dieseltaylor

Tero - the influence of media violence has been covered here before with links to the studies etc. It seems you must have missed that one*. The bottom line was that there is an increase in violence due to media. An American child saw something like 10000 murders by their teens. The implication I suppose is that murdering people solves problems. Violence in the media now as opposed to 30 years ago is much more prevalent - not only TV but with computer games. Problem solving by violence - yep compared to programs problem solving by negotiation, compromise, walking away - much easier. The media might find that too complicated. * Tero Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2000 Posts: 1,924 By dieseltaylor Quote: In any event I am all for sex but media violence is proven to have behavioural effects on those who watch it. And I don't mean good effects. http://www.media-awareness.ca/englis...a_violence.cfm Interesting read. What I was left missing in the studies is the effects of increase in the single parent families and how having the mother (lets face it, women get the custody most of the time) take care of growing boys. It was the Fallujah thread where all the speechifying was. This book below is the one where the vast majority of the 3500 studies were examined "A cognitive psychology of mass communication By Richard Jackson Harris Is the book I linked to. There are many interesting excerpts/pages to read in the book but the one that is perhaps most valid is that the studies tend to come out with a 10-15% figure attributable to the media for violence. Obviously not as important as poverty etc etc but significant in being a controllable factor."

Tero - the influence of media violence has been covered here before with links to the studies etc. It seems you must have missed that one. The bottom line was that there is an increase in violence due to media. An American child saw something like 10000 murders by their teens. The implication I suppose is that murdering people solves problems. Violence in the media now as opposed to 30 years ago is much more prevalent - not only TV but with computer games. Problem solving by violence - yep compared to programs problem solving by negotiation, compromise, walking away - much easier. The media might find that too complicated.

Page 131 Two 2pdr's fire over 300 rounds apiece at ranges of 600-1000 yards in an hour and claim to kill 24 tanks - only counting burnt ones.` Page 409 1st Armoured Brigade destroyed with 24 shermans out of 27 destroyed attacking 88's over 2000 yards [number not specified but unlikely to be as many as the tanks] Page 393 9th April 1943. Four emplaced 6lbers take on thirteen tanks and get a two all draw and the Germans retreat.

In this case both!

: ) I am only discussing on a limited front to preserve the superiority in material and nous. Wikipedia

JC That has to be the most irrelevant fact to bring up to a discussion on battles lasting half an hout to an hour I can concieve. However it is a challenge and actually I think I can top it by pointing out that all the submarine nets set up in harbours around the world during the whole war accounted for a bare handful of captures. It is fair to say however if we cut the time span to mere minutes to a specific harbour then the efficacy rating is 100%. However I would hate to extrapolate from a few incidents to a general theory. And perhaps ditto for the reverse. On something RL - page 245 of "The Battery Commnader, his batman, and a cook" The German force was a column headed by forty tanks. So perhaps something in the correct time frame and scale of CM that shows ATG's were easily capable of taking a couple of tanks each without a problem. In a ten page extraxt from the same book starting on page 205 you can read how during a day, and for the loss of 15 ATG's out of 19 seventy German armoured vehicles and sundry softies are knocked out... However for more specifics at one stage a battery of four ATG's took on 40 tanks at 200 metres and took out twelve of them in 2 minutes. So your talk JC of cheaters appears even more stupid in the light of actual reported incidents together with people's experiments that shows ATG's are generally emasculated in CM. There are plenty of other incidents in the book - published by Battlefront - well worth a read for small actions in the CM scale.

Renaults and turbo's - I suddenly remembered that Renault had a really clever design that ruined turbo's and they denied it was their design fault. Go back three -four years and there was a lot of angry punters: http://ww.honestjohn.co.uk/forum/post/index.htm?f=4&t=52610

Having other programs running in the background can also be a killer, particularly ones that like to butt in. Ideally having just CM running [and PBEMHelper] and blocking your internet is a clean way to do it.

For those who want to go ape**** in Tebourba Engagement the designer decided to drop reinforcements on at 20 vehicles a time! SO all around the same desert road with a mix of tanks, troops, TRUCKS with green drivers!!! etc. Ordering green truck drivers when they are off-road takes forever - well 2 or 3 minutes. And of course getting "there fustest with the mostest" gets a little bit irritatating. I still think practicing with a few vehicles will repay big dividends in future games. Knowing how tanks slow in light wood is valuable, also the effects of the daft tall hedges in CMAK!!

Wiki is interesting about grits: I doubt you can buy grits in the UK without finding a very specialist shop. Its good to see they remain popular in the States - well at least some of them. Porridge would be assumed to be oats in the UK. I think I will go and have some now : ) The 5.30 am breakfast was two slices of toats which is not really enough.!

