garlopf

garlopf t1_ja5tqgd wrote

You can block sound completely by isolating the source of the sound from the ear with vacuum. As sound is waves traveling through matter, it can only travel where there is matter.

Light on the other hand is electro magnetic waves, which will travel wherever there is an electro magnetic field, including in vacuum. Light will interact with matter and you can block light completely by enclosing it in reflective and/or bsorbent material.

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garlopf t1_ja2q28d wrote

It stopped being a problem when Microsoft introduced plug and play in windows 95. This was a hardware standard and software stack that would identify each hardware device automatically, then load the necessary drivers and assign the IRQ and DMA numbers automatically.

In the beginning few devices supported the standard and so the auto detection was kind of hard and also very flakey. We all have vivid memories of how this would fail with blue screen of death and systems hanging. It even got the nick name "plug and pray". But as time went on hardware support improved, and so did the software, and now we take it for granted that hardware detection "just works".

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garlopf t1_j5rjj8j wrote

Correction: they can be explained, but the gp just cant be bothered and/or isn't capable of determine the cause. Their mission is to keep people working, if the symptoms or condition does not interfer with the patient's work then better not spend tax dollars on a wild goose chase. This might be the best argument against free universal health care.

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garlopf t1_j2eo646 wrote

Guide for those that don't know: for every randomly selected typeable character you add to you password, it will multiply the number of combinations by around 60. So if your password is 3 characters, that means 60 * 60 * 60 = 60^3 = 216000.

Computer systems exist that can crack passwords by testing each combination one by one (a.k.a. brute force) and their capacity doubles roughly every 2 years. Currently the best of them are assumed to be able to crack passwords of 12 randomly selected digits within "reasonable time". These are farms of hundreds of computers each testing combinations at millions per second for days, months and years.

So if you select a password with 20 randomly selected characters, you will have a nice margin of 60^8= 167961600000000 longer time to crack than what is reasonable by the best technology of today.

You can stay at this edge by adding another randomly selected character every 60/2=30 years.

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