...it can't have been "then known as CELT" since it is a merge of two codecs of which CELT is one and SILK is the other. It's good that it's an IETF standard as that will help some with adoption. It will also help some with getting other implementations. (Hell, Dirac is a great codec for video but because it's not a recognized standard for anything it's not getting used.)
That is largely the fault of Ronny Reagan. If he'd stopped with the political posturing and helped Gorbachev achieve stable market reforms, Russia would be in a lot better shape today. (Particularly regarding securing nuke sites.) By bankrupting the USSR, a lot of things became extremely unstable very rapidly. It's hard to say if it contributed to the rise in extremism we see today, but it would be a fair bet that it didn't help.
Maybe he was a Russian spy.:) (The Indians and Chinese are getting fairly close to manned missions to the moon, the Russians are planning an inflatable space hotel and the EU and Russians have pretty much divided all the commercial launches between them. The NRO seems... a bit behind the times.)
RIAA/MPAA's response: Ah, but the ISPs aren't filtering the Internet, they're only filtering their individual pipes. And since there's more than one company, it's an ogliarchy, not a monopoly.
As satellites and deep space probes are the only objects that actually navigate by the stars (astronaut = those who sail by the stars), wouldn't it be more correct to call those astronauts?
Mind you, cosmonaut is as bad or worse.
Part of the problem is scarcity. We don't generally call people "aviators" these days, we use specific professional titles that relate to what they do rather than where they happen to be at the time (such as the sky). On the other hand, there simply aren't enough people who have travelled into space for such titles to have matured. Worse, space terminology has been heavily influenced by the military and the military prefers to identify by rank and location (air, sea, ground, space) rather than by anything practical.
I'll agree and put in a journal posting an alternative idea on how you could run an educational system to avoid the problems you mention. Problem is, such a solution would not be cheap, would certainly not be easy, and would not generate insta-profits (just add water).
That's only when the fun begins. Not only are people elected because they hate the Government, those elected (by now being in Government) are now paranoid of those who elected them (who now hate them for being the Government), thus creating new causes for those who do the electing to hate the Government.
I'd suggest that there be one or two elections in which there was a minimum level of sanity to either stand or vote, but it would leave nobody running and 10 voters.
Maybe. The space program might be a counter-example. When the USSR was in the lead, America pushed hard to keep up and "win the race". These are two very different strategies. The USSR was much more into conquering and exploiting the new frontier and had developed technology with that in mind. Arguably it's a damn good thing they didn't win (from any kind of ethical standpoint) for that very reason. The US got bored silly after "winning" and essentially dismantled all of NASA's projects on getting people to Mars (which they actually could have done by the mid 80s). They won the race, they got the prize, contest over. And when a contest is over, the normal thing is to go home and that is exactly what happened.
It has been argued that had Russia actually got men on the moon first, both Russia and the US would have active space colonies by now, not just a crudely-assembled and much-reduced space station that's too damn small for the kind of science needed to continue justifying it.
I would alter the argument a little, as I don't think the Cold War in Space would have been pretty: I think the US is fundamentally incapable of generating momentum in and of itself but is extremely capable of very efficiently tapping into the momentum of others and developing it in new and highly creative ways. In other words, the highly compete-till-you-die aggression of the US is only good if there's a competitor to compete against, that the US has less of a "work ethic" and more of a "win ethic". That other nations have a responsibility, particularly supernations like the EU, to be that competition and not defer a damn thing.
You are correct that it only shows gross changes, which makes it so surprising it can detect Alzheimer's a decade or so before symptoms show. It means that even if you couldn't cure the condition but only stop it, you could stop it before it became a problem. Mind you, with the 9.2T MRIs you can resolve virtually down to the individual neurons. (Having said that, only two exist as far as I know.)
You are also correct that the cost, time and long queues make this a prohibitive technique for preventative medicine.
I'll take a look into Molecular Imaging. I've a great interest in imaging techniques - not only for their intended purpose but also where they can be used in other disciplines for purposes never imagined by the inventor.
PET is extremely useful but I believe it to be under-utilized. The classical way of using it is to use a beta+ emitter as a tracer that is taken up more by whatever you want to study than by the surroundings. There will be synthetic medicines where you can swap out an isotope for another of the same element where the replacement can be used as a tracer element. In these cases, you should be able to actually observe what takes up the medicine and in what amounts, substantially reducing the risks involved in medical trials and the risks of unanticipated side-effects. Of course, the difficulty in gaining access to PET scanners means that even if this would actually be of use (rather than just as an abstract idea), it can't be used in practice because nobody has the tools.
