That isn't always fair. Some private schools are, indeed, purely about meeting the right sort of people, playing some sports, and learning how to not look awkward in a suit. Others provide a genuinely excellent education. Some do both(whether to the same people, or by means of having a meritocratic battle arena and an old boys club on the same campus, catering to different populations.)
If we can just get Windows running in this emulator, they can cut a bulk license deal with Microsoft and finally have a way of delivering a working flash plugin on other platforms!
I suspect that it isn't the best of ideas, as anybody who has ever observed a medical staff get real jumpy about a kid with a high fever knows, the margin between "hot" and "cooking your brain" isn't all that large... There's also the fact that, since they stopped officially using it for medical purposes years ago, most of the remotely recent toxicological work has been from the perspective of its potential as an occupational hazard in certain chemical industries, rather than as a medication.
On the other hand, I suppose, the main alternatives for quick chemical weight loss are mostly amphetamines or other habit-forming stimulants with potential cardiac risks. By virtue of being neither psychoactive nor pleasant(extra heat from inefficient metabolism = you sweat like a pig all the damn time) this stuff conceivably makes it easier for the informed user to find a correct dose, stick to it, and then quit when finished, something that conventional stimulants can make a bit tricky.
I'm not touching it myself; but I am honestly a bit surprised that careful use, under a doctor's supervision, with temperature monitoring(with modern electronics, a little plastic box with an LCD and a bunch of thermal probes would be, what, $100?), isn't in use, when techniques that seem rather more radical(like gastric banding, or "just going in and sucking out the lipid-tissues") are quite common.
Probably because building a tiny machine that efficiently processes sugar into energy(without need for reagents that need to be replenished, wastes that the body can't handle, temperatures incompatible with tissue, etc.) is a task considerably more arduous than simply scaling down and producing in biocompatible materials a few simple mechanisms that some of the brighter classical greeks probably new about.... Biological metabolisms are impressive systems; but Not simple ones.
(Incidentally, if you want to lose weight without effort, throwing a wrench in your metabolism can do the trick, if done very carefully. A dash of 2,4-Dinitrophenol will cause the energy potential of the mitochondrial proton gradient, which normally goes into making ATP, to be dumped straight to waste heat. If you aren't careful, the hyperthermia will kill you; but so it goes...)
With pacemakers, the machine is there as a supplemental timebase to correct for a natural one that is operating outside acceptable tolerances. Essentially all the energy used to pump the blood is handled by muscle metabolism in the usual manner, the pacemaker just triggers the muscle to act on schedule if the natural clocking system fails to do so. Not a zero energy job(but, like controlling a transistor) uses a tiny amount of energy to control the activity of a more powerful system.
A blood-flow powered assistive pump would, of course, be absurd.
According to TFA's description of the problem, the issue wasn't one of technical acumen at all.
In order to be able to do deduplication across their subscriber base, rather than per-user or none at all(likely making for considerable disk and bandwidth savings across a service of their size), Dropbox failed to (usefully) encrypt user files and introduced a fun side-channel attack where anybody can determine whether somebody else has a file stored, just by attempting to upload it and then sniffing the wire to see if it takes the expected upload time, or just a tiny amount of hash comparing to "upload".
Technologically, they didn't exactly advance the state of the art in crypto to power their service; but the issues at question appear to be technologically competent enough, deduplication across the largest set of files possible is a perfectly sensible way of reducing storage and bandwidth costs, it's just that they then proceeded to sharply oversell the amount of actual privacy they were providing.
Given that education doesn't seem to have much effect on honesty(unless you count the courses of study that probably make you worse...) I'd be inclined to say that it is irrelevant to the problem at hand.
So, we typically pay the guys who handle our massively-complex-bundle-of-personal-information-and-spying-potential about as well as the guys who change our oil and then bad things often happen. The independent ones are subject to basically zero supervision and not infrequently include complete amateurs, some rather dodgy. The chain-store ones are subject to supervision aimed primarily at forcing them to upsell and bill as hard as possible, while working as quickly as possible. Quality results are assured. Wow. Allow me to collect my jaw from the floor.
