Also, you get "crappy" movies because a lot of the theatregoing experience is the large screen, massively powerful audio systems, and now 3D. If you write a good and interesting story and don't crank the effects to 11, people will just decide that they can watch it more comfortably, more cheaply, and more immersively at home. Pop your own popcorn for a few pennies, pause the movie when you want, and if a cell phone rings it's probably your own, all for a buck out of Red Box or whatever.
Special-effects extravganzas and movies that use gimmicks like 3D or surround-vision are just not as pirate-able as a whole experience. You would need to download them at nearly impractical resolutions and drop a lot of money on a home theater system to even begin to approximate what the moviegoing public is looking to experience.
Something with a solid story is easy to pirate. I saw "Pirate Radio" in a small local theater with a relatively small screen, and I don't think I would have enjoyed it any more with a larger screen (in fact, I probably would have enjoyed it just as much in VHS quality at home, because it was the story I watched that film for).
Partly because it's expensive by nature, and partly because we haven't done another one. We aren't refining the technology, and instead would have to start pretty much from scratch with newer technology.
If we had been doing moon landings every 5 years, it would be a routine now, having undergone continuous refinement and improvement with practical experience under our belts. Ships wouldn't have to be built as single-purpose one-offs, we'd have a supply base established there, and we might even have a moonbase instead of the fragile and small ISS. We'd also have more practice landing craft on other planets and probably have more than a couple of long-past-shelf-life probes on Mars, and maybe even a few probes on other planets in the solar system.
Precisely why a lot of discussion boards do not allow images in their signatures, especially third-party images. Also why so many companies used to offer "free counters" and "enhanced email with images" (a' la IncrediMail) and whatnot as long as they were served from THEIR site. You can collect a lot of information about users of a site without the complications of having to compensate the site owners or having them cooperate with you.
What? No, really, WHAT!?!?!? People still buy this shit?
Whether the priests were homosexual is immaterial, even if you were correct that 100% of the priests were homosexual. Homosexuality and pedophilia are two completely and utterly different things, done for different reasons, and there is no credible correlation between the two.
A homosexual has no inherent desire toward children of either gender. That takes a pedophile. A homosexual can be a pedophile, and a pedophile can be a homosexual, but there isn't a correlation between the two. Heterosexuals can be pedophiles, too, and have been for a lot longer than the liberalization of the Church.
The actions were homosexual in nature, in that the priests abused young boys, but it's not because the priests actually preferred boys to girls. Boys were victimized because boys were available and easy to manipulate, not because the abusers necessarily had a preference for those of their own gender. If there had been young teen altar girls available and the priests had ignored them and gone after the boys, you might possibly, maybe have a nugget of truth there. And I'm sure some percentage of the priests who committed the abuses are also homosexual, but don't automatically associate the two.
The kind of person who goes after young kids, regardless of gender, is doing it for power and control. Pedophilia is the victimization of someone who cannot defend themselves. In other words, rape.
The kind of person who engages in consensual heterosexual relationships with adults of like mind is doing it for their own flavor of love. You may not be comfortable with the idea homosexual love (I know I'm not, the vision of two men going at it gives me the screaming heebie jeebies, but it's also none of my goddamned business as long as both agree to it), but that doesn't mean that I feel threatened by homosexuals or would be any more concerned having a young child in the presence of a homosexual than I would a heterosexual.
It's not like priests abusing their altar boys is new (or, to be fair, even relegated to priests - it unfortunately happens in a lot of situations where adults with serious psychological issues are put in charge of children and insufficient precautions are taken to protect those children). It's been happening for a LONG time. And a lot of organizations have tried to cover it up. What's new is that the general populace is finally questioning and becoming aware of the actions of one of the most powerful non-Governmental bodies in history, and those actions now have consequences. You can't just have a Bishop or Cardinal give you absolution after you do something illegal and have that be the end of it, because the Church is no longer the law, nor are its members outside the law of the lands they are living in.
I'm hoping you just made that up, and that your statement above is not something your priest laid out for you. If the Church is now making up a correlation between the two is not at all surprising, but it is saddening. I thought the Church had really taken the scandal seriously and was trying to actually prevent it, not just pointing a finger and yelling "it's all the homersexuels's fault!" and bitching about the necessary controls that are honestly helping them prevent this from happening again.
