Right. The old "war is good for the economy" line is more of an example of the broken window fallacy. Or rather, there's some kind of fallacy floating out there-- and I'm not sure whether it could be considered a "broken window fallacy"-- that "it doesn't matter what the economic activity is; any activity is good activity." That's the mindset that gets us into wars, or convinces people that borrowing money we don't have to buy crap we don't need is "good for the economy".
Building necessary infrastructure is a good counter-example to the broken window fallacy. Value is added into the system and good infrastructure actually improves economic conditions. It encourages investment, stabilizes operations, and allows businesses to operate more efficiently.
That's not to say we should build useless infrastructure for the sake of economic activity. The "bridge to nowhere" wouldn't provide value, and therefore it could be argued that it's an example of the broken-window fallacy. But ubiquitous broadband Internet (with speeds on the scale of FiOS, not just DSL), is something we need in order to stay economically competitive with the rest of the world.
you ONLY format those cards and re-use them after the job is complete. before then, a minimum of 2 copies of the data must be kept.
That seems... fine, I guess. But it's not really necessary to keep data on the card for such a long time in order to have multiple copies. Haven't you heard of "backing up your computer"?
Why does everybody think that Apple wants to deal with Enterprise issues?
First, there's a lot of money in it. Anytime there's a lot of money in a market, it's reasonable to assume that major players will want a piece of it if they can get it without too much investment.
Second, Apple has been working on the components to make a competitor to Exchange. It's been piece-by-piece so you might not have noticed, but Snow Leopard server will have a calendaring server, mail server, and directory server built in, presumably with good web access (since they've been building web apps for MobileMe and iWork.com lately).
So iWork is being built to compete with Office, Leopard server is becoming competitive with Windows/Exchange server, and Mail/iCal/Address Book are being set up to compete with Outlook. Plus on top of that, the iPhone is displacing Windows Mobile devices, and Apple stripping DRM from iTunes is going to all but kill WMA.
It's not horribly obvious, but Apple is really hitting Microsoft where it hurts. If they can take even a small percent of the Exchange market, it'll be a huge deal.
Jobs while "great" is still a double edged sword for Apple.
I don't really see it. What's the other edge of that "double edge sword"?
Supposedly Jobs can be a bit of an a-hole sometimes, but it doesn't seem to hamper Apple's success. There are only a handful of things that I think Apple should do differently-- like including a mid-range mini-tower in their lineup to fill the gap between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro.
If anything, taking away peoples' right to CHOOSE ethical behaviour
I can tell you're trying to get heavy here, but no one can take away your right to choose ethical behavior. All anyone can do is make that choice difficult.
What I'm saying is that there's nothing unethical about you deciding to encrypt data that you theoretically "own", nor is it unethical to control the situations under which it can be unencrypted. What's unethical is using supposed "copyright protection" schemes to prevent people from accessing media which they own.
If it's not your data, then the owner doesn't have any ethical obligation to provide access to you other than whatever you've agreed to and paid for. If you've actually purchased a song and supposedly "own" that copy (whatever that means), then labels shouldn't be trying to make it non-functional to force you to buy more copies.
Yes, it's very common for cell phones to support AACs too.
For anyone who doesn't know, AAC was basically developed by the same group that developed MP3, and it was developed as a replacement for MP3.
Now it's a little more confusing than MP3s because AAC files vary a little. They might have any one of a number of extensions, including AAC, MP4, M4A, or 3GP. AACs with some of these extensions may be effectively identical, or they might be very different. Not all players can play all varieties of AACs.
It's a bit confusing, but none the less, it's worth noting that many players can play AACs from iTunes, provided they don't have DRM. So Apple getting the labels to agree to sell all audio without DRM is a very good thing.
I've never carried two at a time so I could swap one when it was dead.
And even if you had been in the habit of swapping batteries, maybe you wouldn't need to anymore. Assuming this battery gives anywhere close to the 8 hour advertised charge, that's a pretty long time to be able to go without power.
Then it seems to me that you object to the concept of digital "rentals" at all, and only believe in purchases.
To me, there's a big difference. Whatever your ethical objection to DRM is, it seems to me it should only hold for someone else applying DRM to data that you own (whether you created it or purchased it). Someone else applying DRM to a copy that they themselves own should be their own prerogative, however smart or stupid the decision might be.
