High five for mentioning Brazil. Gilliam's best movie.

Of course, electronics make the least difference, but it's the easiest target for manufacturers and snake-oil salesmen. Speakers are a much more difficult problem, and room acoustics, even more. Full 3D spatial reproduction can only be fully done in two ways: either with headphones using binaural recordings (microphones in the ears of a dummy head--but even then the dummy head only approximates the listener's own HRTF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function ), or with a many-speaker-in-a-sphere-around-listener setup, which is based on spherical harmonics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics.

The human ear has a dynamic range of 120 dB (between threshold of audibility to threshold of pain). In practice, of course, loud signals mask small distortions (depending on the harmonic order of the distortion or whether it's harmonically related at all; THD has been found in blind studies to have little correlation with audible distortion so is a poor metric), but a significant fraction of the population can hear some types of distortion down to -70 or even -80 dB below the signal. While good modern electronics have no problem with this (a few new DAC chips have exceeded even the full 120 dB range of the ear, and there have been various amplifiers from the mid-80s onwards which have done exceeded 110 dB), speakers are several orders of magnitude worse than electronics. While many blind tests have shown that usually only a fraction of people can tell the difference between mid-level and high-end electronic components, the differences between speakers are very easily noticeable.

For men, the biological basis of sexual orientation has been well established; for women, however, it remains unclear. See for example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10825779 and similar research which indicate that female sexual orientation is not fixed, and thus likely has a significant cultural components. So for women, it may be partly a choice after all in many cases, albeit usually not a conscious one.

Ron Paul you say? Let's see...
Racism which his sycophants are trying to whitewash: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ron-paul-signed-off-on-racist-newsletters-sources-say/2012/01/20/gIQAvblFVQ_story.html -- check.
Being a dominionist with a hidden religious agenda: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/10/is_ron_paul_a_dominionist.php -- check.
Looking for a return to the gold standard, which is what made the great depression worse: Hamilton, J.D. "The Role of the International Gold Standard in Propagating the Great Depression," Contemporary Policy Issues, April 1988 -- check.
Yep, that's the guy!

Good luck, anon.

I've got karma to burn so I'm going to ask this here.
The summary refers to the company planning on "developing another drug to try and address that problem." While I understand that most language, and particularly English, is ultimately defined by usage rather than by formal standards, as someone for whom English is not his first language, I find myself flabbergasted by the "try and" idiom. I can understand "try to" as it makes logical sense; I don't see, however, the logic behind "try and" as it implies two different activities, trying, and actually doing. That seems semantically inconsistent, I'd even say gratingly incongruous (to me at least, perhaps because I did not learn English as a child). I also doubt it's what the idiom is semantically implying anyhow. So, can a kind reader explain the logic behind "try and" replacing "try to" in most usage?

Considering you can buy a hot air soldering system for little over $100 on eBay, I call BS.

Note that some physics theories, such as quantum gravity, support a block-time (eternalism) point of view where the present/past/future distinction and the flow-of-time are simply psychological illusions. From a block time perspective there is no causality, just correlation between observables. Mohrhoff's interpretation of QM is another example.

No. You're views are not far from positivism, and that has been destroyed by Popper. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_rationalism