In a city? A .308, even a .223, or the venerable .30-06 will do that job just fine

If Slashdot had posted a story about "the Lone Gunmen" pilot episode, then they would have a scoop that anticipated the 9/11 attacks with a civilian airliner, by several months...

Yes, but we want asteroids, not meteorites. Or worse, an impactor that doesn't just break up and lie there.

Nah. Not HERE, in the land of the Free, with Rule of Law!

But?

We were right all the time. Unfettered by doctrine, dogma of allegiances, wary of our own cognitive bias, we saw what we saw.

Bitter vindication.

So nothing is real or possible before you see it? Why not kill yourself now, then? After all, tomorrow may never come.

People smarter than you (or I) believe that mining asteroids is not only possible but even feasibly. That doesn't mean that it is, of course. It only means that I have no reason to give a shit what you think about asteroid mining.

Fungus among us.

He preached Torah?

Harrumph. He makes vague statements about Law, in writings committed 60 years after his crucifixion.

Sermon on the Mount is what he taught.

You still can do pretty much any of those things on your own land, just as you could in the 1800s. You can build your own gun, drive an unregistered car, and perform practically any work for your own personal enjoyment.

What part of liberty allow you to do anything you damned well please on *somebody else's* property? Cause if you think you can fire a gun or perform Shakespeare or ride your 4 wheeler in my back yard then FUCK YOU! Because that's the American way.

Possession is 90% of the law, defense is the other 10%. If you can get it and defend it, it's yours. It's the same principle on which ownership of every country on Earth is based.

OK. Tell that to MPEG-LA. By your definition it's a cartel plus extortion. Have fun with that.

Asteroid mining is the only way we're going to build large structures in space anytime "soon". There's plenty of asteroids, this issue can be revisited later.

Ah. I see. I havn't had points on the Dot since 2011.

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...