The appendix has MANY subtle jobs rather than one obvious one, that's why you can do without it.
I've been telling people for 20+ years after reading it online that the appendix is PARTLY a store of stomach bacteria etc. to help reseed the stomach in the case of it being flushed during illness.
People with appendices recover better from a bout of stomach flu and are less likely to get knock-on infections that those without. It's been in the medical literature for decades, at least, and been on this site at least twice I'm sure.
You can't just divide the numbers. Gravity pulls stuff in, and the windows are tiny. Think Apollo 13 - only a tiny offset makes the difference between direct catastrophic entry and bouncing off the atmosphere.
And we have NO WAY to change that trajectory anyhow.
Also, statistically the chances are that most humans will die in such an impact - they're rare but when they happen they are INCREDIBLY serious. This was a BIG object, it would have changed life forever. It would have been "an event" not just a random meteorite landing on a desert or ocean.
Also, the bit you're missing? We basically missed this. It's been circling the Sun forever, it's been going to hit us forever, and we didn't spot it. We probably don't have a way to effectively spot it and others like it.
And a few thousands of a degree change in its arc and it would have been something that people recorded for the rest of future history and killed millions. It was only sheer chance that we "escaped".
So, actually, as a mathematician and therefore of a scientific mind, this is a damn sight more important than what some orange fool said about some actress. By orders of magnitude.
Roll on the day when THIS is the news and not all that other junk.
How many people has coal-fired, gas-fired, oil-fired power stations killed?
Just because it's not in one nice incident all wrapped in a nice little sarcophagus for you, it doesn't mean it was casualty-free.
Again, RELATIVELY SPEAKING, nuclear is safer, cleaner, less impact on the environment, cheaper, and even cheaper to clean up if it does go wrong than almost ANYTHING else.
Even solar has a human cost, you just don't see it because people aren't lying on the floor outside every solar power plant.
We lose more than 235bn a year from people skiving from work (and that's in GBP, not USD!).
We lose more than 235bn a year.
"Abolishing open borders 'could cost Germany â235 bn'"
"20 global banks have paid $235bn in fines since the 2008 financial crisis"
"Brexit risks losing the UK £235bn in trade"
Those are JUST the search results for that exact number. In the grand scheme of things, worldwide, one $235bn accident every 30 years is really chickenfeed. Especially against the entire energy market and its ramifications.
Big numbers are only scary when they are bigger numbers than anything else. And they are made more scary when, like your 235bn and some of those above, they are basically made up to sound scarier.
Please reverse the target of your stupidity for parroting bad advice without doing ANY research:
Only if you're ALREADY SO DEEP THAT THE WATER IS HIGH ENOUGH TO HOLD THE DOOR SHUT.
Cars do not sink immediately. What you do is unroll the window and get out ASAP. You DO NOT wait for it to sink. In fact, what you do is MAKE it sink quicker if you have to. Unroll the window and let it go down quick but - as said, for the first long interval it will happily bob on the surface while you crawl out of the window, no harm.
DO NOT WAIT FOR IT TO SINK. Get out.
If you going down and the door is submerged, it will eventually open. Don't wait for that. Unroll the window and get out.
Prats sitting in cars they could easily have escaped minutes ago because of some rumour is exactly the kind of thing that shouldn't be happening.
Don't believe the hype, Gorilla Glass shatters like anything else. And a windscreen is a hard piece of glass to break, or it wouldn't be any use whatsoever. Stones flying at your face at 120+mph combined barely chip normal windscreen glass. You aren't going to punch your way out of the front screen, even if you're Arnie. Maybe the side windows, if you have the right tool and arm-swing enough to use it.
The reality, as always, is that the chances of you being in a situation where you need to break the glass are VASTLY outweighed by the stuff that the glass being tough saves you from.
Everybody might have their plan to cut seatbelts and smash glass after waiting for water pressure to equalise (RUBBISH! DON'T WAIT FOR IT TO SINK AT ALL!) to escape after driving off a bridge into a river, but it's a vanishingly rare scenario and most people in it won't be able to, or would even know, what to do anyway. For a start, your airbag will probably knock you unconscious before anything else.
All Gorilla Glass does, though, it let you lose weight and retain the same strength. It still has to shatter, not splinter, and withstand the same design forces and no more. It just means it can be thinner/lighter and do the same job.
In case you didn't know, Apple's biggest product is marketing. They sell it with everything and give it away all the time. Only for their products, obviously, bu that's more important to them than anything else.
It's the one thing that's not changed in their entire history, and people still fall for it and perpetuate it all the time.