The only surprise is that anybody is surprised. Even in professions with a very long history of handling personal, highly technical, or discrete matters for their clients, with well developed professional codes, cultural pressures, and often substantially better compensation(think doctors, lawyers, priests) there are innumerable cases of ethical dodginess, laziness, and other issues.
Your ill-understood slander of Enterprise Solutions will not be tolerated.
Any two-bit neckbeard with a sourceforge account can create a "poorly understood clusterfuck."
However, only by leveraging the organizational synergies of a corporation committed to customer-centric excellence across multiple value centers is it possible to create a "poorly understood clusterfuck" backed by overpriced consultants, soporific slide decks, documentation that addresses the hypothetical case of a 50,000 seat installation across hundreds of multinational satellite sites; but fails to have any useful information on why some critical service leaks memory and needs to be restarted every 18 hours, a custom set of Vizio(tm) objects that allows middle managers and Certified Solution Architects to emulate understanding of the system with impressive graphical flourishes, and a mandatory "maintenance contract" that makes you eligible to pay a per-incident fee to have some poor dude in Hyderabad read a script at you.
Freetards, they just don't understand the value of good commercial Solutions.
On the one hand, if the feds have internal emails or similar to the effect of "Sales minion: 'Hey boss, the new clients are clearly illegal scammers.' Sales Manager: 'Minion, illegal scammers pay good money for ads. You didn't see them. Also, unless I 'don't see' at least 30% more by the end of the fiscal year your ass is out the door..." then there is a good argument to be made that Google ought to be on the hook.
There are two aspects that worry me, though: Presumably, as with many high-volume electronic services, most of the bulk Adwords sales receive basically no human scrutiny, and would probably have transaction costs too high to be workable if they did. Many online services are like that, many retail services are like that, cheap cellphones, etc, etc. Creating an implied duty to vet all customers for virtually anything that might have criminal use, on pain of major lawsuits/fines should some of the customers turn out to be criminals, seems wildly dangerous. Even the largely draconian DMCA specifically avoided doing that.
Second, of course, is the concern about making the internet either a highly fragmented geolocated-to-death zone, or an "all entities bound by the union of all sets of laws" one. In this case, for instance, a nontrivial percentage of the US lies pretty close to the Canadian border. It is hardly implausible that canadian businesses might wish to advertise to american audiences certain goods and services that are only legal if they cross the border, nor is doing so obviously criminal(in a similar vein, there isn't anything illegal about running ads for Vegas vacations in states that ban gambling, or prostitution ads in Vegas, despite the fact that you have to leave the county to legally purchase the services offered.)
Obviously, a nontrivial percentage of discount canadian pharmacies do offer to assist in breaking US law, by mailing you some drugs, often with minimal documentation, and a nontrivial percentage of ads for gambling are for illegal online betting, rather than for visits to establishments in different jurisdictions; but it isn't as though a simple keyword search is necessarily going to distinguish between the two, and a crackdown on something with legitimate applications always has potential to go to unfortunate places...
Depends on how OS agnostic the malware is: For basic trojan/social engineering style stuff, I would tend to expect that anything designed to work with 7's somewhat tighter security structure would also work with XP. Only for things that require exploits specific to particular versions would a focus on 7 be directly protective of XP.
I suspect that the fact that 7 now means "home user" while XP is increasingly the domain of control-freak corporates has a lot to do with it.
The precise degree of regulatory capture at any given time is going to be a politically determined matter; but you really can't expect any other stance: Nuclear plants are very expensive to build, and very expensive to decommission; but the cost of fuel is low, and the cost of temporary-turning-into-permanent-on-an-installment-plan 'disposal' of fuel is also fairly low. Thus, unless the maintenance situation is so bad that you have a crack squad of Godzilla slayers on staff, the economics are basically never in favor of replacement if you can keep the sucker running. Even if you can't, decommissioning costs are likely t dwarf the costs of putting it on some sort of "standby" and leaving it until you can retire away from the problem.