Alzheimer's is linked to a number of different things now - beta-amyloid being one, definitely, and now 10 different genes, but the University of Manchester's research into it in the late 80s, early 90s, showed a contaminant was always present in the tau protein plaques. My question has always been one of how to link these disparate observations into a coherent story. My idea was probably far-fetched, my knowledge of biochemistry and neurology are somewhat limited after all, but it was the only one that consistantly fitted the (very limited) information I've had.
Australian censuses are the easiest to fill of any country I've lived in, the information is of very high quality, and the coverage seems to be exceptionally good. If any nation wanted to rework their system, I'd consider it to be one of the best examples of how to do it right - or, at least, as right as censuses ever get (they're never going to be perfect). The UK system comes a close second. The black hole at Cygnus X1 is second to last, followed by the US.
Who cares if they "receive mail"? I'm not talking about posting them the form. You have a map, you have a property marked there as being built, you push the census form under the door.
Who cares if they are a "citizen"? A census is about ensuring that resources go where they are needed. The resources a person needs doesn't change according to their citizenship status. A person doesn't suddenly stop needing air, food and water because they're not "legit". The absolute last thing you want is for people to exclude themselves because of such concerns. And that means you DON'T want to go by mailing addresses, identity cards or other such official crap.
Who gives a f* if not everyone returns the form? Not everyone fills them in in America as it is, and as any genealogist will tell you, coverage in a lot of States is practically non-existant. If you give people greater privacy and greater respect the coverage is likely to go UP not down. Australia uses a very similar system to the one I outlined - as does the UK. Both have far superior return rates than the US and far greater honesty in the responses. The times I have done genealogical work, I absolutely love it when I find someone moved to Australia - the sheer quality of information is amazing. I absolutely loath and despise it when someone moved to the US because it's a bloody black hole.
As far as I'm concerned, if the country can spend 1/100th what it is and get a better, more usable, more honest result then the actual number who mail the form back is of absolutely no consequence. All I'm seeing here is you complaining because I'm expecting you to get off your backside and mail the form rather than have someone waste their time (and your taxes) on your doorstep effectively mailing the form for you. If you want to pay the Government a dollar for every cent it actually NEEDS to spend, DON'T complain when your taxes are due.
Oh, probably better than you do. People have failed to return census forms for almost two centuries. So? Why should that matter? In reality, the only ones who give a damn at the individual level are genealogists a century later. You'd need more than 50% to not return the form before it would make any practical difference at the statistical level. And if that many can't be bothered to post the form back, it's probably an area not worth knowing about.
Second, I said properties not houses. For a reason. You know perfectly well where a property is, it will exist on a map, you can go there, and you can shove the census form under the door. It makes bugger all difference if you don't know who lives there or indeed if anyone lives there at all. You have a box marked "Name" that is empty and is left to be filled in. Since all buildings of significance will be recorded by the local authorities (they tend to object to unauthorized construction work), there WILL be a street address on file. If the road has changed name, it may not be the current address. But there will be one.
I'm not sure why it should cost anything in the range of billions. You know (roughly) how many properties there are in the US. You have a census form delivered to each property, whether occupied or not, to be mailed back. There's 360 million people in the US, so in the worst possible case you've 360 million forms. You can't have any more than that and the chances are you'll have about a fifth since the average family size is about 5. That's 72 million forms. It should be possible to have the key information transcribed and the whole of each form scanned into a computer for very little. At a stretch, I can see the cost pushing $720 million if they absolutely had to hand-key everything.
Translation: "We aren't quite sure how to put all the census data into Excel, and we're not allowed to use anything else - not that we'd know what the anything else was or how to use it."
The BBC is reporting that brain scans can detect Alzheimers decades before symptoms show. If you couple the two studies together, you should be able to identify what biochemistry is related to those specific areas that are thinning and no others. In further news, five more genes linked to the disease have now been identified. One of them turns out to be also linked to the immune system - which is interesting, since one of the key processes involved is the production of tau protein tangles which literally crush areas of the brain to death and toxic substances in the brain (such as aluminium) are known to trigger that process.
It has always struck me that it had to be an immune response of some sort, since the tau proteins "contain" these contaminants, but I'd pictured it as being an archaic response (there's no evolutionary advantage in being dead, but there is an evolutionary advantage in single-cell and simple multi-cell organisms being able to detox). There's nothing in the BioNews article to suggest the mutation is a regression bug, though it's not exactly chock-full of details on things like how old the regions involved are.
