I think you're misunderstanding what VOIP is. It's just voice being carried in data packets.

His home VOIP fails in a power outage because the handset (and router) doesn't have power backup. If he uses uninterruptible power supplies on his home infrastructure then he'll still have VOIP when the power goes out (for as long as the backup power lasts).

The kind of infrastructure that backbone VOIP uses, and believe me many/most cell towers are ALREADY using VOIP for a backbone, has the kind of backup power support that would keep it up in the case of a power failure. If your phone company's POTS switch loses power it's going down too - and they know that so they have backup power solutions in place for that eventuality. Once the traffic is on the wire it's all pretty much the same stuff - wires, switches, routers. And an electrical infrastructure that includes redundancy.

You can even transmit power over Ethernet too, if you want to.

Our Devs have full admin rights....on the Virtual Machines they develop on. It's great, they create a base VM, store that drive file as a template, then do their development and testing. Anytime they want to, which turns out to be a couple of times a month usually, they delete that active VM and start over clean from the base. They can also run multiple identical VMs side-by-side if they need to.

Need to test against a different OS or a server? Create a VM for it and go. Doesn't matter if they trash it, it's just a VM.

Well, that's a good point. But is "Better than nothing" really what we're aspiring to?

Wouldn't it be better to find ways to increase the security of the average folks WITHOUT introducing all of the other risks?

There are a few differences though, the primary one being that money, unlike data, is fungible. If a bank goes out of business you just care that you get an equal amount of your money back. Doesn't have to be the exact same currency.

If your SaaS provider goes out of business it's not really a good substitute for them to say "Here's 213MB of data. It's not the same data you gave us, but it's the same amount so that's good enough, yes?"

Along the same lines, if your bank has a security screw-up and reveals your bank balance to the world that's awkward and embarrassing but probably won't cause you much actual loss. If your SaaS provider reveals confidential company information to your competitors...that could be quite serious.

Problem is, with outsourcing, you don't know who the "insiders" are anymore. Right now I know everybody who has physical access to my servers. How do I know? I handed each one of them their key to the server room, personally. I can shake their hands, I can meet their family at the company picnic, I know who they are and where they live.

If we outsource our data storage into the cloud then I probably don't even know where that data is, much less who can put their hands on those servers. Can I trust anonymous folk somewhere out in the world with my confidential and/or mission-critical data?

Correct. And because of multi-tenant arrangements it's possible that your data could be included, accidentally or otherwise, if the provider is complying with a discovery request for another tenant.

Or worse, an overly broad discovery request could sweep your data up in it.

Imagine if the cops came to serve a search warrant on your neighbor but, perhaps because they didn't understand the underlying infrastructure, they just decided to search the whole block.

Can't happen? Unlawful search and seizure? What if the block, and the cops, are in Singapore?

Or you just keep a closer hold on your data and don't give it to companies that are going to, for the purposes of cutting their own operational costs so they can make a bigger profit, send your data to far-flung (and possibly hostile) nations to be stored.

Part of the problem is that with Cloud Computing you have a much broader set of "enemies" to secure your data from. It's naturally in the interests of cloud/SaaS providers, who are selling an increasingly commodity product, to look for ways to cut their costs. They have price pressure from consumers and competitors so like any business you can bet they're looking for the cheapest providers they can for the services they require. Unfortunately that cost-cutting and corner-cutting will lead to new and different security challenges.

For example: all but the largest will be outsourcing their data centers. And when they outsource that storage will they find the same sort of pricing structures, perhaps on a different scale, that everybody else does - it is attractive, from a price perspective, to off-shore that data to places where it's just cheaper to run. One of the strengths of the Internet is how it shrinks the planet in that regard. But there has recently been a big debate about whether or not the 4th Amendment in the U.S. protects hosted e-mail from search and seizure by the U.S. government. What does the 4th Amendment in Malaysia protect against?

What if your biggest competitor in your particular industry is a Chinese company and your Cloud provider decides to store your data on a server located in China. Do you suppose the Chinese gov't might be able to access (or monitor) your data and provide any of it to their company?

Even if your data stays on a domestic server and your business is entirely legitimate - most Cloud providers are multi-tenant (that's the economy of scale that helps them keep prices down). What if one of the other tenants on that server is doing something naughty and the government decides to seize the server to go after them. Will your data be safe and protected? They're the government, right? OF COURSE your data will be handled properly. :-) Uh huh.

Another big topic is document retention. You want to keep documents as long as you need to and then expire those documents. Will your SaaS/Cloud provider respect your document retention policies? Or are you going to discover, hopefully not after being served with a discovery request, that they actually have copies of your expired documents in cache or on backups somewhere that they never destroyed?

There are a LOT of new security issues that come up when you essentially put your data at arm's length with no real idea of where it's physically stored or who has access to those servers. I'll close with a quote:

"If (CIO) Randy Mott told me 'Put the general ledger up in the Cloud' I'd say 'Go back to work, we're not doing that."
            -Mark Hurd, CEO of Hewlett Packard-

I see, and we're supposed to just surmise which laws you consider unjust? You apparently consider national borders to be unjust. Do you feel the same about personal property rights? Or is it o.k. for a person to draw a line in the sand around their house and decide who does and does not get to come in?

