I probably should have mentioned that I have a home recording studio. Cables get moved around quite a bit depending on what I feel like recording. Cables that do not move are not often a problem. However, cheaper cables do tend to stop working much quicker than the nicer cables.

Some modern audio systems have tried to implement such systems as you describe here, however, this only solves a very limited range of issues -- specifically, issues involving amplitude of a particular frequency. Yes, a sound system can emit a controlled sound and compensate for a particular frequency being louder than the others (this is basically an automatic EQ), however, a speaker cannot compensate for reverberation times or delayed reflections.

Remember that any room will have some amount of reverberation, and that reverberation is not always constant across the frequency spectrum. For example, you may hear a longer sustain for low frequencies than you do for high frequencies. Or perhaps, you have one particular frequency that tends to sustain a bit longer than the others. Reducing the amplitude of that particular frequency does not change the reverberation time. In fact, the amplitude of that frequency may be correct volume wise and reducing it would cause your sound to be even less balanced. There is no way to fix this without modifying the physical parameters of the room itself.

The other issue is called "early reflections". The idea here is that you have sound reflecting off of another surface which arrives at your ear later, most likely causing a stereo imbalance or phase issues at certain frequencies. For example, your right speaker projects sound toward you, but some of it reflects off of the left wall and then arrives at your left ear a split second later. Now your stereo field is incorrect and you have possible phase cancellations for certain frequencies. Again, the only way to correct for this issue is to stop the reflections by treating the room, an audio system cannot compensate for this.

Just because YOU aren't able to distinguish the difference between a cheap speaker and expensive speaker does not mean that there isn't a noticable difference. Several things to consider:

1. Is the quality of the source material good enough to make a difference? Crap quality audio will sound like crap on any speakers, no matter how expensive. However, if the source is of good quality (and some other conditions are true) then you can definately tell a difference.

2. Is the sound of the room masking the sound of the speaker? A speaker, no matter how good, can NOT compensate for a terrible sounding room. Standing waves, reflections, and damping from the room can ruin the sound of the audio. In order to properly hear the audio, this must be compensated for. Typically, you start by adding room treatment to deal with low-frequency standing waves and then work your way up to deal with high end comb filtering and reflection points in the room. The orientation of the room is important here as well, the optimal sound does depend very much on the placement of the speakers in the room relative to the listening position.

As for cables, the only real difference between cheap/expensive cables is how long they last. A cheap cable will most likely not put up with much abuse where as an expensive cable is more robust.

Typically, increasing the core voltage will speed up the processor. Decreasing the core voltage will save power but will slow it down. This is because a higher voltage is able to more quickly charge up the capacitances associated with MOSFETs (there is a capacitance at the gate of every FET which slows down the operation of the transistor. There are also diffusion capacitances on the source/drain side of the FET which also slow things down). The time constant associated with a FET is T = RC where C is the capacitance and R is the resistance associated with the transistor when it is on (and possibly the connections between transistors as well). A simplified model of the charging process is V = Vd * (1 - e^(-t/T)) where t is time, and Vd is your core voltage. Since a transistor must reach some threshold voltage in order to turn on (call it Vt, typically around 0.6V for typical CMOS processes), you can see that if you increase Vd then V will reach the transition voltage more quickly.

When it comes to safety, we should never play the blame game. It does not matter who is at fault, what matters is people being safe. The fact is that we need to do what we can to ensure safety. People will do what people always do -- that is they will do stuipd and dangerous things. I work in industrial automation designing machines. Whenever we design something, we do our best to think of every stuipd thing that the machine operator will try to do. We look at ways they might try to reach into a machine to grab a part, or places where they may try to get too close to a moving machine and every other idiotic thing they try to do.. Then we try to come up with some way to ensure that they can't do those things or at least that the machine will shut off if they do. Yes, it is stupid for them to do these things, yes it may be their "fault" if they get injured, but the fact is that people do these things anyways and we have a responsibility to try and ensure that they keep safe. I never want to see anyone get injured on a machine that I designed. This situation with traffic cameras is no different. People should not be following the car in front of them too closely, but they do. If using cameras causes people to rear end eachother more often (regardless of who is at fault), then we should not be using them.

Audio may be small when you are just ripping CDs. However, this is not the case for anyone who actually does any real audio production. Think about if you are mixing multiple audio tracks, if you record 10 tracks at CD quality (44.1kHz, 16bit, stereo) you are now at 100MB/min. Not to mention, many serious audio producers will record at much higher sample rates -- up to 192kHz, some audio is even done at 24bits. Now you are talking close to 70MB/min for a single stereo track. If you are mixing surround sound, you can see how it would be much higher. Record a few tracks this way and you'll see why you would need a huge hard drive. Not to mention the countless GB of samples used by music producers. Some sample sets can be a hundred GB on their own (think of an orchestra sample set where each instrument/section is sampled at multiple dynamic levels, and over their entire range of notes.)

I believe that monsanto might be considered under the category of biotechnology. They are the biggest patent troll I know of; holding patents on life its self.

A major problem in our schools is teachers who don't know the technology that they are trying to teach to the students. I am reminded of an episode of Southpark where all of the students are sitting in the computer lab while the instructor is reading an instruction set that he obviously doesn't understand himself. Of course all of the students are not listening and instead are playing video games. I don't think this is too far off from reality. I recall when I was in highschool computer classes and many of the students already knew more about the subject than the teacher did. I think the issue boils down to teacher incompetency. Perhaps if some of the money that is spent on technology was instead used to hire more talented teachers then the problem would go away.