The major problem here is what does the brain activity data mean? Even if you can see a difference in brain activity for a 16 bit/44 kHz PCM file verses a 128 kbit/sec VBR AAC file how do you determine if one format is preferred over the other?
Wow. Talk about missing the point. If the brain activity is different for the AAC file then obviously the listener is not hearing the music the way it was intended to be heard. There is no argument here to be made as to which one is preferred. The one which accurately represents the artists intent is clearly preferred.
A more interesting test might be to do the brainwave activity test on PCM 44.1 kHz 16-bit vs. using the original master. That is, if it is an older recording then going back to the original tapes and if it is more modern then using whatever very high PCM rate the producer used. If we are truly sure that humans don't perceive sound above 22.05 kHz then it should not make any difference. But I speculate that despite most humans not being able to tell you they hear a very high tone that that tone can still be perceived in other ways, particularly when the high tones are harmonics to a lower fundamental. It would be interesting to see how that affects the person's thoughts about the music.
Assuming there is only a negligible difference between PCM as found on CDs and super high-resolution PCM (approaching analog) or pure analog then it follows that PCM as found on CDs is an acceptable way to store audio data. I'm guessing that this is probably the case and if not it may follow that bumping up only a few kilohertz will correct it. Now go back to considering AAC. I think we already know the answer to that test. The AAC music does not affect the brain in the same way that the PCM music does. Do you not think that is a bit dangerous? People have been listening to music for thousands of years. It has a profound effect on one's emotions and it can be said that this is the reason people listen to it in the first place. So what happens when all music a person listens to no longer has quite the same emotional effect? That is going to have a profound impact on the way people feel and even think.
The problem with the double-blind tests is that they start off by asking the wrong question. Namely, they ask the participants to tell the tester if the two samples sound different. This is a fine test if you aren't interested in reproducing the intent of the original sound but only the consiously notable sound of it.
The whole point of the article is that even when your brain is unable to conciously tell the difference between two sound samples they may subconsciously affect you in different ways. It is well known and has been for hundreds if not thousands of years that different tonal patterns evoke different emotions. The Church used this to help put congregants in the right mood for a sermon. Most churches today still do. Organs are a fairly interesting device from a musical perspective because they produce a clean tone with the base note and very pure harmonics. Couple that with appropriate building acoustics and you can produce an amazingly beautiful sound.
When you listen to an MP3 or an AAC you are not hearing the original source material. What you are hearing is essentially the output of a program which has transformed the amplitude over time graph to an amplitude by frequency over time graph and then decided which 10% of the amplitude/frequency pairs to store. It is then played back by using that as input to a synthesizer which is basically like an organ but with infinitely variable pitch (frequency) instead of discrete pitch (one key for each note on a particular tonal scale) and infinitely variable amplitude (any volume for a particular pitch).
With a good enough algorithm most people, including those with well-trained ears, will not be able to consciously distinguish the two sounds. But that does not mean that these people don't subconsciously react differently to them. One way to measure that might be to measure brain activity in various regions of the brain, which is exactly what this article mentions. The problem is that that type of test is always going to show a different reaction which is something the makers and users of audio codecs often don't want to hear.
If you are the type of person who enjoys listening to an album for the way it makes you feel I suggest you try listening to something you like in WAV format or with a lossless codec like Apple Lossless and then sometime later after converting it to MP3 or AAC. I personally feel different after listening to something like Dark Side of the Moon on a lossless codec vs. MP3 vs. AAC. Granted I'm not going to store everything as ALE on my iPod because it simply doesn't have the space for that. But anything which has a definite album feel to it gets stored in ALE. If you think about it, ALE or FLAC can do a bit better than 50% compression (2:1 but often 2 and then some to 1) and MP3 and AAC are typically 10:1 at 128kpbs with a 44.1kHz 16-bit 2-channel source file. Once you start bumping the bitrate of the encoders up a few notches to say 512 or 768 you wind up in a situation where you could have the exact original data with about the same level of size reduction.
This analysis of course completely ignores yet another aspect of digital recordings which is that PCM audio is already not entirely true to the original analog waveform. If the interest is capturing and reproducing the sound as it was heard by a person present at the recording then PCM at the low bitrates and low sampling resolutions found on CDs is not going to cut it. One technique is to increase the bitrate and sampling resolution until the effect on the interesting part of the waveform becomes negligible. That is what a format like 192kHz/24-bit does. Another technique is to sample at an insanely high frequency but only record the delta (i.e. did the amplitude increase or decrease) in 1-bit. That is what DSD as used in SACD does, sampling at 2.8224 MHz with a 1-bit rate.
One notable feature of DSD is that dynamic compression occurs at higher frequencies yet the frequencies are able to be reproduced accurately. Contras
This SoftGrid thing looks interesting but I'm guessing the foundation for it is more accurately termed an application sandbox rather than virtualization. Well, guess what, Leopard includes a new sandbox function.
I myself am somewhere around a classical liberal and a conservative
The conservative in the mode of Teddy Roosevelt, or as some make the mistake of saying a Reagan Conservative, is about small government. And about taking care of the environment.
I think why people say a Reagan Conservative is because a lot of people seem to lack a lot of historical knowledge and so a Teddy Roosevelt conservative means nothing to them. But they lived through Reagan and he did an alright job and (most importantly) there are pretty pictures and videos people can look at from that era. It's sad, yes, but unfortunately many people can't be bothered to read it seems.
And you are absolutely right that taking care of the environment is an important thing. I think though we're starting to see the conservatives finally articulate the proper position which is that everyone needs to take it upon himself to be a responsible steward of the earth we live on. Contrast this with the Democrat position which is to increase government bureaucracy and dictate from ivory towers what is and is not acceptable environmental policy.
A co-op isn't necessarily a bad idea and in fact is the epitome of people taking care of themselves and their neighbors.
Yea, coops themselves aren't government controlled, the members of the coop vote on how to run the coop. There are several coops in my area and I'm a member of two. I originally joined the first one because I wanted to show my support for organics. However I also like the idea that they all support local farmers. I believe everyplace should be food self sufficient.
How right you are. One very good thing we have going for us in the U.S. is that we definitely have a surplus of food. Even if the dollar continues to slide with respect to other currencies, we as a country will not starve to death. That's a pretty damn important thing to have because I have a premonition that the dollar is probably only going to continue to slide downward relative to other currencies. I wrote in another post here that it's not necessarily a bad thing. Right now, we import a lot of stuff because we can get a lot for our money due to the fairly high value of the dollar. If our currency devalues relative to other currencies, we'll have to import less and export more. Not necessarily a bad thing so long as the dollar does not devalue too much relative to itself.
In fact, I'm taking advantage of this right now by exporting my services as a programmer at a rate I'm happy with and my employer is happy with because it's equivalent to his local rates for programmers. This leads me to believe that at least as far as the U.S. dollar and U.K. pound are concerned, the relative values are just about right even though a U.S. dollar is worth about half as much as a U.K. pound.
Wow! A Classical Liberal on Slashdot?! I thought you were all gone! Years ago, classical liberals were the bulk of slashdot and the rhetoric was much better. I myself am somewhere around a classical liberal and a conservative. I am 100% with you on the co-op idea and I even stated it explicitly in my original post:
Now, of course, if some rural community wants to band together to provide internet service, or if a state not being served well in general would like to do it then I have no problem with that. A co-op isn't necessarily a bad idea and in fact is the epitome of people taking care of themselves and their neighbors. But this leftist's bunk about needing to foster competition and needing to evaluate what other countries are doing is just crap. It is thinly veiled attempt at giving more power to the federal government which already very clearly has way more power than it can handle.
My preference of course if for the most sensible organization. That likely means a non-governmental non-profit organization such as a group of citizens or a quasi-governmental organization such as a group of cities in preference to the state as a whole or the country as a whole.
I should also point out that it is not impossible, as some people want to suggest here, to run last-mile lines. Here in Virginia I am not familiar with the setup, but where I grew up in Northwest Indiana I can tell you definitively that the "telephone poles" are in fact owned by NIPSCO (now NiSource), the regional electric company. Why is this important? My understanding is that they're willing to lease them to anyone with the money. And guess what.. they already do! How do people think that the telephone and cable TV lines are running on them?
And what if they won't lease them to you? Well, you can in that case then try the courts or even lobbying the legislature, same as the existing companies do. If you think they didn't grease a few palms to be able to run some of those lines in the first place then you're out of your mind.
The bottom line is that the the established telco "monopolies" aren't really stopping an entrepreneur from starting his own communications business nor are they stopping a group of citizens from setting up their own system. This "can't-do" must have the government do it for me attitude that is starting to pervade our culture is absolutely sickening.
We must travel in different circles. I don't think I know anyone, rich or poor, who has a $7K plasma TV and a $40K car (which was what you originally said). So I seriously doubt that there are "a lot" of such people, but maybe you have a credible citation (talk radio shows don't count).
Been to a Best Buy lately? Looked at the prices on the real top-end plasmas? Looked at car prices for some of those SUVs and top-end cars? Seen them on the roads?
Your little rant sounds like it came straight off of Kos.
Gee, you make that sound like a bad thing . Sounds like you read http://www.dailykos.com/ more often than I do. If it gives you heartburn, you should stick to Limbaugh.
I peruse Kos occasionally for many reasons. One of which is that I like to see what other people are thinking even if I disagree with it. It's also a good way to keep the mainstream media honest because it makes it abundantly clear that they are just regurgitating blogs these days instead of reporting the news or writing their own opinions. It doesn't give me heart burn at all, but rather allows me to spot people who are enveloped in group think.
