Zoraptor

ceb are still in use, at least according to... the US Navy. Think I'll go with them, thanks. To whit: "Block III TLAM-D - conventional submunitions dispenser with combined effect bomblets." Updated, April 10 2017, so it's not an abandoned page- cunningly titled 'US Navy Tomahawk fact file', so easy to miss- either. This is a forum for reasoned discussion and analysis of the facts, please don't post any more fake news/ alternative facts designed to muddy the waters with flim flam razzle dazzle, they're tiresome to correct. And in any case, frag bomblets take out parked aircraft absolutely fine. Those six MiG23s parked by the runway would have made a nice satellite image when destroyed, not so nice when they're just sitting there happy as Larry early next morning. Way more efficient too than 3 tomahawks per shelter or whatever the current claim is to get to58 tomahawks arriving. (Ironic really. If this were any other subject at all you and Agiel would be ridiculing Trump and his administration's penchant for fake news/ alternative facts, but because the failure is embarrassing to the image of the US military you're staunchly defending him)

TLAM-D can target a runway fine, since it's cluster based. Would also have the advantage of hitting the aircraft parked on berms as well like the MiG23s that were just sitting there, chillin', after the attack. Mostly though it's kind of embarrassing- and would obviously be so- having it back in action a few hours later. At least that way claims that the runway's existence is trivial anyway can be somewhat supported instead of having multiple videos of obviously armed sukhois taking off and landing. In any case original claims made were that it was hit and out of action, the story only changed later. Indeed, there's clearly been some... 'retconning', shall we say, going on from the press to clean up the mess, the claim that the runway was targeted has been edited out of some articles eg this one though you can find quotes from the article in original form elsewhere (sanity warning, neogaf).

A shot on goal that is saved by a goalkeeper is still accurate, even if it doesn't end up in goal. You seem not to know the definition of accurate. Not a surprise given your general ignorance on most issues. There's been no proof offered of 59 hits, the goalposts have been moved (runway targeting to no runway targeting), the base is still in use and has been since 6 hours after the strike for arming and refueling, and while metre resolution images of some damage has been released most of that claimed has not despite it being trivial to do so. He who asserts, proves, and the US has so far done lots of asserting, and almost no proving.

New MBs and them working consistently at the RAM's rated frequency are what I want most- we also have a dearth of mid range boards available here as they're almost all less than $200 or more than $350. I might be able to hold off for Vega to see what they offer, but most estimates have that a month away still (and expensive due to HBM) and at some point I have to stop waiting and actually buy. Since I'm currently on a 1920x1200 monitor a 580 type ought to be more than enough as well.

P R O J E C T I O N. And FTR, nobody is saying that the Tomahawks are inaccurate in the usual sense, nobody. The ones that arrived seem to have hit the targets they were aimed at, though some may have been aimed at targets that were moved. Once they get off the ocean and can use terrain scanning, inertia and GPS they were clearly accurate. The question at hand is how many got the chance to be accurate. Pretty easy to prove damage conclusively and it was done for 16 targets, but not for 44. Provide evidence of those extra 28 targets at the same resolution/ scale as the others and it'd all have been fine, don't, and you will face questions why you haven't.

