xthetenth

As far as truth goes, I can say that owning Chickens has reinforced my previously held conviction that life is not sacred. 

No, you're supposed to look at the supporting evidence. That book you linked? Its thesis was already featured comprehensively in a pretty good article from 2009.
 
 
http://www.salon.com/2009/06/15/neo_nazis_army/
 
And before you go "biased liberal media" the article quotes DoD documents from 2005/6:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
So really, Walter's anecdote is no mere anecdote. There was in fact a Neo Nazi problem by the 2000s - as filed by reports from the US Army itself, which wasn't resolved and was being even consistently ignored by the brass.
 
====
 
Meanwhile, here are the facts of Kyle's book.
 
First of all, it is a biography, written primarily from his own experiences and recollections. Why we've turned Belton Cooper into a punching bag and haven't done the same to Kyle, I'm not sure, but I'm not too busy hero-worshipping to apply the same level of exacting fact-checking that we've applied to SS fanfiction.
 
And really, it's not a pretty picture.
 
The first and most important thing to realize is that Kyle was found to be lying about multiple statements. He in fact was found guilty of libel against Jesse Ventura - not a man known for his credibility - because his fellow SEALs testified against Kyle. 
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2014/07/29/jesse-ventura-wins-1-8-million-in-damages-against-chris-kyle-slain-navy-seal-sniper/
 
This is before we consider the fact that he also claims to have murdered two people in cold blood in Texas (in "self defense") and said he was shooting looters during Katrina. Those who say the latter is just a joke or a tall tale would be well reminded that America just went through a couple of riots because of the possibility that police may have shot unarmed black men. Here we have a US Army sniper claiming the government authorized him to murder looters in cold blood. 
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/30/the-complicated-but-unveriable-legacy-of-chris-kyle-the-deadliest-sniper-in-american-history/
 
But really, all that really pales in comparison to the real problem of Kyle's record: His supposed 160 "official" kill score.
 
The problem is, I have found zero US Navy sources corroborating these claims, both the official tally of 160 nor his own guesstimate of 220+. In fact, US Special Forces command said this:
 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/american-sniper/facts/
 
 
 
 
 
The article then goes on to say that Kyle's co-author claims he had to verify the claims with command, but let's be frank here - we don't accept self-reported SS kill claims. Neither should we accept self-reported claims from US snipers.
 
Moreover, I have in fact tried to look for other sources to maybe try and corroborate the claims. The problem is that they all lead to even more fantastical stories and blatant inconsistencies. For instance:
 
http://projects.militarytimes.com/citations-medals-awards/recipient.php?recipientid=307606
 
One of the first things I looked at was Kyle's Silver Star citation. At first glance, looks good - 90 confirmed kills over 5 months. "Plausible". But then there's also the rough edges - only 32 overwatch missions, implying 3 kills per overwatch? Only five "snipers with scoped weapons" specifically identified? Sounds like someone is just taking Chris' words at face value and applying the loose standards for kills - which is "as long as the spotter and sniper saw someone go down, it's a kill".
 
So I took a look at the involvement of the SEALs in the above battle - Ramadi 2006 - and found this book:
 
http://www.amazon.com/The-Sheriff-Ramadi-Winning-al-Anbar/dp/1591141389
 
Which claims, on the flap cover, this:
 
 
 
 
At which point any sane SS fanfiction hunter goes "hold it, the SEALs claimed a total of 300-400 kills in Ramadi, stretching to a period beyond Chris Kyle's tour" (Kyle's tour ended in August 2006. The book and the battle stretches to Nov 2007). Is Kyle seriously someone so superhuman that he accounted for 1/3 of all SEAL kills at Ramadi despite participating only in 5 of its 24 months?! Something's fishy here.
 
