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.
Hughes' legacy is enormous, too. As a philanthropic institute, it's endowment is second only to Gates.
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...
That's a cop-out, though. Yes, there is always an element of trust in whatever you do. That's unavoidable, though it's smart to minimize the amount of trust you must put in others. Taken to the extreme it's ludicrous, as you've pointed out. But, that doesn't mean that there's no merit in limiting the amount of trust you put in third parties. Just because you can't completely trust your OS or compiler, doesn't mean that you should throw the entire concept of limiting trust out the window. It's dishonest to suggest that the risk is the same between trusting (your compiler), (your compiler + your OS), and (your compiler + your OS + the CA system).
The CA system is truly an honor system by design. It requires you to put your complete trust in a large, and growing, list of opaque and unfamiliar third parties and the decision to trust them is made by others though an opaque and unaccountable process. It's putatively a "security system", but is insecure by design. It depends entirely on unaccountable, secretive, and self-selected "authorities" to determine who should trust who.
Look at your OS's list of trusted CAs sometime. Any of these organizations, or anyone delegated by any single one of them, are implicitly trusted by your system. Completely trusting Microsoft, Apple, or various Linux devs is naive, but completely trusting everyone in the root CA list is absolutely insane!
Because great men like Winston S. Churchill are now long dead.
It's more that he created an enterprise to facilitate criminal activities, particularly contraband smuggling and sales. Operating a business for the purpose of facilitating crime in general is different than "being a criminal".
What? This is bullshit, dude. Programming isn't a layer on top the physical world of spatial relationships; it's a layer on top the physical world of discrete, numeric algorithms.
In the real world, you have analogue power levels--voltage, current. Then, we build digital circuitry, such that being about 2.8-3.8V from ground state is "3.3V" or "ON", and being below that is "OFF"; being above that is "HALT, CATCH FIRE". This is a purely numerical behavior: the variations in the real world do not apply to digital circuitry.
On top of that, you build a set of operational codes to manipulate states, i.e. assembly. You also build programming languages such as C, Python, and so on, which turn complex algorithms into a static analysis tree, optimize the tree, and then convert that into optimal procedural operational codes.
The best we have for programming is object orientation, which takes a lot of procedural stuff for repeated modules away; but then you need to build the procedural framework to use those objects, as well as the discrete procedural behavior of the object. You're reducing complex procedural code down to a limited interface so that you can write other complex procedural code to handle that, thus reducing the amount of complex procedural shit you have to think about interacting with other complex procedural shit.
You can't program a computer by putting a ball on top a stick. Computers need programming in terms of what is absolutely understood and non-ambiguous.
OK, to clarify... disappearances and purges are bad news, but it's not as if these historical dictatorships were all fine and dandy up until the point where people started disappearing. Holding off judgement until something is allowed to fully develop into its inevitable final product is dangerous and naive.
So people disappearing is the line at which you think a government is atrocious? There was more wrong with the dictatorships of the past than just purges. Would a dystopia where everyone is kept locked up in cages, but nobody is missing, not compare to a real fascist dictatorship? This argument people like you keep parroting is like the No True Scotsman argument of bad government.
I would have ruled that money laundering laws are stupid and should be thrown out! There are a lot of other shits we could charge this guy with. For example: Continuing criminal enterprise.
Okay seriously, some people are retarded. They can't manipulate numbers because their brains are broken. Low-functioning sociopaths can't understand social interactions, and don't connect the pattern behavior together to fake it; high-functioning sociopaths recognize it as an academic subject, and fake it.
How is it hard to believe that some--perhaps many--tasks require an uncanny ability to do a certain thing, which nobody has? Maybe any idiot can learn to make a shitty program in Visual Basic; but, for the vast majority of people, no investment of time and effort is going to make them John Carmack. Similarly, some investment of time will teach you to sculpt; no investment of time will make you Michelangelo. Your creative writing courses won't make you Brandon Sanderson, Stephen R. Donaldson, or J.K. Rowling; the best you can hope for is being the next no-talent hack like Tolkien.
All these people can file SLAPP motion. Even the legitimate ones can claim she's running SLAPP cases around the whole issue, and have her barred from bringing this shit up ever again.
"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra
