Insensitive clod. I'm reduced to posting messages to slashdot written in my own blood, by the light of a burning hobo, over a half-duplex rfc1149 link.
I've heard the theory suggested that engineering knowledge(and accompanying social and technical organization) is exactly what allows a civilization to suddenly die out.
Technology(speaking in the broad sense, including things like complex social structures, bureaucracies, and so forth) is extremely powerful; but also makes it fairly easy to get locked-in to brittle trajectories where(even if alternatives are theoretically possible), your only real approach to any problem becomes "do whatever it is we already do; but more, and harder". This often goes poorly. Worse, you have usually managed to build a population that depends on your complex social structures, which makes for a fun die-off if they should come loose.
When the Roman legions stopped being a net gain, through plunder and Romanization, and started to become a liability(since they couldn't expand the borders any further, and spent most of their time fighting civil wars to install one emperor after another), Roman civilization as a whole never really came up with an alternative. They pretty much just raised more, tried harder, passed a few more laws to try to preserve the status quo. Long-view, they were following a doomed path, proximately, though, they didn't really have a whole lot of options. Any emperor who adopted a "fewer legions" policy would find himself replaced with extreme prejudice by somebody willing to do the opposite.
I don't know how the Mayans went down; but complexity quite possibly helped them along.
I doubt that it's the plumbing per se; but a rise in interlocking technical and social complexity really helps if you want to "go under" in a way dramatic enough for history to notice.
Barring fairly rare events(like the sudden appearance of really nasty plagues, or an advanced culture showing up and gunning you down, or both), low-complexity cultures don't really "collapse" in any useful sense. They wax and wane a bit, some years good some years bad, and they may undergo various sorts of linguistic and genetic shifts due to warfare and migration; but they aren't specialized enough for things to really go to hell.
If you have interlocking specialization, though, you have entire institutions, and populations, that are basically dependent on large numbers of other structures and people for their continued existence. This makes it fairly easy for the right push to, instead of "reducing the hunter-gatherer population by ~10%" do something more along the lines of "catastrophic mass starvation, entire cities abandoned to the flames, the capital investments of 200 years annihilated within months".
It turns out that that only happens when you aren't tossing enough severed heads down the steps of your blood-soaked skull-pyramids, and was thus an unheard of problem.
The "shoddy contractors" theory of water temperature problems is actually just a lie promulgated as part of the post-colonization suppression of native mythology.
PDF/A is indeed the sane specification(though it has a few friends for slightly different purposes; but offering similar levels of standardness and sanity).
Trouble is, though, Adobe has very little incentive to stick to that(if some customer demands it, they obviously have an incentive to be able to emit sane PDF/A; but not much to stop there). Since the core, sane, bits of PDF are a royalty free standard, and Reader is free as in beer, Adobe only makes money if people buy the expensive versions of Acrobat, or heroically expensive "enterprise document workflow solutions" and so forth. Thus there are two pernicious forces at work: 1. If Adobe's de-facto PDF "standard" didn't keep sprouting tentacles of various sorts, it would be easier for competing products to reach parity, or "almost as good but a lot cheaper" status, and erode Adobe's profits. 2. Because Adobe's bread-and-butter involves worming their way into various horrible and convoluted enterprise document/form scenarios, their customers probably give them a lot of weird(and, outside of the customer's specific context, basically terrible) feature requests. "But if we could just embed Flash videos, we could consolidate the new-hire training module with the document compliance tracking system..." "Hey, could we work-in client-side input validation, and HTTP GET? It sure would save us a lot of time collecting the surveys that people fill out; but neglect to email back..", etc, etc.
Do I even want to know how NTP, presumably running largely in userspace(if OSX behaves like other unixes in that regard) is even capable of resolving over IPv6 if IPv6 is disabled?
Does OSX interpret "disabled" to mean "enabled; but politely instruct userspace programs to ignore that fact"?
More than that. Plenty of binary blobs are considered to be serious business(see just about any proprietary software).
Firmware, though, has more or less the ultimate in dongle-based copy protection... It's of essentially no use at all without the hardware, which is what you paid for anyway(the only exception would be those situations where the difference between the high end model and the midrange/low-end model is a couple of firmware locks. In such cases, the "high end" firmware is probably of considerable interest to owners of the "low-end" model who know which way to point a hex editor...).