And guess what? I managed to get a partial copy of the book (more specifically Google Books) and found Chris Kyle's name wasn't even in the index or in the entire damn book. You have Michael Monsoor, who won the MoH by falling on a grenade and a few other SEALs mentioned, but not Chris Kyle.
 
http://books.google.com.ph/books?id=C7rbAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA83&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
 
At which point, I really just have to call bullshit. How the hell can the sniper who supposedly accounted for 1/3 of all SEAL kills in just 5 months of operations be not included or mentioned at all in a book about SEALs in that very battle? 
 
It just doesn't come together. Worse, when I look at USMC accounts of the battle, there's hardly any mention of SEALs, so even the "Sheriff of Ramadi" version may already be overglorifying the SEAL's overall achievements as it stands.
 
Hence, there really is serious doubts about Kyle's kill count or supposed heroic status. Nobody just has the courage to actually look and call it out. And really, given his public record it looks like he made it up. Or worse, if you transplant his Katrina fantasy to Ramadi, you have Kyle acting like a terrorist sniper gunning down people as it pleased him; which the Navy then papered over with a Silver Star that none of his colleagues ever thought was deserved (again, his own fellow SEALs testified against him over Jesse Ventura). The latter is a particularly disturbing possibility when one considers April '06 coincides with the Marines deciding to loosen the rules of engagement around Ramadi with predictably bad results for the civilians - something that was realized to be a mistake.
 
So, yeah, sure, let those families with Iraq War vets try and pretend that this "American Sniper" movie is some kind of catharsis. Me, I would find it supremely ironic if the film which they thought "honored" their families was in fact featuring a protagonist who was ultimately a gun-nut fraud that in fact dishonored all of the actual serving members of the military. Life can be real cruel like that; which is why people keep buying lies in the first place.

It's not beard if it's above the eyes.

I'm hoping for Lives of Famous Whores. Suetonius is fun. (I know, chronology).
 
Serious biggest hope for Romain archaeology in general is Claudius' history of the Etruscans and/or his dictionary.

I thought that was for star wars fans who wanted to roleplay being an AT-AT.

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.

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'm firmly of the opinion that simple conservation is a railed ideology and yet another example of how hippies ruin things.
What we really need is to move away from our absurd natural/manmade mindset and really get into the nuts and bolts of designing and maintaining ecosystems.
For instance, it blows my mind that we have almost no formal studies (not eveb a good theoretical framework) for how to produce a stable, closed ecosystem. Or an ecosystem equivalent of the standardised biological parts initiative.
We're still tinkering when we should be frantically designing, essentially.

8 gigs shared high bandwidth graphics RAM in both consoles. There's gimmick cards coming out with that much already, but cards are actively using 4 gigs for the settings they can drive.
 
I'm more annoyed about the processors being AMD versions of Atom. 8 cores of that isn't much at all. At least it might teach devs to code with multiple threads cause it's the only way they're getting anything out of it.
 
The nice thing about the processor is that a platform can actually last a long time before it gets marginal. That's why I thought about getting a Haswell-E until I realized it'd make the heat output into my relatively small room more than I wanted.

Processors these days automatically throttle to lower speeds when they get too hot. With a good liquid block you'll be fine. This is a pretty good benchmark although they don't include the delta relative to the room temp unfortunately. That's on the 4770k, a much hotter chip than your 4790k. I wouldn't be surprised to see being able to run a 4.5 GHz full core OC at under 60 or even 55 C. Less than that depends on room and everything, but I've seen stuff to indicate that a 15 C drop from the 4770k to 4790 is a pretty reasonable guess. Gains get smaller at lower temperatures though, of course. Core temps in the 70s or higher are probably where you'd prefer to dial it back to get the most power/performance and longevity on the chip, so that'd be plenty for you.
 
Noctua's color is weird. I'm pretty sure the color is because they know they make some of the best stuff, so that color instantly says "I have money to burn on awesome Austrian fans and I care about the performance more than the bling". It is distinctive. I'm probably going to buy some phanteks fans in all white and stuff the noctuas in a different part of the case if the phanteks fans are as good (and I think they're close at least, better be if I'm getting a case with a bunch in it).
.
Noctua's also released later series of fans in a grey and dark grey scheme and industrial ones in black with brown grommets on the corners.
 