Apple is a marketing company that happen to sell a couple of overhyped products. IBM et al are just people who build cities, systems and technologies.
Apple stick a colour screen on top their keyboard, ala that expensive OLED keyboard that's been around for decades, and slap $500 on the price.
And, sorry, but on my laptop Steam is still running and letting me play ALL my games.
I've suspended and resumed 20+ times tonight and it's still working just fine. I'm in a Steam game now, in fact.
Maybe it wouldn't work if you didn't have Steam loaded and were running for the first time to try to update, but it's working fine for me (yes, the website is down and likely matchmaking).
Amazon refunds are amazing, as are their customer returns department.
Amazon is a company that gets it right in many ways, which is why when they get it wrong, hardly anyone cares.
Price. Easy-to-order. Tons of stock. Huge product variety. Great reliability. Quick delivery (stupendously quick). Customer service.
Even my workplace use it "officially". I work in schools and where most state schools have to get three quotes for anything large, and have to be from a specialist retailer and not some multi-store, and everything has to be signed off and approved and then ordered months later, I've found that every independent (private) school I work for just has an Amazon account.
Literally, 100 iPads, or PCs, or stationery, or furniture, or cables, or labels, or batteries, or garden tools, or anything, really. If you want it, you copy the link in an email to finance, after approval (usually a CC: to the right person gets that in seconds), they do a quick search, see if it looks like a decent price (if not, THEN they hunt around for something), and just click Buy. The finance department has more entries on the purchasing for Amazon than any other. In a place that spends MILLIONS each year.
And wherever there is freedom to buy like that, they save SO MUCH money that it's just ludicrous. And it literally arrives in hours, which is amazing for those critical end-of-term things. I've literally ordered SAS hard drives on the rapid delivery and they've arrived and started resyncing in the RAID array before the end of the same day.
You just can't beat that.
All we need is for Amazon to sort out their working practices, and make sure their taxes are in order, and we don't really have a need for any other kind of online store. Almost everyone I speak to in similar businesses hates Amazon with a vengeance - they are basically putting everyone else out of business.
Despite all of the same above infrastructure, often they just throw it in your porch, out front, over the fence or behind a recycling bin, sign for it themselves and then you have hell of a time claiming for anything lost (often, retailers just absorb the cost and send you another as it's hardly worth claiming for most things).
However, nobody accepts cash on delivery as the drivers just get robbed instead.
More often than not, however, they deliver it to a random neighbour and put a card through the door saying which neighbour. Yes, I've had arguments with neighbours who have basically tried to claim they never took delivery.
"when one of their packages gets left on your doorstep" is the weak link, obviously. Let's just stop doing that.
I'm very tempted to buy a strong lockbox with a one-way door (like bank drops) so that they can deliver. But, still, if the parcel demands a signature, I often never have to give one, or I have to traipse along London to sign for it in the middle of the working day from one of their "convenient" depots.
In the UK, every device has to be supplied with a mains plug pre-wired.
Every such main plug has an individual fuse in it, of the correct rating for the appliance..
And every circuit is on an RCD / breaker on the fuse board.
And every fuse board has an RCD / breaker.
And the house has a fuse for the fuse board.
Don't lay the blame at one point or one component. Isolate them all.
As pointed out, an application with permissions to private data is vulnerable no matter what you do - a compromise is a compromise and generally gets full access as the user/program you compromised, along with any data it's given.
The trick is to a) run everything as separate users (yes, every program / user combination should be a different user so even my web browser can't access my word processor, etc.), b) isolate the data and access of each program to the minimum required (e.g. don't let word processor see web cache etc.) and c) keep everything up to date.
Your manager's a cock and breaking the law, in almost any first-world country (and the US).
You sit down for a break, stick to your allowed time, wait for them to complain. If they sack you (a distinct possibility), you can take them to court quite easily.
The problem is that people are SO scared of losing their job that they won't ever question it, as it sounds like you haven't, and they get away with it.
What gets me more is "One of the largest companies in the world thinks that they can't afford to give you your statutory legal breaks". If that doesn't say "Don't ever touch that company", I don't know what does.
"Encourage the patient to cough" is also in there.
But Heimlich - because of the possibility of causing internal damage - is the last resort when, if you don't try it, they are going to die anyway. It's literally the thing you do in the knowledge that if it doesn't work, they're dead anyway and there's nothing more you can do.
And it's not prudish - demonstrating Heimlich is rife with hands reaching blindly into places and causing damage if you're too rough. It's like CPR (again, last resort), you NEVER actually demonstrate the force of CPR that you would do to a real patient - CPR smashes broken ribs into lungs but that's better than dying.
