Zoraptor

The heart went out of Oby when Wals and Monte stopped being around so much. Not much point trolling westlings when nobody is responding. The Russians are training T90 crews which seems to make a huge difference compared to bog standard T55/62/72 usage but the captured and hit T90s were both manned by a militia (possibly either bought by or being tested for Iran) and the other ones in use seem to be by Tiger Force which are elite units, but Syrian elite units. I doubt Russians are crewing any of them outside of any guarding their bases. The Shtora jamming system is pretty old and shouldn't work against certain atgms including TOW- the T90 that was hit had Shtora but was hit full on by the TOW- it also has practical limitations as to how long it can operate continuously especially in a desert type situation. That T90 was likely saved by its Kontakt-5 ERA (theoretically effective against tandem warheads like TOW2) instead as well as being hit on the front turret rather than lower on the hull. There's a pic of it after recovery showing some of the damage. You can tell the Russians were pretty pleased with its performance since the video of the hit even got uploaded to RT.

Turkish losses are up to 16 from yesterday now, and they had 2 Leo2's (slight/ potential NSFW warning for link, I can't see any bodies present but could be missing one) captured too, though supposedly they were destroyed later by airstrikes. The additional knocked out Leo2 from yesterday is confirmed now as well, side hit from a Metis- probably- or maybe even a Malyutka. So that's likely seven, six confirmed, Leo2's lost out of 35 that are known to have been committed. They're not absolutely top of the line models, but then ISIS doesn't have much in the way of top line ATGMs either. Doesn't compare that well to the T90 experience from the government side where one has been captured in an unusable state and one probably damaged beyond repair- another survived a direct hit from a TOW to the front turret, gun was likely unusable after though.

I don't want to be too nitpicky; but I would certainly hope that when looking for an 'inevitable' collapse to compare the current situation to it would happen a little faster than the time between Caesar and Constantine- a mere 350 odd years. That's an awful long time for a gradual collapse, especially since that time frame includes mediocre leaders such as, er, Augustus, Hadrian, Trajan etc and the period when Rome was indisputably at its strongest. If anything the problem with later Rome was that it didn't even bother trying to assimilate the new settlers and treated them with utter contempt, thought themselves inherently superior, stole from them etc etc leading to such utterly pointless wasteful and unnecessary imbecilities as happened at Adrianople. A more rational and less born to the purple attitude and Rome could easily have survived. Would have helped if they didn't continually kill off all the half way competent leaders (Stilicho, Aetius, Majorian) as well. (I think Merkel's open door policy was moronic, but comparisons to Rome aren't so much not in the same ballpark as not in the same city)

They conquered them by force (mostly), but they didn't assimilate them by force. The Empire had a few rules like 'no human sacrifice' but generally allowed conquered people to keep their own culture so long as they didn't fight Rome and paid their taxes etc. They'd (generally, again) lose their own culture fairly rapidly in any case, but such is the nature of assimilation. Their success was such that you had emperors from every corner of the Empire without anyone batting an eyelid- Hadrian was Spanish, Constantine was Thracian, Severus was African etc etc. And I'm not quite sure which Roman Empire you're thinking of which didn't rely on 'migrants' to do the stuff Romans wouldn't; foreign slaves- by definition, since Roman citizens could not be enslaved- were doing the jobs Romans wouldn't do for multiple, multiple centuries prior to the collapse of the WRE.

Bro, Rome successfully assimilated most of western and southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East from the time of the Social War (~90BC) and it was a successful model up until... 370ish AD? Probably not the example you're looking for, really.

14 Turkish soldiers were killed in Al Bab yesterday, doubling the total killed since they entered Syria- possibly including another Leopard 2 loss as well which would make 5 in total (3 confirmed). Since Al Bab is a moderate sized town small city (~50k) it puts the difficulties of taking Mosul into perspective and makes the SDF taking Manbij (~150k) and the Syrians recapturing East Aleppo (~1 million) in about the same time Turkey and allies have been trying to take Al Bab into perspective.

Russia bribed some Chechens to fight other Chechens who could not be bought- that is the secret of the 2nd Chechen War and the ongoing counter insurgency. It's also an ancient strategy used since earlier than the Roman Empire (eg a large proportion of the army Alexander fought at Granicus was actually Greek, not Persian, though it obviously wasn't a successful tactic there). Chechnya is not really a good example as that was a fully fledged war with identified leaders instead of a few radicals hiding in a general population. Plus, everyone has been trying to kill Baghdadi/ 'Ibrahim' for 2 years and most have been trying to kill Zawahiri for longer without success; and despite Russian success in the conventional part of the Chechen War it's still an ongoing problem so far as terrorism goes. People would take Germany's terrorism problem over Russia's every day of the week.

He's been released. There's been enough time that they probably did a DNA test and it didn't match any in the truck- and if so then he obviously didn't do it. It does leave the rather inescapable conclusion that whoever the driver was he's still out there.

"LMAO All this talk about 'faithkless electors' against Trump and it 'faithless el;ectors' who thumped Clinton. LMAO" If my options as an elector were The Hillary and The Donald I'd have voted for Colin Powell as well, and eaten any fine. Not many people who get hacked come out of it looking better than they did before- certainly not the DNC or Podesta. Might be something to learn there for the next election cycle.

