FUD.

I have a machine running Windows 7 that just got reformatted. I'd moved the documents folder to a separate drive and encrypted it; once I reloaded the backup of the keys I could read any of my encrypted files I wanted.

Ah, another gold zealot.
Question for you: What intrinsic value does gold have that renders it more suitable for a store of value than a piece of paper? Answer: Nothing. You can't eat it, you can't plant it, you can't drive it, you can't breathe it, and it won't protect you from 'raptors. Gold is used for electronics and jewelry, and the fluctuating demand for those goods is the second largest factor controlling the price of gold. You may ask what the largest factor is, and I'll tell you: It's the bankers, who set the price of gold in closed meetings according to what they individually desire.
Gold is no better money than cowrie shells, and modern society has rightly left that sort of archaism behind centuries ago.

You and Bruce both are thinking in a very depressingly straight-forward manner. This isn't for watching 9 hours of typing or to protect you against a theoretical pipe-wielding villain who doesn't know about disguises. You would use these to shore up a fallible memory, or for evidence in a lawsuit, or to save more images of your spouse before s/he passed away. The security implications are amusing, but trite. Ultimately, complete life recording is like the NSA's scheme with the Internet: Record enough garbage, and you'll be nearly certain to catch the important bits.

for sharing people's PGP keys

Well there's your problem right there...if you let any email provider have your private key, you might as well have just stapled it to your forehead and wandered around New York asking to be mugged.

Automated status reports from a server are hardly unique. Unless you rolled your own software, Google's seen the exact email thousands of times. And if you did roll your own, then chances are that you use the same words as almost any other monitoring software, so to a Bayesian spam filter it's hardly a new thing.

I didn't think it possible to be more of a grind then WoW

The original EverQuest laughs at your innocence.

You're only considering the trivial case. What if the 4d cube intersects our plane point-first?

You think Sony is going to win. You are wrong. Look at how long the cat-and-mouse game over the PSP has continued. They are not capable of keeping people out of hardware they own.

E8 theory as Lisi currently presents it has been disproven.

Wait, wait, don't tell me: Running an 8 year old development platform written by amateurs with an unsupported 3rd-party plugin in a 32-to-64-bit emulation layer on a modern operating system is unstable? Oh my fuck, it's Armageddon!

Oh, now you're being boring. Nothing but banal insults? So jejune. Farewell, grandpa.

Go lookup "database" in any mainstream dictionary. No, wait. I'll do it for you. Here's what Princeton's wordnet thinks a database is:

Noun

S: (n) database (an organized body of related information)

Note a lack of references to indexes, attributes, varchars, or any other SQL-specific artifact.
Here's what my deadtree edition Webster's unabridged dictionary thinks a database is:

data base, data bank, a large collection of data in a computer, organized so it can be expanded, updated, and retrieved rapidly for various uses: also written database, databank.

Again note a lack of 'attributes', and a few moments of careful thought will prove that a structured text file matches the definition of database precisely. You, sir, are the one inventing your own definitions.

By the way: When YOU can write such a program, YOURSELF MIND YOU (& make it do ALL THAT I NOTE ABOVE) & not just "use others' tools" as I suspect you are only capable of, & faster than mine? Well, then?? Then, you can talk... otherwise, you're a windbag b.s. artist, period. A talker/wannabe...

Let's consider specifications:
* Remove trailing blanks
* Translate 127.0.0.1, 0.0.0.0, and 0 entries to a specific value (for argument's sake, say '0').
* Remove duplicate entries
* Sort alphabetically

If this is correct, then I can write, and have written, a piece of shellscript that accomplishes all these tasks which runs in under a minute. What possible reason could there be to re-implement the wheel in this case? Surely if you are as established a programmer as that collection of unverifiable citations and forum posts would be intended to support, then you understand the value of relying on code re-use. And it takes no thought at all to consider a <1min script as vastly superior to the >1hr (but entirely hand-written and optimized!) code. I could give you my credentials as a programmer, but you wouldn't believe them, and my past employers certainly wouldn't be willing to divulge sensitive information to a wild-eyed forum troll. So I'm sure you understand why I'd rather just let you think whatever you like about my abilities and education, rather than open up another line of pointless flamewar.

But that's gone rather far afield. The argument, which you seem to've forgotten, is that a HOSTS database is an unsupported and poorly-chosen kludge that a simple AdBlocking extension makes a far superior replacement for, and that if DNS security is your concern, that a local DNS server can be run with heightened security and rendered nigh impervious to Dan Kaminsky's attack. Your religious mania, your ersatz multiple degrees, your claimed work history, they are no more than argumentum ad verecundiam, and mean nothing. Please stay on topic, flamewars are so much more fun that way.

Oh, and:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

You would do well to avoid aggrandizing yourself with that particular reference. Unless you mean to imply you are a washed-up and useless wreck.

1) Tell me: Does performing a lookup into a one-million-entry list require more or less CPU than performing a lookup into an empty list? The page will be parsed no matter what you do.
4) Dan Kaminsky's work is important. But the flaw he found is non-trivial to exploit, has never been discovered in the wild, and on a private DNS server is trivial to protect against. (Like, oh, say, using Source Port Randomization)
6) Okay, my mistake. Let's try that, open notepad, open some 30MB file. Oh, look at that. It's locked up. Two minutes later, it's loaded the file. That's certainly easier than the three clicks required to block an entire adserver with AdBlock.
7) What profanity? Is WebSense blocking me? Untwist your panties, grandpa. And again, Dan Kaminsky. One flaw renders the entirety of DNS unusable? I suppose you throw your car away when it runs out of gas, too.

As for your PS, I don't care what you call it. A file containing a series of organized entires in a regular structure is a database. The fact that it's not SQL matters not in the slightest. The fact that it takes you an hour to process this "not a database" with only a million entries is shameful, and the shell script I provided you would likely perform the same task in under a minute. Why so defensive?

1 is flat-out false.
2 is technically correct.
3 is true.
4, while true, is pointless. A far better (and simpler, easier) job of this can be done with a local caching DNS server.
5 is the same as 4.
6 is stupid and wrong. Text editors that can easily handle 30MB of text are rare under Windows, and nobody should ever do that anyways.
7 is completely stupid. There might be bugs in Window's HOSTS implementation. If there are, they will never be corrected. An AdBlock bug, or a DNS server bug, will be corrected within hours at the longest.
8 is vacuously true.
9 is completely false. Any malware that doesn't have admin access can get it trivially, under any Windows platform. It is impossible to lockdown the HOSTS file to the point that an admin-level malware cannot interfere with it.
10 is entirely wrong. See 6), and inspect any modern ad blocker. They've had 3-click-to-block for years now.
11 is flat-out wrong. See 9).

It takes you over an hour to process one million db entries? That's shameful. What are you doing that takes 4ms per entry? And why wouldn't "cat HOSTS | sed -e 's/[\t ]+/ /g' -e 's/[ ]+$//g' | sort -dfu" be faster and easier than processing text in assembler?

The minarets were not banned out of a desire to make the country homogeneous for naive tourists.