Certainly, there are challenges to Moore's law, either fundamental physics or sheer manufacturing difficulty; but they have nothing to do with what the transistors are for(aside from modest differences if the issues have to do with manufacturing difficulties: If your 10nm process is plagued by high defect rates, it is probably easier to build SRAM, with tiny functional blocks, test for bad ones, encode the bad block addresses in a little onboard ROM, and have the motherboard BIOS do some remapping tricks to avoid using those than it is to build CPUs, with large functional blocks, and get pitiful yields).
As for applications, there are definitely huge numbers of them that will see little or no benefit from more cores(either because their devs are lazy/incompetent, or because customers won't pay enough for them to justify the greater costs of dealing with hairy parallelism bugs, or because they depend on algorithms that are fundamentally linear). However, because of servers and virtualization, the demand for more cores should continue unabated on the high end for as long as vendors are able to deliver. If your enterprise has tens or hundreds of thousands of distinct processes, or tens of thousands of distinct VMs, you already posses a crude sort of parallelism, even if every single one of those is dumb as a rock and can only make use of a single core.
Obviously "NVIDIA's Chief Scientist" is going to say something about the epochal importance of GPUs; but WTF?
Moore's law, depending on the exact formulation you go with, posits either that transistor density will double roughly every two years or that density at minimum cost/transistor increases at roughly that rate.
It is pretty much exclusively a prediction concerning IC fabrication(a business that NVIDIA isn't even in, TSMC handles all of their actual fabbing), without any reference to what those transistors are used for.
Now, it is true that, unless parallel processing can be made to work usefully on a general basis, Moore's law will stop implying more powerful chips, and just start implying cheaper ones(since, if the limits of effective parallel processing mean that you get basically no performance improvements going from X billion transistors to 2X billion transistors, Moore's law will continue; but instead of shipping faster chips each generation, vendors will just ship smaller, cheaper ones).
In the case of servers, of course, the amount of cleverness and fundamental CS development needed to make parallelism work is substantially lower, since, if you have an outfit with 10,000 apache instances, or 5,000 VMs or something, they will always be happy to have more cores per chip, since that means more apache instances for VMs per chip, which means fewer servers(or the same number of single/dual socket servers instead of much more expensive quad/octal socket servers) even if each instance/VM uses no parallelism at all, and just sits at one core = one instance.
Working on it(no, not me personally; but the collective "we" are).
Not only does the concept work, mice with fiber lines coupled directly to their brain, complete with a slightly sinister blue glow coming out of their skulls, look utterly badass...
There's also the fact that anything involving injecting genetically engineered viruses into your eyes tends to get a little extra scrutiny.
Surgery, while ever so slightly barbaric(especially in places that you have to break bones to get to) has the advantage of being mostly predictable. The risks aren't zero, and some people heal better than others; but it is basically moving meat around.
Genetic modification, even when the germline isn't involved, is less well behaved. Sometimes it works, sometimes exotic cancer develops.
Not to mention: "desperate" does not equal "rational"...
It isn't a binary thing, rational one moment stark raving mad the next; but it isn't exactly news that people become steadily less discerning as you put them under greater pressure.
It isn't the pedophilia per se(which, while tragic, is expected at a certain level in any situation where an adult population has the opportunity to interact with children), it's the institution-wide, endemic coverup and enabling of that pedophilia that (rightly) makes the catholic church a target of derision.
Some percentage of priests are going to be pedophiles, inevitably, because some percentage of adult males are. However, that doesn't mean that you deliberately conceal them from law enforcement as part of some bullshit assertion that canon law takes precedence over secular law. Nor does it mean that you deliberately circulate the problem priests around, to provide them with fresh victims and, cynically, give them assignments where they are likely to have access to the weakest and most vulnerable, and least likely to be able to cause a scandal, targets...
Now, incidentally, I strongly suspect that priests are more likely than the population at large to exhibit sexual preferences that would displease orthodox catholic teaching on the subject(though, not all of which are, by any means, of legal or ethical concern. Homosexuals who prefer consenting adult partners make the church sad; but are neither legally nor ethically a problem). The logic of my suspicion can be understood by the following analogy:
It is highly likely that, on average, priests as a population have either less interest in money, or less of a belief that they would be able to obtain it, than otherwise demographically equivalent people. The reasons are fairly simple: Priesthood doesn't pay all that well, given the amount of training and effort it requires. Thus, anyone who becomes a priest is either super-gung-ho about priesthood, doesn't care much about money and what it can buy, or doesn't think that they could earn much money elsewhere(making the opportunity cost low), or some combination of the above.