you keep misrepresenting. That's called projection. I'm saying they got the attribution wrong in one specific case. You have to show that the system used is consistently enough correct for an misattribution to be impossible, or for it not to have happened in that case. You can say that the system is perfect and has been since the 80s, but if it shoots down friendly planes it is not perfect and makes mistakes. End of Story. At this point it's got more holes than a nice bit of gruyere. (1) The radar track of the Su22 the DoD released is completely inconclusive. It doesn't actually show the Su22 over Khan Sheikoun at any point despite its caption, and at its closest point to the target it's flying in the wrong direction to hit KS with a dumb bomb. If it was dropping bombs from low altitude it is literally impossible for that aircraft to have hit the area specified. At 5000m to be above Manpads they'd have to be travelling at very least supersonic when dropping their bombs on any other vector shown as it requires ~8km momentum travel. There's no point flying supersonic at that altitude though, since you're above the AA ceiling anyway and might as well fly slower, be more accurate and save fuel and wear and tear. To be fair, the trace released by the DoD is utter crap and lacks basics such as a scale so I had to approximate distances on wikimapia, so there is some wiggle room. But not much. (2) Witness statements include there being bleach/ chlorine (independently verified), ammonia (many), rotten eggs, almonds and spoiled food smells. Only one of those is consistent with Sarin; spoiled food, since organic amines are often used to stabilise it. The others are consistent with other chemicals and while there are some potential explanations such as people confusing bleach cleaner smell with ammonia cleaner smell since they have the same general purpose you'd be hard pressed to explain the others rationally. It's consistent with a chemical store being hit though; but you literally cannot bung all of those into a chemical warhead, you'd destroy the nerve agent. And eventually the warhead, you certainly wouldn't want to handle it or have it stuck to your plane. (3) Nerve gas is not particularly hard to make, it's just hard to make so it lasts for years. If a country, or company, has the capability to make organophosphate insecticides- fly spray, commercial agricultural sprays etc- it can make nerve gas since they're the same thing with different specificities. You'll also get similar symptoms to Sarin if you gas yourself with chlorpyrifos and similar; they're less toxic, not non toxic. Should also be noted than the almond smell, cyanide, is a precursor for Tabun, as is notoriously 'rotten food smelling' dimethylamine. You will also, inevitably, get a bleach smell from chlorine or other bleach contributors (HCl) from synthesis, or precursors, of the other direct Tabun precursor, phosphonyl chloride. Hydrogen sulphide (rotten eggs) and most of those others can also be used in insecticide synthesis. It's plausible that they did hit a chemical store and had a mini Bhopal as a result. (4) The focus of proof has been on proving that the CW weren't a hoax, not their source- that's been assertional and when not, at very best equivocal such as the radar trace. That's perhaps the oldest PR trick in the book, focus on something nobody actually disagrees with to discredit the stuff people do disagree with. The Syrian/ Russian story is not that there were no CW, only that they didn't use them and they came from a ground store. (5) Yellowcake, aluminium tubes, mobile WMD labs, 45 minutes to bombs over London etc etc. Not a specific objection, more an example from history.

As someone who doesn't have a cooler I'd be looking at the 1600, but I'm still pretty certain to go 1700. 1600 is same price as a 7600 non k ($350 in NZ to be specific) yet if it follows the pattern with the 1700 can be overclocked almost as high as the X model even on the 'free' stock cooler. Definitely not the obvious price performance win of the 1700 vs 1800x though, and at this point I think I'd prefer to spend the extra $150 for the future proofing of 8 cores. There are also meant to be a shed load of new motherboards being released over the next few weeks, and the 'new' video cards.

OPCW was, actually, since they're a theoretically neutral party unlike the US or Russia. They even got a Nobel Prize for it.

Well yeah, it is, by definition. That's what friendly fire is. (1) The patriot system friendly fire failure was specifically labelled as not being caused by (avoidable) operator error, but by a complicated system. (2) Many thousands of hours? The whole war lasted less than a thousand, and (3) that in a conflict in which the number of sorties actually flown by Iraq was... zero. There'd have been less losses if he operators had actually been incompetent and been asleep the entire time. So, if radar is capable, alone, of identifying aircraft reliably why not cut the complication and just use radar? Because it isn't capable of doing it, alone, it isn't capable of doing it with absolute reliability even when combined with IFF transponders and all other factors. Your and Agiel's entire argument is that it cannot have been a wrong attribution because such systems are accurate when it's asterisking obvious that it can be a wrong attribution.