As for Limbaugh, I do listen occasionally and agree most of the time. Hannity, listen occasionally, and agree with much less. As for O'Reilly, I prefer his TV program, particularly because he's on the same time as Limbaugh on the radio. Mixed in with a hefty dose of opinion are little facts that appear to be lacking from mainstream sources. Every journalist will of course highlight the facts that prove his point, but what's most disturbing is that the mainstream journalists trying to play themselves off as unbiased reporters are guilty of it just as much, if not more so than the talk radio hosts.
instead of raising taxes maybe they could've avoided spending money on a new stadium among other things.
That's exactly what I was suggesting. But maybe you didn't know that new stadium is funded by raising the local sales tax. Just like raising the gas tax (which is a fixed amount, rather than a percentage, and hasn't been raised since 1988) to pay for highway maintenance. Let people who drive pay for the bridges. If you don't like the idea of a tax, maybe calling it a "user fee" will make you happier.
Well, apparently I made a factual error on where the source of the stadium funding came from. My apologies. The point still stands though that there are several state programs that could have been cut to pay for it. Your idea of raising the gas tax or making it a percentage is a rather interesting one. Making it a percentage of the price of a good with a widely fluctuating commodity price does not dovetail very well with the idea that the gas tax is there to fund highway development. Adjusting the fixed price upwards to account for inflation from 1988 to today would make sense and I would probably support that as a proper way of doing things. However, you also have to realize that even people without a car are highly dependent upon roadways. For instance, most goods are shipped over those highways. An educated guess would be that taking the money out of general funds from income and sales taxes vs. taking it from a special gas tax probably works out about the same for the majority of citizens. Some argument could even be made that a pure gas-tax based system would give an unfair break to those driving very economical cars vs. those driving not very economical cars as the people driving economical cars will travel more roadway (thus contributing to its depreciation) on less gas (thus not paying as much for it).
It is very likely that the most fair system has some component of taxation on fuel (a very rough analog translating to miles of road traveled and thus depreciated) and some component of general taxation. Unless of course we want toll roads everywhere which would be m
I surely didn't intend it that way. It's an opinion laden post like every other post I make and every other thing that every human being writes. I do think we all should take a step back and examine the level of trust we put into news organizations. The bottom line is that they aren't really all that different from you or I posting to Slashdot, they just get paid to do it.
I can't afford to pay for my own health insurance, but I have a 20 year old $100 TV and a $900 car. So your BS hyperbole doesn't impress me.
Fine. Then I'm all for supporting you out of the government till (i.e. out of my pocket) for a limited time until you can find yourself some employment that will cover it or enable you to cover it. That is, I am not opposed to a safety net. But don't think that there aren't people out there who game the system. There are a lot of people who are doing exactly what I say: sitting on their couch watching their plasma with a > $100/mo cable or satellite bill, driving to work in a gas guzzling SUV, then bitching that they can't afford health care and wouldn't it be nice if "the government" provided it.
As for Minnesota, you are way off base. Like most states, they have a budget surplus. They could have fixed the bridge, they chose not to. Your little rant sounds like it came straight off of Kos. Did you happen to notice how the first Kos posting on the Minnesota tragedy was bitching about the Iraq war money that could have been used to fix this bridge? Did you then notice how almost every mainstream media journalist repeated the line verbatim? I'm not talking about having the same idea. I'm talking about using the exact same words in most cases. And this wasn't one of them, it was like 10 of them. All for a statement that isn't even true to begin with since it was a state funding issue and not a federal funding issue.
Not to mention that it wasn't a funding issue at all since the state had money for it and could have used it. And instead of raising taxes maybe they could've avoided spending money on a new stadium among other things. Then they'd have had plenty of money for the bridge. The bottom line is that they had a couple of groups of engineers look at it and one said it would fail in a few years and another said it needed some immediate repairs but could last another 20 years or so with proper maintenance. So they chose to maintain the existing structure and even spent money to do that. Sure, now we know that one group of engineers was wrong, but I'm sure at the time it was a quite rational decision.
I also doubt that the proper engineering was done - and I suspect that this was not due to lack of recommendations, but more likely due to "fiscally conservative" minded legislature that was ultimately only penny-wise.
Ahh, here we go. It's the GOPs fault. If only we'd spent federal money used for the Iraq war to fix this bridge. This was the first comment on Kos about this tragedy and it was echoed verbatim by several reporters in the mainstream media. I don't mean they just had the same thought, I mean they used the same damn words.
Then there's the other one.. if only they'd instituted a 5 cent/gallon gas tax that was proposed. That's a more simple "pay as you go" (e.g. tax and spend) approach instead of the "creative approach" those damn Republicans in the state were trying to come up with to finance road work. That was courtesy of the Minneapolis Star.
Fact is that Minnesota (like most states) has a budget surplus and could have paid for the bridge repair without raising taxes. Perhaps they'd have had to spend less on that new stadium or less on that new art gallery. So what? Can we maybe all agree that fixing the roads ought to be higher on the priority list than doling out money for a privately owned stadium?
All I can figure is that several people probably decided that it was unlikely that the bridge was going to collapse. They had conflicting reports from engineers, some saying it would in say 5-10 years, others giving it more like 20 so long as some repairs were done. So what did they do? They paid for the repairs figuring that repairing the existing structure to get a few more years out of it was a responsible choice vs. building an entirely new bridge.
It's disingenuous to suggest as others have that they paid off the state inspector to paint a more rosy picture after the federal inspector gave a pretty bleak one. It was in nobody's interest to get a more rosy picture since the state still had to pay for the repairs which ultimately, with the benefit of hindsight, were shown not to work.
In the end, I think what we're going to see here is that it wasn't really a case of wanton disregard for safety but rather a reasonable and responsible choice (a calculated risk) that happened to go horribly wrong. It's easy to say now that they should have paid for a new bridge rather than paid to repair the existing one, but that's only now with hindsight.
The good news is that the people of Minnesota really banded together and helped each other out of the tragedy. One of the boys on the school bus apparently took it upon himself to open the door and lead the people out. People on the ground stood by the bus on a crumbling bridge and helped the passengers out. Divers are working in absolutely insane conditions to find the dead so they can give the family a definite answer. That's the real story here. There is still some good in this world, even in the face of tragedy.
Wow. That was really insightful. I like your over-the-top rhetorical style too, sort of reminiscent of older media (like a couple hundred years ago) when it was taken for granted that the writer was always writing an opinion piece. Where did we go wrong and start trusting the media to be some authoritative source of information?
I really hope that media would return back to its roots of being admittedly biased and opinionated instead of trying to act as though they are some purveyors of the Truth.
Interesting how you leave the question open at the end as to what might be done about it, stating only that "sooner or later we are going to have to face up to that fact." I think that hopefully soon people will start to face up to that fact and stop trusting everything the media says. When that happens, the problem will solve itself. The only catch is for that to happen people need to actually start critically thinking again.
The alternative of course is to do away with the media by force which is of course not an option. I had held high hopes that the Internet would start to bring more rhetoric from common men such as you and I and to some extent this is happening. But then you get sites like Kos which basically run in lock-step with the mainstream media and the Democratic party. It's funny in a queer sort of way to hear the reporters in the MSM just blindly repeat what they read on Kos earlier. Rush today did a montage of about 8 different reporters all saying the EXACT same thing. It wasn't that they just had the same idea, it's that they used the exact same words! It was just absolutely nuts to hear that.
With any luck, the socialist/leftist takeover attempt will wither away but it's unfortunate that a lot of very otherwise intelligent people seem to be falling for it hook line and sinker. And you're right that lack of any sort of religion plays a big part in it. When faced with hardships a good religion teaches persistence and patience. But the communist mantra is that when you can't afford to pay for your own health insurance and still buy that $5000 plasma and $40,000 car you really want then that's okay, we'll just get "the government" to pay for it. That is to say, we'll steal from your neighbor for you.
Even worse, I saw a commercial in favor of the SCHIP act (that's pronounced like shit but with a P). Heard of this? It's the latest Democratic attempt to bring health care to all children (under 25) who are poor (part of families making less than $84,000/yr). Guess who sponsored the ad? Why, America's pharmaceutical companies of course! Just think, a government sponsored drug program that covers a huge percentage of the population. When those kids finally grow up, they'll be so used to sucking on the government teat that they'll demand continuing coverage. And what a great way for big pharma to rake in boatloads of new cash flow from people (the rest of the taxpayers) who aren't even using their products!
Only we the people can stop madness like this. We need to start realizing that we are responsible for taking care of ourselves and we need to stop this seemingly never-ending cry for more and more "free" government money.
I don't really care for the government funding business like this at all but I'm not a pure-conservative in the sense that I can allow for some government expenditures for public-access things. For instance, roads aren't usually built by the state but typically by a contractor working for the state DOT. I can definitely see internet lines done in a similar way. Note that that's the state though. I don't see the role of the federal government in last-mile internet connectivity as I think that should be a local issue, possibly even at the city/county level.
Now, if the company doesn't do what they said they'd do with my money then I'd say I want my money back. I wouldn't try to nationalize the other lines they did build. I guess that makes too much sense.
I fully agree with this. I'm getting 15/1 or something ridiculous like that here in Hampton Roads, VA from Cox. Not to mention that Cox has introduced something they call "PowerBoost" whereby when extra bandwidth is not being utilized you get a huge jump in downstream rate for a few seconds. So basically if I download the latest Leopard dmg from Apple or a new Fedora ISO or whatever it will get these little boosts where I'm downloading damn near 1 megabyte/second for a little while and then it drops back off to the more usual 500-600 kilobytes/second. Man, I feel *so* oppressed.
They actually improved the speeds about a year ago for no additional charge, just part of their infrastructure upgrades. Now, let me think, do I want to stick with Cox where the service keeps improving and I get like zero outages or do I want to have some government-run bureaucracy forcibly providing me internet service?
