Ask Walt Disney. He was a force behind the current Life+75 years change.
Ofcourse, he made his fortune animating stories that were out of copyright.
So....
The Copyright Extension Act that extended the term to 50 years (75 for "anonymous works) was passed in 1976, the . Walt Disney himself died in 1966, so I don't think you can blame him for getting the extension passed any more than you can blame Thomas Edison for anything G.E. does today.
The Copyright Term Extension Act (widely called The Mickey Mouse Protection Act) wasn't passed until 1998, more than 20 years after Disney's death.
Except of course, for the web-based trainings that employees have to take that rely on Flash.
Web-based training is a virus. It both decreases productivity and makes users unhappy.
No arguments here, but tell that to the state of California that requires 2 hours of sexual harassment training for all workers that supervise other employees. The training itself decreases productivity and makes users unhappy, making it web based doesn't make it moreso. A least I can browse the web while clicking through the tedious training with "quizes" with answers that anyone with a modicum of common sense can answer.
There's absolutely no reason to have Flash installed on machines in an office. Remove it and give the users regular accounts so it can't be re-installed, and you'll be fine.
Except of course, for the web-based trainings that employees have to take that rely on Flash.
Register account, to keep someone else from using my name (it happens, I've had internet stalkers for over a decade that have done things like register domains, show up at my door, etc).
Disable everything that it's possible to disable. Set to notify me by email of private messages, just in case. Disable ability to tag me in photos, post on my wall, etc, etc.
Put up a user photo on account that says "I DO NOT USE FB. SEND ME AN EMAIL AT >email addy".
Never touch Facebook again.
How does this keep your mythical decade long stalkers from setting up a Facebook profile with your name? My name is not all that common, but there are dozens of people on Facebook with my name -- including 1 in the same town as me.
If you never touch Facebook again, how will you know about your stalkers profile? And what would he do with this fake profile anyway?
damn straight smartphones are PCs. They just happen to be small-format computers with a cellular link chipset added in.
Now, just to make both you and me look like the idiots we are, can anyone come up with an accepted, standardized definition of what constitutes a "personal computer" ? I know I can't.
If they are going to count a 7" android tablet as a "PC", I don't see how they can exclude a 5.5" Galaxy Note 2 cell phone when it runs the same operating system and has more processing power than a lot of tablets.
Visit any sizable downtown area. I grew up in a small town of ~30,000 people and all off the mail in the downtown business district was delivered by a mail carrier on foot.
Now I live in a small city of ~800,000 and all residential delivery that I'm aware of is by foot. I'm sure there are some areas (like large apartment buildings) that are served by a carrier in a truck (and most packages are delivered by truck so the carrier doesn't have to lug them around in his bag or push-cart). There are brown carrier drop boxes on just about every other block throughout the city (they look like regular postal boxes, but without a letter slot and they are brown instead of blue) so the carrier can pick up the mail for that neighborhood and doesn't have to carry so muc mail around.
Our solution: if the message makes it past all our spam filters and the only problem is that the sender's client isn't allowed by their SPF record, we send a friendly, plain-english informational message back to the sender, then deliver their message to our users.
"Please tell your company's IT staff that your mail server isn't set up correctly. This may cause your messages to be rejected or classified as spam. Please forward the following information to your system administrator: [SPF record] [sender's IP]. Thank you!"
That's nice if you don't rely on email for communication with your customers. Generally, customers (and potential customers) don't respond well to nagging -- especially if whatever you're asking is outside of their control. They may be too small to have anyone to complain to (and no idea how to fix it themselves), or they may complain to the corporate helpdesk who says "Nope, our server is set up the way we want it".
If I got an email like that from a vendor I was trying to reach, I wouldn't be doing service with that vendor.
One vendor that we were paying support to was trapping our entire domain's email in a spam filter - none of our emails could go through, we ended up faxing problem reports to them. This went on for 2 months before they finally admitted that there was a problem in their (outsourced) email spam filter, they ended up crediting us 2 months of our monthly support contract because their SLA promised 24 hour response to emailed support requests, and we didn't get any response at all.
No, but they could die (or at least suffer harm) if the mail was something like insulin or heart medication.
Merrly being snarky does not make a convincing argument.
Being dumb doesn't make a convincing argument either. You don't count on the mail for time / mission critical things. It wasn't designed for it and cannot support it.
