womble

This is why AOL should be disconnected from the Internet. With extreme prejudice.

Your cat is a much better tactician than either of ours have been. Their advice has usually been "Charge!" or "Open fire! All weapons!". Or "Now that's what I call a mouse!"

Look at the top right 'atomic number' for Conspiracy Theories... I think 9/11 deniers are just an isotope.

No, drumming I think. As 'bdum-tish'; the drum hit played to tell the hard of thinking that a joke is now complete. Or that it was a joke, not just a non-sequitur.

Citing the first two examples of games built upon an engine doesn't really show that basing things on an engine doesn't limit the builders' creativity. If games based on Euphoria continue to be new and fresh (i.e. RDR and GTA4 haven't exhausted the possibilities) then a new paradigm of game design might have been born

I think part of the problem with seeing it 'all' is that if you zoom out that far, you can hardly see the individual elements, so end up seeing less.

So why don't they build such things out of superconductors? Because the cryogenics of Helium is expensive and difficult. Wind farms are currently pretty low-maintenance installations; that would change if they had to have a continuous supply of l-He (or even l-N2 for 'high' temperature superconductors) and technicians to manage the cryogenics. Not as far as uses of helium are concerned. How do you cool thousands of miles of conductor to liquid helium temperatures? CERN has a hard enough job with a 27km tunnel. No, 'supergrids' aren't going to be built using cryogenic superconductors. The cost saving from eliminating transmission loss won't cover the cost of maintaining the supergrid at near-absolute zero. When the 'holy grail' of "room temperature" superconductors is achieved, these applications will be routine, but even 70-odd K is pretty cold and limits the industrial usefulness of even 'high' temperature superconductors; Helium is too specialised and cold for widespread commercial application of low temperature SCs.

I get what you mean, now. I suppose the problem here is how the crew know to fire on that target, and how they can adjust their fire for effect. Perhaps you could let HQ squads call in fire from all on-map HE-chuckers in the same way as they can with mortars (i.e. if they're in 'command range' and the HQ can spot for 'em). Otherwise, I can see why the crew would be reluctant to speculatively fire minute-long missions from their limited supply of ammo.

CM:N will be the first game I've bought on release for a long time (not counting expansions to games I already play). Unless it's out at Xmas, when my wife might be buying it for me...

Do any of the WW2 carriages allow for enough elevation to fire that close, indirectly? I know arty doesn't have a 'blind spot' that's too close in, but thought that was because you can depress the muzzle and fire direct on targets you can see... Re: MG fire - I'd forgotten about the indirect fire options HMG mounts permitted. Some ded cleva stuff available IRL, there, including the ability to shoot (well) over your own troops (as opposed to parting their hair as they snake along on their bellies...) to hit the target your rifle squads are advancing on.

Isn't that abstracted into picking an area target for your HMG team, or is there some aspect beyond and further than that which you think could be included in the model?

Not necessarily. You have found a different source which offers a different set of casualty figures... Jason's not attributed his 7000 Austrians/4500 French figures, but I don't doubt that he will. The theory isn't disproven just yet.

That'd be the late war variants like the Mk XXIV, no? Battle of Britain models weren't that fast were they? 'Pends how you're counting: number of rounds, it was probably the .30 calibre armed Spit, rather than the German planes with fewer, heavier-hitting, slower-firing cannon mixed into their armament. Me 110 in the early war european theatre, or Zero in the pacific, maybe, would be my guess. Later, P-51s and Lightnings?

I hope the name is some kind of epiphanic revelation when you get to it, after all this time. Or just run with CM: Normandy and get a forum opened for us to froth in

Maybe when I think of something original to say and Michael gives it his imprimatur of approval

Some random pointers... Learning about fire and movement is important. There are lots of references out there on the web, I'm sure. Find 'em; fix 'em; flank 'em; finish 'em. Use your infantry to clear out places where cheap assets can kill your tanks: infantry is very durable when under fire, whereas your armour assets will often pop like balloons when they are actually engaged. Use your armour to support your infantry, using HE and mounted machine guns to suppress and kill enemy infantry that your own pixeltruppen have discovered by getting pinned. Don't scout with your strong armour. Keep an eye on your troops' fatigue levels and figure out how to keep 'em in range of HQs. You probably won't have the option of calling enough arty to break a difficult position by itself, as some formations in the historical war could: makes for more interesting games since you have to fight your way onwards rather than letting the F.O. win the fight for you. Armour dominates territory with its guns, whereas infantry dominate with their presence. Hide a lot.