And even better is this guy's absolute drivel that big companies like Time Warner and Verizon are going to take away our freedoms so we ought to just trust the government to run our internet for us to make sure democracy has a chance.
This dude is clearly a whiner along with all of the other whiners over at Kos. They don't feel they're getting their fair share so it's all about making everything government run and stealing money from your neighbors to pay for your health insurance and your internet service and your everything else in some grand communist plan. To hell with that.
Now, of course, if some rural community wants to band together to provide internet service, or if a state not being served well in general would like to do it then I have no problem with that. A co-op isn't necessarily a bad idea and in fact is the epitome of people taking care of themselves and their neighbors. But this leftist's bunk about needing to foster competition and needing to evaluate what other countries are doing is just crap. It is thinly veiled attempt at giving more power to the federal government which already very clearly has way more power than it can handle.
This is very common. My dad worked for a power company and one of the local news organizations did a story on pollution. So after my dad talked about their scrubbers and other emissions controls (which he was very instrumental in putting in) the reporter decided that it wasn't sensationalist enough so he pulled a dirty trick. One of their power plants was right next to a steel mill so instead of the reporter doing his monologue with the power plant in the background, he and his camera man simply turned around and put the steel mill right next door in the background then proceeded to open up with "I'm here at.. generating station."
He didn't technically lie; after all he was on the property of the generating station. But the images didn't reflect the nearly nonexistant exhaust of the powerplant (a little NOx which shows up brown on certain days) but instead reflected the constant fires and smoke billowing out of the steel mill. No photoshop required.
Hmm.. interesting note about SF being 200 million over budget due to fed budget cut. But I do wonder why is it that cities get so much money from the federal government in the first place. IMO, the only way we can make politicians more accountable, particularly at the federal level, is to make less that needs to be accounted for. Granted every state, county, and city is guilty of putting their hands into the federal till but maybe this is not such a great idea.
One particularly interesting diary I read on Kos the other day was about disbanding the federal government and going back to articles of confederation. Not going to happen obviously but the guy's argument was interesting. It is particularly interesting if you know (as I think he did not) that it used to be that senators were elected by state government and thus the senators were accountable to the state government rather than being supposedly accountable to the people like they are now. The reason the change was made (and this is the 17th amendment) was that some senators were very corrupt and several of them were basically buying the position from their governor. The change was pushed heavily by newspapers which leads me to believe that they were looking for more political influence. After all, when more positions are popularly elected, and the people are taking the word of the newspapers, it stands to reason that the media will have more influence. The flip side of it is that we can quite clearly see with this story (wow, getting back to the real story!) that some senators are still corrupt under the popular election system we've had for not quite 100 years now. Now I'll freely admit that I tend towards voting republican, but this kind of thing with Stevens just sickens me. Granted, he's not my senator (that would be Warner(R) and Webb(D) here in Virginia) but it just shows the absolute failed process we have. Perhaps giving some federal government power back to the state governments would not be a bad thing. After all, we the people would still have the house of representatives to vote on popularly.
As for health care, obviously your employer is accounting for that internally just not showing the cost to you. In case you haven't guessed by now, I have a bit of experience with accounting, specifically with writing specialized accounting software. So I tend to have a keen eye on stuff like this keeping in mind the old TANSTAAFL.
If anything, I'd almost prefer to see benefits packages go away entirely. I am now independent and have to pay for my own health insurance. A French friend of mine thought this was really odd until I explained to her that it's really no big deal, just part of my costs of living and it's really not even that much money. Since I'm young and in good health and chose a plan with a deductible for major medical stuff, I pay less money than I was with the group plan. I've got superb coverage equal to what I had before.
Then of course there is the whole issue of taxes. Did you know that the taxes you see on your paycheck aren't everything? Decades ago, congress passed laws that require companies to match them in amounts not shown on the paycheck. So in effect the company is paying you more than your paycheck says with that extra amount going straight to the feds without you ever even getting a statement that this is happening. The company has to account for this as part of the cost of keeping you as an employee but they cannot show you this cost on your paycheck. That's outright swindling if you ask me.
Particularly for us computer guys you'd think we would realize that more distributed systems can have several advantages over centralized ones. If everyone could truly see how much of their money was really going to taxes and how much was really going to health care then perhaps we'd be a little more up in arms about those costs. By tending towards centralization we are putting power in the hands of fewer people and we have less accountability. The only real accountability with t
the problem with this is that my industry (I have been working with digital legal automation and database and search integrations) really leaves me with a few spots that have a major market for my experience- basically it is new york, chicago, boston and san francisco (unless I wanted to move to india or china). I have been living in san francisco for 17 years now and it is my home, I don't want to be run out of my home.
Reality is that you might be run out of your home. The state you live in is deeply in debt due to years of way too much spending (primarily on social programs) and huge taxes to try to pay for it. That eventually leads to business moving out or doing what they can to cover those extra taxes such as paying you less.
The problem is that this is already happening without the company selloff, most companies are having their major labor budget issues due to health cost and retirement benefits (one good argument for socialized healthcare), but also I have worked in a number of companies that are lopsided with their spending.
What a great argument against socialized health care. Either way it's done you will pay for your own health care, and possibly more. Whether it shows up on your balance sheet, your company's balance sheet, or is buried in the state or federal balance sheet you will pay for it. Do you really want a situation where business can hide part of their costs off their balance sheet by moving them into the state's balance sheet?
On top of that, consider pension plans that were funded only by the company itself instead of invested in the markets. Many of my relatives got screwed on that when the companies went under right before they would have retired. Sure, they got a small early retirement, but that's about it. Do we really want to make this mistake on the national level where everyone is invested solely in a government-run pension?
As for the unions, I'm not entirely anti-union. But I will make an observation that if the employer is unwilling to pay more then it's probably time to find one that will, not bludgeon the employer to death. Of course, most state and federal employees are already getting more benefits than the average worker.
I fundamentally disagree with the idea that anyone is somehow owed a living or owed health insurance or owed benefits. When employers are unwilling or unable to pay their employees it's a clear indicator that their is an inefficiency happening and that those jobs aren't worth as much as they once were. To keep growth and efficiency some of the employees will have to move on to some other job that is worth more to the economy.
I don't disagree with your statement that the standard of living is going to decline in the coming years. I basically said it myself. On average we're not going to be able to afford the luxury items we're used to. But I don't think anyone is going to starve nor are we going to see a spectacular market crash.
Expecting that we can consume more and more without consequences is ludicrous. You deride government policies that favor low cost domestic labor and low cost outsourcing but you appear to ignore the alternative. On a smaller scale, take an industrial company with a unionized labor workforce. After a certain number of iterations of laborers demanding more and more from the company, the company eventually becomes unable to afford its workforce. But of course it made contracts with these people so the only way to get out of it is to close up shop and sell off the assets. A new company will then come in to buy the assets, lay off several people, cut wages considerably, and run a profitable operation.
Now some may point the finger elsewhere and say the company could have been run better or the executives didn't need to make that much. But every company has some level of inefficiency. And executive pay, while occasionally outrageous, is still a small percentage of the overall cost of a company's workforce. That is not to say that that's acceptable, but pointing at the executives for wanting to run a profitable business is stupid. They also work for a living and they will go elsewhere and make themselves, and the company they work for, a lot of money.
Applying this to the country as a whole I guess there's a decision to be made. Is it better to artificially keep up the standard of living until we absolutely run the country into the ground or is it better to allow labor pay rates to fall steadily to a more reasonable level with respect to the rest of the economy? The former is basically a depression, a sudden crash of the economy. I don't think you want that. I sure don't. But I sure can live a bit more lean if I have to, and a lot of people in this country could as well.
As for your specific problem, my only advice is to move. Housing costs are certainly not that outrageous in the entire country. My only guess is that you are probably somewhere like California? If you have to be on or near a coast, try Virginia or even one of the Carolinas. Even the outskirts of D.C., while expensive, is still way cheaper than California. If you don't mind being landlocked, try somewhere in the midwest. Don't leave yourself in a situation where you can barely afford to live the lifestyle you want when there are plenty of places you can afford to live better than you may have thought.
Although you may refuse to believe it, it does make sense when you think of it in terms of the "invisible hand." There are lots of places in this country that are absolutely saturated with people but have few job opportunities. Land is scarce, housing prices are outrageous, and wages are depressed. You need to stack the deck in your favor, and one way to do that is to go somewhere where housing prices are reasonable and wages are good. Economic conditions are encouraging you to move elsewhere but you don't seem to be listening because you are too worried about what the politicians are doing instead of how you are doing.
You seem like a nice guy and it's not my intention to offend you, merely get you to consider that you have more options than you may have thought. The days of getting in to a company and sticking with them and having them stick with you are long gone, if they ever even existed except for a few people. My dad happened to do it basically out of sheer luck coupled with being a reasonably intelligent man. But he'll even admit that it was more about being in the right place at the right time than anything else. Both of my grandfathers thought they would retire as company men, but didn't. That's a pretty strong lesson for me and I'm passing it along to you.
The low value of the dollar against other currencies is not necessarily a bad thing. We've had a huge trade deficit for years now importing all sorts of luxury items from overseas. Note that we don't import a lot of food though. So the benefit of a weak dollar against other currencies is that while we may have to cut back on some inessential purchases, we won't be starving to death since within the country the dollar is relative to itself. We also might start exporting more goods and services than we have been.
For instance, I'm currently working for a company overseas so the weak dollar tends to benefit both myself and my employer. The company I'm contracting for is getting me for relatively cheap, and I'm making plenty of money to buy the things I need. For a "knowledge worker" like myself (a programmer) the Internet is a wonderful boon as it makes the market for my services so much bigger.