Priesthood imposes a "sexual opportunity cost" similar to its monetary one. Thus, one would follow similar logic and expect that priests are either more gung-ho about priesthood than non priests, less interested in sex generally(just lower libido) than non priests, or have sexual preferences that they (as catholics conservative enough to consider priesthood) could not have satisfied even without a vow of celibacy(thus making the opportunity cost of a vow of celibacy low). If you would just love to marry a nice catholic girl and have a bunch of kids, a vow of celibacy is a serious cost. If you are gay, or polyamorous, or a pedophile, or otherwise of unapproved taste, you cannot licitly(within catholic teachings) have the sex that you want in any case, so a vow of celibacy is a minimal cost.
Since humans are way better at deciding to resist temptation in the future than they are at resisting temptation in the present, this more or less ensures that a fair few sexually atypical individuals will end up in the priesthood, under the optimistic impression that they will remain celibate. Now, again, many of them are both legally and ethically unproblematic to society at large. A priest is having an affair, homo or heterosexual? Not our problem. Some of them are legally clear; but ethically dodgy(your classic "father confessor 'counseling' wives looking for advice about their marriages" situation. All legal, consenting adults and so forth; but pretty clear abuse of position). And then you have the pedos and the rapists, for whom the church has been disturbingly willing to cover.
The SHA-1, or equivalent, of a sensitive file tells you basically nothing useful about that file(or if you are addressing situations where things are likely to be split up, you can look for hash matches for smaller subsections of potentially sensitive files).
Since hashes are designed to detect tampering, that would largely ruin the value of the tool against dedicated exfiltrators(since making small modifications that result in totally different hashes; but do nothing to degrade the human utility of a file is quite trivial); but it would allow you to address the vast field of "humans are stupid and lazy, and complexity invites mistakes" style leaks, without having the tool reveal anything useful about what it is looking for.
I suspect that, for Joe User, the trend you mention for yourself will be substantially accelerated by the increase in "cloud" offerings(webmail, google docs and competitors, etc.) and trivial to use internet backup and sync services.
While, for geeks, or for users within a properly administered institutional environment, data and configuration portability has been trivial for a long time now, that hasn't been the case at home. This provides a powerful incentive in favor of having "a computer", and just dealing with a compromise if you have different sets of needs in different areas; because, at least, all your data and configurations will be there when you need them.
If, through a combination of data moving off the local machine, and through sync services, data portability can become easy, the use of application-specific machines can reasonably be expected to become more attractive.
Sounds like a good market segmentation opportunity(which Intel loves these days).
Have an "enterprise edition" for desktop and mobile thinnish clients, that includes crypto acceleration and costs $100 more, and laser it off your otherwise identical consumer models...
Heavy metals are a special nuisance because its the atom, not the molecule, that is of concern. There are a lot of ghastly poisons and unpleasant pollutants that turn into a mixture of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and maybe a dash of phosphorus, nitrogen, an whatnot, if you burn them hard enough, or if some clever bacterium gets to them. Heavy metals aren't one of them.
Barring the development of a bacterium clever enough to catalyze nuclear fission, though, heavy metals aren't going anywhere. Best case scenario, they are(either through organic or inorganic processes) converted into relatively biologically inactive forms, and get incorporated into sediments and just sort of sit there. Worst case, they remain in highly bioavailable forms and float around the food chain wreaking havoc of various flavors.
I'm not an expert; but my understanding is that bacteria and other organisms can cut both ways on this. Some(either by happenstance, or as an evolved measure to protect their own biological systems) have chemical means of binding heavy metals into relatively inoffensive molecules. Others make things worse(from our perspective). There are a number of types of bacteria that can convert mercury(hardly salubrious; but less offensive than its reputation would suggest) into methylmercury(substantially nastier).
Obviously, over a sufficiently long time, all but the nastiest flavors of hydrocarbon are subject to biological attack(which, among other reasons, is why there isn't much free oil just sitting around on the earth's surface, and what is close to the surface has mostly degraded into a hardened mass of tar).
