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Maxwell Comp

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    Bottle Rocketeer
  1. I saw Spectre the other day, and I can't count the number of errors in it. It has such an abundance of the classic unrealistic aspects that the 007 franchise is famous for. I'm not talking about jetpacks or submarine cars, I'm talking about the stuff.
  2. I've done this a few times, though only with Windows 8 and XP (xp didn't know what hit it, lol). I believe I used Acronis and their free trial to do it, as I couldn't get EaseUS to work quite right either. http://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/computer-backup/ As a rule, of course, keep the prior drive for a while in case something goes haywire. Sometimes a problem might emerge a week or two later after an automatic Windows update. Make sure that you get the drivers for the SSD too; I recently had some problems with that caused by a Windows update.
  3. It's good, but it's probably more than you need. It has a lot of extra cost, and only a bit better performance. Any desktop i5 processor should do the trick. Other than that, you'll want 8GB RAM, and a discrete graphics card. There are tons of graphics card models, but there is a chart at http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html that lists all of them in descending order of performance (the two columns are just for the two different major brands, each row is about equally powerful). If you get anything on or above the line that starts with "GTX 260", you should be fine. The higher on the list, the better. Kerbal doesn't use much graphics power compared to other games, but if you play anything else you'll want one of the more expensive cards. Graphics cards change model numbers every year, and each of the two makers (Nvidia and AMD) make several cards to fit various budgets, so the specific models can get a bit confusing to follow until you are fluent with their naming patterns.
  4. I came here to say exactly this. If it's overheating, a probable cause is a lack of thermal paste. I have some Artic Silver that I used when re-seating my old computer's CPU heatsink and it's pretty good, but really almost any thermal paste will do the job if you apply it correctly. It's hard to get a bad paste, and the high-end ones perform only a few degrees better than average ones when they are both applied correctly. A kit may come with a cleaning solution to remove the old paste, and you should use a coffee filter or microfiber cloth to wipe off the CPU and heatsink contact points. Don't let any dust or fingerprints get on the contacts, because that will decrease it's performance.
  5. I would like a sister planet to Kerbal, in the same or a very near orbit, and maybe 10 or 20 degrees ahead along the orbit. This would be a much easier target for a first interplanetary mission. Let's call it Kerbal Prime. It could be part of a storyline that says Kerbal Prime is about to be destroyed by the asteroids or somesuch, and we want to reach it to do some science while it still exists. Whether Kerbal Prime is populated or not is an exercise left to the reader (if it is populated, please give them a planetwide focus on digging and drilling, just for the opposite factor, and because that could be part of its impending doom). Maybe have some benefits for rescuing some inhabitants of Kerbal Prime too - like extra resources because they love digging.
  6. I think you guys are finding brilliantly exotic ideas, but there's a simple one we could try for the in-atmosphere ejection. Because of Mar's low atmospheric density and lower mass, it requires much less power to reach escape velocity than from Earth. In fact, a small rocket could easily be made that could escape Mars's atmosphere, with mass and space to spare. According to Air & Space magazine, a rocket the size of a pencil could do it. That rocket can be fired upwards away from Mars and collect atmospheric samples on the way up. The other 150kg of mass ejected earlier could be another rocket, and the two rockets could link and begin a return trip to Earth. It's a relatively simple sample return mission. The hardest part would be the orbital docking, but the rockets will already be along aligned orbits. Preservation of the returned sample will be important because there will be very little martian dust/atmosphere in it, but there will be enough to experiment with.
  7. I second the App suggestion. The trustworthy Ti-83 is hugely overpriced. It's good for what it is, but I think the price has been constant for at least 10 years with no real changes.
  8. You forgot the lowest-cost storage medium, and it's one that is still common in many industries:tape storage. Yep, old-fashioned tape drives. Modern tape cartridges can hold up to 4TB on a single cartridge, and are often the most cost-effective form of long-term storage for massive amounts of data.
  9. You probably could. The computers used by Apollo were very specialized, whereas your phone has a general-purpose CPU. Your phone can do much, much more because integrated circuits have advanced tremendously.
