Camouflage, possible cloaking device. When you exist in a big black background, and you don't want anyone to find your home world, as the song says, "Paint it Black".
Of course one has to ask what sort of species takes such drastic action to hide themselves.
Is this a case of puppeteers, or simply stealthy invaders?
I can give you a number of reasons why it probably wouldn't lose that one. I can also cite several examples. I would argue it is very hard to continue to wage a "Cyber" war after your civilization has been bombed back to the stone age and all your infrastructure consists of a pile of smoking rubble. It is difficult to maintain an internet connection when you don't have any electricity.
Probably the PSU specification shenanigans don't exactly help either. Where you have various brands of PSU basically lying through their teeth as to what exactly their PSU is capable of and what tolerances they have. Seriously probably one of the loosest regulated or controlled components, that no one knows about or pays any attention to, and as a result I would say MOST companies as a rule regularly fib about their hardware. I am sure this has an effect on how "true" the USB standard (insofar as supplying a stable constant amount of power) is held up from PC to PC and device to device.
But you are right those 2.5" portable external drives are the worst culprit.
What is interesting to me, is if they get the transfer speeds up enough along with the power, we could start seeing truly modular computers. Need a video card? Plug it in. Need some more CPU cores? Plug it in. Monitor? HD? Audio? Etc... Of course this will lead to an even more messy spaghetti mess of cables, but still an interesting notion.
Crypo is pretty slow anyway. Over a network where the work is being done and there is communication latency, it is less a big deal than local. What I mean is over the network is going to be slower than say local to a computer anyway. So if it is a bit slow on one end, that will be lessened by the fact of what is expected over a network to begin with. I know for giggles I try to encrypt a 500GB dive using truecrypt, and got a progress bar that was 7 or 8 hours long, and that was locally.
So it isn't a cloud thing, encryption of more data than handshake keys and the like take time. Besides, having non-crypto cloud is no less secure, than all the commercial sites out there storing passwords in plain text files and the like, or on outdated software.
These kids aren't making a statement, they aren't fighting the system, they aren't protesting against jack shit. They just want to run riot, smash shit up and set fire to stuff whilst getting away with stealing as much as possible.
One might ask why the UK has so many youth that "want to run riot, smash shit up and set fire to stuff whilst getting away with stealing as much as possible." It might be that, while not a protest, is an indication that the UK has some problems that it should really be dealing with.
Off the top of my head: Education, Jobs, Poverty and Wealth inequality.
If the UK as so many youth in this situation, that they can hold the city hostage and overwhelm police, I would say there is quite a large problem that has existed for a very long time, that has not been addressed. Not all protests are rational planned things with signs and marching, some are simply outrage at current conditions.
That said, sucks to be caught up in that mess through no fault of your own...
I seriously doubt there is anything in the RIM EULA that says something to the extent "RIM reserves the right to record and store all messages for an indefinite period of time that you send or receive VIA your BB device."
Providing data to law enforcement is a given. Actually remotely storing you private messages for later inspection is a huge privacy breach. I mean they need to send it across their network, but once delivered it should only be stored locally on the BB device if anywhere, not on some RIM server for some period of time. Just like I expect the phone company isn't taking transcripts of every phone conversation I ever have and keeping it on file. Not only is this a privacy breach, but in many countries I would suggest pretty illegal. However UK is pretty big brother now, so perhaps this is a unique instance where RIM was expected, or required to store such information... pretty scary thought.
The fact that they are RECORDING the messages is what is at issue here for me. Why are they doing that? I know when I saw this story on the news last night that was the first thing that came to mind.
Yes, just like anyone RIM is subject to a court order in whatever country they are in. The fact that RIM is RECORDING and STORING my private messages in the first place seems a bit like a HUGE privacy breach to me. They shouldn't have the records to hand over in the first place. Just another reason not to use BB.
I remember hearing (though not sure it's not all just PR marketing) that the "Do No Evil" slogan came from the group of people that started Google having some pretty idealistic ideas of want they wanted to do. Profit was an ends to a means. The initial growth was to get to the point where they could implement some meaningful and enduring change. Well I think they have figured out the whole profit then now, the next phase to follow will be the most telling.
We shall see if they can stick to the "Do No Evil" slogan. In particular things I see that have the "potential" to be game changers for our collective culture, Google+ for the same reason that Facebook is, the music service once they fight the RIAA into submission in the courts, the out of copyright book service once they fight that fight in court.