I have a lot of trouble understanding the point of view that everyone who dislikes the actions of the RIAA, MPAA, and other copyright holders is automatically a copyright violator who feels they should have the right to infringe copyrights freely. I'm deeply concerned about the state of copyright, yet I do not have any pirated music or movies in my possession whatsoever, nor have I ever done. I feel that acknowledging someone's work is important, and compensating them is equally important. But there's a limit, and we're WAY past that limit today.
We have a fundamentally flawed copyright system in the US today. We have absolutely draconian punishments that were designed to strip corporations of their assets being applied to individuals for relatively benign (still wrong, and deserving of punishment) infringement. We have extended the duration of copyright protections right on past the ridiculous into the insane, and there's no sign it will ever let up. Copyright needs to be either a lot less draconian, or a lot shorter in duration, and I'd argue both.
Copyright needs reform in two very important ways:
1. Duration: Copyright started with an exclusive for 20 years, then it got extended to 30. If you can't profit on your performance in 30 years, it's time to let someone else have a go at it.
2. Punishment: Save the house-mortgage-per-song lawsuits for piracy corporations that need to be put out of business. For individuals, the penalty should certainly be noticeable enough to be a deterrent, but if you share a handful of albums you shouldn't be facing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.
Piracy and excessive copyright are related issues. In any remotely sane copyright scheme, anything that was performed, written, or filmed on or before 1980 should be public domain by now, and therefore free of copyright encumbrances and available for personal use as well as derivative use.
"Happy Birthday", which was written in the 1800s, should be available for public performance now and not the subject of lawsuits and require an annual 5-digit performance license from a company who bought it from people who never even compensated the original authors for changing the school song "Good morning to you" to "Happy Birthday to you", which was hardly deserving of copyright protection in the first place.
You're right, of course. Many theaters are not fully equipped for 3D. However, any movie that is released in 3D is becoming increasingly difficult to see in 2D, because a lot of theaters are upgrading one or two rooms to 3D and showing the 3D-available titles in 3D only.
The new "Tron", for example, is showing in only one theater in my area in 2D, and they weren't running it a lot because they are trying to compete with the 3D theaters and that's what everyone seems to want to see. Everyone else has at least one room for 3D, and that's where "Tron" is showing.
I've got a kid and very few babysitting opportunities. The one showing of "Tron" in 2D that we could have made it to was captioned for the deaf with "interpretive audio" for the blind. Having someone describing what was happening on screen while having captions cover it up was rather unappealing to me, though I think it's great that such things are available for the blind and deaf.
So we saw "True Grit" instead. Great movie, by the way. I'm not really into westerns, but this one was surprisingly enjoyable.
Maybe I'll catch "Tron" when it comes out on rental. Or maybe not. It's more of a "theater" movie, I suspect.
Through the cockpit windscreen? Lasers commonly come in red and green. You filter out those two colors, even a specific shade of each, and it's gonna be a lot harder to see a lot of things, like approach lighting, etc.
My web browser doesn't have access to my clipboard to make changes like that. Yours does? Get that changed. NOW. That there's a mind-bogglingly huge security hole, right there, that most products (even IE) fixed back when we didn't have a "2" as the first digit of our 4-digit year.
the fact is that 90% of the images wouldn't be cracked and stored,
No, but they'll still be stored, and can easily be cracked later.
If this comes out, I predict that someone will release an alternative plugin that is freely available, decrypts all images, uses less resources, has fewer licensing issues, and just happens to ignore the expiration date. "deXPire", anyone?
The first image goes up, and the race is on. My money's on the cracking community. MPAA's spent a shitload of money trying to defeat them, as has RIAA, and Sony, and many others. It's a race they can't win. But it's cute to watch them scurry around and try.
My thought exactly. They needed 18 months to develop this and didn't even come up with the fact that their solution is significantly inferior to the most obvious solution?
So close...:)
Deleting the image from Facebook is forever, if you trust Facebook. If you don't trust Facebook, then you might as well assume they are using a scripting tool to crank through the encrypted images as soon as they are posted and taking an unencrypted copy for themselves.
This allows easy copying until the image is expired, and in a week there'll be a deXPire on every Linux repository that will ensure easy copying after the image is expired. Deleting the image makes it unavailable for everyone who hasn't already made a copy. "X-Piring" the image makes it and all other "expired" images available to anyone who wants to go to the trouble of "apt-get install deXPire-mozilla-plugin".