  10. You should look up Esperanto. It has no irregular conjugations, and I think it allows nouns to be conjugated. For example, in English we can say "it is raining" but we cannot say "it is summering", because summer is only a noun while rain can be both a noun and verb. I have heard that Russian allows conjugations of nouns, at least under certain situations. Esperanto is probably the easiest language to learn, but English is not very difficult. The Romance languages are somewhat easy too. Slavic/Balken/etc languages from Eastern Europe are very difficult (I hear that Polish and Hungarian are particularly hard), and legend is that Icelandic is the hardest national language. I believe Russian has some of the most beautiful pronunciations of certain phrases, but unfortunately few people speak the language to sound beautiful. Not to denigrate French or Italian - they can sound beautiful (and often do) - but Russian has a handful of charming words that a Romance language couldn't produce. Anyway, you will probably enjoy a mathematical field called Discrete Mathematics, as well as Propositional Logic. The things you have written are well thought-out.
  11. It is such a shame that it died in non-spectacular fashion. It would be wonderful if it had somehow presented a 'threat' to Earth (but the type of threat that is only a threat according to the most ratings-obsessed media). It's been a while since we had an End Of The World, and the 2012 Mayan one wasn't even celebrated much. The last good End Of The World was Y2K. We need some type of once-a-decade celebration. New Year's is every year of course, the Olympics are every 4 years (or every 2 years if you include winter Olympics). So, something once every 10 years would fit right in. Doesn't the sun have a cycle duration of about 11 years? We should start a movement to predict the end of each cycle, and celebrate that. The prediction doesn't need to be particularly accurate, it is just an excuse to celebrate.
  12. I have a small experiment that may help illustrate an interesting idea hidden in the question. Get a helium-filled balloon on a string, them get into your car with the balloon. Hold the string so the balloon is floating without touching anything else, and then keep an eye on it while you accelerate. The question is, which way does the balloon move when you accelerate? If my memory is correct, the balloon actually moves forward. This is because it is lighter than air, and so it will be displaced by the air due to the slight pressure change caused by the acceleration. Pressure in the back of the car will be slightly higher, so the balloon moves forward a bit into the lower-pressure air. In light of this interesting fact, what do you think will happen to airplanes that are flying if the earth's rotation suddenly stopped?
  13. Is there any form of climate modeling software that is (somewhat) easy to use and "all batteries included"? I know that climate modeling is incredibly complex and requires much more computing power than the average home user has, but a simplified planet should be model-able with a home computer. That model may not be able to model the effect of ocean currents or arctic melting. But, it would be nice to have a planet with atmosphere that we can experiment with. As an amateur software programmer, I have considered trying to make a simple model, though honestly a project like that is well out of my league. I would need to quit work and devote several years before I could begin to make real progress.
  14. On my first manned Mun-and-back mission, some of the landing gear broke. Fortunately I had enough inline stabilizers to partially lift the ship and get into a orbit with the bit of fuel I had left. Unfortunately, that orbit was completely wrong. Plan B: burn almost all of my remaining the fuel to get into a Kerbal orbit - but I didn't have enough to enter the atmosphere, so I burned retrograde at periapsis to ensure I continued orbiting only Kerbal. Then, I launched my rescue craft, full of fuel and space for the crew. The Mun lander didn't have docking ports, so I just planned to EVA the intrepid crew into the rescue craft. After 20 minutes of fiddling with orbits and alignments (I don't use MechJeb - I would use it, but it doesn't seem operable on my system), I got an orbital rendezvous within 200 meters. I cannot describe the incredible satisfaction of manually reaching orbital rendezvous as I saw the two ships hover in space. I transferred the crew to the rescue craft and burned retrograde into LKO to prepare for re-entry. It was at that moment that I discovered a problem. Where are my parachutes? .... I forgot to put parachutes on the rescue ship. Plan C: Rescue Ship 2.0 (Parachute Edition) was sent up, did another orbital rendezvous in LKO, EVA transfer, and finally I landed the crew on the ground safely.
  15. I would change the laws of physics so that I could (at my own discretion) become completely invisible, except for my retina. The retina need to be visible because, if light passed through them, it would be impossible for me to see anything. That would negate most of the invisibility benefits. If I couldn't do that, I would simply change pi to equal 4. I am aware that this is rounding upward, but 4 is a nice square number, and it would allow circles and squares to have the same circumferences and areas if they have the same diameter. I'd like to see what would happen to the universe if this were instantly changed.
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