taks

hard to say. my brother was in iraq the first time around and he was in an even more difficult position (from a contact standpoint) because concepts such as the web and text messaging didn't really exist then. fortunately, once the quick battle was over there was not nearly as much tension then as there is now. i.e., once they beat down the iraqi forces there wasn't as much concern about getting shot or blown up from an insurgent bomb (my brother was on a base camp which was otherwise secure, he didn't have to venture off camp at all). i'd say just be positive, let your bud know you miss him and you hope he returns safe, throwing in odd bits about cool stuff at home. that's what we did. taks PS: care packages as sand suggests are good, too. my brother loved 'em.

it wasn't as plain as it could be which i did not notice until you posted. taks

yet another mis-characterization of my and/or my opinions... but at least you laughed about it. taks

The issue with the given examples isn't in them being true or not, it's the attitudes surrounding them, as you've just proved. Calling the possible health effects of electromagnetic radiation a 'fraud' is an example of this since there is such conflicting data. The same goes with homeopathy. Unless, of course, I misunderstood what you meant. whether they work or not is not the question, or if there is some effect, it is the use of the name of science that is fraudulent in my context. i.e., assuming that i picked up on walker's intent, he's using examples of "scientifically proved" methods/effects when in fact they are not. some may actually work, or do things that are claimed, but it is not science which was my original point about science being humble. science itself is very humble, there just happen to be those that are willing to misuse the name of science to further their own ends (the same applies that there are those that misuse religion). taks

these aren't examples of science. they are examples of fraud, i.e. snake oil, portraying themselves as science. taks

this is not unlike the problem of independent component analysis, which can be solved using neural nets. in such an implementation, each neuron is connected to its neighbors and the answers "adapt" to the optimal solution. the neurons adjust their individual weights until some optimal criteria is met locally, which ultimately establishes meeting the optimal criteria for the system. "optimal" only makes sense with respect to some pre-defined criteria. in communications systems, "optimal" is often stated with respect to minimum mean-square error between the result and the error-free solution, for example.* neat stuff. this is actually what makes science humble. it is self-correcting and admits its own errors, always striving for the truth (or the best estimate of the truth) rather than accepting any answers it produces as undeniable fact. even the so-called "laws" are constantly being probed in an attempt to explain the how and why (such as the law of gravity). taks * obviously since the error-free solution is not known, there are mathematical games that must be worked through to determine what the magnitude of the error really is. it works out that the error-free solution cancels in the equations leaving nothing but the estimated results and the original data. very slick stuff.

well, there's still only one bus to the memory, so there are always unavoidable conflicts. if an app is small enough to run completely out of local cache, these conflicts will be minimized. the 4-core broadcom chip i was using was a "true" quad, with a separate L1 cache for each core and one shared L2 (128 kB for the L1, 2 MB for the L2 as i recall). one big benefit this chip had was a 256-bit local bus dubbed the "z-bus." unfortunately, their built-in memory controller (the chip was also a true system on a chip) wasn't very efficient so we had a lot of bus conflicts that were difficult to resolve, i.e. you had to write your code in such a manner that each core accessed memory at a different time. taks

depends upon your installation. mine is just under 3.1 GB ("true" GB, though that works out to about 3.3 billion bytes, since a G is 1024^3). i've heard that others have more. oh, i'm using 32-bit XP professional. taks

indeed, though i often wear green anyway. i've still got about 30 shirts from my years attending UMR, and i got 2 more this weekend. we sold russell sweatshirts (kelly green) as a means for funding our celebration so i have scads of them lying around. most don't fit due to the fact they do shrink and i have grown around the waist a bit, but there are several that still get use. interestingly, at one point we were the 2nd largest seller of russell shirts in the world, the 1st being fort leonard wood which hands them out to their boot camp attendees. fort leonard wood is 30 miles down the road from rolla, coincidentally. happy belated, tale. the buddy that i attended the festivities with has a son that waited till the 18th to be born. today is his 5th. i'm almost recovered from the trip though i managed to pick up some sort of cold along the way. having a child in pre-school has been detrimental to my family's health. ugh. taks

