Understood. Still, station-keeping is a solveable problem for any civilization wandering the cosmos placing such things for space-faring species to discover.

Not just meetings, even just phoning your insurance company at 3pm and being told to call back between 9am and 4pm would be a lot more convenient.

Believe it or not, BlackBerry has something like this.

You can have it change modes or disable radios only when it's 1) between certain hours, and 2) on the charger. It's a great combination because it allows you to always receive calls when you're awake, but not over night once you hit the sack without doing anything more than plugging your phone in, plus you can still charge during the day if needed.

Not worth carrying a BlackBerry just for this, but if you already have one, the capability is there.

That's pretty much my point. Figuring out the current time is easy, figuring out future times is more complicated. Having to re-confirm every time with timezone information is even more annoying.

Oh and if someone says a meeting is at 2pm PST in July, do they mean MST or MDT? How do you handle it when they don't know the difference?

Unfortunately people are a lot dumber than you'd expect. A surprising high number of otherwise intelligent technical folks don't know what timezone they're located in at all (although they usually can figure out what state they're in or they can tell me the current time and I can figure it out -- Or just assume EST, since most everyone else knows they're not the only timezone in North America)

Even when working with specific individuals on a regular basis, timezones confuse them. One day they'll schedule a meeting at 2pm their time and email me about it, the next time they'll mean 2pm my time. Then to improve things they'll fire up Outlook and invite me to a meeting, but instead of using Outlook's timezone functionality they'll schedule it at 2pm meaning 2pm my time, which Outlook converts into my timezone automatically giving me a meeting at 12pm.

Oh and to make it more annoying, my current contract has a habit of adding a time-zone: field on internal notes discussing customer communication, but it's +/- the number of hours from their timezone (which is +0100) rather than basing it on GMT/UTC.

Now try it with daylight savings time when you have different regions changing on different weeks. Imagine trying to figure out when a conference call will happen when you have participants in California, Phoenix and someone in Germany? Sadly, not a made up example. (For those who don't see the difficulty in this, Phoenix doesn't observe DST, California and Germany do but starting/ending on different weeks of the year, so you can't even rely on adding or subtracting the number of timezones)

How about when you call a toll-free 1-800 number in the US or Canada and are told their hours are 8:30am-4pm and to call back then, followed by a click. Now what?

Either way people will need to figure out schedules are different depending on region, but at least if we ditch timezones and all talk about the same clock, we won't have to first guess at the other person's mindset, location AND local legislation to determine what they mean by "2pm"

Why did that change your mind?

It's a different issue entirely, granted, but speaking as someone who has worked for a company not based in the same timezone as myself for 8+ years, it really needs to be done.

While it's true that idiots will find "strange" things in natural phenomenon, that isn't necessarily a bad thing if you set the hit threshold appropriately high. Once a block is assigned as being possible, you might then schedule that same block to be reviewed by additional users (more than normal, and much faster) to speed up identification. As long as one or two idiots can't waste a ton of time, the actual scientists can then perform a review.

Software generally needs to be told what to look for while humans only need be told what to ignore, so in some respects humans will do a better job here (or at least a different job than software will do)

If this were the case, the opposite side of the moon would be a good candidate, as might putting it in Earth's orbit, but located on the opposite side of the sun from us.

<AOL>Me too!</AOL>
I've tried a variety of them, Linode is pretty much the one. They're not the cheapest, but the service works properly and reliably and there are actual staff providing support.

It's too bad they never made a sequel.

Time after time after time people report finding sensitive data on used or off-lease systems. Replacing drives is trivial vs the risk of a breach (and also trivial vs the cost of most contracts that have such requirements)

Encryption solves the problem, if implemented and used correctly all of the time, and if no keys were lost or compromised (with or without anyone's knowledge)

Destroyed drives tell no tails.

Given that you can't actually low-level format modern drives out of the factory, I'm not sure what you're suggesting here.

The best encryption in the world won't help you deal with the fact that the device itself needs to store it's own decryption key so that the device can function.

On BlackBerry, the key itself is generated by the device on first boot, and the key is stored encrypted with the user's password as well as some device-specific data, making extraction of the key difficult.

For internal storage, the user can choose whether to encrypt Contacts or Media or not, everything else is encrypted at all times if encryption is enabled.

For the SD card, the user can choose whether to encrypt files using the device's key, their password, or both. This allows you to control who/what can decrypt the card's contents, either requiring the device's key (rendering the data on the card useless if the device itself is lost), the user's password (allowing the data to be decrypted anywhere with the user's password) or both (requiring both the "something you have" and "something you know"). Similarly, media can be encrypted or not, so as to allow media to be accessed from another device.

AFAIK iPhones don't actually use the user's passphrase at all for the device-wide encryption, or the keychain. If you want to prove it, try this:

1) Enter your landline number into the phonebook with a specific name.
2) Lock the device with a code.
3) Reboot
4) Call the device from a landline.

Note that the iPhone figures out the name? This indicates that the contact list is not encrypted in a way that requires the user's passphrase, since if it did, the iPhone would be unable to access the contact list to do the name lookup.

Similarly, the device can receive email after a reboot, before it's unlocked, indicating that either email passwords aren't stored in the keychain, or the keychain is not dependent on the PIN.

In Google's case this might be true, but it's certainly not true across the board. My users can blacklist senders, causing mail from a particular sender to a particular recipient to 550 after the RCPT TO command.

Why wouldn't you tell your wife? If you discuss stuff like this upfront rather than waiting for her to "find" it, things go over much better (especially when you're not actually doing anything wrong)