Hohoho - what timing

If you don't move your lips its nearer a minute : )

Possibly a biased view ......... http://www.thedailycrux.com/content/3247/Government_Stupidity

Detroit is terribly corrupt in government - I read the Detroit Free Press about once a week on average and it is very sad to see a city collapsing so badly. http://michiganmessenger.com/28476/race-dynamic-seen-as-obstacle-in-detroit-urban-farming Dig the writers name : )

I have had three diesels one after the other over the last 30 years and was very pleased with all of them. One of the neat ricks is that 4 up my 205 was still capable of pretty swift progress as the torque really is up to the job of moving weight. My last, a 405 Turbo estate, I had for 13 years and that also had plenty of poke and never needed a new turbo or serious work. Very practical and economical cars. I have a sports car now, petrol driven and very fast, but acceleration from the lights hardly makes up for lugging capacity and durability.

Your wife is called Joachim!!! 8-o

Are you plotting at level 6 to check movement paths are OK. ? Are you accounting for the qualities of the crews reaction times? Have you got the icons on proper size as having enlarged so you can see them will make your plotting more imprecise and iffy. Do you account for slowing for sharp turns with increased spacing? Do you plot multiple way-points on bends so they do not drop speed? After all that it is still a complete nightmare anyway but at least you will have done your best : ) If you are keen you might play with a couple of halftracks and see what difference being very exact makes in distance/time to see if it is really worth the effort in your time. The movement is flawed - most particulalrly in there is no follow my leader order, or, please drive along the road.!!!! What were BF thinking of?

Okay, I concede the point. Are we going to see a revised signature? : )

Porridge is the best answer. A tiny bit of salt and a few raisins thrown in to give the sensation of sweetness. Obviously some milk for the calcium ..... yummy, very cheap, and requiring the body to do serious digestion rather than the pre-processed cereals. http://www.goldenspurtle.com/ for recipes etc. The current World Champion is an American also http://www.scottishrecipes.co.uk/porridge-recipes.htm

Given the huge amount of solar energy hitting the earth daily I would hope that for countries with plenty of sun they would convert this to electricity for homes and cars. For northern countries nuclear, wind and tidal. Biomass is probably OK and gasification of waste also is a win win. Hydrogen is probably best for long range -- but then a Tesla has just done 230? miles on one charge. Of course high tech expensive batteries might be the preserve of the wealthy and most people get around nicely on a vehicle with a lower range and cheaper cost.

Interesting stuff Vark though 30 to to 4 does seem a little unfair. Perhaps a platoon to 1 or 2 would be a more realistic - however I appreciate that was not the point of the test. Would it be easy for you to repeat with trenches? And possibly foxholes? I believe sandbags are totally useless also. : )