Since I don't believe myself to own the movies I "rent", I don't really see the objection.
Meh. People will probably still whine about Apple's evil proprietary AAC format, which actually isn't Apple's format (hint: AAC doesn't stand for Apple Audio Codec). And they're whine (correctly) about iTunes TV shows having DRM, Apple keeping tight control of iPhone application distribution, etc.
So about the same as usual-- a mix of valid and stupid complaints.
No mention of it, but most likely the same DRM as there ever was. Certainly you can't blame them for the movie *rentals* having DRM, but putting DRM on the purchases is a little annoying. I wish they had TV rentals that were cheaper than "buying" them.
What about my current iTunes song library?
The last time I checked, there was a $0.30/song, $3.00/album upgrade fee to strip the DRM and increase the bit rate to 256kbps. The last time I checked was about 10 minutes ago. However, when I went to purchase some of those upgrades, I got an error message that I couldn't buy them because the price had changed, and it wouldn't give me any more details. So maybe it will end being free?
I think the last time I upgraded a song to "iTunes plus" or whatever they call it, they gave an option to simply replace the songs, keeping old metadata. I might be remembering incorrectly, though.
I agree. I am actually of the opinion that the setup you describe constitutes a "bad security practice". Changing every 30 days with two weeks notice essentially brings your window down to 2 weeks, and worse still, I bet they have some kind of rule that doesn't let you use any of your last 15 passwords (maybe not 15, but... whatever).
My solution to too many passwords is to keep them all listed in an encrypted file. That way I only really have to remember the password to the encrypted file, and if I use any of the other passwords regularly, I remember those too. Other people have systems where their passwords follow a pattern. Like they have a strong 8 character password that they have memorized, and they add certain characters depending on the situation. That way, you only have to remember what characters you added where in order to remember the password.
But really, if nothing else, they should just extend that 30 day window (assuming there's not a specific reason for it to be 30 days). If a password is really strong, it should take more than a year to break it with brute force. If the password can be broken some other way, then there's a good chance it can be broken in less than 30 days.
I would say that you are discribing yourself as the boss from 9 to 5
Er... I don't know what that means, but I never said work has to suck. People can still play CDs on their computers, or they can use their iPods, plug their iPods into their speakers, or whatever. Hell, we even have a few game consoles hooked up to a TV in the office.
The point is that your computer is dedicated for work purposes, and anything that interferes with that computer's proper functioning has to go away. People filling their drives with MP3s interferes with the computer's proper functioning.
But anyway, if people still hate coming to work, that's really not my problem. It's not an issue of whether I want them to like coming to work or my company wants them to like coming to work-- it's simply that it's not my problem. They're being paid to come to work, and if the conditions are unbearable and they don't want to show up anymore, they can quit. In spite of that, I try to be friendly.
Think about a bank, for example. Protecting against bank robberies is one kind of security problem, but it's not really the hardest thing to do. You put things in a vault, lock the vault, install an alarm, hire security guards, etc.
What are you talking about? Protecting against bank robberies is nearly impossible these days (here in the USA), and it's ridiculously easy to rob a bank.
If it's easy to rob a bank, it's because their security practices aren't good-- or perhaps aren't designed to stop robberies. In your example, the banks have instituted security policies that are focused on preserving human life, and not securing the money. The idea is that people are less likely to get killed if you give a robber what he wants. They don't care very much about securing the money because, as you said, it's all insured anyway.
I copy a file to a network share, access it randomly from someone's PC that got left unlocked, copy it to a USB stick... it's worse than no evidence, it's incorrect evidence.
That's not incorrect evidence, it's just limited evidence. If you access it from someone else's unlocked computer, then all I know is that it was accessed from that person's computer. Someone who knows what they're doing will know that's the end of the audit trail, and that the information is limited.
I'm not saying that there aren't interesting aspects of security that are different for computer/network security, but in a lot of ways, it's not much different. Lots of the same principles apply.
I know what you're talking about, but as an admin I have to say it: the appropriate place is probably closer to "locked down completely" than "access to everything". That the following issue:
Most people are going to respect "Music must be ripped using THIS easy to use software so that we can secure against viruses." a lot more than "Music is not allowed in our company".
