I suspect it is mostly a he said/she said thing without some extensive research, but I would honestly be surprised to learn that Germany/Belgium/UK have more breweries than the US (taken individually; maybe if you mean all three together). Here's why: size.
The US is HUUUUGE.
You learn something new every day!
On the number of bottled beers you're probably right. However, since US doesn't have much of a tradition in beers unlike said european countries, you're going to lose on the "specialty" market. Incidentally, I forgot to mention Czech. My bad.
Since everyone knows anecdotes are 100% valid arguments on any debate, here's the selection of our national state-owned liquor store on beers: Belgium: 26 items UK: 26 items Germany: 25 items Czech: 17 items US: 7 items
Doesn't really matter that you've got 4x population of Germany if 90% of those that drink beer at all drink the bloody budweiser.. "Specialty" is a bit misleading because you have pretty big selection of mild (=4.7%) beers in bigger grocery stores, so it's not like you have to go to a specialist pub to get your stuff. Of course if you do, you can get even more obscure products not commercially imported to stores..
Most popular beer in Czech is "specialty" beer.. British have been good at pissing on their heritage preferring relatively tasteless dutch lagers, thought. Good for getting wasted, thought.
There are some really ace breweries from US such as Anchor and Sierra Nevada, but they simply do not have the numbers. Unless you count everyone with a vat in the backroom as a brewery.
And of course you can define "specialty beer" in a way that would support your claim, but if we just take it to mean anything except standard Lager.
Has to be better constructed with tighter specifications all around. It's big difference running stuff at 480Mbps vs 12Mbps even if the superficial cable pinout/construction is similar.
Technically speaking it comes down to transmission line impedance, line capacitance and such factors. "shielding" as such is not enough, the distance between the shield and the data wires has to be controlled and so on.
I mean, honestly. You don't expect CAT4/5/6 cables to be interchangeable even if they look similar. Do you?
The reason is very simple, if you have a very big and very lightweight structure it will be intrinsically fragile. Of course, if you build them with modern advanced materials they would be stronger than they were in the 1920s, but they will still be orders of magnitude less safe than heavier-than-air machines.
There's safe and there's safe. If you "crash" an airship, it can mean many things. "Crashing" an aeroplane usually means flaming death. OK, flaming bit is just a bonus, it's the G-forces that kill you.
It doesn't take a genius to comparmentalize an airship so even with worst-case scenario you're going to lose just a fraction of buyoancy. And you can ditch the cargo/ballast to stay up or at least come down in a reasonable fashion. Good luck trying that with a heavier than air vehicle.
You're talking about drug therapies. Their cost of the total health care expenses is neglible (except in US) and you indeed can find many such fine examples of beancounter logic at work where the healthcare is goverment controlled. For example, if you put someone with Schizophrenia on "cheap" drug instead of the "expensive" one, you may and probably will get that person out of whatever productive life they had and hospitalize them regularly due to the neat side effects.
But hey, we saved a bit of money on the drugs and the euros for paying hospital and medical disability is paid from another goverment coffer.
Now for high-tech treatment, they're hideously expensive. No comparison at all. I do not know what's the price tag on treatment-grade particle accelerator but I do assume the grandparent comment on 1:10 ratio of people treated for same money is probably on the low side. After all, radiation therapy machines have been around for long time now and enjoy economies of scale.
Yup, using fancy new tech CAN be justified for the few scenarios pointed out there if it means the person being zapped will spend another 15-20 years as a productive tax-paying member of the society instead of being goverment supported cripple. From pure financial POV with no consideration for ethics. And that's how these things are often decided.
For majority of cancer cases, thought, better to treat the 10 (or 50 or whatever) people with worse but manageable side-effects for the same resources.
The radiation levels were too high for the rescue teams to get near the reactor and figure out what happened. After they recovered one body, they use the radation levels of his body and the rare isotopes they found on his possessions (Gold 198 anyone?) to prove the reactor had gone super critical.