Anyways, with now ten genes identified, a region identified as pre-symptom Alzheimers, and a knowledge of the genes and chemistry of that part of the brain, it should be possible to do quite a bit.
Yes, for human attackers (who are the biggest threat in data theft for the time being, but expect zombies to get better at it). An automatic attack can't tell if a.b.c.d has one user or a million, it's just an IP address that the code will scan and attack if it has the script for it.
Also, if the increase in security exceeds the increase in temptation, you're better off aggregating. Which means, however, that there's a practical limit to how far you should ever aggregate (since the practical limit on how secure a system can get is equal to the security you can buy for how much you stand to lose on average per break-in). If it costs $D per break-in per year, but also costs $D per year to prevent a break-in, a company will put the money in the bank. Always. The interest rate, no matter how low, will always make screwing the user over the better deal for them - even if the cost of cleaning up the mess afterwards by those users and other organizations swamps the costs of improving the security. It isn't their money.
When you push data into the cloud, you're hoping that the company at the other end did NOT put the money in the bank but actually invested it in security fixes and audits. (If using code they can audit, that would include code audits as well.) With the cloud, and even with gridded systems, you cannot possibly know what the other person did. This enters the realm of the Prisoner's Dilemma (quote from Wikipedia: 'In this game, as in most game theory, the only concern of each individual player (prisoner) is maximizing his or her own payoff, without any concern for the other player's payoff'). And game theory suggests that "betrayal" (in this case, the cloud provider not investing in security proportionally to the increase in risk) is the most likely outcome.
The cloud users are unlikely to be too bothered by this, because of a perversity in economics - when something becomes a status symbol, it grossly inflates in value. The fashion world, and apparently British universities, rely heavily on this. All the normal "common sense" aspects of economics go to hell in a handbasket, the Invisible Hand gets roaring drunk and you end up with a complete mess.
This is one reason I am for (appropriate) oversight and regulation. When it is appropriate (has such a thing ever happened?) the individual player's payoff becomes tied to the payoff of the others such that the whole Prisoner's Dilemma argument doesn't hold. Likewise, it has to keep enough market flexibility that no option becomes so overwhelmingly attractive that it destroys the market it is in. However, too far over that threshold and the regulations themselves destroy the markets. And since nobody has a bloody clue what the threshold even looks like, let alone where it is or how they'd know it if they found it, we end up with companies that resemble a trampoline QA facility.
Ah, that's a good question. In theory, central servers will have better security than Joe Average will know how to install. In practice, N times as many users will make the target f(N) times as inviting (where f() depends on who is doing the evaluating). This means that it is f(N) times as likely to be attacked by a human but equally likely to be attacked by zombies, worms and maybe the occasional vampire, since those won't care about N or f().
If you are concerned about human crackers, then f(N) becomes the dominant factor and your server has to be f(N) times as secure in order to maintain the same equivalent risk per person. (More attackers x more attention per attacker != Comfy Sofa.)
If you are concerned about the total number of attacks, then f(N) will never become significant in comparison to the automatic attacks. Since security has risen by more than the total number of attacks, the risk per person goes down.
Both of these ways of looking at the problem are valid, but they are also dependent on context. Automatic attacks against a hardened Linux box, OpenBSD or VMS are unlikely to succeed. I'd be much more worried about human attackers against those. Windows boxes, on the other hand, are harder to secure well and the total number of attacks rather than the potential haul for a successful break-in becomes important.
Well, the problem with (1) is that a TOS is an agreement with no signature, no confirmation of acceptance (implicit is unlikely to hold up in court) and no proof that the TOS was even visible by the user (since what is visible to the user is a function of the browser and cannot be established at the server-side).
There's that and there's the fact that the US (one of the largest consumers of data) has no data privacy laws and has been pressuring places that do (such as the EU) to violate their own laws. The laws don't solve the problem in and of themselves, what they do is make the public more* aware that the problem even exists. (*You can have more than nothing.)
The older ITAR laws and RSA patents didn't help - it effectively criminalized any effort to produce a product, since you'd need to sell the product in the US to be able to generate enough interest.
The problem now is that the legacy protocols are too widely used to be easily replaced and legacy products have so much staying power that a backwards-compatible system would remain effectively insecure for decades.
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...it can't have been "then known as CELT" since it is a merge of two codecs of which CELT is one and SILK is the other. It's good that it's an IETF standard as that will help some with adoption. It will also help some with getting other implementations. (Hell, Dirac is a great codec for video but because it's not a recognized standard for anything it's not getting used.)
