In Iowa, Rep. Tom Latham says he won't be running for Senate, clearing the field for Steve King to be the GOP nominee.

I considered build-myself.... but from what I've read, motherboard compatibility is a real bear to deal with.

An i7 is usually overkill....

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.

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).

I don't want to disparage anyone because of their race, their ethnicity, their name - whatever their religion their father might have been, I'll just say this: When you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected President of the United States -- I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does it look like to the world of Islam? I will tell you that, if he is elected president, then the radical Islamists, the al-Qaida, the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11 because they will declare victory in this War on Terror. Additionally, his middle name (Hussein) does matter. It matters because they read a meaning into that in the rest of the world. ... They will be dancing in the streets if he's elected president. That has a chilling aspect on how difficult it will be to ever win this Global War on Terror.

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.


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.


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.

My recommendations in computer sales, was ALWAYS buy the fastest processor you can afford. You aren't ever buying for today, any computer can do what you want it to do today(barring high end gaming) It's all about how long is this processor going to be able to run whatever is coming down the tubes.

That was good advice at one time, but now it's mostly a waste of money for anybody except the most extreme power users or people who plan on keeping the same computer forever. Somebody who wants to play games and web surf on their computer derives zero value from an i7 3930k processor over a far cheaper i7 3770k, except perhaps in the form of dick waving.

King would have won the primary anyway, so it is just smart politics on Latham's part.

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.


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.

Between continued improvements in comutational power and 3d printing the future is a different place indeed.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

#359 A friend of mine -- a mainframe sysadmin -- has claimed that in certain areas they're actually running into limitations based on the speed of light. Don't know enough about the specifics, but Bob normally knows what he's talking about.

According to Kurzweil, since the beginning of evolution, more complex life forms have been evolving exponentially faster, with shorter and shorter intervals between the emergence of radically new life forms, such as human beings, who have the capacity to engineer (intentionally to design with efficiency) a new trait which replaces relatively blind evolutionary mechanisms of selection for efficiency.

In First, Software Emulates Lifespan of Entire Organism

STANFORD, Calif. — Scientists at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute have developed the first software simulation of an entire organism, a humble single-cell bacterium that lives in the human genital and respiratory tracts.

The scientists and other experts said the work was a giant step toward developing computerized laboratories that could carry out many thousands of experiments much faster than is possible now, helping scientists penetrate the mysteries of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.

“You read in the paper just about every week, ‘Cancer gene discovered’ or ‘Alzheimer gene discovered,’ ” said the leader of the new research, Markus W. Covert, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford. “A lot of the public wonders, ‘Why haven’t we cured all these things?’ The answer, of course, is that cancer is not a one-gene problem; it’s a many-thousands-of-factors problem.”

For medical researchers and biochemists, simulation software will vastly speed the early stages of screening for new compounds. And for molecular biologists, models that are of sufficient accuracy will yield new understanding of basic cellular principles.

This kind of modeling is already in use to study individual cellular processes like metabolism. But Dr. Covert said: “Where I think our work is different is that we explicitly include all of the genes and every known gene function. There’s no one else out there who has been able to include more than a handful of functions or more than, say, one-third of the genes.”

The simulation of the complete life cycle of the pathogen, Mycoplasma genitalium, was presented on Friday in the journal Cell. The scientists called it a “first draft” but added that the effort was the first time an entire organism had been modeled in such detail — in this case, all of its 525 genes.

Darwin is obsolete

This pattern will culminate in unimaginable technological progress in the 21st century, leading to a singularity.

Or, how so? How is Kurzweil a kook?

Newton is obsolete also from one perspective.

King would have won the primary anyway, so it is just smart politics on Latham's part.

Sure, but it would be smart politics on the GOP's part to keep King where he is and have Latham run for Senate. King will get smoked while dealing collateral damage upon his party.

In other words - don't count on him Akin'ing himself into a loss.

@431: For people who don't get the science, Kurzweil (and his ilk) are very threatening. The best crits of his theorizing have to do more with his optimistic timeline than they do with specific objections, or assert that x or y is unsolvable and since x or y are necessary to continued evolution, said evolution necessarily stalls. Do read carefully the people who are freaked out by his line of thinking. They rarely criticize the science. Instead the snark degenerates into some version of "What goofy stuff! That's not what my life is like. How could that ever really happen??"

In other words - don't count on him Akin'ing himself into a loss.



Iowa isn't Missouri.

Hey - don't get me wrong... King's the guy I want to run against in what is probably a "must hold" Senate seat in 2014... I'm just saying that it shouldn't be looked upon as a gimme in the same sense Reid was breathing a sigh of relief when Angle won her NV primary, the Dems started licking their chops when Murdouch won the IN primary, O'Donnell in DE, etc. He's a cut above the standard bomb thrower when it comes to discipline and chops in an actual campaign.

It's also worth noting that we're still an infant species. We've only been around somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years, depending on what you consider "human." If the Earth were one day old, we'd show up fairly close to the last 20 minutes of that day. We've only been able to write for a little more than 5,000 years. What we've been able to do in such a short time is nothing short of remarkable, by the standard of "compared to every other species we've encountered, ever."

