Quality of sound is inherently subjective. The sounds were not identical, just the double blind preference did not favor the Strad. If someone believes that a Strad (or tube amp, of vinyl, or whatever) sounds better, then does it make any sense to argue? This is 100% about entertainment, so the Strad may be better IF you are allowed to tell the audience that is what you are playing.

Personally I wouldn't buy a $1M violin (if I still played and could afford it), .and I also don't have a tube amp and got rid of my vinyl records many years ago. However if someone receives more enjoyment from those things than without them, its their $$$ to spend as they like.

Private flying is dangerous.
NTSB statistics (2012 is what I have).

General avaiation (small planes and some business flights): 6.8 accidents, 1.24 fatalities / 100,000 hours
Commercial aviation. 0.155 accidents, 0 fatalities/ 100,000 hours.
There really is no comparison in the safety record.

For cars I see 1.1 deaths / 100M passenger miles. If we assume a 30mph average speed, that is something like .03 fatalities / 100,000 hours.

You can play with the statistics all sorts of (perfectly valid) ways, but by almost any reasonable analysis, general aviation is substantially more dangerous that either commercial or driving.

These and other safety statistics at NTSB.

It varies. Between major airports, commercial will usually win in speed and cost. There are some trips that are faster and /or cheaper in a small plane than by other means, but in my experience (20 years of private flying), it isn't really all that common. I fly myself because I enjoy it, and I like the flexibility, but I can rarely justify it as an efficient means of transportation.

Figure a 4-seat Bonanza or Cirrus costs $200/hour to operate and flies at ~200mph. A Cessna 172 is considerably less, maybe $120/hour, flies at maybe 130mph, but can't carry as much, and has much more limited weather capability. (vague 1/2 of the total cost is fuel)

These are very rough costs, depends on how you count fixed costs, how fast you fly, etc etc.

Small aircraft are NOT a cost efficient way to get around in most cases.

People use aircraft to travel because their time is valuable.

As a private pilot the legal issues worry me. The pilot training, aircraft maintenance, and operating requirements are very different for different types operations. The "sharing costs" is based on the concept that you can fly your friends to Las Vegas and split the costs. It is assumed that you have reasonable informed your friends of the risks. If you are taking other "passengers" for some form of compensation, have they *really* been informed of the risks - which are dramatically higher for private flights than for air carriers.

If there is an aircraft malfunction and someone is injured, what are the insurance / lawsuit issues? what happens if a passenger damages your airplane - stepping in the wrong place, can do thousands of dollars of damage to some planes. What if you can't reach the intended destination due to weather - does the passenger get a refund? What if you are delayed? It is legal for private flights to operate under weather conditions that are not legal for commercial flights -what happens here? Fuel is less than 1/2 the total operating costs for my plane - do I get to split all costs, or just fuel?

We are also talking a lot of money here. A Bonanza or Cirrus total operating cost is probably ~$200/hour, so a "quick flight" from San Francisco to Las Vegas is $1000 round trip, close to 2X that in my Baron. Non-pilot passengers may expect a level of service and performance that just isn't reasonable for small planes.

Its a nice idea, and I'd love to participate, but there are too many possible problems.

Considering the high visibility of space missions, I'd value a statistical life around $1B. For most activities its much less - I forget the official number used in planning things, but probably $10-$100M. Remember that there are ways to spend money that will (statistically) save lives.

I think the life value ceases to be usable as the probability of death gets near 1. I wouldn't for example allow someone to buy a human hunting license for $100M, because the idea that a wealthy person can kill a poor person with impunity is damaging to the idea of american democracy (or at least what I think it should be).

I place a higher value on astronauts lives because their deaths are very visible - in addition to their personal death (worth say $10-100M), there is the demoralization of the 300 million Americans who are aware of that death.

All these numbers are very rough, I haven't thought about them carefully.

You are right and wrong. The specific problems that killed the Apollo 1, and Challenger astronauts were preventable, but in general with very complex systems you can't eliminate all risks. Engineers make mistakes. Managers incorrectly evaluate risks. Adding bureaucracy and reviews can reduce these risks, but also slows down and increase the costs of the projects, so there has to be some limit. Is it worth spending an extra $1B to prevent a death?

We are in a hurry because just as there is a time value to money, there is a time value to information. Learning something now is more valuable than learning it 10 years from now because we have an extra 10 years of use of that knowledge.

Engineering isn't perfect, In large complex projects people will make mistakes, and that is one of the risks astronauts face.

It depends on the long term goal. Personally I have a long term goal of human expansion into the universe, and I believe that to further that goal we need to try - accepting that many of the explorers will die. If the goal is pure planetary science, then it may well be possible to do it with robots.

I am content for there to me more Challengers and Apollo 1's. We honor brave people because they take risks. I believe it is wonderful and noble that people are willing to die to expand mankind's reach. This loss of life is not needless, it is the natural result of pushing the limits.

We could, we just don't want to. It would take an Apollo program style effort and we don't have the will to do that anymore.

We have reasonably long term habitation in the ISS. We can dust off old NERVA designs, they were about ready to fly test articles. Huge amounts of work to do, hundreds of billions of dollars, but we could do it for less than the cost of the Iraq war.

The answer to the Fermi paradox is that we simply aren't worth talking to.

Magellan didn't survive Magellan's expedition. Scott died trying to get to the South Pole. Mallory died climbing Mt Everest.

How many still die climbing everest even though its been climbed thousands of times? How many people die in bat-suits?

We are not talking about forcing people to take risks, but rather of looking for people who are willing to risk death to become immortalized in history. Have we become such collective cowards that we will not accept risks that daredevils accept daily for fun?

Take volunteers. Make sure that they understand the risk and are not in any way coerced. Send them out. If they die, build a grand monument to their heroism, and look for more volunteers. If they succeed build grand monuments, and bury them there when they die later - as they inevitably will.

In a hundred years everyone reading this will be dead. Give a few of them a chance to do die doing something magnificent.

I guess "harsh interrogation" is what you get when you aren't very good at torture???? The terminology is fundamentally stupid - if you are compelling someone to do something they don't want to do, and continue to do worse things, isn't that torture- whether its sleep deprivation, water-boarding or the rack really doesn't seem important.

China is not under US law. The US government and US companies may try to find ways to convince / pressure China to agree with our policies, just as China will try to find ways to pressure us.

The US government blocking a site in the US would be the exact opposite of freedom of speech. The entire point is to allow anyone to say anything they want without government restriction, unless the speech is specifically disallowed for other reasons: libel, copyright, child porn, etc.