The downside of the weak dollar is that one big import this country has is oil. That of course makes transportation more costly which does have an effect on the price of goods. What this is probably going to mean is that we'll start to see more local foods again. For instance, apples are easy to come by in Virginia. Corn, soy, wheat, cotton can all be grown easily around here. But orange juice is going to go up because orange trees need warmer climates and thus orange-based products need to be transported.
Of course, you actually have to pick those things too so we're probably going to see within our lifetimes farms moving to electrical power to run the equipment. It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that we will see fields with power lines stretched across them or even see a return to (gasp) manual labor.
This is the nature of economics and the nature of life. We've all grown rather lazy and accustomed to being able to get whatever we want whenever we want for not much money. That kind of opulence cannot last forever and was mainly brought about in the first place by the discovery of an incredibly cheap source of energy. As we've seen over the past few years, as that source of energy becomes more expensive it ripples through the economy. Eventually, we will find another source of energy and we can return to our previously scheduled overindulgence. That will probably be my children or even my grand children. Tough shit, that's how it goes. You and I will just have to tough it out.
If you really do want to continue the lifestyle you've been leading with a high dollar and an apparently limitless American economic machine then you ought to be in favor of taking over the middle east. I'm not talking about what Bush is doing now, supposedly trying to build a democracy. I mean, we'd outright have to invade and plunder every bit of oil they have. That is, obviously, not an option and it would in effect only delay the inevitable. Those who say war in the middle-east is mostly about oil are dead on. But it's not necessarily about stealing it, just about making sure we don't have to bend over to every demand the oil-rich nations make. It's a check on the power those states can wield.
The only good thing about high oil prices is that it is and will continue to cause quite a bit more R&D in alternative energy sources. If we're really lucky, we'll be able to bring at least one of our current blue-sky ideas to market within the next 20 years and keep the oil-rich nations in check until we no longer require them. That is a quite plausible reason for keeping the war in Iraq going for another couple of decades. Shitty, isn't it?
Of course, I am sure this will fall on deaf ears because it's actually a reasoned argument about the pros and cons of various government policies, not a tirade about how bad Bush is. Anyone feeling that way should just go back to Kos so he can boo the GOP "team" as if this was some game of high-school football.
This seems to be a relatively recent invention. Last I looked, no one was using the Darwin tools but the old hfsplusutils which is the bad code I was referring to. For instance, see this Gentoo wiki page: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_hfsplus
Using the Apple-supplied tools is of course the best method. I did not realize they merely required a port to Linux.
This does make me wonder though, how hard would it be to rework the kernel hfsplus module to support journalling? I occasionally do kernel programming and tend to crash OS X hard on occasion so I like the FS journalling enabled so I can avoid long fsck times at startup. This, of course, makes the HFS+ volumes unavailable from Linux which is a real bummer.
I've been running case-sensitive HFS+ as the root filesystem on some of my OS X systems for quite some time now, specifically to make sure that I don't write buggy code which uses differently cased filenames. I don't use a lot of third-party software so it works fine. The only thing I had trouble with was early betas of CodeWeaver's CrossOver and that was easily fixable by adding a symlink.
It should be noted that the story poster was looking for something to use as a shared-data drive, probably not a drive to run OS X applications from. In that case there shouldn't be any problems since I can't think of any programs which would munge the case of a user's data filename.
For quite some time now (10.3 Panther I think) there has been a case-sensitive variant of HFS+. The Linux kernel has supported mounting it for some time now since I contributed a patch after realizing I couldn't access my filesystem. Unfortunately, it does not support HFS+ journaling so you have to make sure OS X gets shut down properly. Also, the last time I looked, the open source HFS+ utilities like fsck did not handle case-sensitive HFS+. I looked into fixing it but it was such a god-awful mess of code I decided I didn't trust it anyway.
On Windows you should be able to use MacDrive but you may want to check with them to make sure that case-sensitive HFS+ is supported. I only say this because for instance Alsoft's DiskWarrior product didn't support case-sensitive HFS+ until very recently. Why, I don't know since case-sensitive HFS+ simply omits the case-folding step before determining b-tree position. It's all documented in TN1150.
Since you are looking for a non-technical person I would recommend the Jitterbug. My mom and I got my dad one for Christmas last year and it works very well. They preprogram numbers in for you and you can call their operators and have them add or delete numbers without having to navigate the menus on the phone. The phone also has a more holdable shape since it is wide at the bottom and narrow at the top with a bit of an oval to it.
If you are looking for a decent quality general cell phone I'd recommend an LG VX8300. Yes, it has the camera and has bluetooth and a Micro-SD slot and can play music and all that fancy stuff. But I just use mine as a phone and it is the best cell phone I've had in a long time. Call quality is excellent (Verizon). My only gripe is that the ear piece is mounted closer to the top of the phone than on my last phone so for the first couple of weeks I had to remember to hold the phone a little bit lower on my ear to line the speaker up with my ear so I can hear out of it. It also makes balancing the phone on my shoulder somewhat of a challenge but I usually keep a headset (wired, it sounds better) at home. I don't talk for any length of time while driving as I can't concentrate on the conversation so I usually don't bother with a headset in the car since an entire conversation with me driving is less time than it would take to plug the ear piece in.
A few years ago my folks wanted to get rid of the aerial telephone line running from the utility pole next to the street. They had previously gotten the power company (Dominion/VaPower) to bury the electricity feed and the cable company (Cox) to bury the cable feed.
Verizon would not bury the telephone feed which needed repaired anyway as it had become detached from the house during hurricane Isabel. So my parents had been hearing the Cox commercials about the digital phone service. At first I was rather apprehensive as the hard land line came in pretty useful post-hurricane since I was able to strip the ends off of the aerial and attach a normal phone jack to it to keep our phone service going.
Cox's original plan was to put the converter on the utility pole and use the existing aerial, with Verizon having to repair the aerial (because it is "theirs"). After the guy came out he realized that the buried cable line was RG-11 (fairly fat for a residence) and that he could do the box right on the side of the house. So now my parents have no last-mile copper telephone to their house because we eventually convinced Verizon to take the damn aerial down.
One interesting thing about the cable phone service is that the box has a notice on it warning of 90 VDC. Apparently, the RG-11 line caries cable signals plus 90VDC power to the converter outside which splits it into phone service and regular (non-powered) cable. What a great idea! So it never goes out and no batteries are required.
I used to be an 80 column snob as well but as of late I've decided to move towards 132 column. Part of this has to do with Java keeping all code inside of the class definitions so that every method you implement winds up indented one extra level compared with C right from the start. A similar issue occurs with C++ when implementing methods inline in the class definition. Couple that with the small-talk style of method and variable naming and I find the lines start to exceed 80 columns rather quickly.
This isn't the 1970s or the 1980s. Even the low-end displays sold today can generally hold a couple of slightly overlapped windows full of 132-column text with enough room for some toolbars and sidebars. I find that the 80-column width just looks plain silly on a modern display and it really is too short to express the program flow in a number of cases. It's high time we gave up on artificially limiting ourselves to 80 columns.
I will be the first to condemn any wiretapping done where both endpoints of the call are located inside the U.S. For instance, if these phone calls were between the lawyers and their foriegn client located in the U.S. then not having a FISA warrant would be wrong. However, if these phone calls are between the lawyers (in the U.S.) and their foreign client located outside of the U.S. then I don't see why a warrant is required.
Take away the concept of the telephone and consider shipping something to or from the U.S. U.S. Customs has the duty to inspect everything entering and leaving the U.S. Other country's customs divisions have the same responsibilities. This goes for any goods or any mail or anything entering or leaving the country. Why is a telephone call suddenly different?
There are people in this country, many on this message board, claiming that it may be illegal to wiretap an international phone call without a warrant. But I think that the real issue here is whether it is ethical to not wiretap an international phone call to a suspected terrorist. It is the president's responsibility to "preserve, protect and defend, the Constitution of the United States."
I would ask everyone to take a couple of steps back and put yourself in the President's shoes. You are the executive of one of the largest countries in the world which has recently been attacked on her own soil. Several of the millions of citizens you are charged with protecting have just died. What do you do? Do you rebuild, sit back, and say some Hail-Marys hoping it doesn't happen again? Do you indiscriminately attack other countries? Or do you do what you can to find out who your enemy is, where your enemy is, and what you can do to get rid of your enemy?
To prosecute a war discriminately you need intelligence. It is unfortunate that we have seen first hand what bad intelligence leads to. It got us into a conflict in Iraq we probably could have delayed for quite some time had we not thought there was a serious risk that Iraq was going to be the next major terrorist base. So how do you get good intelligence? Gathering intelligence implies spying on people. The constitution prohibits the government (that's you in this role-play) from spying on its own citizens without due process (i.e. a warrant). The constitution does not say you can't spy on people in other countries. It becomes clear that people you suspect might be plotting against you are making phone calls to the U.S. Do you throw your hands up and decide you can't spy on suspected enemies because you would implicitly be spying on one or more of your own citizens or do you reason that your primary target is international and that you are only incidentally spying on your own citizen?
Let's put this whole thing back in perspective. What are these lawyers claiming? Recall that they are filing a lawsuit. That means they have to show that some damage has occurred to them, whether that be monetary or damage to reputation or what have you. Also recall that their evidence is presumably not a log of all calls they made, but rather a log of calls between them and their foreign client in a foreign country so the scope is really limited to interactions with this one client. Do they have a case? I am not a lawyer but I'll bet that they can show without problems that they were sped on.
The question then becomes one of damages. Did they lose their client because of this or have they simply stopped communicating internationally to avoid the wiretaps? What cost does that have on their business? My guess is that they have sufficient grounds for the suit, including evidence of wiretapping and evidence of damage to their business because of it. They also probably have a pretty good chance of winning this suit. But does winning a civil suit make the wiretapping illegal? Not necessarily. They can win the suit simply because they were damaged by losing this client or damaged by having to communicate with their client domestically. That is really why the FISA court exists, to protect the executive branch from civil lawsuits, not to make international wiretapping legal. It is already legal and remains so regardless of the outcome of this suit.
