The US was beginning to move in that direction several years back. My memory is a bit foggy - it seems like California was leading the way, and maybe a couple of New England states. Time frame would have been the latter half of the '90's. Then, 9/11/01 happened, and cops were given carte blanche. At some point, fleeing and evading the police was made a felony, so that a cop could just shoot to kill anyone who attempted to flee.

IMHO, giving chase is often justified - but no one can justify chasing a bad guy into and through a school zone, or a hospital zone at insane speeds.

The cop decided to take the risk of exceeding any given speed, not you. YOU are only guilty of the speed at which you were driving. The cop is entirely responsible for his own actions.

Question - have you never witnessed police speeding for mundane reasons? No siren, no lights flashing, they're just driving along. I've seen them fly through villages with speed limits of 35, doing double the speed limit.

Cops routinely break the law in most of the US, all on their own initiative.

You ain't very bright. I stated that they gave chase, not that you were running. I used 80 or 90 mph as an example, precisely because those speeds are only a little bit over the legal speed limits in many places. So, you meet a cop on the interstate, doing around 80 - in many places that is just ten mile over the speed limit. The cop drives across the median, does his U-turn, and gives chase. HE EXCEEDS 100 MPH, so he tells the judge that the "chase" exceeded 100 mph, in an effort to make the arrest sound much more serious than a similar arrest in a 35 mph zone.

As for "running away from the cops" - well, maybe I have done that. You don't do it in the family car though. And, "speeds over 100 mph" are meaningless terms on/in any vehicle capable of outrunning a police car. The term "speeds in excess of 175" might make sense then, except very, very, VERY few police cars are capable of that.

Youtube has a number of videos attributed to "Ghost Rider". You might find them interesting. Note that not all of those videos are of the "real" Ghost Rider, but some of the false attributions are as good as the real ones.

Structure, from the sound of it, although mostly this is people committing various fallacies of reification and making false claims of "natural kinds".

Everything is a continuum. Humans divide the continuum up using acts of selective attention. The only infinitely sharp edge is the edge of our attention (because we scale the edge to match the scale we are attending to, so whatever scale we are attending to seems to have a sharp division between the things we are selecting out.)

"Species" do not have particularly crisp boundaries in the general case: they fade into each other, and we draw edges around them in more-or-less arbitrary ways. When we find new varieties we can either create new categories (by drawing new edges) or lump them into old categories (by moving old edges). Which move is to be preferred depends on the purposes of the knowing subject.

Even dogs don't have hearing acute enough to tell the difference. It is as idiotic as asking for certificate of authenticity for the weasel-poop coffee. If you can't tell the difference in taste, why bother drinking poop coffee? If you need an oscilloscope to tell the difference what is big point in buying this sound card?

My old, circa 2008 Gateway machine wouldn't let me record the audio stream (aka, "What You Hear") with the onboard audio, had to install a discrete card to get that capability.

That's about the only useful thing I've done with a PCI sound card in the past decade.

Maybe.

Higher quality headphones, specifically ones that have their own amp, would probably work better, though.

Woah, watch your step around this post, ladies and gents; my Sarcasm Detector is going off the charts!

Even then, you're not going to be using a PCI Soundblaster card, but rather a purpose-built audio interface device. And you sure as hell won't be buying it from Creative. At least, not if you care about your sound.

... which are, by definition, discrete audio devices.

... For less than several hundred bucks, yea.

I mean, sure, right now you could probably get an R-pi or BeagleBone Black, a couple small, hi-res screens, an NFC shield, etc. and cobble together your own solution; but when all is said and done, would it be any cheaper than just using a Galaxy S3?

Hey, mebbe we're onto something here...

Really? I've got an old SB X-FI from, like, 2001 I think, and even though it spends most of its time in a dusty shop I've never had a problem with it.

For the average user, onboard is just fine.

For a power user (gamer/developer), onboard is probably good enough.

If you're an audio pro and/or you're building a semi/professional audio rig, onboard isn't going to cut it 99% of the time.

FWIW, plug in sound cards are actually more common than a lot of people think, because a lot of people seem to think that if it doesn't go into a PCI slot, it's not a sound card.

The Rocksmith cable, with its built-in discrete audio unit, is a prime example, one that I use almost daily.

Don't know about the iShinies, but according to this ad, er, link, from TFS, someone will be making one for Android devices.

I'd hardly consider a device that requires use of a $300+ smartphone to be "cheap," and definitely not free.

Still neat, though, because it shows off the depth of cool stuff you can do with cardboard these days.