i came from a school that is listed on the wiki as one of the longest running st. pat's day celebrations. we started in 1908, so i have been unable to figure out how this year was considered the "100th annual" when in fact it is the 101st. perhaps they should change to the "100th anniversary." anyway, i was also a member of the st. pat's board, which is mentioned in the little blurb about rolla's (UMR's) celebration. the blurb oddly mentions alice, which has maintained a sort of legendary status, but has been over and done with for about a decade. i've been in alice. in spite of what the articles claim, we do know what went into alice. it ain't pretty. we'll just say that much of my "hazing" over my two year stint (1988-1990) helped out. in my opinion, the part that sets our celebration aside from the rest is street painting. we start with what is known as a "street painter's tea" sometime around 4:00 a.m. saturday morning, which then moves to some local place for breakfast (Bs&Gs, with beer, of course) by 7:00 a.m. by "tea," i mean a sort of high-alcohol concoction everyone else in the world would call a punch or similar. not sure why we call it tea. this year's tea was grain with mountain dew. not too bad. we then paint the streets with a sort of lime-based paint and mops. of course, they didn't have enough paint this year and we were done in a half hour, i barely got any paint on me at all. my buddy and i did not make it till 6:00 a.m. or so but we were on the streets for painting. the wiki article on MS&T's st. pat's celebration has a small picture of street painting in action. a better picture of all the guys afterwards is here. the last picture was a rather low-attendance year apparently. i estimated 250 or so alumni painting streets this year, with many others on the sidelines taking pictures. i held the tea at my apartment one year (1995), conveniently located on the street we paint. besides forgetting to add water to the tea (white liquors, green kool-aide mix, sugar and ice), we also left the door open so street painters could get back in to drink more. they mopped the apartment. i got evicted. oh, the guy in the first post here, is my 9th alumni rep. he's almost 50 years old and nothing short of insane. we used to have to do an "alumni chug" as far back as our lists went. my list went back to the early 70s, and the guy in the pic was from 81. when you get up to 10 or so and you're screaming "my alumni, alumni, alumni, alumni, alumni, alumni, alumni, alumni, alumni, alumni rep is..." after drinking all day it gets difficult. i should add, i got into KC (MO) on wednesday, then drove down to rolla thursday morning. got back after a 13 hour drive last night at 9:30 or so. it'll be a few days before i recover. happy st. pat's day everyone. i've got my green on and so does my family. taks

it "works" but if you run dxdiag you'll notice it only recognizes somewhere around 3 GB of that. whether or not the other 1 GB is actually being used is hard to find information on. i've heard rumors that it actually becomes reserved memory for the OS, so you may still be getting some benefit. i would recommend saving money by opting for the dual-core rather than a quad. you can get a faster processor for the same money, and you'll really only notice the difference if you're into heavy multi-tasking. i.e., most apps (including games) thread out to a single core unless they have been written specifically for multi-core implementation. the extra cores then really only help if there is more than one big app running. in any case, adding cores does not provide the same speedup, e.g. a quad is not 4 times faster than a single. memory conflicts drive this - from a common cache and a single bus - along with a few other issues, and it works out to something closer to a log2(num_cores) for your speedup. 2 cores averages out to sqrt(2):1, 4 cores is 2:1, etc, AT BEST, which assumes the app was written for multi-core implementation to begin with. taks

i believe it is already patched, up to the time the collection was originally released, so it wouldn't "come with patches," it would be "already patched." whether or not it contains the final patch i do not know. TotL would bring the "patched state" up to nearly the final anyway, and i don't recall if there was any subsequent patching done after that. perhaps it has something to do with a US vs. UK version? maybe each CD has a CRC based on whatever security measures were put in place? taks

given this constraint, i would opt for as much bang for the buck as possible. it's easy to say that you don't want to put forth the money now (for whatever reason), but if you want something to last for that length of time, you might as well spend it now rather than dole it out repeatedly upgrading over the next few years. of course, with PC-related technology changing so rapidly, it's always a difficult trade. i end up swapping out my desktop components about once every 12-18 months, though this is driven by games more than anything (well, that and i like building PCs). my latest was a complete overhaul changing everything except the case (got an antec server tower). my wife got most of the old PC, with some scattered elements going into my son's machine (which the little turd never uses, he's always on mommy's machine, grrr...) taks

