These "rogue trader" stories come out from time to time, among employees of all the more respectable class of casino, and they leave me deeply skeptical...
Either these outfits are, in fact, handing people the keys to gigantic piles of risk with controls roughly on par with the ones used to keep bored 16-year-old cashiers from skimming the till, or there is a substantial amount of tacit looking-the-other-way as Mr. Golden Boy flouts the rules and makes huge piles of money, and then, if things go south, his actions were "rogue".
Honestly, I find it hard to believe the former. This industry is riddled with perverse incentives toward taking on outsize risk loads(that hopefully won't blow up until you leave, or will blow up in somebody else's face) in exchange for rewards now. Am I supposed to believe that Poor li'l UBS just got plumb slickered by some smooth talker, or that "rogue" is simply the PR response to those who operate particularly close to the risk/reward envelope and happen to stop producing the numbers that HQ wants to see?
And people are still saying Microsoft is evil? They just made HTML5 video reality. It wouldn't have happened without this.
Let's wait and see how Silverlight is supported, or not, in this "plugin-free" mode...
If, in fact, they are terminating all plugins, by default, for reasons of security and efficiency, hooray.
If, on the other hand, they are just taking Flash and Java out back and shooting them so that Silverlight is the only alternative to straight HTML that will be sure to work on consumer Windows boxes, well, that would be them taking the wrong leaf out of Apple's book...
The future economy will be quite simple, at a macro scale, though complex beyond human comprehension at a microscale:
There will be two segments within the economy: The first segment will be automated computronium manufacture and managed service corprosentiences.
The second segment will be financial services corprosentiences, consisting of lumps of computronium arranged in a tightly packed sphere around the NYSE, each jockeying for space a few light-microseconds closer to the trading area.
The computronium manufacturers will manufacture and repair high frequency trading computronium. The high frequency trading computronium will buy and sell unbelievably elaborate derivatives and financial instruments of baroque opacity to one another.
Because humans are extinct, the GDP per capita will be infinite.
Only under the assumption, by no means proven, that increases in well being are somewhat broadly distributed:
If it is "lazy dockworkers against robots" vs. "Everybody who buys or sells things carried by ship", odds are that said lazy dockworkers are currently impoverishing society.
On the other hand, (in the er, totally, um, hypothetical...) situation of the stagnation and/or decline of real wages since 1970 for almost every US population segement save for those at the very top, it is much less clear that "society" is receiving a net benefit(given the declining marginal value of an additional dollar as the number of them you have grows)...
Unfortunately, once robot labor becomes cheap, the only people who bother to keep slaves will be the ones you really don't want to be enslaved by, since humans will have a comparative advantage only in "expressing genuinely human pain and anguish"...
In this case I did do both(to bring all BIOSes for each model up to current, and then standardize the configs; but they were two distinct operations).
I'd be delighted to see the security of vital bits of a PC's guts be down to something other than sheer obscurity(and, I'd really prefer that the alternative not be a cryptographic vendor lock, those don't end well.) Defaulting to a cryptographic lock, so that Joe Blow can safely get BIOS updates without touching his hardware might be ok; but you'd really want a way to override that and susbstitute a different key, by toggling the jumper or whatever. Corporate types could do their custom thing by provisioning their own key during deployment, home times could know nothing safely, and coreboot wouldn't be out in the cold...
Last week, I updated, and then applied desired settings to, several hundred systems across multiple sites without getting up from my desk, much less getting up from my desk, visiting each site, unlocking each chassis, toggling a jumper, completing the update, toggling the jumper back, relocking the chassis, and moving on to the next... Build update package, shove update package over network. Go, settings take effect on next boot(for newly purchased systems, just plug 'em in, PXE boot, and you get your system image and BIOS config automatically).
The option to hard-switch the BIOS into read-only would be handy; but I'm not seeing it become a default any time soon...
TFA is pretty vague; but (when last I checked) ReactOS was pretty much on par with WINE in terms of program compatibility(not a huge suprise, since they share a fair amount of that code); which meant that its only real advantage was in the hypothetical situation where you had to deal with hardware that wasn't linux supported but did have Windows drivers that cooperated with ReactOS' implementation of the NT kernel's driver interface.
