Kryten

How does that have anything to do with what I said, or even the topic of this thread? How is the situation in Iraq remotely relevant to the situation in HL2?

Why do you think they'd have enough time to send it real military units in the time it took betwen the insurgency starting and the attack on the citadel? And they were perfectly capable of defending the citadel. Even a shooter game protagonist (i.e. effectively some kind of demigod) had to let himself be captured to get in

Good question. Why don't you guard banks with tanks? They're police, there's nobody around for them to fight other than a few people with cobbled-together SMGs running around forests, and of course there's absolutely no indication that the Combine have stopped needing the forces to invade more planets. You might as well ask why the germans didn't use their entire army to crush the french resistance/AK/soviet partisans...

Almost everything faced in the game either is derived from human tech or simply is human, and of the others (the dropship and strider) one's just a light transport (which is able to take multiple anti-tank missile hits), and the other's simply programmed in game to not actually hit the player, lowering the perceived threat quite a bit. We do see a couple of clearly-combine units within the citadel that look like some kind of armoured ground combat... things, but they never appear at any point afterwards and aren't seen actually doing anything other than moving on a conveyor belt.

There's only 10 engines in that picture, five of them small ones for control only. Number of nozzles≠number of engines.

Aren't the combine on earth basically just police? They explicitly say they wouldn't have a chance against the actual combine military-after successfully defeating the forces on earth.

How exactly do you intend to 'remove one of Xenon's electrons'?

It doesn't take up space though. The 'radius' of a black hole is simply the distance where the gravitational attraction reaches the point of no return.

It depends on which two engines. Two on the same side could potentially cause mission failure for Falcon 9, and I'm not sure it's different for heavy. It'd certainly cause severe issues if it happened on the centre core.

So what's your opinion on planets discovered using light-curves of the stars they're orbiting?

Surely if you cannot directly see that something, then the only thing it actually could be is a black hole? What you actually observe fits the predicted properties perfectly.

They're talking about one bank of sensors out of the whole system; my guess is there were too many agreeing for it to ignore the information, and too many working in other systems for it to just go immediately. Looking at the videos, I think it was the increasing rate of roll that ultimately overwhelmed the rest of the system.

Is that supposed to be a joke? They'd still be flying Falcon 1s if NASA hadn't handed them enormous amounts of money in both COTS and CRS, and would probably be flat broke by now. There's a reason they cancelled it; even with their planned enhancements the market at that size is minimal.

That 'pocket spacecraft' one actually does involve you 'buying' your own spacecraft: the cost is so low because each one is an extremely thin film disk with all the components printed on.

Yup, not large enough for anything useful. Certainly not big enough for the average-sized GSO comsats which make up the vast majority of missions that actually get launched.

Note the 'lift-off switch'-0.4 seconds before nominal, exactly what happened on this flight. And of course nothing failed-that's my point.

I'm not too sure the timing failure is that significant; as shown here a previous mission lifted off early by a similar amount, and had an entirely nominal flight.

http://www.interfax.com/newsinf.asp?pg=2&id=429110 ...

I'd say we can safely assume Kaspersky is not some kind of Russian plot. Because the FSB aren't stupid enough to assume an expensive program that does a service available at equivalent quality for free is going to get anywhere...

Well, Soyuz seat is now ~$30 million. India's new Mars probe is cheapest I've seen, ~$75 million for the probe, launcher brings it up to $100 million. Obviously you could do a smaller probe, but I don't think there's a lot of downsizing you can really do without not having a big enough engine to get there or big enough antennae to return useful information at that distance.

Not too sure how feasible the idea of an 'interplanetary cubesat' is. Wouldn't they be far too small to carry the equipment needed to communicate at those kinds of distances?

What you should do is show him this thread, where there'll probably soon be at least half a dozen people confirming there's no way that's not a virus.

Kaspersky is a rip-off, simple as.

Microsoft security essentials. And be careful with that Norton, those kind of effectively-advert-for-itself antiviruses are extremely hard to uninstall completely, and having multiple antivirii active can result in various issues.

It's not a 'scam' as such, it's a virus. Either of you could have contracted one just by clicking on that link, never mind the installation it wants you to do...