So... if you were a big media company what would you do?
Well my first step would be lobbying over at Comcast to disable bittorrent and emule uploading and cripple the downloading. After Comcast is conquered I would move on to Verizon. FIOS, with its 2 gbit upload limit is a major and rising threat across America's cities. Really folks it's not so difficult as some of you make it out to be.P2P Piracy can be seriously curtailed. The internet as it stands today is actually quite fragile in terms of bandwidth. It is much more robust when it comes to preserving raw information.
And then there are us old folks who started out playing games on Digital minicomputers and Atari 2600 consoles and feel that the games written for the consoles are aimed squarely at the easily entertained kiddy market who only have time to play games after doing their homework and getting permission from their mommy. I envy the kiddies. The kinds of games they can play so much for weeks on end would bore rigid in 10 minutes. Anyone with a job can afford a $400 graphics card with a little saving. Even a $600 cards once every few years is within the realm of possibility.
Actually, my understanding is that the high end is primarily a prestige thing.
Well your understanding is wrong. Although I hope it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy. Not all of us have high paid cushy tech jobs. Some of us are older gamers who work bagging groceries at the safeway. You think we waste what little money we have on high end parts for 'prestige'? Just goes to show you how the upper classes have so little understanding of the lower classes. We may as well be a different species. Just a hint: the high end typically runs games and applications noticeably faster than the crippled versions of the high end (the aka high end).
You mean they get action? Yes, it's true. I have noticed that women, whether beautiful or very ugly never seem to have a problem getting laid, if that is their goal. However what relevance that has to the parent poster's claims seems less certain.
Actually, I'd have to say American women are pretty damn great.
Can you be a bit more specific? What exactly does that mean? The point that you seem to be missing is that many men all around the world seem to regard American women as some of the most aggressive and downright ferocious females on the whole darn planet. I have traveled a great deal and talked with guys about this perception in more than 50 countries. Whether true or not, that is the perception. Basically that our women act like men. And rather tough men at that.
My own opinion of the situation is a bit different. I do find American women in general to be quite aggressive and very confident ("self-esteem" having been a buzzword for a couple of decades now). However I have also been to countries where the women are even more aggressive than American women. And, in any case, I don't think American women are much different from Canadian or British or Australian or Kiwi women in this regard. You can only teach equality and feminism for so long before the population (in a nurture beats nature sort of way) becomes more androgynous. In any case I do find American women to be far more 'difficult' to deal with in general than from anywhere in Latin America. I also find the beautiful Latin American women to be less 'stuck up' than their North American counterparts. At least this has been my own experience. Although I have never been to Brazil. So I can't speak for that particular country.
Strangely enough I have heard that after several years of living in the U.S. Latin American women become more bulldogish as well. It seems clear that it is some kind of powerful cultural force that seems to turn women into selfish, aggressive, dominant, competitive, greedy, arrogant, self-satisfied, she-monster types who have managed to fall head-over-heels in love with...themselves. It's almost as if in some blind race for equality in every aspect of life, American women have adopted all of the worst character traits of men, without realizing how unbearable those same traits tend to be to the (at least non-female) people around them. At least part of this oversight may be due to the fact that many women regard arrogant, competitive, dominant, aggressive men as being very attractive. These seem to be traits that females tend to admire. We men may find such traits less appealing [cough].
I for one would not want to live with alzheimers. I actually wouldn't even consider that living. I can't read, watch TV or movies, surf the internet, make conversation... Is there anything I *can* do with alzheimers except veg out? That aint life. If I tested positive I would try to gauge just how long I had before my memory and overall thinking ability would diminish to the point that I could no longer self-terminate and do myself right before that time. I think I might choose to go like this. Either that or death by heat exhaustion in the desert. I don't like guns.
As one who has also suffered from traumatic brain injury, I am curious as to what the difference is between it and alzheimers actually. Whether the deficits are caused by blunt trauma or by a slow growth of plaque, either way the results are similar. I guess one difference is that most people with traumatic brain injury improve at least somewhat in the first 1-2 years. I know I did. Whereas someone with alzheimers...
If you put a bunch of one sex on an island from a young age, and they managed to survive, they would find ways of stimulating each other.
