From the money they hope to save in providing books on the long term I guess. At $50-150 (or more once you get to college) per book these costs really add up. I believe the current average textbook expenses in the US is somewhere near $1000/student/year and you have to take into account that in that number, many rent or buy second hand books and many more simply can't afford the books (like in my city school district where nobody has textbooks). Add to that the gigantic logistics cost of tons (literally) of books that have to be printed, transported, distributed and at the end of the year picked up, transported and recycled (as they are usually useless the next year).
Hopefully they haven't locked themselves in again with certain publishers so teachers can just go ahead and give them a link from Apple's or Amazon's e-book store ($5-15 for a decent math book).
the problem has been solved yet not been implemented widely. It's called ENUM and freely available and open. No need for proprietary XConnect stuff to implement this functionality, it's based off DNS and thus already has a widely available penetration. All people (and large corporations) need to do is actually use it.
Statistics can be made to show anything, managerial and C-level executives have to be more responsible and in the end it's cheaper to just let the customers eat the costs of bad security rather than fail trying to do something about it.
The main problem imho is that there are no real punishments when something goes bad. If somebody gets hacked the old adage of "it's happening more often throughout the industry" is used to redirect the blame from the gatekeepers to the attackers. If somebody doesn't get hacked while the competition is, the executives get praised even though they might not have done anything meaningful. Back in the day when castles (security products) were used to protect a lord (the data or the company) and the gatekeeper (managers and sysadmins) didn't do their job, the gatekeeper would get flogged, stripped naked and/or executed. The soldiers didn't blame someone else when somebody invaded their castle and they didn't pat themselves on the back as 'doing a good job' when the neighboring castles were ransacked.
Security procedures have nothing to do with the rest of the industry. Most likely they're unique to your company and structure, and one time, you're going to be up for a targeted attack and you should be ready at all times.
Of course I don't know what peculiarities were in his golden parachute contract as far as how long he couldn't work for the/any competition but I doubt he didn't talk this over with some corporate lawyers at least.
In any case, if they don't like him bringing his ass(ets) over to another company, they should've kept him. Nothing much they can do about it now unless he's still under contract.
One of the reasons is indeed the Oracle DBA's not knowing anything else. But SQL Server is not the end-all of database solutions. I would classify it under Oracle and PostgreSQL. It's not only ridiculously expensive once you get to have more than one SQL Server machine or if you have a bunch of clients connecting to it but the licensing model is atrocious (you'll need a lawyer to figure out what it means) and once it goes towards maxing out your resources it collapses horribly onto itself (in part also because of the Windows underlying platform). It's easy to work with if you have a mediocre DBA or a mixed group of junior and senior DBA's but a well-maintained Oracle will beat the crap out of SQL Server and require less human resources.
There are a lot more refined telescopes out there now in all kinds of spectra and levels. There have been some amazing advances in optics and processing power to combine images since the early 20th century. What used to be a faint dot can now be resolved into something much better.
There is nothing strange about them and experts in astronomy and physics theory are just looking at it and trying to explain what happens based on our (limited) knowledge of physics and relativity. The more we look the more questions are being unearthed, the more stuff gets 'weird' and the more theories are brought to prove/disprove.
No the external security analysts (Sophos, the seller of antivirus software) says: with a good antivirus *cough*buy Sophos AV*/cough* and centrally managed policies *cough*buy Sophos Enterprise*/cough* you can't have this simple attack entering your Windows workstations. They are probably right.
The DoD says, somebody put a USB stick in his computer and this was the result. They are probably also right.
What you can conclude out of those passages is that the DoD probably doesn't have Sophos Antivirus;-) What a good sysadmin would conclude is that the DoD uses Windows for sensitive stuff, probably doesn't have an antivirus on their Windows machines and probably doesn't bother binding their systems to a central directory or if it is, it is only for central usernames and passwords, not for managing and locking down the computers. Some junior sysadmin probably tried once and then got yelled at because the grunts/management couldn't 'download the Internet' without 'entering my login' and this was very inconvenient and 'making them lose days worth of work' trying to figure out 'to install this program that plays this video - why am I not an administrator on my computer? It's MY computer, it says so right on the icon'
Given that the attack worked the way it did makes me think (as I have seen a lot in the last decade that I worked in the field) that all the military really needs is some logs showing where the thing was sending data and it gets a pretty solid idea of what's going on didn't work because they didn't have any logs to begin with. They might have incoming logs (maybe) on the blocked ports of the firewalls (as is the standard in many a firewall) but legitimate incoming, all outgoing and all established traffic probably isn't logged.
