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Sertorius

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About Sertorius

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  1. Sertorius

    Congratulations Bohemia Interactive

    Currently holding at the #1 rank. And to think I'm on a laggy sat connection that can't do MP... :p
  2. Sertorius

    PC Discussion Thread - All PC related in here.

    Probably an Intel i7 for pure power (And higher price tag), or the AMD Phenom II 940 for a more affordable but still powerful solution. I'm an AMD fan myself, but the i7s are currently the heavyweights. They just require a more expensive mobo and RAM. Edit: I don't know what your old CPU is, but I'd bet there's a high chance of bottlenecking if you keep the old CPU and stick a GTX 295 in.
  3. Sertorius

    PC Discussion Thread - All PC related in here.

    Well, as long as installing Linux doesn't involve excessive amounts of work, it sounds like a good deal. Ubuntu is the only Linux-based OS I've heard of. Is that good, or should I be looking for something else? Hail to the Cheap 2.0 Case: HEC Black/Silver SECC Steel MicroATX Mini Tower PSU: 485W (Included w/ Case) Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM CPU: AMD Sempron LE-1200 Sparta 2.1GHz Memory: Crucial 2GB (2 x 1GB) HD: Western Digital Caviar 80GB OS: Ubuntu Desktop Edition Monitor: Hanns·G HX-191DPB Black 19" D Drive: LITE-ON DVD-ROM Cost: $332.92
  4. Sertorius

    PC Discussion Thread - All PC related in here.

    Hail to the Cheap Case: HEC Black/Silver SECC Steel MicroATX Mini Tower PSU: 485W (Included w/ Case) Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM CPU: AMD Sempron LE-1200 Sparta 2.1GHz Memory: Crucial 2GB (2 x 1GB) HD: Western Digital Caviar 80GB OS: Windows Home Basic 32bit Monitor: Hanns·G HX-191DPB Black 19" D Drive: LITE-ON DVD-ROM Cost: $432.92 Couple of questions: 1. Any other ways that I can skimp on the cash? This computer is supposed to be a budget home system for accessing the Internets and running a word processor. 2. The Mobo has an onboard ATI Radeon HD 2100. Will that be enough to run the display at 1280x1024?
  5. Sertorius

    PC Discussion Thread - All PC related in here.

    Hey QBA69, Newegg has a GTX 260 available for exactly $200 (And there's also an extra $20 mail-in rebate). It's here if you want to take a look.
  6. Sertorius

    PC Discussion Thread - All PC related in here.

    Newegg has currently got a Radeon 4870 512MB card going for $170 (See here). If you don't want Radeon, probably one of the better nVidia cards within your budget is the 9800GTX+ (Link). You might want to compare them on Tom's Hardware or something similar. Edit: A quick look on Tom's Hardware (At aggregate scores for 1280x1024 performance) shows the 4870 with a slight lead, though both cards are definitely near the head of the pack (Excluding the mongo 4870X2s and the GTX cards).
  7. Sertorius

    USA Politics Thread - *No gun debate*

    Could be true, but the problem is that US debt is neither limited nor manageable. I could see the government operating one or two billion in the red, as a relatively small increase in taxes could quickly eliminate the problem and put the country back in the black. Of course, the US national debt is no longer even measured in billions anymore, it's measured in trillions (Soon to be tens of trillions ). While it is the banks fault for offering the stupid loan, it's also the consumer's fault for seeking and taking the loan. If you borrow X Dollars to buy an object with the assumption that you'll immediately be able to turn around and sell the object for X + Y Dollars, fine. Different people invest in different ways. But I fail to see why people who gamble and lose should be compensated for the money they were gambling, particularly using money from other people who are either digging themselves out of a similar hole or people who didn't bother digging such a hole in the first place. Ditto for the banks that tried to make a buck by investing in the risky loans.
  8. A lot of the old C&C games (RA1, RA2, Tiberian Sun). Also Age of Kings.
  9. Sertorius

    PC Discussion Thread - All PC related in here.

    Is the reverse also true? Could I buy a new mobo/CPU and keep using an old PCI 1.0 card?
  10. Sertorius

    PC Discussion Thread - All PC related in here.