It's very much unlike, say, gas units, which are pretty cheap to put up and tear down; but burn fairly expensive fuel(and, worst case, just sort of explode a little bit, spreading not-very-scary natural gas combustion products), where the economic incentives to take down old plants and put up more efficient ones work out comparatively well.
The NRC, on the other hand, is pretty much in the business of delivering bad news in order to head off low-probability, but very bad, potential accidents. People that unpopular need institutional cultures of iron to avoid subversion.
I think that it would be fair to approve Google's request, on the condition that they agree to ensure that all autonomous vehicles in their employ exercise their right to bear arms while within the state.
Why do we need all this fancy optical apparatus when good old-fashioned two-body superposition can easily be achieved at home, without additional hardware(unless desired, of course)?
Pop-quantum physics is, alas, absolutely fucking rife with nonsense derived from the interpretation that the "observer" in ye olde Schrödinger's cat thought experiment means "conscious, in the way I imagine myself to be, observer" rather than "virtually any outside interaction that disrupts the closed system". From that fount much bullshit flows...
It isn't just the "nuclear nuts", though they probably haven't improve the R&D supply. Properly decommissioning a plant, especially one that really deserves it, is not inexpensive, and turns a reasonably profitable(once the construction/startup expenses have been amortized or written off) baseline unit into a big cost center. There is, thus, a strong built in incentive to keep patching and running as long as possible. Best case, you can continue to use the plant as a generating asset. Worst case, if you've had to make a number of repairs that compromise capacity, it may well still be cheaper to keep the lights on and the plant "operating" than it is to tear it down.
Wow. Try the sedatives. Have you honestly forgotten Apple's original 'Well, you can just develop webapps and like it.' position on 3rd party iDevice software so quickly? Compared to the matter of whether development tools are free-with-purchase-of-mac, or slightly expensive, or a few thousand bucks, the fact that they created an entire category of devices that you had to exploit bugs just to run 3rd party code is slightly more noticeable...
They eventually conceded, and now 3rd party code can be run, subject to their blessing and on their terms; but I find your contention that the price of dev tools, rather than the control of platforms, indicates an entity's attitude toward 3rd parties very strange. While it is true that Apple does not view dev tools as a profit center, they consistently treat 3rd party entities as barely tolerable adjuncts to the mac experience, who have to be carefully kept in line. Hence the iDevice lockdown and app store rules. Hence the migration of the app store to the desktop. Hence the safari plugin signing requirements.
Even more than that, don't compete with your channel or your supplier in what is more or less a commodity business at which they are likely to be better than you...
Apple suffers 3rd party software to exist at all because they recognize that they cannot fulfill every customer desire themselves(though they really would have preferred to keep it all first party, if their initial response was anything to go by...) Apple's um.. world unrenowned.. gaming team, for instance, is not likely to threaten Angry Birds in the immediate future.
But Bloody Ebooks? Displaying text isn't exactly rocket surgery(and, since Apple has both an text editor and a web browser under development, they have some expertise in even those areas where doing it correctly takes some work), and Apple's ability to negotiate IP licenses for stuff is well established, with ITMS. Not only does Apple have the technological power, with their cryptographically controlled walled garden, to exterminate a competitor, this particular competitor was entering an area where Apple has every expectation of being able to produce something that is at least adequate, possibly even as good, with minimal effort.
Some businesses, at least, while they are vulnerable to the power of their platform vendor, have a product that is sufficiently differentiated that exterminating it will either take years of incremental improvement, piss off numerous customers, or both. They are vulnerable at a strategic level; but their near-term safety is largely assured. These guys, though, sound like Apple could knock together a good-enough epub+'fairplay' DRMed ebook format in an afternoon, and a slight-modification-of-webkit based reader in a weekend, and have something adequate enough to roll out once they extirpated these competitors by technological means. Game Over.
