The Washington Nationals might have bitten off more than they can chew by naming William Howard Taft as their next racing mascot. If you aren’t familiar with the controversy, the baseball team features four mascots dressed as U.S. presidents that race around the Nationals’ stadium during home games to entertain fans.
“Teddy has handpicked the next president for the Presidents’ Race,” Nationals COO Andy Feffer told the newspaper on Friday, a day before the Taft mascot was rolled out. “There was a great amount of banter and discussion back and forth, but Teddy won out with his recommendation.”
On Saturday, the sanitized Taft mascot made its debut at a fan event, looking at least 100 pounds lighter than its real-life counterpart.
The reaction in the media, so far, is that even sportswriters who aren’t historians know the two men hated each other.
The Post’s Dan Steinberg asked a local historian how bad the blood was between TR and Taft.
Allan Lichtman, distinguished professor of history at American University, told Steinberg that each man considered the other a backstabber, and they had no qualms taking down each other in a presidential election.
“The rivalry was as bitter as it gets in politics,” said Lichtman. “There’s nothing like the feeling of betrayal, and both men felt betrayed by the other.”
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I am younger than Chelsea Clinton apparently.
That may be true, but I ain't that much older than Chelsea Clinton, which was the real shock.
As for Clinton, isn't she one more public fainting spell during a campaign event from being eminently beatable in the primaries or the general? It's easy to say 69 isn't old, but for today's permanent campaign it's pretty damned old, and what we know about her health tells us it's an issue.
I'll bet a sizable amount on "Other" (than Biden or HRC).
I also think the GOP can stay exactly this crazy for another couple of decades, losing Presidential elections unless unemployment skyrockets, but dominating at the local and state levels. As long as we allow the sort of gerrymandering we allow, there's not enough incentive for Republicans to move towards sanity, if that's still possible. I don't think it is, but that's another matter.
But, going to GF's point, the Democratic Party has a long and proud history of refusing to nominate the front-runner, for good or for ill. (As opposed to the Republicans, who always nominate the next in line.) A primary campaign is a long-ass time, and Clinton is not even a lock to run for president.
If Hillary runs, I'd put her at something like 1-to-3 odds to win the nomination. Even given the Democratic Party's history, Hillary is currently crazy popular with both the activist base and the rank-and-file primary voter types. She's going to be harder to knock off than any front-runner on the Dem side in my lifetime, and by a wide margin. (Hillary in 2008 had her foolish Iraq War support that opened up a space on her left for Obama, now with the war ending ad out of the news, and years of respected international service on her resume, that's not going to be an option for the underdog this time around.)
If Hillary doesn't run, then you probably get a race of Biden vs. Field, and this is the Democratic Party, so you bet heavily on Field.
I don't watch the Simpsons so I don't know if the short was only derivative, but it was a pleasure to watch.
I disagree for a couple reasons. I am not sure big money or the consultant class would be happy with this scenario, and they are two groups with big power in both parties, especially the GOP. So I think they would try things (even painful things) to get out of that rut.
Also your scenario means control over the judiciary/supreme court for the Dems for a generation. Would the GOP base sign up for perpetual minority/roadblock status while losing their pet rock of cultural issues (between the SC, President, and cultural trends there would be nothing to stop "creeping liberalism and moral decay"). I don't know how the GOP base reacts, but I suspect it might splinter and/or withdraw.
Additionally the demographic trends are going to continue. Even the younger envangelicals have (on average) more liberal views on many things than the elder group. And the wave of minorities is not going to stop and will impact the lower level races no matter how gerrymandered things get.
Finally change is natural. It always happens, and usually in very unexpected ways. If the bet is stay the same for years or change in unexpected ways, always take change. Of course I have no idea how the GOP will change (or the Dems for that matter), but I am pretty sure they will.
hillary could be at 100% approval right now, but the moment that she is nominated as the democratic candidate for president, she becomes Huey P. Ledbetter-Marx in the eyes of the republican base, and her approval rating would be down to 60 at best.
Which would be plenty. In 1984 vs. Mondale, Reagan won 59% of the popular vote.