Honestly, my problem with people ripping music has never been viruses. Most people just use WMP or iTunes anyhow, so viruses aren't really the issue. The problem I've run into with ripping music in the past is that I get the complaint, "my computer isn't working," and when I check out the situation, the hard drive is full of music. Literally full. I've seen a single person fill up several hundred gigabytes because they insisted on ripping wave files because "MP3s don't sound good to me."
So you might think that I should just clear off music in those rare cases it becomes an issue, but there are a couple problems with that. First, it's not that rare. Second, it ends up being a big waste of my time.
If the rule is "you're allowed to put music on your computer," then people are going to keep copies of music on that computer without a backup. It always happens that people don't back things up. So that put me on the hook to support that usage. Whenever I re-image a machine, I have to copy their music library too. When their hard drive goes bad, people are going to ask me to recover those files. When their hard drive fills up, they're going to expect me to come up with a solution that allows them to keep their entire music library. Even if I specifically say ahead of time that I won't do those things, people will expect it. When I don't do it, I then have to deal with the politics of someone being pissed off at me.
So what I do is make the policy that you can't rip music to your hard drive, and if I see it, I'll delete it. I don't bother looking for it, because that would also be a big waste of my time, and honestly if I see it, I might just let it go. But I make a habit of explaining that, if I see it, I'll delete it, and every now and then I actually delete someone's library (usually after that person's computer is malfunctioning due to the music).
It's really just an issue of managing expectations. If you think I'm going to delete it, then you'll try not to make it my problem. If I specifically allow it, then I effectively have to support it.
That might be true, but regardless it has always been true that employees have been one of the big security risks for businesses. In one way of dividing things up, security basically falls into two categories: denying access to people who shouldn't have access and preventing those who have access from abusing their access.
Think about a bank, for example. Protecting against bank robberies is one kind of security problem, but it's not really the hardest thing to do. You put things in a vault, lock the vault, install an alarm, hire security guards, etc. The trickier issue is that you have all these employees with access to the money, and if there are no security measures, it wouldn't be hard for a teller to pocket a hundred dollars every now and then. So banks have procedures where the tellers have to do account for the money in their drawers at the end of the day (or whatever the particular procedure is).
So computer security isn't really much different. Instead of vaults and locks and security guards, we have encryption and firewalls and antiviruses. Protecting against external threats isn't really that hard a lot of the time. Most of the time, the biggest dangers are either directly or indirectly from employees. It's a very tricky security issue to deal with, since you can't "plug the hole"-- employees are *supposed* to have access.
And when I talk about dangers that come "indirectly from employees", I mean that they might be the source of a breach even if they aren't themselves criminal or dishonest. I've heard hackers say that often social engineering (i.e. getting an authorized employee to give you access) is easier than actually exploiting any security holes.
Besides the danger of purposeful social engineering attacks, employee carelessness can also leave you exposed. People often choose bad passwords in spite of good password policies, i.e. just because you make them use a 10 character combination of letters/numbers/symbols doesn't mean they won't choose a password that's easy to guess (Passw0rd!!). Also people do things like access a secure webpage in an Internet cafe computer (which might have keyloggers installed for all anyone knows) and then walk out without closing or logging out, or put highly sensitive data on a usb stick and lose it somewhere. Sometimes employees even go through a lot of trouble to pierce their company's security (for example, in order to get Kazaa working inside the firewall) and effectively open a hole to potential hackers, too.
So overall, yes, employees are a big potential danger to securing your data. A criminally inclined employee can cause lots of damage, but so can a careless one.
Allowing infinite regenerations could easily be done without breaking continuity
I read a quote somewhere where Steven Moffat (who I think is now the head writer or executive producer or something) said something to the extent of (this isn't a word-for-word quote), "It's impossible to break continuity when you're writing a story about a time-traveling alien. You can always explain that there was a change in the timeline, or a fluctuation in space-time."
I'm sure he was joking to some extent, but it's a pretty good point. Even if they want to break continuity, they can always do that without really breaking continuity.
I don't think that the experimentation is what causes people to make fun. It's more the fact that Microsoft kept it around for 10 years, in spite of overwhelming negative reactions. It's as if someone at Microsoft was just determined to force Clippy on their customers.
