If the world moves to touch computing, what's going to happen to PC gaming? Traditionally, PC gaming has been popular because PCs get used for many other things besides gaming. If most people switch to touch devices for their primary computers, will there still be enough people building gaming rigs for developers to care about that market? I'm sure the big console manufacturers would love nothing more than to move everyone over to consoles, but this would signal the downfall of indie games, certain kinds of first-person shooters, real-time strategy games, simulators, and many other genres. I would be devastated to see this happen. (Cross-posting this from Hacker News.)

Actually, the reason to use EAC is because problematic disks produce pops and cracks on ripping. Very audible no matter what encoder you're using.

Brian: if only people who can hear a difference submit the survey, then the results will be inaccurate. It's important that everyone who takes the survey submits their results, especially if they can't hear a difference.

In terms of HD movies, though, I can't agree with you yet. A Blu-Ray is generally 30GB—40GB whereas a compressed video is often 4GB—8GB, and it's far easier to see compression artifacts with our eyes than it is to hear them with our ears. In addition, Blu-Rays offer director's commentary, multiple languages, different audio configurations, bonus snippets, chapter selection, subtitles, etc. — none of which are supported by any of the leading digital video stores. (Of course, the pirates have had this stuff for years.) And what about 4k, when it becomes more mainstream? That's almost 4x as many pixels! I doubt most people have enough storage for that.

There are a lot of misconceptions about lossy music, unfortunately. I've never done a test like this myself, but I tend to trust the listening tests of the folks over at Hydrogenaudio, who've consistently found that people can't tell the difference between the original track and V2-encoded LAME MP3 (which is ~192kbps VBR), and that many people can't even tell the difference with 128kbps VBR LAME MP3. (And I believe they have a lot of audio engineers on board, as well as people with really good equipment.) With that said, I keep all my music in FLAC format, just for the archival benefits and the pleasure of having the "definitive" version. I'm interested to see what the results of your informal poll will show. "Also: you obviously never listen to opera, or other continuous music split (gaplessly) into tracks. Everyone can hear the glitch at each track change, it's that obvious. This glitch is an artifact of the mp3 encoding format, and it cannot be corrected." This was actually fixed years ago. Modern MP3s have extra metadata to avoid the gap, supported by all but the most obscure music players.

Whoops, pressed enter before I was ready to post. And I really hate how we don't really have a standard open format for ebooks. I really wanted to buy the iBooks copy of Code Complete, but I thought that I might want to read it on my computer at some point, so I settled for Kindle. And since I've never bought a Kindle book before, I now have two disparate sources and interfaces for reading books on my iPad. Not to mention, I don't feel comfortable using my iPad while taking a bath or on the beach. I don't know what the solution is, but I hope that meatspace books don't go the way of the CD.

I recently bought a Kindle copy of Code Complete, and it's terrible. The images have comically low resolution. The code wraps around and is missing the grey backdrop found in the book. The layout is broken, with headers often appearing at the bottom of the page before the content. And the list goes on. It definitely doesn't have to be like this. I've seen PDF copies of textbooks that are 100% accurate, probably because the final published book used some form of that PDF.