If you have prescription medications that are filled by mail order you're supposed to have a buffer supply. Shit happens. Even Saturday delivery doesn't change that.
I'm not sure that a 2500 year old feel-good creed is an enforcable service level agreement, and certainly shouldn't be relied on. There have been many snow days when the mailman didn't make it out to my rural delivery location - and this was back when I actually cared about the mail.
And yet insurance frequently requires you to use mail order for critical medications. Saturday delivery shouldn't affect that as you should order far enough in advance for that to matter, but I was still required to rely on mail delivery in order to pay less than $900 a month for a couple of the prescriptions I was on.
My mailorder meds come through priority mail (which will still be delivered on Saturday). Your provider uses first class mail? Without proof of delivery, how do they know you received them?
What? Really? All I can say is finally! Waaaaaaaaaayyy less junk mail will get to me and everyone else now (99% of mail I get is junk -- goes right from my mail box straight into the recycling) Sure, there's probably some poor people who depend on this extra day of mail (I know we kinda did as I was growing up), but too bad...
How will this affect the quantity of junk mail?
It's not like the post office is going to throw away all of the mail on Saturdays instead of delivering it. Instead they will hold it and deliver it on Monday. So you'll still get the same amount of mail.
If only there were some article of the Constitution that could be used as an argument to convince conservatives that the Post Office is a vital national service and that it is okay to pay for it in much the same way as it is okay to pay for a navy.
I guess one can only wish.
Why is Saturday mail delivery a vital national service? Will people die if they don't receive their Victoria's Secret catalog on Saturday?
If it was free a geostationary satellite would make access available to everyone even in very remote areas. There is the ping time issue but that is a performance problem; there are commercial alternatives available to almost everyone so this would prevent the commercial providers from getting killed. My worry is what DHS and the Jesus lobby would do with the network control.
Yeah, the ping times are the weak part of that plan. Providing internet service to 300 million devices from a single satellite is the easy part.
Most tech companies claim ownership of anything created by employees, whether created at work or on their own time.
But, the students are not employees, and signed no waiver when they enrolled. Claiming ownership of the student's creations is rediculous.
That's not the case in California. Or rather, companies may still claim ownership of all inventions in their employment contract, but it's not enforceable. If the invention is done on the employee's own time and equipment and is not related to or derived from the employee's work at the company, the company has no right of ownership:
All of these are somewhat interesting, I'll give you that.
Aren't marine communication transmitted in VHF (~156MHz), and weather satellite images at 137Mhz? Well outside the 30Mhz upper limit of the RFSPACE device?
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.
Isn't that exactly what happened? CBS didn't want the product to earn the award (thus giving it greater recognition and popularity), so they told CNet not to grant it the award, thereby causing extra press attention focused on the product.
If that's not enough to sway you, how about an article from the guy who is widely recognized as starting the phrase "The Streisand Effect", where he also says that this is an example of the effect?
Hello Streisand Effect. There were approximately one gazillion articles this week about products coming out of CES, and the place was wall to wall with journalists -- probably half of whom were coming up with their own "best of" lists. Most people were completely saturated with CES stories and would barely glance at such a story. Except... now, tons of people are suddenly finding out about this awesome Dish DVR, the Hopper with Slingbox.
I think that when the guy that coined the phrase calls it the Streisand Effect, you pretty much have to go with what he says.
Once you pay the difference and cancel your contract, the phone is yours and I'm certain that the carrier would not only be obliged to, but be happy to give you the unlock code.
The part *I* don't get, is why they needed a new law for this. If you unlock your phone and use it on a different carrier, and STOP paying your old carrier, you've basically stolen your phone by way of defaulting on the payments for it. I'm sure there were/are plenty of laws already covering the provider under those circumstances.
yeah, it's called an early termination fee which is supposed to reimburse the carrier for the full cost of the phone.
The part I REALLY don't get is Americans inability to understand that THEY DON'T OWN their contract phones - at least until the end of the contract. They don't seem confused about their leased cars, you don't see Americans simply stop paying their lease and assume the car's theirs. Why the fuck do they do it with phones?
The part you don't get is that the carrier is not obliged to unlock the phone at the end of the term - nor even if you paid the full unsubsidized price and kept the same phone for 5 years.
And even if you break your contract and pay the early termination fee, the carrier is still not obligated to unlock it for you.