Bullshit. Utter bullshit. You think sexual orientation is a matter of choice or convenience? Some people are just wired differently. We call them homosexuals. They have sexual identity problems or whatever. It is not *normal*. Homosexual behavior does not have survival value for the species. Finding women attractive has nothing to do with a 'warm wet hole'. We are quite attracted to them without seeing their holes. And the idea that all you have to do is put a group of people together on an island and they would change their sexual orientation is ludicrous. Aint gonna happen. They just wouldn't have sex. Due to being ugly I don't normally have much opportunity to have sex and you don't see me starting to find other men attractive just because I can't have sex with women. It just doesn't work that way. It shouldn't even be necessary to explain that.
Actually the key selling points of X-38 for an overclocker seem to be PCIe 2.0 and a heatspreader on the northbridge chip. PCIe 2.0 has twice the data transfer rate of PCIe 1.1. It's sort of like buying a motherboard with AGP8X versus AGP4X. It remains to be seen what difference, if any, it makes in game benchmarks. The heatspreader may be an advantage for cooling the northbridge which may allow for higher FSB clocks eventually, but all of this is still speculative. And these boards are awfully expensive.
I have to admit that Eve is hot. Her skin is not quite realistic enough though. Latex and silicone are not going to do it people. Actually she seems a little creepy to me. Maybe that uncanny valley thing. The only way is to grow some kind of real biological skin. Once you do that then maybe you can get away with a version of Eve that I would buy. Even then her value would be somewhat limited since a beautiful, willing, 18 year old girl can be leased/rented from any number of third world countries starting at around $500/month. And even for as little as $200 a month is possible(I almost made just such a deal!). So as long as the real thing is so affordable, Eve-like Sexbots would not be all that appealing unless they were priced pretty competitively with their human counterparts. And then there is the ethics standpoint of putting real life women out of a 'job'.
Actually it sounds like that horsey could already be a sex robot for females. After the way I've heard some women talk about horse riding. Seems to be a very different experience than for us men. I can just imagine mommy 'borrowing' her daughter's pony for a ride every once in a while. Of course the problem with real women is they don't usually care about sex that much. Not enough testosterone in their blood I guess.
Bring on the Sean Young-Rachael androids/replicants. And the sooner the better. Not gonna happen in 50 years though. Maybe in 500. Don't know what that guy has been smokin'. Blade Runner actually presents a much more realistic scenario of androids as biological entities that are sort of grown. We are talking wetware, not circuits, solenoids, and aluminium. Again, not gonna happen in our lifetimes though.
I wonder if this would have enough power to run Emule or uTorrent. A 24/7 p2p server that only uses 6 watts of electricity. That small HD could be a problem though. Would like to substitute a 1 TB HDD.
You are forgetting that we have to arrive in our own country too. Do you think we are treated that much better? The people that are hired for these jobs are trained to treat everyone like a suspect in a crime and most of them have the mindset of thugs. I don't think you want to turn your immigration procedures into the kind of Police State welcome that we receive whenever returning home. The U.S. is by far the worst country in the world in this respect. The Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves if they could see it. We used to be about welcoming people from other lands. Now we are about lining them up against a wall, strip searching them, interrogating them, intimidating them, harassing them so much that they would never even think of returning to this strange land where everyone is a suspected terrorist until proven otherwise. We *are* becoming a police state and are already being recognized as such by many foreigners who can laugh at how "free" we are. I might laugh with them, but it is just sad.
Yeah. Great. Are any of the candidates proposing to abolish the fucking TSA. I would definitely be a one issue voter on that one. Someone should start an anti-TSA, anti-Homeland Security political party. Like we really need the fucking gestapo in airports. I thought state troopers were bad. The TSA and homeland security folks are just animals. And the US is getting closer and closer to a pure fascist, corporate controlled state where we need 72 hour advance permission to leave 'our' homes just in case we may be leaving in order to commit some kind of crime against the state. I'm just waiting for someone to lob a hand grenade in a trashcan in NYC and watch our government declare martial law and implement a 6pm curfew. It won't be too long folks. We are already on that road and it doesn't have many turns.
though I'm not a huge fan of Obsidian who generally produce an inferior product to the original
Actually the devs at Obsidian are the remains of Black Isle Studios, the RPG subdivision of Interplay that was responsible for Planescape:Torment, Fallout 1/2, Icewind Dale and assisted with Bioware's Baldurs Gate 1/2. KOTOR2 is not at all representative of their best work. It was their first project as a small startup company. They had to take whatever they could get. Unfortunately it looks like they are still in that position. Obsidian definitely has some of the most talented RPG devs of any game developer. Chris Avellone and some others from the PS:T dev team are over there. They have the talent to produce great, art-quality, story-driven RPGs. But whether they have the will and the funding is another matter. The problem is that publishers have learned that bad, cheaply made games that pander to the lowest common denominator with good marketing make money. Great games that are too complicated or difficult for the masses make much less money, are lucky to make any profit at all in fact and are anything but a good ROI. I don't think we will be seeing any more artistic game titles. In fact any kind of complicated games are doomed. Consoles will be king. Any game not designed to appeal to a gamer in the 8-14 age group will eventually stop being made.
