Gorth

Berlin was a bit atypical, as most sources include the half a million surrendering German troops as casualties (which is technically correct, as they are no longer an available asset). Atypical because there wasn't really a lot of German held territory nearby to retreat to anymore. Looking just at dead and wounded, it still was an expensive price for victory to pay. Also, most sources only focus on the battle in the city, not the advance towards the city... Best estimates I could find (Quora) are only for the final battle of Berlin (the city itself). The advance or rather the race towards Berlin was considerably more costly in Soviet lives, as neither Konev nor Zhukov cared about casualties incurred in the race to be the first to actually reach Berlin. Sadly Google is not your friend, as any and all search involving the words Soviet and Berlin all leads to the same 20 sites only covering the battle in the city, not the battle to get to the city. The battle for Berlin itself: Germany's Strengths: 1,000,000 soldiers (also children and elderly) 10,400 artillery 1,500 tanks 3,300 aircraft Casualties and Losses: Exact losses unknown But i will try to give the closest number Estimate: Between 320,000 to 400,000 killed or wounded Around 500,000 POW Around 700+ tanks Between 1,500 to 2,500 Aircraft Artillery losses unknown Soviet's Strengths: 2,500,000+ Soldiers 41,600+ Artillery 6,250+ Tanks 7,500 +Aircraft Casualties and Losses: 360,000+ dead or missing 2,000+ tanks 2,108 artillery pieces 900 to 1500+ aircraft

/sigh The old terminology debate. Didn't we already have this one 20 years ago when the forum was new??? Let me add some fuel to the fire and call RTS games for action games, the "strategy" part of the name being completely false advertising 😝

You can add Leningrad, Unternehmen Zitadelle (Kursk) and the battle of Berlin to the list. All strategic victories... gained at loss ratios between 2:1 and 5:1 depending on the battle. As said, throw enough bodies at the fight, and you may just make the other guy despair and give up.

This ❤️❤️❤️ (I still love my old Saitek X-52 stick/throttle combo)

Probably the closest Israel came to a real peace agreement (the Oslo Accords). Both Rabin and Arafat had come to the conclusion, that continuing the conflict would make nobody other than the respective populist factions on each side happy. Conflict and fear is the bread and butter of populist leaders, they need an abundance of it in order to gain power. Creating it, if it isn't there and encouraging it at every opportunity. I do not doubt for a moment, that peace rearing it's ugly head led somebody to motivate a man with an UZI to kill Rabin "for the cause".

Yeah. The second one pretty much picks up where the first one left off... not a direct continuation, but you get it indirectly as things referenced and happening in the background, enabling you to work out what happened to some of the main characters of the first game. No small feat considering Obsidian didn't get to play the first game until development of the second game was already somewhat progressed.

I have both games and I've played both games through a few times. The second one more so, especially after a few restored content mods (for me a must). The first one has less bugs, but the story is... not good (imho) and the characters feels paper thin so to speak (very 2 dimensional). Biggest crime for me was an encounter which they repeated in Mass Effect 3... you beat the living snot out of the boss and use his face to wipe your boot soles clean, after which the game designer decided "oh, thanks for winning, but you have now lost". And then proceeds as if you lost the fight. Pissed me off no end in both games. The second one has a horrible first map, which I struggled to get through the second and subsequent times (it's a mystery/whodunnit kind of thing and after knowing the background it becomes a grind to do again when the mystery is no more). Apart from the first map, the story is way more up my alley and it has some rather memorable (if criminally underused) Sith Lords and protagonists. Just listen to @Gromnir waxing lyrical about Kreia 😁 I hope somebody some day do a if not a remake, then a spiritual successor to the second game (the swtor mmo sort of continued the first game) Edit: About the mods, it feels like almost a third of the game ended up in the cutting room, because of some extreme deadline requirements, like a year or less. The bugs are many and the wtf? moments too, when you feel something is missing (not kidding, it's obvious in several situations, more was supposed to happen).

it worked for the Soviet Union and it was more or less how they won WWII... throw enough stuff at the Germans and eventually they will run out of bullets.

