misterhamtastic

This is actually a good solution. Most social issues should be dealt with on a state level, anyway, but I'll save that can of worms for another thread. It would be pretty simple-using your example-moving firearms from texas to california for some temporary use would require a bit more planning, sure, but if california wanted to say that "arms" are nothing more complex than muskets, and you wanted to bring in something wild like an M2 Browning machine gun with ammo-you'd contact the California department of (whatever) that would oversee this, fill out some forms, agree to some specific terms, and then you'll get either a yes or a no, which you can refuse to abide by at your peril. One major problem we face as a nation is that not all solutions fit all people. Gun laws within New York City should probably be different than gun laws in Texas, not only for practical, but also cultural reasons. The US is a hodgepodge of cultures, and so there won't be alot of "one size fits all" solutions to ANY issue, and gun control is going to be the single most divisive issue we can face. Consider this-Wyoming has already put out legislation which will make it illegal for a federal agent to enforce any gun law passed after 1/1/13. (not sure if that's passed yet) It's out there, though. If the federal government insists on running roughshod over the state laws of Wyoming (like they do in CA with marijuana laws), it WILL lead to a second civil war with secession of states and everything. What is more important, avoiding civil war, or putting odious laws(to most law-abiding gun owners) into place in order to pacify those who cry for "protection"?

Wow, so much good info. This has helped more than hours of research on tom's and similar sites. Let me ask you one more thing. Cooling-I am terrified of of overclocking my processor, only to not get it cooled enough to survive, not to mention that I've had 2 mobos die from what looks like overheating causing swollen capacitors. How do I find the right level of cooling? How important is cooling to the FSB, GPU, memory, etc? If it is important-how do I know if I have the right power setup for it? The case I'm going to use is an AZZA Solano 1000-a full tower with 6 fans to start with. Or... am I better off settling for a little less capability in trade for a warranty and perhaps some overclocking done at a professional builder? I'm talking micronpc or something, there's no way I'll afford Falcon Northwest or something wild like that.

I didn't read the entire thread(kinda long for that), but here is my 2 cents. I believe in the second amendment, for one simple reason. It allows us as citizens to tell the government, tread on our rights, become too corrupt, or otherwise abuse the processes by which we choose our representatives, "We the people" have the equipment to effect a change of government. People seem to think that making these weapons illegal will somehow protect the average citizen from other citizens, or something along those lines. The problem is, if legislation, reduction in freedom and personal responsibility were the keys to "fix" our issues, then the existing laws against murder and so forth would be enough to prevent tragedies. Evil acts will be committed. Humanity will commit atrocities. It simply is a part of humanity, and not a very pretty one. Optimistically embracing the idea that "making the weapons illegal will prevent their use and availaibility" is the real madness. Make it a crime to own assault weapons-you simply make it so that only those who will break the laws anyway are armed this way, as well as the government forces who will b e able to enforce whatever they feel is necessary to "protect" the people from themselves. I mean, if you really believe that banning weapon X from availability in order to "protect the public" is what needs to happen, then where should it stop? Shall we limit the purchase of hammers to licensed construction workers and make them register them? What about steak knives? Shall we also make owning a pointy stick illegal and/or regulated? The solution-in my opinion-is to charge the complete opposite direction. Encourage people to be armed. If a criminal has to think to himself,"Chances are that if I brandish a weapon, at least 50% of everyone around me will also be armed," they have to think to themselves,"I'm gonna get shot pretty quick if I show up with a gun." Let's take recent tragedies-Sandy Hook, the cinema shooting-In both cases, had every third or fifth individual in those places been armed, the innocent casualties would have been reduced. It really comes down to your views on human nature. Will disarming the law-abiding citizens in some way make the country safer? If you believe that people are incapable of responsible weapon ownership, then you would say yes. How then, in a disarmed nation, would you make the people feel they have the power to effect change in the face of weapons they have no access to? Machiavelli himself pointed out that disarming the the populace does one thing above all else. It breeds hatred for the government, because it says to the populace that the government does not trust them to act responsibly. If that is the real issue-that humanity cannot act responsibly-then we will not legislate the issue away without getting into ideas addressed by Orwell and similar authors. In order to "keep people safe" we would need to monitor people's every move, every word, and hold them responsible for it all. The smart thing to do-identify the mistakes made by the gun owner involved. He got the weapons from his mother, is what we're told, correct? I assume that she must have somehow left at least one available to him in order for him to shoot her. We have technology to fix this-require a gun lock on all weapons that makes it useless (without heavy modification) in the hands of anyone besides the owner. (didn't steve jobs bring up a technology like this?) Banning assault weapons does one simple thing-it creates strong distrust between the people and the government. A move like this (especially if you include forced confiscation) would say to me that those who are in power want to bring the US to an end as a world power-because it will be civil war. No matter what optimistic ideals you point to, no matter what "civilized thought" you appeal to, that will be the result.