I don't really know enough to say anything about Mourdock's visibility in Indiana before his run.

In general this is a silly thing to say. Newton is obsolete also from one perspective. In fact every scientist becomes quickly "obsolete" unless their science is basically dead and solved.

I am not willing to say he is a kook, but the past is littered with people who "knew" the future and all of them were wrong (though a lucky few were wrong less than 100%).

That would indicate that we're still young, but we're past the point at which 10% of our peer species have been winkled out by their environment.

No idea if the average lifespan of a maml is 1 million years or what,

King was just kind enough to vote against VAWA.

He's just standing up for the low-status males who are tired of being bullied by manipulative harridans who have stacked the courts and rigged the laws in their favor. Why are you so opposed to a little balance on behalf of men?

King was just kind enough to vote against VAWA.

I have been told there is no GOP war against women, but sometimes is hard not to blame women for thinking there is ...

Our resolution is simple: to find that what's right (in all senses) is what favors us. Why can't others see that? They do. Only the placeholders change position.

We right because we want it to favor us; others are wrong because they want it to favor them.

We need someone to speak up and represent the poor downtrodden white male. If only we had a thread where we could discuss such things ...

Do you know what biological altruism means?

I have been told there is no GOP war against women, but sometimes is hard not to blame women for thinking there is ...

“Some people could make the argument that a lot of people like being in abusive relationships. It’s a love-hate relationship. It’s very, very common for people to stick around with somebody they love who also abuses him or her,” said [New Hampshire State] Rep. Mark Warden, a Republican who represents Deering, Goffstown and Weare, during a meeting of the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, according to a video provided by Granite State Progress, a liberal advocacy group.

According to the video, Warden added, “Is the solution to those kind of dysfunctional relationships going to be more government, another law? I’d say no. People are always free to leave.”
[...]
Warden spoke during the debate on a bill introduced by Derry Republican Rep. Frank Sapareto that would reduce simple assault from a misdemeanor crime to a violation-level offense in any case of “unprivileged physical contact” that “does not result in harm or injury.” -Ben Leubsdorf, The Concord Monitor

You don't even take classes after the first year, except maybe for funsies.

Mark Levin calls for Cantor to step down for allowing VAWA vote

Approaching maximum awesomeness

You may not like that, but it doesn't make Kurzweil a kook for his (and thousands of others) exploration of the near term consequences of the exponential increase in computational power.

Darwin is obsolete

It's also worth noting that we're still an infant species. We've only been around somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years, depending on what you consider "human."

Mark Levin calls for Cantor to step down for allowing VAWA vote

King was just kind enough to vote against VAWA.

Conservative media figures are abandoning Washington Post writer Bob Woodward's over-hyped claim that he was threatened by a White House official.

... several conservatives are now turning on Woodward.

The Daily Caller, which hyped Woodward's initial claims last night, posted an article by Matt Lewis this morning explaining that conservatives had seized on Woodward's initial story because it "confirmed our suspicion about the Obama Administration's 'Chicago-style' of politics." After reading the full emails, Lewis concluded that conservatives had been "played," and that the exchange is "much more innocuous" than it was initially presented.

Echoing Lewis, Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson said during an appearance on Fox News that the full emails suggest Woodward "hyped" the claim that he had been threatened.

Picking battles is a form of compromise, and compromise is verboten.

Picking battles is a form of compromise, and compromise is verboten.

But you'd rather have me fail to stop the rate from going up by X when I can get it raised only X*0.5? They were adamant: Yes.

agree with your first two grafs. Also, even if we attain practical immortality, most questions remain. There will be some forms of scarcity, still, and as always the superrich will have first claim on any dramatic leaps. One of the most interesting of the new issues will be multiple identities. Why couldn't there be a flesh and blood Morty, enjoying endless rejuvenation (but always at the risk of corporeal death) along with Zetaflop Morty, who will experience the universe differently, and in a potentially infinite number of ways? Zetaflop Morty Prime might send himself out as an interstellar probe, some sort of Bracewell Probe, whose primary sensory apparatus experiences the universe at the quantum level.

Zetaflop Morty Prime might instead have an additional dozen or thousand versions who report back to ZMPrime, whose primary task is to integrate those experiences. Even so, there will always the moral issue of how you treat other entities, and what you might owe them. Multiple identities or an immortal identity also probably only defers the question of an afterlife for many folks.

There's nothing in the least unfortunate about it. It is the defining brilliance of the democratic system.

Say what? Inability to compromise is a terrible thing.

There's nothing in the least unfortunate about it. It is the defining brilliance of the democratic system.

For normal people, I would think that the ability to not compromise is a good thing, but in some respects the hard right people appear to be Roscharch going up against Ozymandias/Dr Manhattan. Compromise is unfortunately a central tenet of public office, the fact that they haven't realized that does tend to make them look ridiculous.

Even in corporate business, you have to learn the skill of compromise, if only because if you're fighting every battle you're not getting anything done.

Please tell me you're not serious.

Fine, but the inability to distinguish between "certain principles" and the means to the end of furthering them is just plain stupidity. Surely you agree.

Mark Levin calls for Cantor to step down for allowing VAWA vote

Approaching maximum awesomeness