Your post makes abundant sense IF (it's too bad we can't change type sizes) you're talking about a group of people with the capacity for rational behavior, of seeking effect and rearranging cause, but you're not. There's a level of cohesiveness necessary to making the kind of coherent change you describe in order to aim at a sensible goal. That cohesive just isn't there. These are people, the most rational of whom demonstrably cannot add.
I wrote 'can' because I think it's not inevitable the party will continue to devolve into irreconcilable factions that are unable to put up the sort of convincing faux moderate the R's need to run in order to win a national election, but I do think it's likely. The current rift is enormous. It's similar in size to the rift that caused the Dems to win all of one Presidential election between the rise of Nixon's silent majority in 1968*** and Clinton being helped by a weak economy and Ross Perot. That was 24 years where the Dems only squeaked a Presidential victory because Nixon went mad.
The TPers have real political strength at the local and state levels. They aren't going anywhere any time soon, and you may have noticed they don't make deals. They may have to literally age out and even start to die off, the way the Democratic left did by the late 80s, for the Republican party to be able to remake itself again into a party capable of winning Presidential elections.
The more I think about it the more apt the analogy is to the Dems wandering in the wilderness. A quarter century out of Presidential power is not impossible. Only Nixon saved the Democrats from that.
***Nixon first used 'silent majority' in a speech in November, 1969, but he didn't invent the term.
As an Arkansan, I remember when she was born. I was a college senior. Talk about feeling old.
Not to mention that all that Clintonian baggage will once again come to the fore. I believe someone has paid Lewinsky $12 million for her "memoirs"--when do you think that will be coming out? There are some things the Republicans will not give up on, no matter how often they get the short end of the custard pie.
Parties don't tend to nominate under-competitive candidates for more than 2 cycles. The Democrats responded to McGovern by going to the center hard with anti-labor Carter in four years. The Republicans responded to Clinton by making GW Bush. Historically you'd bet on the Republicans nominating someone tending moderate in 2016 because it is rare to go symbolic after two consecutive defeats. If they lose in 2016, the pressure to nominate someone who can win in 2020 will be overwhelming.
The caveat and the reason the doubters could be right is that there are a few times when that didn't happen, especially the Democrats in their long national eclipse after the Civil War. A party with a totally solid regional base can sometimes sink into permanent second place status, but even then the comparison is tricky. The Democrats nudged to the center in 1864 (with the candidate not the platform), kind of punted in 68, nominated a Republican in 72, and then won the popular vote in 76. 80 they nominated a war hero and lost the popular vote by 10,000 votes (bigger in EC.) 84, 88, 92 they win the popular vote each time (though lose the EC in 88). The economy breaks up under them and they make a new Bryan coalition that is too weak to win the White House and so get beaten in 96, 1900, 1904, 1908. Luck into things in three-way 1912, carry over into 1916, then lose the first two of the 20s.
Then the Republican eclipse is really just FDR. They blow winnable, close elections in 48 and 60 and win in 52 and 56.
So there's precedent for a party losing a bunch of elections in a row but 1) generally the losing party has tried running to the center and 2) lost some very close elections. There isn't precedent for a party getting its ass kicked a bunch of elections in a row without doing something about it.
Those popular vote victories/close calls depended on voter suppression of an extent which wouldn't be tolerated today. I'm not sure how that plays out, but I suspect that the series of close races kept the Dems from changing their policies. If today's Rs, who occupy the same role, can't suppress the vote or cheat the system (gerrymander, change the EC votes, etc.), they'll be forced to compromise in ways the old Dems weren't. I think that'll be true even though the Bourbon South would otherwise be willing to stay in the wilderness forever.
Oh, jeez... I think the opposition trying to make hay out of Lewinsky would help Bill Clinton if he could run again, never mind the wronged woman in the situation.
It's of course accurate that Hillary will lose non-committed-Democrat support once she becomes a Democratic candidate. And I'm sure the opposition will try to revisit 20th century dirt, just like they keep trying to push certain narratives about Obama that have never gotten any traction. But overall, I certainly think Hillary's affiliation with Bill and his presidency is far more a plus than a minus.