And you think someone in 2030 won't be able to break 2010 encryption with their pocketknife?
If the image is out there, it's viewable. After it expires, unless you remove it from the web site it's on, it's still viewable and with very little effort. If you've removed it from the web site it's on, then expiring it has no value.
MPAA can't keep an encryption scheme secure for more than a month, what chance do you think a browser plugin will have after 15 months? 15 years? C'mon, there'll be an tool akin to DeCSS for it in a week.
So your phone will wipe itself after 10 failed attempts? Better hold on to it when going to the bathroom!
Why?
We've had several people forget their passwords. We contact the Helpdesk, give them our employee ID, and we get an email with a new activation password. All company data is backed up on the server, and is pushed back to the phone once I re-activate it. The whole thing takes about an hour.
I think you're thinking recovering a wiped phone is a big deal. It's easier than losing the password to my whole-drive encryption tool on my laptop...
Wrong. With a BES, the data is also stored on the blackberry, and the two of them are kept in sync.
You're right of course, but you're refuting something I never said. The question was, "As for Blackberries... don't they store most of your data on Blackberry's servers? That doesn't sound very secure.", which I interpret to mean "servers owned and operated by Research in Motion."
The data is not, in fact, stored on RIM-owned servers. As I already stated, it's stored on BES (company-owned, as in the company that owns the cell phones) equipment, not RIM's.
Yes, the BES and the Blackberry both have copies of the data, obviously. But RIM does not.
Wrong again. With a BES, RIM does NOT have the keys needed to decrypt. Contacting RIM isn't going to help you. You need to contact the owner of the BES
What? You're arguing another point I never even made. My first assertion was that RIM does NOT have a copy of the data, and this was a continuation that even if they did law enforcement or ne'er-do-wells would have a hard time getting it from them.
Well, if you were really concerned about it, I suppose you could get a Blackberry and encrypt it (which means your data is pretty decently protected), then if you were REALLY concerned spend the extra to implement a BES and run your Blackberry as if it were a corporate one (which supports nice little features like "remote wipe", "remote brick", etc). It's costly for an individual, but...
No. BES (Enterprise) users have their data stored on the corporate Blackberry Enterprise Server, which is company equipment, and data is generally backed up by that server. BIS users have their stuff stored on the phone and you have to back it up to Blackberry Desktop if you wish to do that.
Plus, merely getting their paws on your phone wouldn't be enough even if Blackberry did have it. They'd have to contact RIM, which is a Canadian company.
My Blackberry is set with an 8-character moderately complex password, but the key is to have a try limit. If you enter a bad password ten times, my Blackberry will nuke itself clean of all data. Only music and pictures are unencrypted, the rest is a very hard nut to crack. Probably not impossible, but very tough.
Last time I checked, a lot of faiths claim "acknowledged" miracles.
My point precisely, though I may have made it poorly. If you don't have enough information about it, it's a miracle or magic or whatnot, and religion can explain it. If a scientific explanation ever comes along, then it's not a miracle any more, it's lost the Faith surrounding it except to those that cling to it.
Religion needs to let go of their attempt at scientific credibility, because they are destroying their underlying force, Faith, in the process.
There are plenty of unanswerable (within any reasonable definition of "unanswerable", though I could be proven wrong later on today) questions. Is there life after death? What is the nature of that life? Is there an invisible, unobservable, omnipotent entity out there watching us and occasionally prodding his nose into our affairs?
You can neither prove nor disprove it, therefore such things are a matter of Faith.
Religion gives Answers. The kind that cannot be wrong, because religion operates on Faith, which is the acceptance of an Answer to things you cannot explain.
Yes, religion is also used occasionally as a temporary filler in science by people afraid to leave gaps in their science until they can be filled. And when those gaps are actually filled, it is the responsibility of religion to get out of the way.
Religion fills in the really scary voids, like "what happens after I die?", and as long as someone can believe hard enough that they'll be OK after they die, they can live their lives without worrying about an afterlife. The rest of us accept that we don't know and get on with it anyway. Different people have different coping mechanisms.
What really gets ugly is when one person's coping mechanism comes in conflict with another person's coping mechanism.
