If you have 100 files all of one size, you'll have to do 4950 comparisons.

You only have to do 4950 comparisons if you have 100 unique files.

What I do is pop the first file from the list, to use as a standard, and compare all the files with it, block by block. If a block fails to match, I give up on that file matching the standard. The files that don't match generally don't go very far, and don't take much time. For the ones that match, I would have taken all that time if I was using a hash method anyway. As for reading the standard file multiple times: It goes fast because it's in cache.

The ones that match get taken from the list. Obviously I don't compare the one which match with each other. That would be stupid.

Then I go back to the list and rinse/repeat until there are less than 2 files.

I have done this many times with a set of 3 million files which take up about 600GB.

Evergreen!

Yes, sure, she has a pure, wonderful, beautiful voice, blah blah blah. But that's the point. In my experience, the notes she sings travel hundreds of yards down the corridor and infect everyone's office.

Play it over and over and over and over and over and ... people will be tearing their hair out. We could call it ... I don't know ... the Streisand Effect?

The real answer is that you're not the customer. You're the product

If I'm being billed, I'm a customer.

Maybe I'm not a priority, but I'm still a customer, and if I don't like what I'm getting for the price, then they lose me as a customer.

And if I'm also a product, they lose that too.

I call BS.

I was wondering who would bring up the Barbara Streisand Effect first.

So now, Barbara Streisand is a Terrorist!

I'm sure he did write assembly. But Object Oriented assembly?

I'm incredulous that you are incredulous. I thought I saw a book about that somewhere. So I walked over to my tall stack of random language books and there it is:
Object-Oriented Assembly Language, Len Dorfman, McGraw-Hill, 1990

I hereby thwack you upside the head.

and I'd bet that someone's found a transcription factor somewhere that binds to methylated DNA and ...

I believe there are inhibitor regions which will, when not methylated, attract some special-purpose snotball (yeah, I'm gonna call that a technical term) which interferes with transcription. And then when methylated, these inhibitor regions fail to interfere.

they opt to make the most money with a supply ordained by the government

Logical, plain and simple. Sure. You don't think the pharmaceuticals had a hand in that "government" decision?

Once the notice comes to IT that they've had a break-in you've got an awful lot of work to do.

Of course. Reactive security audits are much more expensive than proactive security audits. Life sucks when you are inept. What he did was inexcusable, but to put all the blame on a script kiddie is just unprofessional. If a criminal organization had broken in it could be way more expensive.

Concentrate on fixing the problem, not the blame.