xthetenth

The World of Warplanes Effect.

Probably not. Really worth a try.

Yeah, my only component lighting is a blue logo on my graphics card I can disable, but I'm thinking an orange surround should make nice contrast with a blue bit in the middle. This after a case chosen for not being nerd candy (which is possibly going to end up at work).

Not all over it but there'll be LEDs inside that I can change the color on. I'm thinking a ring all around the window door opening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7WPFS3oKYQ

Basically the same as yours just slightly lower ticket. Slightly slower RAM (1866 but with good timings), 4790K, and a Gigabyte 970. Looking to put it in a Phanteks Enthoo Luxe.

Probably going to put together my upgrade in about a week or so, looking forward to exposing you guys to the horrid clutter of my desk and the glories of my USS Colorado Mousepad.

I'm pretty sure there are skyrim mods that are an ad-hoc, bug-ridden and poorly optimized version of common Lisp, as well as textures that take five gigabytes to implement very sharp versions of ugly textures. You'll find something. I'm pretty sure that MSI's overclocking and fan control program, afterburner is actually the best of any of them. Sounds very nice overall, looking forward to being bad and putting together the rest of my system.

http://forum.worldofwarships.com/index.php?/topic/11756-na-closed-alpha-test-recruitment/page__p__387042#entry387042 I'll link these threads as they happen. They seem to be pretty good odds.

Niiiiiiiiice! How are games running?

The really really fun bit about modern consoles is that they use a ton of graphics RAM and that sucks because good luck emulating that sort of thing well. The whine is noise during gaming and is the leading complaint about 970s. The MSI 970 with a similar heatsink to what you got has vastly fewer complaints per review. Like a third as many as the rest.

So something funny happened you might want to know about. Just saw someone sat down and compiled data on what percent of reviewers were having problems with coil whine on their 970s, and guess what won? That's right, the MSI! Nice pick.

The non blower MSI is gonna be a really pretty solid card that should behave overall pretty much like the ASUS if a bit worse. This is angry nerd optimization, not something that'll ruin everything forever if you don't do it. It's got the fans stop when the card's cool bios and a solidly competitive cooler.

They've got terrorists too if we stick with the definition of people who use violence and fear to further their political aims, although they tend to implicit violence, where their actions merely indirectly cause bloodshed. I tend to maintain the primary difference is how well the perpetrator sleeps however.

The longer form would require research I don't really have the schedule room for, it's a book I've heard a lot of discussion of by people with pretty sound knowledge of historical practice, but the short form of the argument is partly what's been mentioned earlier with the bumper crops of animals like the passenger pigeons, and partly discussions of carrying capacity of the land to support the people mentioned in accounts of the first explorers. Their agricultural practice was pretty awesome, Tenochtitlan was a big city supported by a mix of chinampas, which were small plots on shallow lake beds that could get up to 7 or so harvests in a year, and that whole giant lake, where a series of levees allowed pretty large-scale fish farming. This is of course partially advanced compared to the usual implications of stone age, when they were considerably more advanced than that. I do want to read the book, but I'm pretty busy these days.

I'd slightly push towards a 970 and save the difference because it's a big price increase for not a huge increase in performance. 350 bucks for a Gigabyte 970, which has the most effective cooler on load, and does a good job cooling all the chips and VRMs. Now about those 980s: The PNY is the reference design, which would be my choice for a blower type. The blower type is a bit less quiet and a bit warmer, but it doesn't vent its heat onto the motherboard, which is a bit of a plus for a system without a CPU fan blowing on it. I think the ASUS has the best open cooler, with pretty good cooling of most components and passive idle for totally quiet desktop use. The MSI (not the blower, that looks pants) is probably a decent second option, also with a passive idle. I think EVGA has their ACX 2.0 sorted out, and they stand by their products, so even though it isn't necessarily the best performer (although I think if it's got a full on ACX 2.0 it's a solid performer), it's a good safe choice. All told, I'd lean towards EVGA because it's safe, the PNY because blowers are good for peace of mind and if you're overclocking long term you don't want too much heat on the mobo VRMs, or the gigabyte 970 because it's a solid performer for significantly less money (if you don't desperately want the free game or are cool with the OC'ed version, I'd probably recommend that even with the EVGA because that cooler is awesome.

