Zoraptor

This is extremely funny, considering what your reaction is if someone 'but both sides' the Ukrainian situation. Oh yeah, and 'both sided' it without mentioning holodomor as background. Just admit Turkey is too important to offend, you need Azeri gas and Armenia isn't as important as Ukraine so a bit of light ethnic cleansing is OK and be done with it. Because that's certainly the politicians' attitude, they just won't state it. (It's not very similar to what happened in Ukraine at all. Want to paint the Azeris as the Ukrainian equivalent? Poor victims fighting bravely against a country with... hmm, a quarter their population, while backed by a country with 30x Armenia's population and armed forces literally 25% of Armenia's entire population? Doesn't really fit, now does it? And you can't paint the Armenians as Ukraine equivalents either, they fit even worse. This is that cognitive dissonance thing I was talking about at work) Crimea voted to leave Ukraine in 1991 in a perfectly legitimate referendum, lest we forget. Got suppressed at rifle point and memory holed by the media, but it did happen.

Orban's always struck me as mostly having a problem with the EU, not NATO. Really no comparison at all between Hungary and Turkey, who really would block Sweden and Finland and quite obviously intend to leverage it for all they can. And, of course, Cyprus is permanently blackballed by Turkey, with the puppet unrecognised Turkish republic in their north dating back to well before RTE started selling watermelons, let alone became a politician. EU might think they have issues with Orban and a few others, just imagine Erdogan being there and the problems... don't look that bad any more.

None of those are the major backer of Azerbaijan. (As soon as Article 4 is accepted Turkey will intervene on Azerbaijan's behalf, and as soon as that happens Armenia is fundamentally indefensible, which is obvious to anyone looking at a map. By conventional means, at least. Now, even though the situation should not trigger Article 5 and thus shouldn't bring NATO in do you really want a nuclear staredown between people as intransigent as Erdogan and Putin? Because that is what it would take, literally the threat of mushroom clouds over Baku and Ankara- and more- until they withdrew. The current situation may be crappy, but it's better than that. Sadly, the only country that might be willing to actually fight for Armenia is Iran, and that is a double edged sword for obvious reasons; them intervening would instantly make the Azeris the good guys so far as the west is concerned even if the Azeris are cheerfully 1915ing the Armenians, and that would almost certainly... bring in Turkey as well, so either way Armenia is still screwed. I eagerly await the energy boycotts of Azerbaijan and massive western supply of weapons to Armenia per Ukraine, or maybe ignoring the UNSC to bomb the Azeris civilian infrastructure to prevent ethnic cleansing per Kosovo. The energy boycott probably would make a difference since ultimately that's how Aliyev's government maintains itself, but satan will be icedancing before that happens)

lol Armenia is just an awful example because... who is the major backer of Azerbaijan? No, not major western ally Israel, they're its second biggest backer (mostly in the hope they'll, double lol, invade Iranian Azerbaijan), but important NATO member with its [belated edit, 2nd, obviously] largest military, Turkey. For anyone who thinks NATO- or the EU, or individual western countries- will do anything at all for Armenia I present the Syrian Kurds who did 99% of the dying on behalf of the 'international coalition' in Syria yet have been and are being hung out to dry by them now. Of course, you don 't hear much about it, now, because it ain't Trump doing it, it's Biden. Who was going to stand up to Erdogan and MbS, and instead is kissing their ring about as badly as Trump did. Oh yeah, and who do you think is a major supplier of gas to Europe? Azerbaijan. Doesn't matter how many times Macron phones Pashinyan to express support, c'est la carte blanche for the Azeris in realityland. Only worse example would actually be the Syrian Kurds not being protected by Russia. Because guess who's been cheerily blowing up civilian infrastructure like power stations in their revenge for a bombing- carried out by a religious arab woman whose brother is a commander of the Turkish sponsored FSA and two other brothers fought for ISIS and who had been repeatedly contacted by the Turkish Nationalist Party; supposedly on behalf of atheist anarchist Kurds? Yep, it's NATO member Turkey. Let's see how long it takes for the Euroweenie Parliament to declare them a terrorist state, shall we? My money is might get passed just before earth gets swallowed up when the sun goes nova, but only might. Mmm, I do love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning. I eagerly await all the accusations of whataboutism from the usual suspects who can't cope with the cognitive dissonance.