Like someone says in the comments, Clippy has been around since Office 98.
Was there an Office 98? I thought there was only an Outlook 98, which may have been the introduction of Clippy, but I thought Clippy was around in 97. I do remember upgrading someone to Outlook 98 and them getting annoyed at clippy, which does make me think that either the feature was introduced in Outlook 98, or else it was turned on by default and made more difficult to turn off.
That is normal (using your number there will be 10 servers crashing every 20 seconds every day of the year) but those 10 people will think it 'an awfully unlikely coincidence', while the other 15379200 server crashes during a year are ignored.
Yes, this is a much-misunderstood issue with statistics. Just because something is unlikely doesn't mean that it won't happen. Just because two things are unlikely to happen together doesn't mean it's more than a coincidence when they do happen together. Unlikely things just happen. They happen often. You just can't figure out which unlikely thing is going to happen when.
So anyway, why would it crash 20 seconds before midnight? It seems to me like that makes it less likely to be causal, since a computer probably wouldn't anticipate a leap second 20 in the future and decide to crash ahead of time. I guess it's possible...
Yeah, remember when there were tons of websites that would refuse to display, only giving you the message, "Please upgrade to IE 5.5" (or whatever)? The wouldn't even render improperly, they'd just refuse to display at all.
It won't make any PST file? Like go to "File>New>Outlook Data File". If it won't let you create one where the original archive was, then create it with another name, close Outlook, rename the file to the right name, and then restart Outlook.
Another option is that you might be able to go into your mail preferences and tell outlook not to try opening the file. The mail preferences should have its own icon in the Control Panel, of if Outlook appears at the top of your Start menu, then you should be able to right-click on it and select something like "Properties" (sorry I don't remember what everything is called, but I'm on a Mac right now and can't check).
So in the Mail settings, there should be some kind of subsection about "data files". You can look there to see if you can just remove your archive.
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Right. The old "war is good for the economy" line is more of an example of the broken window fallacy. Or rather, there's some kind of fallacy floating out there-- and I'm not sure whether it could be considered a "broken window fallacy"-- that "it doesn't matter what the economic activity is; any activity is good activity." That's the mindset that gets us into wars, or convinces people that borrowing money we don't have to buy crap we don't need is "good for the economy".
Building necessary infrastructure is a good counter-example to the broken window fallacy. Value is added into the system and good infrastructure actually improves economic conditions. It encourages investment, stabilizes operations, and allows businesses to operate more efficiently.
That's not to say we should build useless infrastructure for the sake of economic activity. The "bridge to nowhere" wouldn't provide value, and therefore it could be argued that it's an example of the broken-window fallacy. But ubiquitous broadband Internet (with speeds on the scale of FiOS, not just DSL), is something we need in order to stay economically competitive with the rest of the world.
Oh, that makes sense. Thanks.
you ONLY format those cards and re-use them after the job is complete. before then, a minimum of 2 copies of the data must be kept.
That seems... fine, I guess. But it's not really necessary to keep data on the card for such a long time in order to have multiple copies. Haven't you heard of "backing up your computer"?
Why does everybody think that Apple wants to deal with Enterprise issues?
First, there's a lot of money in it. Anytime there's a lot of money in a market, it's reasonable to assume that major players will want a piece of it if they can get it without too much investment.
Second, Apple has been working on the components to make a competitor to Exchange. It's been piece-by-piece so you might not have noticed, but Snow Leopard server will have a calendaring server, mail server, and directory server built in, presumably with good web access (since they've been building web apps for MobileMe and iWork.com lately).
So iWork is being built to compete with Office, Leopard server is becoming competitive with Windows/Exchange server, and Mail/iCal/Address Book are being set up to compete with Outlook. Plus on top of that, the iPhone is displacing Windows Mobile devices, and Apple stripping DRM from iTunes is going to all but kill WMA.
It's not horribly obvious, but Apple is really hitting Microsoft where it hurts. If they can take even a small percent of the Exchange market, it'll be a huge deal.
Jobs while "great" is still a double edged sword for Apple.
I don't really see it. What's the other edge of that "double edge sword"?
Supposedly Jobs can be a bit of an a-hole sometimes, but it doesn't seem to hamper Apple's success. There are only a handful of things that I think Apple should do differently-- like including a mid-range mini-tower in their lineup to fill the gap between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro.