Heh. That's not saying too much in fact. Radiation is bad for you, m'kay? Being close to a radiation source is even worse. Standing next to an exposed radiation sterilization rod means good night. Looking at such from the other end of a football field is bad, especially if you don't have indication you should be somewhere else. (Radiation is used to sterilize surgigal gear for example. Fast, thorough, clean..)
Radiation protection wise we've come a long way of stalin-era science town personnell handling plutonium without any protection whatsoever..
Since when does Greenpeace have terror campaigns? Hanging banners from buildings and bridges, running weenie dinghies around motherf*cker-sized warships, disrupting whaling, fishing and toxic waste dumping, all without violence? That's terror?
If we ignore the ha-ha misguided "inviduals" and fringe groups with "no association", it comes to the definition of terror.
You can spread terror by outré violence. It works just as well to spread propaganda of fear and disinformation to the suspectible. Greenpeace has never been shy to steer away from outright lies in addition to the usual cooked numbers you'd expect from a SIG.
In any case, if you convince a group of people to take extreme actions by calculated lies, can you really claim to be innocent of the results?
Haven't personally used an inkjet for about six years. Laser all the way. You can get colour networked laser for home use for about £300, with reasonable sized toners. I even have a Samsung that have a refillable combined toner/drum that's only on it's second actual toner/drum and has been refilled dozens and dozens of times from a £10 toner bottle. Perfect prints every time, used every single day.
Fortunately, Samsung (and other manufacturers) have solved this problem. So you do not have to suffer from such limitations with your new laser printer!
New entry-level lasers from samsung have various measures to stop printing after given page count has been reached. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the amount of ink and cannot be overridden easily. Early method was that the toner cassette has an actual fuse. The fuse blows when you put it into the printer and the printer starts counting pages at that point. After set number of pages, no more printing. This was too straightforward to circumvent (just buy a new fuse) so they devised more sophisticated methods.
Eg. Samsung CLP-510 has taken this to fairly sophisticated and very obnoxious level - Practically EVERYTHING in the printer has an associated counter with it. Not just toner but print head, fuser, belt, even the waste toner bottle!
Toner protection is especially nasty as it actually has EEPROM chip in it that you cannot override. Other counters can be reset via service menu, but to reset the toner cartridges, you actually need to rewrite the EEPROM with appropriate EEPROM image that has "toner left".. And the counter is incremented whether or not you're actually using the cassette, that is, if you print black text only in "color" mode, all of the toner cassettes are being "used"
For the selling price the samsung is a real steal considering the features but you have to be aware that you have to jump thru hoops if you don't want to be shafted by the toner counters.
So they will actually move to the only reasonable vehicle to put mass into orbit? That is, nuclear warhead powered (im)pulse rocket? Well, that's cool. Way cool.
I hope they didn't just steal the name from a cool project for something lame such as same-old, same-old ho-hum rocketry..
Would you start murdering people tomorrow if congress said it was no longer a crime? I really hope I don't live in a country where people would answer yes to that. If that is the case then I have GROSSLY overestimated the compassion and general decency of my countrymen. I just don't believe I'm working, living, talking and laughing with people every single day who would slit my throat at their first possible chance were it not for the fact there's a law against it!
Some people would. You can find them in most major public companies in the board of directors. Not like they'd kill you for no reason of course, but if they'd see some tangible benefit such as getting your lucrative position or some such.. You thought killer instict was just a figure of speech?
Besides that, most people are kept in line by fear of punishment, some people by sense of community and so forth. There are some people who do not care, thought. If you like, you might say their value system is just so fundamentally broken that they do not function properly in a society unless you find them a suitable niche such as gangbanger..
I guess I'll just go out an light a joint then to make this dreadful morning a bit more toleratable...Or not, as it would mean probably losing my job and maybe even getting fined. But that's not having anything to do with the choices I make. It's just some free-floating independent moral compass, yes sir!
For now I'm sticking with XP for the games that I can't play in Linux.
You were doing fine until that last bit, there..
