finish off that bottle of Wild Turkey
Wild Turkey...please. Who's gonna drink that swill when I've got a few quarts of homemade slivovitza under my sink? That way, besides the buzz, I get all the vitamins and minerals from the plums. And, in a pinch, I can run my 1973 Mercedes diesel on the stuff.
If you were a real "thoughtful admirer" of Nikola Tesla, you'd know that. Hmph.
I have a Yugoslavian one hundred billion dinar note from when there was hyperinflation in that country a few decades ago. It's got a nice picture of Tesla on the front.
His birthday is also the same as my wife's.
I'm posting this comment apropos of nothing. But Tesla was one bad ass. And was so cool that David Bowie played him in a movie. And I have no evidence of this, but I'm pretty sure that the huge explosion in Tunguska back in 1908 was caused by Tesla trying to build a time machine. Or something. Here, go read it yourself. I have the day off tomorrow, so I'm already half in the bag. Catch me in an hour or so, and I'll tell you my theory about Tesla actually being the immortal Count of St. Germain, who still lives today developing Android apps and smoking DMT.
No, not if you are a consumer of sound.
If you are a creator of sound, or music, then discrete audio hardware is a must. But you all knew that already. You cannot create music on the audio hardware that comes onboard a PC or Mac.
It is easy to make good DACs these days. Basically any DAC, barring a messed up implementation, is likely to sound sonically transparent to any other in a normal system. When you look at the other limiting factors (amp, noise in the room, speaker response, room reflections, etc) you find that their noise and distortion are just way below audibility. Ya, maybe if you have a really nice setup with a quiet treated room, good amps, and have it set for reference (105dB peak) levels you start to need something better than normal, but that isn't very common. Even then you usually don't have to go that high up the chain to get something where again the DAC is way better than other components.
Now that said, there can be a reason to get a soundcard given certain uses. For example you don't always want to go to an external unit, maybe you use headphones. In that case, having a good headphone amp matters and onboard sound is often remiss in that respect (then again, so are some soundcards). Also even if you do use an external setup, you might wish to have the soundcard do processing of some kind. Not so useful these days, but some games like to have hardware accelerated OpenAL.
Regardless, not a big deal in most cases. Certainly not the first thing to spend money on. If you have $50 speakers, don't go and buy a $100 soundcard. If you have a $5000 setup, ok maybe a soundcard could be useful, but only in certain circumstances.
As a side note, the noise in a PC isn't a big issue. Properly grounding/shielding the card deals with it. A simple example is the professional LynxTWO, which is all internal yet has top notch specs, even by today's standards. http://audio.rightmark.org/tes...
One of the very, very few times I've ever seen on
"that bloke's sodding knackered"
That you're complaining about a single comic strip doing this seems at least as odd. (Female characters in xkcd don't have breasts either but you don't see me complaining.)
*what the truth is and purposely
*Mistakenly conveying the wrong
Blargh.
Programming a computer to lie and be evasive about its nature is easy, and many chatbots can already do that.
This sounds very dubious.
A) A computer can only lie if it has a sense of truth, can't it? Lying implies that you know what the truth is an purposely state the opposite. Mistakenly convening the wrong information is not lying.
B) Regurgitating responses that were pre-programmed to be incorrect does not fit my definition of "lying." Programming a computer to give an incorrect response is ordering it to do so, so you're telling it to lie, which it obediently does. What would be far more philosophically interesting was if you told it to lie and it *didn't.* Now THAT would be a good indication of intelligence (although it's a bit hairsplitting).
Movies
Destiny and me woke up at the same time the next morning. We cuddled a while, made love again, then made coffee and took a shower together while the robots made us steak and cheese omelettes and toast and hash browns. Destiny put on the news. There was something about a problem in one of the company's boat factories; some machinery malfunctioned and killed a guy. I sure took notice of that! They didn't really have much information about it, though
By what metric do you declare Plutonium to be the deadliest substance on Earth?
Well, if it's not the deadliest, it's gotta be in the top ten. Doctor Jonathan Osterman, notwithstanding, that is.
Oh, and you are absolutely wrong about Hobby Lobby being "just like it was a sole proprietorship". A closely-held corporation is not like a sole proprietorship. They are granted a level of exemption to liability by the government that sole proprietorships are not. That means there is a "veil" between the individual and the corporation.
Apparently, the five (male) justices on the Supreme Court who comprised the majority in the Hobby Lobby case believed that the veil is impervious to all but the Judgement of the Lord God Jehovah, based upon absolutely nothing but their own religious beliefs in the Lord God Jehovah.
As I said, it will be looked back upon with embarrassment.
When I talk about "they" I am not talking about a corporation, but Mr. and Mrs. Green who own Hobby Lobby.
But Mr and Mrs Green are not the ones paying for the employees' health care. Rather, those checks are from the corporation.
People are acting like Hobby Lobby employees are somehow harmed by not having their employer pay for something they never paid for in the first place.
Maybe you don't understand how employer health care works. The reason an employer provides health care is because an employee works for them. So, in a very real way, the value of the health care has already been earned by the employee. Thus, it's not Mr and Mrs Green paying for the health care at all is it? It's the employees who pay for it, with their labor (and also direct deductions from their paychecks). Employer health care is not charity.
Hobby Lobby is this era's version of Plessy v Ferguson. In a relatively short time, it will be looked back upon with embarrassment.
Oh wait, it gets better. The esteemed Dr Cohen also stated that you could not die from exposure to radiation.
I'm pretty sure you'll agree that 1410 lbs of plutonium is probably not safe to keep under your bed.
You will notice that while Dr Cohen offered to consume as much plutonium as you would caffeine, he never actually did so.
The annals of the history of science are littered with cranks.
Dr Cohen also said that he believed uranium to be a renewable resource. Unless he's figured out a way to grow uranium, I'm sure you'll agree there is a finite amount of the substance. Dr Cohen did not believe that the amount of uranium on Earth was finite.
Crackpot.
Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.
