It actually is not. This has been thoroughly tested with studio equipment (including the headphones) and with music professionals and semi-professionals as testers. While 128 kbps can be told apart, it gets close to random chance with 192 kbps, and with 256 kbps, only some people with impaired(!) hearing can tell the difference, because the physical properties of their ears are quite different to a normal public, and the compression algorithms are not adapted to the acoustic properties of their hearing abilities. At 320 kbps, no one will hear any difference even on high end studio equipment.

Yes, that "warmer" sound is called "low pass filtered". As a vinyl recording is limited to about 60 dB, while a CD has 96 dB, the vinyl recording is missing lots of higher frequencies (and some of the very low ones too). You can easily simulate the "warmer" sound of vinyl by just low pass filtering the CD signal. And the "better" sound in this case is more likely "what I was listening to when my listening taste developed". As the turnover from vinyl and MC to CD happened between 1980 and 1995, older people born before 1975 tend to like the low pass filtered sound better, while younger people who were never that much exposed to the 60 dB sound of vinyl, think it just sounds hollow or muffled, if they hear it now.

(Real, live music has a much higher share of high frequency noise than both vinyl and CD, but it gets mastered and filtered to the tastes of the listening public.)

And those things are?

As it seems, they are just vapor and will vanish if you try to catch them.

More like the fact that until affordable 3D printing comes along, there is no point in having CAD software targeted at non-professionals. Intuitive CAD software is missing because there never was any demand for it outside of people who actually liked to write CAD packages as a hobby.

I am not the developer, I am merely the user, and I have to use what's installed on the systems, because that's their maintenance interface, and I am not going to develop an own interface in my free time.

It solves the problem so neatly that we keep several VMs around with different Java versions, just to maintain older systems that were developed with Java 1.3 or 1.4 and break as soon as you install Java6 oder Java7.

Mandating standards is so stupid, that every vendor uses its own plugs, has his own specification for power, his own definition of racks... This fosters innovation, right?

No. Having standards is actually a precondition for competition. Your product can only compete with another product if there is any base for comparision. And that base is called a standard. There are governmentally mandated standards, and there are industry standards, but they are standards nonetheless. If you want to know how horrible a situation without standards can get, look at the U.S. railway system before 1850. For a trip from Philadelphia to Charleston, you had to change trains seven times, because eight different companies were operating the tracks inbetween, each one with a different gauge. Governmentally regulated standard gauges changed that, and just this improved services on all train services, because only now a waggon could go across the tracks of different operators.

Yes, standards can become entrenched and starting to hinder innovation if being to rigid and not allowing for flexibility in the areas where most of the innovation happens, but that's a problem one can attack of the situation arises. Until then having a standards is at first a blessing for both producers and consumers alike.

Because of the fun doing so? If you plant flowers in your front yard and mow the lawn inbetween and repaint the facade, it looks nice for everyone walking along. But you are not entitled any remuneration of the passers-by. So why you are doing it anyway?

Red Hat has nothing to do with ODF. StarOffice, the venerable predecessor of OpenOffice and LibreOffice back in the day, had their headquarters in Hamburg, Germany. And ODF is the native file format of OpenOffice and LibreOffice. (And even the database engine has german roots: It's the old SAP DB, originally developped by Software AG and then bought by SAP, both being german companies).

Nicholas of Myra is not the first person, of whom a lot of legends exist with no direct connection to reality. But just telling some very phantastical stories of someone doesn't make him irreal. (And yes, he was always depicted with a red mantle, even in the oldest icons known of him. He was bishop in Myra, and the red dress is the bishop's mantle.)

But Santa is real in the sense that there was a historical person later called St. Nicholas or Santa Claus. He was born in the late 3rd century between 270 and 286 AD, died at Dec 6 probably in one of the years 326 AD, 345 AD, 351 AD or 365 AD. He was buried in Myra (today's Demre in Turkey), and his grave was broken into in 1087 AD, his remains taken and again buried in the Basilica di San Nicola of Bari, Italy. You can still visit his sarcophagus in Demre and his remains in Bari. And yes, he is famous for anonymously sending gifts to people.

You misunderstand the term "filter" here. Information at first glance is just the inverse of probability (see C. Shannon for details). Yes, all information that gets to you is filtered in a sense that you never get the complete information. (Even your senses filter the information.) But on the Internet, there are hundreds and thousands of filters at work, and each one works differently, filters differently and has different flaws. And you can get the same information differently filtered from different sources. In an idealized Internet, all the filters will add some white noise to the information that gets to you, but mainly the different biases will cancel out each other.

Only if a single filter (or a collection of a few filters) gets prevalent, your information in general will be strongly biased.

You realize that "the fall of man" is a) an english term coined long after the original text was published in hebrew, and b) not used in the Bible, yes? And you know that in other languages, the same idea is called "original sin", which is not bound to any gender or sex? (And again, the word "original sin" is not used in the Bible either).

You are just sporting the same misogyny the english Middle Age scholars sported when they coined the term.

You know that copyright itself is not criminal law? It's civil law, and there the concept of "guilt" in a criminal sense doesn't exist. There is damage, and there is the damaged party, and if the damaged party can show they lost something (money, value, integrity), they are entitled the other party stopping whatever caused the damage and compensation for the losses. And for that, preponderance of evidence is sufficient. All you have to show is that you lost something and that the action (or non-action, presence, absence, whatever) of someone else caused you to lose it.

Yes, if there is sufficient evidence that the damage will increase if the other party is allowed to continue, the damaged party is even entitled to demand from the damaging party to immediately stop whatever they are up to, before things are settled in court.

This is a completely false analogy. People became sick all the time and were dying, and contagious spread of illness was wellknown. And even the Sumerians were already theorizing that spreading could be caused by very little animals jumping from person to person, too small to be seen with the bare eye. And sickness befell everyone, independent of the personal belief.

Differently than that, paranormal activity can't be seen by anyone except by people actually believing in paranormal activity.