If your trying to change things, particularly in the US, any business has to be prepared to basically get sued by everyone with a stake in the industry. They have the resources to have legs in these legal battles, and provided that the sentiment of the people, and political will can also be satisfied, than these and more can be accomplished.
So yes, I am hopeful for Google's future. I only hope that those that started it will keep the majority of shares, so that it won't just become another robotic slave to shareholders and profit, blindly gnashing for every scrap of money regardless of anything else. Maybe it is already there. However many of their projects seem at least on the surface to have some altruistic thought to it, however in many cases Google walks the line between those ideals, and the need to monetize some component for profit.
As anyone in a waste water plant could probably tell you, only a small amount of water that goes through sewage actually comes from your toilet. The vast majority likely comes from your shower, tub, sink, dishes, watering you lawn, washing your car, rain water, etc... You don't think they maintain a special pipe for urine right?
As I recall this happened to Canada years ago, back in the 1990's. It put the scare into people. Allowed politicians to make the hard unpopular decisions like raising taxes and limiting services. After that, we ran pretty much balanced or surplus budgets until ironically we put the "Conservatives" into power. Who then proceeded to run the largest deficit ever in Canadian history. Granted this was because they did the whole bailout and throw money at the problem hoping it will go away policy like every other government in the world. I love how the argument now is, well just imagine how much worse it would be now if we hadn't done that, it would be way worse! Politics would be funny if it wasn't so real...
Anyway maybe this will allow politicians to make some correct decisions for a change. Because despite what people say about politicians acting all stupid, they act this way because the people are like that. They want all these services, yet do not believe somehow that they need to pay for them, hence a huge deficit. As soon as at least a large group of the population accepts the fact that "shit ain't free", then politicians can start raising taxes, and cutting services, which is basically what is required to eliminate the deficit. You can't just reduce it, you need surpluses to start paying down debt. This isn't rocket science people.
Although I also had one instance of a toxic prof (my fault really). So I went to a College between my 3th and 4th years of University. One of the courses I was required to take was C+ programming. Now I was a CS student in University, so I already had some programming under my belt, certainly a high caliber than in this College, and I had also taken C+ at University among other languages. Anyway upon going to class, my respect for my college prof dropped considerably. Not only was he not really teaching programming, he was really just teaching C+ syntax, and he was horrible at it. He used transparencies exclusively, which were full of errors, and he spent the first two classes simply correcting his own teaching material. After that I stopped going, I didn't attend another class, I figured it would just pollute my brain. Anyway I did all the labs, assignments, and test and going into the final I had one of my highest marks... something like a 96%, keep in mind that all that stuff was marked by the lab tech (who by the way was about 10x more knowledgeable than the prof). So going into my final exam which was worth something like 40% of my mark I had a 96%... The exam, was stupid. Here is a piece of paper and a pencil, and some problems, write C+ code to solve them. Anyway I get my exam back, and I got a 10%. Seriously a 10%. No other marking or comments. Obviously I was a little ticked. So I request a meeting with the Prof to "discuss" my mark. I confronted him, and asked him why he gave me 10%, and his answer was that I was wrong. I asked him to point on where in each of my code, exactly what was "wrong". He refused, and simply took the paper, and put a red X next to each question. At this point I knew I was getting nowhere with this guy. Now I would appeal the grade, however the problem was, this asshat was also the chair of the program I was in (for anyone still in school, one thing you can take from this is DO NOT skip you class if the prof is also the chair), which meant that wasn't going to work. The only other alternative was to appeal it to the chair of the entire college... I debated about doing that, but in the end, I had such a high mark going in, even getting a 10% BS mark from that jerk, I still passed his course getting a 55% or something like that (which I am fairly certain why I got 10% rather than 0%, as he probably guessed at that point I would go to the chair of the College). So in the end, the mark brought down my grades, but I still got credit, passed and moved on, so who cares. However I still remember what a complete jerk the guy was, simply because I snubbed his class.
From my experience, even grades from non-toxic professors are more less arbitrary. There is lots of variation between profs, TA's, and even themselves simply over time/another instance. Two examples:
The first, I'm not sure if this counts as cheating, thought it probably counts as lazy. I was in two 3rd year geography courses, that were pretty similar in content. For one of my papers, I selected (and got approved) the exact same topic. I then proceeded to write one paper, and hand it in to two different professors (I would say indifferent as well). Both were 300 level courses, both had the exact same topic, and both were duplicate papers, but had different profs. I got a B+ on one and a C- on the other. I had a laugh and shrug (I wasn't going to complain, I lazily got out of writing another paper...).