As long as you separate the physical and the metaphysical and approach them as separate issues, you can be an honest scientist and a devout (Atheist/Theist). There simply is no conflict between the two unless you create one.
The problem comes when you see something in science that conflicts with something your religion tells you. If you can observe it, it falls outside the bounds of religion. As we get more advanced, we can explain more and more, and many of these things we could not explain religion filled in the gaps for us. Science displaces religion for things like that. But any good scientist will accept that there are things that we will probably never be able to explain (What originally made the Big Bang? Do we have souls and if so what happens to them after we die?)
Religion answers the unexplainable. Science explains the explainable. When the unexplainable becomes the explainable, religion must give way to science. But there will always be plenty of unexplainable stuff for religion to play with.
Science is frequently wrong, and this trend is expected to continue forever, but it's the fact that science CAN be wrong that makes it science. Science starts with observations and tries to assemble enough of them into an answer.
except that I would also argue that if a creator is outside of our science (and yet created our science), then our science is not the highest authority
It's the highest-order observable information. Religion falls outside science, and vice-versa. Religion concerns the unobservable, the permanently un-explainable. These things are of no interest to science. Science concerns the observable and (possibly eventually) explainable. These things are of no interest to religion.
if our science assumes no God and tries to explain everything from an atheist POV (i.e., everything must be explained naturally), then it could be that science could be wrong.
It could be that our science is wrong anyway. There's nothing theist or atheist about a scientific point of view, you are trying to explain things based on what you can observe about them.
There's nothing that precludes a scientist from reveling in the glory of his God or Gods in the majesty of what he/she observes, but when a scientist concludes that something is inexplicable in nature and therefore is proof of his/her God(s), he/she is no longer in the realm of science.
In science, all phenomenon must have a natural explanation, and scientists just leave the open questions open so if data comes in to fill them, they can observe that data and not be blinded by the question being filled in by something supernatural. It's a detail that we have not discovered yet (or, if you want to put it in religious terms, has not been revealed to us fully). That doesn't mean there isn't an explanation, and filling it in with "then a miracle happened" or "here there be God" is stepping outside the bounds of science. Filling it in with a placeholder theory that you are open to disproving later is well within the bounds of science.
If you can demonstrate it, observe it, prove it, disprove it, touch it, measure it, or destroy it, it's in the realm of science. You make up reasonable-sounding explanations about what's going on then set out to prove or disprove those explanations.
If you can do none of those things, it's probably religion. There is no observable phenomenon that exists beyond the realm of nature, and one would be required in order to prove God. And then God would become the realm of science and not religion.
The foundation of religion is Faith (note the capitalization). If you have to see verifiable proof in order to believe something, it's not religion. I'd argue that if you DO see proof, it's no longer religion, since "without Faith I am nothing".
Actually, they are using those tools so there can be only 10 or so of them. I mean, you could come closer to guaranteeing security without all that stuff if you had one of them for each user, standing over their shoulders, but what company is going to pay for that many security administrators? Plus, getting all the blood out of the carpet is a major pain, and there's the fussy paperwork once you have to beat a user to death to prevent them from clicking on the natalie_portman_in_hot_grits.exe they just got in their email.
If you have a 10:1000 ratio, that means each of your "IT guys" is responsible for keeping 100 people's machines from being infected by malware, surfing porn, or loading software on the computer that breaks compatibility with the software they need to do their jobs. That means they'll have, on average, about two days per year to deal with each of the individual computers they have to deal with.
With many users, it's not going to be a problem. But with only 1,000 desktops in your organization, 1 machine getting infected with a "look at the fluffy kitten!" trojan is more than enough to spread like wildfire through your network. If they don't have multiple firewalls, virus scanners, policy managers, etc in place, they'll have a 6-month backlog of work each time a virus hits your network. Plus a massive amount of lost data because users decided to use their local storage to save documents, and didn't bother backing up critical documents to the network where it gets backed up.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, you get "crappy" movies because a lot of the theatregoing experience is the large screen, massively powerful audio systems, and now 3D. If you write a good and interesting story and don't crank the effects to 11, people will just decide that they can watch it more comfortably, more cheaply, and more immersively at home. Pop your own popcorn for a few pennies, pause the movie when you want, and if a cell phone rings it's probably your own, all for a buck out of Red Box or whatever.