A couple of months ago there was a declassified document (either on/. or Wikileaks) that was basically a CIA/War Department handbook for (civilian) saboteurs against an oppressive regime. If you read this, you can see a lot of the practices that are recommended to be used against the 'enemy' are exactly the same as those contractors use. The goal is to have the enemy (or the company you're contracted to) spend as much money as possible on lost time and resources. The only difference is the people/group that profits from it.
I've been a contractor before for some of those contracting companies - they basically try to keep you as long as possible in a position even if it's totally unnecessary since they get paid ~80%-120% of your (before-tax) wages.
HTML5 depends on your browser actually. I have a Nokia N800 and I could've told you years ago that Flash on mobile devices sucks badly. HTML5 on the Mobile Firefox platform also sucks somewhat (but not as bad as Flash) but if you get a WebKit browser, it works quite spiffy for an older mobile processor.
You do not know not every Judeo-Christian religion has the (same) concepts of heaven, hell and 'judgment' don't you? Afaik none of the Holy Books (Bible, Koran) speaks about going to the Catholic heaven (all people end up there eventually) or depicts a fiery hell (tormented in fire until you're pure enough to go to heaven) as a literal place.
The problem with either is and always will be content. AppleTV and GoogleTV would do better with 2 or 3 tuners and a recording function (eg. a simple-to-use, generic hardware DVR) but it won't - just like TiVo this would open them to a lot of hurt from content providers (suing because you can skip their ads) and patent semi-trolls (orcs?) like TiVo.
I'm glad AppleTV gets Netflix which might make it interesting since it's a cheap box but 0.99 per show is still quite steep and 4.99 for HD rentals is very badly priced if you can go to a RedBox and get one for $1/day. However Apple (and Google in the future) will have their nuts clamped for at least the near future by the content providers who won't budge very much on prices just to keep the cable networks alive. Warner but also a bunch of others have too much interest in the waste of bandwidth that cable-tv is. IPTV (by anyone, Google or Apple) in the US would be a great step forwards for the customers (and the economy) but our dear ol' buggy whip makers won't allow it.
That company is not truly open source. The only thing they do distribute is VTK (which is only a library under a BSD license) but programs that are actually useful without being a programmer (as most researchers that use this stuff are not programmers) are under a more restrictive license. It's similar to saying Mac OS X is open source because the kernel is open or Windows is open source because BIND and the TCP stack is derived from BSD. They use the open source label to get the community to fix their problems on some of their other stuff but the non-commercial releases are fairly unstable or plain useless.
Sad, but true. I sometimes get scared when I see what runs on a networked Windows (XP). Neonatal monitors, respiration controllers, fMRI consoles, oscilloscopes, websites... The problem with most of these things is that they never can get updated to the latest service packs (and thus all run without Service Pack or Service Pack 1) or have any other software (like virus scanners) installed because that would void the warranty/FDA approval/application support.
It also depends on what you drink. Liquor (spirits) and wine seem to help, beer not so much. The problem with that is that there are too much differences between what they drink. Beer for example has some very good breweries (artisan) but there are also those that are utter crap (Bud) which put chemicals in their beer to make it taste different (Lime-flavors etc.) or makes the taste stronger or have a longer shelf-life. I can drink moderately a good beer and have little effects, but the others will task my liver even more.
The same goes for wine. Many good wines but also many wines that put sulfur in their wine to expand the volume or again, flavor it somehow with chemicals. If you get drunk off wine you shouldn't get a hangover but bad wines will give you major headaches.
Liquor the same thing - get a good whisky or wodka, no problem. Get some of that mixed-drink crap that Smirnoff tries to pass as wodka (or is it rum) and you'll be hanging over the sh*tter for a day.
I don't know how much and what type of radiation they get but both Buzz and Neil have been there in '60's technology (shielding or health risks were none of their concerns) and are still kicking around at 80 years of age - if anything, I would say it helped? The rest of the moonwalkers seem to be doing pretty good too with only a couple of them dying seemingly of natural causes. If those were real risks, wouldn't they all have cancer or died of cancer by now?
Why? If it happens to you, you actively provide those people with that information. It's basically walking around in the mall and giving everybody a list of what you looked at before - there's always going to be sales people using that to provide you with 'interesting' sales.