"Nah. he is the ONLY president to allow a forgein government to hack an US election." Having watched his press conference I'm not sure what Obama's position actually is, since he says that Wikileaks had the DNC leaks before the Russians did the hacking, to whit: Which fits perfectly with Seth Rich leaking the docs as Assange claimed, but not with Russia 'hacking' the DNC to influence anything as pretty much everyone else is claiming. And at least like General Hayden admitting the US won the 1996 election for that inebriated cretin Boris Yeltsin he's passably honest, on that at least. That only leaves John 'p@ssw0rd' Podesta's emails being hacked as potentially the Russian's responsibility and there's literally nothing you can do to stop a private individual working for a private entity being that sort of abject moran. Seems there's been a deliberate policy to obfuscate from Hillary's supporters in the press with selective leaking to target and dicredit two of their favourites: Wikileaks and Russia. Indeed, Politifact [sic] went so far as claiming Podesta's emails were released to obfuscate Trump's "grab them by the [kitty cat]" video using a WL tweet on their release as reference. Unfortunately, Wikileaks actually released them hours before making the announcement tweet and thus before that video was released- so if there was obfuscation going on it had to be in the reverse direction. A such I rate Politifact's fact check as: complete bollocks.

I'm vaguely disappointed that 'Caligula' isn't about the roman emperor. The achievement list would have been, uh, unique if it were.

As per Barti, Sanders did say he'd support the eventual nominee, ie Hillary, when the time came and if he lost. He did that, and nobody has seriously complained about him doing so half heartedly. Had he decided to shank Hillary instead it would undoubtedly be him being blamed for her loss, and being accused of being disloyal or whatever. That would be the perfect excuse for a 'no change' policy from the Dem's establishment- which we've kind of got anyway, with Putin being blamed and Hillary winning the popular vote, but not to such an extent. If he actually were a socialist firebrand then might have gone kamikaze on Hillary anyway but when it comes right down to it he was a fairly standard Euro style social democrat who would fit in fine with Labour here or in the UK, and he'd probably be a bit too right wing for the traditional French Socialists. He's only a radical socialist by comparison with mainstream US politics where things like Single Payer Health is just wacky, crazy talk rather than mainstream like most of the rest of the developed world.

Nah, that would be Trump. Winners always end up doing the most about faces as they have the biggest potential by far to do so, and Trump isn't draining the swamp as he promised. Hillary would have flipped on stuff as well, of course, had she had the opportunity. All Bernie did was pick the least offensive corporate candidate over the more- and in the US system that's about all you realistically can do. Anything else is like, well, puling about winning the popular vote when everyone knows that it's not how you measure victory. In theory it's a valid complaint, in practice, that's just how things work. On the supposed Russian hacking, I am somewhat amused that the reason given by Michael Hayden for why Putin would be involved was that when the US did it the President had to give approval. Not exactly a claim to moral superiority there, either.

It probably had more to do with bad weather and thus limited air support being available and the Russian sapper team and their supporting troops finishing their job and withdrawing a few days before the attack started. ISIS is opportunist, and can pick their place to attack in a situation like Palmyra where a large area has to be defended by relatively few troops so can get local numerical superiority every time. Palmyra is also far more useful to ISIS than the government since it's a road junction and they controlled most of the roads into it already; it's only really useful to the government as propaganda or if they wanted to try and get to their besieged troops in Deir Ez Zor (which they don't, at present, as that involves 100km of utterly undefendable desert road through ISIS territory). If ISIS really committed 4000 troops to the attack there was no practical way they weren't going to take it, the government simply can't have similar numbers of troops in the dozen or so vulnerable spots on their front line with ISIS. Some of those involved in the attack may well have come from Iraq though, via the road that was deliberately left open from Mosul until the shia militia stopped it. While that was a deliberate US policy to funnel ISIS towards Syria it's also a perfectly legitimate strategy to minimise fighting in Mosul as well. It definitely wasn't an attack to try and derail the Aleppo offensive, Palmyra just plain isn't important enough and Aleppo was to most purposes finished already; if they wanted to do that an attack on the Kanasar/ Ithiriya road would have happened instead as it's the only route into Aleppo controlled by the government.

They weren't frontal hits, so armour would be considerably less. There's some variance in sources for how much armour Turkey's Leo2's have, but it seems that a Konkurs could just penetrate their Leo2A4 even from the front- so practically, probably not- and both Konkurs and Fagot (plus Toophan which ISIS may have some of) could from the side/ rear. Kornet (and TOW2) could destroy them from a front angle, and so could even some recoilless rifles/ RPGs. The Leopards are certainly a lot more protected than the Pattons that are the alternative though, especially when it comes to crew survivability if they are hit.