Special-effects extravganzas and movies that use gimmicks like 3D or surround-vision are just not as pirate-able as a whole experience. You would need to download them at nearly impractical resolutions and drop a lot of money on a home theater system to even begin to approximate what the moviegoing public is looking to experience.
Something with a solid story is easy to pirate. I saw "Pirate Radio" in a small local theater with a relatively small screen, and I don't think I would have enjoyed it any more with a larger screen (in fact, I probably would have enjoyed it just as much in VHS quality at home, because it was the story I watched that film for).
Partly because it's expensive by nature, and partly because we haven't done another one. We aren't refining the technology, and instead would have to start pretty much from scratch with newer technology.
If we had been doing moon landings every 5 years, it would be a routine now, having undergone continuous refinement and improvement with practical experience under our belts. Ships wouldn't have to be built as single-purpose one-offs, we'd have a supply base established there, and we might even have a moonbase instead of the fragile and small ISS. We'd also have more practice landing craft on other planets and probably have more than a couple of long-past-shelf-life probes on Mars, and maybe even a few probes on other planets in the solar system.
Precisely why a lot of discussion boards do not allow images in their signatures, especially third-party images. Also why so many companies used to offer "free counters" and "enhanced email with images" (a' la IncrediMail) and whatnot as long as they were served from THEIR site. You can collect a lot of information about users of a site without the complications of having to compensate the site owners or having them cooperate with you.
What? No, really, WHAT!?!?!? People still buy this shit?
Whether the priests were homosexual is immaterial, even if you were correct that 100% of the priests were homosexual. Homosexuality and pedophilia are two completely and utterly different things, done for different reasons, and there is no credible correlation between the two.
A homosexual has no inherent desire toward children of either gender. That takes a pedophile. A homosexual can be a pedophile, and a pedophile can be a homosexual, but there isn't a correlation between the two. Heterosexuals can be pedophiles, too, and have been for a lot longer than the liberalization of the Church.
The actions were homosexual in nature, in that the priests abused young boys, but it's not because the priests actually preferred boys to girls. Boys were victimized because boys were available and easy to manipulate, not because the abusers necessarily had a preference for those of their own gender. If there had been young teen altar girls available and the priests had ignored them and gone after the boys, you might possibly, maybe have a nugget of truth there. And I'm sure some percentage of the priests who committed the abuses are also homosexual, but don't automatically associate the two.
The kind of person who goes after young kids, regardless of gender, is doing it for power and control. Pedophilia is the victimization of someone who cannot defend themselves. In other words, rape.
The kind of person who engages in consensual heterosexual relationships with adults of like mind is doing it for their own flavor of love. You may not be comfortable with the idea homosexual love (I know I'm not, the vision of two men going at it gives me the screaming heebie jeebies, but it's also none of my goddamned business as long as both agree to it), but that doesn't mean that I feel threatened by homosexuals or would be any more concerned having a young child in the presence of a homosexual than I would a heterosexual.
It's not like priests abusing their altar boys is new (or, to be fair, even relegated to priests - it unfortunately happens in a lot of situations where adults with serious psychological issues are put in charge of children and insufficient precautions are taken to protect those children). It's been happening for a LONG time. And a lot of organizations have tried to cover it up. What's new is that the general populace is finally questioning and becoming aware of the actions of one of the most powerful non-Governmental bodies in history, and those actions now have consequences. You can't just have a Bishop or Cardinal give you absolution after you do something illegal and have that be the end of it, because the Church is no longer the law, nor are its members outside the law of the lands they are living in.
I'm hoping you just made that up, and that your statement above is not something your priest laid out for you. If the Church is now making up a correlation between the two is not at all surprising, but it is saddening. I thought the Church had really taken the scandal seriously and was trying to actually prevent it, not just pointing a finger and yelling "it's all the homersexuels's fault!" and bitching about the necessary controls that are honestly helping them prevent this from happening again.
I have a lot of trouble understanding the point of view that everyone who dislikes the actions of the RIAA, MPAA, and other copyright holders is automatically a copyright violator who feels they should have the right to infringe copyrights freely. I'm deeply concerned about the state of copyright, yet I do not have any pirated music or movies in my possession whatsoever, nor have I ever done. I feel that acknowledging someone's work is important, and compensating them is equally important. But there's a limit, and we're WAY past that limit today.