In any case, yeah, DX10 is a non-issue as it is. Never fear, thought, since Vista is crammed down new pc shopper's throats 9 times out of 10, you'll start seeing those DX10 -required games sooner or later. Maybe Xmas 2008 already?
I'm not really sure what you're complaining about here. The 360 will stream from any compatible upnp server. Tversity isn't a "hack", just a upnp server. I can stream videos from my desktop (or my server) just fine...no laptop required.
One that's excruciatingly slow about core functionality such as hashing the media files. You might want to try simplecenter (www.simplecenter.org) if you simply want to serve compatible media (no transcoding).. Transcoding is possible but you have to pay for it.
And chime in short lifespan + great numbers and loooooong time.
This is just one species of wasp with one specific cocroach (works on other insects too?) whereas great many species of wasps did not make the leap from "paralyze -> chew and/or drag on your own"
Heck, spiders have nice living food storage thing going..
It's worth noting that US ICBMs required dual-activated keys, so it was still secure against a single compromised person (but not two due to the bad codes).
Well, that, or you would take a spoon/fork from cafe, twist it 90 degrees, tie string to it and hey presto, you would have hi-tech nuclear bomb-launching device. After you shot the guy on the other desk in the neck, that is.
Friend, I hate to break it to you, but there's this newfangled invention called submarine. More specifically, nuclear powered submarines (that can theoretically stay underwater for months) with ballistic nuclear missiles.
In other words, UK and US have same reaction time to russian nuclear strike or "not enough".. Any Mutually Assured Destruction deal would be in practice be carried out by whatever C^3 survives the first strike.
Even better, 1st strike would probably be delivered by shipping containers..
With the optical mouse MS found the supplier and patent holder and purchased 6 months production (with excess profits made in a different market) to ensure that other companies could not compete.
Bullpuckies. Microsoft has always had ace hardware. They should really concentrate on what they do well, ie. hardware.
Taking a bit more long term view, Microsoft mouse has ALWAYS been nice. I'm talking about the good old fashioned mousies with kugels that you had to deflorate periodically to scrape the "gunk" off the rollers.
Surprisingly, at the time, everyone else had same tech coming up the wazoo but MS mouse did many things right. And prospered.
There was a level reached around late 1950's when it was possible to have excellent sound, and all the advances since then have been in lowering cost improving convenience, and adding style variations. I suppose I should add that there have been improvements in efficiency too. I don't think that valve amplifiers such as my own are necessarily the best in terms of Hi Fi, but they are very good, and extremely stable due their simplicity, and I can repair any fault apart from the output transformers (which are extremely robust and should last another half century).
Well, in 50s first transistor amplifiers became available so you could say that since then it's been just developments in semiconductor design. From designer's point of view, thought, power MOSFET amplifier is completely different from BJT transistor amplifier.
More recently, there's the switching amplifier or "Class D" which is again completely different from technology standpoint. Also from the principle of operation, too, so it's a new class. Seeing you're tube man I do doubt you appreciate much the concept of switch mode amplifier but it's really good for putting out really big wattage in relatively small amplifier without liquid nitrogen cooling required. Perfect for those multi-kilowatt bricks for large scale live concerts. Also nice for car audio etc where "oomph" is more crucial than the absolute THD..
Yes I don't know about necessarily sounding nicer, but I have found that the sound seems to make sense and sounds good to me. For example the distortion increases for an increase in level, which is how you expect things to go, your ear works the same way.
[tube amplifiers]
I was just saying you can design bjt/mosfet amplifier and ADD those even harmonics in a controlled manner. True, it would be very tricky to get nonlinear tube response perfectly reproduced but getting "tube sound" would be quite possible from MOS amplifier. I'm actually sure I could find a bunch of amplifiers with such a function if I started digging in. Good luck figuring out what the manufacturer nomenclature would call such "warming filter", thought..