As such, demoing with big rough guys on tiny waifs of girls is potentially dangerous, especially if there's larking about.
As anyone who runs martial arts or first aid clubs will tell you, it's not the experienced people who will hurt you. It's the novice that has no idea the power, extension or force of their movements, and no control over them.
Why wait? Just remove anything Java from your systems.
Seriously, when the owner of a technology starts getting like this, there's no clawing back custom.
Just start planning to leave the entire platform now. Because the situation isn't going to get any better, even if you do win a lawsuit on reasonableness grounds.
What's needed is better operating system management, not better development practices.
Once a piece of software is patched, the problem is fixed. That's not the issue at hand. The issue is that that fix then does not make it back to production systems in a decent time.
What's needed - and I've posited this a number of times for a number of things - is a central repository which lists which, say, linux packages are secure and which are not. Which algorithms, hashes and cryptosystems are compromised or not.
Then there needs to be an API - running a production system live on the Internet? It will check its version numbers and package hashes against the centralised "uncompromised" versions service. If there's a discrepancy -a package that's been marked as potentially compromisable, but which has an updated or patched version available - the OS is tainted much like the kernel is tainted. If MD5 is retired and any software on the machine still utilises it, the system is marked as tainted as soon as it checks into the centralised API.
We've needed this for hashs and crypto systems for a long time. SHA-1 is retired, but how do you KNOW that? And how do you know what uses that? Nobody would recommend building a system using WEP or MD5 in this day and age but nowhere is that listed in a queryable manner.
And then you start saying "Why weren't Facebook checking their systems against the Secure Software Database? Their own fault if they were compromised.", "Why did Yahoo not re-hash with a listed-good algorithm as soon as their existing hash was obsolete?", "Why were they compromised? Because they turned off database checks and updates? Idiots".
There needs to be a way for production systems to algorithmically say "This is no longer acceptable practice" and start making a fuss such that the system maintainers are forced to start upgrading, with specified timescales (the API could easily obsolete stuff on a set timescale, with warning enough to test changes to newer algorithms).
Then, if you're compromised because you ignored this, or because you hard-coded MD5 instead of using libraries, all the fault will be in the your third-party, unlisted libraries. And then you might be able to actually start forcing vendors to publicly state "All our software uses the latest database-compatible algorithms, software and patches" rather than just hope that someone at Google isn't just running Slackware 2.0.
The software can be fixed in a trice. The problem is getting that fix out to production systems in good time, and not being able to sufficiently shame those who don't manage their systems (it's easy to blame a hack on the software, rather than your lax update practices).
Because the hard bit of building a car is building something that drives in the first place, and the easy bit of building a self-driving car is the car itself.
When the inputs are reduced to accelerator, brake, left, right, it quickly becomes two projects - build a car, and make a car autonomous.
Doing both simultaneously is stupid and expensive and without advantage. Doing them separately means you could just use any car, without the hassle and worry.
But doing either still needs the autonomous control, computer vision, "AI" bits, and those are almost unaffected by what the car is or how it works (even if the wheels turn all the way round to park sideways, the decisions behind the steering logic barely change).
As stuntmen the world over have proven, controlling a car with a computer isn't hard. That's the easy bit. It's a remote control and a few actuators.
But deciding WHAT to do to control it is much harder and complicated by anything else.
That a multi-billion dollar company doesn't realise this is pretty much stupid. Build the AI, when that works put it into an existing car, then integrate the AI and car. Trying to do both at once is stupid, costly, and a waste.
To be honest, though, if they've got this far, I'm going to suggest that they are having their funding cut and the easy part to get rid of while keeping the project alive is the car. If the AI doesn't start performing soon, or a suitable business model found at all, they're going to be ditched.
All these self-driving cars and the only model actually on the road (sorry, that's "not self-driving", but "automatic pilot", right, Tesla?) is getting bad press everywhere? Either you have to come up with something fabulously different, or you lose your market before you even start.
I'm surprised that they even go there in the first place.
The kind of people who can do software security audits, tap into hardware designs and suchlike can command just about any salary they like.
The problem I have is understanding why such people would ever end up at places like the NSA/GCHQ in the first place. It's no longer a "cracking open the enigma" kind of place and hasn't been in a very long time, and now they are spying on their own, including themselves and their families, and putting deliberate holes into things, and doing all kinds of stupid shit.
I'm amazed anyone goes there at all.