What you need to do is turn off 3rd party cookies or turn off cookies all by itself. There are plenty of ways to do that and all browsers (except maybe IE) come with the defaults set to not accept 3rd party cookies.
It makes me feel sad that there are about 250M miseducated people roaming this world and they're not in a typical 3rd world country, they're what some people would called an advanced world power. That's a serious problem in education brought by socialized nationalism.
BTW: North America (what US-ians call America) also includes Canada and Alaska, Canada being a territory of the British and Alaska until the '50's being a territory of the US and in the 1800's being a part of Russia.
I think for a board game it should be quite simple. The pieces can be made conductive so that when you touch the piece, it detects you are touching a piece, they do make styluses for capacitive touch screens. If you're say, playing chess, you place the pieces in a starting position that is quite universal. From there on, all you have to do is detect the touches (from where to where) and you'll be able to 'know' where each piece is at any given point in time.
... and that's the reason why BIOS 'virus protection' blocks access to that portion of the hard drive. Too bad that DRM breaks everything once again and too bad the mainstream of users isn't affected by it.
This is Eastman Kodak you're talking about. I know a lot of people that worked there. It wasn't until the company was nearly bankrupt that the leadership saw that the management level wasn't doing a good job and laid off virtually all of middle-management (but sadly nearly all of their workers and a lot of engineering and r&d talent). Their mismanagement was so bad that quite some ex-Kodak managers can't find a management job in the area with that on their resume even a decade later.
You're right though, they could've sold a system like that using solid-state memory or faster drives which were available back then and sold it to NASA or the military or something. With the knowledge of radio systems back then they could've made "instant image" spy planes without the need of tapes.
where every object has a list of children and explicit keywords to pass and share ownership, where the latter would cause automatic ref-counting pointers.
Try ObjectiveC. Works very similar to what you're describing. You have objects with their own memory control passing messages or objects with automatic reference counting and automatic (or manual if you're masochistic) cleanup once you're done.
I don't know if that's true. I know you probably can't redistribute the kernel with the CDDL bits but you can redistribute them separately (CDDL = Common Development and Distribution License). Then all you have to do is make sure that your software (or customer) installs the right bits and then you can get a pretty decent NAS box.
Besides the legal issues, I would love to see them tackle the technical issues. ZFS itself is very clean in code, very well documented and pretty simple once you get down to the wire. The issue (and selling point) is going to be performance and upkeep and for commercial implementations support. If the upkeep is going to be similar to BSD's implementation (several versions behind) or the performance as bad as FUSE, people are just going to stick to OpenSolaris (or one of it's commercially supported decendants like Nexenta).
Probably not the point the GP was trying to make, Microsoft DID shaft both DR-DOS and WordPerfect. You're probably not old enough to remember so let me explain for all them young folks here:
DR-DOS: Windows 3.1 was made incompatible with DR-DOS by using the AARD code. Once that bit was disabled (DR-DOS came with an option for that in it's installer later on) it would work perfectly.
WordPerfect: If you installed Microsoft Word on a computer (Windows 3 through '98), it would in some instances corrupt the WordPerfect installation making it unusable. There were also differences in the way Word worked vs. the API others (including WP) used which made Word work much faster. The reason we have such a difficult-to-implement Word format is one of the results of Microsoft's anti-competitive practices. The format kept changing for practically every version (without any openness about it) and WordPerfect couldn't keep up. WordPerfect also made a lot of mistakes but it's still widely used in some fields for some very good reasons.
After actually having implemented such a methods, it is noticed that nobody ever uses the classified network except for highly official stuff, when the project is done. It seems that all work in progress is just being saved on the non-classified network.
Trust me, I have implemented just about any security method in a variety of settings (medical, financial,...). The fact remains that people can't be bothered to lock their screens when they step out because it's "too difficult" and "too complicated" let alone click the button to encrypt their e-mail or their USB sticks.
Some sources have pointed towards the possibility of a keep-alive signal for the Dead Hand system. The station broadcasts a tone at a regular interval (kinda like a ping). The messages might be one-time pads for other purposes (change of nuclear codes etc.). The fact that there have only been a handful of messages might suggest that this might only be used for emergency procedures. The recent increase in messages might have to do with the current political situation in Iran vs. the USA (where Russia is providing the nuclear material) or other things that are currently happening in Russia. It might also have to do with a sleeper cell spy network or something similar.