However, if anybody thinks that bacteria that evolved to metabolize oil seeps are going to be able to eat the output of a more or less uncapped modern production well before it floats and oils a whole lot of birds/beach/furry animals, they are dreaming.
There are practically no complex organic compounds that are truly persistent, between UV and adventurous microbes; but there are plenty that are persistent enough that you'll be dead by the time they've worked themselves out.
Oh, there isn't a chance in hell that Oracle would risk any significant legal exposure just so that their second-tier virtualization product can do something that most of their customers don't care about.
However, VirtualBox(with the exception of a few bits and pieces found only in the commercial/proprietary version) is FOSS. If the "OSX on Macs only" restriction is largely artificial, it seems extremely likely that some annonymous dude in Lithuania or somewhere will cook up a patch that removes the restriction and uncrippled binaries will float around in the usual dark corners.
It's like libDVDCSS. Totally DMCA violating; but not exactly hard to get ahold of.
IT can't do jack to your computer without your consent. To do so would be criminal. However, IT is under absolutely no obligation to let your computer on their network. And, while they probably can't stop you from pinging the mailserver, they can certainly stop you from logging in from an untrusted machine. Given that (I am quite sure) this process is a gigantic pain in the ass for the IT guys, they have probably been told that stopping you is their job(either under the law, or because the boss will fire them otherwise).
You are basically at an impasse here. They can't touch your computer without your consent; but you can't touch their network without their consent, and they can make your consent a condition of their consent.
Your options are basically as follows:
1)Stop checking email from home/personal machine at work. If this is impractical/untenable, move on to step two.
2)Request that, if IT wants security and management, they issue you the hardware you need to do your job. If you don't have the clout/there's no chance in hell/you'll be stuck on a Latitude CPi from 1999 if you do that, move on to step 3.
3)Purchase a "sacrificial" notebook. A netbook or cheap CULV thin-and-light(depending on where you fall on the small size vs. screen size issue) can be had for $400 or less on any given day, depending on which models are on sale. Buy one, set up a restore disk, then let the IT department do its vile work. If their software fucks it up, run the restore and make IT do it again.
Using Flash as a video player is, by a fair margin, the most trivially replaced function that isn't addressed by pre-HTML5 web standards(stupid shit like Flash based menus and random site chrome is, of course, even easier to replace; because it could have been done in standard HTML+javascript ages ago; but that is largely a lost cause). However, that (quite simple) function is also a huge driver of Flash installation. Basically, if you want to watch video on the web, you need to install Flash. Once you have flash, you bolster Adobe's install base stats, serve as a target for much more sophisticated Flash-based applications, and bolster Adobe's efforts(through AIR) and similar to have a quasi-unified webapp/desktop-app runtime based on Flash and their various content creation tools.
Microsoft has its own, competing quasi-unifed webapp/desktop-app runtime, based on.net, winforms, and the like. Unlike AIR, it much more closely ties the user to Microsoft, and Microsoft platforms and technologies. Therefore, they want to destroy AIR and Flash.
By indicating support for HTML5, which will support the relatively trivial video use cases(youtube style stuff, without Serious DRM mandated by paranoid content providers), they substantially reduce the motivation of users to download Flash and corporate IT departments to install and support it. Since Silverlight comes by default in newer MS OSes, they get increased marketshare vs. Flash/AIR.
Since HTML5 makes possible advanced web applications, but still lags in easy tools vs. Flash or Silverlight(which won't stop Google and their ilk; but will stop Joe Flash Monkey, or Bob corporate intranet developer), HTML5 can be safely supported without destroying Silverlight.
That is my theory. Yeah, h.246 as the html5 video codec of choice puts mozilla in a tough spot; but it isn't as though there won't be some workaround(patent violating 3rd party builds, plugin that exposes system codecs, whatever.) in short order. It isn't good; but it isn't a huge threat. I'd say that this is about kicking Adobe while Apple is already holding them down...
Slashdot Mirror
Insensitive clod. I'm reduced to posting messages to slashdot written in my own blood, by the light of a burning hobo, over a half-duplex rfc1149 link.
I've heard the theory suggested that engineering knowledge(and accompanying social and technical organization) is exactly what allows a civilization to suddenly die out.