That is largely the fault of Ronny Reagan. If he'd stopped with the political posturing and helped Gorbachev achieve stable market reforms, Russia would be in a lot better shape today. (Particularly regarding securing nuke sites.) By bankrupting the USSR, a lot of things became extremely unstable very rapidly. It's hard to say if it contributed to the rise in extremism we see today, but it would be a fair bet that it didn't help.
Maybe he was a Russian spy. :) (The Indians and Chinese are getting fairly close to manned missions to the moon, the Russians are planning an inflatable space hotel and the EU and Russians have pretty much divided all the commercial launches between them. The NRO seems... a bit behind the times.)
RIAA/MPAA's response: Ah, but the ISPs aren't filtering the Internet, they're only filtering their individual pipes. And since there's more than one company, it's an ogliarchy, not a monopoly.
You need a season in there. Substitute "court" for "spring"?
As satellites and deep space probes are the only objects that actually navigate by the stars (astronaut = those who sail by the stars), wouldn't it be more correct to call those astronauts?
Mind you, cosmonaut is as bad or worse.
Part of the problem is scarcity. We don't generally call people "aviators" these days, we use specific professional titles that relate to what they do rather than where they happen to be at the time (such as the sky). On the other hand, there simply aren't enough people who have travelled into space for such titles to have matured. Worse, space terminology has been heavily influenced by the military and the military prefers to identify by rank and location (air, sea, ground, space) rather than by anything practical.
I'll agree and put in a journal posting an alternative idea on how you could run an educational system to avoid the problems you mention. Problem is, such a solution would not be cheap, would certainly not be easy, and would not generate insta-profits (just add water).
That's only when the fun begins. Not only are people elected because they hate the Government, those elected (by now being in Government) are now paranoid of those who elected them (who now hate them for being the Government), thus creating new causes for those who do the electing to hate the Government.
I'd suggest that there be one or two elections in which there was a minimum level of sanity to either stand or vote, but it would leave nobody running and 10 voters.
Maybe. The space program might be a counter-example. When the USSR was in the lead, America pushed hard to keep up and "win the race". These are two very different strategies. The USSR was much more into conquering and exploiting the new frontier and had developed technology with that in mind. Arguably it's a damn good thing they didn't win (from any kind of ethical standpoint) for that very reason. The US got bored silly after "winning" and essentially dismantled all of NASA's projects on getting people to Mars (which they actually could have done by the mid 80s). They won the race, they got the prize, contest over. And when a contest is over, the normal thing is to go home and that is exactly what happened.
It has been argued that had Russia actually got men on the moon first, both Russia and the US would have active space colonies by now, not just a crudely-assembled and much-reduced space station that's too damn small for the kind of science needed to continue justifying it.
I would alter the argument a little, as I don't think the Cold War in Space would have been pretty: I think the US is fundamentally incapable of generating momentum in and of itself but is extremely capable of very efficiently tapping into the momentum of others and developing it in new and highly creative ways. In other words, the highly compete-till-you-die aggression of the US is only good if there's a competitor to compete against, that the US has less of a "work ethic" and more of a "win ethic". That other nations have a responsibility, particularly supernations like the EU, to be that competition and not defer a damn thing.
You are correct that it only shows gross changes, which makes it so surprising it can detect Alzheimer's a decade or so before symptoms show. It means that even if you couldn't cure the condition but only stop it, you could stop it before it became a problem. Mind you, with the 9.2T MRIs you can resolve virtually down to the individual neurons. (Having said that, only two exist as far as I know.)
You are also correct that the cost, time and long queues make this a prohibitive technique for preventative medicine.
I'll take a look into Molecular Imaging. I've a great interest in imaging techniques - not only for their intended purpose but also where they can be used in other disciplines for purposes never imagined by the inventor.
PET is extremely useful but I believe it to be under-utilized. The classical way of using it is to use a beta+ emitter as a tracer that is taken up more by whatever you want to study than by the surroundings. There will be synthetic medicines where you can swap out an isotope for another of the same element where the replacement can be used as a tracer element. In these cases, you should be able to actually observe what takes up the medicine and in what amounts, substantially reducing the risks involved in medical trials and the risks of unanticipated side-effects. Of course, the difficulty in gaining access to PET scanners means that even if this would actually be of use (rather than just as an abstract idea), it can't be used in practice because nobody has the tools.
