Has there ever truly been any objective criteria by which the quality of a tool or work of art (and I would propose a Stradivarius is both) can be meaningfully judged? Wine connoisseurs may all agree that a particular vintage is exceptionally fine, but when you get right down to it what you truly have is a mutual-admiration society agreeing that it performs well according to their shared set of subjective criteria. Meanwhile the craft beer connoisseur can't understand why they're all getting so worked up over spoiled grape juice.

I think the main factor in timeliness is product lifespan. The average middle-class person buys a new car what, every few years? And thus the collective volume is immense, quickly diffusing the up-front design costs. For aircraft on the other hand... well I don't honestly know much about the market. Certainly airliners are only rarely replaced, and I know the market for 30+ year old Cessnas in good condition is still going strong. And I would suspect that given the high cost of even a small new aircraft that the volume is quite small, meaning that any new design (i.e. with computer control systems) would incur a high per-unit marginal cost. Not to mention the much tighter testing and safety certification which I suspect exist for any new consumer aircraft.

Plus, IIRC computer assistance is largely a result of the fact that modern fighters are *extremely* unstable (stability and maneuverability being inversely related), and literally can't be kept in the air by human reflexes, it requires a computer to make the hundreds of corrections per second needed just to fly in a straight line. Meanwhile it comes at the cost of making the plane considerably more vulnerable to cosmic rays and electrical interference. Not so much of an issue when your chances of being shot down are far better than falling to an "unknown equipment malfunction", but for a craft expected to see decades of use without ever being shot at it's something worth considering. Especially if that plane is nice and stable and flies just fine under human control.

As pointed out on that very page, Inuit are only one of the larger of many cultures that are grouped under the generic term "Eskimo", and thus it is not a suitable substitute.

I stand technically corrected, though it doesn't address the core point. As that page points out, like Russian, the Eskimo languages are agglutinative, capable of expressing what would be an extended phrase in English in only a few syllables. So the question becomes how precise is the normal usage? You and I may speak of wet snow or powdery snow, but normally we would simply call it snow. An Inuit on the other hand might speak of "tlapripta" (snow that burns your scalp and eyelids) or "tlarin" (snow that can be sculpted into delicate corsages) - the question is would they normally use such precision, or simply refer to it as "tla" (which I'm assuming that's the part than means "snow")?

I don't think you can directly compare those second numbers in a meaningful fashion. Consider: in a non-catastrophic accident many/most fatalities will be due largely to bad luck - flying debris, unfortunate angle of impact, etc, and will thus scale roughly linearly with the number of passengers. If for the sake of argument we say that the chances of any given person involved in a non-catastrophic accident dying is 1%, then we'll only have one in 100 single-occupancy car accidents resulting in a fatality, and most land vehicles are single-occupancy most of the time. Meanwhile an airliner has hundreds of passengers, so virtually every accident could be expected to have at least one or two fatalities. I'm not sure what the average private aircraft occupancy is, but my guess is that it still tends to be considerably larger than one - after all, considering the expense even if you're going out for a joyride you may well invite a few friends along to share the sky.

A more meaningful metric might be to compare accident fatalities as a percentage of total accident victims (participants?), not that I have any idea what those numbers are.

Do they? I'm trying to think back, and I can't say I recall any significant outpouring of furry spam. Certainly nothing to compete with the various surges of various bigots, true-believers, and other off-topic idiocy that saturates the internet. Not to mention commercial spam and various gay, straight, and fetish postings. None of which seems to attract a similar level of ridicule.

Perhaps I've just been fortunate enough to never stumble upon these spammy, whiny furries you are so plagued by, but I'm have a pretty omni-voracious curiosity and have visited more bizarre corners of the 'net than I care to remember (hell I felt the need to google "waifu" just to make sure I had the right idea from context). And aside from occasionally stumbling into the middle of a furry-oriented site I can't say I've ever even been particularly conscious of them.

Not that I doubt the existence of such people - but spammy, whiny, assholes loudly proclaiming their victimization are practically synonymous with the internet, if I had to list the various groups by how vocal and annoying they are furries would be way down the list.