David Frum sort of volunteered for the job, but was easily shouted down.
Unless, of course, the current GOP strategy of paralyzing the economy via austerity measures pays off, and the voters somehow can't figure out how to put 2 and 2 together and hold them accountable for it. But so far it's only the hard core GOP voters who are blaming Obama for the sequestration deadlock, and we'll see what happens when the red state voters start to get laid off as a result.
Right, up until the point where the hard core social conservatives in the primaries more or less said it was their way or the highway, and both McCain and Romney capitulated. Take the Tea Party mentality out of the primaries and sure, McCain and Romney might well have stopped catering to the loons. The McCain of 2008 was a far cry from the "maverick" of 2000, and Mr. 47% spent most of his campaign running away from that other guy who was once allegedly the Governor of Massachusetts. Calling those two "moderates" during their general election campaigns is kind of like calling the 2012 A-Rod a Triple Crown threat.
I will be somewhat crushed if/when it turns out that Beck was in on things from the start - I hate it when people I take to be total wastes of flesh actually demonstrate a hint of the sly and wry.... Still - maybe I can look forward to Triple H (or whomever) kicking Beck's ass on Letterman at some point in the future.
Frum ran quite a few folks off, first. Then when he tried to get the remaining folks to act like adults was himself booted from the room. Bad for the country but fun to watch.
Even with that Southern tinge, the party nominated exclusively northerners (and mostly New Yorkers with some Indianans) and, when they could find them, Union war heroes, so it wasn't like they were nominating Vardaman or even Wade Hampton. It's a party with an extreme base trying to win without shattering its base.
That is also a good point. There's a separate question about the genuflection they required from Romney. If he hadn't had to act so riled up, he might have played the moderate more consistently, as he tried in the first debate. The party protected GWB from that in 2000, and could theoretically protect and support a candidate who wouldn't swing for the fences in the primaries. I agree that it isn't a magic bullet to have the perfect candidate. I also do think an organized party can help preserve a candidate in the way the party simply did not in 2012. GHWB looked better for having beaten back Robertson and Buchanan, not worse. It's hard to see how that happens now, I agree, but I wouldn't be shocked if it did happen.
Step one: skip Iowa. Write it off and make it seem like a sideshow for the losers.
Step two: whip the SC organization into line. That's the one state with a big gap between the organization and the base. The organization saved Bush in 2000 and McCain in 2008 but could not save Romney in 2012.
Major flaw in theory: if Arizona really moves itself way up, that will presumably be a major, major boost to a Tea Party-style candidate, and force an establishment candidate to keep fighting much longer.
I think Andy is on to something here. The wildcard is if things crater (economy or other "important things") then authoritarian populisim* can become real popular real fast and I can easily see the GOP sliding over into that territory and succeeding nationally (whether they deserve to or not is a different matter, because deserve has got nothing to do with it).
* I am using this term because it is somewhat descriptive of a wide variety of governmental movements from all over the spectrum from fascisim, to communism to FDR new dealism could all from some standpoints fit under this umbrella. Perhaps Charismatic Populism or Cult of Personality could also fit the populist waves that often come after/during dire economic times. And no I am not suggesting the GOP are communists or fascists.
If the Tea Party fades--big if!--I think the WWE making it into a figure of derision by having a heel character come out with his Tea Party sponsor to boos from the crowd while the announcers call them "scary men" will be some kind of weird indicator. A long way from the Iron Sheik! link
Or Adorable Adrian Adonis for that matter...
Still, the WWE marketing folks aren't stupid -- perhaps even better than the politicos, I have to think they have a pretty good sense of where the heels and faces should be positioned relative to the audience.
The Giuliani strategy?
Maybe Linda McMahon should have hired them as political consultants.
I don't watch 'rasslin anymore but anything that gives Dirty Dutch Mantell a steady paycheck in 2013 is OK in my book.
But it has worked in the past and could work again. But you do have to be able to win New Hampshire if you skip Iowa.