For fighter aircraft perhaps it doesn't have the speed and acuity that is preferable, but as I've elaborated before with ground-based platforms processing power is not an issue and could easily have distinguished between aircraft types. Oh ffs, the friendly fire incidents in 2003 were from ground based Patriot missile batteries and very well publicised. So much for reliable radar only identification from the late 80s onwards. What, like DoD officials tweeting that their launch targets included the runway at Shayrat then claiming that was never the aim when it was shown undamaged the next day? Like Mattis claiming the runway is of trivial use when Syrian airplanes- clearly armed- have been using it since a few hours after the air strikes? Like him claiming that 20% of Syria's planes were destroyed? Flim flam razzle dazzle yes indeedy. Has been available from April 7, and is the source for 16 targets being hit because they only show 16 targets hit. The rest is 28 circles drawn at a kilometer level scale which could show literally anything and for which there isn't any purpose in not zooming in unless they're on a 1996 server that can only handle five MB level pngs. They're also claiming more targets hit in more areas than the fricking US DoD itself does.

That was a contributing factor (especially in Syria), but not at all in, say, Libya. The factors vary for different places. The broadest root cause is that arab countries tend to have a high population growth rate but low economic one. That means that large segments of the population are either under or unemployed with very little prospects except of getting poorer. Add to that the influence of endemic corruption and radical Islam telling them that things can be All Right in the next life and you have a recipe for radicalisation. Fair dos to Tunisia though, it was the least violent revolution and most successful; albeit in part because their radicals went off fighting elsewhere.

If you're talking deterrence factor and salami slicing then there has been no deterrence yet even with the US alone spending more than 10x what Russia does on the military. Few billion more won't make a difference- and there have never been salami slices against anyone already in NATO anyway. NATO is meant to be a defensive alliance for the North Atlantic, not an extension and projection of imperial power. It's also pretty apparent that the salami slices happen as a response to and in order to block further NATO expansion.

Those rumours have been around for ages. To be honest they're pretty likely to be true, especially if the new movies are off limits to EA and they aren't really doing that much with the licence otherwise apart from Battlefront. As for romances, I'd probably settle for Ithorians since they're in KOTOR already. Though I'd be thinking of Ishi Tib or Lepi (don't judge me, please) I should have picked a Rik Mayall as Lord Flashheart avatar instead of Alan B'Stard. Replacing Obi Wan with Flash would immensely improve the prequels. Though to be fair, replacing just about any character with Flash would improve anything. And make it far shorter.

The 2% spending figure is for 2024 and is not a requirement now. No matter how much money Raytheon and pals spends on fluff opinion pieces and donations to John McCain types. In any case, an arbitrary requirement is mostly there as corporate welfare rather than as a sensible approach, because any actual conflict involving NATO where 2% spending matters ends with an Ink Spots song and Ron Perlman narration.

Have you heard the tragedy of Bioware, the EA division? I thought not, it's not a story John Riccitiello would tell you. It's a gaming legend. Bioware was a gaming studio so large and so influential it could use its previous titles to influence EA to authorise expenditure… It had such a knowledge of gaming that it could even keep itself from being Bullfrogged/ OSIed/ Maxied/ Westwooded. It could actually save itself from being disbanded? Sales success is a pathway to abilities many consider... unlikely. What happened to them? It became so powerful… the only thing it was afraid of was losing its audience appeal, which eventually, of course, it did. Unfortunately, it subsumed itself in pet causes, bad romances, SPMMO gameplay and poor testing, and eventually its master will kill them in their sleep. Ironic. It could avoid being assimilated, but still ended up a typical EA studio anyway. Is it possible to avoid these pitfalls? Only for an independent studio.