Alzheimer's is linked to a number of different things now - beta-amyloid being one, definitely, and now 10 different genes, but the University of Manchester's research into it in the late 80s, early 90s, showed a contaminant was always present in the tau protein plaques. My question has always been one of how to link these disparate observations into a coherent story. My idea was probably far-fetched, my knowledge of biochemistry and neurology are somewhat limited after all, but it was the only one that consistantly fitted the (very limited) information I've had.
Australian censuses are the easiest to fill of any country I've lived in, the information is of very high quality, and the coverage seems to be exceptionally good. If any nation wanted to rework their system, I'd consider it to be one of the best examples of how to do it right - or, at least, as right as censuses ever get (they're never going to be perfect). The UK system comes a close second. The black hole at Cygnus X1 is second to last, followed by the US.
Who cares if they "receive mail"? I'm not talking about posting them the form. You have a map, you have a property marked there as being built, you push the census form under the door.
Who cares if they are a "citizen"? A census is about ensuring that resources go where they are needed. The resources a person needs doesn't change according to their citizenship status. A person doesn't suddenly stop needing air, food and water because they're not "legit". The absolute last thing you want is for people to exclude themselves because of such concerns. And that means you DON'T want to go by mailing addresses, identity cards or other such official crap.
Who gives a f* if not everyone returns the form? Not everyone fills them in in America as it is, and as any genealogist will tell you, coverage in a lot of States is practically non-existant. If you give people greater privacy and greater respect the coverage is likely to go UP not down. Australia uses a very similar system to the one I outlined - as does the UK. Both have far superior return rates than the US and far greater honesty in the responses. The times I have done genealogical work, I absolutely love it when I find someone moved to Australia - the sheer quality of information is amazing. I absolutely loath and despise it when someone moved to the US because it's a bloody black hole.
As far as I'm concerned, if the country can spend 1/100th what it is and get a better, more usable, more honest result then the actual number who mail the form back is of absolutely no consequence. All I'm seeing here is you complaining because I'm expecting you to get off your backside and mail the form rather than have someone waste their time (and your taxes) on your doorstep effectively mailing the form for you. If you want to pay the Government a dollar for every cent it actually NEEDS to spend, DON'T complain when your taxes are due.
Oh, probably better than you do. People have failed to return census forms for almost two centuries. So? Why should that matter? In reality, the only ones who give a damn at the individual level are genealogists a century later. You'd need more than 50% to not return the form before it would make any practical difference at the statistical level. And if that many can't be bothered to post the form back, it's probably an area not worth knowing about.
Second, I said properties not houses. For a reason. You know perfectly well where a property is, it will exist on a map, you can go there, and you can shove the census form under the door. It makes bugger all difference if you don't know who lives there or indeed if anyone lives there at all. You have a box marked "Name" that is empty and is left to be filled in. Since all buildings of significance will be recorded by the local authorities (they tend to object to unauthorized construction work), there WILL be a street address on file. If the road has changed name, it may not be the current address. But there will be one.
I think they were more referring to the rock group that split up over their personality "problems".
I'm not sure why it should cost anything in the range of billions. You know (roughly) how many properties there are in the US. You have a census form delivered to each property, whether occupied or not, to be mailed back. There's 360 million people in the US, so in the worst possible case you've 360 million forms. You can't have any more than that and the chances are you'll have about a fifth since the average family size is about 5. That's 72 million forms. It should be possible to have the key information transcribed and the whole of each form scanned into a computer for very little. At a stretch, I can see the cost pushing $720 million if they absolutely had to hand-key everything.
Translation: "We aren't quite sure how to put all the census data into Excel, and we're not allowed to use anything else - not that we'd know what the anything else was or how to use it."
I/O swamps are caused by techies spilling coffee. It drips down the keyboard cable, through the computer and into the I/O ports where it pools up.
The BBC is reporting that brain scans can detect Alzheimers decades before symptoms show. If you couple the two studies together, you should be able to identify what biochemistry is related to those specific areas that are thinning and no others. In further news, five more genes linked to the disease have now been identified. One of them turns out to be also linked to the immune system - which is interesting, since one of the key processes involved is the production of tau protein tangles which literally crush areas of the brain to death and toxic substances in the brain (such as aluminium) are known to trigger that process.
It has always struck me that it had to be an immune response of some sort, since the tau proteins "contain" these contaminants, but I'd pictured it as being an archaic response (there's no evolutionary advantage in being dead, but there is an evolutionary advantage in single-cell and simple multi-cell organisms being able to detox). There's nothing in the BioNews article to suggest the mutation is a regression bug, though it's not exactly chock-full of details on things like how old the regions involved are.
