the soviets never actually had factories for killing people oh yea the german language... the most-spoken language in europe with about 130million, and still not at all involved in the official european languages quote> actually, i'll think you'll find that there are twenty official EU languages, and that germany is among them. english makes sense, since it's the most widely understood language, while the locations of all the EU 'capitals' are in french-speaking areas. btw, i'm 1/4 german

Hamburg International? it's the only charter airline i can find that flies to Kirkenes and German destinations...

well, the airport is Kirkenes Airport, Høybuktmoen edit - the only airline i can come up with is SAS, but it's not direct...

hmm, ignore that post; i didn't realize it had gone to the ninth page. anyways, Norway uses all yellow markings and Japan uses them at some airports. since it's to show up better against snow, i'm surprised Canada doesn't use them... edit - btw, i've guessed 3 airports so far

for some reason it reminds me of somewhere in eastern europe...

Because as we all know, when someone is killing someone else right in front of you, you should just sit there and think "sucks for them!" at let them die. quote> because when someone has just been stabbed multiple times in the chest with a hunting knife and then had his head cut off, your first thought is to see if you can render assistance; in this case i think CPR would be a little difficult to perform and a bit redundant. personally, if i was sitting in a bus and all of a sudden some clearly deranged person beheaded a fellow passenger before my eyes and was armed with a quite vicious knife, i would try to get off that bus as quickly as possible. and as a canadian, i don't think there's anything wrong with us not all carrying guns around - people shouldn't have to prepare for the contingency of shooting crazy murderers in buses; and if it should happen the proper authorities should be called in to deal with it. besides, the passengers did use improvised weapons to trap him on the bus until the police could arrive...

wow, that's crazy; all the more shocking for happening in my own province!! admittedly, if the attacker was native it's hardly surprising... still, Portage is only 45min away from here, it's kind of embarassing actually.

Kiruna Airport, Sweden

#2 jalalabad airport

Narbonne, France

hmmm, my first thought is Medan-Polonia for some reason, but i don't think so...

Trondheim Airport, Værnes? only that was pretty hard, had to search for 737's with the code 'LN-B*' which revealed pictures of planes in Norway, and then a quick google maps search... edit - dammit! took a little bit too long!! sorry, bout that...

rio de janeiro - gale

@patricius maximus - taken out of context it may seem serious, but i thought that if the whole paragraph was read it would be quite apparent that i was being sarcastic when i wrote that - the world superpower getting taken by surprise in that manner is not a surprise to me at all... additionally, the collapse of at least the north tower likely took much longer than it would seem from most of the video images taken from a considerable distance - some time before the visible collapse began, NYPD helicopters circling the building could see visible signs of failure and even gave a warning in the minute prior to the collapse that the building was coming down (they'd also been giving warnings of 'impending collapse' for a considerable period of time before this). from their vantage point they could likely discern much more of what was going on around the compromised floors of the tower - the failure and buckling of floors and other structural elements. so the collapse was already well underway when the first 'explosions' started appearing...

oh, i'm sure i've watched most of the videos, i also know you shouldn't really believe a lot of things on the internet. that accompanies perhaps a lack of exposure to legitimate information regarding outrageous claims;quote>oh no, i've been exposed to at least the vast majority of the more 'legitimate' claims, i suppose i'm just negatively biased towards conspiracies or maybe i just have a basic level of common sense... a more outrageous claim perhaps would be that there was no inside conspiracy involved when the most powerful country in the world failed to put up one military aircraft in over an hour to combat a group of men reportedly wielding boxcutters who could barely fly cessnas ... quote>i must admit, the facts as they are do seem a little outrageous - the world superpower taken utterly by surprise?! how can that happen?! no, clearly the government was in league with the terrorists, and they used remote controlled airplanes, and relocated all the people who were on the airplanes and gave them new identities, and NORAD was told to stand down, and even though they flew remote-controlled planes into the buildings they thought they better make sure and rigged the whole thing with explosives - and all this complex operation was done secretly without anyone knowing because the CIA might just be the most impressive secret service organization the world has ever seen - or maybe it was the 'Impossible Missions Force'. now that isn't outrageous at all...

i have videos of the owner larry silverstein admitting in a televised interview that tower 7 was "pulled" (purposely imploded) after talking to the nyc fire chief,quote> in the videos i've seen, this statement is always taken out of context. he was asked whether they should remove the fire teams as the building was in danger of collapse, he responded that they should be "pulled" from the building to prevent further casualties - not that the building should be collapsed. Silverstein knew previously that the twin towers were going to be hit by 2 airplanes and prepared a plan to demolish his own building using the crash as an excuse?quote> he was clearly in league with bush/al-qaeda and hoped to collect on the extra insurance money he could get from another building falling down! as it is coming straight down into its own neat little footprintquote> why should a major office building topple over? the centre of gravity is such that the structure will normally fail - due to the tremendous stresses, especially after having been subjected to fire - and collapse straight downwards rather than topple sideways. when the south tower of the world trade centre collapsed the part of the tower above the impact site was beginning to lean; the tremendous forces this applied to the compromised structure led to comprehensive failure long before it had leaned far enough for it's centre of gravity to shift to the point where it would actually fall sideways...