I'm a maths and computer science graduate. I have a keen interest in coding theory and graph theory especially, both borne of an interest in codes, ciphers and such concepts. I'm a tinkerer and play with electronics and radios in my spare time, not to mention programming and other kinds of gadgets. I don't claim to be anywhere near the top of the class but, surely, I'm at least the type of person who they should be looking at.
The problem is that because of the above, I'm inherently buried in reasons that freedom, privacy and security need to be preserved by means other than trust in the government.
They are quite literally the last places I'd want to work and, even as a pacifist, if we were to go to war (a proper war, not some undeclared concept-war), and I was drafted in and told to do something, I'd refuse to the utmost of my being but even if forced at gunpoint every morning, I'd end up making bullet casings or delivering food rather than touch those kinds of organisation. Some activity for which I'm just another pair of hands.
Turing is my hero, Bletchley is my nativity manger, and "brains over brawn" are my commandments . But I couldn't ever do what he did, or work where he did, because of what it was and, even worse now, because of what it's become.
It's why I don't give credence to the "acres of supercomputers tapping all your calls" crap. I don't believe it's impossible, it's just expensive. And you can find an acre of supercomputers in any country if you rearrange things. I just don't believe they have the talent to make it do anything useful, and that much of it is wasted in isolated brute-force and hope rather than working out how to utilise it effectively.
Whenever I hear "the next stage" - more surveillance, laws protecting those agencies when they break the law, etc. - I find it even more ludicrous that what they have are a bunch of highly-skilled, educated, dedicated codebreakers, engineers and undetectable spies. It doesn't fit. These agencies are so good and yet Manning and Snowden can just copy embarrassing things to a USB stick and make them look like fools (not that I particularly think either of them got anything of value out of the venture, even if they believe so... they may have made the agencies look foolish and showed things weren't as they should be but literally NOTHING has changed because of them that I can see).
I don't buy it. I certainly don't buy that highly educated people who could walk out tomorrow and get a job in a computer security company (even of their own making) and sell products never seen before, ala Zimmerman, and they just sit there tapping people's emails and letting their agency's reputation go to shit in the press when they are all about secrecy.
The good ones probably left a long time ago. And no Times crossword is going to bring them back, even if we go to war, while those agency's agendas aren't compatible with the precept that they are they to "protect" their peoples.
To be honest, the price of a copy of VMWare Workstation or similar is well worth it.
Run business stuff in a VM, then any computer you can put that VM onto and carry on. Meanwhile your choice of hypervisor OS (Linux or Windows), and your choice of personal platform (e.g. Windows for gaming) doesn't make any difference.
Hell, Pro versions of Windows all come ready with the software to create and run HyperV images of Windows and Linux, even the client versions.
If your business depends on it and you can't run to a few hundred dollars to insulate it against failure, loss or hardware change, you're an idiot.
Actually, a lot larger effect is gained by the differing attentuation and reflection of the signal by each ear. This is how "2-speaker 3D sound" systems like QSound, A3D etc. worked - by slightly changing the actual sound pattern to simulate passing through your skull / around your head instead of just changing the volume.
The problem is that 0.7ms of delay is NOTHING when the primary data channel is operating over something like Bluetooth (i.e. a 2.4GHz carrier, data rates around 1Mbit/s, etc.). In those instances, 0.7ms is orders of magnitude greater than the base data rate even after error detection, retransmission (if you even bother), correction, etc.
What they are saying is that they are having to synchronous three separate wireless devices to within 0.7ms of each other. My wireless network does that all day long on similar frequencies, with base levels of hardware expense, with error correction, encryption and retransmission.
And if you're really that worried, you buffer ever so slightly (even a few ms will do) and spend more time on sync to make sure you keep the same idea of "now" on both earbuds.
Basically, Apple chose a crap design with inherent problems that everyone else has thus far avoided, and then they blame that for problems with supply, when similar - and far superior - solutions are sitting in everyone's phones, laptops, cars and access points already.
Honestly, if your pings across a local network spike more than a few ms, you have a crap network. Hell, I have to use the Linux ping tool as it does the proper floating point ping rather than just "1ms" which is all that Windows ping will give me.
And once you buffer and accept a tiny imperceptible difference between the audio source and the headphones for that buffer, then syncing two buffered speakers playing the same source is relatively trivial.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. Wikipedia has citations going back to 1989 for that.
Not news.
The appendix has MANY subtle jobs rather than one obvious one, that's why you can do without it.
I've been telling people for 20+ years after reading it online that the appendix is PARTLY a store of stomach bacteria etc. to help reseed the stomach in the case of it being flushed during illness.