I think we may be approaching the "upper limit" as far as processor capabilities in their current form, physically. (I SO want a quantum based desktop. :D ) Thank you for the advice. It really helps narrow things for me. I have a budget of 1750$ us-including shipping and warrantees and case mods if I do any, all that. I think you're right-so I'll shoot for a higher end mobo-an ivy bridge i5(can upgrade to i7 later), 16 gb ram(32 isn't that big a reach, although memory speed and all that confuses me). I'm hoping that between some programming changes(tell it to keep track of everything in a less memory intensive way or something) and getting my memory numbers high enough, I'll avoid the choppy times when I get to high play time numbers. Any thoughts on SLI? I have 3 8800GTS (I think that's what they are. They were awesome in 2009. :D ), and I'm thinking that I should have this functionality in order to expand with technology without breaking the bank. Even if I start with one decent GPU-it might be cheaper to get a second in 6 months than upgrade to a whole new one to try to keep up. I really am looking forward to FO4 (don't rush, guys. I can keep messing with New Vegas for awhile), and just want to be able to play it from day one and not wonder,"Is this an issue that needs patching, or my system unable to keep up?"

My first experience with an RPG was Tunnels of Doom on the TI-99/4A. Simple dungeon romp, but I was 4 and I thought it was awesome. I never did figure out how to get the stone crossbow, but just wandering around killing beasts with the occasional wander around the halls was simply amazing to me. Time passed, and I ran into a couple of new ones. Bard's Tale and Ultima 4. I played both games almost religiously, enjoying the whole character creation and leveling process of BT, although the repetitious death I experienced trying to get to the first dungeon was painful. Ultima was... huge. I think I spent a couple of years trying to finish that game, eventually getting to the bottom of the stygian abyss only to realize that those odd bone shapes I got at the shrines were letters I should have written down. Bard's Tale 3 was my next addiction, where I learned that it's not really that hard to manipulate the file system to duplicate items. Once you have a near unlimited supply of harmonic gems, the game became simpler, and the fun part was hunting encounters to gain XP. I learned there that, just because you CAN equip your level 1 paladin with the weapons picked up by the level 80 paladin, it sort of takes away from the enjoyment of the game. I found Wasteland about this time, and loved being able to imagine myself in fights with my Meson Cannon or my assault rifle(was it the.. M-1989 or something?). I was hooked on the idea of a post apocalyptic world and all it entailed. I played these games pretty consistently until I found Fallout 2. I missed fallout, so it was my first experience. Fallout 2 blew my mind. It was huge, in a recognizable setting, and my choices MEANT SOMETHING. Fallout 3 and New Vegas made it into a whole new experience, but held onto some of the ideas, as well as the post-nuclear setting. I consider them a seperate genre, though, because Turn based and First Person Real-Time are such completely different experiences. What did I learn from all of this? What do I want from RPG's? A few things, taken from each. Bard's Tale-the ability to pick a "type" of character to play. Ultima 4 had this to a lesser degree, but Bard's Tale brought home the fact that your Knight and Hunter and the rest of the melee characters really were there mostly to protect the magic-users. The specialization though and the different functions of the characters, even being locked into them, was kind of cool. I always wish for this sort of option. IE-Alt Starts in FO:NV are something I play with using mods and console commands. One character is a techno-freak, with an army of robots at his disposal, another is a simple courier, talking his way through the game. (Just examples, I have tried to play as a BOS Knight to start, A raider, a legionary, a mercenary.) It works great... until you hit that high enough level that you can't focus on your chosen specialties anymore, you have to become a super jack of all trades, master of all skills. It's like playing the "Hero" from Temple of Doom, or the Avatar from later Ultimas. Let me specialize, and give me some bonuses/penalties to go along with the specialization. I thought FO2 came close to this idea, with skill levels of 300. Another thing-why do I always have to face these apparently unreasoned