A nuclear powered de-salination plant and pumping station. But good luck getting that built in Ca.

But not by volume.

But we have to ignore all of that because of what it implies our society and the living conditions of the junkies. We must resolutely hold the line. No 'facts' may deter us from the message that addiction is a moral failing and so the addict deserves his fate. Now, all rise and put your fingers in your ears and sing the new national anthem: "LA LA LA LA LA".

Agreed, to actually be sure, the software needs to be at least verified by someone you trust. It would not be wise for that someone to be a telco. However, end-to-end has a specific meaning and Verizon's service isn't it.

As for the keys, you can identify the party through conversation. If you've never met, you would need a trusted introducer in a 3 way call to verify each of you to the other. Then transmit public keys around and read back the key fingerprints. In other words, use the PGP/GPG web of trust rather than a central authority.

From then on, you have the keys stored and so you can skip that part.

I do know very well that the company is not at all immune to government pressure. I never anywhere suggested otherwise. I suggested that claiming a thing that is untrue and legally cannot be true is immoral. A moral company simply wouldn't claim to offer end to end encryption.

The legit parties to the conversation would notice that none of them are the master. Or choose an election system that makes one of them the master every time.

I fully agree that a talented professional can get amazingly good results out of the hardware out there today. It is also within reach of an avid amateur.

The modern digital gear is not quite as forgiving as the old tube gear but in exchange the result when you do it right is orders of magnitude better.

Ideally, all music should be released at full dynamic range and if it needs to be compressed for FM or crappy earbuds, the radio station or player can easily handle it.

I'm going to laugh when new standards for measurement come out that punish the current 'loud' recordings.

But that can easily be prevented in a public key system. Just a simple example that I am formulating as I type. The peers elect a master based on any arbitrary criterion (pick a number, who has the lowest mac address, who called in first, whatever). Everybody else hands it a public key. The master generates a session key and encrypts it with each authorized public key to distribute it. If LEO taps in, he gets nothing unless he can convince the master to accept his public key. If there are supposed to be 3 parties on the call, the master's owner will notice that there is an extra request for the session key.

An added benefit is that it is actual end-to-end encryption. The provider has no ability to tap the line as long as the keys are reasonable and the software doesn't have a back door in it..

If the public keys have been exchanged in advance, all the better for knowing the identity of everyone involved in the call.

I would say that advertising the 'service' as end to end when it isn't even legal for it to actually be end to end is a legitimate moral shortcoming.

But they DIDN'T have to falsely advertise it as end-to-end encryption when it clearly is not.

And nobody would willingly buy a vehicle new unless/until they dropped the price enough to not lose a quarter to nearly half of their value the moment they drive off the lot.

Perhaps it isn't specific to IT but for whatever reason, fads run rampant in IT.

Limited compression is fine. If that compression includes DSP simulation the behavior of a tube beginning to clip, the listener will hear it as louder than it actually is.

For the third point, there is necessarily an analog stage in front of the ADC. On the listener side, the brick wall filter needed after the DAC to get rid of the aliasing before it screws with the amplifier can have all sorts of nasty effects. That's the REAL reason higher sample rates (and so nyquist limit) makes it sound better.

All of this absolutely can be dealt with in a digital system, it's just a matter of actually doing it (avoiding the under-design so common in consumer gear these days).

But all of this suggests that if people still swear the analog sounds better, it's worth considering that we might have overlooked something before we write it off as audioweenie gibberish.

What attitude would you suggest when your budget gets jacked around every year. What attitude can fix having more expenditures towards various multi-year projects than you have money to spend? In the '60s they had full support from Congress and a growing budget.

Exactly! The blame goes directly to Congress as they were the ones making the bad decisions.

See Mork and Mindy talking about not having enough money at a restaurant on Ork. "We had to tip the waiter".