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Wow. Talk about missing the point. If the brain activity is different for the AAC file then obviously the listener is not hearing the music the way it was intended to be heard. There is no argument here to be made as to which one is preferred. The one which accurately represents the artists intent is clearly preferred.
A more interesting test might be to do the brainwave activity test on PCM 44.1 kHz 16-bit vs. using the original master. That is, if it is an older recording then going back to the original tapes and if it is more modern then using whatever very high PCM rate the producer used. If we are truly sure that humans don't perceive sound above 22.05 kHz then it should not make any difference. But I speculate that despite most humans not being able to tell you they hear a very high tone that that tone can still be perceived in other ways, particularly when the high tones are harmonics to a lower fundamental. It would be interesting to see how that affects the person's thoughts about the music.
Assuming there is only a negligible difference between PCM as found on CDs and super high-resolution PCM (approaching analog) or pure analog then it follows that PCM as found on CDs is an acceptable way to store audio data. I'm guessing that this is probably the case and if not it may follow that bumping up only a few kilohertz will correct it. Now go back to considering AAC. I think we already know the answer to that test. The AAC music does not affect the brain in the same way that the PCM music does. Do you not think that is a bit dangerous? People have been listening to music for thousands of years. It has a profound effect on one's emotions and it can be said that this is the reason people listen to it in the first place. So what happens when all music a person listens to no longer has quite the same emotional effect? That is going to have a profound impact on the way people feel and even think.
The problem with the double-blind tests is that they start off by asking the wrong question. Namely, they ask the participants to tell the tester if the two samples sound different. This is a fine test if you aren't interested in reproducing the intent of the original sound but only the consiously notable sound of it.
The whole point of the article is that even when your brain is unable to conciously tell the difference between two sound samples they may subconsciously affect you in different ways. It is well known and has been for hundreds if not thousands of years that different tonal patterns evoke different emotions. The Church used this to help put congregants in the right mood for a sermon. Most churches today still do. Organs are a fairly interesting device from a musical perspective because they produce a clean tone with the base note and very pure harmonics. Couple that with appropriate building acoustics and you can produce an amazingly beautiful sound.
When you listen to an MP3 or an AAC you are not hearing the original source material. What you are hearing is essentially the output of a program which has transformed the amplitude over time graph to an amplitude by frequency over time graph and then decided which 10% of the amplitude/frequency pairs to store. It is then played back by using that as input to a synthesizer which is basically like an organ but with infinitely variable pitch (frequency) instead of discrete pitch (one key for each note on a particular tonal scale) and infinitely variable amplitude (any volume for a particular pitch).
With a good enough algorithm most people, including those with well-trained ears, will not be able to consciously distinguish the two sounds. But that does not mean that these people don't subconsciously react differently to them. One way to measure that might be to measure brain activity in various regions of the brain, which is exactly what this article mentions. The problem is that that type of test is always going to show a different reaction which is something the makers and users of audio codecs often don't want to hear.
If you are the type of person who enjoys listening to an album for the way it makes you feel I suggest you try listening to something you like in WAV format or with a lossless codec like Apple Lossless and then sometime later after converting it to MP3 or AAC. I personally feel different after listening to something like Dark Side of the Moon on a lossless codec vs. MP3 vs. AAC. Granted I'm not going to store everything as ALE on my iPod because it simply doesn't have the space for that. But anything which has a definite album feel to it gets stored in ALE. If you think about it, ALE or FLAC can do a bit better than 50% compression (2:1 but often 2 and then some to 1) and MP3 and AAC are typically 10:1 at 128kpbs with a 44.1kHz 16-bit 2-channel source file. Once you start bumping the bitrate of the encoders up a few notches to say 512 or 768 you wind up in a situation where you could have the exact original data with about the same level of size reduction.
This analysis of course completely ignores yet another aspect of digital recordings which is that PCM audio is already not entirely true to the original analog waveform. If the interest is capturing and reproducing the sound as it was heard by a person present at the recording then PCM at the low bitrates and low sampling resolutions found on CDs is not going to cut it. One technique is to increase the bitrate and sampling resolution until the effect on the interesting part of the waveform becomes negligible. That is what a format like 192kHz/24-bit does. Another technique is to sample at an insanely high frequency but only record the delta (i.e. did the amplitude increase or decrease) in 1-bit. That is what DSD as used in SACD does, sampling at 2.8224 MHz with a 1-bit rate.
One notable feature of DSD is that dynamic compression occurs at higher frequencies yet the frequencies are able to be reproduced accurately. Contras
This SoftGrid thing looks interesting but I'm guessing the foundation for it is more accurately termed an application sandbox rather than virtualization. Well, guess what, Leopard includes a new sandbox function.
I think why people say a Reagan Conservative is because a lot of people seem to lack a lot of historical knowledge and so a Teddy Roosevelt conservative means nothing to them. But they lived through Reagan and he did an alright job and (most importantly) there are pretty pictures and videos people can look at from that era. It's sad, yes, but unfortunately many people can't be bothered to read it seems.
And you are absolutely right that taking care of the environment is an important thing. I think though we're starting to see the conservatives finally articulate the proper position which is that everyone needs to take it upon himself to be a responsible steward of the earth we live on. Contrast this with the Democrat position which is to increase government bureaucracy and dictate from ivory towers what is and is not acceptable environmental policy.
A co-op isn't necessarily a bad idea and in fact is the epitome of people taking care of themselves and their neighbors. Yea, coops themselves aren't government controlled, the members of the coop vote on how to run the coop. There are several coops in my area and I'm a member of two. I originally joined the first one because I wanted to show my support for organics. However I also like the idea that they all support local farmers. I believe everyplace should be food self sufficient.How right you are. One very good thing we have going for us in the U.S. is that we definitely have a surplus of food. Even if the dollar continues to slide with respect to other currencies, we as a country will not starve to death. That's a pretty damn important thing to have because I have a premonition that the dollar is probably only going to continue to slide downward relative to other currencies. I wrote in another post here that it's not necessarily a bad thing. Right now, we import a lot of stuff because we can get a lot for our money due to the fairly high value of the dollar. If our currency devalues relative to other currencies, we'll have to import less and export more. Not necessarily a bad thing so long as the dollar does not devalue too much relative to itself.
In fact, I'm taking advantage of this right now by exporting my services as a programmer at a rate I'm happy with and my employer is happy with because it's equivalent to his local rates for programmers. This leads me to believe that at least as far as the U.S. dollar and U.K. pound are concerned, the relative values are just about right even though a U.S. dollar is worth about half as much as a U.K. pound.
Wow! A Classical Liberal on Slashdot?! I thought you were all gone! Years ago, classical liberals were the bulk of slashdot and the rhetoric was much better. I myself am somewhere around a classical liberal and a conservative. I am 100% with you on the co-op idea and I even stated it explicitly in my original post:
Now, of course, if some rural community wants to band together to provide internet service, or if a state not being served well in general would like to do it then I have no problem with that. A co-op isn't necessarily a bad idea and in fact is the epitome of people taking care of themselves and their neighbors. But this leftist's bunk about needing to foster competition and needing to evaluate what other countries are doing is just crap. It is thinly veiled attempt at giving more power to the federal government which already very clearly has way more power than it can handle.My preference of course if for the most sensible organization. That likely means a non-governmental non-profit organization such as a group of citizens or a quasi-governmental organization such as a group of cities in preference to the state as a whole or the country as a whole.
I should also point out that it is not impossible, as some people want to suggest here, to run last-mile lines. Here in Virginia I am not familiar with the setup, but where I grew up in Northwest Indiana I can tell you definitively that the "telephone poles" are in fact owned by NIPSCO (now NiSource), the regional electric company. Why is this important? My understanding is that they're willing to lease them to anyone with the money. And guess what.. they already do! How do people think that the telephone and cable TV lines are running on them?
And what if they won't lease them to you? Well, you can in that case then try the courts or even lobbying the legislature, same as the existing companies do. If you think they didn't grease a few palms to be able to run some of those lines in the first place then you're out of your mind.
The bottom line is that the the established telco "monopolies" aren't really stopping an entrepreneur from starting his own communications business nor are they stopping a group of citizens from setting up their own system. This "can't-do" must have the government do it for me attitude that is starting to pervade our culture is absolutely sickening.
We must travel in different circles. I don't think I know anyone, rich or poor, who has a $7K plasma TV and a $40K car (which was what you originally said). So I seriously doubt that there are "a lot" of such people, but maybe you have a credible citation (talk radio shows don't count).
Been to a Best Buy lately? Looked at the prices on the real top-end plasmas? Looked at car prices for some of those SUVs and top-end cars? Seen them on the roads?
Your little rant sounds like it came straight off of Kos.
Gee, you make that sound like a bad thing . Sounds like you read http://www.dailykos.com/ more often than I do. If it gives you heartburn, you should stick to Limbaugh.
I peruse Kos occasionally for many reasons. One of which is that I like to see what other people are thinking even if I disagree with it. It's also a good way to keep the mainstream media honest because it makes it abundantly clear that they are just regurgitating blogs these days instead of reporting the news or writing their own opinions. It doesn't give me heart burn at all, but rather allows me to spot people who are enveloped in group think.
As for Limbaugh, I do listen occasionally and agree most of the time. Hannity, listen occasionally, and agree with much less. As for O'Reilly, I prefer his TV program, particularly because he's on the same time as Limbaugh on the radio. Mixed in with a hefty dose of opinion are little facts that appear to be lacking from mainstream sources. Every journalist will of course highlight the facts that prove his point, but what's most disturbing is that the mainstream journalists trying to play themselves off as unbiased reporters are guilty of it just as much, if not more so than the talk radio hosts.
instead of raising taxes maybe they could've avoided spending money on a new stadium among other things.
