Fox already does the copy your DVD thing here in the States, I’ve got a bunch of Blu-Ray discs from Fox and others that come with a second disc with a digital copy. Only problem is, you can copy it into WMV or MOV format, but the DRM on the WMV format won’t let you transfer it to a Zune! Gah!

i belong to minority who thinks global temp rise is due to natural planetary cycle and not increased carbon in athmosphere

Hey we have something else in common then 😀

If they both want into the EU, why not just disband NATO, as it has no point anymore, and let them into the EU? Then form an EU military arm to clean up its own backyard in case Kosovo or some other place blows up again, and everybody can move on. Stupid politicians. It’s called being solutions oriented, ask Woody Page!

I still don’t see why sovereign nations shouldn’t be allowed to join NATO if they choose to do so. I understand why it irritates Russia, but if the Ukraine and Georgia want to join NATO, what are they really going to do about it?

Funny, I thought that attrition took care of the USAF’s F-104 problem :diablo:

The point is that Russia had/has better missiles than that and it would have then, and now defeated NATO, not the down-graded Missiles Iraq had.

Conventionally? NATO probably would’ve been rolled. Were/are Russian SAMs better now than back then? Yes.

The U.S. Gov doesn’t beleive you:

That coalition is not part of the government. The government, DoD, and CIA never bought the SAMs as ABMs concept either (partially leading Lee to write his book on the whole issue), even though the evidence for such a system with the S-200 was pretty damn strong. You can throw out the missiledefence.com link too, the S-300V has not been exported and it is garrisoned at five locations (Strugi Krasnyye, Kaliningrad, Naro Fominsk, Birobidzhan, and Orenberg, not to mention Madgeburg in the DDR during the Cold War), not spread all around the country. That’s the S-300P. Read my S-300P article, the Russian-language sources at the bottom also cover the S-300V in varying degrees depending on their focus and it was always intended to be the tactical variant of the S-300 system. It was never intended for static basing, it wanted to follow T-80s around and swat down Pershing IIs, A-10s, Apaches, and anything else in their way.

Yeah but I heard a rumor that someone flew over Dalian in an airliner and the Varyag was absent.

Oh yeah. The back end of the second stage does look suspiciously like the front end of a Python 4.

First off, that piece doesn’t mention the number of tankers.

Secondly, all it says is “according to press reports” from the 70s and 80s. How does that prove anything, given the amount of accurate knowledge about Soviet aircraft during that time period (anybody remember the “Su-19”?). It even contradicts the defector’s “report” later in the article: “On 31 July 1991 the Soviet side declared as part of the START I negotiations that it would not give the Tu-22M airplane the capability of operating at intercontinental distances in any manner, including by in-flight refueling.” If the article is 100% correct, which it isn’t, then no IFR for BACKFIRE.

Thirdly, the article was last updated, if you’d seen the bottom of the page, in 2000. A lot of that info has been disproven. The Kh-55, we know, was never tested or intended for BACKFIRE. It was the result of a program to arm the Tu-160, beating out the badass Meteorit (also referred to as Missile of Total Awesomeness). A lot of information has been published about most of these projects and aircraft since the end of the Cold War, and it puts most of that speculation in its place.

Besides, the article also mentions Indian BACKFIREs being in service by now. Where are they based?