Part of the problem is people see groups like Hamas as the cause of the conflict, rather than a symptom of a much longer lasting conflict that has been going on for 6+ decades.

Is Guy Fawkes day coming up soon?

That guys sounds very Danish 😂 Watching the rest of the video sort of confirmed it, if nothing else, the book title for the book he just managed to do a moments product placement for 😝

There is a kind of perverse irony in Israel stealing all the thunder, the attention (and ammunition), giving Russia a big helping hand. Not knowing any better, you would think Putin instigated this new conflict as part of some big, cunning plan... which of course it isn't, we're talking about a guy who screwed up a simple invasion despite an initial advantage on every metric that mattered at the time...

Keys are the key to success 😂 Ok, they are only part of the recipe for living happily ever after. Don't throw the predictions out of whack by ruining the statistics (used for the optimized pre-fetch routines internally) and if you have at your disposal, set up some data cubes that gets updated with key information over time, rather than all 1 billion on that day you want to leave early 😝 Assuming a fair sized client, they would have their stuff in a SAN. Are the data files, log files, tembdb etc. each on their own RAID10's ???

Those AI's are getting sneakier and sneakier... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67302788 Or should I say, they are becoming more "human"? This is not meant as a compliment 😖 "In a demonstration at the UK's AI safety summit, a bot used made-up insider information to make an "illegal" purchase of stocks without telling the firm. When asked if it had used insider trading, it denied the fact." I.e. the AI cheated and when confronted with it, lied and denied it had cheated 😂

I saw there was 3 new episodes out, but it looked more like the start of a third season? Haven't watched them yet

I don't remember seeing these guys often here...

A subject that has been frustratingly hard to find reliable sources on... https://www.wired.com/2013/10/dwave-nasa/ Tl;dr; the US government ordered some computers and AI projects shut down recently (Skynet says "Hello humans, I come in peace") Google's Quantum Computer in Limbo After Government Shutdown Google just barely dodged a bullet. The NASA team booted up their D-Wave Two just days before the federal government shutdown would have put a complete stop to the project. But with NASA and Ames almost completely shut down, it's not exactly clear what's happening with the machine. ...

Ooh, kinky! Wonder what kind of cosplay that was for 😁

😂 👍

Looks like the perpetrator of the attack on the Finnish-Estonian gas pipepline has been identified... https://apnews.com/article/finland-estonia-china-vessel-baltic-sea-gas-pipeline-39334c9c565753c7e189c6efc302e43e "Anchor of Chinese container vessel caused damage to Balticconnector gas pipeline, Finnish police say"

It (the still picture) made me scratch my head too, but then I remember a previous video I saw. Those things are built in the US, Europe and wherever Iveco is from (AU has no manufacturing industry worth mentioning). That, or the picture is flipped on it's x-axis edit: more what you would expect it to look like in it's "natural environment". Never mind half the time, they're probably running on dirt roads without hard surfaces

JuiceMedia's take on where humanity is headed...

We don't really have an economics/business thread, but I guess it is tangentially related to politics, as I suspect it will inevitably become a headache for politicians, not just in Beijing https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67191262 The Chinese property developer Evergrande owes more than $325bn (£269bn). That's more than Russia's entire national debt. For two years, the company has been lurching from crisis to crisis, repeatedly failing to make payments on its multi-billion dollar loans. Now its billionaire chairman is under police surveillance, its shares are practically worthless and more than a million people in China are still waiting for their homes to be completed. I guess my first question would be, why was there so little (none) oversight with this company's dealings and doings?

Only in Australia... go big or go home 😁

The long running war between Canada and Denmark over Hans Island ended with a peace agreement recently. No war crimes have been brought forth to any international tribunals ☮️ edit: as a result of the peace treaty Canada and Denmark now share a land border