That is what largely scotched my interest in the project. If you need a Windows program to work, it should work more or less equally well in Wine or ReactOS. Unless the ReactOS driver-interface compatibility is pretty much entirely bulletproof(which is hard, just ask Google how much fun NDISwrapper users are having...) and you have some hardware that is useless under linux and still supported under a version of windows close enough to ReactOS, what is the point?
Obviously, it's the dev's time, and they can do as they please, more power to them; but I just never really understood the point of trying to clone the kernel/driver side of Windows. The userspace side has massive value for legacy software purposes; but the degree of effort required to achieve binary compatibility with Windows drivers seems greater than just avoiding windows-only hardware...
Parts of the application-facing side of things are shared with WINE(since both projects aim at having a working win32 land, as far as programs are concerned); but ReactOS goes to the additional effort of attempting to duplicate the NT kernel sufficiently closely as to be compatible with Windows drivers as well...
Luckily, Russia has a good deal of experience with producing largely functional clones of western computer systems, so ReactOS could be a perfect fit for them...
The Tegra parts are pretty much stock ARM Cortex A9 cores, minus NEON, pretty much exactly the same CPU power as any other Cortex A9 part. The only real difference is that they have an integrated GPU derived from Nvidia's full fledged laptop and desktop design history, rather than one of the (historically pretty dire, probably improving quickly now that demand for 3D punch in ARM SoCs is abundantly obvious) embedded graphics cores.
For power reasons, of course, the Tegra GPU is still a pretty wimpy Nvidia GPU(I don't know exactly which desktop/laptop GeForce it can be most closely compared to; but the high end "Tegra 2" has 4 pixel and 4 vertex shaders at 400MHz, claiming 6.4GFLOPs. The nastiest Geforce 200m chip available has 16 shaders at 1.6GHz, claiming 72GFLOPs. Of course, the latter also consumes 14 watts all by itself, so it isn't exactly going to make it into your phone in the near future.)
Given that many GPU tasks parallelize pretty nicely, and Nvidia doesn't exactly have super secret mobile sauce that they wouldn't also use to boost performance and reduce draw on high end parts, the Tegra can't help but be pretty anemic against even the integrated GPUs of today(though the Intel Xtremes of yesteryear are definitely targets...). You just can't avoid the fact that a chip with the die and power budget to run far more compute units, at a much higher clock rate, with a wider bus to faster RAM, are going to stomp on some teeny little sliver of silicon talking to LVDDR over some parsimonious little mobile bus.
In addition to the relatively low cost of supporting Android on x86(it already works, albeit not necessarily 100% optimally or with the mothership's blessing outside of Google TVs), and hedging their bets as to whether Intel ever gets it right on truly "mobile" stuff, it could also be that Google is happy enough to go along with Intel's aspirational blather about finally getting into products without fans; but figures that whether or not they manage that, there is still a lot of "embedded" territory to cover.
The world is absolutely infested with "embedded" systems that are x86 based and more or less massively overpowered; but either need to support some legacy application, or are fairly low volume and time-to-market sensitive, so it makes more sense to just buy an industrial-rated single board PC, with a normal BIOS, and just dump WinCE, WinXP embedded, or Linux on there and let your coders get to slapping together the application-specific interface, rather than spend time fucking around with whatever weirdo boot setup and peripheral layout the ARM SoC of the day is pushing in order to save a few bucks or a few watts per unit. Most of these systems are deeply unsexy, and not really offered in the consumer channel; but there are a lot of them. It certainly wouldn't hurt Team Google if, for a minimal investment on the off chance that Intel finally manages to ship tablet/phone silicon, they also get to make inroads into the higher power embedded markets.
They sold most of that to Marvell. They retained a few bits, some hardware RAID chips and maybe NIC TCP offload; but all the general-purpose PXA* stuff is no more. I haven't kept up with Marvell's use of what they bought, so I don't know if they just changed the model numbers and kept on shipping, or whether all the old lines are dead and the just bought it for some design features/IP for their future cores...