Technically, the Guiliani strategy wasn't just skipping Iowa... It was skip Iowa, blow off New Hampshire, abide by the national party ban on Michigan, ignore South Carolina, pretend Nevada doesn't exist, and focus on Florida.
To be fair I betb if he had had a chance in any of those states he would have tried. The idiots were those who thought he had a chance at all (which might include Rudy actually). But yeah if you skip Iowa you better do really well in NH.
And wow do I hate the duopoly those two states have. Really annoying.
From the outside, his campaign looks like a perfect way to funnel $60 million to your favorite consulting companies. So it's tempting to think that he simply raised his profile and funneled money from donors to consultants knowing he couldn't win.
But...he ended up having to pay 200k in campaign debt from personal funds, saw his speaking fees drop when he cratered, and came out of it worse.
So it does seem more likely that he was duped by some combination of his ego and the consultant leeches who fastened on to him. If so, the agony for him must have been extreme when the scales dropped.
Agreed. Every politician is an egotist, of course, but Giuliani took it to a whole 'nother level.
I've mentioned it here before, but a politico friend of mine told me the same thing in 2010 or so.
I'm just going to be laying here in the corner with a bottle of wine for the rest of the day.
The whole day, and just one bottle? God your old. 20 years ago, that wouldn't have lasted more than 2 hours.
And I do think it's possible to win the nomination without winning IA or NH. If anything, I bet that's more true now than ever, as media saturation seems to have exaggerated momentum swings (didn't like a dozen different people lead the Republican popularity polls at one point or another during the process?) But, as mentioned, somewhat weird circumstances (Michigan shenanigans, and Romney having unusual strength in Massachusetts-neighboring NH and Mormon-heavy NV) left no place for Rudy to make inroads. It's probably more important that he turned out to be a bad national candidate. On a superficial level, he didn't seem all that polished or prepared. And on a policy level, what was he offering, other than social stances that the primary voters didn't like? An even more aggressive foreign policy than the other guys already had? I don't think there proved to be much reason to point to him in a very large field and say "that's my guy."
Anyways, you can change procedures such as how you do the primaries -- it's certainly not like they make logical sense the way they currently are -- but 1) as I said, the Republicans have been nominating "electable moderates" anyway, and 2) procedural changes aren't going to quell the underlying issues. It's certainly true that the party dragging the electable moderate to the right does undo a lot of the point of nominating an electable moderate. The whole thing is like trying to get a fire truck somewhere where the guy driving the front and the guy driving the back want to go in totally different directions. I have no idea how it turns out. As mentioned, it's probably easier for them at this point to profit off discontent with Democrats than it would be to get their own house in order.
His being Canadian didn't help.
I doubt it. Every other word is 9/11.
He's probably planning to use a glass, too.
Two problems with this. First is, the Clintonian baggage won't matter. That HRC put up with Bill's philandering and kept her marriage together will reflect well on her, not poorly. It's also sufficiently exhausted that the MSM won't be pressing her on any of it. The story will be, 'those wingnuts won't leave her alone'. The second is 'Well, what of it'? If the Dems ran a George Washington clone the Republicans would attempt to paint him as the second coming of Satan. You assume it'll be all smears, all the time, so what matters isn't what they say (since they'll be saying it regardless), but what they can prove.
It sounds like we have a lot of people in the computer biz posting on this site. Are any of you primarily hardware guys?
edit: maybe not, wrt Moore, and speaking of the cell discussion, and the computation necessary to simulate one:
"IDF: Intel says Moore's Law holds until 2029
Pat Gelsinger, head of the Digital Enterprise Division at Intel, says that Moore's Law will continue to apply for the next few years. In his keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai, he said that the performance of supercomputers would be measured in zettaflops (10 to the 21st power floating-point operations) per second by around 2029. With that power, he said it would be possible to make weather forecasts that would be sufficiently accurate for 14 days. He expects by 2017 it will be possible to create a complete genetic simulation of a cell, which would require an exaflop (10 to the 18th power floating-point operations) per second."
http://www.h-online.com/newsticker/news/item/IDF-Intel-says-Moore-s-Law-holds-until-2029-734779.html
I don't have any serious reservations about seeing where all this takes us. We're not much of a species, so any possibility of radical improvement seems worth pursuing, and any course likely to lessen the influence of religion is valuable on that basis alone.