Bethesda hasn't made a real RPG since Daggerfall. Oblivion is about as exciting as an Nvidia tech demo. Bethesda makes Action RPGs, or more specifically, offline, single player MMORPGs. To be fair, their game philosophy hasn't really changed since Arena (their best game BTW). They had the idea of open ended sand box games way before MMORPGs came around. Although there were MUDs back then I guess. They do lie a lot however pre-release. They have about as much credibility as Lionhead.
unless you recharged the battery with a microwave beam, or with a laser, or used a nuclear power source like betavoltaics, RTGs, or thermoelectric radioisotope generators. All in all it does seem rather unlikely. In any case you wouldn't have enough energy density to fly continuously. You would have to land somewhere and rest/recharge after, say, 5 minutes of flying time.
Well there's no doubt that many Chinese *still* hold grudges against Japan due to its actions in WWII. However I'm not sure that the Japanese hold any deep seated resentment against China. And I certainly think it's an exaggeration to say that either country 'loves' America. Certainly I have met some Chinese who don't have too many nice things to say about Americans in general. And I'm talking about the American people, not the US government.
So it was largely the government that was at war with the US, not the 'people'.
Sorry but that is simply not true. Way to rewrite history. The majority of Japanese citizens believed in what their government was doing. That was one of the reasons in fact that the bombs were dropped despite the fact that the US was already on the point of winning the war by conventional means. US generals believed that there would essentially be no way to really 'win' in any conventional sense because there would be so many civilians rising up to fight in the streets. They believed any attempt to take Japan would be met with *very* high losses to both sides because the resistance from the civilians would be so strong. The belief was that many would prefer to die fighting in the streets than surrender. Ironically in Iraq it seems to be just the opposite. If there has been a mass organizing of Iraqis to overthrow the US occupation I have certainly not heard anything about it. These sneaky little bombs here and there are just not going to do it. Sorry. So they may be pissed about being occupied by a foreign power, but I guess they are not pissed enough to try to really fight.
You should expect to pay some significant fraction of the wholesale value of the distribution.
Wow there nelly. what's with this 'should' stuff? That's just your own opinion. Many folks here would disagree and our opinions are equally valid. Go ahead and prove, with the same level of burden of proof that would be accorded a criminal trial, that anyone has uploaded 10 million songs to anyone. It's gonna be a little tough. But what's even tougher to prove (beyond any reasonable doubt) is that every single one of the people downloading the songs would have bought the CD with said songs, and at full retail price (as opposed to used for 1/2 or 1/4 the price). That's a pretty big assumption. I would hazard a guess that only 1 out of every thousand downloaders is actually swayed from buying a new CD due to it being easily available for download. The vast majority would be happy to try listening to a song they have never heard before by downloading it, but they sure as hell aren't going to go to a store to buy the CD just in case they might like it. The days of people blindly going out and buying CDs in the off chance that they might like the music are *long* gone. No way to put that genie back in the bottle. They may scare a few marginal folks into just not buying any music, but the rest of us will feel we are protected by, if nothing else, the rest of the herd, and keep on keepin' on. And there are plenty of us who have so few assets and whose incomes are so low that we are basically judgement proof anyway. And it's mostly folks with mainstream tastes (yay britney!) who get nabbed anyway. Maybe it will encourage people not to have the musical tastes of grazing sheep.
Are you pissed because the hackers published all your emails? Let me explain something to you, AC, we are onto you! You're not convincing anyone or accomplishing anything. Don't you realize where you're posting?
Actually I am guessing that you don't download 'illegally' because the RIAA is where your paycheck comes from. Didn't think we would guess that one did you?
Someone needs to point out that not all audiophiles believe that speaker cable makes a difference. You cannot use that as a strawman to show that all of the difference in the character of music that audiophiles claim is not valid or real. Just because speaker cable may not make any difference to the audible character of music does not mean that all differences in audio quality due to the nature of the components are mere illusion. Or that all audiophiles are gullible, stupid and rich. Individuals have different levels of hearing sensitivity. What is obvious to some people will not be detected at all by people with poor or damaged hearing. Just because you or I cannot hear a difference in some blind listening test does not mean that everyone else in the world cannot.
