dieseltaylor

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=99218&highlight=reverse I think if you read this thread I started many months ago you will see how slow reverse was for WW2 tanks - well at least the three were I could get definitive figures. I am afraid the Imperial War Museum and Bovington Tank Museum have not been much help when I made further enquiries of them. Tactically I think it is very significant if reverse is very slow in comparison to forward speeds as reversing moves would be minimised as far as possible. In real life a tank is pretty blind anyway and in reverse under fire you are not really wanting to have a commander head-up or turn the turret so it would be vulnerable. So MichaelE it is sort of a realism issue. And in game terms I was playing in a town map and dancing tanks speedily up and reversing down roads was a feature particularly given the grid layout of the streets. It may be thinks were differnt with Shermans or the programming has been tweaked but you will see from the thread I linked to Shermans were not fast in reversing. And bear in mind momentum/time/distance to get to maximum reverse speed. Anyway a game that promises realism ought perhaps to have the basics correct. Culliton - I did do some work on tank gun accuracy on the move so its not like I have not sought the betterment of the game. And I have tried to establish whether Panthers ever fired on the move - especially broadside - so my interest in what is right is not superficial. PS I have added to the Wiki in my sig, I did playtest scenarios, and did proof-read/corrected scenario briefings for CMBN. However RL does affect people and means less time can be spent on sorting out glitches.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2075228/What-nanny-saw-Housekeepers-stunning-images-1950s-Chicago-working-class-America-new-light.html The guy bought a jackpot. Really excellent the photos shown. Interesting to see how many Yanks follow English papers and comment.

Just curious why instead of having one compromised e-mail address [yours] there will be multiple ones available for picking off the thread : ) And on paranoia as per your sig. If you wish to see how people with paranoia react follow them around : )

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/national-geographic-photo-contest-2011/100187/ Some great photos

Great stuff. JpzIV/70 showing it REALLY is nose-heavy

Phil Culliton Phil, I think perhaps I ought to say then design decisions which I find unfathomable and politely call bugs. Finding tanks driving as fast in reverse as they can go forwards is deeply disturbing. One might have thought that this hangover design feature from CMx1 would have been removed. I am not going to delve into the acceleration figures for vehicles as that perhaps would be beyond normal expectations for a game. The invisible walls around a battlefield - which seems to be the default - seems absolutely insane in terms of realism. Gee I must run back into the bombardment .... I will keep my trucks here for the enemy to capture. And of course in the first iteration there was the laser guided firing on the move problem which was standout wrong. I am now programming genius but then none of the items I have listed is really a programming "bug". As I say, I politely lump them as bugs. One that I did consider a bug was that if you drive through a wire fence you destroy it, drive along the length of it and it remains pretty much all in place. This may have been sorted out but I am not bothering to boot the game to find out - that goes with not wishing to be a paying game-tester.

On a similar note - but in reverse. A single change that becomes more common. http://www.rdmag.com/News/2011/12/Life-Science-Genetics-Genomics-Scientists-discover-second-oldest-gene-mutation/

Praetori A very interesting point. Anyway it is some sadness I come back after many months absence to find that there are still outstanding problems on tank movement. Whilst supporting the company for the last decade or so the latest offering offended me mightily that purporting to be a realistic simulation tanks travelled as fast in reverse as going forwards. For all I know that may be cured but it is obvious bogging has not. WTF! In my innocence I thought the modern forerunner would have ironed out all the obvious bugs before we got back to WW2. So it looks like I will have to disappear for a few more months until I can believe it is a good game. I cannot bear to be a paid playtester - you know - the one where I have unknowingly paid.

Me? I think you misunderstand my request. I am asking for all writers to be honest. I am already : )

Lets be honest about this. We know that medical companies suppress unfavourable research, and that science evolves and what is fine in one era is deadly in another. So I for one do not believe in absolute "safeness" of anything. Look at thalidomide as a drug that has been lauded, dammed and now has a practical use. But then there is Teflon and a 20 year hiding of adverse results by DuPont. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/11/29/business/main1083164.shtml Chemicals in the body may have unintended or unmeasured consequences. And who wants to carry out lots and lots of experiments with combinations of chemicals that people might be ingesting? Certainly not a company trying to sell a new product. Ultimately science will get things wrong and right but when you allow business to pervert the processes and accelerate the introduction of new foods/drugs then that is a bad reflection on the society. PS Wicky - you could have at least quoted the guys in the white hats going to work for the black hats so often. Even if it gives the impression that people are being paid-off.

Just in passing this came up on the BBC today and shows, in passing, that as is reasonably well-known but generally ignored, not all people react the same.

PHYSORG is great and covers much much more than physics http://www.physorg.com/breaking-news/ *Physorg.com is proud to announce Medical Xpress, a new division of Physorg.com, which will cover all medical research advances and health news at http://medicalxpress.com. The separation will allow Physorg.com to focus on other sci-tech research, while Medical Xpress will focus on the latest in medicine and health. Our hope is to further expand the content on both sites and improve the overall quality and experience for our readers. We hope to make the division of news as painless as possible. PhysOrg.com visitors will still find daily medical content on its home page, while readers only interested in medical stories may now go directly to Medical Xpress.

