There's usually no need to spend so much on the motherboard. The motherboard doesn't really contribute to the gaming performance, so a mid-level board from one of the good brands (Asus, MSI, Gigabyte) is probably good enough.

While you may get slightly higher out-of-the-box clock speeds with the i7 CPUs, a high-end i5 gives better bang for the buck in gaming, as the main difference between i5 and i7 series is Hyper-Threading support in the latter series, and Hyper-Threading doesn't usually increase gaming performance (and some games actually suffer from Hyper-Threading). The CPU performance isn't very critical, as the gaming performance comes mostly from the graphics card, at least in graphics-intensive games and with high resolutions. In general, the graphics card should be the most expensive component in a gaming build, and by a good margin.

It seems that very few games gain anything from more than 8 Gb of RAM. A higher amount of RAM doesn't hurt, of course, but it can be wasted money if the budget is more limited than $2000.

There are very few setups with a single graphics card that won't run with a good 500 W PSU. For example, a computer with a new i5 or i7 CPU and for example GTX 980 will use a bit over 300 W tops under heavy loads (you can find measured power consumption figures in card reviews).

Good cases can be bought for a lot less than $150. Of course, looks are worth taking into consideration, as the case is what you'll actually be looking at.

Again, you have no point:

- If you can produce plutonium, you can produce tritium (in fact, you'll produce tritium in any water-cooled reactor).

- The relative amounts of Pu-239 and Pu-240 is a function of burn time. If you have a nuclear reactor, you can control the burn time, producing the isotope mix you prefer. Pu-239 doesn't need to be enriched with centrifuges or other methods like U-235.

- If you don't have plutonium production capability, but can get enough plutonium to make a bomb, getting tritium is trivial. Tritium has been widely used, and for example missing exit signs generate a large portion of NRC's "missing radioactive material" alerts.

- Pu-240 was discussed above. Its presence in large concentrations complicate bomb design because of its high spontaneous fission rate and shorter half-life compared to Pu-239.

I fail to see any point in your reply:

- All explosives have impurities. A uranium-based nuclear bomb is not 100 % U-235, it's enriched to somewhere around 90 % U-235. A block of TNT is not 100 % trinitrotoluene, there are impurities too. The impurities sometimes contribute to the outcome, but in nuclear weapons, it's the U-235 or Pu-239 that's brought to critical density condition to make the explosion possible.

- Working nuclear weapons have been designed without D-T boosting; in fact, no nuclear weapons program to date has began with such a boosted design. The boosting is a complication from engineering point of view.

- It's access to weapons-grade uranium or plutonium that's the problem from proliferation point of view. If you have working nuclear plants, like Japan does, access to tritium is a trivial addition.

Pu-240 isn't used for nuclear weapons, though. The isotope for bombs is Pu-239, with a critical mass of ~10 kg. The spontaneous fission rate for Pu-240 is much higher than for Pu-239 (about 30000 times as high), and it's also more highly radioactive, leading to additional problems with keeping the bomb cool before detonation.

The critical mass isn't that important in "normal" bomb designs. For example, Little Boy and Fat Man weighed about 4500 kg (the former being a couple hundred kg lighter), so a difference of a few tens of kg in the critical mass is negligible when compared to the total bomb mass. However, if you are aiming at the smallest possible physical bomb size, plutonium has a big advantage. Compare two actual weapons with ~1 kt yields, W33 and W54. The former is a gun-type uranium device, weighing something like 110-120 kg, based on the estimates I've seen, and it's an artillery shell with a base diameter of 20 cm and length of roughly 70 cm. The latter is a miniature plutonium implosion device with a weight of 23 kg and a diameter 27 cm.

Reading the press release (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/10/23Apple-Introduces-Next-Generation-iWork-and-iLife-Apps-for-OS-X-and-iOS.html), I'd guess you need to be running Mavericks to get the free versions.

Read the relevant article. Also, if they are already giving away the latest iWork and iLife suites, what's the point of having some of your users with older and possibly vulnerable versions?

What's the problem? iWork and iLife suites are free now. Or do you mean Aperture?

No, the AC set up a straw man in his "experiment". It ignores the higher thermal capacity and lower heat conductivity of humid air compared to dry air, for starters. He may have a PhD in physics (so do I), but that doesn't excuse him from the fact that CO2 has been shown to be a greenhouse gas.