Maybe you'd be less condescending if you'd learn a bit about the issue before spouting off about how stupid people are.
Because you didn't pay 650$, you paid 99$. If you get the 650$ version from Apple, it's not carrier locked.
You don't seem to understand the early termination fee.
AT&T has the iPhone 5 for $199, and if you cancel the contract early, an early termination fee of $350.
If you bought the phone, then broke the contract immediately by paying the ETF, you'd pay $550 for the phone.
Their "unlocked" price for the phone is $650, so you'd get a $100 discount.
But if AT&T is really losing money when selling the phone for "only" $550, then it seems like the answer to that problem is either to charge a higher purchase price, or raise the ETF. I don't see why they need the government to enforce their business model by putting people in jail for unlocking the phones.
If congress feels it needs to take action on cell phones, then how about doing something about prorating ETF fees. AT&T deducts $10 for each month of service from the ETF. So why does it cost $350 - $230 = $120 to break the contract after 23 months but after 24 months there's no fee -- the fee should be prorated at ($ETF / term_length)
While the "We the People" petition is a nice symbolic measure, it's not likely to result in any real action even if it reaches the signature limit.
It'd be far better if everyone wrote letters to their congressional representatives. There are lots of guides on the internet for doing so, here's one:
So when people need to run, they run, but if they don't need to run, they don't? Is that really all this is saying? I sure hope there is some more technical benefit to the field of prostheses or this study was probably a waste of money.
My dog doesn't follow this pattern, she runs pretty much everywhere, even when she has no obvious reason to get there in a hurry. Except of course, when I'm standing by the car calling her and trying to coax her to come quickly so we can go home, then she walks slowly and meanders her way back to the car.
If you hack a bank that causes them to say stop funding a hospital due to a "Computer Error" and people die because the hospital didn't get the resources they needed in time. The hacker is no less evil then a guy who just pushed the button to hit a bomb.
They justify their consciousness because it is just cleaner and they don't have the see the full effect.
Yeah, it would be the fault of the finance people at the bank that didn't have a manual process in place to secure operational funding.
Buildings destroyed, probably not... Thousands murdered, perhaps. Why? Because many public utilities run on computers. You hack that system, you can do things like shut off electricity for an extended period of time and very few people have things like a backup generator. That guy with an oxygen pump? Dead. The diabetic who over time has their insulin harden into a jelly like substance because it's not cold? Dead. That hospital that didn't have a proper backup system for power? Many dead.
It's not exactly hard to murder people with a cyber attack, you won't see buildings destroyed like a normal attack though. Cyber attack, you could take out the financial market, which while not of upmost importance to most people these days, if you shut down VISA and Mastercard, there's a good chunk of people that won't have access to their money so getting food and water becomes a problem.
Now do I think this is going to happen soon? Nah... I'm not a doomsday theorist. Can it happen? Sure.
Pretty much every area of the USA is subject to disasters than can cause power interruptions, and already have measures in place to help those that can't survive for an extended period without power. Unless there is wide spread physical damage to repair, a cyber attack power outage will be relatively short lived.
I certainly think that 10's may die, maybe even 100's, but thousands? That seems unlikely. Even Hurricane Sandy's death toll in New York City was only 41
That depends on if you're talking about cloud storage or cloud computing.
Encrypting your data is pointless for cloud computing. You're better off asking whether your data is stored in an encrypted file system of some sort. Encrypting your data for putting onto cloud storage is more practical. Yes, the "client" you install may have the ability to root your computer on command, but you might as well unplug the cable going out to the WAN from your home network if you're that afraid of people getting access to your data.
Encryption is not pointless even in cloud computing. When I encrypt my data, I know that no matter what bugs or faulty procedures the cloud provider may have (i.e. selling old hardware without erasing the hard drives) that exposes my data to a third party, I know that no one can read my sensitive data. It's just another layer of protection.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask Walt Disney. He was a force behind the current Life+75 years change.
Ofcourse, he made his fortune animating stories that were out of copyright.
So....
The Copyright Extension Act that extended the term to 50 years (75 for "anonymous works) was passed in 1976, the . Walt Disney himself died in 1966, so I don't think you can blame him for getting the extension passed any more than you can blame Thomas Edison for anything G.E. does today.
The Copyright Term Extension Act (widely called The Mickey Mouse Protection Act) wasn't passed until 1998, more than 20 years after Disney's death.