Could ATR really penetrate the side armour of the IIIs and IVs that mostly received Schurzen? To sufficient a degree as to be worth the extra effort of putting tin-thin spaced armour (rather than the same weight of applique which would be an easier maufacturing proposition)? I don't see any references in that list that mention the medium tanks much, so it's really difficult to see which ones should be chased up to confirm the original author's point.

That's a bit disturbing. If you've got a few platoons of infantry and some company mortars, plus a bit of DF HE and some off-table arty, you're looking, potentially at 'hundreds' of craters, without any significant prep barrage... and it chokes the engine? [frets]

Sounds like you're hanging around just a little toooo long. Once you've nailed the first two, you've used up that firing position, unless you can distract them, when it might be survivable to return to it. But, juicy a position as it may be, you need to bug out before the return fire bites, and go elsewhere to look for targets. Covered routes for withdrawal are your friend.

Corporations may not feel pain, but, to stretch an analogy a bit, they do have good sensors for what will impair their effectiveness as money-making machines. Like a Terminator, they recognise damage and operate to reduce its impact, whereas individuals react much less rationally. Absolutely. But you have to recognise that it's a punishment, not a deterrent, for many of those who elect to break the rules.

There have been other times when, given the situation at the time, it looked categoric, including confession, but the confession turned out to be the fantasies of a deranged mind and the real killer walked away. Not just in cases where the capital option was available, mind, but had the death penalty been on the books at the time, the wrong person would have been killed in revenge. Because revenge is all it is. It's not a deterrent, as I've pointed out. Interesting http://www.metro.co.uk/news/747748-half-of-us-back-death-penalty suggests that half the popullation supports the death penalty. And what do you think of a Parliament apparently voted for its abolition against the wishes of 75% of the population. Curious thing democracy.

As a Brit, and holding a number of liberal views alongside my conservative ones, I have to say that, for me, the finality of a death sentence is the biggest argument for simply not doing it. If the principle "Better 10 guilty go free than 1 innocent is punished" is valid (as I believe it to be) at a lesser level (say, simple theft) then it is emphatically more so when the punishment is so emphatically more. And punishments really don't seem to make very much difference to criminals' propensity towards crime. One of the first things necessary to consider serious crime is a disregard towards the possibility (probability in many cases) that the perptrator will get caught. Bank robbers and kidnappers-for-profit mostly get caught, so any rational comparison of risk v reward would suggest that it's not a good way of making a living, yet people still undertake both. I don't see why people get so worked up about the method where the death penalty is part of the legal process though. Firing squad, while messy (though I'd expect expanding rounds and no overpenetration, so not very messy), is less fraught with potential screwups than either frying or poisoning seem to be. Guillotine, now there's a messy way of offing someone. You want to be humane? Carbon monoxide poisoning is a good way to 'put someone to sleep'. Edit: And, out of interest, just how do you take, from the text of that article, that '...the anti-death penalty group have the meida sown up pretty tightly in the UK'? Is it not legitimate to mention that there were objections? Was there a pro-death-penalty lobby making their voices heard in a presentable way, other than the legitimate authorities making their statements. The article seemed largely to be bloodlessly stating the facts of the matter, to me, and the ACLU's overblown bleatings (as reported) were obvious and arthiritic rhetoric, rather than treated with any favour.

The problem with expecting the draconian punishment of individuals to curb corporate excesses is that for the most part, infringers of laws don't expect to get caught (as in they consider the possibility zero, not just negligible, making the risk x punishment equation come out to zero too). If they did, then current sanctions are probably sufficient. This, as someone has pointed out wrt airlines, doesn't seem to apply so strongly to corporate entities which arguably have a more rational approach to risk than humans in general do. Sure, punish people who've been criminally negligent, but don't expect that to stop criminal negligence. Punishing the corporations will do a better job of that.

Last thing I read, the EU/eurozone is China's biggest export market... Which isn't to say that devastating the economy of your second-biggest currency-defined market makes any sense either, since there's not much of a difference in quantity. Nevertheless, China does have the wherewithal to put some serious pressure for extended periods of time on both the dollar and euro markets, and probably sterling too, keeping those currencies where they want 'em to keep their economy booming at the level they need to suppress internal dissent. The importing countries need to impose levies on Chinese (actually all third world) imports based on their human rights and ecological shortfalls, I reckon. Not enough to make things cost the same in a market as they'd cost if made by labour in that market, but enough to encourage the emerging economies to rush past the sweatshop/child labour/suppression of the press stage in order to make more money.

Oh, you tease.