    Thank you. I asked because NewEgg sells some cables labeled as "SATA" and some as "SATA II", and I wasn't sure if I might run into compatibility problems. I wasn't quite sure how many USB ports a header could support. Thanks for answering my question  . I'm looking at a Gigabyte GA-EX58 UD3R. It's supposed to have 6 SATA connectors from the South Bridge and 2 from the SATA2 chip. Probably not that big of a deal, I'm not planning to do RAID.
  11. Sertorius

    PC Discussion Thread - All PC related in here.

    OK, a relatively minor question. I've got most of the wiring for my theoretical computer worked out, but one part has me scratching my head a bit. The system has a mobo with 8 SATA 3GBs ports and 1 PATA port (ATA100 2 Dev. Max). I'll be connecting a DVD-RW drive ("SATA interface"), a hard drive (SATA 3GBs), and 4 external USB ports on the case. The USB ports come on the case, I believe they come with cabling, and I'm not particularly concerned about them anyway. What I'm mainly wondering about is which format of cable I should use for the other two devices (SATA or SATA II). The mobo comes with an IDE/PATA cable and a SATA cable. Should I be shopping for SATA II cable(s)? I certainly am not looking to be stuck with PATA/IDE. Edit: However, speaking of the USB ports, they are located on the front of the case, and I would like to have all of them connected to the mobo. The mobo is listed as having 2 USB 2.0/1.1 headers. As I said before, I'm pretty sure the USB ports come with connectors, but am I going to need to purchase some sort of bracket/splitter to connect the USB cables to the mobo? Edit2: Right now, I'm pretty sure I'll need a SATA II cable to connect the HDD to the mobo (A SATA 3GBS HDD to a SATA 3GBs port seems fairly straightforward). The SATA cable will connect the disc drive to the mobo. Am I on the right track here?
  12. Sertorius

    USA Politics Thread - *No gun debate*

    My problem here is that I believe in a difference in the ethics of redistribution to help the unfortunate (People who've had bad luck, whether born into bad families or somehow stricken by unforeseen events) versus helping the willfully irresponsible. I'd repeat my example about the difference between helping the child of drunk and helping the drunk himself. In the first case, we help the child now and hope that they grow into a productive member of society. In the latter, we merely subsidize and likely encourage a continuing pattern of bad behavior. True. From a policy perspective, this still leaves the gaping question of what is a "treatable" illness. Basic medical procedures like stitches, immunizations, antibiotics, or treating broken limbs is one thing. But what happens as we try to pay for treatment of the elderly? The cost of treating an old person becomes higher and higher with every year they live, as the amount of effort and technology used to extend his/her life becomes ever more complex. Organ transplants, joint replacements, cancer therapy, or just sustaining someone in a vegetative state cost many thousands of dollars. At some point we're going to have to say "You've lived a long time, you're using thousands of dollars worth of treatment while inputting very little through taxes, so come up with the payments yourself." Well, I agree with you there. However, personally I'd imagine that massive defense cuts would be accompanied by huge hikes in entitlement spending, as any party that cuts military spending by a huge amount is going to take a beating at the polls (And so must bribe people with more goodies). Hell, I'd think it was great if we slashed our military down to a basic force sufficient to protect our borders, some intel gathering capabilities, and some ICBMs as a deterrant. It's just that drastic cuts will be accompanied by charges of "Isolationism" or just plain "Hating America".
  13. Sertorius