The damage was to the reputation for informational integrity more than anything. Which is pretty important if that's what your job relies on but doesn't really alter any facts on the ground. Firstly there's a massive amount of information pushed by anonymous sources 'vetted' by the press in exactly the same way that information was vetted, now every bit of that should get the skepticism warranted (uh, haha no). Then there was the... intemperate reaction from the Ukrainians which did a lot of reputational damage and may have done some actual political damage too. Nothing quite like hearing that every person saying it was a Ukrainian missile is peddling conspiracy theories- basically a direct quote from Kuleba- and Zelensky going almost as far when those Russian shills are the US and NATO military. And thirdly, as much as the media tried to massage the later parts of the story away from their initial reactions you could not miss that they'd bought wholesale into an inaccurate story without showing much critical thinking about it at all.

The dlcs are better than the base game and are, certainly for dlc, pretty long and involved. Their issue is that the base game isn't quite good enough for 'more of the same, but better' to be really worth it at the point you're likely to play them. So yeah, a bit of s struggle at points. Main issue with the base game: just too much combat. It's certainly not that the combat is bad per se, it's OK; but it's too long, too much, too repetitive and there's not really enough other stuff post combat to make it worthwhile. Then add in respawning so you get to do a lot of the combat again... Outer Worlds is the absolute classic example of a game where nothing is really good, but also nothing is really bad. Which ends up being a bit disappointing because most Obsidian games even when they had significant problems also had stuff which was really good to balance it out. Still, the building blocks are there and a sequel with the quality of the dlcs and maybe 2/3 the combat would be very much worthwhile.

I'd unironically buy a Yeston card because of the 'art'.

Turkey has been bombing the Kurds in Syria again in response to the bombing last week in Istanbul*. That was a bombing supposedly carried out by a headscarf wearing (ie religious) arab who had been contacted multiple times by the Turkish nationalist MHP party (claimed to be a wrong number due to her having the same name as someone else...), supposedly done on behalf of the Kurdish atheist PKK. And the suspect had very obviously been beaten up (at best) when 'confessing'. *Whatever you do don't read the BBC article, utter garbage that reads like it was dictated by Erdogan.

It doesn't, per below, but there's wiggle room/ justification if the killings happened spontaneously under a belief of threat. There isn't really anything to cite about that, that's just the general principle that you cannot expect people in a warzone to not respond to a threatening situation. eg you're not allowed to shoot children either- but if a kid is shooting at you you can respond because you don't have an obligation to let yourself be killed. Since there's been a lot of misinformation about it, those surrendering are definitely PoWs by that point in the legal sense, per Article 5, and should not be shot unless there was a reasonable threat justifying it. Search etc is irrelevant, except to perceived threat. Shooting them after the fact would therefore be illegal, so if they really were all shot in the head afterwards having not moved it would very likely be a war crime. Just one that would very likely be too hard to prove. emphasis added. And Perfidy from GCP1, since that has come up pretty often as a justification for executing the soldiers Perfidy won't apply to those on the ground unless they were actively involved. Them all still lying on the ground and seemingly not having moved much at all very strongly suggests they weren't. I think the general observation would be that if a bunch of Ukrainian soldiers got shot in similar circumstances after someone not wearing their uniform opened fire during a surrender the interpretation of facts would be... significantly different from some, even with the same evidence.

That's mentioned in the Beeb article. Impossible to know what was actually happening from the footage, especially since the guy shooting was clearly not in a normal Russian uniform and may be not in a uniform at all. Could be justifiable under Perfidy (to whit faking surrender) but that's generally only applicable to those, well, faking surrender and most of the dead soldiers don't seem to have been faking. Also justifiable if they were shot incidentally which is... unlikely in this case. If the incident was finished and they were genuinely surrendering and were clearly doing so and remained doing so by taking no part and remained prone etc and then were executed it could be a war crime. There's definitely enough doubt as to the circumstances for it not to be prosecuted even if that were the case. Frankly, there are far more clear cut cases that are not going to get prosecuted than this one. Reckon that horse has well and truly bolted but as above probably not in this case.