limits to my character's level? Use a couple of bytes of address space and make the limits obscene-and dare me to try to max them. Let's face it, once you have leveled to level 100 or more in almost any game-you're just doing it for the level and the stats that go with it. You want to be a god, and that's your goal. Let me try to become one. Weapons and equipment-skill level should factor into the chances for a critical failure, not the inherent damage of a weapon. A bullet fired form a gun does the same damage regardless, although a novice with the weapon will be inaccurate, and possibly drop the weapon or have it blow up in his face if it jams hot. These are the things to be addressed by weapons skill levels, and familiarity with the weapons should affect the weapons inherent repairability. IE-you could repair the marksman carbine at a total repair+guns level of say 100 or something or higher. This is, in my opinion, a better way to limit access and use of weapons than skill damage or leveled vendor lists. (You can get the All-American at level 1, sure. Using it, you'll never be able to fix it, and expect yourself to drop the weapon when you reload, or jam it frequently as it degrades, etc.) It's these sorts of things I want. Let me play the character I want to play, and let me have the option to make it work. Give me multiple "endings", more so than I saw in NV. If I start as a BOS initiate-let me have a seperate main quest and ending for that role. Main quests can tie together, and quest completion should affect other quests and people. This was implemented fairly well in NV and FO3, but I always wish for a bit more along these lines. Honestly, though, if you guys did it right, you could probably get alot of it done by simply involving the top modders of past games in the beta, with the specific goal of getting them to put out some mods that can be included with the initial release. Things like Project Nevada, Darnified UI, A world of pain, so many other major mods that simply made the game better. Pick 10 of them, and invite those modders to participate from an early point in the beta. Get their hands on the game and ask them to recreate their popular mods, with payment for their work being their name in the credits and some type of free collector's edition or something. Another lesson from an old game-Fallout 2. If you really want to open the game up-include things like alternate speech for dumb characters(only at helios one? really?). Or let me be truly evil-a slaver/cannibal character who only wants to watch the world burn should be able to do so, and have an ending that points out what a b@stuhd the character has been. Something from real life-get a survival expert like Les Stroud or someone to come in and really give the importance of survival a healthy think over. Someone playing hardcore with a survival skill of 10 should find themselves thoroughly dead from simple exposure. Hardcore should be just that... hardcore and unforgiving. (Just to point out-I use Project Nevada's rebalance to make the frequency of needing to eat drink and sleep what I think makes sense, the only issue is that death from lack of sleep is a bit odd... shouldn't I be hallucinating midget deathclaws or something?) Let me stop there, I expect you may give me some doses of TL:DR as it is, but believe me, after playing RPG's and doing personal mods and tweaks to them for this long, I could write a book on what I want, and still not give all of my thoughts to you. I think the most important thing is what you have already figured it out. Make it easily moddable, provide tools, and let us get wild with it. Let us, the gamers and modders, make the game our own. Please, if anyone has personal ideas, they are welcome here. We all have our own personal preferences, and I doubt anyone else has my exact mod list they use (especially since I mod the mods I get to do what I want them to do. ).

So I'm building a desktop in February, and I want it to play Fallout 4 with about the same ease as this laptop handles Diablo 2. (Laptops fairly new, but only 2 cores, 2Ghz, with 4Gbs ram. Diablo 2 flies on it, though. ) Any chance someone could post some specs to work with, some possible specs for what FO4 will require? How about avoiding known issues with past products? Do I need 32 Gbs of Ram from day one, or could I start with 8 and probably be ok? Do I go with the I5 Ivy Bridge and spend some extra on a higher quality GPU, or go ahead and get an I7 and get what I can?

Mine was a TI-994/A with which I played Tunnels of Doom and Galaxy on our awesome cassette tape drive. :D