If the benchmarks for Kaby Lake are accurate it may well be a good time for an AMD release since there seems to be (very close to) no improvement at all over Skylake. Presumably- hopefully for me since I'll be buying Q1 2017- Intel will cut prices as a sweetener, depending on how Zen turns out Kind of amused with the renaming though, since Ryzen is ~'zero' in Japanese (eg Mitsubishi A6M 'Reisen' == 'Zero' WW2 fighter) and thus doesn't have the best connotations- and it doesn't sound that much like 'rising'. Should have gone for Zenpai, or better given it a trademarked code name in the first place.

Cornets captured from the Syrians? I doubt they have a whole lot of them. Consensus seems to be Konkurs or even Fagot rather than Kornet- so soviet era rather than more modern like the Kornet. I don't think there's any video of the launcher so no proof either way. They seem to be short enough on ATGMs that they're rationed and they don't 'waste' them on soft targets, but they do seem to be able to produce them when needed against armour.

Licensed. It's a limited license too, don't think that mobile or (current) movie tie ins are included nor pre-existing agreements, hence things like Lego Force Awakens from WB rather than EA and no TFA tie in game from EA. A new Kotor would have to come from EA though. At this point I'd just expect new games (or perhaps remakes), TOR and the Revan novel muddy the waters too much and would have to be either incorporated or fully and permanently invalidated. On the positive side there are certainly people quite high up who do know and care about the Kotors, SW Rebels last season used Malachor (and a variant of the Trayus Academy no less) as their finale location.

All it needs now is an animated gif of Trump wiggling a sausage suggestively.

To be fair, that is exactly what you would expect those fleeing to say if their well being depends on pleasing the government, as it is what the government would want them to say and means that they didn't actually support the rebels so should be just left alone after fleeing. I have very little doubt personally that many east Aleppo residents were forcibly held, but such statements have to be taken with a grain of salt. As do wholly unsourced (well, there are some pictures provided but they're clearly of bodies that have been recovered, not massacred as there's too little blood in situ and some are decomposing while others are, uh, fresh) accusations of 'massacres' and 'genocide' from the other side, of course. Parroted acritically by the non 'fake news' media, of course, who will then be baffled by why nobody believes them later. Looks like ISIS has knocked out 2-3 Turkish Leopard 2 tanks in Al Bab as well. 2 seem pretty definite (video evidence) and one has been admitted to by the Turks which seems to be a separate incident. It's fairly significant because they are Turkey's best tanks and they don't have anything better protected.

I agree, more or less- and especially because a lot of the same people seem to like Deus Ex Original's ending, which was functionally identical- but there are some pretty big differences between the endings with respect to AI and the like. Having the Reapers stay around to help with reconstruction and everyone (?) being part synthetic is one ending, that's hugely different from having all AI destroyed which is another. triggered

The funny thing is that they will have to address this in the games to come, if any more are made at all after this. Timetravel. I bet the next Mass Effect series after Andromeda will be about timetravel. Just so that Bioware don't have to do choice and consequence from previous games or come up with new setting. Going by current industry direction there'd be remasters of the original Mass Effect series, then remasters of ME: Andromeda after that... As it is if they do want to revisit the Milky Way they'll have best part of a decade (assuming an Andromeda trilogy) between the end of ME3 and any revisiting. Most will either have forgotten what they chose or not have save games by then, so problem solved and they can just pick whatever one they like. Can't say I really care much either way, so long as they don't go the Deus Ex: IW route and decide that all the endings happened despite it making no sense.

Looks like Aleppo is fully back under government control. Pretty quick in the end, about the same amount of time as Manbij or Fallujah (2008) once the siege was established and despite even the rebel held areas being bigger than both those cities combined. Their biggest win of the Civil War since 2013 at least. The government did manage to lose Palmyra to ISIS, though it's strategically irrelevant unless they want to get to the Euphrates and pretty hard to hold unless they were willing to commit lots of troops. ISIS supposedly committed about 4000 troops to taking it so 10 times as many as they captured Ramadi or Mosul with. On the other hand the T4 (Tiyas) airbase a few km up the road is extremely important (if of limited functionality at present due to ongoing runway upgrades), if ISIS can take that it would be a major win.

There isn't any. Even the 'anonymous source' on whom the reports are based actually says that the only evidence they have is that a private Russian hacking group was involved. That's why you have the dichotomy between what the FBI and CIA say- the FBI is concerned with what can be proven legally, which is ironically how Hillary didn't get charged, while the CIA is concerned with what they think happened rather than what they can prove happened. The last is equally ironic (more so, with regards to the CIA complaining about others interfering in elections) as that and politically mandated group think was exactly how the Saddam/ WMD BS happened. Podesta's password was- literally- 'p@ssw0rd'. It wouldn't exactly take Skynet to hack him.

Erdogan gonna Erdogan, basically, all his pet groups in Syria are named after Turkish sultans like Murad and Zengi and he thinks that- and Putin- is the template to follow. The bombs were from TAK- Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, deniable PKK splitter group that uses suicide bombers. It pretty clearly wasn't ISIS once you knew they waited until there weren't civilians around, ISIS would have just blown up police and fans without blinking while TAK at least target military/ police targets with their terrorism. Citing a wikipedia article (!) in which the single line supporting you has citation needed (!!) is at least more imaginative than your usual efforts. It's earned you an actual response, well done.