We have a fundamentally flawed copyright system in the US today. We have absolutely draconian punishments that were designed to strip corporations of their assets being applied to individuals for relatively benign (still wrong, and deserving of punishment) infringement. We have extended the duration of copyright protections right on past the ridiculous into the insane, and there's no sign it will ever let up. Copyright needs to be either a lot less draconian, or a lot shorter in duration, and I'd argue both.
Copyright needs reform in two very important ways:
1. Duration: Copyright started with an exclusive for 20 years, then it got extended to 30. If you can't profit on your performance in 30 years, it's time to let someone else have a go at it.
2. Punishment: Save the house-mortgage-per-song lawsuits for piracy corporations that need to be put out of business. For individuals, the penalty should certainly be noticeable enough to be a deterrent, but if you share a handful of albums you shouldn't be facing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.
Piracy and excessive copyright are related issues. In any remotely sane copyright scheme, anything that was performed, written, or filmed on or before 1980 should be public domain by now, and therefore free of copyright encumbrances and available for personal use as well as derivative use.
"Happy Birthday", which was written in the 1800s, should be available for public performance now and not the subject of lawsuits and require an annual 5-digit performance license from a company who bought it from people who never even compensated the original authors for changing the school song "Good morning to you" to "Happy Birthday to you", which was hardly deserving of copyright protection in the first place.
Two words: "Red Matter".
You're in luck, then. A new "Pirates of the Caribbean" sequel is coming out soon. Disney is doing their part to combat global warming.
You're right, of course. Many theaters are not fully equipped for 3D. However, any movie that is released in 3D is becoming increasingly difficult to see in 2D, because a lot of theaters are upgrading one or two rooms to 3D and showing the 3D-available titles in 3D only.
The new "Tron", for example, is showing in only one theater in my area in 2D, and they weren't running it a lot because they are trying to compete with the 3D theaters and that's what everyone seems to want to see. Everyone else has at least one room for 3D, and that's where "Tron" is showing.
I've got a kid and very few babysitting opportunities. The one showing of "Tron" in 2D that we could have made it to was captioned for the deaf with "interpretive audio" for the blind. Having someone describing what was happening on screen while having captions cover it up was rather unappealing to me, though I think it's great that such things are available for the blind and deaf.
So we saw "True Grit" instead. Great movie, by the way. I'm not really into westerns, but this one was surprisingly enjoyable.
Maybe I'll catch "Tron" when it comes out on rental. Or maybe not. It's more of a "theater" movie, I suspect.
Arr, we already do!
Oh, wait, matey, ye said "pilot." It's pronounced with an ARRRR!
Through the cockpit windscreen? Lasers commonly come in red and green. You filter out those two colors, even a specific shade of each, and it's gonna be a lot harder to see a lot of things, like approach lighting, etc.
My web browser doesn't have access to my clipboard to make changes like that. Yours does? Get that changed. NOW. That there's a mind-bogglingly huge security hole, right there, that most products (even IE) fixed back when we didn't have a "2" as the first digit of our 4-digit year.
the fact is that 90% of the images wouldn't be cracked and stored,
No, but they'll still be stored, and can easily be cracked later.
If this comes out, I predict that someone will release an alternative plugin that is freely available, decrypts all images, uses less resources, has fewer licensing issues, and just happens to ignore the expiration date. "deXPire", anyone?
The first image goes up, and the race is on. My money's on the cracking community. MPAA's spent a shitload of money trying to defeat them, as has RIAA, and Sony, and many others. It's a race they can't win. But it's cute to watch them scurry around and try.
My thought exactly. They needed 18 months to develop this and didn't even come up with the fact that their solution is significantly inferior to the most obvious solution?
So close... :)
Deleting the image from Facebook is forever, if you trust Facebook. If you don't trust Facebook, then you might as well assume they are using a scripting tool to crank through the encrypted images as soon as they are posted and taking an unencrypted copy for themselves.
This allows easy copying until the image is expired, and in a week there'll be a deXPire on every Linux repository that will ensure easy copying after the image is expired. Deleting the image makes it unavailable for everyone who hasn't already made a copy. "X-Piring" the image makes it and all other "expired" images available to anyone who wants to go to the trouble of "apt-get install deXPire-mozilla-plugin".