The other was CS100, as many of you can attest to is a total joke. Anyway the first paper was just an essay on 3 topics. I wrote it in about an hour, the night before, while pre-drinking to go out to the bar, went out and had fun, handed it in the next day. Anyway it was absurdly easy (at least for someone planning to major in CS) and I got an 80%. The following year, I had two friends of mine take CS100, one was taking as an elective, and the other was apparently a CS student even lazier than me that both used my old essay and handed it in exactly. Anyway long story short, I was slightly amused (and sort of ticked), than they got 90% and 100% respectively. Granted, it was all probably graded by TA's and different ones at that (CS100 usually has like 3-400 students as it is an intro course). Still, it just goes to show how arbitrary many of the grades really are. After those experience, I rarely got worked up about any grade high or low after that. Its just about completing the work and moving on.
That is what the new reboot should have been, a half-robot half-alien, radioactive spider bitten superhero!
Seriously that would be awesome!
An Alien spacecraft crash lands on earth. Its mysterious badly injured occupant is found by Doctor Octavius. Using his (Patent Pending) design for symbiotic robotic arms, he saves the aliens life, but for his own nefarious purposes. The alien after inadvertently finding out about plans to use him/her/it, attempts a dashing escape from the lab through the rector level. However during the escape a radioactive spider bites him. The rest is history...:)
Probably the one country I would say "Go for it", and not get my back all up about privacy etc...
I would, should I live in Pakistan, but I don't, and given all that has happened over say the last 10 years... Go nuts.
That said, nothing to say the government would actually act responsible anyway, or that this would actually be very enforceable. Odds are the people that want to do it would just become very good at hiding it.
I agree. However if it only makes sense if you assume failure in 2 years or less.
If you are comparing them to the HDD on the graph, you can see that HDD have a failure rate of about 1-2% in the first two years (dependent on whatever the fsck the different colors mean), and beyond that can go as high as 20% after 5 years.
So what is it you are testing for? What are you doing comparisons against? Not to mention why they assume one is linear as opposed to all the other long term data being exponential. If anything you should come to the conclusions that after two years 2-4% failure rates in SSD could translate into 40% after 5 years or something of that nature. Run it statistically, and all that jazz of course.
Anyway bottom line is they are trying to come to conclusions with too little data and trying to extrapolate some sort of meaning, when there is none to extrapolate. It. Is. Meaningless. They go on to say in the text that apparently it is HIGHLY depended on what actual device you use, so unless they do a large sample so as not to be weighed by a bad model, or batch for that given year, leap in technology or whatever it is even harder to say one way or the other. So even had they they most robust amount of data, they could really only come up with some very general numbers to depict a trend between general technologies but not subject to specific cases. However they can't do that.
The reason I hate the chart, besides the linear extrapolation, is the meaningless legend. Which I realize is probably taken out of context by being displayed on its own, and likely there are explanations of what the varies lines mean off chart. So my criticism was more of the post and editors, than the actual article itself.
Generally I think most companies don't need it. Some only need the basics. You got my personal information, or credit cards? Just securely encrypt those sources. Sure some might slip out here and there, but you won't lose your whole database of 300,000 customers or whatever.
I just mean if your a bank, financial institution of some description, or someone that handles my medical information, get on the encryption boat and set sail. Seriously. I mean it is one thing if someone gets my VISA number... its usually protected anyway.
However your right it is a cost thing. And until companies are held responsible in court financially they will not take it seriously. Once some CEO's start getting the boot for allowing a catastrophic lawsuit to take place, change will happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Camouflage, possible cloaking device. When you exist in a big black background, and you don't want anyone to find your home world, as the song says, "Paint it Black".
Of course one has to ask what sort of species takes such drastic action to hide themselves.
Is this a case of puppeteers, or simply stealthy invaders?
Number of employees X how scary they are...
Fight. The biggest is the company that wins.
Sure McDonald's can field a pretty bit army, but they are all skinny teenagers, easily overwhelmed.
Apple, I've seen the folks that work at the iStore. They are not scary.
Exxon. While not all of them work on a oil rig or a refinery, I'm fairly certain they would wipe the floor with Apple.
As it can just escalate it to "real" war.