I always thought the limits to forecasting were caused by the difficulties in gathering sufficiently precise/accurate data and the chaotic nature (small variances in inputs create large variances in outputs) of fluid dynamics.
The sufficiently precise data you mention is available once we have enough computational power and speed to process that data, which also lets us better calculate the behavior of apparently chaotic systems.
You have an example of a better one? I mean, I get pretty cynical at time myself, but your post lists some amazing engineerig achievements that are created by the species you then disparage.
You really want to stand up for the general lot of humanity? Feel free. Have at it.
(Sorry, couldn't help it. Whee! Go Mets!)
It's a bad joke: instead of "fixing" the law to prevent you from carrying a gun into the freaking Capitol Building, this nitwit wants to change it to allow you to carry near groups of schoolchildren.
By and large I think humanity is OK. Not perfect, but pretty good. I am terribly sad we do not meet with your approval Jack, and I for one will lose sleep trying to come up with a way to justify our collective existence. Feel free to hold your breath.
By and large I think humanity is OK. Not perfect, but pretty good. I am terribly sad we do not meet with your approval Jack, and I for one will lose sleep trying to come up with a way to justify our collective existence. Feel free to hold your breath.
I more or less agree with the tart tasting mouse. With the exception of holding your breath. I think self-criticism and the desire to improve, which Jack implicitly suggests, is precisely what makes us a worthy species. Of course we do stupid, destructive things. Show me an animal that doesn't. We recognize it, mourn it and hope to do better. And, if you look broadly at history, we do get better. The general trend of human improvement isn't sufficiently fast for any one person to get much out of it in their lifetime but it's there.
Have a bottle of wine and curl up with someone you love, Jack. You'll like humanity more for it.
I'm not a hardware guy - but my understanding in regards to the supercomputer/'really, really big number of computations' race is that it's really come down to power rather than architecture... that each most recent leap ahead by the various competitors have been more a matter of constructing and allocating the necessary power to push forward. My understanding is that Tianhe-2 is basically getting/constructing its own hydroelectric plant for this purpose. Not to say there's no architectural role, but a more hardware-oriented colleague recently told me that the TOP500 race has really become a race to see who can get their government to build them their very own nuclear power plant first.
Could not disagree more. Even though I may be a member of that 1%, I will shout to the mountains that the smartest people are not the wisest, nor the kindest, nor the most self-sacrificing. They are not the bravest, or the most creative, or the most empathetic. They are not the happiest, the best parents, or the most generous. Those qualities can be found among all people rich and poor, educated and uneducated, young and old. There's a lot more to being a good person, or a productive member of society, than being smart.
Note: The above really imprecise description is from some articles I read months ago with the details lost to time and bad memory. Honestly none of it may be right, as I said I am not a hardware guy though I did just install a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device on my home network, but that was so simple truly anyone could have done it.
Between continued improvements in comutational power and 3d printing the future is a different place indeed.
In my experience even the smartest do really dumb things. Even the dumbest (functional) people can apply themselves and do some really smart things when motivated. So yeah I am a humanist as well (which is why Jack's post annoyed me more than it should have and I went too far - sorry Jack).
What did you get? I'm looking at getting a 4 disk NAS in the next couple of months ...
I imagine cooling is also problematic. Facebook made headlines by acquiring considerable real estate in the north of Sweden so that they could air-cool whatever monstrous machines they now need to store consumer data on the entire Universe. And just this week there's a headline about an innovative aquifer-cooled supercomputer in Australia. I have no idea how these machines in China are cooled, but the infrastructure to cool them down must be almost as elaborate as that to heat them up.
Amen and amen. This whole humanity sucks screed is old and tired, as is the whole random anti-religion bit injected for no evident reason into the comment. Yawn.
