They also have unrestricted root/administrator access to your machine.

Well, it's Sony. They used to sue their own customers, so why shouldn't they sue the press now.

They sure know how to make friends.

No, it can't be emulated by equalization. If at all it could be emulated by special DSP effects that also add some special distortion. There are plenty such effects available (in fact, a bit too many), but it's usually a horrible idea to slap one of those over an already mastered track.

The real problem has nothing to do with the warmth of vinyl, though. The real problem is that as a result of the infamous loudness war digital CDs are nowadays mastered in a completely different way than vinyl records, a way that is so overcompressed that it completely destroys the sound quality of the music - and provably so, as you can measure the horrible effects of this mastering precisely. It's not a subjective thing at all. Vinyl records have become much louder over the past few decades, too, but they have physical limits that digital media like CDs don't have. If a vinyl record was mastered like a CD, the needle would literally jump out of the track. (With adequate mastering CDs would be superior to Vinyl in almost every respect, but the reality is different due to the way mastering engineers were and are still forced to squeeze every inch of dynamics out of productions.)

Things get much worse with modern digital formats like MP3 or AAC. These would be barely tolerable with very careful mastering, but with modern "loudness competitive" mastering they create even worse artefacts than CDs due to intersample peaks and the interplay with the lossy recording process. Mid/side processing can reveal the horrible blubbering effects that these formats produce in case you can't hear them. (Although, if you can't hear them then you're probably deaf anyway and it won't matter.)

There is great hope that once broadcast stations have adopted new loudness measurement standards like EBU R128 the problem will vanish over time. These standards level the broadcast signals not to standard amplitude levels but according to broader loudness criteria - measuring mean values and taking into account the dynamic range of the audio material using standardized procedures. With these new standards we will hopefully get some dynamics and audio quality back to digital media which are principally vastly superior to vinyl.

I've never had any problems with WD, but fully agree about Seagate drives. They must have a built-in self-destruction device.

No, it is illegal wiretapping punishable by 21 years in prison. However, it will be made legal for them once they've figured out how to do it, simply because they are large corporations.

Funny, I've got all that information from the New York Times.

Children below 13 were killed by drone strikes, too.

Not if you're standing under it and it rains down in torrents.

You're just bullshitting, right? I know plenty of artists, writers, and musicians but I've never heard a creative person call himself or herself a "content owner".

Oh please fuck off ...

I disagree. You and the original author are typical proponents of soft AI, where "intelligence" is basically just meant in the sense of "complex heuristic algorithms to solve complicated and unusual problems" - and that's the good part of it, I also know plenty of people from our local A.I. institute who only do logic research without any application at all. Messing arounf with forrests of decision trees or answer set programming is at least of more practical use than that. It doesn't have much to do with real intelligence, though.

Real intelligence is almost defined by the ability to adapt to new situations, and so it requires autonomy.

Sadly, things don't work in the world as they should.

US presidents, current and past, also frequently order the execution of foreigners without any due process or publically strutinized evidence, and the drone strikes very often kill women and children who are definitely innocent. If that's so fine methodology, why don't they just blow up the whole building with an air strike when they spot a suspected criminal or an islamist in a Walmart? US double standards are criminally insane.

Well, the only problem with this version of the story is that Bush himself explicitly denies it. He claims he was well aware of what was going on, so he should go to prison for it. So should Cheney and the rest of those bestiaries.

It worked quite well in the past.

That's the crucial point where the analogy fails completely. You cannot be billed for something you have never agreed with in the first place, and at least in Europe you also cannot enforce a contract unilteraly by showing it to someone or hide it in the source code.

Regarding monetization of the web, I think you're a bit confused there. There is no right for businesses to sustain moronic business models that are not sustainable, and I really don't give a shit about whether and how people could make money from the web when I and others are using ad blockers. I have a right to determine what is displayed on my computer screen, and I sincerely hope that all ad-sponsored websites someday will go the way of the Dodo.

The poor sod might have thought that US government authorities don't really care, since the US government is the largest sponsor of the Egypt military anyway.