For amplifier design and the like, not a lot has happened in decades, really. High-end audio is not very attractive for good engineers as it tends to revolve around audiophile nonsense where you're not supposed to measure the performance with repeatable methods (THD and the like). Therefore getting good revies in audiophile mags has as much to do with using $500 wooden knobs and cool sounding (and very very expensive) audiophile components in the electronics that has makes no measurable difference in the product. And actually the audiophile equipment often performs poorly on objective test..
Wikipedia also has decent collection of links on the issue. Some slant there for the audiophile POW, no big surprise.
Again, thought, the amplifier design as such has been perfected to a great extent. We're more into the territory of cramming as many channels into as cheap amplifier as possible for home theater use in current equipment..
My favourite bit about expensive nonsense - Tube amplifiers "sound" nicer in certain conditions. This is actually due to inherent distortion of the equipment type. It'd be perfectly possible (and not terribly hard) to add "niceness" knob to standard amplifiers where you can decide yourself how "nice" the sound should be like. Think of it as the "film noise" garbage added into digitally shot movies..
They can supply you with standard speaker cable with extra-thick insulator and nice texture. Gold "plated" connectors can be bought for approximately same cost as connectors without gold "plating" unless you're into real mass production.
Then again, if you're not gouging ridiculous sums for cable, it's not REALLY audiophool grade and you can forget those all-important reviews in magazines..
Might work as a way of living longer. Heart is not doing so well when you're 70? Replace it with one from a 20 year old clone.
They'd have to figure out a way to "reset" your DNA/Telomerase/whatnot first. Otherwise you'll have a 20yr old heart that's (almost) as crappy as your 70yr old except for proper diet and blah.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect it is mostly a he said/she said thing without some extensive research, but I would honestly be surprised to learn that Germany/Belgium/UK have more breweries than the US (taken individually; maybe if you mean all three together). Here's why: size.
The US is HUUUUGE.
You learn something new every day!
On the number of bottled beers you're probably right. However, since US doesn't have much of a tradition in beers unlike said european countries, you're going to lose on the "specialty" market. Incidentally, I forgot to mention Czech. My bad.
Since everyone knows anecdotes are 100% valid arguments on any debate, here's the selection of our national state-owned liquor store on beers:
Belgium: 26 items
UK: 26 items
Germany: 25 items
Czech: 17 items
US: 7 items
Doesn't really matter that you've got 4x population of Germany if 90% of those that drink beer at all drink the bloody budweiser.. "Specialty" is a bit misleading because you have pretty big selection of mild (=4.7%) beers in bigger grocery stores, so it's not like you have to go to a specialist pub to get your stuff. Of course if you do, you can get even more obscure products not commercially imported to stores..
Most popular beer in Czech is "specialty" beer.. British have been good at pissing on their heritage preferring relatively tasteless dutch lagers, thought. Good for getting wasted, thought.
The US brews more specialty beers than anywhere.
Umm. No. Germans/Belgians/UK have more breweries.
There are some really ace breweries from US such as Anchor and Sierra Nevada, but they simply do not have the numbers. Unless you count everyone with a vat in the backroom as a brewery.
And of course you can define "specialty beer" in a way that would support your claim, but if we just take it to mean anything except standard Lager.
Has to be better constructed with tighter specifications all around. It's big difference running stuff at 480Mbps vs 12Mbps even if the superficial cable pinout/construction is similar.
Technically speaking it comes down to transmission line impedance, line capacitance and such factors. "shielding" as such is not enough, the distance between the shield and the data wires has to be controlled and so on.
I mean, honestly. You don't expect CAT4/5/6 cables to be interchangeable even if they look similar. Do you?
Technically speaking, the water is heating the ice...
The reason is very simple, if you have a very big and very lightweight structure it will be intrinsically fragile. Of course, if you build them with modern advanced materials they would be stronger than they were in the 1920s, but they will still be orders of magnitude less safe than heavier-than-air machines.
There's safe and there's safe. If you "crash" an airship, it can mean many things. "Crashing" an aeroplane usually means flaming death. OK, flaming bit is just a bonus, it's the G-forces that kill you.