which is the same time an object in free fall would take to reach the ground if dropped from the top of the building. quote> i was wondering where you got this, because similar claims were made of Towers 1 and 2, when i read somewhere that they in fact fell at about 40%-50% slower than freefall. personally, when people have brought up the 'fire wasn't hot enough to melt steel' argument i sometimes wonder at the stupidity of the human race - clearly buildings only collapse when the structural elements actually liquefy! the claim that they're extraordinary because they're the only towers to have collapsed from fire conveniently ignores the tremendous amount of impact trauma they collectively recieved *sigh* my father - who's an architect - has told me that in many instances wood can withstand fire far better than untreated/covered steel; it takes some time for fire to eat through a large mass of wood, so the structure remains sound (even if wooden walls etc are being rapidly eaten through) whereas a steel structure will weaken and deform leading to collapse relatively quickly. steel is not some kind of wunder-material, and can be very prone to sagging if heated. Top photo look about half-way down and do you see that puff coming from the tower where the texture looks different?quote> many people say that the 'explosions' of material out of the building from floors underneath the point of collapse are the characteristic 'squibs' that are the result of controlled demolition; however, when one considers the volume of air inside the building and the speed with which it must've been expelled - carrying with it all sorts of internal debris - i fail to see why they are apparently so anomalous. Remember, there's a big difference in scale between several fires started by falling flaming debris and going unbattledquote> not to mention that the south face of the building recieved a tremendous amount of trauma from the collapse of the north tower a mere 350ft away, the structure of the tower was also vulnerable because it was supported on a fairly small number of internal columns, some of which were severed as a result of debris impacts - the remaining structure was then further weakened by the fires which burned out of control for hours. part of the problem is that when one wants to believe in a conspiracy, you end up twisting the facts around to fit what you want to believe - ignoring or altering information that doesn't fit, and latching onto minor discrepancies...

i've also found that certain downloaded lots produce massive amounts of garbage. i had a bit of a garbage problem in one of my cities (pop 150 000), when i checked the data map the garbage was concentrated around a couple of lots, when i destroyed them the garbage situation returned to normal. i think they're typically industrial lots, but i might be mistaken.

go to data view and click 'zones', it will show your transit and public buildings, but all the RCI buildings will disappear so you can see what zones you have underneath. this is what i use when i need to see behind RCI buildings...

well, that was somewhat politicized, for instance cuba and venezuela were some of the first countries to offer assistance to the US, and they were rebuffed, and China offered $5 million in aid, plus emergency supplies. for political reasons China will almost certainly provide significant assistance to Burma, and has provided assistance to Pakistan as well as the Tsunami disaster as krbe says - it fits into their overall plans to assume the 'big brother' role to the third world. additionally, as far as i know, China has not asked for outside assistance, it has stated that it would accept any aid, and gave it's thanks. Thank god, allah, buddah, whoever you thank, that that dam did not collapse.quote> perhaps whoever engineered the dam? i'm sure it's designed to withstand large earthquakes (especially one so far away), they're hardly an uncommon occurance in China... I think I speak for a majority of the American people when I say I wouldn't want their troops on the ground anywhere on US soil for any reason.quote> that seems a little sinophobic, why on earth shouldn't such assistance from china be accepted?

i think the death toll is now estimated at over 10 000, although even numbers as high as 20 000 would be relatively low for china (where an earthquake claimed c 200 000 in the 70's). and this was a fairly remote, and relatively poor region of China, thankfully, so when 80% of structures have collapsed these may be largely simple dwellings and homes in rural areas; luckily it's also quite sparesely populated or the toll is sure to have been much higher. the numbers have, and will likely continue, to increase steadily as time goes on. as others have said, it is heartening that the response has been much better than Burma's, they must certainly feel a little beset at the moment, what with the pressure of the olympics, international demonstrations, tibetan riots, and civilian unrest over high inflation and shortages - the communist party is certainly not in an enviable position right now...

Where i live a bag of thai rice that used to cost $9 is now $15, that increase occured over a monthly or, at most, bi-monthly interval. @ MNU - I agree that allowing the market to fix itself would do a lot of good. However, governments are intensely involved in food production and fiddling around with prices and farmer subisides. Cheese in Canada costs three or four times as much as cheese in the US because of protectionism and dairy regulations. Even food aid, if kept up for too long or managed poorly, can be disastrous for third-world countries since it can depress food prices and make locally grown crops not only uncompetetive on the world market, but in the domestic market as well. Also, history has shown that purely market driven forces are susceptible to hysteria and crashes. Panic buying and hoarding of rice will only serve to artificially increase food prices further. I agree that the system should be flexible enough to meet dramatic changes in supply and demand, and to react accordingly, but i also think it's neccessary for governments and regulators to keep price fluctuations and absolute prices from swinging too dramatically.

No matter which licenses you got, it's common courtesy to know who you adresses, and make it possible for them to know that they are indeed being adressed.quote> Not in a bloody poem, things can be inferred and not necessarily stated explicitly. Suddenly human suffering is absolute?quote> I'm not the one who's been against relativism all this time. As for what you say about Canada, you're right, it's not nearly as bad as what China does. But you're missing the point; in 2010 when Canada is scrutinized in the same way that China is now there should be attention drawn to our record of genocide and the ongoing human rights abuses that exist within the country. People living in desperate poverty in absolutely primitive and appalling conditions in one of the wealthiest countries in the world is something that should be rectified, where racism directed at the native population is exceedingly common. Surely people will make a big stink about the Seal Hunt? We've been criticized for that often enough (likely more than our treatment of the native population, which is telling...). Should the Olympics have been politicized to such a degree, or is it only China that will be target in such a manner? I do not doubt that you're going to say "no" when the dark side wants to rent you and your friends to counter-demonstrations. quote> I'd join wholeheartedly! I detest rallies in general, so I'd gladly join a counter-demonstration!!