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/dear-detroit/article1343879/ 1. SEIZE THE ELECTRIC CAR Ford Motor Co. has taken a hard line against bringing alternative energy vehicles such as plug-in electrics to market—until recently, that is. Although Ford marketed the Ranger electric vehicle in the 1990s to conform with California alternative-energy regulations, and later launched the Escape Hybrid SUV, the company maintained it wouldn’t develop new vehicles until a proven demand existed. “If customers aren’t buying them, we’re not making them,” proclaimed Ford’s senior manager of energy storage, Ted Miller, to a reporter in 2008. But soon, gas prices spiked, customer demand for electric options grew, and Ford watched as General Motors won attention for its Chevy Volt, due out in 2010. Now Ford was too far behind to catch up: Thanks to the Gogolian bureaucracy that ensnarls North American vehicle manufacturers, a typical product development cycle is four to five years. Fortunately for Ford, Magna founder Frank Stronach and his design staff came to the rescue. Stronach had discussed the market potential of electric vehicles with his executive VP of new product creation, Ted Robertson, in January, 2008. Six months later, with help from Magna’s R&D budget for things electric, Robertson shipped a working EV prototype to the company’s Ontario headquarters. “Great,” Stronach said, staring at what appeared to be a typical Ford Focus. “What is it?” “It’s your electric car,” Robertson said. Robertson’s team had placed an electric drivetrain in a Ford Focus for no other reason than it was convenient—the engine compartment and trunk size had the right dimensions. But the test drives went so well (for this writer’s review, see below) that Stronach suggested approaching the automaker for an unconventional partnership. “I want you to go show this to Ford,” said the auto parts magnate. “Tell them we want to get into the electric car business. Are they interested?” Magna’s timing was good: Robertson approached Ford just as it was reconsidering plug-in electrics. Forced into the unusual position of playing catch-up, Ford’s engineering staff realized a Magna-engineered Focus would enable them to get an all-electric vehicle on the market soon after the Volt’s debut. The company introduced its BEV (battery electric vehicle) model at the 2009 Detroit Auto Show—barely a year after Stronach first mentioned the idea to Robertson. “The Ford-Magna deal would never have been done 10 years ago,” says Ron Cogan, editor and publisher of Green Car Journal. “Granted, it was a case of exceptional timing and initiative on Magna’s part. Serendipity exists—but then again, in any other time, Ford wouldn’t have been so open to Magna’s approach. It’s a unique time in the auto industry.” The bankruptcies of Chrysler and GM, and the difficult climate over all, have made the Detroit Three more open to new ideas than ever before, Cogan says. He compares the Ford-Magna arrangement to Daimler AG’s purchase of a 10% stake in electric pioneer Tesla Motors, announced in May for a reported double-digit million-euro sum. That deal, too, was an example of an established auto manufacturer acknowledging that superior expertise existed outside its own walls. 2. BE OPEN SOURCE In Detroit, the development of a new vehicle has traditionally been a secretive, top-down process. An executive issues a directive to a corps of designers and engineers, who huddle in high-security facilities as they develop the thousands of elements that constitute a prototype, which is only unveiled to the public once it’s been exhaustively test-driven and refined. Jay Rogers wants to demolish that model. Through his company, Local Motors, of Wareham, Massachusetts, the former U.S. marine captain and Harvard Business School grad is attempting to apply open-source business theory to carmaking. The open-source philosophy gained mainstream prominence in the 1990s with such free software programs as the Linux computer operating system and the Mozilla project, which grew into Firefox—now the second-most popular Web browser after Internet Explorer. Writing code for the programs, like any open-source task, was the work of a community of volunteers who collaborated transparently, with the help of online message boards. The approach has since been applied to disciplines as varied as encyclopedia-writing (Wikipedia) and clothing design (the Chicago-based company Threadless). “Local Motors is a quantum leap past these iterations,” says Karim Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who specializes in studying open-source communities; he’s also a member of the Local Motors strategic advisory board. “No one has ever used the open-source model in a sector where the barrier to entry is so high.” Here’s how it works: Local Motors stages contests that challenge volunteers to design facets of a specific vehicle (prizes range from a few hundred dollars to $10,000). A network of auto design students and moonlighting engineers post their ideas to the company website, where they’re judged and voted on. The best and most popular elements are incorporated into the design. There is a “green” element to all this, but it’s not immediately evident from the company’s debut vehicle, a burly off-road racer called the Rally Fighter. First conceptualized by Sangho Kim, who now works for Subaru in Japan, the model gets much better fuel mileage than comparable vehicles. (The Local Motors pipeline includes some explicitly green models like the electric Boston Bullet.) Since the design work in the Local Motors model focuses on aesthetics and the particular needs of the model at hand, most parts are sourced from conventional suppliers—the Rally Fighter’s engine, for example, is a diesel-powered 3.0 litre BMW 335d with the sort of specs that activate the salivary glands of adrenalin addicts: 265 horsepower on a suspension system with 18 inches of vertical tire movement. The prototype is slated for its first tests in November. Rogers says the company