It doesn't take a genius to comparmentalize an airship so even with worst-case scenario you're going to lose just a fraction of buyoancy. And you can ditch the cargo/ballast to stay up or at least come down in a reasonable fashion. Good luck trying that with a heavier than air vehicle.
You're talking about drug therapies. Their cost of the total health care expenses is neglible (except in US) and you indeed can find many such fine examples of beancounter logic at work where the healthcare is goverment controlled. For example, if you put someone with Schizophrenia on "cheap" drug instead of the "expensive" one, you may and probably will get that person out of whatever productive life they had and hospitalize them regularly due to the neat side effects.
But hey, we saved a bit of money on the drugs and the euros for paying hospital and medical disability is paid from another goverment coffer.
Now for high-tech treatment, they're hideously expensive. No comparison at all. I do not know what's the price tag on treatment-grade particle accelerator but I do assume the grandparent comment on 1:10 ratio of people treated for same money is probably on the low side. After all, radiation therapy machines have been around for long time now and enjoy economies of scale.
Yup, using fancy new tech CAN be justified for the few scenarios pointed out there if it means the person being zapped will spend another 15-20 years as a productive tax-paying member of the society instead of being goverment supported cripple. From pure financial POV with no consideration for ethics. And that's how these things are often decided.
For majority of cancer cases, thought, better to treat the 10 (or 50 or whatever) people with worse but manageable side-effects for the same resources.
The radiation levels were too high for the rescue teams to get near the reactor and figure out what happened. After they recovered one body, they use the radation levels of his body and the rare isotopes they found on his possessions (Gold 198 anyone?) to prove the reactor had gone super critical.
Heh. That's not saying too much in fact. Radiation is bad for you, m'kay? Being close to a radiation source is even worse. Standing next to an exposed radiation sterilization rod means good night. Looking at such from the other end of a football field is bad, especially if you don't have indication you should be somewhere else. (Radiation is used to sterilize surgigal gear for example. Fast, thorough, clean..)
Radiation protection wise we've come a long way of stalin-era science town personnell handling plutonium without any protection whatsoever..
Since when does Greenpeace have terror campaigns? Hanging banners from buildings and bridges, running weenie dinghies around motherf*cker-sized warships, disrupting whaling, fishing and toxic waste dumping, all without violence? That's terror?
If we ignore the ha-ha misguided "inviduals" and fringe groups with "no association", it comes to the definition of terror.
You can spread terror by outré violence. It works just as well to spread propaganda of fear and disinformation to the suspectible. Greenpeace has never been shy to steer away from outright lies in addition to the usual cooked numbers you'd expect from a SIG.
In any case, if you convince a group of people to take extreme actions by calculated lies, can you really claim to be innocent of the results?
I wonder if their cost/kWh figures includes Greenpeace terror campaign against nuclear anything..
Haven't personally used an inkjet for about six years. Laser all the way. You can get colour networked laser for home use for about £300, with reasonable sized toners. I even have a Samsung that have a refillable combined toner/drum that's only on it's second actual toner/drum and has been refilled dozens and dozens of times from a £10 toner bottle. Perfect prints every time, used every single day.
Fortunately, Samsung (and other manufacturers) have solved this problem. So you do not have to suffer from such limitations with your new laser printer!
New entry-level lasers from samsung have various measures to stop printing after given page count has been reached. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the amount of ink and cannot be overridden easily. Early method was that the toner cassette has an actual fuse. The fuse blows when you put it into the printer and the printer starts counting pages at that point. After set number of pages, no more printing. This was too straightforward to circumvent (just buy a new fuse) so they devised more sophisticated methods.
Eg. Samsung CLP-510 has taken this to fairly sophisticated and very obnoxious level - Practically EVERYTHING in the printer has an associated counter with it. Not just toner but print head, fuser, belt, even the waste toner bottle!
