Soddball

You do remember correctly but I think you might be remembering the reason incorrectly, if that makes sense. CM:AK introduced the 'curved' function for armour, which allowed, for the first time, Shermans to bounce rounds from their turrets. Before that, the quite clearly sloped armour of the Sherman had been rated for game purposes as 89/0, that is, 89mm thick at 0 degrees slope.

A questionable assumption which ignores factors such as fuel shortages and allied air supremacy.

Ironically, despite his multiple personality issues which ought to have had him banned yonks ago, it wasn't. It was for pretending to be someone else, or rather, posting a review of a CM game pretending to be someone else. At least, that's the way I remember it. If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me.

I'm waiting for CM:Normandy. Then I might resurrect the Cheery Waffle thread. Depends whether CM:N sux0r. Most of us are over at Gyrene's shack at http://dosomefink.com/phpbb2/ .

Absolutely. Take the famous commando raid on St Nazaire. Many of the small craft were knocked out but some survived a hail of fire from other ships, infantry on the docks and coastal batteries.

There's a good reason why you can buy bumper stickers which say "All I needed to know about science I learned from Joss Wheedon" (the author of the show). Try not to think about the 'science'. There isn't any.

I don't know if anyone's recommended it, but I liked "Eagles and Bulldogs in Normandy" - it follows the US 29th Division from Omaha to St Lo and the British 4th Division from Sword to Caen. The author's name escapes me.

Sounds like the military's going to have to recruit golfers rather than soldiers.

Other tools you could run: CCleaner to clear out temp files that might be infected. Lavasoft's Ad Aware 2008. AVG Free 8.0 is also pretty effective at cleaning these things. Run as many of them as you can in Safe Mode.

You will need malwarebytes Anti-malware to kill this little bastage. First, load the PC as normal. Disable system restore (right-click my comptuer, go to properties, go to system restore, turn system restore off on all drives) Next, restart the PC in safe mode (F8 at start up, Safe Mode with Networking) Once in safe mode, use your web browser to reach www.malwarebytes.com Download, update, and install this software. Run a complete scan. Let it remove any files, and restart in normal mode. Forever more, use Mozilla Firefox for your web browsing, an router instead of a modem, a decent firewall (eg Sunbelt's free personal firewall), and a better email program than the one you're using.

Let's see the seismograph results then, and we can compare them to the results from a 5KT nuclear blast's seismograph result. You must have both of these pieces of information? Otherwise, you'd be taking an anti-American dictatorship's state news agency report, and the unsubstantiated claim of an aircraft mechanic at face value with no evidence. So let's see the seimsograph results. Just post the link.

As if we needed yet more proof that we no longer govern ourselves.

Well, if the Iranian state news agency is claiming it, and the Pentagon is denying it, that means it must be true, right?

Yes, well, that's the Guardian you're citing there. They are the most ghastly bunch of middle-class Trots you'll ever run in to. Their editorials consist of articles like 'Global Financial Crisis - Now Is The Time For The Working Classes To Rise Up'.

What about a limited download speed for free accounts and a faster one for paid-for accounts?

Were you aware that making statements like this without providing pictures is a criminal offence?

'Hard drives often die after being stored on a shelf for a while' is pure BS. Often? How often? 70%? A while? How long? Six months? That phrase is deliberately couched in vague terms to frighten rather than inform. Hard drives do fail, but not 'often' and not after being stored on a shelf. For $50 you can buy yourself a piece of backup software that'll do incremental. For $100 you can buy two 500GB hard drives, and you can swap them fortnightly for your backups. Then you can stick them in a fireproof safe on another site. That's about as secure as you can reasonably make your backup.

Have I just entered a discussion from 1996? Has nobody heard of USB hard drives? Cheap, fast, reliable. If you're worried about one failing, buy two.

Damn those wily Jews for controlling everything. Now I know why my paper didn't get delivered by the paper boy this morning. It's the JOOOOOOOS controlling the media!