Technology(speaking in the broad sense, including things like complex social structures, bureaucracies, and so forth) is extremely powerful; but also makes it fairly easy to get locked-in to brittle trajectories where(even if alternatives are theoretically possible), your only real approach to any problem becomes "do whatever it is we already do; but more, and harder". This often goes poorly. Worse, you have usually managed to build a population that depends on your complex social structures, which makes for a fun die-off if they should come loose.
When the Roman legions stopped being a net gain, through plunder and Romanization, and started to become a liability(since they couldn't expand the borders any further, and spent most of their time fighting civil wars to install one emperor after another), Roman civilization as a whole never really came up with an alternative. They pretty much just raised more, tried harder, passed a few more laws to try to preserve the status quo. Long-view, they were following a doomed path, proximately, though, they didn't really have a whole lot of options. Any emperor who adopted a "fewer legions" policy would find himself replaced with extreme prejudice by somebody willing to do the opposite.
I don't know how the Mayans went down; but complexity quite possibly helped them along.
I doubt that it's the plumbing per se; but a rise in interlocking technical and social complexity really helps if you want to "go under" in a way dramatic enough for history to notice.
Barring fairly rare events(like the sudden appearance of really nasty plagues, or an advanced culture showing up and gunning you down, or both), low-complexity cultures don't really "collapse" in any useful sense. They wax and wane a bit, some years good some years bad, and they may undergo various sorts of linguistic and genetic shifts due to warfare and migration; but they aren't specialized enough for things to really go to hell.
If you have interlocking specialization, though, you have entire institutions, and populations, that are basically dependent on large numbers of other structures and people for their continued existence. This makes it fairly easy for the right push to, instead of "reducing the hunter-gatherer population by ~10%" do something more along the lines of "catastrophic mass starvation, entire cities abandoned to the flames, the capital investments of 200 years annihilated within months".
It turns out that that only happens when you aren't tossing enough severed heads down the steps of your blood-soaked skull-pyramids, and was thus an unheard of problem.
The "shoddy contractors" theory of water temperature problems is actually just a lie promulgated as part of the post-colonization suppression of native mythology.
PDF/A is indeed the sane specification(though it has a few friends for slightly different purposes; but offering similar levels of standardness and sanity).
Trouble is, though, Adobe has very little incentive to stick to that(if some customer demands it, they obviously have an incentive to be able to emit sane PDF/A; but not much to stop there). Since the core, sane, bits of PDF are a royalty free standard, and Reader is free as in beer, Adobe only makes money if people buy the expensive versions of Acrobat, or heroically expensive "enterprise document workflow solutions" and so forth. Thus there are two pernicious forces at work: 1. If Adobe's de-facto PDF "standard" didn't keep sprouting tentacles of various sorts, it would be easier for competing products to reach parity, or "almost as good but a lot cheaper" status, and erode Adobe's profits. 2. Because Adobe's bread-and-butter involves worming their way into various horrible and convoluted enterprise document/form scenarios, their customers probably give them a lot of weird(and, outside of the customer's specific context, basically terrible) feature requests. "But if we could just embed Flash videos, we could consolidate the new-hire training module with the document compliance tracking system..." "Hey, could we work-in client-side input validation, and HTTP GET? It sure would save us a lot of time collecting the surveys that people fill out; but neglect to email back..", etc, etc.
Do I even want to know how NTP, presumably running largely in userspace(if OSX behaves like other unixes in that regard) is even capable of resolving over IPv6 if IPv6 is disabled?
Does OSX interpret "disabled" to mean "enabled; but politely instruct userspace programs to ignore that fact"?
More than that. Plenty of binary blobs are considered to be serious business(see just about any proprietary software).
Firmware, though, has more or less the ultimate in dongle-based copy protection... It's of essentially no use at all without the hardware, which is what you paid for anyway(the only exception would be those situations where the difference between the high end model and the midrange/low-end model is a couple of firmware locks. In such cases, the "high end" firmware is probably of considerable interest to owners of the "low-end" model who know which way to point a hex editor...).