Slashdot Mirror
From the money they hope to save in providing books on the long term I guess. At $50-150 (or more once you get to college) per book these costs really add up. I believe the current average textbook expenses in the US is somewhere near $1000/student/year and you have to take into account that in that number, many rent or buy second hand books and many more simply can't afford the books (like in my city school district where nobody has textbooks). Add to that the gigantic logistics cost of tons (literally) of books that have to be printed, transported, distributed and at the end of the year picked up, transported and recycled (as they are usually useless the next year).
Hopefully they haven't locked themselves in again with certain publishers so teachers can just go ahead and give them a link from Apple's or Amazon's e-book store ($5-15 for a decent math book).
the problem has been solved yet not been implemented widely. It's called ENUM and freely available and open. No need for proprietary XConnect stuff to implement this functionality, it's based off DNS and thus already has a widely available penetration. All people (and large corporations) need to do is actually use it.
Statistics can be made to show anything, managerial and C-level executives have to be more responsible and in the end it's cheaper to just let the customers eat the costs of bad security rather than fail trying to do something about it.
The main problem imho is that there are no real punishments when something goes bad. If somebody gets hacked the old adage of "it's happening more often throughout the industry" is used to redirect the blame from the gatekeepers to the attackers. If somebody doesn't get hacked while the competition is, the executives get praised even though they might not have done anything meaningful. Back in the day when castles (security products) were used to protect a lord (the data or the company) and the gatekeeper (managers and sysadmins) didn't do their job, the gatekeeper would get flogged, stripped naked and/or executed. The soldiers didn't blame someone else when somebody invaded their castle and they didn't pat themselves on the back as 'doing a good job' when the neighboring castles were ransacked.
Security procedures have nothing to do with the rest of the industry. Most likely they're unique to your company and structure, and one time, you're going to be up for a targeted attack and you should be ready at all times.
Of course I don't know what peculiarities were in his golden parachute contract as far as how long he couldn't work for the/any competition but I doubt he didn't talk this over with some corporate lawyers at least.
In any case, if they don't like him bringing his ass(ets) over to another company, they should've kept him. Nothing much they can do about it now unless he's still under contract.
One of the reasons is indeed the Oracle DBA's not knowing anything else. But SQL Server is not the end-all of database solutions. I would classify it under Oracle and PostgreSQL. It's not only ridiculously expensive once you get to have more than one SQL Server machine or if you have a bunch of clients connecting to it but the licensing model is atrocious (you'll need a lawyer to figure out what it means) and once it goes towards maxing out your resources it collapses horribly onto itself (in part also because of the Windows underlying platform). It's easy to work with if you have a mediocre DBA or a mixed group of junior and senior DBA's but a well-maintained Oracle will beat the crap out of SQL Server and require less human resources.
There are a lot more refined telescopes out there now in all kinds of spectra and levels. There have been some amazing advances in optics and processing power to combine images since the early 20th century. What used to be a faint dot can now be resolved into something much better.
There is nothing strange about them and experts in astronomy and physics theory are just looking at it and trying to explain what happens based on our (limited) knowledge of physics and relativity. The more we look the more questions are being unearthed, the more stuff gets 'weird' and the more theories are brought to prove/disprove.
No the external security analysts (Sophos, the seller of antivirus software) says: with a good antivirus *cough*buy Sophos AV*/cough* and centrally managed policies *cough*buy Sophos Enterprise*/cough* you can't have this simple attack entering your Windows workstations. They are probably right.
The DoD says, somebody put a USB stick in his computer and this was the result. They are probably also right.
What you can conclude out of those passages is that the DoD probably doesn't have Sophos Antivirus ;-) What a good sysadmin would conclude is that the DoD uses Windows for sensitive stuff, probably doesn't have an antivirus on their Windows machines and probably doesn't bother binding their systems to a central directory or if it is, it is only for central usernames and passwords, not for managing and locking down the computers. Some junior sysadmin probably tried once and then got yelled at because the grunts/management couldn't 'download the Internet' without 'entering my login' and this was very inconvenient and 'making them lose days worth of work' trying to figure out 'to install this program that plays this video - why am I not an administrator on my computer? It's MY computer, it says so right on the icon'
Given that the attack worked the way it did makes me think (as I have seen a lot in the last decade that I worked in the field) that all the military really needs is some logs showing where the thing was sending data and it gets a pretty solid idea of what's going on didn't work because they didn't have any logs to begin with. They might have incoming logs (maybe) on the blocked ports of the firewalls (as is the standard in many a firewall) but legitimate incoming, all outgoing and all established traffic probably isn't logged.
