Well, technically you're correct, you would be able to distinguish 16bit to 24bit with enough volume. What I'm not entirely sure if your ear drums would still function after it... possibly. This is certainly something I've contemplated, but fortunately my current audio interface allows me to select the line level and also specifies the specific dynamic range for it.

But I will not question the plausibility of the placebo effect in audio.

I really doubt anyone can actually hear the difference between 16bit and 24bit samples. The distinction and use comes in when mixing multiple samples together to preserve maximum accuracy in the result. (And yes, I have professional studio gear) You might also use higher resolution like 32bit+ these days because it's possible.

The frequency range of human hearing is more interesting, have you ever listened to music on studio gear for longer periods of time?

The common applications for rare earth magnets seems to list wind turbines.

I will give you increased bandwidth, it's quite expensive to increase bandwidth and the server parts like Xeon E5 and beyond do have increased bandwidth. As do the extreme edition consumer parts which are essentially Xeon E5s.

Core count is really a profit optimization thing, larger chips are more expensive due to taking up more space. Considering the profits and manufacturing technology Intel has, they could easily make consumer products at current prices with higher core counts and make a profit. How do you like weak AMD?

"Parity and error correction inside and out" ... I'll say you refer to ECC, I really doubt there is any difference in this inside the CPU (Aka, registers, cache and whatever else they need memory bits internally) But I'll give you that the Xeons do support ECC DRAM, but realistically this is a market segmentation issue, supporting ECC on consumer products would be trivial.

The lifetime, temperature and duty cycle stuff sounds like it's from some wank marketing handbook. These are primarily affected by manufacturing (defects) and the QA can at best only guarantee the operation of the chip on delivery. I really expect that the only difference between sever parts and consumer parts in this segment is that the server parts have a larger margin on operation tolerances.

I agree on the AK47 (and variants), but fiat money isn't explicitly worth anything. Turkey, which would be the stepping stone to Europe has a budget of 200B USD. Liechtenstein has a budget of 1B USD, and it's a micronation with 37k population.

I question if they have a significant army or tax base. Just look up German history regarding WW1 and WW2, and then scale that up to declaring war on everyone, but this time around they have immense manufacturing resources, incredible air superiority... Even if they managed to annex Iraq and Syria, they'd fail because they've declared the Caliphate, which they'll never get.

Put a bucket of water in the roof garden to heat water?

A true statement, but impractical in terms of governments. Just look at what happened in Europe during the enlightenment. A more powerful medium is controlling the media and affecting the majority, as opposed to direct oppression.

I've always been wondering where the extremism expresses itself in the US. In Europe you get the surges in radical groups in the government positions, but mostly failing deliver and falling into obscurity. Maybe give the plebs more sugar?

For a long while I've wondered what would happen in the US if they adopted the Jeffersonian/D'Hondt method for all federal elections.

It's inverse for me. I used to get motion sickness from facing the wrong way in busses or reading while in a moving vehicle, but now I can do both at the same time with no ill effects.

I imagine it's the same for VR, do enough and you'll become immune.

What I'm not sure about is how I ended up resolving the nausea, because the nausea from motion sickness isn't something I really want to inflict myself with, but with VR you could easily just pace the session length.

I think the point where GPL fails in hardware currently is tooling, and assosiacted low level designs/operations to make ASICs. There's plenty of hardware model designs under (L)GPL, including the OpenRISC. It's not that the materials in the chips is expensive, it's just expensive to start making them.

Realistically something like this could be kickstarted - aka, making a large batch of OpenRISC SoC's, but it would be quite risky, in many areas like performance or having a completely failed batch due to a issue in the asic design. I'd probably give money, but there'd need to be a huge pool to make it feasible.

Netherlands has a population of 17M, so assuming you sell a copy to a quarter the popluation, it's 4M copies. Quite frankly out of their population they'll have enough software engineers to make their own security if necessary.

So you actually think we wouldn't have ACTA if the EU didn't exist? Assuming the same treaty got to the same point, but in a world where the EU didn't exist, do you think a few Eastern European countries would've stopped it from coming into force?

I'd say it's quite the opposite, the Parliament actually seems to respond to public outcry, and it has the power to nullify trade treaties of it's member states. The laws certainly should be explicitly changed to force transparency on any trade agreement negotiations, but I think only the EU Parliament has the will and power to actually do that. The US certainly has the power, but seems way too apathetic.

I have to imagine you're British. The EU is full of issues but it seems better than the alternative, and yes, it's bound to cause issues like the Junker cases, just look at the US.

The difference between OpenJDK and Java JDK is meaningless (In Android), so nothing will break. I think the core build systems has been using OpenJDK over official java for a while, and I would imagine this is the shift for the app developer stuff, but it won't really change anything aside from having to download a new JDK.

My heart bleeds for you.

Perhaps you or your company would like to pay for the work?

I do hope you don't use NVIDIA drivers to verify compliance however. Last time I worked with OpenGL code and Mesa/Nvidia (~4 years ago), I found out that Nvidia is so lax in enforcement that it doesn't comply with the OpenGL Specs and Mesa is so strict that the nvidiaisms were very problematic to fix.

No, the US wouldn't become more like Italy or Belgium it'd become more like the US.

While Italy certainly does have issues and has had for a very long time, why Belgium? Do you actually mean the EU Council or Parliament?

Realistically if the US become more like Belgium, I'd be all for it. Belgium makes good beer and haven't invaded anyone for a while.

I find that a very interesting in the sense that a more 'stable' (in the sense of ruling policitical parties) seems to promote corruption.

The more I've contemplated the problem, the more I think proportional voting is better than the FPTP that the US uses. Too much stability seems to create the exact same problems that monarchies do.