Certainly, there are challenges to Moore's law, either fundamental physics or sheer manufacturing difficulty; but they have nothing to do with what the transistors are for(aside from modest differences if the issues have to do with manufacturing difficulties: If your 10nm process is plagued by high defect rates, it is probably easier to build SRAM, with tiny functional blocks, test for bad ones, encode the bad block addresses in a little onboard ROM, and have the motherboard BIOS do some remapping tricks to avoid using those than it is to build CPUs, with large functional blocks, and get pitiful yields).
As for applications, there are definitely huge numbers of them that will see little or no benefit from more cores(either because their devs are lazy/incompetent, or because customers won't pay enough for them to justify the greater costs of dealing with hairy parallelism bugs, or because they depend on algorithms that are fundamentally linear). However, because of servers and virtualization, the demand for more cores should continue unabated on the high end for as long as vendors are able to deliver. If your enterprise has tens or hundreds of thousands of distinct processes, or tens of thousands of distinct VMs, you already posses a crude sort of parallelism, even if every single one of those is dumb as a rock and can only make use of a single core.
Obviously "NVIDIA's Chief Scientist" is going to say something about the epochal importance of GPUs; but WTF?
Moore's law, depending on the exact formulation you go with, posits either that transistor density will double roughly every two years or that density at minimum cost/transistor increases at roughly that rate.
It is pretty much exclusively a prediction concerning IC fabrication(a business that NVIDIA isn't even in, TSMC handles all of their actual fabbing), without any reference to what those transistors are used for.
Now, it is true that, unless parallel processing can be made to work usefully on a general basis, Moore's law will stop implying more powerful chips, and just start implying cheaper ones(since, if the limits of effective parallel processing mean that you get basically no performance improvements going from X billion transistors to 2X billion transistors, Moore's law will continue; but instead of shipping faster chips each generation, vendors will just ship smaller, cheaper ones).
In the case of servers, of course, the amount of cleverness and fundamental CS development needed to make parallelism work is substantially lower, since, if you have an outfit with 10,000 apache instances, or 5,000 VMs or something, they will always be happy to have more cores per chip, since that means more apache instances for VMs per chip, which means fewer servers(or the same number of single/dual socket servers instead of much more expensive quad/octal socket servers) even if each instance/VM uses no parallelism at all, and just sits at one core = one instance.
Working on it(no, not me personally; but the collective "we" are).
Not only does the concept work, mice with fiber lines coupled directly to their brain, complete with a slightly sinister blue glow coming out of their skulls, look utterly badass...
There's also the fact that anything involving injecting genetically engineered viruses into your eyes tends to get a little extra scrutiny.
Surgery, while ever so slightly barbaric(especially in places that you have to break bones to get to) has the advantage of being mostly predictable. The risks aren't zero, and some people heal better than others; but it is basically moving meat around.
Genetic modification, even when the germline isn't involved, is less well behaved. Sometimes it works, sometimes exotic cancer develops.
Not to mention: "desperate" does not equal "rational"...
It isn't a binary thing, rational one moment stark raving mad the next; but it isn't exactly news that people become steadily less discerning as you put them under greater pressure.
It isn't the pedophilia per se(which, while tragic, is expected at a certain level in any situation where an adult population has the opportunity to interact with children), it's the institution-wide, endemic coverup and enabling of that pedophilia that (rightly) makes the catholic church a target of derision.
Some percentage of priests are going to be pedophiles, inevitably, because some percentage of adult males are. However, that doesn't mean that you deliberately conceal them from law enforcement as part of some bullshit assertion that canon law takes precedence over secular law. Nor does it mean that you deliberately circulate the problem priests around, to provide them with fresh victims and, cynically, give them assignments where they are likely to have access to the weakest and most vulnerable, and least likely to be able to cause a scandal, targets...
Now, incidentally, I strongly suspect that priests are more likely than the population at large to exhibit sexual preferences that would displease orthodox catholic teaching on the subject(though, not all of which are, by any means, of legal or ethical concern. Homosexuals who prefer consenting adult partners make the church sad; but are neither legally nor ethically a problem). The logic of my suspicion can be understood by the following analogy:
It is highly likely that, on average, priests as a population have either less interest in money, or less of a belief that they would be able to obtain it, than otherwise demographically equivalent people. The reasons are fairly simple: Priesthood doesn't pay all that well, given the amount of training and effort it requires. Thus, anyone who becomes a priest is either super-gung-ho about priesthood, doesn't care much about money and what it can buy, or doesn't think that they could earn much money elsewhere(making the opportunity cost low), or some combination of the above.