Except of course, for the web-based trainings that employees have to take that rely on Flash.
Web-based training is a virus. It both decreases productivity and makes users unhappy.
No arguments here, but tell that to the state of California that requires 2 hours of sexual harassment training for all workers that supervise other employees. The training itself decreases productivity and makes users unhappy, making it web based doesn't make it moreso. A least I can browse the web while clicking through the tedious training with "quizes" with answers that anyone with a modicum of common sense can answer.
There's absolutely no reason to have Flash installed on machines in an office. Remove it and give the users regular accounts so it can't be re-installed, and you'll be fine.
Except of course, for the web-based trainings that employees have to take that rely on Flash.
Exactly.
My use of facebook is as follows:
Register account, to keep someone else from using my name (it happens, I've had internet stalkers for over a decade that have done things like register domains, show up at my door, etc).
Disable everything that it's possible to disable. Set to notify me by email of private messages, just in case. Disable ability to tag me in photos, post on my wall, etc, etc.
Put up a user photo on account that says "I DO NOT USE FB. SEND ME AN EMAIL AT >email addy".
Never touch Facebook again.
How does this keep your mythical decade long stalkers from setting up a Facebook profile with your name? My name is not all that common, but there are dozens of people on Facebook with my name -- including 1 in the same town as me.
If you never touch Facebook again, how will you know about your stalkers profile? And what would he do with this fake profile anyway?
damn straight smartphones are PCs. They just happen to be small-format computers with a cellular link chipset added in.
Now, just to make both you and me look like the idiots we are, can anyone come up with an accepted, standardized definition of what constitutes a "personal computer" ? I know I can't.
If they are going to count a 7" android tablet as a "PC", I don't see how they can exclude a 5.5" Galaxy Note 2 cell phone when it runs the same operating system and has more processing power than a lot of tablets.
I have never in my life seen a mailman walk
Visit any sizable downtown area. I grew up in a small town of ~30,000 people and all off the mail in the downtown business district was delivered by a mail carrier on foot.
Now I live in a small city of ~800,000 and all residential delivery that I'm aware of is by foot. I'm sure there are some areas (like large apartment buildings) that are served by a carrier in a truck (and most packages are delivered by truck so the carrier doesn't have to lug them around in his bag or push-cart). There are brown carrier drop boxes on just about every other block throughout the city (they look like regular postal boxes, but without a letter slot and they are brown instead of blue) so the carrier can pick up the mail for that neighborhood and doesn't have to carry so muc mail around.
We had the same problem.
Our solution: if the message makes it past all our spam filters and the only problem is that the sender's client isn't allowed by their SPF record, we send a friendly, plain-english informational message back to the sender, then deliver their message to our users.
"Please tell your company's IT staff that your mail server isn't set up correctly. This may cause your messages to be rejected or classified as spam. Please forward the following information to your system administrator: [SPF record] [sender's IP]. Thank you!"
That's nice if you don't rely on email for communication with your customers. Generally, customers (and potential customers) don't respond well to nagging -- especially if whatever you're asking is outside of their control. They may be too small to have anyone to complain to (and no idea how to fix it themselves), or they may complain to the corporate helpdesk who says "Nope, our server is set up the way we want it".
If I got an email like that from a vendor I was trying to reach, I wouldn't be doing service with that vendor.
One vendor that we were paying support to was trapping our entire domain's email in a spam filter - none of our emails could go through, we ended up faxing problem reports to them. This went on for 2 months before they finally admitted that there was a problem in their (outsourced) email spam filter, they ended up crediting us 2 months of our monthly support contract because their SLA promised 24 hour response to emailed support requests, and we didn't get any response at all.
No, but they could die (or at least suffer harm) if the mail was something like insulin or heart medication.
Merrly being snarky does not make a convincing argument.
Being dumb doesn't make a convincing argument either. You don't count on the mail for time / mission critical things. It wasn't designed for it and cannot support it.
If you have prescription medications that are filled by mail order you're supposed to have a buffer supply. Shit happens. Even Saturday delivery doesn't change that.
And yet
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
I'm not sure that a 2500 year old feel-good creed is an enforcable service level agreement, and certainly shouldn't be relied on. There have been many snow days when the mailman didn't make it out to my rural delivery location - and this was back when I actually cared about the mail.
