Good luck listening to 32 kbit WMAs then.

How much is a disappeared citizen worth, exactly? I'm bad at math so please humor me.
More money is spent each DAY on beauty products worldwide than on the entire cost of looking for '370 up to date. Wasted food in the USA costs 40B a year for households alone (Jones, Timothy. Corner on Food Loss. Biocycle, July 2005. p25). Compared to those numbers, looking for 239 missing people is pocket change.

From a different perspective (that is, excluding money from the equation), I agree with you, and that perspective is temporal. Too much time has passed since the plane's disappearance. The chances of finding it are below what I'd consider a threshold for continuing to search for it. And again, I must emphasize on this: it is not about the money to me, and it never was.

I have 1+TB of music on my HDDs. I don't need an MP3 player to listen to it, and I can listen to any of it, from anywhere, using my mobile phone and PLEX Media Server (on my PC) combined with the Android client (on my phone).
There's one method to achieve hassle-free access to all your music.
The purpose of an MP3 player is different; it's never intended to hold ALL your music, especially if you have alot of it.

While I would agree with you about not being able to differentiate between MP3 and FLAC in terms of sound, I don't agree about support (even shitty Chinese MP3 players do it natively) and storage space isn't an issue anymore nowadays. Maybe that 1GB MP3 player would fit 10 albums instead of 3 by using MP3 versus FLAC, but that's a sign you should go for a newer MP3 player (as in spend 30 bucks on a 16 GB MP3 player).

I had to be doubly-extra.careful when typing the twisted word myself, I feel your pain bro.

Yes, but after wanting to buy 3-4 things that I liked and being smacked in the face with "nope", I really don't want to settle to the "mini-drone".

Don't you wanna read about "clarificiations"?

Oh, now I understand.

I guess I'm out of luck, then.

Sahara disagrees.
http://www.desertec.org/

Not a perfect solution but a start. There are issues with desert storms and keeping the panels clean (currently done with water, dry cleaning isn't quite there) but if you think about how cars were in the early 1900s... there's hope, to say the least.

We're not talking about billion dollar problems, that's a severe underestimation.
Climate fuck-up and possible extinction (yes, it CAN get there, albeit not in the next few centuries, hopefully) can't be counted in dollars. It's actually reaching an infinite amount in damages.
So yes, if a solution costs trillions, then so be it. Do you think it's a lot? What's the total USA debt?

yes I did.

Japan's easy: Watch their shows; watch their ads; watch their music; watch their products. All, with very few exceptions, are way over the top.
China's really too big to be momolithic in this approach. It's a subcontinent by itself, to the extent that people from the North side don't speak the same language as those from the South, therefore one can't say "Chinese culture" without over-generalizing.
South Korea is gravitating toward extremes as well.

If they're told to.
That's the big difference. A human mind starts constructing a simulation by itself, a computer doesn't, nor do I see it doing so in the foreseeable future.

In which way?
If a computer can make additions, subtractions, multiplications at 0.00001% of the time we're capable of, this doesn't mean they're more powerful. It only means they're more specialized in a very narrow activity. Yes, very narrow, since a human being uses a very tiny fraction of their time performing mathematical calculations.

Humans are way above machines when we're talking about performing various activities one after another without extensive downtimes spent reprogramming themselves.
Here's an example: get up, dance, write a 50-word paragraph about eggs, clap hands, take a shower, hum the national anthem, name 5 random objects presented to you, understand a joke someone's telling you, smell a flower.

The list could go on. Intelligence is not about doing one thing very fast, but about doing many different things well enough. And yes, this includes animal world as well.