I've dealt with plenty of network storage and about all I can say is that shop based on your needs.
As resident computational biologist let me just say that I am not sure what level of "genetic" simulation this hardware dude is talking about, but he's likely wrong by orders of magnitude in _either_ direction.
None of that has anything to do with what Jack said. What he said was that without the smartest 1%, very little technological advance would have been made in human history . That's basically undeniably true.
And by the way, creativity and empathy (which cover all the other adjectives you used) are part of any reasonable definition of "smart." I'm sure they're part of Jack's definition. What you're really talking about it just sheer neuron-firing speed or something, which has nothing to do with anything.
The NAS device I bought and installed was crazy easy to set up. I am still playing (just installed it Monday evening and I do have a life), but yeah I over bought for home network use, but so what? A fun toy I got to reward myself (for doing something I hate, but needed to do).
Given the previous discussion on site regarding intelligence I take no definition of it on faith. And if you define the top 1% by what they accomplished then yeah we would miss a bunch of stuff by excluding them, but it is really hard to define the top 1% a priori, and I bet plenty of accomplishments would happen even excluding that group. I think the individuals that make the discovery deserve full credit, but many advancements are built on what has gone before and are to a degree inevitable (Heck control of fire predates humanity).
The Wright Brothers deserve credit, but I am pretty sure we would have airplanes even if they had not existed. I have heard it suggested there are things (like Einstein's theories) that were so inspired that things without him would have been very different, but I suspect that is rare.
EDIT: Link was broken. I tried to fix(and failed I guess, sigh). I bought a DS213 from Synology.
EDIT #3: Gah, fixed more. I give up. Stupid Rodent.
That's all very nice, but would the shacks have mothers living in them? And would they have basements?
I think he went far beyond that, but on the face of it that is clearly false, in so many respects.
Just off the cuff, in A.D. 1500, of the smartest 1% of the population, 1 million lived in China, 900,000 lived in India, 150,000 lived in France and around 80,000 lived in England. So naturally most of the technological development over the following 100 years occurred in China and India, right?
I don't think that's how Jack was using it. I know remarkably empathetic and creative people who have a sixth-grade education, who suffer from learning disabilities, and who live on minimum wage. I doubt Jack would argue that those people are the only thing standing between him and shack living.
How else could we define it? I mean, yes, I understand that that makes the entire discussion virtually meaningless.
One of the things that bothers me most is not only the suffering of people in underdeveloped countries, but the opportunity cost. There must be geniuses all over the world who never get a chance to do anything ingenious. But there's unfortunately no way to measure that. All we can possibly measure is what people actually do.
I agree that a lot of innovations would be made by somebody five or ten years later, at the least, if they weren't made by the person who actually made them. But the person who made them instead would still be a person whose other accomplishments, though not as spectacular, still had him or her in a position to do it. It wouldn't be some random person.
And yet a sizable proportion of those 150 million deaths can reasonably be laid at the hands of those who under the most commonly accepted definition of "smartest" would have themselves been among that upper 1%---and the rest of that 1% wasn't apparently smart enough to stop them.
-------------------------------------------------
And by the way, creativity and empathy (which cover all the other adjectives you used) are part of any reasonable definition of "smart." I'm sure they're part of Jack's definition. What you're really talking about it just sheer neuron-firing speed or something, which has nothing to do with anything.
I completely agree with your definition of smart, but when the numbers crunchers get through with you, I'm sure you'll be accused of some evil variant of affirmative action by not sticking to measuring that neuron-firing speed. But once again, as is usually the case with so many of these discussions, it all comes down to who controls the dictionary.
There's no way to measure that, but there are things that we can do to remove artificial barriers that prevent potential genius from flourishing. The only problem is that many of these things (GI bills, civil rights laws, etc.) involve raising taxes and / or involving " the government", and are always resisted by the usual suspects for the usual reasons.
And this is why globalism and exporting of jobs to other countries is not quite the tragedy that some portray it. Life in South Korea is so much better than it was (to pull out one semi-random example) and we in the US get to benefit from what they do. A job lost to South Korea is neither pure good nor pure bad, but in net the whole world is better off by them moving forward.