And yet insurance frequently requires you to use mail order for critical medications. Saturday delivery shouldn't affect that as you should order far enough in advance for that to matter, but I was still required to rely on mail delivery in order to pay less than $900 a month for a couple of the prescriptions I was on.
My mailorder meds come through priority mail (which will still be delivered on Saturday). Your provider uses first class mail? Without proof of delivery, how do they know you received them?
What? Really? All I can say is finally! Waaaaaaaaaayyy less junk mail will get to me and everyone else now (99% of mail I get is junk -- goes right from my mail box straight into the recycling) Sure, there's probably some poor people who depend on this extra day of mail (I know we kinda did as I was growing up), but too bad...
How will this affect the quantity of junk mail?
It's not like the post office is going to throw away all of the mail on Saturdays instead of delivering it. Instead they will hold it and deliver it on Monday. So you'll still get the same amount of mail.
If only there were some article of the Constitution that could be used as an argument to convince conservatives that the Post Office is a vital national service and that it is okay to pay for it in much the same way as it is okay to pay for a navy.
I guess one can only wish.
Why is Saturday mail delivery a vital national service? Will people die if they don't receive their Victoria's Secret catalog on Saturday?
If it was free a geostationary satellite would make access available to everyone even in very remote areas. There is the ping time issue but that is a performance problem; there are commercial alternatives available to almost everyone so this would prevent the commercial providers from getting killed.
My worry is what DHS and the Jesus lobby would do with the network control.
Yeah, the ping times are the weak part of that plan. Providing internet service to 300 million devices from a single satellite is the easy part.
Most tech companies claim ownership of anything created by employees, whether created at work or on their own time.
But, the students are not employees, and signed no waiver when they enrolled. Claiming ownership of the student's creations is rediculous.
That's not the case in California. Or rather, companies may still claim ownership of all inventions in their employment contract, but it's not enforceable. If the invention is done on the employee's own time and equipment and is not related to or derived from the employee's work at the company, the company has no right of ownership:
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&group=02001-03000&file=2870-2872
Coast guard. Commercial marine communications. Weather reports (teletype, naxtex, FAX WX maps, greyscale satellite images.)
All of these are somewhat interesting, I'll give you that.
Aren't marine communication transmitted in VHF (~156MHz), and weather satellite images at 137Mhz? Well outside the 30Mhz upper limit of the RFSPACE device?
From the Wikipedia page:
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.
Isn't that exactly what happened? CBS didn't want the product to earn the award (thus giving it greater recognition and popularity), so they told CNet not to grant it the award, thereby causing extra press attention focused on the product.
If that's not enough to sway you, how about an article from the guy who is widely recognized as starting the phrase "The Streisand Effect", where he also says that this is an example of the effect?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130111/00145421637/just-how-dumb-is-it-cbs-to-block-cnet-giving-dish-award.shtml
by Mike Masnick
Hello Streisand Effect. There were approximately one gazillion articles this week about products coming out of CES, and the place was wall to wall with journalists -- probably half of whom were coming up with their own "best of" lists. Most people were completely saturated with CES stories and would barely glance at such a story. Except... now, tons of people are suddenly finding out about this awesome Dish DVR, the Hopper with Slingbox.
I think that when the guy that coined the phrase calls it the Streisand Effect, you pretty much have to go with what he says.
We use easy to remember, RFC compliant UUIDs.
Easy to generate and we haven't had any username collisions yet.
Email me for more details, I"m at mailto://ddd74e74-58e7-4077-ab87-0037feef6013@f3be36f9-be76-4042-9ec2-e7df5bb01479.com
Once you pay the difference and cancel your contract, the phone is yours and I'm certain that the carrier would not only be obliged to, but be happy to give you the unlock code.
The part *I* don't get, is why they needed a new law for this. If you unlock your phone and use it on a different carrier, and STOP paying your old carrier, you've basically stolen your phone by way of defaulting on the payments for it. I'm sure there were/are plenty of laws already covering the provider under those circumstances.
yeah, it's called an early termination fee which is supposed to reimburse the carrier for the full cost of the phone.
The part I REALLY don't get is Americans inability to understand that THEY DON'T OWN their contract phones - at least until the end of the contract. They don't seem confused about their leased cars, you don't see Americans simply stop paying their lease and assume the car's theirs. Why the fuck do they do it with phones?
The part you don't get is that the carrier is not obliged to unlock the phone at the end of the term - nor even if you paid the full unsubsidized price and kept the same phone for 5 years.