For some reason it seems important to those people with poor hearing that no one else on the planet can hear things any better than they. I am not sure why this is. It certainly doesn't happen with vision. There are people with 12/20 vision who can see things from far away that wouldn't seem to be there from our perspective and that fact doesn't seem controversial at all.
Every time any sound quality issue comes up on slashdot there are always large numbers of people claiming that no one can hear the difference between a 128kbps MP3 track (encoded with Lame of course!) played on a $3.00 pair of headphones and, well, pretty much anything else. I'm not sure whether to feel sorry for such people, just as perhaps people with 12/20 vision might feel sorry for me always having to wear glasses or contact lenses just to walk around. The fact that *you* cannot hear a difference does not mean that the difference is not there.
A similar situation can be found with food. 'Gourmets' are often looked at in a similar light from the POV of people with fewer or less sensitive taste buds who are quite simply blind to any subtle distinction in flavor. To them the gourmets seem to be deluding themselves about any imagined difference. But the differences are quite real to the ones who can detect them.
Not sure what you mean by 'resistive', but any geek worthy of the name should know that silver has a higher conductivity than copper. This difference has some practical applications for use in heatsinks and water blocks for CPU/GPU cooling.
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Well my first step would be lobbying over at Comcast to disable bittorrent and emule uploading and cripple the downloading. After Comcast is conquered I would move on to Verizon. FIOS, with its 2 gbit upload limit is a major and rising threat across America's cities. Really folks it's not so difficult as some of you make it out to be.P2P Piracy can be seriously curtailed. The internet as it stands today is actually quite fragile in terms of bandwidth. It is much more robust when it comes to preserving raw information.
And then there are us old folks who started out playing games on Digital minicomputers and Atari 2600 consoles and feel that the games written for the consoles are aimed squarely at the easily entertained kiddy market who only have time to play games after doing their homework and getting permission from their mommy. I envy the kiddies. The kinds of games they can play so much for weeks on end would bore rigid in 10 minutes. Anyone with a job can afford a $400 graphics card with a little saving. Even a $600 cards once every few years is within the realm of possibility.
Well your understanding is wrong. Although I hope it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy. Not all of us have high paid cushy tech jobs. Some of us are older gamers who work bagging groceries at the safeway. You think we waste what little money we have on high end parts for 'prestige'? Just goes to show you how the upper classes have so little understanding of the lower classes. We may as well be a different species. Just a hint: the high end typically runs games and applications noticeably faster than the crippled versions of the high end (the aka high end).
You mean they get action? Yes, it's true. I have noticed that women, whether beautiful or very ugly never seem to have a problem getting laid, if that is their goal. However what relevance that has to the parent poster's claims seems less certain.
Can you be a bit more specific? What exactly does that mean? The point that you seem to be missing is that many men all around the world seem to regard American women as some of the most aggressive and downright ferocious females on the whole darn planet. I have traveled a great deal and talked with guys about this perception in more than 50 countries. Whether true or not, that is the perception. Basically that our women act like men. And rather tough men at that.
My own opinion of the situation is a bit different. I do find American women in general to be quite aggressive and very confident ("self-esteem" having been a buzzword for a couple of decades now). However I have also been to countries where the women are even more aggressive than American women. And, in any case, I don't think American women are much different from Canadian or British or Australian or Kiwi women in this regard. You can only teach equality and feminism for so long before the population (in a nurture beats nature sort of way) becomes more androgynous. In any case I do find American women to be far more 'difficult' to deal with in general than from anywhere in Latin America. I also find the beautiful Latin American women to be less 'stuck up' than their North American counterparts. At least this has been my own experience. Although I have never been to Brazil. So I can't speak for that particular country.
Strangely enough I have heard that after several years of living in the U.S. Latin American women become more bulldogish as well. It seems clear that it is some kind of powerful cultural force that seems to turn women into selfish, aggressive, dominant, competitive, greedy, arrogant, self-satisfied, she-monster types who have managed to fall head-over-heels in love with...themselves. It's almost as if in some blind race for equality in every aspect of life, American women have adopted all of the worst character traits of men, without realizing how unbearable those same traits tend to be to the (at least non-female) people around them. At least part of this oversight may be due to the fact that many women regard arrogant, competitive, dominant, aggressive men as being very attractive. These seem to be traits that females tend to admire. We men may find such traits less appealing [cough].