Ironically, ARM's strengths may actually reduce the chance of the "ARM PC" ever showing up(in any quantity: various ODMs have slapped smartphones into netbook chassis and then failed to ever do anything with them already...).
Since they are comparatively small, comparatively cheap, and comparatively low power; but persistently weak compared to x86s, it would likely be easier to bodge one on to an x86 motherboard(with mechanisms for it to steal an adjustable amount of system RAM, if activated, embedded GPU style, and paint to some or all of the graphics output of the device. It wouldn't be totally trivial; but you could get a full x86 laptop that can also run an embedded ARM simultaneously or by itself in some sort of low-power mode for not a huge cost and board-space premium over a conventional unit. That strikes me as much less of an uphill battle than trying to adjust customer expectations for something that looks like a laptop but acts sort of like a tablet...
Why would Google possibly object to Intel adding their pet OS to the list of operating systems that intel pushes along with their embedded CPUs?
I'd be a bit shocked if the next Nexus whatever phone happens to have Intel inside, Intel just hasn't cracked the low power problem very well; but they move Atoms like crazy for slightly higher powered applications. It isn't make-or-break; but I doubt that Google would mind displacing WinCE in a few of the ubiquitous-but-wastefully-overpowered Kiosk/Signage/etc. applications that are typically intel/WinCE or intel/XP-embedded powered today.
Plus, while it isn't officially blessed and released at present, Android already runs on x86. The "GoogleTV" products are all Android running on an Atom-based STB SoC(the CE1400 if memory serves.)
Are they going to deploy their reserve army of carcinogen ninjas or something?
Do organizations often have a structural problem with dependence on what they are supposed to fight? That they do, and a fair few succumb. However, there is a nontrivial additional burden of proof when you go from saying that an organization is merely bloated, feckless, and profiteering, to saying that the organization is willing and capable of halting progress in order to preserve its reason for existence.
It can, and does, happen; but it takes an additional step, additional power, and additional ruthlessness and/or blindness on the part of those involved...
Unfortunately for us, "Cancer" is a very plural mass noun(both because it is a catch-all category for a large number of conditions caused by one's own cells dividing in excess, and because cells that have jumped the tracks and defeated the various safeguards in place against uncontrolled replication are in an excellent position to evolve rapidly).
If he's lucky, this particular flavor of cancer won't be back to finish him off. Even then, though, there are a zillion others just waiting in the wings...
Only in those cases(which I imagine do come up) where a company's research raises the risk of cannibalizing their current products:
If I don't make chemo drugs, say, I get 0% of Mr. Cancer Patient's medical spending. If I can develop a cure for his particular flavor of cancer, suddenly I capture a substantially greater than zero slice of the pie. Even if the absolute size of the pie shrinks(because my hypothetical single treatment is cheaper than his previous slow demise), my slice is larger. Assuming I can cover my costs, it makes perfect sense for me to go ahead and nuke the other guys' profits in exchange for some of my own. The issues arise if there is excessive consolidation of researching entities...
Multicellular organisms generally, humans not excepted, have a whole bunch of mechanisms to terminate abberant cells. Some are internal to the cell, conditions that trigger cellular suicide, and some involve the immune system coming in for the kill.
What we call "cancer" are the abberant cells that manage to overcome the internal defenses and multiply their way to clinical significance.
Unless gas separation processes are much more efficient than I am aware of, I assume that it is cheaper to have a grunt with what amounts to a heavy-duty syringe on a hose breach the coolant loop and pull the refrigerant before shredding, rather than try to separate it out of the diffuse mixture of refrigerant, air, misc. dust particles, and whatnot floating around the shredder...
Or, if the refrigerant isn't worth it, the "eh, they phased out CFCs a while back, right?" approach may be taken...
While this alleged "sensitivity" has borne up quite poorly against basic double-blind testing, which makes me deeply doubtful of its existence, I do have to wonder what is going on when such a comparatively large number of people are exhibiting psychological phenomena strong enough that they will do things like hide out in a faraday cage, move, risk ridicule, etc.