And you think someone in 2030 won't be able to break 2010 encryption with their pocketknife?
If the image is out there, it's viewable. After it expires, unless you remove it from the web site it's on, it's still viewable and with very little effort. If you've removed it from the web site it's on, then expiring it has no value.
MPAA can't keep an encryption scheme secure for more than a month, what chance do you think a browser plugin will have after 15 months? 15 years? C'mon, there'll be an tool akin to DeCSS for it in a week.
So your phone will wipe itself after 10 failed attempts? Better hold on to it when going to the bathroom!
Why?
We've had several people forget their passwords. We contact the Helpdesk, give them our employee ID, and we get an email with a new activation password. All company data is backed up on the server, and is pushed back to the phone once I re-activate it. The whole thing takes about an hour.
I think you're thinking recovering a wiped phone is a big deal. It's easier than losing the password to my whole-drive encryption tool on my laptop...
Believer: Because God explained it to us in the Bible, that He created the Universe the way it is and that's why you see the sky as blue.
Unbeliever: Because religion makes up a pretty story about a bearded dude in the sky assembling everything in a week.
Huh?
Wrong. With a BES, the data is also stored on the blackberry, and the two of them are kept in sync.
You're right of course, but you're refuting something I never said. The question was, "As for Blackberries... don't they store most of your data on Blackberry's servers? That doesn't sound very secure.", which I interpret to mean "servers owned and operated by Research in Motion."
The data is not, in fact, stored on RIM-owned servers. As I already stated, it's stored on BES (company-owned, as in the company that owns the cell phones) equipment, not RIM's.
Yes, the BES and the Blackberry both have copies of the data, obviously. But RIM does not.
Wrong again. With a BES, RIM does NOT have the keys needed to decrypt. Contacting RIM isn't going to help you. You need to contact the owner of the BES
What? You're arguing another point I never even made. My first assertion was that RIM does NOT have a copy of the data, and this was a continuation that even if they did law enforcement or ne'er-do-wells would have a hard time getting it from them.
Well, if you were really concerned about it, I suppose you could get a Blackberry and encrypt it (which means your data is pretty decently protected), then if you were REALLY concerned spend the extra to implement a BES and run your Blackberry as if it were a corporate one (which supports nice little features like "remote wipe", "remote brick", etc). It's costly for an individual, but...
No. BES (Enterprise) users have their data stored on the corporate Blackberry Enterprise Server, which is company equipment, and data is generally backed up by that server. BIS users have their stuff stored on the phone and you have to back it up to Blackberry Desktop if you wish to do that.
Plus, merely getting their paws on your phone wouldn't be enough even if Blackberry did have it. They'd have to contact RIM, which is a Canadian company.
My Blackberry is set with an 8-character moderately complex password, but the key is to have a try limit. If you enter a bad password ten times, my Blackberry will nuke itself clean of all data. Only music and pictures are unencrypted, the rest is a very hard nut to crack. Probably not impossible, but very tough.
Last time I checked, a lot of faiths claim "acknowledged" miracles.
My point precisely, though I may have made it poorly. If you don't have enough information about it, it's a miracle or magic or whatnot, and religion can explain it. If a scientific explanation ever comes along, then it's not a miracle any more, it's lost the Faith surrounding it except to those that cling to it.
Religion needs to let go of their attempt at scientific credibility, because they are destroying their underlying force, Faith, in the process.
There are plenty of unanswerable (within any reasonable definition of "unanswerable", though I could be proven wrong later on today) questions. Is there life after death? What is the nature of that life? Is there an invisible, unobservable, omnipotent entity out there watching us and occasionally prodding his nose into our affairs?
You can neither prove nor disprove it, therefore such things are a matter of Faith.
Religion gives Answers. The kind that cannot be wrong, because religion operates on Faith, which is the acceptance of an Answer to things you cannot explain.
Yes, religion is also used occasionally as a temporary filler in science by people afraid to leave gaps in their science until they can be filled. And when those gaps are actually filled, it is the responsibility of religion to get out of the way.
Religion fills in the really scary voids, like "what happens after I die?", and as long as someone can believe hard enough that they'll be OK after they die, they can live their lives without worrying about an afterlife. The rest of us accept that we don't know and get on with it anyway. Different people have different coping mechanisms.