The only way they could have proven there was no corruption was to do the right thing and award the WCs to England and the US! I'm always reminded of the situation when Australia was part of the Oceania Confed and constantly complained about not having the FIFA rep from it, eventually (partly) leading to them leaving for Asia. Oddly enough the non Australian rep corruptly distributed money to the other countries leading to him getting returned as rep all the time instead of honestly giving 90% to Australia as the most important country. Budweiser? What's the fuss about then, they weren't going to sell beer at the stadiums anyway.

It can also be avoided by designing the socket/ pins properly, eg a simple end user error can't have a live and unearthed 3 pin electrical plug because the earth pin is longer than the live ones, so if it is not engaged the live ones cannot be either. If there's no way to prevent a bad connection and no indication of a good connection end user error is inevitable and it's badly designed. It's just badly designed by pcisig instead of/ as well as nVidia.

Doesn't seem to mean much except them deciding a US based studio is better off* being managed in the US rather than in Germany, which makes a reasonable amount of sense. If it's just the ownership that is being transferred internally it's similar to Embracer giving the Deus Ex IP to Eidos Montreal; just shifting stuff around internally. *Plenty to complain about in Gearbox's management of course, but then Deep Silver isn't called Derp Silver for no reason either.

Russia really doesn't seem to be running short of cruise missiles, or at least no shorter than they were meant to be after one week. They just fired off ~100 supposedly after all. Kh-22 (the anti ship missiles) is nowhere near like for like with S3/400. It's got more than twice as much explosive as a cruise missile, literally literally 1t of HE. They've got a lot of built in margin of error for accuracy from that. The only similarity is their relevance to their original role; a Kh-22 is defunct as an anti ship missile and the short range S-300 missiles are- for Russia- defunct as SAMs so can be used at basically zero cost.

Heh, our news has just downgraded it to "Russian made" missile rather than "Russian". Yes, the longer range versions definitely can be used for ground attack in theory. End of the day you can use any missile for ground attack in theory though, due to gravity. They've just never been used for it before, they would be a really weird choice for a precision attack and there are far better alternatives (ie drones) if you don't want as big a bang as a cruise missile. The only scenarios that would make sense are failed AD from Russia or Ukraine, not ground attack.

The long range versions aren't being used for ground attack though- hence the 85km range Malc cited. The debris matches a 5v55R, which Russia uses for ground attack and Ukrainian uses for AD. Don't think it's anywhere near solid enough to say definitively it is debris from that model, but if it is it has to be Ukrainian as a Russian one physically could not fly that far. There's a workable scenario below where it is a Russian long range missile, that just isn't a very likely scenario. At this point near definite they (if there actually were two) were S-300 missiles. The debris is a near precise match, crater fits, everything. They would not have been fired in ground attack mode, but they could still have been Russian missile(s) fired at Ukrainian planes. Fundamentally not very likely- long way away, Ukrainian planes always fly low, missiles have a self destruct- which to be sure doesn't always work...) but possible. Far, far more likely to be Ukrainian AD missiles though.

Most amazing thing about that drone was that something that old still worked. Well, kind of, since whoever used it it wasn't meant to go to Croatia. The chances are certainly miniscule of hitting anything accidentally, but they wouldn't have to be hundreds of km off course. Lviv is ~50km away and it was definitely targeted, so it would only have to be 10s ok km off target. The crater in Przewodów definitely isn't from a cruise missile though, way, way too small. For comparison, a tomahawk crater (also with ~450kg warhead) looks like this which isn't even close size wise, conservatively a tenth the explosive force. Which puts it potentially into suicide drone territory, but the wreckage certainly doesn't match that. Still could be Russian as they have several air launched missiles in the appropriate warhead range, but they also have to be fired from pretty close (10s of km; main issue is that I haven't heard anything about Russian warplanes near Lviv ever. It's always been cruise missiles hitting that deep in Ukraine). OTOH a S-300 crater looks like this (note: using a Ukrainian source) which... matches just about perfectly. Theoretically a Russian S-3/400 (especially) firing from Belarus could fly that far, but it would far more likely be Ukrainian AD if so.