Lots of good advice here, particularly about not selling off Elerium. Research laser weapons and medical stuff early. Interesting that some of you don't like night missions, I really enjoy them. I always had 24 flares loaded on my craft so that each soldier had at least 2. Toss them out as the doors open, then each soldier should throw one as he moves out of the transport. Did anyone else find the rocket launcher useless? I never got on with it. The autocannon with incendiary ammo, though, I heartily recommend. HE's pretty good, but incendiary is awesome. Do not be afraid to lay down firepower, especially grenades. Early in the game I'd equip my squad with laser rifles and autocannons in an 8/4 ratio, with the autocannon guys carrying a laser pistol for when they ran out of ammo. City terror missions - now they are a dog. Anyone got any bright ideas how to do a good job on those, because I'd usually lose a third to a half of my squad on them. Later in the game, you'll find that your craft do so much damage to UFOs when they shoot them down that the engine and elerium are destroyed. I tended to keep a fighter loaded with 6 long-range missiles at my bases, so that I could use it to drop the smaller UFOs and capture their engines and elerium intact.

Yes he was. I misread to begin with, but he referred to both the 2001 and 2005 Ashes series. The Aussies won the 2001 series. Clear evidence of Perfidious Poms at work, losing like that to lull you in to a false sense of security.

Trescothick was referring to the 2001 Ashes, which Australia won.

I know that there was Britophobia and Yankophobia and nobody's immune. Montgomery's snobbery is legendary, but Alan Brooke's constant carping is no better. Maybe Atkinson lets it get to him. There is a story to tell there and I remember it weaving through An Army at Dawn but it bothered me less. I have plenty of stuff on British performance so that wasn't the problem for me. The problem for me was that, as the book went on, I felt that Atkinson's impression was that the British and Americans were failing to fight like the Germans. He seemed to me to suggest that Clark and Patton both wanted to fight German-style, with no regard for short-term casualties, and he seemed to think that it would have shortened the war. As Max Hastings points out, that only works when you have a completely different structure of army to the allied armies of the time. It simply wouldn't have worked and Atkinson doesn't seem to recognise this. Montgomery was a primadonna, a thoroughly unpleasant man who saw everyone else's faults as a mirror for his own perceived virtues. He was, though, aware of what his men were capable of after 4 years of warfare and aware of his promise made when he took over from Auchinleck not to waste their lives. The criticism that he moved too slowly has to be taken in context with both those points and I don't think Atkinson did that. Don't assume that this is chauvinism on my part. I assure you it isn't. I think it's Atkinson's perceived notions of how the war could have been won faster which cause him to lay the blame he does.

I found it disappointing. I felt Atkinson swallowed too readily the criticisms of British fighting performance in Italy while being too prepared to excuse failings in US command. Atkinson also seemed, to my mind, to be an apologist for the ghastly (IMO) Mark Clark. One example - Atkinson continually berates Montgomery for 'taking his time' to advance. Montgomery was a cautious commander, and didn't want to risk unnecessary casualties - probably a legacy of his WW1 experience. Atkinson sees that as some kind of weakness instead of what I see it as, which is a virtue. Britain didn't have essentially unlimited manpower. His apologism for Mark Clark grated most, though. The man was a poor commander (again, IMO), and was profligate with mens' lives in a way that would have fitted in well on the Eastern Front. I did enjoy An Army at Dawn, but having reread it a couple of times and having also read other stuff about the fighting in Torch, I have gone off Atkinson. Take, for example, his complaints about the plan to take the port of Oran by US Rangers. Atkinson coruscates the plan, the execution and the whole concept and (IIRC) hints that Perfidious Albion was prepared to spend any amount of lives to regain their empire. He doesn't put the attack in to context at all by mentioning the success of Operation Chariot in March 1942. There was also some stuff about the fighting with Vichy troops, which Atkinson skipped over and which I read elsewhere wasn't quite the walkover he implies. I probably won't buy the last of his trilogy. All just my opinions, of course.

Well, there's this one: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/nickbryant/ There was also a story in the Torygraph, which I can no longer find. If it's BS, then all the better. I find the sort of petty nationalism that primarily revolves around an inferiority complex most vexing because there's no way to cure it.