Yes. You seem to be pretty out-of-date in normal laptop and other WiFi-enabled systems.

I thought putting up a disclaimer (as there are "commercial" products for pretty much everything), but I thought that it was clear from the context. Your OEM laptop will not crack WEP out-of-the-box.

Having a laptop open in your car does that, it's nothing special. My ages-old iBook would connect to any open WiFi network, were I using the default settings. Picking up an unencrypted connection is trivial, whether by purpose or by accident; connecting to a WEP-encrypted WiFi network requires some specific effort. You are building up some ridiculous straw-man here: There's a lot of equipment that will connect to any open WiFi network in out-of-the-box configuration, but there's no such commercial products that'll crack WEP without user configuration.

The collision energies are ~10 % of LHC's. The benefit of a linear collider is that leptons like electrons and positrons can be used, making the analysis of the collisions simpler.

No. He wants religious indoctrination of children to be labeled as child abuse. That is not equal to criminalizing religion.

Wrong. 72.8 % of philosophers being atheists is much, much higher than the average in the US. Link to a very recent study: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/04/29/what-do-philosophers-believe/

But that's what you claim: The existence of a creator is a 50/50 chance situation, with nothing possibly skewing those odds to either direction. You just can't see how taking that stance in the lottery analogy leads to an absurdity. I'm not twisting any facts. I just find your unsupported 50/50 claim ludicrous, and tried to show how a true/false situation can mean anything but 50/50 odds.

I don't really agree with this. The ancient Greek philosophers got several things wrong, when they didn't do the experiments they could have done.

And that specific philosophy is called science. Philosophy in general lacks the self-correcting feedback that science has between the experiment and the theory. But, a theory begins with observations; usually such observations that aren't explained by existing theories.

Not my problem. My credentials are verifiable, but I'll prefer anonymity, as I don't try to make it an argument from authority. While you are on your trip to visit the cosmologist, find a couple of experimentalists and ask your philosophy question.

And? Science doesn't provide moral guidance in this sense. Though I'd like to know Einstein's view on atom bomb vs. invasion of the Japanese main islands, as the latter had a lot higher projected death toll.

:D You do know that the giant skeleton was a hoax?

No. We have found evidence of local floods, but no evidence for a global one. And there isn't enough water on earth for a biblical flood.

Wind driving the water off from such a large area is a stretch, and it hasn't been demonstrated in reality. But yeah, I'll grant that it's not entirely impossible. The problem then is that you are trying to use a natural phenomenon as evidence for the supernatural.

I did not make that claim, I said "much". There are also the boring parts (genealogies, *yawn*), and even a few reasonably entertaining stories.

What does that have to do with theories not being proven right? Of course some theories are so wrong that it's waste of time to study them, but to recognize theories that are wrong usually requires developing the theory to a stage where it can make predictions, and then making the experiment or observation.

That's an absurd claim. BB theory is based on Einstein's general relativity, which predicts non-static (that is, expanding or contracting) universes. If you want details, check out FLRW metric. "Race science" or eugenics, on the other hand, was politically motivated and twisted to produce "results" that the ruling parties wanted. It was more an ideology.

Would you finally describe the EV theory? Google doesn't recognize it, and as I said earlier, the small bits you've inferred don't point to a theory which I've heard of.

You have to substantiate this claim (actually two claims: 1) different BB theories, and 2) claim to be right).

But Krauss's work is mostly about BB cosmology. Are you referring to A Universe from Nothing? A popular account of how the Big Bang could have happened.

Perhaps. But those are also well integrated into other disciplines, so math covers the logic part, for example.

Yet you seem to be leading at this front, starting the very post I'm replying to with a fallacy.

Evidence? I'd rather expect that education in general makes people smarter, and starting from an earlier age gives better results.

The problem here is you try to claim that philosophy, and only philosophy, can give these tools. In reality, those tools are in the sciences and math, and only in those disciplines philosophy can lead to actual knowledge about our world. You need to combine the philosophy with experiment, i. e. do science, to produce actual results. You can see this in the study I linked above: The philosophers don't have a consensus on any of the questions asked (external world comes closest, with 80 % agreeing with it). So while philosophy can provide us some useful tools, and studying it surely won't hurt anyone, it doesn't seem to be that useful alone.