I for one would not want to live with alzheimers. I actually wouldn't even consider that living. I can't read, watch TV or movies, surf the internet, make conversation... Is there anything I *can* do with alzheimers except veg out? That aint life. If I tested positive I would try to gauge just how long I had before my memory and overall thinking ability would diminish to the point that I could no longer self-terminate and do myself right before that time. I think I might choose to go like this. Either that or death by heat exhaustion in the desert. I don't like guns.
As one who has also suffered from traumatic brain injury, I am curious as to what the difference is between it and alzheimers actually. Whether the deficits are caused by blunt trauma or by a slow growth of plaque, either way the results are similar. I guess one difference is that most people with traumatic brain injury improve at least somewhat in the first 1-2 years. I know I did. Whereas someone with alzheimers...
Bullshit. Utter bullshit. You think sexual orientation is a matter of choice or convenience? Some people are just wired differently. We call them homosexuals. They have sexual identity problems or whatever. It is not *normal*. Homosexual behavior does not have survival value for the species. Finding women attractive has nothing to do with a 'warm wet hole'. We are quite attracted to them without seeing their holes. And the idea that all you have to do is put a group of people together on an island and they would change their sexual orientation is ludicrous. Aint gonna happen. They just wouldn't have sex. Due to being ugly I don't normally have much opportunity to have sex and you don't see me starting to find other men attractive just because I can't have sex with women. It just doesn't work that way. It shouldn't even be necessary to explain that.
Most women have vibrators? I thought most women weren't very interested in sex. Or maybe it's just a lack of interest in sex *with me*.
Actually the key selling points of X-38 for an overclocker seem to be PCIe 2.0 and a heatspreader on the northbridge chip. PCIe 2.0 has twice the data transfer rate of PCIe 1.1. It's sort of like buying a motherboard with AGP8X versus AGP4X. It remains to be seen what difference, if any, it makes in game benchmarks. The heatspreader may be an advantage for cooling the northbridge which may allow for higher FSB clocks eventually, but all of this is still speculative. And these boards are awfully expensive.
I have to admit that Eve is hot. Her skin is not quite realistic enough though. Latex and silicone are not going to do it people. Actually she seems a little creepy to me. Maybe that uncanny valley thing. The only way is to grow some kind of real biological skin. Once you do that then maybe you can get away with a version of Eve that I would buy. Even then her value would be somewhat limited since a beautiful, willing, 18 year old girl can be leased/rented from any number of third world countries starting at around $500/month. And even for as little as $200 a month is possible(I almost made just such a deal!). So as long as the real thing is so affordable, Eve-like Sexbots would not be all that appealing unless they were priced pretty competitively with their human counterparts. And then there is the ethics standpoint of putting real life women out of a 'job'.
Actually it sounds like that horsey could already be a sex robot for females. After the way I've heard some women talk about horse riding. Seems to be a very different experience than for us men. I can just imagine mommy 'borrowing' her daughter's pony for a ride every once in a while. Of course the problem with real women is they don't usually care about sex that much. Not enough testosterone in their blood I guess.
Bring on the Sean Young-Rachael androids/replicants. And the sooner the better. Not gonna happen in 50 years though. Maybe in 500. Don't know what that guy has been smokin'. Blade Runner actually presents a much more realistic scenario of androids as biological entities that are sort of grown. We are talking wetware, not circuits, solenoids, and aluminium. Again, not gonna happen in our lifetimes though.
I wonder if this would have enough power to run Emule or uTorrent. A 24/7 p2p server that only uses 6 watts of electricity. That small HD could be a problem though. Would like to substitute a 1 TB HDD.
You are forgetting that we have to arrive in our own country too. Do you think we are treated that much better? The people that are hired for these jobs are trained to treat everyone like a suspect in a crime and most of them have the mindset of thugs. I don't think you want to turn your immigration procedures into the kind of Police State welcome that we receive whenever returning home. The U.S. is by far the worst country in the world in this respect. The Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves if they could see it. We used to be about welcoming people from other lands. Now we are about lining them up against a wall, strip searching them, interrogating them, intimidating them, harassing them so much that they would never even think of returning to this strange land where everyone is a suspected terrorist until proven otherwise. We *are* becoming a police state and are already being recognized as such by many foreigners who can laugh at how "free" we are. I might laugh with them, but it is just sad.