Toner protection is especially nasty as it actually has EEPROM chip in it that you cannot override. Other counters can be reset via service menu, but to reset the toner cartridges, you actually need to rewrite the EEPROM with appropriate EEPROM image that has "toner left".. And the counter is incremented whether or not you're actually using the cassette, that is, if you print black text only in "color" mode, all of the toner cassettes are being "used"
For the selling price the samsung is a real steal considering the features but you have to be aware that you have to jump thru hoops if you don't want to be shafted by the toner counters.
Erh. Orion?
So they will actually move to the only reasonable vehicle to put mass into orbit? That is, nuclear warhead powered (im)pulse rocket? Well, that's cool. Way cool.
I hope they didn't just steal the name from a cool project for something lame such as same-old, same-old ho-hum rocketry..
Would you start murdering people tomorrow if congress said it was no longer a crime? I really hope I don't live in a country where people would answer yes to that. If that is the case then I have GROSSLY overestimated the compassion and general decency of my countrymen. I just don't believe I'm working, living, talking and laughing with people every single day who would slit my throat at their first possible chance were it not for the fact there's a law against it!
Some people would. You can find them in most major public companies in the board of directors. Not like they'd kill you for no reason of course, but if they'd see some tangible benefit such as getting your lucrative position or some such.. You thought killer instict was just a figure of speech?
Besides that, most people are kept in line by fear of punishment, some people by sense of community and so forth. There are some people who do not care, thought. If you like, you might say their value system is just so fundamentally broken that they do not function properly in a society unless you find them a suitable niche such as gangbanger..
Punishment does not deter crime.
..Or not, as it would mean probably losing my job and maybe even getting fined. But that's not having anything to do with the choices I make. It's just some free-floating independent moral compass, yes sir!
O RLY?
I guess I'll just go out an light a joint then to make this dreadful morning a bit more toleratable.
For now I'm sticking with XP for the games that I can't play in Linux.
You were doing fine until that last bit, there..
In any case, yeah, DX10 is a non-issue as it is. Never fear, thought, since Vista is crammed down new pc shopper's throats 9 times out of 10, you'll start seeing those DX10 -required games sooner or later. Maybe Xmas 2008 already?
I'm not really sure what you're complaining about here. The 360 will stream from any compatible upnp server. Tversity isn't a "hack", just a upnp server. I can stream videos from my desktop (or my server) just fine...no laptop required.
.. Transcoding is possible but you have to pay for it.
One that's excruciatingly slow about core functionality such as hashing the media files. You might want to try simplecenter (www.simplecenter.org) if you simply want to serve compatible media (no transcoding)
On the other hand, he could trivially destroy your life after taking offence about your /. post unlike the guy from the other office..
And chime in short lifespan + great numbers and loooooong time.
This is just one species of wasp with one specific cocroach (works on other insects too?) whereas great many species of wasps did not make the leap from "paralyze -> chew and/or drag on your own"
Heck, spiders have nice living food storage thing going..
Figuring out how to end a centuries old blood feud is left as an exercise to the reader.
Genocide is a valid solution to any ethnic conflict.
It's worth noting that US ICBMs required dual-activated keys, so it was still secure against a single compromised person (but not two due to the bad codes).
Well, that, or you would take a spoon/fork from cafe, twist it 90 degrees, tie string to it and hey presto, you would have hi-tech nuclear bomb-launching device. After you shot the guy on the other desk in the neck, that is.
Friend, I hate to break it to you, but there's this newfangled invention called submarine. More specifically, nuclear powered submarines (that can theoretically stay underwater for months) with ballistic nuclear missiles.
.. Any Mutually Assured Destruction deal would be in practice be carried out by whatever C^3 survives the first strike.
In other words, UK and US have same reaction time to russian nuclear strike or "not enough"
Even better, 1st strike would probably be delivered by shipping containers..
With the optical mouse MS found the supplier and patent holder and purchased 6 months production (with excess profits made in a different market) to ensure that other companies could not compete.