That's exactly what I was suggesting. But maybe you didn't know that new stadium is funded by raising the local sales tax. Just like raising the gas tax (which is a fixed amount, rather than a percentage, and hasn't been raised since 1988) to pay for highway maintenance. Let people who drive pay for the bridges. If you don't like the idea of a tax, maybe calling it a "user fee" will make you happier.
Well, apparently I made a factual error on where the source of the stadium funding came from. My apologies. The point still stands though that there are several state programs that could have been cut to pay for it. Your idea of raising the gas tax or making it a percentage is a rather interesting one. Making it a percentage of the price of a good with a widely fluctuating commodity price does not dovetail very well with the idea that the gas tax is there to fund highway development. Adjusting the fixed price upwards to account for inflation from 1988 to today would make sense and I would probably support that as a proper way of doing things. However, you also have to realize that even people without a car are highly dependent upon roadways. For instance, most goods are shipped over those highways. An educated guess would be that taking the money out of general funds from income and sales taxes vs. taking it from a special gas tax probably works out about the same for the majority of citizens. Some argument could even be made that a pure gas-tax based system would give an unfair break to those driving very economical cars vs. those driving not very economical cars as the people driving economical cars will travel more roadway (thus contributing to its depreciation) on less gas (thus not paying as much for it).
It is very likely that the most fair system has some component of taxation on fuel (a very rough analog translating to miles of road traveled and thus depreciated) and some component of general taxation. Unless of course we want toll roads everywhere which would be m
I surely didn't intend it that way. It's an opinion laden post like every other post I make and every other thing that every human being writes. I do think we all should take a step back and examine the level of trust we put into news organizations. The bottom line is that they aren't really all that different from you or I posting to Slashdot, they just get paid to do it.
Fine. Then I'm all for supporting you out of the government till (i.e. out of my pocket) for a limited time until you can find yourself some employment that will cover it or enable you to cover it. That is, I am not opposed to a safety net. But don't think that there aren't people out there who game the system. There are a lot of people who are doing exactly what I say: sitting on their couch watching their plasma with a > $100/mo cable or satellite bill, driving to work in a gas guzzling SUV, then bitching that they can't afford health care and wouldn't it be nice if "the government" provided it.
As for Minnesota, you are way off base. Like most states, they have a budget surplus. They could have fixed the bridge, they chose not to. Your little rant sounds like it came straight off of Kos. Did you happen to notice how the first Kos posting on the Minnesota tragedy was bitching about the Iraq war money that could have been used to fix this bridge? Did you then notice how almost every mainstream media journalist repeated the line verbatim? I'm not talking about having the same idea. I'm talking about using the exact same words in most cases. And this wasn't one of them, it was like 10 of them. All for a statement that isn't even true to begin with since it was a state funding issue and not a federal funding issue.
Not to mention that it wasn't a funding issue at all since the state had money for it and could have used it. And instead of raising taxes maybe they could've avoided spending money on a new stadium among other things. Then they'd have had plenty of money for the bridge. The bottom line is that they had a couple of groups of engineers look at it and one said it would fail in a few years and another said it needed some immediate repairs but could last another 20 years or so with proper maintenance. So they chose to maintain the existing structure and even spent money to do that. Sure, now we know that one group of engineers was wrong, but I'm sure at the time it was a quite rational decision.
Ahh, here we go. It's the GOPs fault. If only we'd spent federal money used for the Iraq war to fix this bridge. This was the first comment on Kos about this tragedy and it was echoed verbatim by several reporters in the mainstream media. I don't mean they just had the same thought, I mean they used the same damn words.
Then there's the other one.. if only they'd instituted a 5 cent/gallon gas tax that was proposed. That's a more simple "pay as you go" (e.g. tax and spend) approach instead of the "creative approach" those damn Republicans in the state were trying to come up with to finance road work. That was courtesy of the Minneapolis Star.
Fact is that Minnesota (like most states) has a budget surplus and could have paid for the bridge repair without raising taxes. Perhaps they'd have had to spend less on that new stadium or less on that new art gallery. So what? Can we maybe all agree that fixing the roads ought to be higher on the priority list than doling out money for a privately owned stadium?
All I can figure is that several people probably decided that it was unlikely that the bridge was going to collapse. They had conflicting reports from engineers, some saying it would in say 5-10 years, others giving it more like 20 so long as some repairs were done. So what did they do? They paid for the repairs figuring that repairing the existing structure to get a few more years out of it was a responsible choice vs. building an entirely new bridge.
It's disingenuous to suggest as others have that they paid off the state inspector to paint a more rosy picture after the federal inspector gave a pretty bleak one. It was in nobody's interest to get a more rosy picture since the state still had to pay for the repairs which ultimately, with the benefit of hindsight, were shown not to work.
In the end, I think what we're going to see here is that it wasn't really a case of wanton disregard for safety but rather a reasonable and responsible choice (a calculated risk) that happened to go horribly wrong. It's easy to say now that they should have paid for a new bridge rather than paid to repair the existing one, but that's only now with hindsight.
The good news is that the people of Minnesota really banded together and helped each other out of the tragedy. One of the boys on the school bus apparently took it upon himself to open the door and lead the people out. People on the ground stood by the bus on a crumbling bridge and helped the passengers out. Divers are working in absolutely insane conditions to find the dead so they can give the family a definite answer. That's the real story here. There is still some good in this world, even in the face of tragedy.
Wow. That was really insightful. I like your over-the-top rhetorical style too, sort of reminiscent of older media (like a couple hundred years ago) when it was taken for granted that the writer was always writing an opinion piece. Where did we go wrong and start trusting the media to be some authoritative source of information?
I really hope that media would return back to its roots of being admittedly biased and opinionated instead of trying to act as though they are some purveyors of the Truth.
Interesting how you leave the question open at the end as to what might be done about it, stating only that "sooner or later we are going to have to face up to that fact." I think that hopefully soon people will start to face up to that fact and stop trusting everything the media says. When that happens, the problem will solve itself. The only catch is for that to happen people need to actually start critically thinking again.
The alternative of course is to do away with the media by force which is of course not an option. I had held high hopes that the Internet would start to bring more rhetoric from common men such as you and I and to some extent this is happening. But then you get sites like Kos which basically run in lock-step with the mainstream media and the Democratic party. It's funny in a queer sort of way to hear the reporters in the MSM just blindly repeat what they read on Kos earlier. Rush today did a montage of about 8 different reporters all saying the EXACT same thing. It wasn't that they just had the same idea, it's that they used the exact same words! It was just absolutely nuts to hear that.
With any luck, the socialist/leftist takeover attempt will wither away but it's unfortunate that a lot of very otherwise intelligent people seem to be falling for it hook line and sinker. And you're right that lack of any sort of religion plays a big part in it. When faced with hardships a good religion teaches persistence and patience. But the communist mantra is that when you can't afford to pay for your own health insurance and still buy that $5000 plasma and $40,000 car you really want then that's okay, we'll just get "the government" to pay for it. That is to say, we'll steal from your neighbor for you.
Even worse, I saw a commercial in favor of the SCHIP act (that's pronounced like shit but with a P). Heard of this? It's the latest Democratic attempt to bring health care to all children (under 25) who are poor (part of families making less than $84,000/yr). Guess who sponsored the ad? Why, America's pharmaceutical companies of course! Just think, a government sponsored drug program that covers a huge percentage of the population. When those kids finally grow up, they'll be so used to sucking on the government teat that they'll demand continuing coverage. And what a great way for big pharma to rake in boatloads of new cash flow from people (the rest of the taxpayers) who aren't even using their products!
Only we the people can stop madness like this. We need to start realizing that we are responsible for taking care of ourselves and we need to stop this seemingly never-ending cry for more and more "free" government money.
I don't really care for the government funding business like this at all but I'm not a pure-conservative in the sense that I can allow for some government expenditures for public-access things. For instance, roads aren't usually built by the state but typically by a contractor working for the state DOT. I can definitely see internet lines done in a similar way. Note that that's the state though. I don't see the role of the federal government in last-mile internet connectivity as I think that should be a local issue, possibly even at the city/county level.
Now, if the company doesn't do what they said they'd do with my money then I'd say I want my money back. I wouldn't try to nationalize the other lines they did build. I guess that makes too much sense.
I fully agree with this. I'm getting 15/1 or something ridiculous like that here in Hampton Roads, VA from Cox. Not to mention that Cox has introduced something they call "PowerBoost" whereby when extra bandwidth is not being utilized you get a huge jump in downstream rate for a few seconds. So basically if I download the latest Leopard dmg from Apple or a new Fedora ISO or whatever it will get these little boosts where I'm downloading damn near 1 megabyte/second for a little while and then it drops back off to the more usual 500-600 kilobytes/second. Man, I feel *so* oppressed.
They actually improved the speeds about a year ago for no additional charge, just part of their infrastructure upgrades. Now, let me think, do I want to stick with Cox where the service keeps improving and I get like zero outages or do I want to have some government-run bureaucracy forcibly providing me internet service?
And even better is this guy's absolute drivel that big companies like Time Warner and Verizon are going to take away our freedoms so we ought to just trust the government to run our internet for us to make sure democracy has a chance.
This dude is clearly a whiner along with all of the other whiners over at Kos. They don't feel they're getting their fair share so it's all about making everything government run and stealing money from your neighbors to pay for your health insurance and your internet service and your everything else in some grand communist plan. To hell with that.