If anything, taking away peoples' right to CHOOSE ethical behaviour
I can tell you're trying to get heavy here, but no one can take away your right to choose ethical behavior. All anyone can do is make that choice difficult.
What I'm saying is that there's nothing unethical about you deciding to encrypt data that you theoretically "own", nor is it unethical to control the situations under which it can be unencrypted. What's unethical is using supposed "copyright protection" schemes to prevent people from accessing media which they own.
If it's not your data, then the owner doesn't have any ethical obligation to provide access to you other than whatever you've agreed to and paid for. If you've actually purchased a song and supposedly "own" that copy (whatever that means), then labels shouldn't be trying to make it non-functional to force you to buy more copies.
Yes, it's very common for cell phones to support AACs too.
For anyone who doesn't know, AAC was basically developed by the same group that developed MP3, and it was developed as a replacement for MP3.
Now it's a little more confusing than MP3s because AAC files vary a little. They might have any one of a number of extensions, including AAC, MP4, M4A, or 3GP. AACs with some of these extensions may be effectively identical, or they might be very different. Not all players can play all varieties of AACs.
It's a bit confusing, but none the less, it's worth noting that many players can play AACs from iTunes, provided they don't have DRM. So Apple getting the labels to agree to sell all audio without DRM is a very good thing.
I've never carried two at a time so I could swap one when it was dead.
And even if you had been in the habit of swapping batteries, maybe you wouldn't need to anymore. Assuming this battery gives anywhere close to the 8 hour advertised charge, that's a pretty long time to be able to go without power.
Then it seems to me that you object to the concept of digital "rentals" at all, and only believe in purchases.
To me, there's a big difference. Whatever your ethical objection to DRM is, it seems to me it should only hold for someone else applying DRM to data that you own (whether you created it or purchased it). Someone else applying DRM to a copy that they themselves own should be their own prerogative, however smart or stupid the decision might be.
Since I don't believe myself to own the movies I "rent", I don't really see the objection.
Yes, just $0.30 per song to get rid of the crap that we forced on you in the first place. Awful.
Also to double the bit rate. I'm not saying it's a great deal, but theoretically it's not just to get rid of the DRM.
Meh. People will probably still whine about Apple's evil proprietary AAC format, which actually isn't Apple's format (hint: AAC doesn't stand for Apple Audio Codec). And they're whine (correctly) about iTunes TV shows having DRM, Apple keeping tight control of iPhone application distribution, etc.
So about the same as usual-- a mix of valid and stupid complaints.
What about TV show and movie purchases?
No mention of it, but most likely the same DRM as there ever was. Certainly you can't blame them for the movie *rentals* having DRM, but putting DRM on the purchases is a little annoying. I wish they had TV rentals that were cheaper than "buying" them.
What about my current iTunes song library?
The last time I checked, there was a $0.30/song, $3.00/album upgrade fee to strip the DRM and increase the bit rate to 256kbps. The last time I checked was about 10 minutes ago. However, when I went to purchase some of those upgrades, I got an error message that I couldn't buy them because the price had changed, and it wouldn't give me any more details. So maybe it will end being free?
I think the last time I upgraded a song to "iTunes plus" or whatever they call it, they gave an option to simply replace the songs, keeping old metadata. I might be remembering incorrectly, though.
I agree. I am actually of the opinion that the setup you describe constitutes a "bad security practice". Changing every 30 days with two weeks notice essentially brings your window down to 2 weeks, and worse still, I bet they have some kind of rule that doesn't let you use any of your last 15 passwords (maybe not 15, but... whatever).
My solution to too many passwords is to keep them all listed in an encrypted file. That way I only really have to remember the password to the encrypted file, and if I use any of the other passwords regularly, I remember those too. Other people have systems where their passwords follow a pattern. Like they have a strong 8 character password that they have memorized, and they add certain characters depending on the situation. That way, you only have to remember what characters you added where in order to remember the password.
But really, if nothing else, they should just extend that 30 day window (assuming there's not a specific reason for it to be 30 days). If a password is really strong, it should take more than a year to break it with brute force. If the password can be broken some other way, then there's a good chance it can be broken in less than 30 days.