I don't understand why people find this so difficult: A walled garden can be an attractive place to run a business. The grass is clipped, most of the riff-raff gets stopped at the door, and all the happy little consumers and UUIDs and associated credit cards. However: In. A. Walled. Garden. You. Exist. At. The. Power. And. Mere. Pleasure. Of. The. Management. Period. Full Stop. Etc. If they think that their garden is more colorful with some 3rd parties selling peanuts on the sidewalk, such will be permitted to exist. If not, such will be removed.
Why would you ever "put your faith" in a self-interested, value-rational entity that has the power to unilaterally crush you like a bug? It isn't rocket surgery to work out that you will be permitted to exist so long as you are useful, and crushed immediately after. Why is this a surprise?
The most jarring place I've ever run into RAR is by a few companies, mostly random hardware OEMs for forgettable routers and such, who understand their legal obligations under the GPL; but clearly are totally disconnected from any cultural conventions of OSS. You go to their GPL page and boom, just a giant.RAR of the directory in which their firmware guy built the firmware.
Oh, certainly, I'm not expecting a remote disk of given performance to perform equivalently to a local disk of the same performance, particularly for latency sensitive applications. However, at least for basic desktop stuff, the most noticeable lags are in the "poke 600MB file, twiddle fingers" case, rather than the "notice just a tiny bit of latency in everything you do" case. And, at least in our setup, each of the desktops has whatever unspecified-brand disk Dell felt was cheapest that day, while the network storage locations are all located on multiple shelves of 15kRPM SAS drives with substantial backing RAM. Were the desktops equipped with decent SSDs, or PCIe-attached ones, it'd be no contest.
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That isn't always fair. Some private schools are, indeed, purely about meeting the right sort of people, playing some sports, and learning how to not look awkward in a suit. Others provide a genuinely excellent education. Some do both(whether to the same people, or by means of having a meritocratic battle arena and an old boys club on the same campus, catering to different populations.)
If we can just get Windows running in this emulator, they can cut a bulk license deal with Microsoft and finally have a way of delivering a working flash plugin on other platforms!
I suspect that it isn't the best of ideas, as anybody who has ever observed a medical staff get real jumpy about a kid with a high fever knows, the margin between "hot" and "cooking your brain" isn't all that large... There's also the fact that, since they stopped officially using it for medical purposes years ago, most of the remotely recent toxicological work has been from the perspective of its potential as an occupational hazard in certain chemical industries, rather than as a medication.
On the other hand, I suppose, the main alternatives for quick chemical weight loss are mostly amphetamines or other habit-forming stimulants with potential cardiac risks. By virtue of being neither psychoactive nor pleasant(extra heat from inefficient metabolism = you sweat like a pig all the damn time) this stuff conceivably makes it easier for the informed user to find a correct dose, stick to it, and then quit when finished, something that conventional stimulants can make a bit tricky.
I'm not touching it myself; but I am honestly a bit surprised that careful use, under a doctor's supervision, with temperature monitoring(with modern electronics, a little plastic box with an LCD and a bunch of thermal probes would be, what, $100?), isn't in use, when techniques that seem rather more radical(like gastric banding, or "just going in and sucking out the lipid-tissues") are quite common.
Probably because building a tiny machine that efficiently processes sugar into energy(without need for reagents that need to be replenished, wastes that the body can't handle, temperatures incompatible with tissue, etc.) is a task considerably more arduous than simply scaling down and producing in biocompatible materials a few simple mechanisms that some of the brighter classical greeks probably new about.... Biological metabolisms are impressive systems; but Not simple ones.
(Incidentally, if you want to lose weight without effort, throwing a wrench in your metabolism can do the trick, if done very carefully. A dash of 2,4-Dinitrophenol will cause the energy potential of the mitochondrial proton gradient, which normally goes into making ATP, to be dumped straight to waste heat. If you aren't careful, the hyperthermia will kill you; but so it goes...)