I can give you a number of reasons why it probably wouldn't lose that one. I can also cite several examples. I would argue it is very hard to continue to wage a "Cyber" war after your civilization has been bombed back to the stone age and all your infrastructure consists of a pile of smoking rubble. It is difficult to maintain an internet connection when you don't have any electricity.
Probably the PSU specification shenanigans don't exactly help either. Where you have various brands of PSU basically lying through their teeth as to what exactly their PSU is capable of and what tolerances they have. Seriously probably one of the loosest regulated or controlled components, that no one knows about or pays any attention to, and as a result I would say MOST companies as a rule regularly fib about their hardware. I am sure this has an effect on how "true" the USB standard (insofar as supplying a stable constant amount of power) is held up from PC to PC and device to device.
But you are right those 2.5" portable external drives are the worst culprit.
What is interesting to me, is if they get the transfer speeds up enough along with the power, we could start seeing truly modular computers. Need a video card? Plug it in. Need some more CPU cores? Plug it in. Monitor? HD? Audio? Etc... Of course this will lead to an even more messy spaghetti mess of cables, but still an interesting notion.
Gamers VS Casual Games...
You could argue that Facebook is the Gaming Platform of choice...
I would say that it is set to become the Mobile Gaming Platform of choice...
Games cost 1$ so ya, you get more of them playing and bought over 70$ titles for a console or PC...
C) God destroyed Man by throwing rocks at the Earth.
This is a great article, I'll just program my current computer to copy the article using these punch cards, and record it on this handy wax cylinder.
I'll just plug my wax cylinder and punch card readers into my serial port, its so easy!
Crypo is pretty slow anyway. Over a network where the work is being done and there is communication latency, it is less a big deal than local. What I mean is over the network is going to be slower than say local to a computer anyway. So if it is a bit slow on one end, that will be lessened by the fact of what is expected over a network to begin with. I know for giggles I try to encrypt a 500GB dive using truecrypt, and got a progress bar that was 7 or 8 hours long, and that was locally.
So it isn't a cloud thing, encryption of more data than handshake keys and the like take time. Besides, having non-crypto cloud is no less secure, than all the commercial sites out there storing passwords in plain text files and the like, or on outdated software.
Not to defend the position, however:
These kids aren't making a statement, they aren't fighting the system, they aren't protesting against jack shit. They just want to run riot, smash shit up and set fire to stuff whilst getting away with stealing as much as possible.
One might ask why the UK has so many youth that "want to run riot, smash shit up and set fire to stuff whilst getting away with stealing as much as possible." It might be that, while not a protest, is an indication that the UK has some problems that it should really be dealing with.
Off the top of my head: Education, Jobs, Poverty and Wealth inequality.
If the UK as so many youth in this situation, that they can hold the city hostage and overwhelm police, I would say there is quite a large problem that has existed for a very long time, that has not been addressed. Not all protests are rational planned things with signs and marching, some are simply outrage at current conditions.
That said, sucks to be caught up in that mess through no fault of your own...
I seriously doubt there is anything in the RIM EULA that says something to the extent "RIM reserves the right to record and store all messages for an indefinite period of time that you send or receive VIA your BB device."
Providing data to law enforcement is a given. Actually remotely storing you private messages for later inspection is a huge privacy breach. I mean they need to send it across their network, but once delivered it should only be stored locally on the BB device if anywhere, not on some RIM server for some period of time. Just like I expect the phone company isn't taking transcripts of every phone conversation I ever have and keeping it on file. Not only is this a privacy breach, but in many countries I would suggest pretty illegal. However UK is pretty big brother now, so perhaps this is a unique instance where RIM was expected, or required to store such information... pretty scary thought.
The fact that they are RECORDING the messages is what is at issue here for me. Why are they doing that? I know when I saw this story on the news last night that was the first thing that came to mind.
Yes, just like anyone RIM is subject to a court order in whatever country they are in. The fact that RIM is RECORDING and STORING my private messages in the first place seems a bit like a HUGE privacy breach to me. They shouldn't have the records to hand over in the first place. Just another reason not to use BB.
I remember hearing (though not sure it's not all just PR marketing) that the "Do No Evil" slogan came from the group of people that started Google having some pretty idealistic ideas of want they wanted to do. Profit was an ends to a means. The initial growth was to get to the point where they could implement some meaningful and enduring change. Well I think they have figured out the whole profit then now, the next phase to follow will be the most telling.