I would say that you are discribing yourself as the boss from 9 to 5
Er... I don't know what that means, but I never said work has to suck. People can still play CDs on their computers, or they can use their iPods, plug their iPods into their speakers, or whatever. Hell, we even have a few game consoles hooked up to a TV in the office.
The point is that your computer is dedicated for work purposes, and anything that interferes with that computer's proper functioning has to go away. People filling their drives with MP3s interferes with the computer's proper functioning.
But anyway, if people still hate coming to work, that's really not my problem. It's not an issue of whether I want them to like coming to work or my company wants them to like coming to work-- it's simply that it's not my problem. They're being paid to come to work, and if the conditions are unbearable and they don't want to show up anymore, they can quit. In spite of that, I try to be friendly.
Think about a bank, for example. Protecting against bank robberies is one kind of security problem, but it's not really the hardest thing to do. You put things in a vault, lock the vault, install an alarm, hire security guards, etc.
What are you talking about? Protecting against bank robberies is nearly impossible these days (here in the USA), and it's ridiculously easy to rob a bank.
If it's easy to rob a bank, it's because their security practices aren't good-- or perhaps aren't designed to stop robberies. In your example, the banks have instituted security policies that are focused on preserving human life, and not securing the money. The idea is that people are less likely to get killed if you give a robber what he wants. They don't care very much about securing the money because, as you said, it's all insured anyway.
I copy a file to a network share, access it randomly from someone's PC that got left unlocked, copy it to a USB stick... it's worse than no evidence, it's incorrect evidence.
That's not incorrect evidence, it's just limited evidence. If you access it from someone else's unlocked computer, then all I know is that it was accessed from that person's computer. Someone who knows what they're doing will know that's the end of the audit trail, and that the information is limited.
I'm not saying that there aren't interesting aspects of security that are different for computer/network security, but in a lot of ways, it's not much different. Lots of the same principles apply.
I know what you're talking about, but as an admin I have to say it: the appropriate place is probably closer to "locked down completely" than "access to everything". That the following issue:
Most people are going to respect "Music must be ripped using THIS easy to use software so that we can secure against viruses." a lot more than "Music is not allowed in our company".
Honestly, my problem with people ripping music has never been viruses. Most people just use WMP or iTunes anyhow, so viruses aren't really the issue. The problem I've run into with ripping music in the past is that I get the complaint, "my computer isn't working," and when I check out the situation, the hard drive is full of music. Literally full. I've seen a single person fill up several hundred gigabytes because they insisted on ripping wave files because "MP3s don't sound good to me."
So you might think that I should just clear off music in those rare cases it becomes an issue, but there are a couple problems with that. First, it's not that rare. Second, it ends up being a big waste of my time.
If the rule is "you're allowed to put music on your computer," then people are going to keep copies of music on that computer without a backup. It always happens that people don't back things up. So that put me on the hook to support that usage. Whenever I re-image a machine, I have to copy their music library too. When their hard drive goes bad, people are going to ask me to recover those files. When their hard drive fills up, they're going to expect me to come up with a solution that allows them to keep their entire music library. Even if I specifically say ahead of time that I won't do those things, people will expect it. When I don't do it, I then have to deal with the politics of someone being pissed off at me.
So what I do is make the policy that you can't rip music to your hard drive, and if I see it, I'll delete it. I don't bother looking for it, because that would also be a big waste of my time, and honestly if I see it, I might just let it go. But I make a habit of explaining that, if I see it, I'll delete it, and every now and then I actually delete someone's library (usually after that person's computer is malfunctioning due to the music).
It's really just an issue of managing expectations. If you think I'm going to delete it, then you'll try not to make it my problem. If I specifically allow it, then I effectively have to support it.
That might be true, but regardless it has always been true that employees have been one of the big security risks for businesses. In one way of dividing things up, security basically falls into two categories: denying access to people who shouldn't have access and preventing those who have access from abusing their access.
Think about a bank, for example. Protecting against bank robberies is one kind of security problem, but it's not really the hardest thing to do. You put things in a vault, lock the vault, install an alarm, hire security guards, etc. The trickier issue is that you have all these employees with access to the money, and if there are no security measures, it wouldn't be hard for a teller to pocket a hundred dollars every now and then. So banks have procedures where the tellers have to do account for the money in their drawers at the end of the day (or whatever the particular procedure is).