A couple of months ago there was a declassified document (either on /. or Wikileaks) that was basically a CIA/War Department handbook for (civilian) saboteurs against an oppressive regime. If you read this, you can see a lot of the practices that are recommended to be used against the 'enemy' are exactly the same as those contractors use. The goal is to have the enemy (or the company you're contracted to) spend as much money as possible on lost time and resources. The only difference is the people/group that profits from it.
I've been a contractor before for some of those contracting companies - they basically try to keep you as long as possible in a position even if it's totally unnecessary since they get paid ~80%-120% of your (before-tax) wages.
HTML5 depends on your browser actually. I have a Nokia N800 and I could've told you years ago that Flash on mobile devices sucks badly. HTML5 on the Mobile Firefox platform also sucks somewhat (but not as bad as Flash) but if you get a WebKit browser, it works quite spiffy for an older mobile processor.
You do not know not every Judeo-Christian religion has the (same) concepts of heaven, hell and 'judgment' don't you? Afaik none of the Holy Books (Bible, Koran) speaks about going to the Catholic heaven (all people end up there eventually) or depicts a fiery hell (tormented in fire until you're pure enough to go to heaven) as a literal place.
The problem with either is and always will be content. AppleTV and GoogleTV would do better with 2 or 3 tuners and a recording function (eg. a simple-to-use, generic hardware DVR) but it won't - just like TiVo this would open them to a lot of hurt from content providers (suing because you can skip their ads) and patent semi-trolls (orcs?) like TiVo.
I'm glad AppleTV gets Netflix which might make it interesting since it's a cheap box but 0.99 per show is still quite steep and 4.99 for HD rentals is very badly priced if you can go to a RedBox and get one for $1/day. However Apple (and Google in the future) will have their nuts clamped for at least the near future by the content providers who won't budge very much on prices just to keep the cable networks alive. Warner but also a bunch of others have too much interest in the waste of bandwidth that cable-tv is. IPTV (by anyone, Google or Apple) in the US would be a great step forwards for the customers (and the economy) but our dear ol' buggy whip makers won't allow it.
That company is not truly open source. The only thing they do distribute is VTK (which is only a library under a BSD license) but programs that are actually useful without being a programmer (as most researchers that use this stuff are not programmers) are under a more restrictive license. It's similar to saying Mac OS X is open source because the kernel is open or Windows is open source because BIND and the TCP stack is derived from BSD. They use the open source label to get the community to fix their problems on some of their other stuff but the non-commercial releases are fairly unstable or plain useless.
Sad, but true. I sometimes get scared when I see what runs on a networked Windows (XP). Neonatal monitors, respiration controllers, fMRI consoles, oscilloscopes, websites...
The problem with most of these things is that they never can get updated to the latest service packs (and thus all run without Service Pack or Service Pack 1) or have any other software (like virus scanners) installed because that would void the warranty/FDA approval/application support.
It also depends on what you drink. Liquor (spirits) and wine seem to help, beer not so much. The problem with that is that there are too much differences between what they drink. Beer for example has some very good breweries (artisan) but there are also those that are utter crap (Bud) which put chemicals in their beer to make it taste different (Lime-flavors etc.) or makes the taste stronger or have a longer shelf-life. I can drink moderately a good beer and have little effects, but the others will task my liver even more.
The same goes for wine. Many good wines but also many wines that put sulfur in their wine to expand the volume or again, flavor it somehow with chemicals. If you get drunk off wine you shouldn't get a hangover but bad wines will give you major headaches.
Liquor the same thing - get a good whisky or wodka, no problem. Get some of that mixed-drink crap that Smirnoff tries to pass as wodka (or is it rum) and you'll be hanging over the sh*tter for a day.
I don't know how much and what type of radiation they get but both Buzz and Neil have been there in '60's technology (shielding or health risks were none of their concerns) and are still kicking around at 80 years of age - if anything, I would say it helped? The rest of the moonwalkers seem to be doing pretty good too with only a couple of them dying seemingly of natural causes. If those were real risks, wouldn't they all have cancer or died of cancer by now?
Why? If it happens to you, you actively provide those people with that information. It's basically walking around in the mall and giving everybody a list of what you looked at before - there's always going to be sales people using that to provide you with 'interesting' sales.