What really gets ugly is when one person's coping mechanism comes in conflict with another person's coping mechanism.
"Why?"
Science is great at "How?". Religion is required to care about (and explain) "Why?"
"Why is the sky blue?", by the way, is not a scientific question. "How is it that the sky appears blue to us?" is.
As long as you separate the physical and the metaphysical and approach them as separate issues, you can be an honest scientist and a devout (Atheist/Theist). There simply is no conflict between the two unless you create one.
The problem comes when you see something in science that conflicts with something your religion tells you. If you can observe it, it falls outside the bounds of religion. As we get more advanced, we can explain more and more, and many of these things we could not explain religion filled in the gaps for us. Science displaces religion for things like that. But any good scientist will accept that there are things that we will probably never be able to explain (What originally made the Big Bang? Do we have souls and if so what happens to them after we die?)
Religion answers the unexplainable. Science explains the explainable. When the unexplainable becomes the explainable, religion must give way to science. But there will always be plenty of unexplainable stuff for religion to play with.
Science is frequently wrong, and this trend is expected to continue forever, but it's the fact that science CAN be wrong that makes it science. Science starts with observations and tries to assemble enough of them into an answer.
except that I would also argue that if a creator is outside of our science (and yet created our science), then our science is not the highest authority
It's the highest-order observable information. Religion falls outside science, and vice-versa. Religion concerns the unobservable, the permanently un-explainable. These things are of no interest to science. Science concerns the observable and (possibly eventually) explainable. These things are of no interest to religion.
if our science assumes no God and tries to explain everything from an atheist POV (i.e., everything must be explained naturally), then it could be that science could be wrong.
It could be that our science is wrong anyway. There's nothing theist or atheist about a scientific point of view, you are trying to explain things based on what you can observe about them.
There's nothing that precludes a scientist from reveling in the glory of his God or Gods in the majesty of what he/she observes, but when a scientist concludes that something is inexplicable in nature and therefore is proof of his/her God(s), he/she is no longer in the realm of science.
In science, all phenomenon must have a natural explanation, and scientists just leave the open questions open so if data comes in to fill them, they can observe that data and not be blinded by the question being filled in by something supernatural. It's a detail that we have not discovered yet (or, if you want to put it in religious terms, has not been revealed to us fully). That doesn't mean there isn't an explanation, and filling it in with "then a miracle happened" or "here there be God" is stepping outside the bounds of science. Filling it in with a placeholder theory that you are open to disproving later is well within the bounds of science.
If you can demonstrate it, observe it, prove it, disprove it, touch it, measure it, or destroy it, it's in the realm of science. You make up reasonable-sounding explanations about what's going on then set out to prove or disprove those explanations.
If you can do none of those things, it's probably religion. There is no observable phenomenon that exists beyond the realm of nature, and one would be required in order to prove God. And then God would become the realm of science and not religion.
The foundation of religion is Faith (note the capitalization). If you have to see verifiable proof in order to believe something, it's not religion. I'd argue that if you DO see proof, it's no longer religion, since "without Faith I am nothing".
Actually, they are using those tools so there can be only 10 or so of them. I mean, you could come closer to guaranteeing security without all that stuff if you had one of them for each user, standing over their shoulders, but what company is going to pay for that many security administrators? Plus, getting all the blood out of the carpet is a major pain, and there's the fussy paperwork once you have to beat a user to death to prevent them from clicking on the natalie_portman_in_hot_grits.exe they just got in their email.
If you have a 10:1000 ratio, that means each of your "IT guys" is responsible for keeping 100 people's machines from being infected by malware, surfing porn, or loading software on the computer that breaks compatibility with the software they need to do their jobs. That means they'll have, on average, about two days per year to deal with each of the individual computers they have to deal with.
With many users, it's not going to be a problem. But with only 1,000 desktops in your organization, 1 machine getting infected with a "look at the fluffy kitten!" trojan is more than enough to spread like wildfire through your network. If they don't have multiple firewalls, virus scanners, policy managers, etc in place, they'll have a 6-month backlog of work each time a virus hits your network. Plus a massive amount of lost data because users decided to use their local storage to save documents, and didn't bother backing up critical documents to the network where it gets backed up.