So computer security isn't really much different. Instead of vaults and locks and security guards, we have encryption and firewalls and antiviruses. Protecting against external threats isn't really that hard a lot of the time. Most of the time, the biggest dangers are either directly or indirectly from employees. It's a very tricky security issue to deal with, since you can't "plug the hole"-- employees are *supposed* to have access.
And when I talk about dangers that come "indirectly from employees", I mean that they might be the source of a breach even if they aren't themselves criminal or dishonest. I've heard hackers say that often social engineering (i.e. getting an authorized employee to give you access) is easier than actually exploiting any security holes.
Besides the danger of purposeful social engineering attacks, employee carelessness can also leave you exposed. People often choose bad passwords in spite of good password policies, i.e. just because you make them use a 10 character combination of letters/numbers/symbols doesn't mean they won't choose a password that's easy to guess (Passw0rd!!). Also people do things like access a secure webpage in an Internet cafe computer (which might have keyloggers installed for all anyone knows) and then walk out without closing or logging out, or put highly sensitive data on a usb stick and lose it somewhere. Sometimes employees even go through a lot of trouble to pierce their company's security (for example, in order to get Kazaa working inside the firewall) and effectively open a hole to potential hackers, too.
So overall, yes, employees are a big potential danger to securing your data. A criminally inclined employee can cause lots of damage, but so can a careless one.
Allowing infinite regenerations could easily be done without breaking continuity
I read a quote somewhere where Steven Moffat (who I think is now the head writer or executive producer or something) said something to the extent of (this isn't a word-for-word quote), "It's impossible to break continuity when you're writing a story about a time-traveling alien. You can always explain that there was a change in the timeline, or a fluctuation in space-time."
I'm sure he was joking to some extent, but it's a pretty good point. Even if they want to break continuity, they can always do that without really breaking continuity.
I don't think that the experimentation is what causes people to make fun. It's more the fact that Microsoft kept it around for 10 years, in spite of overwhelming negative reactions. It's as if someone at Microsoft was just determined to force Clippy on their customers.
Like someone says in the comments, Clippy has been around since Office 98.
Was there an Office 98? I thought there was only an Outlook 98, which may have been the introduction of Clippy, but I thought Clippy was around in 97. I do remember upgrading someone to Outlook 98 and them getting annoyed at clippy, which does make me think that either the feature was introduced in Outlook 98, or else it was turned on by default and made more difficult to turn off.
That is normal (using your number there will be 10 servers crashing every 20 seconds every day of the year) but those 10 people will think it 'an awfully unlikely coincidence', while the other 15379200 server crashes during a year are ignored.
Yes, this is a much-misunderstood issue with statistics. Just because something is unlikely doesn't mean that it won't happen. Just because two things are unlikely to happen together doesn't mean it's more than a coincidence when they do happen together. Unlikely things just happen. They happen often. You just can't figure out which unlikely thing is going to happen when.
So anyway, why would it crash 20 seconds before midnight? It seems to me like that makes it less likely to be causal, since a computer probably wouldn't anticipate a leap second 20 in the future and decide to crash ahead of time. I guess it's possible...
Oh, it might say that, but it still works. You can still access Hotmail with Safari.
I was talking about normal static webpages (not even a web application, just a static page) that would refuse to display at all except in IE.
Yeah, remember when there were tons of websites that would refuse to display, only giving you the message, "Please upgrade to IE 5.5" (or whatever)? The wouldn't even render improperly, they'd just refuse to display at all.
Can you imagine major sites doing that now?
It won't make any PST file? Like go to "File>New>Outlook Data File". If it won't let you create one where the original archive was, then create it with another name, close Outlook, rename the file to the right name, and then restart Outlook.
Another option is that you might be able to go into your mail preferences and tell outlook not to try opening the file. The mail preferences should have its own icon in the Control Panel, of if Outlook appears at the top of your Start menu, then you should be able to right-click on it and select something like "Properties" (sorry I don't remember what everything is called, but I'm on a Mac right now and can't check).
So in the Mail settings, there should be some kind of subsection about "data files". You can look there to see if you can just remove your archive.