With pacemakers, the machine is there as a supplemental timebase to correct for a natural one that is operating outside acceptable tolerances. Essentially all the energy used to pump the blood is handled by muscle metabolism in the usual manner, the pacemaker just triggers the muscle to act on schedule if the natural clocking system fails to do so. Not a zero energy job(but, like controlling a transistor) uses a tiny amount of energy to control the activity of a more powerful system.
A blood-flow powered assistive pump would, of course, be absurd.
According to TFA's description of the problem, the issue wasn't one of technical acumen at all.
In order to be able to do deduplication across their subscriber base, rather than per-user or none at all(likely making for considerable disk and bandwidth savings across a service of their size), Dropbox failed to (usefully) encrypt user files and introduced a fun side-channel attack where anybody can determine whether somebody else has a file stored, just by attempting to upload it and then sniffing the wire to see if it takes the expected upload time, or just a tiny amount of hash comparing to "upload".
Technologically, they didn't exactly advance the state of the art in crypto to power their service; but the issues at question appear to be technologically competent enough, deduplication across the largest set of files possible is a perfectly sensible way of reducing storage and bandwidth costs, it's just that they then proceeded to sharply oversell the amount of actual privacy they were providing.
Given that education doesn't seem to have much effect on honesty(unless you count the courses of study that probably make you worse...) I'd be inclined to say that it is irrelevant to the problem at hand.
Hey, not every VPS service has the advanced management APIs that make operating 7 proxies on demand hassle free...
So, we typically pay the guys who handle our massively-complex-bundle-of-personal-information-and-spying-potential about as well as the guys who change our oil and then bad things often happen. The independent ones are subject to basically zero supervision and not infrequently include complete amateurs, some rather dodgy. The chain-store ones are subject to supervision aimed primarily at forcing them to upsell and bill as hard as possible, while working as quickly as possible. Quality results are assured. Wow. Allow me to collect my jaw from the floor.
The only surprise is that anybody is surprised. Even in professions with a very long history of handling personal, highly technical, or discrete matters for their clients, with well developed professional codes, cultural pressures, and often substantially better compensation(think doctors, lawyers, priests) there are innumerable cases of ethical dodginess, laziness, and other issues.
Your ill-understood slander of Enterprise Solutions will not be tolerated.
Any two-bit neckbeard with a sourceforge account can create a "poorly understood clusterfuck."
However, only by leveraging the organizational synergies of a corporation committed to customer-centric excellence across multiple value centers is it possible to create a "poorly understood clusterfuck" backed by overpriced consultants, soporific slide decks, documentation that addresses the hypothetical case of a 50,000 seat installation across hundreds of multinational satellite sites; but fails to have any useful information on why some critical service leaks memory and needs to be restarted every 18 hours, a custom set of Vizio(tm) objects that allows middle managers and Certified Solution Architects to emulate understanding of the system with impressive graphical flourishes, and a mandatory "maintenance contract" that makes you eligible to pay a per-incident fee to have some poor dude in Hyderabad read a script at you.
Freetards, they just don't understand the value of good commercial Solutions.
On the one hand, if the feds have internal emails or similar to the effect of "Sales minion: 'Hey boss, the new clients are clearly illegal scammers.' Sales Manager: 'Minion, illegal scammers pay good money for ads. You didn't see them. Also, unless I 'don't see' at least 30% more by the end of the fiscal year your ass is out the door..." then there is a good argument to be made that Google ought to be on the hook.
There are two aspects that worry me, though: Presumably, as with many high-volume electronic services, most of the bulk Adwords sales receive basically no human scrutiny, and would probably have transaction costs too high to be workable if they did. Many online services are like that, many retail services are like that, cheap cellphones, etc, etc. Creating an implied duty to vet all customers for virtually anything that might have criminal use, on pain of major lawsuits/fines should some of the customers turn out to be criminals, seems wildly dangerous. Even the largely draconian DMCA specifically avoided doing that.