    USA Politics Thread - *No gun debate*

    Asides from my opinion that it's not ethically stellar, nor economically sensible, to confiscate from the responsible to give to the irresponsible, there is the problem of subsidizing poor behavior. If the gov't funded a program that gave everyone free dog food, the result of the program would be an explosive growth in dog ownership. Making an item or an activity cheaper without also lowering demand for it through some other means will result in a growth of the cheapened activity. So if we make bad behavior more affordable, more people will engage in it. The result will be that the program will grow far larger than initially anticipated, which brings us right back around to the problem of America's ridiculous budget. So yes, if you make bad choices, your rights are either directly or indirectly restricted. The problem that arises, and one of the reasons I personally have problems with libertarian theory, is that innocent people can suffer because of the screwups of others. To me, at least, there is a vast gulf between gov't health insurance for the child of a drunken bum and gov't insurance for the drunken bum himself. I wouldn't bother imagining that "my share" is going to some good people, because that means someone else is funding the irresponsible people. If you've committed anything more than a minor infraction, you can very likely lose your right to buy a gun. Felonies certainly cost you that right, and some milder offenses (For example, domestic abuse in some areas) will also do so. So will certain psychological diagnoses. If you've blown all your money, you won't be allowed to buy the gun because no one will sell one to you. You also aren't technically "free" from religious harassment, you are only protected against gov't interference and private criminal acts against you. You can lose any right against religious interference by engaging in sufficiently despicable religious practices, such as screwing and/or eating children. On the same note, you might lose your right to be free from a warrantless police search if an officer saw blood in your driveway and heard screaming from the basement. You have a right to be protected from cruel and unusual punishment, at least until you do something really bad, at which point we will throw you into a windowless cell and leave you there for several decades (Admittedly, we claim this isn't cruel and unusual, a stance that is technically referred to as "being full of shit"). It's a positive right, unless the old terminology changed while I wasn't watching. If you have the right to something, it's a positive right; If you have the right to be free from something, that's a negative right. I'm not trying to imply that positive rights are good and negative rights bad ("Positive" and "negative" are not meant to be value judgments), or vice versa, just that the nature of these two different types of rights results in a very different sort of policy for each one. Personally, I think that positive rights are much more expensive, and so we as a country need to make some hard decisions. We may be able to afford a few positive rights protected through carefully managed bureaucracies, but raft of such rights will eventually sink under the sheer weight of what's being funded. Well, pork spending always has had a consequence: People vote for the politicians who bring home the bacon . It's also seemingly impossible to properly fund the government, because balancing the budget will necessitate a huge cut in gov't goodies and/or a considerable tax hike. The politicians reflect what the people want to vote for. If Americans were genuinely concerned with a balanced budget, either the parties would nominate candidates for this end or a new party would arise to exploit the political demand for a candidate with a balanced-budget policy.
  14. Sertorius

    USA Politics Thread - *No gun debate*

    Of course it's a commodity. However, most of us (I think) believe that everyone has a right to have some of that commodity. I'm not sure if gov't run train schedules are any more intelligible . Speaking from my own experience as a US citizen, a privately run postal system is superior to a gov't run outfit. If I want to send or receive something quickly, then I'd use UPS, DHL, FedEx, or some other outfit, never the dread US Postal Service. Actually, if I recall, there have been some great bureaucratic semi-scandals involving this principle: The story, possibly apocryphal, is that a politician was strongly arguing against privatizing the Postal Service, so due to this immediate need for some documents he had them delivered overnight by FedEx . Not sure if it's true, but it's a funny anecdote. And it does match at least with many Americans view of the differences between the Postal Service and the private deliverers. The private companies have to compete with each other, hence they make great effort to deliver items on time; The Postal Service has, or at least used to have, no competition, and developed a reputation for sluggish deliveries. Then it's a positive right, not a negative right like the rights enumerated in the US BoR. Declaring health care to be a negative right ("You may not be denied coverage on the basis of sex, race, nationality, political belief, etc") is something I'd be far more comfortable with than declaring it to be a positive right. Why should it be a positive right? Declaring it to be such seems to evade the issues inherent in declaring unconditional gov't-provided health insurance. What about people dying of expensive-to-treat diseases? Putting them on the system makes it one of straight redistribution, not insurance. On a related note, it seems inevitable that with the growth in scientific knowledge, our ability to manipulate the human body will increase, though it will be done through ever more expensive procedures. There must come a point when there's some form of operation that will be very popular but will be completely unaffordable to make a universal right. Ten thousand dollar procedures, heading to hundred thousand dollar procedures, heading to million dollar procedures (Maybe they'll find a way to put quadraplegics into Terminator exoskeletons). A guarantee of very basic medical procedures (Immunizations, anti-biotic prescriptions, etc) is one thing; Declaring that the gov't will handle all your potential medical expenses is another thing entirely. Also, why does everyone "deserve" insurance? What about some of the guys I knew back in construction, whose lot in life had much to do with voluntary choices (Becoming a drunk in high school, dropping out in the 10th grade, and acquiring a minor criminal record)? Why should I, the college-boy who studied on Friday and Saturday nights, spend my working years paying additional taxes to subsidize the lives of people who made poor decisions where I made better ones? Doing so would only make sense if there was sort of benefit to society for insuring everybody, otherwise it's just another weight around the neck of the US budget, which is already half sunk and is still sinking. P.S. - I will return later and correct some of my early morning babble.
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