Psych symptoms are real symptoms(albeit often not of what the patient thinks they are), so the prevalence of psych symptoms is worrisome. Given that the usual prescription for the EMI "sensitive" is "get rid of your electronic crap and move to the country", I have to wonder if there is some sort of connection with stress disorders induced by the (undoubtedly hard on you) pace of modern life, constant connectedness to assorted babble sources, and whatnot...
Humming in what ought to be solid-state hardware is often improperly potted high frequency magnetic passives. Inductors, transformers, and suchlike widgetry. Get a bunch of fluctuating magnetic fields in close proximity, in wires that aren't properly potted, and you'll get some vibration.
CRTs could be doing the same thing(flyback transformer and friends), or could be electrostatic crackling(40Kv has a way of making itself heard sometimes...)
They speak very differently, as you note; but there are some interesting parallels in epistemology between the (at this point largely extinct) postmodernist leftist types who used to whine about how science was an oppressive western edifice of technocratic epistemic imperialism, mostly against anybody who had the slightest claim to 'minority' status and the current (definitely not largely extinct) hard-right culture warriors who gave us "teach the controversy", "only a theory", and the like, though they tend to view science(but, unlike the former postmodernist left, not technology) as being a representative of some anti-western or anti-american bogey, either Atheism in the case of the life sciences, or Communism in the case of climatology, toxicology, and the like...
Both assert that science is a necessarily political enterprise(ie. it isn't just possible for somebody to be doing science and doing politics, so-called "science" is just a form of suasion used for political ends) and essentially reject anything resembling enlightenment-style optimism on the subject of having real knowledge of the material world(team jesus asserts certainty in metaphysics; but has developed an elaborate folk-postmodernism to dispel certainty about anything else, team mammon follows empiricism so far as it is useful, and no further.) It is a curious sort of overlap.
Slashdot Mirror
These "rogue trader" stories come out from time to time, among employees of all the more respectable class of casino, and they leave me deeply skeptical...
Either these outfits are, in fact, handing people the keys to gigantic piles of risk with controls roughly on par with the ones used to keep bored 16-year-old cashiers from skimming the till, or there is a substantial amount of tacit looking-the-other-way as Mr. Golden Boy flouts the rules and makes huge piles of money, and then, if things go south, his actions were "rogue".
Honestly, I find it hard to believe the former. This industry is riddled with perverse incentives toward taking on outsize risk loads(that hopefully won't blow up until you leave, or will blow up in somebody else's face) in exchange for rewards now. Am I supposed to believe that Poor li'l UBS just got plumb slickered by some smooth talker, or that "rogue" is simply the PR response to those who operate particularly close to the risk/reward envelope and happen to stop producing the numbers that HQ wants to see?
And people are still saying Microsoft is evil? They just made HTML5 video reality. It wouldn't have happened without this.
Let's wait and see how Silverlight is supported, or not, in this "plugin-free" mode...
If, in fact, they are terminating all plugins, by default, for reasons of security and efficiency, hooray.
If, on the other hand, they are just taking Flash and Java out back and shooting them so that Silverlight is the only alternative to straight HTML that will be sure to work on consumer Windows boxes, well, that would be them taking the wrong leaf out of Apple's book...
The future economy will be quite simple, at a macro scale, though complex beyond human comprehension at a microscale:
There will be two segments within the economy:
The first segment will be automated computronium manufacture and managed service corprosentiences.
The second segment will be financial services corprosentiences, consisting of lumps of computronium arranged in a tightly packed sphere around the NYSE, each jockeying for space a few light-microseconds closer to the trading area.
The computronium manufacturers will manufacture and repair high frequency trading computronium. The high frequency trading computronium will buy and sell unbelievably elaborate derivatives and financial instruments of baroque opacity to one another.
Because humans are extinct, the GDP per capita will be infinite.
Only under the assumption, by no means proven, that increases in well being are somewhat broadly distributed:
If it is "lazy dockworkers against robots" vs. "Everybody who buys or sells things carried by ship", odds are that said lazy dockworkers are currently impoverishing society.