Baseball, cocktails, painting, refridgeration, soccer, #######, the internet, hip-hop, humanity did all of this, and none of its occurred just because fascist supermen willed it - every one of us is dependent on families and communities and friends, not to mention human societies and physical ecosystems, to make these things possible.
Humans do all kinds of bad ####. There are lots of arguments that humans do as more or more bad #### than good. I am open to that, though ultimately I just like people and it's going to be hard to convince me otherwise.
I think what I object to most in Jack's post is the implicit "but I'm great" aspect of it. If you're going to go full anti-humanist, don't except the ubermenschen and implicitly number yourself among them. Damn the whole lot of us.
Forgot he'd gone there from AP. Worked with him at the Arkansas Democrat (very misnamed; it's kneejerk GOP through & through) in the early '90s. Big Tigers fan, unless I'm confusing him with someone else.
That link reminds me of the documentary I saw on Henry Darger a long time ago. Love that movie as well.
Fournier revealed his positions long ago.
But yeah, "If only Obama would 'lead'" is getting real old, but I don't think it is going away any time soon.
Of course it's OK for the GOP to be against everything Obama and Democrat. That's as American as apple pie.
But the issue here is that the current-day GOP is engaging in much more than simply being against everything Obama and Democrat, in the way that the historical standard of major-party behavior in the US would define being "against." The current-day GOP is ardently abandoning any semblance of negotiation and responsible governance, which is what the system has historically expected and received. This is not normal.
I got a new laptop a couple months back - and intentionally, by design did spring for a dedicated gpx card (Nvidia GTZ 660m, 2 gigs onboard). The laptop also has what I think is the standard integrated gpx processing (about a gig, I think). I think it's supposed to work with both in tandem -- offloading/firing up the 660m when demand calls for it.... However, I noticed this wasn't really happening -- EU3 or HOI3 would pop up notes about limited graphics and I also noticed in the 'Windows Scoring' widget on the control panel that the graphics capability was far lower than it should have been (in effect, it wasn't recognizing the 660m as present/attached).
I don't do much in the way of hardcore gaming -- mostly Paradox titles (which do require some relatively current 3d and pixel shader rendering due to the maps), so it wasn't a big deal, but I occasionally fiddled around with it... updating drivers here (I think I went through about 15 different versions - about 5 each from nvidia, from lenovo using their rec'ed specs, and via Windows), playing around with the nvidia control panel settings, etc. I read that the lenovo power management system tends to have a real problem dealing the card - so I also uninstalled that (then reinstalled and also played with those settings).
In the end -- I'm getting a corrupted display display in the Nvidia control panel (you know - the area where you see that 3d shape and and toggle between quality/performance, etc). I ran a variety of utilities -- GPU-Z, system diagnostics, etc.... Using a PCI checker -- I am getting a fatal fault there.
The manufacturer keeps insisting that the hardware isn't the issue - it's either driver related (even though I patiently went through about 2 hours of replicating driver installs and rollbacks with one of their techs that I had done previously) or Windows related (I am running 8).
I keep insisting that even though the hardware listing insists all the components are fine and functioning normally -- there's clearly a fault between the card and the mb, likely in the PCI slot that the card is plugged into... They've finally relented to let me send it in for service - but I'm also a bit concerned that it may not be just a card/slot/board... but might be a fundamental level of incompatibility between the card and the board. From what I've read online, this issue seems to be hitting a lot of people with similar configurations and I'm quite sure it's not above either the manufacturer of the laptop or the gpx card to just pound into place and pray.
The ironic thing about all of this is 1)I only got a laptop because the only desktops around anymore are truly hardcore gaming rigs (which I don't need or really want)... I really couldn't care less about 'power management' since I rarely have it unplugged anyway, and 2)the gpx card is really more than I need anyway, but I just figured it would be nice to have.
Anyone have any thoughts or ideas? I feel pretty sure that it's got to either be faulty hardware (card or pci slot) or a more fundamental incompatibility (in which case, I think I ought to be entitled to a refund, even if just partial, of some sort).