People with appendices recover better from a bout of stomach flu and are less likely to get knock-on infections that those without. It's been in the medical literature for decades, at least, and been on this site at least twice I'm sure.
It's also not the appendix's only job.
This is not "news" at all.
You can't just divide the numbers. Gravity pulls stuff in, and the windows are tiny. Think Apollo 13 - only a tiny offset makes the difference between direct catastrophic entry and bouncing off the atmosphere.
And we have NO WAY to change that trajectory anyhow.
Also, statistically the chances are that most humans will die in such an impact - they're rare but when they happen they are INCREDIBLY serious. This was a BIG object, it would have changed life forever. It would have been "an event" not just a random meteorite landing on a desert or ocean.
Also, the bit you're missing? We basically missed this. It's been circling the Sun forever, it's been going to hit us forever, and we didn't spot it. We probably don't have a way to effectively spot it and others like it.
And a few thousands of a degree change in its arc and it would have been something that people recorded for the rest of future history and killed millions. It was only sheer chance that we "escaped".
So, actually, as a mathematician and therefore of a scientific mind, this is a damn sight more important than what some orange fool said about some actress. By orders of magnitude.
Roll on the day when THIS is the news and not all that other junk.
These were pensioners in Scotland.
How far from the Mediterranean would you like to go?
How many people has coal-fired, gas-fired, oil-fired power stations killed?
Just because it's not in one nice incident all wrapped in a nice little sarcophagus for you, it doesn't mean it was casualty-free.
Again, RELATIVELY SPEAKING, nuclear is safer, cleaner, less impact on the environment, cheaper, and even cheaper to clean up if it does go wrong than almost ANYTHING else.
Even solar has a human cost, you just don't see it because people aren't lying on the floor outside every solar power plant.
We lose more than 235bn a year from people skiving from work (and that's in GBP, not USD!).
We lose more than 235bn a year.
"Abolishing open borders 'could cost Germany â235 bn'"
"20 global banks have paid $235bn in fines since the 2008 financial crisis"
"Brexit risks losing the UK £235bn in trade"
Those are JUST the search results for that exact number. In the grand scheme of things, worldwide, one $235bn accident every 30 years is really chickenfeed. Especially against the entire energy market and its ramifications.
Big numbers are only scary when they are bigger numbers than anything else. And they are made more scary when, like your 235bn and some of those above, they are basically made up to sound scarier.
*COUGH*
Please reverse the target of your stupidity for parroting bad advice without doing ANY research:
Only if you're ALREADY SO DEEP THAT THE WATER IS HIGH ENOUGH TO HOLD THE DOOR SHUT.
Cars do not sink immediately. What you do is unroll the window and get out ASAP. You DO NOT wait for it to sink. In fact, what you do is MAKE it sink quicker if you have to. Unroll the window and let it go down quick but - as said, for the first long interval it will happily bob on the surface while you crawl out of the window, no harm.
DO NOT WAIT FOR IT TO SINK. Get out.
If you going down and the door is submerged, it will eventually open. Don't wait for that. Unroll the window and get out.
Prats sitting in cars they could easily have escaped minutes ago because of some rumour is exactly the kind of thing that shouldn't be happening.
Don't believe the hype, Gorilla Glass shatters like anything else. And a windscreen is a hard piece of glass to break, or it wouldn't be any use whatsoever. Stones flying at your face at 120+mph combined barely chip normal windscreen glass. You aren't going to punch your way out of the front screen, even if you're Arnie. Maybe the side windows, if you have the right tool and arm-swing enough to use it.
The reality, as always, is that the chances of you being in a situation where you need to break the glass are VASTLY outweighed by the stuff that the glass being tough saves you from.
Everybody might have their plan to cut seatbelts and smash glass after waiting for water pressure to equalise (RUBBISH! DON'T WAIT FOR IT TO SINK AT ALL!) to escape after driving off a bridge into a river, but it's a vanishingly rare scenario and most people in it won't be able to, or would even know, what to do anyway. For a start, your airbag will probably knock you unconscious before anything else.
All Gorilla Glass does, though, it let you lose weight and retain the same strength. It still has to shatter, not splinter, and withstand the same design forces and no more. It just means it can be thinner/lighter and do the same job.
Seriously? You linked to the fucking Sun newspaper? For a science article?
I'm done with this site.
In case you didn't know, Apple's biggest product is marketing. They sell it with everything and give it away all the time. Only for their products, obviously, bu that's more important to them than anything else.