Priesthood imposes a "sexual opportunity cost" similar to its monetary one. Thus, one would follow similar logic and expect that priests are either more gung-ho about priesthood than non priests, less interested in sex generally(just lower libido) than non priests, or have sexual preferences that they (as catholics conservative enough to consider priesthood) could not have satisfied even without a vow of celibacy(thus making the opportunity cost of a vow of celibacy low). If you would just love to marry a nice catholic girl and have a bunch of kids, a vow of celibacy is a serious cost. If you are gay, or polyamorous, or a pedophile, or otherwise of unapproved taste, you cannot licitly(within catholic teachings) have the sex that you want in any case, so a vow of celibacy is a minimal cost.
Since humans are way better at deciding to resist temptation in the future than they are at resisting temptation in the present, this more or less ensures that a fair few sexually atypical individuals will end up in the priesthood, under the optimistic impression that they will remain celibate. Now, again, many of them are both legally and ethically unproblematic to society at large. A priest is having an affair, homo or heterosexual? Not our problem. Some of them are legally clear; but ethically dodgy(your classic "father confessor 'counseling' wives looking for advice about their marriages" situation. All legal, consenting adults and so forth; but pretty clear abuse of position). And then you have the pedos and the rapists, for whom the church has been disturbingly willing to cover.
Hashes, perhaps?
The SHA-1, or equivalent, of a sensitive file tells you basically nothing useful about that file(or if you are addressing situations where things are likely to be split up, you can look for hash matches for smaller subsections of potentially sensitive files).
Since hashes are designed to detect tampering, that would largely ruin the value of the tool against dedicated exfiltrators(since making small modifications that result in totally different hashes; but do nothing to degrade the human utility of a file is quite trivial); but it would allow you to address the vast field of "humans are stupid and lazy, and complexity invites mistakes" style leaks, without having the tool reveal anything useful about what it is looking for.
It's not a botnet. The evil bit is set to 0 on all command and control packets.
1 core for you, 1 core for Norton...
I suspect that, for Joe User, the trend you mention for yourself will be substantially accelerated by the increase in "cloud" offerings(webmail, google docs and competitors, etc.) and trivial to use internet backup and sync services.
While, for geeks, or for users within a properly administered institutional environment, data and configuration portability has been trivial for a long time now, that hasn't been the case at home. This provides a powerful incentive in favor of having "a computer", and just dealing with a compromise if you have different sets of needs in different areas; because, at least, all your data and configurations will be there when you need them.
If, through a combination of data moving off the local machine, and through sync services, data portability can become easy, the use of application-specific machines can reasonably be expected to become more attractive.
Sounds like a good market segmentation opportunity(which Intel loves these days).
Have an "enterprise edition" for desktop and mobile thinnish clients, that includes crypto acceleration and costs $100 more, and laser it off your otherwise identical consumer models...
Absurd, good sir.
America's culture of freedom and individual responsibility has made it a hotbed of unconventional electronic marketing entrepreneurs.
Godless elsewhereistan's degenerate criminality makes it a hive of spammer scum.
Get the Facts(tm)!
Heavy metals are a special nuisance because its the atom, not the molecule, that is of concern. There are a lot of ghastly poisons and unpleasant pollutants that turn into a mixture of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and maybe a dash of phosphorus, nitrogen, an whatnot, if you burn them hard enough, or if some clever bacterium gets to them. Heavy metals aren't one of them.
Barring the development of a bacterium clever enough to catalyze nuclear fission, though, heavy metals aren't going anywhere. Best case scenario, they are(either through organic or inorganic processes) converted into relatively biologically inactive forms, and get incorporated into sediments and just sort of sit there. Worst case, they remain in highly bioavailable forms and float around the food chain wreaking havoc of various flavors.
I'm not an expert; but my understanding is that bacteria and other organisms can cut both ways on this. Some(either by happenstance, or as an evolved measure to protect their own biological systems) have chemical means of binding heavy metals into relatively inoffensive molecules. Others make things worse(from our perspective). There are a number of types of bacteria that can convert mercury(hardly salubrious; but less offensive than its reputation would suggest) into methylmercury(substantially nastier).