Anyways, with now ten genes identified, a region identified as pre-symptom Alzheimers, and a knowledge of the genes and chemistry of that part of the brain, it should be possible to do quite a bit.
Yes, for human attackers (who are the biggest threat in data theft for the time being, but expect zombies to get better at it). An automatic attack can't tell if a.b.c.d has one user or a million, it's just an IP address that the code will scan and attack if it has the script for it.
Also, if the increase in security exceeds the increase in temptation, you're better off aggregating. Which means, however, that there's a practical limit to how far you should ever aggregate (since the practical limit on how secure a system can get is equal to the security you can buy for how much you stand to lose on average per break-in). If it costs $D per break-in per year, but also costs $D per year to prevent a break-in, a company will put the money in the bank. Always. The interest rate, no matter how low, will always make screwing the user over the better deal for them - even if the cost of cleaning up the mess afterwards by those users and other organizations swamps the costs of improving the security. It isn't their money.
When you push data into the cloud, you're hoping that the company at the other end did NOT put the money in the bank but actually invested it in security fixes and audits. (If using code they can audit, that would include code audits as well.) With the cloud, and even with gridded systems, you cannot possibly know what the other person did. This enters the realm of the Prisoner's Dilemma (quote from Wikipedia: 'In this game, as in most game theory, the only concern of each individual player (prisoner) is maximizing his or her own payoff, without any concern for the other player's payoff'). And game theory suggests that "betrayal" (in this case, the cloud provider not investing in security proportionally to the increase in risk) is the most likely outcome.
The cloud users are unlikely to be too bothered by this, because of a perversity in economics - when something becomes a status symbol, it grossly inflates in value. The fashion world, and apparently British universities, rely heavily on this. All the normal "common sense" aspects of economics go to hell in a handbasket, the Invisible Hand gets roaring drunk and you end up with a complete mess.
This is one reason I am for (appropriate) oversight and regulation. When it is appropriate (has such a thing ever happened?) the individual player's payoff becomes tied to the payoff of the others such that the whole Prisoner's Dilemma argument doesn't hold. Likewise, it has to keep enough market flexibility that no option becomes so overwhelmingly attractive that it destroys the market it is in. However, too far over that threshold and the regulations themselves destroy the markets. And since nobody has a bloody clue what the threshold even looks like, let alone where it is or how they'd know it if they found it, we end up with companies that resemble a trampoline QA facility.
Ah, that's a good question. In theory, central servers will have better security than Joe Average will know how to install. In practice, N times as many users will make the target f(N) times as inviting (where f() depends on who is doing the evaluating). This means that it is f(N) times as likely to be attacked by a human but equally likely to be attacked by zombies, worms and maybe the occasional vampire, since those won't care about N or f().
If you are concerned about human crackers, then f(N) becomes the dominant factor and your server has to be f(N) times as secure in order to maintain the same equivalent risk per person. (More attackers x more attention per attacker != Comfy Sofa.)
If you are concerned about the total number of attacks, then f(N) will never become significant in comparison to the automatic attacks. Since security has risen by more than the total number of attacks, the risk per person goes down.
Both of these ways of looking at the problem are valid, but they are also dependent on context. Automatic attacks against a hardened Linux box, OpenBSD or VMS are unlikely to succeed. I'd be much more worried about human attackers against those. Windows boxes, on the other hand, are harder to secure well and the total number of attacks rather than the potential haul for a successful break-in becomes important.
Well, the problem with (1) is that a TOS is an agreement with no signature, no confirmation of acceptance (implicit is unlikely to hold up in court) and no proof that the TOS was even visible by the user (since what is visible to the user is a function of the browser and cannot be established at the server-side).
There's that and there's the fact that the US (one of the largest consumers of data) has no data privacy laws and has been pressuring places that do (such as the EU) to violate their own laws. The laws don't solve the problem in and of themselves, what they do is make the public more* aware that the problem even exists. (*You can have more than nothing.)
The older ITAR laws and RSA patents didn't help - it effectively criminalized any effort to produce a product, since you'd need to sell the product in the US to be able to generate enough interest.
The problem now is that the legacy protocols are too widely used to be easily replaced and legacy products have so much staying power that a backwards-compatible system would remain effectively insecure for decades.
In the dot-com era, US dollars. These days, Zimbabwe dollars.
People were selling desert islands on Second Life for millions at one point. A profitable virtual farm has to be worth more.
Wasn't there an e-mail list company that got hacked recently? If their database flagged sad, pathetic losers then there's your answer.