It sounds a lot like my experience with Linux.

I hate feeling like I have to turn in my geek card to use Windows, but Linux has always felt like the place for hobbyists-turned-career, while you go with the MS solution if you have other things to spend your time on than coming up with clever ways to make things actually work.

IMHO, of course.

I hear this plan has a security hole where the men can see it all...

So under peer pressure from my fellow geeks, I joined the smartphone revolution and bought an HTC EVO. What do I do on my new smart phone? Call people, receive calls, check voicemail, and text. What is harder to do on a smart phone? Call people, receive calls, check voicemail, and text. What do I not do with my smart phone? Read my e-mail, shop, get directions, remote into my PC, sling video, watch TV, play MP3s, tether, control my TV, play games, etc. I regret my smart phone move, and fact is, there will always be a segment of people who will have no desire to use their phone for anything but communicating with people in a space and energy efficient manner.

It's about time someone made a crisis out of educated people making more money than everyone else; all the crying over our society's devaluing of education was getting old.

http://www.fender.com/promos/2010/rockband3 Only cheaper, easier, and most likely better interaction with the game.

The only possibility of better quality sound might be USB devices, because the signal is purely digital until converted in the external box - or some kind of digital wireless technology that completely separates the PC from the DAC and amp without introducing noise or lost bits. I challenge anyone to find an internal sound card that provides the quality they are looking for, because it doesn't exist. Every consumer sound card on the market up-samples, so it is reprocessing the sound internally before pushing it out, and this is creating noise. Some professional equipment MIGHT not do this, but you can't always rely on their spec page to tell you about this specific feature(I know, I've bought a midiman sound card). This internal processing is the reason I've gone as far as pushing out S/PDIF do an external $300 DAC, and still got background noise. If the analog conversion is happening in a noisy environment, then that's as good as it'll get. You either learn to put up with it, or start going for really specialized setups.