Obviously, over a sufficiently long time, all but the nastiest flavors of hydrocarbon are subject to biological attack(which, among other reasons, is why there isn't much free oil just sitting around on the earth's surface, and what is close to the surface has mostly degraded into a hardened mass of tar).
However, if anybody thinks that bacteria that evolved to metabolize oil seeps are going to be able to eat the output of a more or less uncapped modern production well before it floats and oils a whole lot of birds/beach/furry animals, they are dreaming.
There are practically no complex organic compounds that are truly persistent, between UV and adventurous microbes; but there are plenty that are persistent enough that you'll be dead by the time they've worked themselves out.
Have you considered getting some seed capital and commercializing that one?
Oh, there isn't a chance in hell that Oracle would risk any significant legal exposure just so that their second-tier virtualization product can do something that most of their customers don't care about.
However, VirtualBox(with the exception of a few bits and pieces found only in the commercial/proprietary version) is FOSS. If the "OSX on Macs only" restriction is largely artificial, it seems extremely likely that some annonymous dude in Lithuania or somewhere will cook up a patch that removes the restriction and uncrippled binaries will float around in the usual dark corners.
It's like libDVDCSS. Totally DMCA violating; but not exactly hard to get ahold of.
IT can't do jack to your computer without your consent. To do so would be criminal. However, IT is under absolutely no obligation to let your computer on their network. And, while they probably can't stop you from pinging the mailserver, they can certainly stop you from logging in from an untrusted machine. Given that (I am quite sure) this process is a gigantic pain in the ass for the IT guys, they have probably been told that stopping you is their job(either under the law, or because the boss will fire them otherwise).
You are basically at an impasse here. They can't touch your computer without your consent; but you can't touch their network without their consent, and they can make your consent a condition of their consent.
Your options are basically as follows:
1)Stop checking email from home/personal machine at work. If this is impractical/untenable, move on to step two.
2)Request that, if IT wants security and management, they issue you the hardware you need to do your job. If you don't have the clout/there's no chance in hell/you'll be stuck on a Latitude CPi from 1999 if you do that, move on to step 3.
3)Purchase a "sacrificial" notebook. A netbook or cheap CULV thin-and-light(depending on where you fall on the small size vs. screen size issue) can be had for $400 or less on any given day, depending on which models are on sale. Buy one, set up a restore disk, then let the IT department do its vile work. If their software fucks it up, run the restore and make IT do it again.
I suspect a different motivation: Silverlight.
.net, winforms, and the like. Unlike AIR, it much more closely ties the user to Microsoft, and Microsoft platforms and technologies. Therefore, they want to destroy AIR and Flash.
Using Flash as a video player is, by a fair margin, the most trivially replaced function that isn't addressed by pre-HTML5 web standards(stupid shit like Flash based menus and random site chrome is, of course, even easier to replace; because it could have been done in standard HTML+javascript ages ago; but that is largely a lost cause). However, that (quite simple) function is also a huge driver of Flash installation. Basically, if you want to watch video on the web, you need to install Flash. Once you have flash, you bolster Adobe's install base stats, serve as a target for much more sophisticated Flash-based applications, and bolster Adobe's efforts(through AIR) and similar to have a quasi-unified webapp/desktop-app runtime based on Flash and their various content creation tools.
Microsoft has its own, competing quasi-unifed webapp/desktop-app runtime, based on
By indicating support for HTML5, which will support the relatively trivial video use cases(youtube style stuff, without Serious DRM mandated by paranoid content providers), they substantially reduce the motivation of users to download Flash and corporate IT departments to install and support it. Since Silverlight comes by default in newer MS OSes, they get increased marketshare vs. Flash/AIR.
Since HTML5 makes possible advanced web applications, but still lags in easy tools vs. Flash or Silverlight(which won't stop Google and their ilk; but will stop Joe Flash Monkey, or Bob corporate intranet developer), HTML5 can be safely supported without destroying Silverlight.
That is my theory. Yeah, h.246 as the html5 video codec of choice puts mozilla in a tough spot; but it isn't as though there won't be some workaround(patent violating 3rd party builds, plugin that exposes system codecs, whatever.) in short order. It isn't good; but it isn't a huge threat. I'd say that this is about kicking Adobe while Apple is already holding them down...