It's the one thing that's not changed in their entire history, and people still fall for it and perpetuate it all the time.
Apple is a marketing company that happen to sell a couple of overhyped products. IBM et al are just people who build cities, systems and technologies.
Apple stick a colour screen on top their keyboard, ala that expensive OLED keyboard that's been around for decades, and slap $500 on the price.
And, sorry, but on my laptop Steam is still running and letting me play ALL my games.
I've suspended and resumed 20+ times tonight and it's still working just fine. I'm in a Steam game now, in fact.
Maybe it wouldn't work if you didn't have Steam loaded and were running for the first time to try to update, but it's working fine for me (yes, the website is down and likely matchmaking).
Amazon refunds are amazing, as are their customer returns department.
Amazon is a company that gets it right in many ways, which is why when they get it wrong, hardly anyone cares.
Price.
Easy-to-order.
Tons of stock.
Huge product variety.
Great reliability.
Quick delivery (stupendously quick).
Customer service.
Even my workplace use it "officially". I work in schools and where most state schools have to get three quotes for anything large, and have to be from a specialist retailer and not some multi-store, and everything has to be signed off and approved and then ordered months later, I've found that every independent (private) school I work for just has an Amazon account.
Literally, 100 iPads, or PCs, or stationery, or furniture, or cables, or labels, or batteries, or garden tools, or anything, really. If you want it, you copy the link in an email to finance, after approval (usually a CC: to the right person gets that in seconds), they do a quick search, see if it looks like a decent price (if not, THEN they hunt around for something), and just click Buy. The finance department has more entries on the purchasing for Amazon than any other. In a place that spends MILLIONS each year.
And wherever there is freedom to buy like that, they save SO MUCH money that it's just ludicrous. And it literally arrives in hours, which is amazing for those critical end-of-term things. I've literally ordered SAS hard drives on the rapid delivery and they've arrived and started resyncing in the RAID array before the end of the same day.
You just can't beat that.
All we need is for Amazon to sort out their working practices, and make sure their taxes are in order, and we don't really have a need for any other kind of online store. Almost everyone I speak to in similar businesses hates Amazon with a vengeance - they are basically putting everyone else out of business.
I live in the UK.
Despite all of the same above infrastructure, often they just throw it in your porch, out front, over the fence or behind a recycling bin, sign for it themselves and then you have hell of a time claiming for anything lost (often, retailers just absorb the cost and send you another as it's hardly worth claiming for most things).
However, nobody accepts cash on delivery as the drivers just get robbed instead.
More often than not, however, they deliver it to a random neighbour and put a card through the door saying which neighbour. Yes, I've had arguments with neighbours who have basically tried to claim they never took delivery.
"when one of their packages gets left on your doorstep" is the weak link, obviously. Let's just stop doing that.
I'm very tempted to buy a strong lockbox with a one-way door (like bank drops) so that they can deliver. But, still, if the parcel demands a signature, I often never have to give one, or I have to traipse along London to sign for it in the middle of the working day from one of their "convenient" depots.
In the UK, every device has to be supplied with a mains plug pre-wired.
Every such main plug has an individual fuse in it, of the correct rating for the appliance..
And every circuit is on an RCD / breaker on the fuse board.
And every fuse board has an RCD / breaker.
And the house has a fuse for the fuse board.
Don't lay the blame at one point or one component. Isolate them all.
As pointed out, an application with permissions to private data is vulnerable no matter what you do - a compromise is a compromise and generally gets full access as the user/program you compromised, along with any data it's given.
The trick is to a) run everything as separate users (yes, every program / user combination should be a different user so even my web browser can't access my word processor, etc.), b) isolate the data and access of each program to the minimum required (e.g. don't let word processor see web cache etc.) and c) keep everything up to date.
Your manager's a cock and breaking the law, in almost any first-world country (and the US).
You sit down for a break, stick to your allowed time, wait for them to complain. If they sack you (a distinct possibility), you can take them to court quite easily.
The problem is that people are SO scared of losing their job that they won't ever question it, as it sounds like you haven't, and they get away with it.
What gets me more is "One of the largest companies in the world thinks that they can't afford to give you your statutory legal breaks". If that doesn't say "Don't ever touch that company", I don't know what does.
Slapping is the first stage.
"Encourage the patient to cough" is also in there.
But Heimlich - because of the possibility of causing internal damage - is the last resort when, if you don't try it, they are going to die anyway. It's literally the thing you do in the knowledge that if it doesn't work, they're dead anyway and there's nothing more you can do.