We shall see if they can stick to the "Do No Evil" slogan. In particular things I see that have the "potential" to be game changers for our collective culture, Google+ for the same reason that Facebook is, the music service once they fight the RIAA into submission in the courts, the out of copyright book service once they fight that fight in court.
If your trying to change things, particularly in the US, any business has to be prepared to basically get sued by everyone with a stake in the industry. They have the resources to have legs in these legal battles, and provided that the sentiment of the people, and political will can also be satisfied, than these and more can be accomplished.
So yes, I am hopeful for Google's future. I only hope that those that started it will keep the majority of shares, so that it won't just become another robotic slave to shareholders and profit, blindly gnashing for every scrap of money regardless of anything else. Maybe it is already there. However many of their projects seem at least on the surface to have some altruistic thought to it, however in many cases Google walks the line between those ideals, and the need to monetize some component for profit.
As anyone in a waste water plant could probably tell you, only a small amount of water that goes through sewage actually comes from your toilet. The vast majority likely comes from your shower, tub, sink, dishes, watering you lawn, washing your car, rain water, etc... You don't think they maintain a special pipe for urine right?
As I recall this happened to Canada years ago, back in the 1990's. It put the scare into people. Allowed politicians to make the hard unpopular decisions like raising taxes and limiting services. After that, we ran pretty much balanced or surplus budgets until ironically we put the "Conservatives" into power. Who then proceeded to run the largest deficit ever in Canadian history. Granted this was because they did the whole bailout and throw money at the problem hoping it will go away policy like every other government in the world. I love how the argument now is, well just imagine how much worse it would be now if we hadn't done that, it would be way worse! Politics would be funny if it wasn't so real...
Anyway maybe this will allow politicians to make some correct decisions for a change. Because despite what people say about politicians acting all stupid, they act this way because the people are like that. They want all these services, yet do not believe somehow that they need to pay for them, hence a huge deficit. As soon as at least a large group of the population accepts the fact that "shit ain't free", then politicians can start raising taxes, and cutting services, which is basically what is required to eliminate the deficit. You can't just reduce it, you need surpluses to start paying down debt. This isn't rocket science people.
Although I also had one instance of a toxic prof (my fault really). So I went to a College between my 3th and 4th years of University. One of the courses I was required to take was C+ programming. Now I was a CS student in University, so I already had some programming under my belt, certainly a high caliber than in this College, and I had also taken C+ at University among other languages. Anyway upon going to class, my respect for my college prof dropped considerably. Not only was he not really teaching programming, he was really just teaching C+ syntax, and he was horrible at it. He used transparencies exclusively, which were full of errors, and he spent the first two classes simply correcting his own teaching material. After that I stopped going, I didn't attend another class, I figured it would just pollute my brain. Anyway I did all the labs, assignments, and test and going into the final I had one of my highest marks... something like a 96%, keep in mind that all that stuff was marked by the lab tech (who by the way was about 10x more knowledgeable than the prof). So going into my final exam which was worth something like 40% of my mark I had a 96%... The exam, was stupid. Here is a piece of paper and a pencil, and some problems, write C+ code to solve them. Anyway I get my exam back, and I got a 10%. Seriously a 10%. No other marking or comments. Obviously I was a little ticked. So I request a meeting with the Prof to "discuss" my mark. I confronted him, and asked him why he gave me 10%, and his answer was that I was wrong. I asked him to point on where in each of my code, exactly what was "wrong". He refused, and simply took the paper, and put a red X next to each question. At this point I knew I was getting nowhere with this guy. Now I would appeal the grade, however the problem was, this asshat was also the chair of the program I was in (for anyone still in school, one thing you can take from this is DO NOT skip you class if the prof is also the chair), which meant that wasn't going to work. The only other alternative was to appeal it to the chair of the entire college... I debated about doing that, but in the end, I had such a high mark going in, even getting a 10% BS mark from that jerk, I still passed his course getting a 55% or something like that (which I am fairly certain why I got 10% rather than 0%, as he probably guessed at that point I would go to the chair of the College). So in the end, the mark brought down my grades, but I still got credit, passed and moved on, so who cares. However I still remember what a complete jerk the guy was, simply because I snubbed his class.
From my experience, even grades from non-toxic professors are more less arbitrary. There is lots of variation between profs, TA's, and even themselves simply over time/another instance. Two examples:
The first, I'm not sure if this counts as cheating, thought it probably counts as lazy. I was in two 3rd year geography courses, that were pretty similar in content. For one of my papers, I selected (and got approved) the exact same topic. I then proceeded to write one paper, and hand it in to two different professors (I would say indifferent as well). Both were 300 level courses, both had the exact same topic, and both were duplicate papers, but had different profs. I got a B+ on one and a C- on the other. I had a laugh and shrug (I wasn't going to complain, I lazily got out of writing another paper...).