Now, of course, if some rural community wants to band together to provide internet service, or if a state not being served well in general would like to do it then I have no problem with that. A co-op isn't necessarily a bad idea and in fact is the epitome of people taking care of themselves and their neighbors. But this leftist's bunk about needing to foster competition and needing to evaluate what other countries are doing is just crap. It is thinly veiled attempt at giving more power to the federal government which already very clearly has way more power than it can handle.
This is very common. My dad worked for a power company and one of the local news organizations did a story on pollution. So after my dad talked about their scrubbers and other emissions controls (which he was very instrumental in putting in) the reporter decided that it wasn't sensationalist enough so he pulled a dirty trick. One of their power plants was right next to a steel mill so instead of the reporter doing his monologue with the power plant in the background, he and his camera man simply turned around and put the steel mill right next door in the background then proceeded to open up with "I'm here at .. generating station."
He didn't technically lie; after all he was on the property of the generating station. But the images didn't reflect the nearly nonexistant exhaust of the powerplant (a little NOx which shows up brown on certain days) but instead reflected the constant fires and smoke billowing out of the steel mill. No photoshop required.
Hmm.. interesting note about SF being 200 million over budget due to fed budget cut. But I do wonder why is it that cities get so much money from the federal government in the first place. IMO, the only way we can make politicians more accountable, particularly at the federal level, is to make less that needs to be accounted for. Granted every state, county, and city is guilty of putting their hands into the federal till but maybe this is not such a great idea.
One particularly interesting diary I read on Kos the other day was about disbanding the federal government and going back to articles of confederation. Not going to happen obviously but the guy's argument was interesting. It is particularly interesting if you know (as I think he did not) that it used to be that senators were elected by state government and thus the senators were accountable to the state government rather than being supposedly accountable to the people like they are now. The reason the change was made (and this is the 17th amendment) was that some senators were very corrupt and several of them were basically buying the position from their governor. The change was pushed heavily by newspapers which leads me to believe that they were looking for more political influence. After all, when more positions are popularly elected, and the people are taking the word of the newspapers, it stands to reason that the media will have more influence. The flip side of it is that we can quite clearly see with this story (wow, getting back to the real story!) that some senators are still corrupt under the popular election system we've had for not quite 100 years now. Now I'll freely admit that I tend towards voting republican, but this kind of thing with Stevens just sickens me. Granted, he's not my senator (that would be Warner(R) and Webb(D) here in Virginia) but it just shows the absolute failed process we have. Perhaps giving some federal government power back to the state governments would not be a bad thing. After all, we the people would still have the house of representatives to vote on popularly.
As for health care, obviously your employer is accounting for that internally just not showing the cost to you. In case you haven't guessed by now, I have a bit of experience with accounting, specifically with writing specialized accounting software. So I tend to have a keen eye on stuff like this keeping in mind the old TANSTAAFL.
If anything, I'd almost prefer to see benefits packages go away entirely. I am now independent and have to pay for my own health insurance. A French friend of mine thought this was really odd until I explained to her that it's really no big deal, just part of my costs of living and it's really not even that much money. Since I'm young and in good health and chose a plan with a deductible for major medical stuff, I pay less money than I was with the group plan. I've got superb coverage equal to what I had before.
Then of course there is the whole issue of taxes. Did you know that the taxes you see on your paycheck aren't everything? Decades ago, congress passed laws that require companies to match them in amounts not shown on the paycheck. So in effect the company is paying you more than your paycheck says with that extra amount going straight to the feds without you ever even getting a statement that this is happening. The company has to account for this as part of the cost of keeping you as an employee but they cannot show you this cost on your paycheck. That's outright swindling if you ask me.
Particularly for us computer guys you'd think we would realize that more distributed systems can have several advantages over centralized ones. If everyone could truly see how much of their money was really going to taxes and how much was really going to health care then perhaps we'd be a little more up in arms about those costs. By tending towards centralization we are putting power in the hands of fewer people and we have less accountability. The only real accountability with t
Reality is that you might be run out of your home. The state you live in is deeply in debt due to years of way too much spending (primarily on social programs) and huge taxes to try to pay for it. That eventually leads to business moving out or doing what they can to cover those extra taxes such as paying you less.
The problem is that this is already happening without the company selloff, most companies are having their major labor budget issues due to health cost and retirement benefits (one good argument for socialized healthcare), but also I have worked in a number of companies that are lopsided with their spending.What a great argument against socialized health care. Either way it's done you will pay for your own health care, and possibly more. Whether it shows up on your balance sheet, your company's balance sheet, or is buried in the state or federal balance sheet you will pay for it. Do you really want a situation where business can hide part of their costs off their balance sheet by moving them into the state's balance sheet?
On top of that, consider pension plans that were funded only by the company itself instead of invested in the markets. Many of my relatives got screwed on that when the companies went under right before they would have retired. Sure, they got a small early retirement, but that's about it. Do we really want to make this mistake on the national level where everyone is invested solely in a government-run pension?
As for the unions, I'm not entirely anti-union. But I will make an observation that if the employer is unwilling to pay more then it's probably time to find one that will, not bludgeon the employer to death. Of course, most state and federal employees are already getting more benefits than the average worker.
I fundamentally disagree with the idea that anyone is somehow owed a living or owed health insurance or owed benefits. When employers are unwilling or unable to pay their employees it's a clear indicator that their is an inefficiency happening and that those jobs aren't worth as much as they once were. To keep growth and efficiency some of the employees will have to move on to some other job that is worth more to the economy.
I don't disagree with your statement that the standard of living is going to decline in the coming years. I basically said it myself. On average we're not going to be able to afford the luxury items we're used to. But I don't think anyone is going to starve nor are we going to see a spectacular market crash.
Expecting that we can consume more and more without consequences is ludicrous. You deride government policies that favor low cost domestic labor and low cost outsourcing but you appear to ignore the alternative. On a smaller scale, take an industrial company with a unionized labor workforce. After a certain number of iterations of laborers demanding more and more from the company, the company eventually becomes unable to afford its workforce. But of course it made contracts with these people so the only way to get out of it is to close up shop and sell off the assets. A new company will then come in to buy the assets, lay off several people, cut wages considerably, and run a profitable operation.
Now some may point the finger elsewhere and say the company could have been run better or the executives didn't need to make that much. But every company has some level of inefficiency. And executive pay, while occasionally outrageous, is still a small percentage of the overall cost of a company's workforce. That is not to say that that's acceptable, but pointing at the executives for wanting to run a profitable business is stupid. They also work for a living and they will go elsewhere and make themselves, and the company they work for, a lot of money.
Applying this to the country as a whole I guess there's a decision to be made. Is it better to artificially keep up the standard of living until we absolutely run the country into the ground or is it better to allow labor pay rates to fall steadily to a more reasonable level with respect to the rest of the economy? The former is basically a depression, a sudden crash of the economy. I don't think you want that. I sure don't. But I sure can live a bit more lean if I have to, and a lot of people in this country could as well.
As for your specific problem, my only advice is to move. Housing costs are certainly not that outrageous in the entire country. My only guess is that you are probably somewhere like California? If you have to be on or near a coast, try Virginia or even one of the Carolinas. Even the outskirts of D.C., while expensive, is still way cheaper than California. If you don't mind being landlocked, try somewhere in the midwest. Don't leave yourself in a situation where you can barely afford to live the lifestyle you want when there are plenty of places you can afford to live better than you may have thought.
Although you may refuse to believe it, it does make sense when you think of it in terms of the "invisible hand." There are lots of places in this country that are absolutely saturated with people but have few job opportunities. Land is scarce, housing prices are outrageous, and wages are depressed. You need to stack the deck in your favor, and one way to do that is to go somewhere where housing prices are reasonable and wages are good. Economic conditions are encouraging you to move elsewhere but you don't seem to be listening because you are too worried about what the politicians are doing instead of how you are doing.
You seem like a nice guy and it's not my intention to offend you, merely get you to consider that you have more options than you may have thought. The days of getting in to a company and sticking with them and having them stick with you are long gone, if they ever even existed except for a few people. My dad happened to do it basically out of sheer luck coupled with being a reasonably intelligent man. But he'll even admit that it was more about being in the right place at the right time than anything else. Both of my grandfathers thought they would retire as company men, but didn't. That's a pretty strong lesson for me and I'm passing it along to you.
The low value of the dollar against other currencies is not necessarily a bad thing. We've had a huge trade deficit for years now importing all sorts of luxury items from overseas. Note that we don't import a lot of food though. So the benefit of a weak dollar against other currencies is that while we may have to cut back on some inessential purchases, we won't be starving to death since within the country the dollar is relative to itself. We also might start exporting more goods and services than we have been.
For instance, I'm currently working for a company overseas so the weak dollar tends to benefit both myself and my employer. The company I'm contracting for is getting me for relatively cheap, and I'm making plenty of money to buy the things I need. For a "knowledge worker" like myself (a programmer) the Internet is a wonderful boon as it makes the market for my services so much bigger.
The downside of the weak dollar is that one big import this country has is oil. That of course makes transportation more costly which does have an effect on the price of goods. What this is probably going to mean is that we'll start to see more local foods again. For instance, apples are easy to come by in Virginia. Corn, soy, wheat, cotton can all be grown easily around here. But orange juice is going to go up because orange trees need warmer climates and thus orange-based products need to be transported.
Of course, you actually have to pick those things too so we're probably going to see within our lifetimes farms moving to electrical power to run the equipment. It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that we will see fields with power lines stretched across them or even see a return to (gasp) manual labor.
This is the nature of economics and the nature of life. We've all grown rather lazy and accustomed to being able to get whatever we want whenever we want for not much money. That kind of opulence cannot last forever and was mainly brought about in the first place by the discovery of an incredibly cheap source of energy. As we've seen over the past few years, as that source of energy becomes more expensive it ripples through the economy. Eventually, we will find another source of energy and we can return to our previously scheduled overindulgence. That will probably be my children or even my grand children. Tough shit, that's how it goes. You and I will just have to tough it out.