On the other hand, (in the er, totally, um, hypothetical...) situation of the stagnation and/or decline of real wages since 1970 for almost every US population segement save for those at the very top, it is much less clear that "society" is receiving a net benefit(given the declining marginal value of an additional dollar as the number of them you have grows)...
Unfortunately, once robot labor becomes cheap, the only people who bother to keep slaves will be the ones you really don't want to be enslaved by, since humans will have a comparative advantage only in "expressing genuinely human pain and anguish"...
In this case I did do both(to bring all BIOSes for each model up to current, and then standardize the configs; but they were two distinct operations).
I'd be delighted to see the security of vital bits of a PC's guts be down to something other than sheer obscurity(and, I'd really prefer that the alternative not be a cryptographic vendor lock, those don't end well.) Defaulting to a cryptographic lock, so that Joe Blow can safely get BIOS updates without touching his hardware might be ok; but you'd really want a way to override that and susbstitute a different key, by toggling the jumper or whatever. Corporate types could do their custom thing by provisioning their own key during deployment, home times could know nothing safely, and coreboot wouldn't be out in the cold...
Last week, I updated, and then applied desired settings to, several hundred systems across multiple sites without getting up from my desk, much less getting up from my desk, visiting each site, unlocking each chassis, toggling a jumper, completing the update, toggling the jumper back, relocking the chassis, and moving on to the next... Build update package, shove update package over network. Go, settings take effect on next boot(for newly purchased systems, just plug 'em in, PXE boot, and you get your system image and BIOS config automatically).
The option to hard-switch the BIOS into read-only would be handy; but I'm not seeing it become a default any time soon...
Any printer that doesn't speak Postscript or PCL is just a stepper-motor donor waiting to happen...
TFA is pretty vague; but (when last I checked) ReactOS was pretty much on par with WINE in terms of program compatibility(not a huge suprise, since they share a fair amount of that code); which meant that its only real advantage was in the hypothetical situation where you had to deal with hardware that wasn't linux supported but did have Windows drivers that cooperated with ReactOS' implementation of the NT kernel's driver interface.
That is what largely scotched my interest in the project. If you need a Windows program to work, it should work more or less equally well in Wine or ReactOS. Unless the ReactOS driver-interface compatibility is pretty much entirely bulletproof(which is hard, just ask Google how much fun NDISwrapper users are having...) and you have some hardware that is useless under linux and still supported under a version of windows close enough to ReactOS, what is the point?
Obviously, it's the dev's time, and they can do as they please, more power to them; but I just never really understood the point of trying to clone the kernel/driver side of Windows. The userspace side has massive value for legacy software purposes; but the degree of effort required to achieve binary compatibility with Windows drivers seems greater than just avoiding windows-only hardware...
Parts of the application-facing side of things are shared with WINE(since both projects aim at having a working win32 land, as far as programs are concerned); but ReactOS goes to the additional effort of attempting to duplicate the NT kernel sufficiently closely as to be compatible with Windows drivers as well...
Luckily, Russia has a good deal of experience with producing largely functional clones of western computer systems, so ReactOS could be a perfect fit for them...
The Tegra parts are pretty much stock ARM Cortex A9 cores, minus NEON, pretty much exactly the same CPU power as any other Cortex A9 part. The only real difference is that they have an integrated GPU derived from Nvidia's full fledged laptop and desktop design history, rather than one of the (historically pretty dire, probably improving quickly now that demand for 3D punch in ARM SoCs is abundantly obvious) embedded graphics cores.
For power reasons, of course, the Tegra GPU is still a pretty wimpy Nvidia GPU(I don't know exactly which desktop/laptop GeForce it can be most closely compared to; but the high end "Tegra 2" has 4 pixel and 4 vertex shaders at 400MHz, claiming 6.4GFLOPs. The nastiest Geforce 200m chip available has 16 shaders at 1.6GHz, claiming 72GFLOPs. Of course, the latter also consumes 14 watts all by itself, so it isn't exactly going to make it into your phone in the near future.)
