Father Xmas

Because you still need to pick and slot the powers on your alternate build. They can be completely different from the character's main build. Also the alternate build needs it's own set of enhancements.

I'm old enough that I had a poster of her hidden behind a more mundane poster (I think it was the original Star Wars movie poster) so my Mom wouldn't find it.

As for the photo of the outfit. Make the boots red and it's reasonable. No self respecting woman is going to fit in a skirt and the dance leotard bottom is just asking for problems plus it doesn't go seamlessly with the corset top. Sad to say but pants is just the better alternative.

Video: Jelly-Like Artificial Muscles Improve Robotic Flexibility With Rotary Motion

I live with the pain. I usually get anywhere between 44K on a bad connection to 50.6K on a good one. Usually however it's 45.2K.

Now Web Accelerators help a lot with something like reading forums or news and tech sites but it's nowhere near a 1.5M or 3.0M DSL. My folks have ATT DSL and they just got the speed boosted from 1.5M to 3.0M but I doubt they use 10GB a month much less anything close to 150GB.

And for me I'm too far from my CO for DSL. Hill in the way for satellite. Not willing to pay $25 for a wireless cap that I already exceed just with dial-up and I'm literally 30 miles away from my cable company and they promise someday to upgrade the trunks to offer us boondockers internet access.

The easiest explanation is a respec is time consuming, especially on 50s. Now imagine doing respecs on all your characters, some that may have alternate builds, and multiply that number by the time to put together a respec plan that a) takes into account the extra powers that may need slotting; b) what powers to take to to replace the Fitness pool powers you had and c) and still make it exemplarable, that is taking powers in a specific order so you don't gimp the character if you are doing Ouroboros missions or simply playing on a low level team. Then you do the respec and usually end up short on one or more types of enhancements due to the juggling of slots so you have to go to the market and see what's available or to a store simply to toss a couple of SOs for the short term.

A lot of times, I'm just happy I have the free time to log in and run a mission or two with one character for an hour or so.

The thing about 80 Plus PSUs is that they are at least tested by an outside agency that they can put out the wattage they said they can. So personally I limit my choices to 80 Plus PSUs.

The 80 Plus Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum standards are newer than the original 80 Plus standard. Before the 80 Plus campaign, even some big name PSU companies had PSUs that were only 70-75% efficient. Still a number of dirt cheap PSUs are as low as 65%.

Remember the savings in watts due to efficiency isn't just saving you a bit in your power bill but that wasted energy is radiated off as heat from you power supply. A cooler PSU is a quieter PSU and to a lesser extent, a cooler case.

Don't really understand why you are looking for 700+ watts with a system that uses a 95 watt CPU and a 160 watt video card. It's not like you can add a 2nd video card.

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Didn't mention this last night, I was half a sleep when I posted, the only drawback with that motherboard, and drawback is really too harsh of a work, is the lack of any heatsinks on the CPU + RAM voltage regulators around the CPU socket. That's the circuitry that takes the 12 volt power from the 2x4 pin CPU power connector and converts it down to voltages used by the CPU and RAM.

Now slapping heatsinks on the VRM is a relatively new phenomenon and sometimes it gets to be a tad extreme (towering heatsinks of copper connected by heat pipes) and while this is a very basic no frills motherboard it still seems a little cheap on MSI's part. At least you don't have to worry about a 3rd party CPU cooler bumping into those heatsinks.

Choose the DDR3-1600 memory. Tweeking the memory settings in the BIOS is trivial, due to their use of XMP (eXtreme Memory Profiles).

The difference in efficiency between an 80 Plus rated PSU and an 80 Plus Bronze is 2% (80% Vs 82%). If the rig was using 300 watts DC, the difference on the AC side is around 10 watts (375 Vs 365.9 watts). The big difference is design philosophy. The TP-750 is designed so it can provide nearly 100% of it's rated out as 12 volts (744 watts). The Earthwatts 650 can only supply 540 watts at 12 volts, but since you are planning to use only one video card, that's more than sufficient so either one is fine.

Everything else looks fine.

There was one I watched yesterday which was only sampled for about 15 seconds on TV news.

It certainly shows the shear power of moving water.

Instead of a mission objective spawning in the open game world, a copy of the mission is created for each team doing it. In early MMOs a queue would form to take out the boss that spawned in one spot of the game world.

It would be like if everybody who ran a particular mission had to wait around for the Ghost Ship to appear in Talos and defeat ten Lost Souls for the mission to finish and award you some awesome loot. Soon there would be crowds of teams waiting around for the Ghost Ship to appear and descend upon it like locusts and then there would be a chance for some teams not be able to defeat enough Lost Souls and need to wait for the next spawning.

I took tech wings and tried to color them bronze and dull silver (for aluminum) for my character that time skipped from the 1800s.

Gina Torres is also Mrs. Morpheus so as long as Laurence Fishburne is doing CSI there really isn't a pressing need to work beyond cameo and voice overs. Anyways she had a baby in 2007 so that can put a bit of a crimp in her career.