Yes, math is an integral part of physics. But if I calculate the trajectory of a projectile, am I doing physics or math? Or fit a theoretical model to my data? In the same vein, I'm not philosophizing when I try to deduce the magnetic interactions in a sample from different datasets.

You've yet to show that Krauss holds that view. Abolishment through education (as higher education correlates with less belief in sky-fairies) seems to be what he advocates.

So, you couldn't find anyone giving those odds? Winning in lottery is a true/false question, how can anyone set those odds as anything different than 50/50? This is something that you seemingly fail to grasp.

As a PhD, I'll have to inform that you are wrong. Every scientific theory begins with experimental data. This is why, say, the ancient Greeks theorizing about atoms didn't produce anything usable.

You are showing a great amount of ignorance of history here. Read up on Sumeria and Ancient Greek beliefs. It's not difficult to come up with any modern religion based on previous beliefs.

That's part of my point. The religious dogma seems like fairy-tales built on older fairy-tales. I did say "in vacuum", i. e. working without knowledge of the current and past religions.

Much of the Old Testament is factually wrong or pretty hideous stuff morally. I don't know about truth, but science has been the only tool to give us something usable.

So show me wrong with actual quotes.

What conflicting information? We have talked about inaccuracy in measurements of parameters, like the age of the universe.

I haven't claimed that BB theory is right, as no theory is ever right. They can only shown to be wrong; until that happens, the prevailing theories are our best models to match the universe we observe. Did you read the Scienceblogs page I linked to? Where were the numerous BB theories presented there?

You still don't get it: Parameters are part of a theory. Using different parameter sets within a theory doesn't make different theories.

What "expanding vacuum theory"? It's just your misinterpretation, as far as I can tell.

Yes, that's the starting point of BB theory.

How does it do that, when it's part of the BB theory?

Show the differences, then. All you have shown so far are different parameters used in the BB theory.

To what accuracy do we know those masses? Does using different values within the known inaccuracy produce different Newtonian gravity theories?

Again you show your ignorance. Dark energy and dark matter are placeholders for causes of things that we observe, but don't have a proper theory for. For example, the Bullet Cluster gives pretty much direct observation of the dark matter, but we still don't know what the dark matter is, exactly. We only know some things that it isn't. The difference to your magical things is the dragons aren't needed to explain the moon's orbit.

Again, you are only talking about something that you have invented, not the actual BB theory.

But the BB theory doesn't claim a massive explosion. That's only an analogy. And I don't see how an explosion would lead to contraction; I've never observed the gasses released when firing a gun contract back into the barrel or case. It's all a straw man you are building here. And if you are talking about running time backwards so that expansion turns into contraction, didn't you just above say that your imaginary expanding vacuum theory starts from a small point?

It'd be helpful if you showed those discrepancies instead of your own misunderstandings.

Is this the level of sophistication that 30 years of philosophizing has given you? What if you are only programmed to think that?

The problem is that nothing in Krauss's work resembles your expanding vacuum, as opposed to the BB theory.

It is clear that you can't answer this question.

So is physics, at least when talking about modern level (say, the level of 1900s like quantum mechanics). So?

While I don't doubt that you can find people with extreme views such as abolishment of religion, that's not what atheists in general demand. The demand is to keep the beliefs inside the believers and out of the society.

And yet you can't give an example of your 50/50 claim. Not that it matters, philosophy is pretty worthless in evaluating claims of existence.

I've often wondered, how many of those people would have believed in a god, had they not been indoctrinated during their childhood (I don't claim that all of them were). I have hard time believing that anyone would come up with the Christian God and dogma (virgin birth and such) just starting from first principles and working in vacuum. Additionally, Einstein was a pantheist, he didn't believe in a creator god.

You still haven't shown a single disagreement. You just don't get it: That two popular sources cite somewhat different numbers does not mean that there are two different Big Bang theories. The theory is the framework that ties the parameters together in a consistent way. For example, in BB theory, the size of the universe is tied to the age of the universe. The size of the universe is also tied to the Hubble constant. If we measure the Hubble constant with say 20 % accuracy, we get an estimate for the age of the universe that's 20 % or more inaccurate. This inaccuracy in determination of parameters has as just little to do with correctness of the BB theory than inaccuracy in the earth's circumstance measurements has to do with the theory of the spherical earth.