Given that many GPU tasks parallelize pretty nicely, and Nvidia doesn't exactly have super secret mobile sauce that they wouldn't also use to boost performance and reduce draw on high end parts, the Tegra can't help but be pretty anemic against even the integrated GPUs of today(though the Intel Xtremes of yesteryear are definitely targets...). You just can't avoid the fact that a chip with the die and power budget to run far more compute units, at a much higher clock rate, with a wider bus to faster RAM, are going to stomp on some teeny little sliver of silicon talking to LVDDR over some parsimonious little mobile bus.
In addition to the relatively low cost of supporting Android on x86(it already works, albeit not necessarily 100% optimally or with the mothership's blessing outside of Google TVs), and hedging their bets as to whether Intel ever gets it right on truly "mobile" stuff, it could also be that Google is happy enough to go along with Intel's aspirational blather about finally getting into products without fans; but figures that whether or not they manage that, there is still a lot of "embedded" territory to cover.
The world is absolutely infested with "embedded" systems that are x86 based and more or less massively overpowered; but either need to support some legacy application, or are fairly low volume and time-to-market sensitive, so it makes more sense to just buy an industrial-rated single board PC, with a normal BIOS, and just dump WinCE, WinXP embedded, or Linux on there and let your coders get to slapping together the application-specific interface, rather than spend time fucking around with whatever weirdo boot setup and peripheral layout the ARM SoC of the day is pushing in order to save a few bucks or a few watts per unit. Most of these systems are deeply unsexy, and not really offered in the consumer channel; but there are a lot of them. It certainly wouldn't hurt Team Google if, for a minimal investment on the off chance that Intel finally manages to ship tablet/phone silicon, they also get to make inroads into the higher power embedded markets.
They sold most of that to Marvell. They retained a few bits, some hardware RAID chips and maybe NIC TCP offload; but all the general-purpose PXA* stuff is no more. I haven't kept up with Marvell's use of what they bought, so I don't know if they just changed the model numbers and kept on shipping, or whether all the old lines are dead and the just bought it for some design features/IP for their future cores...
Ironically, ARM's strengths may actually reduce the chance of the "ARM PC" ever showing up(in any quantity: various ODMs have slapped smartphones into netbook chassis and then failed to ever do anything with them already...).
Since they are comparatively small, comparatively cheap, and comparatively low power; but persistently weak compared to x86s, it would likely be easier to bodge one on to an x86 motherboard(with mechanisms for it to steal an adjustable amount of system RAM, if activated, embedded GPU style, and paint to some or all of the graphics output of the device. It wouldn't be totally trivial; but you could get a full x86 laptop that can also run an embedded ARM simultaneously or by itself in some sort of low-power mode for not a huge cost and board-space premium over a conventional unit. That strikes me as much less of an uphill battle than trying to adjust customer expectations for something that looks like a laptop but acts sort of like a tablet...
Why would Google possibly object to Intel adding their pet OS to the list of operating systems that intel pushes along with their embedded CPUs?
I'd be a bit shocked if the next Nexus whatever phone happens to have Intel inside, Intel just hasn't cracked the low power problem very well; but they move Atoms like crazy for slightly higher powered applications. It isn't make-or-break; but I doubt that Google would mind displacing WinCE in a few of the ubiquitous-but-wastefully-overpowered Kiosk/Signage/etc. applications that are typically intel/WinCE or intel/XP-embedded powered today.
Plus, while it isn't officially blessed and released at present, Android already runs on x86. The "GoogleTV" products are all Android running on an Atom-based STB SoC(the CE1400 if memory serves.)
Are they going to deploy their reserve army of carcinogen ninjas or something?
Do organizations often have a structural problem with dependence on what they are supposed to fight? That they do, and a fair few succumb. However, there is a nontrivial additional burden of proof when you go from saying that an organization is merely bloated, feckless, and profiteering, to saying that the organization is willing and capable of halting progress in order to preserve its reason for existence.