Thank you, I really should have mentioned the too costly aspect in my example. Engineers can over design a building or bridge to withstand forces well outside of anything their imagination can think of. Problem is the cost can quickly become prohibitive or it may simply impractical to build.

Also I should have said "that nobody was paying close attention". The Daiinch complex was designed to handle a tsunami up to around 20 feet. However the tsunami was much larger and like a river levy, it works right up to the point the water crests over it and then it's just like it was never there. Comparing sat photos from the Daini complex about 10Km to the south with the Daiichi complex shows that at Daini there was very little damage along the water front, unlike what you can see at Daiichi. I'm guessing the wave simply wasn't as high.

[rant]

If the Union of Concerned Scientists were around 400,000 years ago they would be still debating today if the discovery of fire was a good thing and whether it should be used.

Okay the aren't that bad but they are extremely conservative in the advancement of science, especially in the field of nuclear energy as well as some more modern discoveries and advances.

I've found some of their members to be over cautious to the point of paralysis. They are the kind of people who aren't willing to help fix a problem but are rather the ones that like to say "I told you so". Now if they're all so smart then help brainstorm some solutions that don't include time travel so those reactors aren't built in the first place. Nope, easier to declare defeat and throw in the towel.

[/rant]

You see in engineering, the biggest strides come from understanding failure. Why did that bridge or building collapse? Why did that engine explode? Finding out the whys allows engineers to incorporate those types of failures into future designs hopefully making the finished design more robust.

The problem with nuclear engineering is that failure has a fairly high collateral damage so the more traditional methods of "build->failure->analyze->build better" is somewhat problematic. You need the same kind of mindset that top level programmers need, not only design for what it should do but try to anticipate all the things that can go wrong and design against that. You have to worship Murphy's law and all it's corollaries. And just like programming, sometimes you can't anticipate everything that can go wrong.

Some of it is human nature. I'm sure they were so focused on restoring cooling the active reactors, the immediate and continuing problem, that nobody was paying attention to cooling the spent fuel pools, which is now becoming a problem five days in.

Actually the i7-2600K is $29 more than the i7-2600. It's the i5-2500K that's only $10 more than it's non-K counterpart.

The difference between the i7-2600 and the i5-2500? 2MB more Level 3 memory cache, 100 MHz of clock and Hyper Threading (Windows sees 8 cores instead 4). Actually buys you something in heavily multi-threaded applications but not so much in gaming, right now. May even hurt in some cases but that's the nature of HT.

Good point Dissolution.

From a price for performance perspective, AMD and Intel are pretty well matched. However the most expensive quad core AMD (at NewEgg) lists at $190 which is about where Intel's Socket 1155 quad core starts while the cheapest Socket 1156 quad core is $210. In general performance the AMD and Intel's Socket 1156 $200 CPUs are pretty well matched. However the performance of the new Sandy Bridge CPUs are faster than the old Socket 1156 i5-760 for a similar price.

Now Intel's quad CPUs start at around $200 but go up to $1000. AMD's start at $100. Intel's hex cores start at $595 and go up to $1000. AMD's hex core line, which again are priced appropriately for their performance in heavily multithreaded tasks like video compression or 3D rendering, range from $180 to $230. Intel's $1000 hex core is only 50% faster than AMD's $230 hex core in those tasks so the question becomes is saving 1/3rd of the time worth four times the cost?

Now in games, unless you are driving multiple high end video cards or running games at resolutions and settings that don't challenge a single GPU based video card, at some point additional CPU performance isn't necessary. Tom's Hardware for instance generally dismisses CPUs costing more than $200-250 for gaming.

Praetoria is great from the standpoint that you can make all of the standard ATs. The story is more engaging and the technology behind the zones better. The downside is certain established methods of quickly bypassing the early levels that are found in Paragon or the Rogue Isles aren't available. Also certain rewards at low levels such as a jet pack and zero-g pack that you get from radio/newspaper missions in CoH/CoV aren't there. And you will need to use the Flashback system at Ouroboros to access some of the better sub level 20 stories from CoH and CoV. Note that access to Praetoria is limited to only those who got the Going Rogue expansion.

There is a lot that has changed in five years. There's now crafting better enhancements as well as a market. A feature in Paragon and Rogue Isles that allow you to create your own missions. The new Level 50 endgame system is just starting to come out (requires Going Rogue). Epic ATs now unlock at level 20. Heroes can now become Villains and vice versa (requires Going Rogue). And those are just off the top of my head.

A good source for game information is ParagonWiki. This will take you to the page with links with info on all of the Issues that have been released so you can see all that you missed.

Remember the game is heavily instanced and with added ways to bypass travel between zones quickly you tend not to find many players hanging around at the trams or around trainers anymore. You will find them around the market areas but they are usually to busy buying and selling to bother. It does make the zones appear rather empty. Also a round of annoying "gold sellers" a few years back when the market and crafting was first introduced induced a number of players to hide from global searches.

On one hand, there is still only one of Rush and Telford and Telford is back on Earth so to some degree status quo is restored.