Yeah, that's not damage from the 400kg of explosives a Kh or Kalibr carries. That's tens of kg at most so if it was Russian and targeted it would have to be a 'suicide drone'. Otherwise debris from an interception, or the interceptor itself. Which happens pretty regularly, even with faultless wunderwaffe (obv not actually a patriot here).

Fair enough. Guess we won't get the BBC insisting it's a remote controlled Ukrainian boat this time. lol at the commentator authoritatively claiming Russia was trying to destroy the generators though, the power station is on the Russian side of the dam. You're still in whackadoodle land over the casualties though.

Sigh. You can't tell what damage was done previously since there's no comparison available. Which is what I was complaining about. As previous, your 'November 3' picture is at best from months before that claimed date. All the other publicly available and recent pics don't show the northern side at all. Yeah, Maxar says, but as below, saying is one thing, it being true is another. Particular lol at those saying there are no northern sluice gates so the dam itself is actually damaged, eg Ukrainian Pravda living up (down) to their soviet pedigree. 1) Fundamentally, you don't need the breakwater/ embankment if there aren't sluices, since no current --> no undercutting of the bank. So, logically there are sluices. 2) Practically, there are literally literally pictures of the dam spilling water on its northern side, eg. And yes, that's 100% the northern side, unless the Dniepr has started running uphill... For extra lols, one from, uh, RFE/ RL too, which is even more unequivocal. There are sluices on the northern side, qed. (For anyone wondering how much time I'm wasting on 'research' that was cunningly hidden away behind the arcane facade of "Nova karkhovka dam" DDG image search. Literally took 15 seconds to find a picture of the dam spilling water on its northern side... Now to see how many outlets run with the UP story without actually checking. I'm going to put $10 on the local TV news doing so at least) Please. No one is going to say that I uncritically spout whatever the US military says as gospel, because I patently don't. In no way shape or form are they 'my' numbers because they don't come from a source I'm inherently biased towards. That's not exactly true with you and UkMOD/ Zelensky though. This leads to some pretty... inconsistent opinions I'm afraid. You're saying that Russian losses have to be 5:1 if they're on attack, yet are also 8:1 (or 10:1) if they're on defence. This leads to two possibilities 1) they're attacking 'pointlessly' because it costs them less soldiers than defending, which makes it not pointless. Good guy Putin, sparing his soldiers by making them attack instead of defend <-- this one makes no sense, and is wrong 2) Or your figures are just ridiculous and aren't even internally consistent with each other. <-- It's this one.

Not my claim, Mark Milley's. You know, the top general of the US. Who, yes since bugarup's criticism is fine, might be wrong; but is an expert and certainly doesn't have a reason to exaggerate Ukrainian losses or minimise Russian ones. UkMOD and Zelensky otoh have a very good reason for claiming ludicrous figures as true, not least that people actually convince themselves they're accurate whatever they are. Ukraine has been bumping their heads against Kherson for 7 months and you've been claiming 8:1 losses in their favour there. You're not even consistent in your (bad) application of military theory.

Pfft, we've had carpet that will generate electricity as you walk over it for decades.

1) Milley gave a separate figure for civilian casualties, and that was clearly not included in the 100k figure. You'd know that, if you'd read the article. 2) There isn't any wiggle room for interpretation, it's 100k soldiers on each side. The handy quote I provided- in case anyone, well, didn't read the article- makes that clear. 3) Now, to be fair, a lot of media managed to somehow leave out the "same thing probably on the Ukrainian side" part of the quote, like our TV news here, leaving Milley just saying that Russia has had 100k casualties. I provided a source with the full quote though, not the truncated one. The Ukrainian claims of 8 or 10:1 casualties are fantasy, as anyone with even a soupçon of critical thinking could very easily have guessed.

Meanwhile, back in reality... “You are looking at well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” Milley said in remarks at the Economic Club of New York. “Same thing probably on the Ukrainian side.” [source]

To see what Trump's response to being ignored by Putin would be just look at Syria 2018 where archdove Jim Mattis had to talk Trump out of attacking Russian forces there because they said they'd shoot his missiles down (on, uh, Twitter). Tends to get Occam's Broomed by anyone who wants Trump to be a Russian asset though. To paraphrase the great philosopher Viscerys I "Trump's pride has pride" and that informs all his decisions.