It can, and does, happen; but it takes an additional step, additional power, and additional ruthlessness and/or blindness on the part of those involved...
Unfortunately for us, "Cancer" is a very plural mass noun(both because it is a catch-all category for a large number of conditions caused by one's own cells dividing in excess, and because cells that have jumped the tracks and defeated the various safeguards in place against uncontrolled replication are in an excellent position to evolve rapidly).
If he's lucky, this particular flavor of cancer won't be back to finish him off. Even then, though, there are a zillion others just waiting in the wings...
Only in those cases(which I imagine do come up) where a company's research raises the risk of cannibalizing their current products:
If I don't make chemo drugs, say, I get 0% of Mr. Cancer Patient's medical spending. If I can develop a cure for his particular flavor of cancer, suddenly I capture a substantially greater than zero slice of the pie. Even if the absolute size of the pie shrinks(because my hypothetical single treatment is cheaper than his previous slow demise), my slice is larger. Assuming I can cover my costs, it makes perfect sense for me to go ahead and nuke the other guys' profits in exchange for some of my own. The issues arise if there is excessive consolidation of researching entities...
Already in effect.
Multicellular organisms generally, humans not excepted, have a whole bunch of mechanisms to terminate abberant cells. Some are internal to the cell, conditions that trigger cellular suicide, and some involve the immune system coming in for the kill.
What we call "cancer" are the abberant cells that manage to overcome the internal defenses and multiply their way to clinical significance.
Unless gas separation processes are much more efficient than I am aware of, I assume that it is cheaper to have a grunt with what amounts to a heavy-duty syringe on a hose breach the coolant loop and pull the refrigerant before shredding, rather than try to separate it out of the diffuse mixture of refrigerant, air, misc. dust particles, and whatnot floating around the shredder...
Or, if the refrigerant isn't worth it, the "eh, they phased out CFCs a while back, right?" approach may be taken...
While this alleged "sensitivity" has borne up quite poorly against basic double-blind testing, which makes me deeply doubtful of its existence, I do have to wonder what is going on when such a comparatively large number of people are exhibiting psychological phenomena strong enough that they will do things like hide out in a faraday cage, move, risk ridicule, etc.
Psych symptoms are real symptoms(albeit often not of what the patient thinks they are), so the prevalence of psych symptoms is worrisome. Given that the usual prescription for the EMI "sensitive" is "get rid of your electronic crap and move to the country", I have to wonder if there is some sort of connection with stress disorders induced by the (undoubtedly hard on you) pace of modern life, constant connectedness to assorted babble sources, and whatnot...
Humming in what ought to be solid-state hardware is often improperly potted high frequency magnetic passives. Inductors, transformers, and suchlike widgetry. Get a bunch of fluctuating magnetic fields in close proximity, in wires that aren't properly potted, and you'll get some vibration.
CRTs could be doing the same thing(flyback transformer and friends), or could be electrostatic crackling(40Kv has a way of making itself heard sometimes...)
They speak very differently, as you note; but there are some interesting parallels in epistemology between the (at this point largely extinct) postmodernist leftist types who used to whine about how science was an oppressive western edifice of technocratic epistemic imperialism, mostly against anybody who had the slightest claim to 'minority' status and the current (definitely not largely extinct) hard-right culture warriors who gave us "teach the controversy", "only a theory", and the like, though they tend to view science(but, unlike the former postmodernist left, not technology) as being a representative of some anti-western or anti-american bogey, either Atheism in the case of the life sciences, or Communism in the case of climatology, toxicology, and the like...
Both assert that science is a necessarily political enterprise(ie. it isn't just possible for somebody to be doing science and doing politics, so-called "science" is just a form of suasion used for political ends) and essentially reject anything resembling enlightenment-style optimism on the subject of having real knowledge of the material world(team jesus asserts certainty in metaphysics; but has developed an elaborate folk-postmodernism to dispel certainty about anything else, team mammon follows empiricism so far as it is useful, and no further.) It is a curious sort of overlap.
Good luck with invoicing the nutjob.
I got Poe'd. With extreme prejudice.