The other was CS100, as many of you can attest to is a total joke. Anyway the first paper was just an essay on 3 topics. I wrote it in about an hour, the night before, while pre-drinking to go out to the bar, went out and had fun, handed it in the next day. Anyway it was absurdly easy (at least for someone planning to major in CS) and I got an 80%. The following year, I had two friends of mine take CS100, one was taking as an elective, and the other was apparently a CS student even lazier than me that both used my old essay and handed it in exactly. Anyway long story short, I was slightly amused (and sort of ticked), than they got 90% and 100% respectively. Granted, it was all probably graded by TA's and different ones at that (CS100 usually has like 3-400 students as it is an intro course). Still, it just goes to show how arbitrary many of the grades really are. After those experience, I rarely got worked up about any grade high or low after that. Its just about completing the work and moving on.
It's these Android commies that are ruining our capitalist paradise!
Real Science!
http://xkcd.com/683/
I hate all people, does that make me racist?
Only Robots and Aliens for me!
That is what the new reboot should have been, a half-robot half-alien, radioactive spider bitten superhero!
Seriously that would be awesome!
An Alien spacecraft crash lands on earth. Its mysterious badly injured occupant is found by Doctor Octavius. Using his (Patent Pending) design for symbiotic robotic arms, he saves the aliens life, but for his own nefarious purposes. The alien after inadvertently finding out about plans to use him/her/it, attempts a dashing escape from the lab through the rector level. However during the escape a radioactive spider bites him. The rest is history... :)
Rather than "hire" a bunch of people and support staff, and buildings, and technology, just use capitalism!
Start a website called US Digital Bounty Hunter Service. Post targets and corresponding bounty amounts.
Sit back and enjoy the show!
or
1) Post Cyber Warfare Bounties
2) ???
3) PROFIT!!!
Probably the one country I would say "Go for it", and not get my back all up about privacy etc...
I would, should I live in Pakistan, but I don't, and given all that has happened over say the last 10 years... Go nuts.
That said, nothing to say the government would actually act responsible anyway, or that this would actually be very enforceable. Odds are the people that want to do it would just become very good at hiding it.
can. no. parse.
head 'splosion!
Two Wrongs don't make a Right...
http://xkcd.com/605/
I agree. However if it only makes sense if you assume failure in 2 years or less.
If you are comparing them to the HDD on the graph, you can see that HDD have a failure rate of about 1-2% in the first two years (dependent on whatever the fsck the different colors mean), and beyond that can go as high as 20% after 5 years.
So what is it you are testing for? What are you doing comparisons against? Not to mention why they assume one is linear as opposed to all the other long term data being exponential. If anything you should come to the conclusions that after two years 2-4% failure rates in SSD could translate into 40% after 5 years or something of that nature. Run it statistically, and all that jazz of course.
Anyway bottom line is they are trying to come to conclusions with too little data and trying to extrapolate some sort of meaning, when there is none to extrapolate. It. Is. Meaningless. They go on to say in the text that apparently it is HIGHLY depended on what actual device you use, so unless they do a large sample so as not to be weighed by a bad model, or batch for that given year, leap in technology or whatever it is even harder to say one way or the other. So even had they they most robust amount of data, they could really only come up with some very general numbers to depict a trend between general technologies but not subject to specific cases. However they can't do that.
The reason I hate the chart, besides the linear extrapolation, is the meaningless legend. Which I realize is probably taken out of context by being displayed on its own, and likely there are explanations of what the varies lines mean off chart. So my criticism was more of the post and editors, than the actual article itself.
Generally I think most companies don't need it. Some only need the basics. You got my personal information, or credit cards? Just securely encrypt those sources. Sure some might slip out here and there, but you won't lose your whole database of 300,000 customers or whatever.
I just mean if your a bank, financial institution of some description, or someone that handles my medical information, get on the encryption boat and set sail. Seriously. I mean it is one thing if someone gets my VISA number... its usually protected anyway.
However your right it is a cost thing. And until companies are held responsible in court financially they will not take it seriously. Once some CEO's start getting the boot for allowing a catastrophic lawsuit to take place, change will happen.