The Swiftech is gorgeous though, it's high end stuff (the seperate pump is actually because of copyright issues iirc).

Sounds funny to me though it might clash with the LEDs.
 
I'm gonna have to post my build when I get it going although that's about a year off for some of it. I'm thinking mine's gonna be a white case with orange lights. My graphics card is going to be all contrasty in its black and blue and I think most of the components will be too.

Yeah, of late the fact that the motherboards have control over the implementation of turbo is pretty much resulting in boards running the top turbo bin all the time. YMMV. 4.3 might be an overclock function turned on as well.
 
Tmax on cpus is usually in the high 80s to low 90s C range. If you're not actually overclocking the CPU I'd consider keeping it under 60 under load to be fine for most use (although I just got 1.5 kilos of heatsink to hang off my processor so I want it a good bit cooler than that).
 
That's weird about the drive. Not sure what's up there.

That's a thing. I've got one of these big bad beauties waiting for me to get a motherboard without the only PCIe x16 being in the first slot and therefore blocked by the cooler, and as far as I can tell that's the gold standard of air cooling. As far as I can tell it's going to cool the hell out of a CPU for overclocking as well as a closed loop water cooler until you get to E series processors (which you don't have one of).  If you're looking for a bit less aggressive option, the phanteks offerings offer pretty good price/performance and come in colors that are a bit more computer chic than 'chai latte'. The PF-TC14PE is most of the performance of the Noctua, and should do a little bit better for raw performance than that Cooler Master.
 
However these options don't look like a totally freaking awesome match for your build, so the choice is definitely yours there.
 
For closed loop, I don't think they'll do what they do as quietly as one of the Noctua or Phanteks (or a thermalright silver arrow), and I wouldn't go with the corsair one because I hear it takes $50 of fans to bring it to even with the noctua for noise (I think the cooler master Seidons are pretty decent kit for the all in one style), but the biggest thing you buy with one is the flexability in your build usually at the cost of noise. It may not be as efficient as pouring all your money into two top end 140mm radiators and fans hanging off your socket, but it lets you get the heat to a different part of the case so it isn't potentially overlapping RAM or the first PCIe slot. The nice thing about the Noctua is it has a nice compatibility list. Phanteks doesn't seem to have socket 1150 listed, pcpartpicker lists it as compatible with your mobo, but I'd do a quick check with a ruler and the dimensions listed http://www.phanteks.com/ph-tc14pe.html.
 
Also nice pick on the PSU, didn't realize how good a job eVGA were doing in that regard.
 
If you really want to go water, I'd recommend the Swiftech H240-X which starts with good fans, and is actually made of good liquid cooling equipment but set up so it's got a three year maintenance free guarantee. If the water cooling bug really bites you you can expand it too because it's actually just good water cooling gear in a compact easy to handle package.

Found this looking for what the Air Force's involvement did to the Shuttle design, seems pretty solid:
 
Why Does the Space Shuttle Have Wings?: A Look at the Social Construction of Technology in Air and Space
 
And this big beautiful archive of scanned Standard Aircraft Characteristics and other datasheets for US aircraft:
 
Standard Aircraft Characteristics Archive
 
And a paper by Ben Rich OCR'ed that I've seen a few places before:
 
The Strategic Aspect of Supercruising Flight

If you use them for the right stuff they are the single greatest change you can make for everyday feel of using a computer. They're very nice. 256 should be a pretty good size, and frankly for people who don't have them the black november deals are nuts. Even something as relatively old as an intel 530 is going to be a big deal for less than $.50 a gig, and the Samsung stuff's been nice and cheap for the high performance hotrods they are. A decent SSD from none is more of a jump than a good one from a decent one.