caters to the same customization trend that made hits of the Mini and Toyota Scion. “When you drive down the road in a Ford Taurus, people’s heads don’t turn,” says Rogers. “Great design turns heads. We’re trying to create head turners.” On one level, Local Motors hearkens back to the glory days of Fifties hot rods and grease monkeys, when significantly more drivers knew their carburetor from their alternator. Only 3,000 Local Motors Rally Fighters will be built, with the majority of manufacturing slated to begin next June at a micro-factory in Phoenix. Another innovation? About 60 hours worth of the final assembly will be conducted by the vehicle’s owner, operating under the guidance of factory staff. Will the company ever appeal to a wider audience than car hobbyists? Rogers hopes so, drawing comparisons between his company and the way Michael Dell popularized extreme customization of personal computers. On another level, it doesn’t matter. The open-source nature of Rogers’s product development cycle means his break-even point is only 200 vehicles per model. His ultimate goal is to persuade better-established automakers to open up their R&D cycles, which he thinks is bound to create more efficient vehicles in a more sustainable way. “I’m not in this to be a gazillionaire,” says Rogers. “I do want to make a profit. But more importantly, I want to change the world.” 3. TAKE THE HASSLE OUT OF BUYING What if shopping for a car were easy? What if you could go to a single storefront and test drive a half-dozen subcompacts made by different manufacturers? And what if you didn’t have to negotiate with Larry, the commission-hungry salesman? What if the listed price was the amount you paid, end of story? That last part isn’t a new idea: Back in 1985, it was one of the founding principles of Saturn LLC, established as a pseudo-independent arm of General Motors to combat incursions into North America by Japanese and German automakers. Saturn dealerships were supposed to be on the side of the buyer. They didn’t try to upsell; they didn’t bargain. The unusual strategy helped to create a fanatically devoted community of Saturn owners. Problem was, GM didn’t do enough to provide those Saturn owners with new vehicles to buy. So, with Saturn poised to evaporate in the wake of the great industry shakeout of 2009, billionaire Roger Penske, the former race car driver and turnaround specialist, went after the Detroit brand. His plan? Quit manufacturing, period—offload it. Instead, use the Saturn dealership network to sell cars built by a variety of manufacturers, including brands from China and India. Call it the auto version of cosmetics retailer Sephora. The idea made a certain amount of sense. Anyone who has ever bought a car knows it’s a painfully slow process, requiring visits to a half-dozen or so different dealerships, where each salesperson attempts to engage the customer in time-wasting negotiations. Penske’s idea was an audacious move in the right direction. Perhaps too audacious—the deal collapsed in late September, days before closing, after Penske failed to find anyone to build Saturn vehicles for him. Still, there is at least one other sign that Detroit is changing the way it sells cars. In August, GM mounted a pilot project to sell its cars through eBay. With 225 of California’s 250 GM dealers participating, the automaker allowed prospective customers to bid on new vehicles at such mini-sites as gm.ebay.com and chevy.ebay.com. Although the websites attracted 960,000 searches during the first week, sales were lukewarm: Only 45 cars sold over the first nine days. It turned out that consumers were using the sites to educate themselves, then heading into a dealership for a test drive. So, the conventional dealership isn’t dead yet—much to the relief of North American automakers. “If Walmart existed in 1900, then maybe we’d all be buying our cars at a big-box store,” says auto consultant Dennis DesRosiers. “But they didn’t, and the manufacturers invested in these dealership networks, and now they’re forced to protect them.” Anti-trust laws and dealer-manufacturer agreements also make it difficult for manufacturers to experiment with new retail outlets, which inevitably compete with existing dealerships. For the time being at least, we’re pretty much stuck with Larry. 4. DON'T GIVE UP ON GAS The internal combustion engine gets a lot of flak from the new, “green” Detroit. Critics want to bolster its fuel efficiency by coupling it with an electric engine, à la hybrid vehicles like the Toyota Prius. Or they want to scrap it altogether and rely on all-electric vehicles. But what if gas is getting a bad rap? Some automotive engineers believe the problem isn’t gas engines—it’s that Detroit executives didn’t prioritize R&D that could have produced ultra-efficient gas-driven vehicles. Take a company like suburban Detroit’s EcoMotors, which has audaciously announced a goal of developing a vehicle that gets 160 kilometres per litre—by 2011, no less. The model they’re using makes the idea seem even more implausible: Its technology dates back to the 1930s. The design employs an opposed piston/opposed cylinder engine, a concept that was pioneered by the German aircraft manufacturer Junkers & Co. during the Nazi regime. Conventional auto engines have vertical cylinders in which pistons push down on a crankshaft to create the rotations that power the car; the force is directed downward, and the design wastes a lot of energy on friction because the pistons travel relatively long distances. EcoMotors’ technology has horizontal cylinders with pistons on either end of the cylinder—two pistons per cylinder, with a single crankshaft between the cylinders. As a result, the pistons don’t have to travel nearly so far; more power goes to the crankshaft; and there’s a lot less friction. The opposed piston/opposed cylinder engine hasn’t taken the world by storm previously because earlier designs used twin crankshafts, creating engines that were fussy and prone to break down. EcoMotors’ founder