She did, but the UN ambassador position has no actual power and is used (by basically everyone) for hatchet jobbing each other, the only dependant part is who is hatcheting whom at different times and on different issues. Samantha Power did exactly the same thing and said exactly the same things, nothing actually came of it. The US won't fight Russia unless they have to, and if they tried that they'd have to. We've also been told the strike is a one off, and that the US won't themselves remove Assad from power by people like McMaster and Tillerson who are far higher food chain than Haley. If it's Turkey andor Saudi & rebels vs Syria and Russia it's the latter who wins, every time. Saudi loses pathetically to shoeless Houthis and Turkey, well, they were just told that they weren't wanted for the Raqqa campaign because they were too crap. The US will try and leverage Assad out via Russia and try and block Iran off from western Syria with 'their' rebels (indeed, they already tried exactly that last year though they lost rather badly) and that's about it- unless something else changes, or they're bonkers.

I can't do anything other than gape at the stupidity of people who believe that "doing it right this time" with the same old regime change recipe is even a remote possibility. Have you been in a coma these last 20 years? If they are going to do it (they aren't, most likely) then there's no harm hoping they do it properly. But yeah, the fundamental problem is that militant salafi jihadism with its philosophy fundamentally rooted in the 7th century and secular moderate democracy are not miscible concepts, and the one passably secular democratic group won't fight for western Syria. So you can't get secular democracy, and if you're not going to get secular democracy you pretty much have to settle for the 1/2 that Assad gives rather than the 0/2 the rebels do. At this point if they could get zombie Gaddafi back (Haftar was a top Gaddafi general, for those who don't know) with a new face and new name they'd take him. Haven't learned anything about trusting Saudi and Qatar though, and that's the fundamental problem since their reliance on retrograde salafi/ wahhabi states infects every decision the US makes in the ME every bit as much as their obsession with doing what Israel wants. But that's not the best feasible solution for Israel or for Saudi or Qatar or Turkey though. It's just the best solution for Syria, and we can safely say that, to mildly paraphrase the great philosopher Kanye, "Trump doesn't care about Syrian people". The issue at the moment is that Assad is winning, and perhaps winning fast enough to prevent the Euphrates Valley being blocked to Iran and ISIS still hasn't taken Deir Ez Zor despite US help (!) in doing so. The US knows perfectly well that the strongest rebel factions outside the Kurds are literal headchopping salafi jihadis (x2) and literally Al Qaeda and that it isn't in their interests to let them win- it just isn't in their interests to let them lose. Same reason Israel has Al Qaeda (!) and ISIS (!!) next to the Golan Heights and actively protects them. If the US cannot get the whole country then the end game involves balkanisation and perpetuation of the current status quo, not an actual solution.

They had a public bet over the result of the election. (Some forums do have a ban on For Attention Of posts, unless I missed it this one doesn't; and the relevant thread is well and truly locked)

That's not necessarily the case- all we know is WB challenged the trademark filing at the USPTO and ND withdrew it. The potential problems with the developer and publisher being bought by different entities (Monolith--> WB; Fox--> Vivendi--> Activision) and the IP maybe being split and hence difficult to re-release as a consequence still exists, all that is now known is that WB claims part of it. They still may or may not own all of it, and may or may not be willing to license to someone. To be fair to Warners they're a massive company, if some no name was asking for information on an obscure and not particularly successful game from the early 2000s not treating it seriously is understandable; as is getting annoyed when they decide to fish for a response. The group that Night Dive dealt with over System Shock was a bank/ insurer (Meadowbrook Bank/ Star Insurance) used to selling off seized collateral by the nature of their business.

If it's that easy to distinguish aircraft there wouldn't be friendly fire incidents, would there. It's just not that easy, except in theory. There were also other Ukrainian planes used in theatre both before and after MH17, eg MiG29s from ~five weeks earlier in 2014 and the two Mig29s that Ukraine officially claim as shot down were in August 2014. Ukraine mostly using Su25 is only important because that would influence what a contact had set as preliminary identifications, they clearly were using other planes in the region as well, just not as much since an air superiority fighter has little utility in that context. Ukraine also accused Russia of launching air to air attacks on its planes literally the previous day, as such having their own proper fighters in the area is eminently plausible. As for flim flam razzle dazzle, the Russians gain literally nothing from claiming it was a Su25 as opposed to a Mig29 there.