Question: If our borders were "thoroughly opened" do you think there would be anybody living south of Texas anymore? A few in Brazil, perhaps?

Funny how people cavalierly dismiss what the law says...until they need it to protect them. The cops are all pigs and tyrants...until it's your home being broken into, your family under attack, you who needs protection under those same laws from those same "tyrants."

In the absence of law you would see a whole other kind of tyrant. It would be the tyranny of the strong and cruel where the bullies would rise up and take what they wanted without consequences. For evidence of that just look to some of the parts of the world where there is no working system of law. If that's the way you want to live I'm sure you could find a nice place in Somalia, for example.

At least the way it is now we get to choose who has that power and it's those laws you speak of so derisively that keep them at least somewhat in check.

Is our system perfect? No, it's the worst system there is...except for all of the other ones.

Wow, you Linux FanBoys really have no sense of humor, do ya? =)

Hey, Linux is pretty cool stuff, I'll grant you that. But other than for very specialized applications I just don't have much use for it. If you ask 6 Linux guys what distro you should run you'll get 7 different answers. That should tell you what you need to know about that.

And, I've used quite a few of them. From CentOS to Ubuntu and a couple of flavors of Red Hat and...Knoppix and I forget what else. Roughly half the time it didn't work "out of the box" and I had to break out the Google-Fu (on a Windows or Mac box of course) to figure out why. Almost always a case of needing to find and download new drivers for something, then figure out how to get them installed. Even on plain 'ole Dell or HP desktops.

I was amused recently when a professional Linux guy and I were on a job site and had to change a couple of static IP address - he on a server running CentOS and I on a workstation running...XP Pro, I think. Took me about 20 seconds. Took him about 4 minutes. I'm not sure how many conf files he had to locate and edit.

My grandfather was able to do basic stuff (check e-mail, a little web surfing, manage his checkbook in Quicken) with a Windows XP PC with virtually no experience or training. He wouldn't have grepped the first thing about a Linux box - even with one of the GUI front-ends.

Yes, Linux *IS* getting better in that regard. But it still has quite a ways to go before it's really going to challenge the two mainstream OS's (Windows and OSX) on the desktop. It's just not that easy or intuitive for people who aren't computer pros/hobbyists with the time and interest to figure it out.

Just to put out my unscientfic, uneducated on the subject thoughts, but don't you have to survive the infection? An extreme, and possibly poor example, compare the affects of smallpox on Native Americans and Europeans after 1700 or so. The Native Americans, with no ancestral exposure to smallpox or cowpox were devastated by smallpox when exposed, while the Europeans were less affected.

So, do I want to be exposed to someone's unwashed filth, knowing that it will make be stronger, if it doesn't kill me? Do I want to transfer it to my car or my home, maybe intentionallly expose my family to it, just to make them stronger? In the comparison of the Native Americans and Europeans in the 1600 - 1900's, the less clean Europeans won, but how many lives did that genetic immunity, if there is such a thing, cost?

In the end, cleanliness is cultural, and might just be another case of "Play Now, Pay Later".

Getting back on topic, I doubt that washing whatever gets upon my hands in the restroom, or from using the keyboard of a coworker with snot dripping from his nose, impacts my favorable gut bacteria much. Alcohol consumption, and not replenishing them with cheeses or yougurts, stuff like that is what leads to their decline.

was a rough year. Been a couple of years since I last worked and I lost my home and a lot of other stuff.
I will say all the charity support I've received this last year was from friends and family - but last time I needed help I got some from Salvation Army.

Whoever said I was a creationist?

Which is my point.

No alternative theory can exist because you "priests of Darwinism" won't allow anything other than Darwinism to explain your view of the world.

If it is different than yours you immediately bring God into the picture and claim I am a religious nut cake.

Just remember though, you assumed I was a creationist and I am not, a creationist.

I simply observed all you people desperately, want to kill "God". Why you people always respond to any critique of the evolutionary BIBLE of Darwin as a attack by an imaginary being is beyond me.

You see, my position I don't care which is which, I want the facts.

Until biochemistry can solve all of these riddles and we begin to produce species out of the lab all the "quaint" little You Tube videos in the world are not going to convince me that Darwin is correct.

You change ONE freakin protein in the eye and it all comes falling apart.

One guy on here even thinks the whole thing is deterministic and doesn't work by chance and that "somehow natural selection" makes it work, ywet won't explain what the difference is between random probability and natural selection!

What a bunch of bull. If natural selection makes it work, then if it is that well understood, make a new species from a frog then. I want four eyes on the frog, and I want it purple with speckled poka dots.

Since it is very well understood "theory" then it shouldn't be too hard to do.

You Darwinists are so full of yourselves and you point at creationists that can't provide proof of God, yet turn around and endorse a theory of how life works, yet can't produce one freakin new species.

Your all hypocrites and THAT is one thing you have in common with creationists.

-Hack

You have nicely lined out how much the drug prohibition costs.

But to be complete you would have to answer other question too: how much would cost NOT having drug prohibition?

Thinking of all those good-willed, but stressed workers running to drug-lords and not pay anymore taxes seems like tremendous cost to me. Unless you would tax those operations taxable, too.. (... already happening? legal drugs..)

So, you cannot call it 'complete failure' yet..