Second, of course, is the concern about making the internet either a highly fragmented geolocated-to-death zone, or an "all entities bound by the union of all sets of laws" one. In this case, for instance, a nontrivial percentage of the US lies pretty close to the Canadian border. It is hardly implausible that canadian businesses might wish to advertise to american audiences certain goods and services that are only legal if they cross the border, nor is doing so obviously criminal(in a similar vein, there isn't anything illegal about running ads for Vegas vacations in states that ban gambling, or prostitution ads in Vegas, despite the fact that you have to leave the county to legally purchase the services offered.)
Obviously, a nontrivial percentage of discount canadian pharmacies do offer to assist in breaking US law, by mailing you some drugs, often with minimal documentation, and a nontrivial percentage of ads for gambling are for illegal online betting, rather than for visits to establishments in different jurisdictions; but it isn't as though a simple keyword search is necessarily going to distinguish between the two, and a crackdown on something with legitimate applications always has potential to go to unfortunate places...
Depends on how OS agnostic the malware is: For basic trojan/social engineering style stuff, I would tend to expect that anything designed to work with 7's somewhat tighter security structure would also work with XP. Only for things that require exploits specific to particular versions would a focus on 7 be directly protective of XP.
I suspect that the fact that 7 now means "home user" while XP is increasingly the domain of control-freak corporates has a lot to do with it.
The precise degree of regulatory capture at any given time is going to be a politically determined matter; but you really can't expect any other stance: Nuclear plants are very expensive to build, and very expensive to decommission; but the cost of fuel is low, and the cost of temporary-turning-into-permanent-on-an-installment-plan 'disposal' of fuel is also fairly low. Thus, unless the maintenance situation is so bad that you have a crack squad of Godzilla slayers on staff, the economics are basically never in favor of replacement if you can keep the sucker running. Even if you can't, decommissioning costs are likely t dwarf the costs of putting it on some sort of "standby" and leaving it until you can retire away from the problem.
It's very much unlike, say, gas units, which are pretty cheap to put up and tear down; but burn fairly expensive fuel(and, worst case, just sort of explode a little bit, spreading not-very-scary natural gas combustion products), where the economic incentives to take down old plants and put up more efficient ones work out comparatively well.
The NRC, on the other hand, is pretty much in the business of delivering bad news in order to head off low-probability, but very bad, potential accidents. People that unpopular need institutional cultures of iron to avoid subversion.
I think that it would be fair to approve Google's request, on the condition that they agree to ensure that all autonomous vehicles in their employ exercise their right to bear arms while within the state.
Why do we need all this fancy optical apparatus when good old-fashioned two-body superposition can easily be achieved at home, without additional hardware(unless desired, of course)?
Pop-quantum physics is, alas, absolutely fucking rife with nonsense derived from the interpretation that the "observer" in ye olde Schrödinger's cat thought experiment means "conscious, in the way I imagine myself to be, observer" rather than "virtually any outside interaction that disrupts the closed system". From that fount much bullshit flows...
It isn't just the "nuclear nuts", though they probably haven't improve the R&D supply. Properly decommissioning a plant, especially one that really deserves it, is not inexpensive, and turns a reasonably profitable(once the construction/startup expenses have been amortized or written off) baseline unit into a big cost center. There is, thus, a strong built in incentive to keep patching and running as long as possible. Best case, you can continue to use the plant as a generating asset. Worst case, if you've had to make a number of repairs that compromise capacity, it may well still be cheaper to keep the lights on and the plant "operating" than it is to tear it down.
The NRC initially became concerned about the plant when it realized that employees had begun logging maintenance work directly on thereifixedit...
You sound a mite terrorized, there...
