Plenty of popular novels were written in days or weeks. Michael Moorcock, for example

I take it he's a writer of romance novels?

Good points. One minor objection: the objective-C/kool-aid thing is true for iOS, but not really for OSX (yet, at least).

...I wonder if it has http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beats in it.

Here's the "Uncanny Valley" effect again. Fringe actually doesn't bother me because it's SO out there - to me it presents an expectation of "we're not even going to *try* to come close to the real world."

For this reason, I'm able to suspend disbelief without discomfort for Fringe; the "reality" is so cracked that I don't even try to compare it to real life.

The Sound FX department may well not be braindead and probably do know the difference in sound. It's almost certain that they are being directed by others who care about the emotional/visceral impact of the sound and don't care much about accuracy. All storytelling does this in innumerable ways - compromise accuracy for spectacle and impact. Different people just have different taste for where and how much they are willing to suspend disbelief for those compromises.

Except it's NOT EVEN A PDF, so you don't need to take those precautions. OS X will say "_____ is an application you downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to run it?" so any tech-literate user will know that it's an executable, not a PDF.

This reminds me of the old joke:

Alice and Bob are camping when they get attacked by a hungry lion. Running away at top speed, Alice begins to overtake Bob. "We'll never be able to outrun it!" says Bob. Alice replies, "I don't need to outrun the lion - I only need to outrun YOU!"

In that sense, all the security any given person needs is just not to be low-hanging fruit.

It doesn't make sense to me when you say frequency-domain codecs cannot be perceptually transparent. That statement is general and absolute and is in contradiction to the experimental data.

If a codec is indistinguishable from the original by a given individual, it is by definition transparent - at least for that person, with that source material, on that system.

Absolute proof is not achievable in this situation, but I believe the extensive double-blind ABX tests on hydrogenaudio provide a reasonably convincing body of evidence in favor of general perceptual transparency of high-bitrate MP3 with most source material on most sound systems for most people.

Vague and dogmatic assertions about "known issues" are less convincing to me. If it is a question of human perception, which this is, then the way to get closer to the answer is to test it by observing humans, not by theorizing without experimenting.

Dither

There must be something in the brain that will make us stand and fight for our "side", even if it's in the wrong...

And THAT is exactly what politics in the US has devolved into.

No no, FF5 wasn't released in the US, at least not for SNES. FF4 was rebranded as FF2, and FF6 as FF3.

Parent is correct. The only difference between Audio CD-Rs and Data CD-Rs is that "Audio" CD-Rs can be burned in a standalone burner not labeled "Professional." Audio CD-Rs and "Professional"-labeled standalone burners (which, like computers, can burn audio to "Data" CD-Rs) have a royalty to the RIAA included in their price. IAAAE (Audio Egineer).

How did you choose "update" without a keyboard or mouse? Tell me, Mr. Haedrian, what good is a phone call when you are unable to speak?