If you really do want to continue the lifestyle you've been leading with a high dollar and an apparently limitless American economic machine then you ought to be in favor of taking over the middle east. I'm not talking about what Bush is doing now, supposedly trying to build a democracy. I mean, we'd outright have to invade and plunder every bit of oil they have. That is, obviously, not an option and it would in effect only delay the inevitable. Those who say war in the middle-east is mostly about oil are dead on. But it's not necessarily about stealing it, just about making sure we don't have to bend over to every demand the oil-rich nations make. It's a check on the power those states can wield.
The only good thing about high oil prices is that it is and will continue to cause quite a bit more R&D in alternative energy sources. If we're really lucky, we'll be able to bring at least one of our current blue-sky ideas to market within the next 20 years and keep the oil-rich nations in check until we no longer require them. That is a quite plausible reason for keeping the war in Iraq going for another couple of decades. Shitty, isn't it?
Of course, I am sure this will fall on deaf ears because it's actually a reasoned argument about the pros and cons of various government policies, not a tirade about how bad Bush is. Anyone feeling that way should just go back to Kos so he can boo the GOP "team" as if this was some game of high-school football.
This seems to be a relatively recent invention. Last I looked, no one was using the Darwin tools but the old hfsplusutils which is the bad code I was referring to. For instance, see this Gentoo wiki page: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_hfsplus
Using the Apple-supplied tools is of course the best method. I did not realize they merely required a port to Linux.
This does make me wonder though, how hard would it be to rework the kernel hfsplus module to support journalling? I occasionally do kernel programming and tend to crash OS X hard on occasion so I like the FS journalling enabled so I can avoid long fsck times at startup. This, of course, makes the HFS+ volumes unavailable from Linux which is a real bummer.
I've been running case-sensitive HFS+ as the root filesystem on some of my OS X systems for quite some time now, specifically to make sure that I don't write buggy code which uses differently cased filenames. I don't use a lot of third-party software so it works fine. The only thing I had trouble with was early betas of CodeWeaver's CrossOver and that was easily fixable by adding a symlink.
It should be noted that the story poster was looking for something to use as a shared-data drive, probably not a drive to run OS X applications from. In that case there shouldn't be any problems since I can't think of any programs which would munge the case of a user's data filename.
For quite some time now (10.3 Panther I think) there has been a case-sensitive variant of HFS+. The Linux kernel has supported mounting it for some time now since I contributed a patch after realizing I couldn't access my filesystem. Unfortunately, it does not support HFS+ journaling so you have to make sure OS X gets shut down properly. Also, the last time I looked, the open source HFS+ utilities like fsck did not handle case-sensitive HFS+. I looked into fixing it but it was such a god-awful mess of code I decided I didn't trust it anyway.
On Windows you should be able to use MacDrive but you may want to check with them to make sure that case-sensitive HFS+ is supported. I only say this because for instance Alsoft's DiskWarrior product didn't support case-sensitive HFS+ until very recently. Why, I don't know since case-sensitive HFS+ simply omits the case-folding step before determining b-tree position. It's all documented in TN1150.
Since you are looking for a non-technical person I would recommend the Jitterbug. My mom and I got my dad one for Christmas last year and it works very well. They preprogram numbers in for you and you can call their operators and have them add or delete numbers without having to navigate the menus on the phone. The phone also has a more holdable shape since it is wide at the bottom and narrow at the top with a bit of an oval to it.
If you are looking for a decent quality general cell phone I'd recommend an LG VX8300. Yes, it has the camera and has bluetooth and a Micro-SD slot and can play music and all that fancy stuff. But I just use mine as a phone and it is the best cell phone I've had in a long time. Call quality is excellent (Verizon). My only gripe is that the ear piece is mounted closer to the top of the phone than on my last phone so for the first couple of weeks I had to remember to hold the phone a little bit lower on my ear to line the speaker up with my ear so I can hear out of it. It also makes balancing the phone on my shoulder somewhat of a challenge but I usually keep a headset (wired, it sounds better) at home. I don't talk for any length of time while driving as I can't concentrate on the conversation so I usually don't bother with a headset in the car since an entire conversation with me driving is less time than it would take to plug the ear piece in.
A few years ago my folks wanted to get rid of the aerial telephone line running from the utility pole next to the street. They had previously gotten the power company (Dominion/VaPower) to bury the electricity feed and the cable company (Cox) to bury the cable feed.
Verizon would not bury the telephone feed which needed repaired anyway as it had become detached from the house during hurricane Isabel. So my parents had been hearing the Cox commercials about the digital phone service. At first I was rather apprehensive as the hard land line came in pretty useful post-hurricane since I was able to strip the ends off of the aerial and attach a normal phone jack to it to keep our phone service going.
Cox's original plan was to put the converter on the utility pole and use the existing aerial, with Verizon having to repair the aerial (because it is "theirs"). After the guy came out he realized that the buried cable line was RG-11 (fairly fat for a residence) and that he could do the box right on the side of the house. So now my parents have no last-mile copper telephone to their house because we eventually convinced Verizon to take the damn aerial down.
One interesting thing about the cable phone service is that the box has a notice on it warning of 90 VDC. Apparently, the RG-11 line caries cable signals plus 90VDC power to the converter outside which splits it into phone service and regular (non-powered) cable. What a great idea! So it never goes out and no batteries are required.
Starbucks sells an excellent all-stainless insulated tumbler. They have a lot of crap plastic ones or plastic in and stainless out but the one to get is the all-stainless one found here:s p?SKU=548585
http://www.starbucksstore.com/products/shprodde.a
I simply make (not-quite) a pot of coffee, fill up two of them, and just takes sips for most of the rest of the day. The coffee will not get cold.
Don't be fooled by the imitators. I'm not a big fan of starbucks coffee (prefer Dunkin Donuts beans) but this particular cup is amazing.
I used to be an 80 column snob as well but as of late I've decided to move towards 132 column. Part of this has to do with Java keeping all code inside of the class definitions so that every method you implement winds up indented one extra level compared with C right from the start. A similar issue occurs with C++ when implementing methods inline in the class definition. Couple that with the small-talk style of method and variable naming and I find the lines start to exceed 80 columns rather quickly.
This isn't the 1970s or the 1980s. Even the low-end displays sold today can generally hold a couple of slightly overlapped windows full of 132-column text with enough room for some toolbars and sidebars. I find that the 80-column width just looks plain silly on a modern display and it really is too short to express the program flow in a number of cases. It's high time we gave up on artificially limiting ourselves to 80 columns.
Right on.
I will be the first to condemn any wiretapping done where both endpoints of the call are located inside the U.S. For instance, if these phone calls were between the lawyers and their foriegn client located in the U.S. then not having a FISA warrant would be wrong. However, if these phone calls are between the lawyers (in the U.S.) and their foreign client located outside of the U.S. then I don't see why a warrant is required.
Take away the concept of the telephone and consider shipping something to or from the U.S. U.S. Customs has the duty to inspect everything entering and leaving the U.S. Other country's customs divisions have the same responsibilities. This goes for any goods or any mail or anything entering or leaving the country. Why is a telephone call suddenly different?
There are people in this country, many on this message board, claiming that it may be illegal to wiretap an international phone call without a warrant. But I think that the real issue here is whether it is ethical to not wiretap an international phone call to a suspected terrorist. It is the president's responsibility to "preserve, protect and defend, the Constitution of the United States."
I would ask everyone to take a couple of steps back and put yourself in the President's shoes. You are the executive of one of the largest countries in the world which has recently been attacked on her own soil. Several of the millions of citizens you are charged with protecting have just died. What do you do? Do you rebuild, sit back, and say some Hail-Marys hoping it doesn't happen again? Do you indiscriminately attack other countries? Or do you do what you can to find out who your enemy is, where your enemy is, and what you can do to get rid of your enemy?
To prosecute a war discriminately you need intelligence. It is unfortunate that we have seen first hand what bad intelligence leads to. It got us into a conflict in Iraq we probably could have delayed for quite some time had we not thought there was a serious risk that Iraq was going to be the next major terrorist base. So how do you get good intelligence? Gathering intelligence implies spying on people. The constitution prohibits the government (that's you in this role-play) from spying on its own citizens without due process (i.e. a warrant). The constitution does not say you can't spy on people in other countries. It becomes clear that people you suspect might be plotting against you are making phone calls to the U.S. Do you throw your hands up and decide you can't spy on suspected enemies because you would implicitly be spying on one or more of your own citizens or do you reason that your primary target is international and that you are only incidentally spying on your own citizen?
Let's put this whole thing back in perspective. What are these lawyers claiming? Recall that they are filing a lawsuit. That means they have to show that some damage has occurred to them, whether that be monetary or damage to reputation or what have you. Also recall that their evidence is presumably not a log of all calls they made, but rather a log of calls between them and their foreign client in a foreign country so the scope is really limited to interactions with this one client. Do they have a case? I am not a lawyer but I'll bet that they can show without problems that they were sped on.
The question then becomes one of damages. Did they lose their client because of this or have they simply stopped communicating internationally to avoid the wiretaps? What cost does that have on their business? My guess is that they have sufficient grounds for the suit, including evidence of wiretapping and evidence of damage to their business because of it. They also probably have a pretty good chance of winning this suit. But does winning a civil suit make the wiretapping illegal? Not necessarily. They can win the suit simply because they were damaged by losing this client or damaged by having to communicate with their client domestically. That is really why the FISA court exists, to protect the executive branch from civil lawsuits, not to make international wiretapping legal. It is already legal and remains so regardless of the outcome of this suit.