I'm pretty sure there's a lot of stuff to that effect in 1491. American civilizations were really pretty advanced as far as ecological management goes. Part of the theory of that book is that the Americas had a pretty good sized carrying capacity and a huge number of people died in the massive plague-based destruction of their society. Ponce de Leon went through a very different America than people who went later. There's a great number of things we don't think about because they've "always been that way", yet we have a huge amount of power to shift in one direction or another, and where we'd really be best off remembering that refraining from deciding what to do is in fact our decision what to do. It's like playing a game where you have the option to pass, passing every turn and expecting to win.

Honestly if they didn't have socioeconomic status a lot more groups would be getting called terrorists.

Yeah, I agree there that that'd be a very good idea. It would give us a lot more flexibility in messing around with things in the wild. The last sentence is true of basically everything though, from the environment to politics to literally everything that isn't explicitly engineering.

A game that uses the control inputs of one player with one set of eyes and one brain to do the jobs of four or five people with hopefully a proportional number of brains and eyes always makes me twitch when it claims to be hugely realistic. At that point being themed or inspired by it and being unafraid to take the game where gameplay goes is one good option (I think tanks did a relatively decent option). The other is to not try to slavishly make realistic mechanics when your simulation has massive holes in it. The goal for a realistic game should then to be to make an interface that has a realistic feel and gameplay that creates a realistic set of decisions for the player. I would contend that a game with abstracted mechanics that makes the player make the same decisions as his real life counterpart does is more realistic than a game with realistic mechanics that changes the decisions or interactions because of an incomplete simulation. For example, I tend to feel that some form of vision mechanics is a good idea in fighter sims because the FoV of the pilot isn't as small as a monitor and he has the significant advantage of knowing which way his neck is craned to have a rough idea of where his plane is pointed.

That's a gorgeous model. Is it even a kit, and if so which one is it? Stop making me want to build my Iowa. Do you even know how many little autocannons that kit has?

I'd say that even pests should if possible be kept around in limited numbers. Mosquitoes that carry malaria might be one of the very few things that is probably outright going to be worth wiping out regardless of damage to the ecosystem and food production. While we rely on agriculture for sustenance, major changes to ecosystems, implicit or explicit, should have their potential impact seriously considered. Other than that I'd say we should try to save species as grist for the genetic engineering mill. Easier to find genes that do what we want than make them. Much easier.

Yeah, I should probably at some point go ahead and get a resources post together, and believe me it'll be there, and probably a few choice things from there will get their own posts, like Stuart's one on designing a ship.

I believe the smart money from the cool kids' club was modernized 8" guns that would give some serious range if you absolutely need to make some senators feel happy, or a modernized 5" gun if you want to do it on the cheap. Battleships are a way to pay a sum of money that could give you major force projection capability and contribute meaningfully to its own defense in a way that its screens couldn't do on something that does none of those things. WWII era battleships are a great way to pay to fill a ship with 3000 people decades older than the people who would normally get those jobs with a bunch of rare technical expertise from a country where manpower is incredibly expensive and rare technical skills command large sums of money. They are an awful idea and frankly advocating for those things is like advocating for a new service halberd except halberds can be discarded in a cost-efficient manor and don't require a parallel industrial and technical skill base to support them.

I get called one a bunch on imgur for getting pissed off with the continual anti-feminist circlejerk, does that count? Frankly though it's an awful term because it really doesn't specify any defining characteristic that actually properly distinguishes the people who outright suck and are too busy playing privlege power politics or people actually just trying to tone down the hate. So it's all too easy for people to throw that title around and dismiss your opinions because you don't match the in-group's accepted opinions. Unlike hippies, which by definition are neo-luddite morons who'd rather empathize with animals than the poor because then they might be expected to actually do something to help humans.

SJW is kind of a meaningless term, since it's used to shut down debate against basically anyone arguing against the socioeconomic status quo with little rhyme or reason. A lot of people who get called that most emphatically aren't neo-luddites who prefer a good view to alleviating human suffering and are petrified of any technology that wasn't mainstream in their childhood but will blithely accept anything from then.