As far as cost is concerned, Not necessarily. Injection molding is a batch process, and in fact often starts with plastic pellets that were themselves extruded as filament that was immediately chopped into tiny lengths. Extrusion is potentially far more efficient since it can be done as a continuous process.

For strength you are correct, assuming an equivalent quantity of plastic. On the other hand in most cases there's no reason you can't use more plastic to create stronger parts. Especially as personal recyclers improve so that when you're done with your 3d printed doodad you can chuck it back into the bin to become fresh filament. Certainly we're not there yet, but we already have PLA(?) recyclers that can convert old milk-jugs into fresh fiber, even if it is currently pretty low-grade.

Probably some really bitchin' funny cat videos. Who has time to make violins by hand?

Not at all. Take cars for example - a front-wheel drive with automatic transmission will be far easier to drive, but a good driver will be able to drive circles around it in an otherwise identical rear-wheel drive with manual transmission. It's more difficult to drive initially, but with mastery it also has more potential.

It just sounds better when caressed by the ghost of Stradivarius.

On the other hand I bet you you've bought a car/bike/game/etc. at some point in your life that was great fun initially, but had annoying little aspects that weren't immediately obvious but started started to really bug you over time. Or similarly started a game that seemed like just a way to kill some time until something decent comes out, only to discover that it possessed some ineffable quality that made it one of your favorites. You can't dismiss the subtleties of someone else's passion without simultaneously denying the subtleties of your own.

Well, a lot of it is no doubt total BS, but we also don't actually have a lot of words dedicated to describing sound. Like the Eskimos with their 50(?) different words for snow, it's not that they just got bored with one word, it's that snow is an important enough factor in their lives that the subtleties become worth distinguishing. Similarly for an audiophile or professional musician the subtleties of sound are important enough to warrant new words, but rather than create new ones they've repurposed existing words with analogous meanings: If I tell you some new instrument's sound is "like a steel-string guitar", except "sharper" or "smoother", then you probably get at least a vague idea of what it might sound like - despite the fact that those words can't be meaningfully applied to sound in any literal fashion - analogy is an *extremely* powerful and deeply-engrained aspect of our cognition.

That is quite true. But to invoke the mandatory car analogy a well-heeled driving enthusiast might take several sports cars out for a test drive and choose the one that was immediately the most fun to drive, and a second just for variety. But after months of driving both might discover that, once having mastered the basics, the subtleties of the second actually make for a more enjoyable drive. This is actually not at all uncommon in driving games where players have massive fleets of different cars at their disposal.

Well, there *was* one. Unfortunately he had a few too many Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blasters on New Years eve and can now barely remember his own name.

My guess? They're a minority population with an oft-sexual fascination with something most people find strange or disgusting. What's not to mock? After all we're no longer allowed to mock blacks or gays since they didn't choose to be the way they are. But furries? They're voluntarily weird outsiders, let the tribalistic bashing commence.

What I find slightly strange is that the tendency is in full swing even on geek-oriented sites - you'd think there'd be a certain level of truce between weird outsider groups, and that seems to superficially be the case at SF conventions and such - at least I've seen plenty of costumed furries, but never any obvious mocking. I suppose it's possible that's just a side effect of "punch in the nose"-risk based civility though. Or perhaps it's that it's a more strongly self-selected group of weird outsiders that go to conventions - technology geeks in general have become rather mainstream these days, and our geekiness gets social validation in the form of nice fat paychecks.

On the other hand perhaps it's something a little more insidious: assholes will always mock someone, and others may leap to their defense, but it's less likely when they're worried about being painted with the same brush as the victim. It's better these days, but it wasn't so very long ago that a white man who stood up for his persecuted black neighbors risked being branded a "nigger-lover" and finding a bunch of coneheads burning a cross on his own lawn. Similarly defending gay rights today (or worse, a decade ago) could well end with people questioning your own sexuality. Even you felt the need to establish that you weren't a furry yourself before commenting - be honest, was that 100% to establish context?

I found myself in a similar questionable situation once, and afraid.org helped me block/undo that subdomain when I explained my suspicion. They're responsive. Also, I dunno if it's default but you can be notified of each subdomain request and require explicit approval; that is how I learned of the questionable one in the first place.