Stalins Organ

I'll warn the locals.....

Tasmania now?

As far as ammunition explosions go TBH it looks kind of lame - eg - Centurion hit by RBS 56 - T-72 - not teh size of the "jet" of fire out the commander's hatch - massively larger than the Libyan one

hobbyists are required to fly lower than 400 feet - which is below the minimum allowed altitude for a/c unless tehy ahve a legitimate reason for doing so (eg landing and taking off, medical evac, crop/fire/dispersant spraying, etc) so your basic GA pilot should never, ever, be less than 100ft seperated from a RC a/c.....yeah...right! Here is the FAA web page of news releases regarding unmanned aerial systems (UAS) - which is the technical term these days the FAQ page linked from there is probably the best palce to start

The changes are in airspace use - at the moment most airspace is restricted to manned aircraft. The rule changes will allow unmanned aircraft into some of it under some conditions. Drones are currently fee to operate, IIRC, up to 500 feet and some distance away from airports. Within those limitations you can do anything you like - "spy" on your neighbours - IIRC LA real estate agents have been using them for taking overhead photos of sections for example. The LA police are concerned about this because their helicopters also sometimes operate in this airspace. So the changes to rules are for safety reasons - to lay out how manned and unmanned a/c can operate in the same airspace.

Drones are legal now - the conspiracy nuts are quite ignorant about reality and are off on their own little fantasy

Australians??

Depends what you mean by civilised. You might consider Gauls/Celts/Britons civilised in a tribal, druidc and primitive way - they had some pretty awesome metalworking skills, inventing chain mail for example, and their chariot axles, gold working and cavalry were all better than Roman equivalents. their society was also relatively peaceful - or at least it was not egregiously expansionist as Rome was, nor as far as we know was it as riven with intenecine warfaer as classical Greece - possibly because the areas were relatively sparsely populated (not that they didn't have war of course) Contemporary with them are the Germans, who appear to have been considerably more primitive in a technological sense (the Romans took no technology from them, they rode barebacked and some used hardened sticks as spears) and given to warfare. Of course pretty much all we know about these 2 branches of ancient Europeans comes from the Romans - but at least they considered both to be barbarians so we may presume some equality of bias!

Which other guys are those??

Looking at he explosion - would you really expect an RPG to generate enough overpressure insude teh tank to eject het commander like that? I've no great experience in tank explosions - but this one looks like there was a big explosion INSIDE - something like ammo going up so as to cause a "jet" out the available aperture - ie his hatch. I guess an RPG may have hit poorly stowed ammo in the turret to do that? either that or it has been photoshoped in!

Windows 7 upgrades are going cheap now

And what would you be doing with your cell phone in the sme circumstance?? Have it in a front pocket set to vibrate??

Ah...fudge.... Ok - thanks for that - no wonder.....

Dual 2.8GHz CPU, XP, 4 Gb Ram, now a 512 Mb AGP vid card - 2k have all this info so I suspect they are probably in a better place to comment than y'all good folk on here

Still trying - new video card did not help, verifying did not help, nor did uninstalling & reinstalling - have had various suggestions from Steam & 2K - 2K have my dxdiag & MSconfig32 files atm & am waiting to hear back from them...

I think it may be a hardware problem - my old desktop meets teh physical requriemetns with a 256mb video card....but it is a much smaller number than the NVidia 8600 specified as "minimum" - 5200. So I've ordered up a 512 card with a much larger number than the ATI card required for "optimal" performance - fortunately brand new AGP cards are still available and cheap Should be here by tomorrow and perhaps I will owe Steam an apology!! We'll see......

I select it from the Steam menu, a little window pops up for a couple of seconds saying "Preparing to play X-com" then that little window goes away and nothing further happens - no messages, no errors, no game - I left it for 3 hours while I went & did something else once.....so it's not just a matter of waiting for it to launch!! i've asked on the Steam forum & Steam & 2k help - no useful answers yet

I would love to play it - so much that I have bought it - but I cannot get it to run It's my first steam game, and I have to say it's not looking like I'll be using the system willingly in the future...I wonder what their refund policy is like??!!

I have sen a photo like that in "Soviet Panzers (sic) in Action" - an old Squadron/Signals publication from 1973 I have somewhere - it is a thin soft cover that is all German photos of Soviet tanks from the early days of WW2 - I have always thought the hole was quite small, but I'll check it out at home tonight. The book is fascinating and a little revolting in places - eg IIRC 1 page has several photos of some T28's & towed artillery said to have been KO'ed by stka's - one T28's front-left MG turret is blown off, and the gunner's body is visible arched up out of the hole - blackened and sans his right arm!! He "features" in at least 2 or 3 of the photos.

Google translate is a bit rough....but you can get some idea of the content

And to think that 6 years ago all we could get was this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNJ8rIEPLOo

RUSI links go to the home page - do they require a subscription? And the ausa link goes to nowhere - "web page not found"

A "few thousand" in a "support role" are going to look like a juicy target for your basic terrorists.

And in the mean time christians world wide stormed islamic embassies to protest the burning and threatened pissing on of a x-ian bible. Or perhaps not.......

I didn't say that the west was planning to withdraw "everyone" - I said: for me at least, small combat groups are not "vast amounts of support" - perhaps you read that differently. Yes they operated in the 1990's as a fairly conventinal force - against other fairly conventional forces - alboth sides being what we would probably describe as being "irregular" - but they have not done that for 10 years now - I suspect they may have changed their tactics. AFAIK Pakistan and militant moslems from around the world still seem to be supporting the Taliban