". Those requirements are *not* there when using skype or similar."

And quite frankly, most of the time there is no reason to have these requirements.
Besides, the available bandwidth on packet switched networks these days is much bigger then required for having a voice communication.
Telephone bitrate is somewhere around 64kbps which is insignificant in modern networks.
You could have about 16 simultaneous phone conversations with a symmetrical 1mbps connection.
Voice is trivial in most situations.

"They just gave you an Android smartphone for signing up"

They don't give you anything.
You pay more than retail price for that device through your monthly subscription.
All they do is provide very expensive credit that you can pay off over the contracts period.

", but if a God did create something to look 14 billion years old, then that's how old it would look despite our best testing."

But that would make the god a very childish one, for wanting to fool us this way.
And besides, we are then nothing but puppets for its ammusement, aren't we?
I mean, he had absolute power to design us like he wanted and yet he gives us black death and cancer and aids.
I mean, why all the needless suffering?

In DDR Germany the system tells you it is done well, and you don't need support...

"It doesn't even include a study of productivity."

We are talking about government here..

Funny thing. My version of google update does run in the background as a service.
I had to manually disable it.
Only to find out that running a google application would agressively reintroduce the service.
Untill i removed that too.

"Those obsolete components cost a lot more than newer ones. "

But to use the new ones you would need a brand new machine that you would have to pay for.
So what is cheaper, 1x obsolete expensive component or 1x new pc (includes the new component)?

Mind you, today's PC's are embarrassingly overpowered for office work.
There are generally very little tasks in an office that need faster computers.
I mean, doesn't anyone realize that flash adds in webpages have been the one of the bigger drivers of PC hardware sales in the past decade?

Obligatory reading:
https://xkcd.com/936/

"YMMV."

Yeah, and i think this is exactly why 3D will not become what manufacturers and conctent creators want it to become anytime soon.
You see, there are technical issues that are inherent to 3D scening.
I'm saying this because i created several 3D CG clips a month ago.
This experience tells me that 3D will prevent certain visual storytelling elements from existing, bringing down the whole medium.
Ultimately, 3D will always produce tangible aquariums where it is more difficult to imagine them representing big spaces because your spatial relation to the picture is very much defined.
With 2D you have to mentaly re-map the picture into a space and there a sense of scale is produced.
With 3D the scale depends on and is imposed by technical stuffs like screen size and prespective relations to the viewer.
So a movie designed for the theatre will impose a completely different spatial relation when viewed on a small screen.
That is less of a problem with CG as you can re-render the home version, but for real life movies this is, and will be, a problem.

"What is the obsession with 3D"

It's a realy realy neat trick..

"Just because you're antisocial and do not care about being on a social network..."

Wait, people who don't do social networks are anti-social?
Dang, that's a stupid thing to say... for various reasons.

Most JRPG games originated from the home computer scene in the middle 80s.
And when most PC users were blown away by the amazing color spectrum of CGA i was already enjoying paletted 15 bit colors.
These 'better than pc' graphics (don't worry, almost anything had better graphics than pc in those days) helped develop the style that would flourish in the SNES days.
Konami, Compile, Falcom, Square and Enix all were producing great and defining jrpg's in the 80s and some series continue untill this day.

So yeah, for an article claiming to be about /computer/ games it seems to be ignoring a big part of history.

Nah, don't worry about those things.
None of those ever stopped anyone from making good music.
And in a lot of ways you seem to overreact.
You don't have to downsample your 24 bit track, you can upsample the 16 bit track.
I mean, a lot of pop and electronic music is basicly made up of 16 or even 8 bit samples layered, often first going through analog and then back to digital conversion.
And guess what, noone is whyning about that.
In the end you will have to make it sound good, not the bit-depth.

As for effects, you don't need the material to be in 24 bits to enjoy better resolution plugins.
Altho 24 bits does give you more headroom which makes recording and mixing easier.
And of course all tools have at least a 32bit floating point internal bus so you always get the maximum quality out of any bitdepth material.
For compressor plugins samplerate can be important.
Since the plugin operates on the samples and the samples near nyquist rate don't acurately describe the waveform they become less precise for higher frequency trancients.
But then you're talking very high end and noone will expect that from a home studio.
And besides, if you use material from cd then the last thing you propably want is more compression.

Point is you propably have much much better tools and a much better possibility for a good sound then ever before.
Use it.

"As a personal example, I had a friend named Xu. He kept complaining that I mispronounced his name."

I, for one, am able to perceive such small intonation differences in foreign languages due to a bug in my brain.
All this is besides the auditory system and is much more related to understanding the intent of the sound.
In your example, you are simply not looking for the right king of difference.
If you were to take a recording of your pronounciation and compare that to a recording of your friends voice you would find numerous differences.
There is a difference of pitch, there is a difference in how the sound resonates in your mouths etc,etc,etc.
Now there is a slight difference somewhere and your friend puts some significance to that difference.
You hear the same difference, you even perceive it but you do not understand that there is some significance to it.

So this is completely about putting significance in sounds and is not about perceiving sound as such.
It is about understanding speech.

"Blind tests show that we perceive ultrasound: http://jn.physiology.org/content/83/6/3548.full [physiology.org] "

Since the body of ABX tests that shows people do not hear any difference between present and filtered ultrasound in music is much much larger that the body of theses guys we can safely assume that ultrasound frequencies, albeit maybe perceptable, have no significance whatsoever on listening to music.