the black boxes are a result of using one of the 32-bit settings (in config, i don't recall the actual setting). i think if you switch to 16 or 24-bit they go away. i had the same problem. using software BLT may remedy the problem, but probably creates the slow-downs you're speaking of. qwerty's ultimate collection file is probably updated from any original HoW CD set you may have, which would explain why it has a different CRC check. i.e., the ultimate collection was probably based on a new build generated with some (or all) of the patches and resulted in a different checksum value. since you have the original (assumed), it's looking for the original checksum. taks

the core duo is not that much different than the M-class processors, but the core2 IS different. die shrink, more efficient and lower power. core2 uses the core microarchitecture which is different than the M-class processor core, though it can be argued that the former evolved from the latter (same design group developed the core architecture and the M-class processor). core2s are also 64-bit, while the M-classes are not. going from an M 760 to even a mid-range core2 you'll probably notice a rather significant performance jump, and a cooler laptop to boot. of course, i've got a dual-core turion (AMD) in my laptop and it performs about as well as mid-to-low end core2s from what i understand. i'm probably more limited by the integrated graphics than anything, but at 12", i'm not expecting to play any graphics intensive games anyway. it's a portable laptop for doing work, not play (it only weighs 4 lbs., which makes it easy to carry around). on my desktop at home, i've got an E6600 (or is it a 6700... can't recall) and it is smoking fast. also got an 8800 GTS and 4 GB of mammaries, which helps, though i need to upgrade to a 64-bit OS to take advantage of all the mammaries (winders XP only recognizes about 3 GB). wiki has a pretty good writeup of the core2 and its evolution. taks

because once mccain took a lead, he never had to look back. hillary v. obama is simply more press-worthy because it's a dead heat down the stretch. nobody knows what the outcome will be with that one, but mccain is already done, so there's nothing really to report on. overall, he's not a very controversial candidate, either, at least, not from a media standpoint. during the last election, however, there was a hard fought battle between bush and mccain which did get a lot of press. taks

that's a pretty idiotic stance, pop. abe ran the country in completely different times, so you're making a complete strawman argument. abe didn't have to deal with "foreign policy" as we do today, nor did he have 303 million folks, 6 million employees, a littany of bureaucracies to run, a 2 million man army, income taxes... the internet did not exist so any of his flaws would never have made a splash. media, too, was non-existent compared to today. the list of differences is endless. not a surprise, either, that the best example you could come up with was from over 140 years ago. dum, dum, dum dum duuuuuum. taks

that would be a critical failure, nay, fatal... my father died at 69 as well. he would have been 70 this past saturday. sometimes life is just plain sad. mark

or would you actually end up with the body of a 920 year old? taks

pull the HDD and put it into another laptop is the only suggestion i have. taks

burn notice is great. i really like bruce campbell's character, too, but i've always liked him even in his more campy movies. psych, also on USA Network, is hilarious. the way they deal with shawn's "psychic" abilities in some cases is a bit odd (like a bionic "zoom-in" to whatever he notices), but otherwise the two main characters (the other being gus) are great together. taks

nah, no different than bennifer or branjelina... and i'd counter the billary term is actually meant to imply not that one is in control over the other, but with the two, you get one voice. i've heard a lot more comments that hillary was actually running bill's show, not vice versa. taks

definite eggheads. "natural born american" does not require birth on US soil, though american bases are considered US soil anyway as you note. simply being born to a US citizen also makes one a natural born, even if born on foreign soil. taks

i should add, i really like porters, too. taks

i had some flying dog beers at the breckenridge brew-fest a couple summers ago, but i don't recall which. one i didn't like, but the other was pretty good. i don't think either was road dog, but it's hard to tell because we got pretty drunk that day. our wives picked us up (two of us) at the end of the festival and we were the first ones through the gate in the late morning. it was ugly and we were camping on the reservoir just outside of breck, which made the rest of the evening interesting. i think the one was the IPA now that i ponder a bit... and no, i don't like IPAs in general. taks