Bullpuckies. Microsoft has always had ace hardware. They should really concentrate on what they do well, ie. hardware.
Taking a bit more long term view, Microsoft mouse has ALWAYS been nice. I'm talking about the good old fashioned mousies with kugels that you had to deflorate periodically to scrape the "gunk" off the rollers.
Surprisingly, at the time, everyone else had same tech coming up the wazoo but MS mouse did many things right. And prospered.
There was a level reached around late 1950's when it was possible to have excellent sound, and all the advances since then have been in lowering cost improving convenience, and adding style variations. I suppose I should add that there have been improvements in efficiency too. I don't think that valve amplifiers such as my own are necessarily the best in terms of Hi Fi, but they are very good, and extremely stable due their simplicity, and I can repair any fault apart from the output transformers (which are extremely robust and should last another half century).
..
Well, in 50s first transistor amplifiers became available so you could say that since then it's been just developments in semiconductor design. From designer's point of view, thought, power MOSFET amplifier is completely different from BJT transistor amplifier.
More recently, there's the switching amplifier or "Class D" which is again completely different from technology standpoint. Also from the principle of operation, too, so it's a new class. Seeing you're tube man I do doubt you appreciate much the concept of switch mode amplifier but it's really good for putting out really big wattage in relatively small amplifier without liquid nitrogen cooling required. Perfect for those multi-kilowatt bricks for large scale live concerts. Also nice for car audio etc where "oomph" is more crucial than the absolute THD
Yes I don't know about necessarily sounding nicer, but I have found that the sound seems to make sense and sounds good to me. For example the distortion increases for an increase in level, which is how you expect things to go, your ear works the same way.
[tube amplifiers]
I was just saying you can design bjt/mosfet amplifier and ADD those even harmonics in a controlled manner. True, it would be very tricky to get nonlinear tube response perfectly reproduced but getting "tube sound" would be quite possible from MOS amplifier. I'm actually sure I could find a bunch of amplifiers with such a function if I started digging in. Good luck figuring out what the manufacturer nomenclature would call such "warming filter", thought..
For amplifier design and the like, not a lot has happened in decades, really. High-end audio is not very attractive for good engineers as it tends to revolve around audiophile nonsense where you're not supposed to measure the performance with repeatable methods (THD and the like). Therefore getting good revies in audiophile mags has as much to do with using $500 wooden knobs and cool sounding (and very very expensive) audiophile components in the electronics that has makes no measurable difference in the product. And actually the audiophile equipment often performs poorly on objective test..
..
Great write-up about all this by very experienced audio engineer: http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/ampins/pseudo/subjectv.htm
Wikipedia also has decent collection of links on the issue. Some slant there for the audiophile POW, no big surprise.
Again, thought, the amplifier design as such has been perfected to a great extent. We're more into the territory of cramming as many channels into as cheap amplifier as possible for home theater use in current equipment..
My favourite bit about expensive nonsense - Tube amplifiers "sound" nicer in certain conditions. This is actually due to inherent distortion of the equipment type. It'd be perfectly possible (and not terribly hard) to add "niceness" knob to standard amplifiers where you can decide yourself how "nice" the sound should be like. Think of it as the "film noise" garbage added into digitally shot movies
No.
Well, okay. If you want to go into business of undercutting snake-oil cable guys, try their catalog:
http://belden.com/03Products/03_CableBasics.cfm
They can supply you with standard speaker cable with extra-thick insulator and nice texture. Gold "plated" connectors can be bought for approximately same cost as connectors without gold "plating" unless you're into real mass production.
Then again, if you're not gouging ridiculous sums for cable, it's not REALLY audiophool grade and you can forget those all-important reviews in magazines..
Might work as a way of living longer. Heart is not doing so well when you're 70? Replace it with one from a 20 year old clone.
They'd have to figure out a way to "reset" your DNA/Telomerase/whatnot first. Otherwise you'll have a 20yr old heart that's (almost) as crappy as your 70yr old except for proper diet and blah.