Yes, yes, there are different parameters in the BB theory. Using two different sets of parameters doesn't produce two different theories. If you use two different masses for the earth and the moon to model the earth-moon system with Newtonian gravity, you don't produce two different theories of Newtonian gravity.

The measurements indicate that the rate is increasing. Speeding, slowing down, doesn't matter from the theory point of view, because using different parameters in the BB theory produces those scenarios. By ever-increasingly accurate measurements we can determine those parameters.

What "mass inflation" scenario? Please explain how mass and inflation are connected. It is clear that while you may have read about some of these things, you haven't really understood what you have read.

Wrong again. There are no expanding vacuum and big ball of mass versions for the BB theory. Those are just your fundamental misunderstandings. Again, I can only suggest discussing these matters with an actual expert.

Use facts a little bit. The term was coined up by the BB theory opponent Fred Hoyle to give some sort of catchy name in a radio broadcast. The Higgs particle is often referred to as "the God particle" in mainstream media. By your logic, this means that the Standard Model includes a god.

Again, you misunderstood me. First, a lack of belief is not a belief. Second, I dismiss those based on available evidence, just like I dismiss universal aether, flat earth, unicorns, and so on.

You should study the concept of null hypothesis. If there's no evidence for something, no matter how hard we look, the thing probably doesn't exist. Should there be evidence for a god or gods in the future, I'll reassess my view.

It's not my belief, I just acknowledge the possibility, and I'm sorry, but we can't.

Bullshit, at least in the given context. We can't prove any portion of string theory correct, just like we can't prove Big Bang to be correct. Don't get me wrong, string theory has some interesting math, but it's not factual. If there is no fact, there is no possible way to have a testable prediction.

Of course there is a way to make testable predictions starting from first principles. Einstein did this (say, slowing down of clocks special relativity), BB theory did this (cosmic microwave background, for example, or abundance of light elements).

Yet, BB theory has made predictions that have been confirmed.

Perhaps you could at this point summarize your EV theory, as it's nothing I can recognize.

Well, you were talking about being biased on what is taught. So what should be taught then?

And they are, in the philosophy classes.

You are missing a lot of possibilities here. What if the universe (or multiverse, or whatever you wish to call it) has always existed, and our observable universe began from a phase change in that larger entity about 13.8 billion years ago? Or, we are are a 3+1-dimensional brane in a higher-dimensional multiverse?

Already wrong at this point. Say, an uranium atom decays just now. What made that happen at that precise moment? Nothing.

Why would those universes have to pop up within our universe? If our universe sprang up from something in a higher vacuum state dropping to its ground state, that could have happened many times, with the other universes being outside ours? Or, as scientists like Stephen Hawking have at some point surmised, what if our black holes give birth to other universes, which create their own space-times?

Not any philosophers I'm aware of. Perhaps you could provide some references.

No, I don't dismiss it. I dismiss any personal, interacting god. I dismiss any biblical and such creator gods, who create the universe in an already-evolved state. A creator who just pushes the button, so to speak, and ends the interaction there, is an option that must be considered possible. For example, if our universe is a computer simulation, the entity who started the simulation would qualify as such a creator. However, I find this option rather disinteresting. How would you show that this is what really happened? I don't see a way, and we'll be stuck in a situation of "we don't know what happened". As long as science can hypothesize testable (at least in principle) theories of the beginning of the universe, that's the way to go.

You really are banging on your ignorance of the subject. Who are these "most cosmologists", who claim that the universe is about 15 bn years old, instead of 13.8 or thereabouts. The latest data by the Planck probe gives the age as 13.8 bn years, and that was a minor surprise to most cosmologists, as that's some 80 million years higher than our previous-best data indicated. Read all about it here: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/03/21/what-the-entire-universe-is-made-of-thanks-to-planck/

Yes, details and parameters of a theory change, as first those are unknown, and only later determined in more and more precise measurements. You probably dismiss the theory of heliocentrism too, as the distance between the earth and the sun has been estimated to have different values over time. Or the theory of a spherical earth, as the ancient greeks got a different circumference value than what we measure now.

That's only an issue with theories that don't make (currently) testable predictions.

OK, so what alternative for BB theory should be taught? That there was a creator? What happened after the creation?