Peter Hofbauer’s decision to use only a single crankshaft makes the motor simpler and more reliable. What does all that mean for non-gearheads? First, there are fewer of the nasty emissions that have earned diesel its bad reputation. Plus, EcoMotors’ engine is 30% lighter and provides 50% better mileage than comparable conventional engines. EcoMotors’ 2.5-litre engine will weigh 135 kilograms less than the 6.5-litre powerhouse used by truck manufacturers today—while providing the same amount of power. And with only a few small design tweaks, the engine can run on regular gasoline as well as alternatives like ethanol; it can also act as the gas power source in hybrid cars. EcoMotors’ engine grew out of a fact some electric vehicle aficionados like to forget: Power density is a measure of the horsepower generated by a fuel source. Comparing similar weights of contemporary lithium-ion batteries (the standard in electric cars) to plain old gasoline, gas still generates more horsepower—by a factor of 100. “Batteries have made significant progress, but liquid fuel remains the medium we think most important,” says Don Runkle, EcoMotors’ CEO. He should know. As the former head of GM’s advanced engineering division, he was the executive who oversaw GM’s late, lamented EV-1. Who’s paying for all this R&D? The design grew out of a research project conducted for the U.S. military by Hofbauer, who’s best known as the engineer who pioneered the diesel engine designs used today by Volkswagen. Once Hofbauer developed the prototype, Vinod Khosla, the Sun Microsystems co-founder turned hard-headed eco-investor, put up the venture capital; exactly how much capital, Runkle won’t say. Khosla’s no dreamer. His unblinkered take on green technologies has caused him to slam hybrid vehicles as overly expensive; he’s looking for ultra-fuel efficiency that can play in China and India. Cheap, fuel-efficient and powerful—maybe these whiz kids can manage the tricky combo that’s so far eluded the rest of Detroit. 5. MAKE IT EASIER TO CHARGE IT Electric cars can be unnerving. Forget to charge the battery and there’s a chance your morning commute could end at the side of the road. But what if you could stop into a station on your way to work and switch your near-dead battery for a charged one? And what if you could do it in less time than it takes to fill a conventional car’s gas tank? That’s the proposition being marketed by the California-based company Better Place. Here’s how it works: In addition to a more extensive grid of plug-in “charge spots,” battery swap stations are scattered around cities the way gas stations are today. Drivers roll their rides into a garage bay, where automated machinery exchanges a weak battery for a fully charged one and, voila, your vehicle has another 160 kilometres of juice. Under the Better Place model, the company owns, stores and maintains the batteries. Drivers purchase one of a variety of pay-as-you-go plans—a 500-km bundle, for instance. Company spokesman Joe Paluska argues that the switchable battery model makes financial sense for consumers. Exclude the cost of a $15,000 lithium-ion battery, and the typical electric vehicle costs about the same as a diesel-powered one. And if governments subsidize electric vehicles, as they’ve indicated they will—the Ontario government, for example, has announced subsidies for buyers ranging from $4,000 to $10,000—then it’s possible that EVs with Better Place plans could have lower upfront purchase costs than their conventional counterparts. Skeptics like Paul Scott, a vice-president at the educational non-profit organization Plug In America, call the model an attempt to apply gas-based thinking to the electric world. Scott points out that auto manufacturers would need to standardize their battery layout to accommodate the Better Place switching mechanism—something he doesn’t think is likely to happen. “If you know the auto industry, that’s just a non-starter. They can’t agree on anything,” he says. Drivers may also find the arrangement inconvenient, particularly since chargers that can restore a battery in less than an hour are expected to be available soon. Scott asks, “Why would you bother going to a charge station when you can just charge your vehicle at home?” Still, the Better Place model is gaining momentum. The company has partnered with the Renault-Nissan alliance; Renault’s 2011 Fluence ZE electric vehicle will be sold in Denmark and Israel with a Better Place charging plan; and Better Place swap stations and charge spots are slated to begin operating next year in both countries. Closer to home, the company has teamed with Bullfrog Power, which will provide the electricity for charge spots in Ontario. As part of the planning process for the network, Better Place intends to open a demonstration centre in Toronto in 2010. But the company’s biggest ambitions are in China, where market research suggests only 2% of the population own vehicles. “Our view is that China will skip conventional vehicles and move directly to electrics,” says Paluska. “Just like they skipped land lines for cellphones.” Well, maybe. And maybe all those Chinese drivers will opt to charge their batteries themselves. I am very impressed with the engine - seems unbelievable it has not been developed before - are their hidden problems?

http://www.lonesentry.com/articles/misc_may43/index.html First thing in Google Mr E. - say about 3 ft high by 6ft. and then there is this http://www.achtungpanzer.com/gen1.htm Page 20 of this book is relevant 88 mm FlaK 18/36/37/41 & PaK 43, 1936-45 By John Norris, Mike Fuller

Thats the trouble with Wiki - just a quick mention and thats it .... : )

Very interesting argument/article beyond simply the DVD refunds. I have thought CBeebies wrong in conception from the start. http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article6894458.ece Highlights : The Swedes and France seem more ahead of the game. Is it something to do with the respective clout of the vested interests in WASP countries.?