Yeah. Great. Are any of the candidates proposing to abolish the fucking TSA. I would definitely be a one issue voter on that one. Someone should start an anti-TSA, anti-Homeland Security political party. Like we really need the fucking gestapo in airports. I thought state troopers were bad. The TSA and homeland security folks are just animals. And the US is getting closer and closer to a pure fascist, corporate controlled state where we need 72 hour advance permission to leave 'our' homes just in case we may be leaving in order to commit some kind of crime against the state. I'm just waiting for someone to lob a hand grenade in a trashcan in NYC and watch our government declare martial law and implement a 6pm curfew. It won't be too long folks. We are already on that road and it doesn't have many turns.
Bethesda hasn't made a real RPG since Daggerfall. Oblivion is about as
exciting as an Nvidia tech demo. Bethesda makes Action RPGs, or more specifically, offline, single player MMORPGs. To be fair, their game philosophy hasn't really changed since Arena (their best game BTW). They had the idea of open ended sand box games way before MMORPGs came around. Although there were MUDs back then I guess. They do lie a lot however pre-release. They have about as much credibility as Lionhead.
unless you recharged the battery with a microwave beam, or with a laser, or used a nuclear power source like betavoltaics, RTGs, or thermoelectric radioisotope generators. All in all it does seem rather unlikely. In any case you wouldn't have enough energy density to fly continuously. You would have to land somewhere and rest/recharge after, say, 5 minutes of flying time.
Well there's no doubt that many Chinese *still* hold grudges against Japan due to its actions in WWII. However I'm not sure that the Japanese hold any deep seated resentment against China. And I certainly think it's an exaggeration to say that either country 'loves' America. Certainly I have met some Chinese who don't have too many nice things to say about Americans in general. And I'm talking about the American people, not the US government.
Sorry but that is simply not true. Way to rewrite history. The majority of Japanese citizens believed in what their government was doing. That was one of the reasons in fact that the bombs were dropped despite the fact that the US was already on the point of winning the war by conventional means. US generals believed that there would essentially be no way to really 'win' in any conventional sense because there would be so many civilians rising up to fight in the streets. They believed any attempt to take Japan would be met with *very* high losses to both sides because the resistance from the civilians would be so strong. The belief was that many would prefer to die fighting in the streets than surrender. Ironically in Iraq it seems to be just the opposite. If there has been a mass organizing of Iraqis to overthrow the US occupation I have certainly not heard anything about it. These sneaky little bombs here and there are just not going to do it. Sorry. So they may be pissed about being occupied by a foreign power, but I guess they are not pissed enough to try to really fight.
Are you pissed because the hackers published all your emails? Let me explain something to you, AC, we are onto you! You're not convincing anyone or accomplishing anything. Don't you realize where you're posting?
Actually I am guessing that you don't download 'illegally' because the RIAA is where your paycheck comes from. Didn't think we would guess that one did you?
Someone needs to point out that not all audiophiles believe that speaker cable makes a difference. You cannot use that as a strawman to show that all of the difference in the character of music that audiophiles claim is not valid or real. Just because speaker cable may not make any difference to the audible character of music does not mean that all differences in audio quality due to the nature of the components are mere illusion. Or that all audiophiles are gullible, stupid and rich. Individuals have different levels of hearing sensitivity. What is obvious to some people will not be detected at all by people with poor or damaged hearing. Just because you or I cannot hear a difference in some blind listening test does not mean that everyone else in the world cannot.
For some reason it seems important to those people with poor hearing that no one else on the planet can hear things any better than they. I am not sure why this is. It certainly doesn't happen with vision. There are people with 12/20 vision who can see things from far away that wouldn't seem to be there from our perspective and that fact doesn't seem controversial at all.
Every time any sound quality issue comes up on slashdot there are always large numbers of people claiming that no one can hear the difference between a 128kbps MP3 track (encoded with Lame of course!) played on a $3.00 pair of headphones and, well, pretty much anything else. I'm not sure whether to feel sorry for such people, just as perhaps people with 12/20 vision might feel sorry for me always having to wear glasses or contact lenses just to walk around. The fact that *you* cannot hear a difference does not mean that the difference is not there.
A similar situation can be found with food. 'Gourmets' are often looked at in a similar light from the POV of people with fewer or less sensitive taste buds who are quite simply blind to any subtle distinction in flavor. To them the gourmets seem to be deluding themselves about any imagined difference. But the differences are quite real to the ones who can detect them.
Not sure what you mean by 'resistive', but any geek worthy of the name should know that silver has a higher conductivity than copper. This difference has some practical applications for use in heatsinks and water blocks for CPU/GPU cooling.