What you need to do is turn off 3rd party cookies or turn off cookies all by itself. There are plenty of ways to do that and all browsers (except maybe IE) come with the defaults set to not accept 3rd party cookies.
It makes me feel sad that there are about 250M miseducated people roaming this world and they're not in a typical 3rd world country, they're what some people would called an advanced world power. That's a serious problem in education brought by socialized nationalism.
BTW: North America (what US-ians call America) also includes Canada and Alaska, Canada being a territory of the British and Alaska until the '50's being a territory of the US and in the 1800's being a part of Russia.
I think for a board game it should be quite simple. The pieces can be made conductive so that when you touch the piece, it detects you are touching a piece, they do make styluses for capacitive touch screens. If you're say, playing chess, you place the pieces in a starting position that is quite universal. From there on, all you have to do is detect the touches (from where to where) and you'll be able to 'know' where each piece is at any given point in time.
... and that's the reason why BIOS 'virus protection' blocks access to that portion of the hard drive. Too bad that DRM breaks everything once again and too bad the mainstream of users isn't affected by it.
This is Eastman Kodak you're talking about. I know a lot of people that worked there. It wasn't until the company was nearly bankrupt that the leadership saw that the management level wasn't doing a good job and laid off virtually all of middle-management (but sadly nearly all of their workers and a lot of engineering and r&d talent). Their mismanagement was so bad that quite some ex-Kodak managers can't find a management job in the area with that on their resume even a decade later.
You're right though, they could've sold a system like that using solid-state memory or faster drives which were available back then and sold it to NASA or the military or something. With the knowledge of radio systems back then they could've made "instant image" spy planes without the need of tapes.
where every object has a list of children and explicit keywords to pass and share ownership, where the latter would cause automatic ref-counting pointers.
Try ObjectiveC. Works very similar to what you're describing. You have objects with their own memory control passing messages or objects with automatic reference counting and automatic (or manual if you're masochistic) cleanup once you're done.
I don't know if that's true. I know you probably can't redistribute the kernel with the CDDL bits but you can redistribute them separately (CDDL = Common Development and Distribution License). Then all you have to do is make sure that your software (or customer) installs the right bits and then you can get a pretty decent NAS box.
Besides the legal issues, I would love to see them tackle the technical issues. ZFS itself is very clean in code, very well documented and pretty simple once you get down to the wire. The issue (and selling point) is going to be performance and upkeep and for commercial implementations support. If the upkeep is going to be similar to BSD's implementation (several versions behind) or the performance as bad as FUSE, people are just going to stick to OpenSolaris (or one of it's commercially supported decendants like Nexenta).
Probably not the point the GP was trying to make, Microsoft DID shaft both DR-DOS and WordPerfect. You're probably not old enough to remember so let me explain for all them young folks here:
DR-DOS: Windows 3.1 was made incompatible with DR-DOS by using the AARD code. Once that bit was disabled (DR-DOS came with an option for that in it's installer later on) it would work perfectly.
WordPerfect: If you installed Microsoft Word on a computer (Windows 3 through '98), it would in some instances corrupt the WordPerfect installation making it unusable. There were also differences in the way Word worked vs. the API others (including WP) used which made Word work much faster. The reason we have such a difficult-to-implement Word format is one of the results of Microsoft's anti-competitive practices. The format kept changing for practically every version (without any openness about it) and WordPerfect couldn't keep up. WordPerfect also made a lot of mistakes but it's still widely used in some fields for some very good reasons.
After actually having implemented such a methods, it is noticed that nobody ever uses the classified network except for highly official stuff, when the project is done. It seems that all work in progress is just being saved on the non-classified network.
Trust me, I have implemented just about any security method in a variety of settings (medical, financial, ...). The fact remains that people can't be bothered to lock their screens when they step out because it's "too difficult" and "too complicated" let alone click the button to encrypt their e-mail or their USB sticks.
Some sources have pointed towards the possibility of a keep-alive signal for the Dead Hand system. The station broadcasts a tone at a regular interval (kinda like a ping). The messages might be one-time pads for other purposes (change of nuclear codes etc.). The fact that there have only been a handful of messages might suggest that this might only be used for emergency procedures. The recent increase in messages might have to do with the current political situation in Iran vs. the USA (where Russia is providing the nuclear material) or other things that are currently happening in Russia. It might also have to do with a sleeper cell spy network or something similar.