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...
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.
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.
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.
Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself. -- A.H. Weiler