And it's not prudish - demonstrating Heimlich is rife with hands reaching blindly into places and causing damage if you're too rough. It's like CPR (again, last resort), you NEVER actually demonstrate the force of CPR that you would do to a real patient - CPR smashes broken ribs into lungs but that's better than dying.
As such, demoing with big rough guys on tiny waifs of girls is potentially dangerous, especially if there's larking about.
As anyone who runs martial arts or first aid clubs will tell you, it's not the experienced people who will hurt you. It's the novice that has no idea the power, extension or force of their movements, and no control over them.
Why wait? Just remove anything Java from your systems.
Seriously, when the owner of a technology starts getting like this, there's no clawing back custom.
Just start planning to leave the entire platform now. Because the situation isn't going to get any better, even if you do win a lawsuit on reasonableness grounds.
What's needed is better operating system management, not better development practices.
Once a piece of software is patched, the problem is fixed. That's not the issue at hand. The issue is that that fix then does not make it back to production systems in a decent time.
What's needed - and I've posited this a number of times for a number of things - is a central repository which lists which, say, linux packages are secure and which are not. Which algorithms, hashes and cryptosystems are compromised or not.
Then there needs to be an API - running a production system live on the Internet? It will check its version numbers and package hashes against the centralised "uncompromised" versions service. If there's a discrepancy -a package that's been marked as potentially compromisable, but which has an updated or patched version available - the OS is tainted much like the kernel is tainted. If MD5 is retired and any software on the machine still utilises it, the system is marked as tainted as soon as it checks into the centralised API.
We've needed this for hashs and crypto systems for a long time. SHA-1 is retired, but how do you KNOW that? And how do you know what uses that? Nobody would recommend building a system using WEP or MD5 in this day and age but nowhere is that listed in a queryable manner.
And then you start saying "Why weren't Facebook checking their systems against the Secure Software Database? Their own fault if they were compromised.", "Why did Yahoo not re-hash with a listed-good algorithm as soon as their existing hash was obsolete?", "Why were they compromised? Because they turned off database checks and updates? Idiots".
There needs to be a way for production systems to algorithmically say "This is no longer acceptable practice" and start making a fuss such that the system maintainers are forced to start upgrading, with specified timescales (the API could easily obsolete stuff on a set timescale, with warning enough to test changes to newer algorithms).
Then, if you're compromised because you ignored this, or because you hard-coded MD5 instead of using libraries, all the fault will be in the your third-party, unlisted libraries. And then you might be able to actually start forcing vendors to publicly state "All our software uses the latest database-compatible algorithms, software and patches" rather than just hope that someone at Google isn't just running Slackware 2.0.
The software can be fixed in a trice. The problem is getting that fix out to production systems in good time, and not being able to sufficiently shame those who don't manage their systems (it's easy to blame a hack on the software, rather than your lax update practices).
Because the hard bit of building a car is building something that drives in the first place, and the easy bit of building a self-driving car is the car itself.
When the inputs are reduced to accelerator, brake, left, right, it quickly becomes two projects - build a car, and make a car autonomous.
Doing both simultaneously is stupid and expensive and without advantage. Doing them separately means you could just use any car, without the hassle and worry.
But doing either still needs the autonomous control, computer vision, "AI" bits, and those are almost unaffected by what the car is or how it works (even if the wheels turn all the way round to park sideways, the decisions behind the steering logic barely change).
As stuntmen the world over have proven, controlling a car with a computer isn't hard. That's the easy bit. It's a remote control and a few actuators.
But deciding WHAT to do to control it is much harder and complicated by anything else.
That a multi-billion dollar company doesn't realise this is pretty much stupid. Build the AI, when that works put it into an existing car, then integrate the AI and car. Trying to do both at once is stupid, costly, and a waste.
To be honest, though, if they've got this far, I'm going to suggest that they are having their funding cut and the easy part to get rid of while keeping the project alive is the car. If the AI doesn't start performing soon, or a suitable business model found at all, they're going to be ditched.
All these self-driving cars and the only model actually on the road (sorry, that's "not self-driving", but "automatic pilot", right, Tesla?) is getting bad press everywhere? Either you have to come up with something fabulously different, or you lose your market before you even start.
Sued for telling the truth and giving fair warning...
I'm surprised that they even go there in the first place.
The kind of people who can do software security audits, tap into hardware designs and suchlike can command just about any salary they like.
The problem I have is understanding why such people would ever end up at places like the NSA/GCHQ in the first place. It's no longer a "cracking open the enigma" kind of place and hasn't been in a very long time, and now they are spying on their own, including themselves and their families, and putting deliberate holes into things, and doing all kinds of stupid shit.