It was strongly implied that ND couldn't get anyone to even check that they owned the NOLF rights. So they went for the trademark (which is pretty cheap to apply for) to see who if anyone would block them. IIRC it was Warners, and they were sufficiently unhappy about that approach that there's no chance of ND getting the rights- and odd as it may seem something like System Shock being successfully relaunched makes it less likely that the rights would be sold outright, at least. There have been rumours of GOG working on NOLF compatibility but I'd be sceptical of that until there's better evidence that isn't basically wishful thinking.

They (ND) tried trademarking the name. It didn't go well.

Bro, that wikilink doesn't even say that you can reliably identify planes by radar alone, now, except in theory. Yeah, there are suites to give them likely designations and have been for ages but those are nowhere near infallible or you wouldn't get any of the friendly fire incidents that happened in Gulf War 2 well after the 80s nor other unintended targetings like MH17 (or IranAir655, albeit that was the 80s). Even more recently than 2003 the Russians supposedly shot down 2 of their own Su24s during the Ossetia War because they mistook them for Georgian Su25s- and Georgia didn't even have Su24s (or anything supersonic, iirc). Mostly though, having it tagged as an Su25 is the least of the problems with that story. The fundamental problem is that it is pretty definitively a SAM that hit MH17, and that was always the most likely explanation with being shot down air to air possible, but unlikely. An incorrect type attribution is far more likely than Russians deliberately picking- almost literally- the only combat plane which is incapable of shooting down an airliner for their alternative explanation.

That ship was already on its way, it was at/ near the Bosporus when the attack happened. If the Pyotr Veliky goes back that would be significant, as it's a meat wagon and was far more significant than the Kuznetsov (carrier) being there, this is just normal schedule most likely. Bloody useless experts everywhere. The Russian story was bollocks, but the Su25 'debunking' is as bad a bit of false information as anything they did. (Why? Radar designations are preliminary since you cannot identify a target by radar alone, obviously if you could then MH17 wouldn't have itself been shot down as it would not have been mistaken for an Il76. Nor would IranAir655 have been mistaken for an F14. To put it in perspective, a Su25 is very similar size to Su27 and Mig29 which could easily shoot an airliner down, an airbus is multiple orders of magnitude larger than an F14 yet Scott Lustig still identified said Airbus as an F14 for which, lest we forget, he literally got a medal. The Su25 designation could have easily as been for said Su27 or Mig29 as an actual Su25, and again, either of those is more than capable of shooting down any airplane. It didn't happen, but their reasoning in debunking it is itself a load of old tosh)

Russians said that a weapons depot was hit, and that it contained CW. While there are issues with that explanation it would explain there being 2 CW agents present despite all sources saying only one potential CW bomb was dropped (you can't just bung sarin and chlorine in together, they're both reactive and have differing physical properties, it's actively counterproductive). There's also no pictures whatsoever of the delivery device. At this point you, and the US, are basically taking the word of Hayat Tahrir al Sham- Al Qaeda- as to the facts. Rebels have even used sarin before, in Khan al Assal (as mentioned in the politics thread the US explanation for that is, near literally, 'they gassed themselves for the lulz'). You realise that even if one accepts the claim that only 23 targets were hit, common targeting procedure is to double (or even triple or quadruple, depending on target priority) up on munitions against one target for redundancy's sake (in the event defenders are attempting to intercept the missiles, or in case of weapon failure)? Or that many cruise missiles, particularly when used against hardened targets, detonate post-penetration so showing the exterior of a hangar after the strike may be misleading? 23 missiles, not 23 targets. Best evidence so far is that 16 targets were hit, which fits 23 missiles pretty well. There's also plenty of ground level photos available showing undamaged planes sitting in undamaged armoured hangars, from ground level, and the airfield was/ is back in use with planes taking off/ landing scant hours later. Don't think there's any credible argument for the strikes being effective if they've resume use the morning of the bombing. The only real argument is whether they were deliberately ineffective or not.