And it actually was an accident. If Telford II didn't get his knickers in a twist about not going home and confront Rush I he would still be alive.

Right now I'm torn between wanting to know what is currently going on but not wanting to doom and gloom spin that nearly all the news sites/news channels. Little things like word choice which implies one thing when actually another is happening. Leading questions that include words like "inevitable" makes me want to reach out and slap those talking heads. Their choices for their "experts" ranging from "Bill Nye the Science Guy" to investment bankers who specialize in green energy to those in the scientific community who are diametrically oppose to nuclear energy period (if you bother to Google up their bios) while discounting experts from MIT and CALTECH and others since they aren't crying the "SKY IS FALLING" but rather talk about the facts released to the general public.

Which is why I've try to put everything in context by checking the postings at the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) site.

What's not going to help is the NYTimes now has computer projections about the radioactive plume's path. Note the radiation levels are in arbitrary (aka meaningless) units and even though they bolded "The forecast does not show actual levels of radiation" and "extremely minor health consequences", want to bet this will be used literally "scare up" more viewers and readers.

Cold Shutdown basically means it's not generating steam anymore so the pressure in the containment tank is basically atmospheric and the water temp is below boiling.

It appears that one of the explosions at Reactor 3 damaged the offline Reactor 4 building. Reactors 4 through 6 were already offline before the quake, for months, for inspection.

Latest IAEA entry indicates that now the water level in Reactor 5 is decreasing around 3-4" per hour. Reactor 5 and 6 aren't that near to the other four but maybe it got struck by debris from either 1 or 3.

Link to old sat picture (very large) of the plant from 1975. The reactors from Left to Right are 4, 3, 2, 1 (big gap) 5, 6 (under construction at the time).

Let me chime in here for a moment.

My $750 rig uses an AMD CPU because AMD uses the same socket for their entire line of consumer CPUs from a very cheap single core up through their premium quad and hex cores. Great for upgrading however the fastest AMD CPU is still mid range when compared to what Intel offers.

My $1350 rig is on it's last legs because Intel really wants to kill Socket 1156 and replace the whole line with Socket 1155 Sandy Bridge series of CPUs. However due to a little mishap with the motherboard chipset, everyone pulled the Socket 1155 product until Intel fixed it. Those fixed motherboards are finally starting to come to market but it'll probably take another couple weeks until all the various motherboard models that were out before the problem are reliably back in stock with the fixed chipset.

@Voodoo

When Intel went for the Core 2 to the Core iX series of CPUs they decided to name them based on performance and features and not socket. Therefore in the case of the Core i7, there are actually three different CPU sockets, each with there own little family of Core i7 CPUs. They are either quad or hex cores and run two threads per core to make either 8 or 12 pseudo cores.

Socket 1366 is the original i7-9xx series which likes memory three sticks of ram at a time and has a chipset that can handle 3-way SLi/Crossfire without needing to do anything tricky.

Socket 1156 is the budget i7-8xx series which likes memory two sticks of ram at a time but can only handle 2-way SLi/Crossfire at x8 speeds instead of x16 like 2-way on Socket 1366. Intel really really want Socket 1156 to go away yesterday because despite having a wide range of i7's at different speeds and price points, hard core do it yourselfers only buy the cheapest of them and overclock the snot out of it.

Socket 1155 is the "new" budget i7-2xxx series. Still can only handle 2-way SLi/Crossfire at x8 without doing anything tricky but is tightly locked in at it's specific speed (only allows +400MHz or so) unless you pay a bit more (~$30) for the K version which can overclock well beyond the +400MHz.

Note that 2-way SLi/Crossfire on Socket 1156 and 1155 is motherboard specific, that's one reason there are so many bloody P8P67 motherboard models from Asus.

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All P67 based motherboards should be able to support DDR3-1066, -1333, -1600, -1866, -2133 memory. Officially the Sandy Bridge CPUs only support the first 1066 and 1333 but the P67 unlocks those other settings. What's really important when choosing memory is it's voltage. Intel says no more than 1.55 volts for Sandy Bridge CPUs.

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When comparing CAS numbers you need to take the memory speed into account as well. It's easy to compare when either the CAS number or the memory speed is the same between two different sticks of memory. If the CAS number is the same, then the memory with the faster speed is better. If the memory speed is the same, then the memory with the lower CAS number is better. However if you are comparing memory that have both different speeds and CAS values, it's a little more difficult. What you need to compare (CAS+4)/speed, lower number generally means better performance. This means CAS 7 DDR3-1333 is nearly the same performance as CAS 9 DDR3-1600 so buy what's cheaper.

EDIT: This (CAS+4)/speed is my rule of thumb for comparing unlike DDR3 memory. Actual application benchmarks at X-bit Labs and Tom's Hardware seems support it. However unless the difference is between the (CAS+4)/speed numbers is significant, performance improvement with real world tasks is only a percent or two, if that.

I believe you need to register a movie name with somebody and you have it reserved for X number of years. Cameron registered Avatar as a movie name first. TV series don't count.

Hello Ladies.

I'm the Intersect that your Intersect could smell like.