I'm amazed anyone goes there at all.
I'm a maths and computer science graduate. I have a keen interest in coding theory and graph theory especially, both borne of an interest in codes, ciphers and such concepts. I'm a tinkerer and play with electronics and radios in my spare time, not to mention programming and other kinds of gadgets. I don't claim to be anywhere near the top of the class but, surely, I'm at least the type of person who they should be looking at.
The problem is that because of the above, I'm inherently buried in reasons that freedom, privacy and security need to be preserved by means other than trust in the government.
They are quite literally the last places I'd want to work and, even as a pacifist, if we were to go to war (a proper war, not some undeclared concept-war), and I was drafted in and told to do something, I'd refuse to the utmost of my being but even if forced at gunpoint every morning, I'd end up making bullet casings or delivering food rather than touch those kinds of organisation. Some activity for which I'm just another pair of hands.
Turing is my hero, Bletchley is my nativity manger, and "brains over brawn" are my commandments . But I couldn't ever do what he did, or work where he did, because of what it was and, even worse now, because of what it's become.
It's why I don't give credence to the "acres of supercomputers tapping all your calls" crap. I don't believe it's impossible, it's just expensive. And you can find an acre of supercomputers in any country if you rearrange things. I just don't believe they have the talent to make it do anything useful, and that much of it is wasted in isolated brute-force and hope rather than working out how to utilise it effectively.
Whenever I hear "the next stage" - more surveillance, laws protecting those agencies when they break the law, etc. - I find it even more ludicrous that what they have are a bunch of highly-skilled, educated, dedicated codebreakers, engineers and undetectable spies. It doesn't fit. These agencies are so good and yet Manning and Snowden can just copy embarrassing things to a USB stick and make them look like fools (not that I particularly think either of them got anything of value out of the venture, even if they believe so... they may have made the agencies look foolish and showed things weren't as they should be but literally NOTHING has changed because of them that I can see).
I don't buy it. I certainly don't buy that highly educated people who could walk out tomorrow and get a job in a computer security company (even of their own making) and sell products never seen before, ala Zimmerman, and they just sit there tapping people's emails and letting their agency's reputation go to shit in the press when they are all about secrecy.
The good ones probably left a long time ago. And no Times crossword is going to bring them back, even if we go to war, while those agency's agendas aren't compatible with the precept that they are they to "protect" their peoples.
To be honest, the price of a copy of VMWare Workstation or similar is well worth it.
Run business stuff in a VM, then any computer you can put that VM onto and carry on. Meanwhile your choice of hypervisor OS (Linux or Windows), and your choice of personal platform (e.g. Windows for gaming) doesn't make any difference.
Hell, Pro versions of Windows all come ready with the software to create and run HyperV images of Windows and Linux, even the client versions.
If your business depends on it and you can't run to a few hundred dollars to insulate it against failure, loss or hardware change, you're an idiot.
Why would a business person not be subject to domain control and WSUS even on a mobile PC?
Keep a spare computer, if it's that important.
Actually, a lot larger effect is gained by the differing attentuation and reflection of the signal by each ear. This is how "2-speaker 3D sound" systems like QSound, A3D etc. worked - by slightly changing the actual sound pattern to simulate passing through your skull / around your head instead of just changing the volume.
The problem is that 0.7ms of delay is NOTHING when the primary data channel is operating over something like Bluetooth (i.e. a 2.4GHz carrier, data rates around 1Mbit/s, etc.). In those instances, 0.7ms is orders of magnitude greater than the base data rate even after error detection, retransmission (if you even bother), correction, etc.
What they are saying is that they are having to synchronous three separate wireless devices to within 0.7ms of each other. My wireless network does that all day long on similar frequencies, with base levels of hardware expense, with error correction, encryption and retransmission.
And if you're really that worried, you buffer ever so slightly (even a few ms will do) and spend more time on sync to make sure you keep the same idea of "now" on both earbuds.
Basically, Apple chose a crap design with inherent problems that everyone else has thus far avoided, and then they blame that for problems with supply, when similar - and far superior - solutions are sitting in everyone's phones, laptops, cars and access points already.
Honestly, if your pings across a local network spike more than a few ms, you have a crap network. Hell, I have to use the Linux ping tool as it does the proper floating point ping rather than just "1ms" which is all that Windows ping will give me.
And once you buffer and accept a tiny imperceptible difference between the audio source and the headphones for that buffer, then syncing two buffered speakers playing the same source is relatively trivial.