Wow. Try the sedatives. Have you honestly forgotten Apple's original 'Well, you can just develop webapps and like it.' position on 3rd party iDevice software so quickly? Compared to the matter of whether development tools are free-with-purchase-of-mac, or slightly expensive, or a few thousand bucks, the fact that they created an entire category of devices that you had to exploit bugs just to run 3rd party code is slightly more noticeable... They eventually conceded, and now 3rd party code can be run, subject to their blessing and on their terms; but I find your contention that the price of dev tools, rather than the control of platforms, indicates an entity's attitude toward 3rd parties very strange. While it is true that Apple does not view dev tools as a profit center, they consistently treat 3rd party entities as barely tolerable adjuncts to the mac experience, who have to be carefully kept in line. Hence the iDevice lockdown and app store rules. Hence the migration of the app store to the desktop. Hence the safari plugin signing requirements.
Even more than that, don't compete with your channel or your supplier in what is more or less a commodity business at which they are likely to be better than you...
Apple suffers 3rd party software to exist at all because they recognize that they cannot fulfill every customer desire themselves(though they really would have preferred to keep it all first party, if their initial response was anything to go by...) Apple's um.. world unrenowned.. gaming team, for instance, is not likely to threaten Angry Birds in the immediate future.
But Bloody Ebooks? Displaying text isn't exactly rocket surgery(and, since Apple has both an text editor and a web browser under development, they have some expertise in even those areas where doing it correctly takes some work), and Apple's ability to negotiate IP licenses for stuff is well established, with ITMS. Not only does Apple have the technological power, with their cryptographically controlled walled garden, to exterminate a competitor, this particular competitor was entering an area where Apple has every expectation of being able to produce something that is at least adequate, possibly even as good, with minimal effort.
Some businesses, at least, while they are vulnerable to the power of their platform vendor, have a product that is sufficiently differentiated that exterminating it will either take years of incremental improvement, piss off numerous customers, or both. They are vulnerable at a strategic level; but their near-term safety is largely assured. These guys, though, sound like Apple could knock together a good-enough epub+'fairplay' DRMed ebook format in an afternoon, and a slight-modification-of-webkit based reader in a weekend, and have something adequate enough to roll out once they extirpated these competitors by technological means. Game Over.
"We put our faith in Apple and they screwed us."
I don't understand why people find this so difficult: A walled garden can be an attractive place to run a business. The grass is clipped, most of the riff-raff gets stopped at the door, and all the happy little consumers and UUIDs and associated credit cards. However: In. A. Walled. Garden. You. Exist. At. The. Power. And. Mere. Pleasure. Of. The. Management. Period. Full Stop. Etc. If they think that their garden is more colorful with some 3rd parties selling peanuts on the sidewalk, such will be permitted to exist. If not, such will be removed.
Why would you ever "put your faith" in a self-interested, value-rational entity that has the power to unilaterally crush you like a bug? It isn't rocket surgery to work out that you will be permitted to exist so long as you are useful, and crushed immediately after. Why is this a surprise?
The most jarring place I've ever run into RAR is by a few companies, mostly random hardware OEMs for forgettable routers and such, who understand their legal obligations under the GPL; but clearly are totally disconnected from any cultural conventions of OSS. You go to their GPL page and boom, just a giant .RAR of the directory in which their firmware guy built the firmware.
Somebody really looking for a flame war would note that the qualifications for standard-issue guard humans might not be so different...
Oh, certainly, I'm not expecting a remote disk of given performance to perform equivalently to a local disk of the same performance, particularly for latency sensitive applications. However, at least for basic desktop stuff, the most noticeable lags are in the "poke 600MB file, twiddle fingers" case, rather than the "notice just a tiny bit of latency in everything you do" case. And, at least in our setup, each of the desktops has whatever unspecified-brand disk Dell felt was cheapest that day, while the network storage locations are all located on multiple shelves of 15kRPM SAS drives with substantial backing RAM. Were the desktops equipped with decent SSDs, or PCIe-attached ones, it'd be no contest.
My doctor tells me that thinking about people like you is bad for my hypertension, so I try not to...