Let me see - how did the approvals go ... US approval 1981 Canada 1981 UK 1982 EU Aspartame has been authorised for use in foods and as a table-top sweetener by several Member States since the 1980s. The European legislation harmonised its use in foodstuffs in 1994. The politics of what Rumsfeld did is the point of the piece in it perverted a system. Secondary must be the actual validity of the decision. However what is interesting that nobody seems to be doing tests on what happens when you mix the new drugs etc now available. Systemic flaw?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228421.200-power-of-babel-why-one-language-isnt-enough.html ALONGSIDE almost every creation myth about the origin of the Earth or the genesis of humankind, you'll find another story about the diversity of language. In the Old Testament, "confounding the one language" is God's punishment on humans for building the Tower of Babel. In Greek mythology, Hermes divides language to spite his father Zeus. The Wa-Sania people of east Africa put it down to a jabbering madness brought on by famine, while the Iroquois story tells of a god who directed his people to disperse across the world. Creation myths are just myths, of course, but the question of linguistic diversity is a genuine problem. If Americans and the British are two peoples divided by a common language, then the whole world is one united by the mutual incomprehension of nearly 7000. Language is perhaps the defining feature of our species, and yet also the most divisive. Why is ... And then you pay or log-in!

Affen - points for paying attention : ) Should have been language 1 LDI= 0

Interesting article from New Scientist on language - and why there are so many languages. The Linguistic Diversity Index goes : If everyone has their own language the figure is one and if there was only one language worldwide that would be zero. So - USA an LDI = 0.319 364 languages[ 176 indigenous] Population 310 million North Korea LDI = 1 Population 24 million Papua New Guinea LDI = 0.990 830 languages - all indigenous Population 7 million Rather interestingly genetic make-up and language have a common effect. As people left Africa they only took a small-subset of the gene pool which narrowed every time peoples moved further on. Similarly phonemes* if little used would get left behind. So the language with the highest number is in Africa, Taa, has 110, and the ones with lowest numbers are further away in South America and Oceania. A papuan tribe has 11 phonemes *In a language or dialect, a phoneme (from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, "a sound uttered") is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.[1] Wikipedia The article is interesting in many ways but I will keep it brief and just the odd bits. This is fun: In English I walked the dog [tense shows its a past action] Mandarin The verb does not change but a word may be added to show it was past Yagua[peruvian] they choose one of five verb endings depending on whether the walk was hours days weeks months or years ago!!! And this is cute: People in warm climates use more vowels. I won't spoil it by the theory why : )

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robbie-gennet/donald-rumsfeld-and-the-s_b_805581.html Sort of encapsulates the world where business and politics, and the making of money, trumps decent behaviour.

Blimey what a lot of books on C-130's Hercules!. Go for a book-token : )

Actually the Norwegians are guarding their last butter store: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/12/07/oukoe-uk-diet-butter-norway-idUKTRE7B622620111207

How true http://www.naturalnews.com/034381_Tennessee_cannery_stored_food.html And I will disappear from here in a couple of weeks for a few more months. I had not realised how upset I was by CMBN : (

Irfanview if its not video. And Irfanview does a lot more than screen capture.

I don't think it was deliberately a lifting tackle insomuch as the French player was momentarily standing up deciiding to off-load when he was hit. Warburton was just going for a hard hit anticipating some resistance. The law was for deliberately dmaging tackles rather than oin game incidents. As Joubert said with replays and linesmen available it does seem overly harsh without some thought.

The New Scientist editorial suggested that this would form a rich seam where GM food could be engineered for profit... sorry they dsaid the benefit of mankind or something! : ) I have a major problem with the concept that we need people to live longer by "better" food and genetic engineering. They have also found out the early stages of preventing aging by replacing the bits that replicate the cells which eventually decline and start producing more slowly and with inferior cells. Science can be wonderful but apparently no one wishes to consider the problems of the wealthy [the West?] and connected having longer/better lives in a World that will have problems feeding the population. It seems strange but I really believe that life span may have to be limited otherwise in five decades time we will have a revolution of the drones! against the gerontocracy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerontocracy

I think it is a matter of the designers trying to make the game more realistic. We as players know we are meant to have a fighting chance as the attackers therefore game designers have to put in some checks and balances. If they are clever the checks can be factually based and I think in this instance the restraint of the hedge movement has worked very well. : )

Interesting point. I would hazard a guess that you were smaller and lither than an average soldier and not wearing any webbing and carrying extraneous kit like weapons, rations and ammo! : ) I think there is also the question of every soldier realising that they are in a fairly indefensible posture, and the question of noise attracting attention resulting in a fatal event. Not something as a boy you would have to worry about.! There is also the matter of time as the Germans were good at register mortars to hedgelines so the more time was spent exploring and groups of men gathering the more risky it might become. I also think that there is bocage and BOCAGE. Actually similar sorts of terrain does exist in the England - not unsurprsingly as both countries were Norman occupied and the climate etc being very similar. So where the terrain/soil type were the same you would expect the same crops and fields systems. I can imagine that there would be bocage like hedges that were "permeable" but I can also see that many were not even to a boy armed with a stick. : ) Incidentally as a younger man I was early on the Paintball scene and our band of novices faced the Blackheath Re-enactment Society. Whilst suitably impressed by their collection of WW2 vehicles the authentic uniforms and webbing seemed to slow them down in moving through a dank and untidy English wood as they seemed to catch the brambles and branches better than we did. Not directly relevant as we had no hedges to practice penetrating : ). French woods I hasten to say are much better managed. We would have been hugely more cautious in playing if it were a matter of dying. In game terms the balance may actually be right.