And even if you break your contract and pay the early termination fee, the carrier is still not obligated to unlock it for you.
Maybe you'd be less condescending if you'd learn a bit about the issue before spouting off about how stupid people are.
Because you didn't pay 650$, you paid 99$. If you get the 650$ version from Apple, it's not carrier locked.
You don't seem to understand the early termination fee.
AT&T has the iPhone 5 for $199, and if you cancel the contract early, an early termination fee of $350.
If you bought the phone, then broke the contract immediately by paying the ETF, you'd pay $550 for the phone.
Their "unlocked" price for the phone is $650, so you'd get a $100 discount.
But if AT&T is really losing money when selling the phone for "only" $550, then it seems like the answer to that problem is either to charge a higher purchase price, or raise the ETF. I don't see why they need the government to enforce their business model by putting people in jail for unlocking the phones.
If congress feels it needs to take action on cell phones, then how about doing something about prorating ETF fees. AT&T deducts $10 for each month of service from the ETF. So why does it cost $350 - $230 = $120 to break the contract after 23 months but after 24 months there's no fee -- the fee should be prorated at ($ETF / term_length)
While the "We the People" petition is a nice symbolic measure, it's not likely to result in any real action even if it reaches the signature limit.
It'd be far better if everyone wrote letters to their congressional representatives. There are lots of guides on the internet for doing so, here's one:
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/uscongress/a/letterscongress.htm
So when people need to run, they run, but if they don't need to run, they don't? Is that really all this is saying? I sure hope there is some more technical benefit to the field of prostheses or this study was probably a waste of money.
My dog doesn't follow this pattern, she runs pretty much everywhere, even when she has no obvious reason to get there in a hurry. Except of course, when I'm standing by the car calling her and trying to coax her to come quickly so we can go home, then she walks slowly and meanders her way back to the car.
The hardware is Bay Bridge. The Chinese knockoff will be available around Labor Day 2013.
Bleeding edge is for military aircraft, not commercial airliners that carry hundreds of people at a time with as little downtime as possible.
Some aircraft needs to make the leap to new technology or airliners would still be using unsealed lead-acid batteries.
If you hack a bank that causes them to say stop funding a hospital due to a "Computer Error" and people die because the hospital didn't get the resources they needed in time. The hacker is no less evil then a guy who just pushed the button to hit a bomb.
They justify their consciousness because it is just cleaner and they don't have the see the full effect.
Yeah, it would be the fault of the finance people at the bank that didn't have a manual process in place to secure operational funding.
Buildings destroyed, probably not... Thousands murdered, perhaps. Why? Because many public utilities run on computers. You hack that system, you can do things like shut off electricity for an extended period of time and very few people have things like a backup generator. That guy with an oxygen pump? Dead. The diabetic who over time has their insulin harden into a jelly like substance because it's not cold? Dead. That hospital that didn't have a proper backup system for power? Many dead.
It's not exactly hard to murder people with a cyber attack, you won't see buildings destroyed like a normal attack though. Cyber attack, you could take out the financial market, which while not of upmost importance to most people these days, if you shut down VISA and Mastercard, there's a good chunk of people that won't have access to their money so getting food and water becomes a problem.
Now do I think this is going to happen soon? Nah... I'm not a doomsday theorist. Can it happen? Sure.
Pretty much every area of the USA is subject to disasters than can cause power interruptions, and already have measures in place to help those that can't survive for an extended period without power. Unless there is wide spread physical damage to repair, a cyber attack power outage will be relatively short lived.
I certainly think that 10's may die, maybe even 100's, but thousands? That seems unlikely. Even Hurricane Sandy's death toll in New York City was only 41
That depends on if you're talking about cloud storage or cloud computing.
Encrypting your data is pointless for cloud computing. You're better off asking whether your data is stored in an encrypted file system of some sort. Encrypting your data for putting onto cloud storage is more practical. Yes, the "client" you install may have the ability to root your computer on command, but you might as well unplug the cable going out to the WAN from your home network if you're that afraid of people getting access to your data.
Encryption is not pointless even in cloud computing. When I encrypt my data, I know that no matter what bugs or faulty procedures the cloud provider may have (i.e. selling old hardware without erasing the hard drives) that exposes my data to a third party, I know that no one can read my sensitive data. It's just another layer of protection.