But he's a Muslim!
Ook. Should have bought a desktop, you can get a perfectly cromulent one for under $800 that would have met your needs for years to come.
Who built the laptop for you? What kind of MB and processor do you have in there?
No he isn't. But this guy is:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/27/keith-ellison-sean-hannity-worst-journalist-fox-news_n_2772687.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&ir=Politics
It's just extraordinarily difficult to get one anymore -- at least, one configurable... Dell really doesn't do custom builds as well as they used to. Plus - with a quad core and 6 gigs of RAM now stuffed into a laptop, I figured I might as well just make the switchover. FWIW - I did price around, but to basically get similar muscle in a desktop would have been about $300 more.
Lenovo - Intel quad core (i7 at 2.3 ghz)... Other than the gpx issue - it's really a pretty good setup.
If you aren't going to build it yourself, which is by far the best option, then your best bet is to find the cheapest one you can with a decent processor. Then just immediately replace the RAM and video card.
If you want a customized desktop, you need to go outside of the huge manufacturers and find an aftermarket builder. Cyberpower has some very cheap desktops and lets you tinker with the configurations, although their build quality and customer support can be sketchy. Digital Storm is expensive, but has outstanding customer support and customization, along with great build quality. Alternatively, just buy the parts and throw the thing together yourself; desktops are easy enough to assemble, and are dirt cheap if you do your own build. It requires a modicum of homework to ensure compatability, but it sounds like you wound up having to do that anyway...
An i7 is usually overkill for a home gaming/surfing/email PC. I have a 4+ year old desktop at home running on one of the first gen i7 processors and it's not remotely taxed by any of the new, graphic-intensive games. Anyway, you didn't tell me what MB is in there, although it doubt it matters. FWIW, my gut tells me you just have a jacked up gpx and probably need a new one.
I considered build-myself.... but from what I've read, motherboard compatibility is a real bear to deal with. Plus, I'm not sure I'm proficient enough to actually do it right... I.e., I've done plenty of card and memory swap-outs myself, replaced fans, etc... but once you get into issues of proper voltage and such across the broader array of hardware, I'm a bit over my head (at least, beyond the standard "bigger and beastlier must be better"... which means I probably wouldn't be doing it in a cost effective manner anyway).
Ironically enough, I do have a relatively newer desktop with an mb that went bad... I've considered using it as a shell - most of the components are relatively current, so I figure I might just shop around for a new mb, upgrade the processor (its a first gen quad core)... but I do have 8 gigs of RAM, a 2 year old, but then high-end gpx, etc. I may still do that... just slowly and patiently shopping around the core pieces (new mb and processor) I need. I've actually been trying to decide whether to just part it out on ebay/amazon or go that route. I suppose I should probably make up my mind soon since the clock is always ticking on shelf life.
Ryan Howard: I want to be lead, but don't you dare tell me want to do. *Goes to customer service to fight with Kelly.*
This will change in the next year or two as developers play around with the PS4 and XBox 720 and stop developing PS3/Xbox360 games. You'll start to see a big ramp up in requirements that will leave a lot of old PCs behind.
You don't really mess with voltages unless you are attempting to overclock, everything will just run at default voltages without you doing anything. If you get a retail box processor, the HSF will come with thermal compound already applied. Which means you don't have to worry about applying it or lapping the heatsink. The rest is pretty simple, the motherboard has holes for mounting it in the case. The case's wiring and the motherboards jumpers for it are all labelled. Everything else you probably have experience doing already(installing RAM, vid card, HDDs/SSDs). The only other thing to do would be the power supply, but that is simple to install and connecting it is rather straightforward(make sure the motherboard, video card, fans, and hard drives are plugged into it). I haven't really run into any issues with compatibility. Some motherboards seems to have issues with certain models/brands of RAM, but that is rare and generally easy to check if it will be a problem before you purchase.
Unfortunately, this will likely take at least 2-3 years before we see a real effect. And even then, a decent i5/i7 will still provide more than enough power such that the GPU will be the limiting factor.
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