I'd bet £10 that, in all these cases there was a subtle bug in the code.

For example, in C, shifting a 32 bit value by 32 bits is undefined behaviour. Intuitively, you might expect all of the bits to be shifted out of the number, the same as if you shifted it by one bit thirty two times. However, it is just as likely that nothing at all happens. I guess it is even possible to generate an invalid op code.

Why? On 32 bit Intel, the field in a shift instruction is only five bits wide and you need six bits to represent 32. The compiler could compile a 32 bit shift as a 31 bit shift and a 1 bit shift or mask the shift amount leaving you with a shift of 0 or possibly even put 32 into that field thus setting a bit outside the field.

Weird crashes that go away when you call particular functions or add local variables to a function are almost always caused by stack smashing bugs. For example, you might allocate an array on the stack and then pass a pointer to it in a function call. If the called function assumes the array is bigger than it really is (or is told that), it might write past the end of the array thus destroying something important, like it's own return address. Adding local variables makes a bit of extra padding so writing past the end of the array doesn't do enough damage to crash the program.

This is not about vaccines, it's about making them mandatory.

Look I'm sure you're comfortable with having such naive trust in anything that has the word "vaccine" attached to it. I choose to be a bit more cautious. Before something is injected into your bloodstream you'd better be damn well sure that it is safe. Because a lot can go wrong with human chemistry. A lot.

You said it yourself in another post:

Can you not see how such a megalomaniac would use a mandatory vaccination programme to their advantage?

Of course current vaccines are perfectly safe, as they have undergone rigorous testing and refining. Why did they undergo such a process? Because of people who don't think like you do. My point was that at some point malice or error could very easily cause something undesirable to enter your bloodstream.

Blind trust is seldom a good thing. I'm sorry that you don't seem to grasp that, and from your post it doesn't look as if you will be receptive to anything I say here - I just leave this here for the benefit of anyone else following this thread.

tl;dr: Trust, but verify

Disclaimer: I am pro-vax.

It has been established beyond all reasonable doubt that current MMR, DTaP, etc, vaccines are harmless except to those with specific medical conditions, and are effective against the diseases they target.

Current vaccines.

I think, however, that giving the government power to mandate vaccincations in this manner could lead to serious problems in future.

While today's vaccines are fine, there is the possibility that one day a vaccination will be produced that will not be desirable by the people. The NSA for example has proven itself to be insidious and virtually untouchable. At some point in the future they could introduce tracking nano-devices or a behaviour modifying cocktail to some otherwise innocuous vaccine, and the populace would have no legal standing to object. Another possibility is a product being introduced that may not have gone through sufficient testing due to some failure in due process. While the government launches inquiries and debates matters, people who refuse it are subsequently refused healthcare and die.

Vaccines for other conditions exist that have raised legitimate safety concerns: look up the current HPV vaccine for example.

So, how exactly do they propose to recover from a compromise of these kinds of systems where it's impossible to change the authentication data? And these systems will be compromised, history has taught us that. At least with a password or a certificate carried in a two-factor dongle I can change/reissue it and what the crooks have is no longer valid. I don't like systems whose failure mode in the event of a compromise is catastrophic.

If only it were that simple. Unfortunately, the classroom full of unvaccinated children may contain one of the few unlucky ones who have legitimate medical reasons for not being vaccinated. The fact that there are a small fraction of people like this, dependent on herd immunity for their protection, is one of the reasons for compulsory vaccination.

It's done the way it is because the alternative is unmanageable.

Apple would have to introduce a way for app developers to add external dependencies to their executables and for those external dependencies to be downloaded, if necessary, along with the app. This is obviously all possible as the Linux and BSD package management systems demonstrate but it would mean Apple would have to maintain an enormous repository of external libraries and the app developers would have to regression test their apps against every single version of the library just in case downloading a new version breaks their app.

No he's not, he is accused of rape. That is the accusation from which he is running away. As far as I'm aware, there have, so far been no formal charges of releasing state secrets.

although the latter doesn't automatically adjust based on your latitude and time of day

That should read:
although the latter doesn't automatically adjust based on your latitude, longitude, and time of day

I second this. Personally I use Redshift to accomplish the same thing on my PCs, and the simpler Nightfilter on Android (although the latter doesn't automatically adjust based on your latitude and time of day).

The difference between "night" and day mode is, well, night and day. When I turn if off late at night my eyeballs scream and then heave a sigh of relief when I re-engage it.

Sometimes it's needed to help prevent a service being overwhelmed: our phone calls used to cost 4x more 9am to 1pm than 6pm to 8am because our phone service (government run) had limited available bandwidth. Now that is no longer an issue (largely c/o fibre optics) there is no pricing surcharge for the daytime peak.

In fact on a wholesale level from BT there still are three different time bands for pricing (daytime, off-peak, weekend) and different charges based on whether the call just goes through the local exchange, one regional ('single-tandem') exchange, or two ('double-tandem', which in turn is broken down into short, medium and long distances). Retail phone companies tend to lump them all together into a single rate, though - either an unlimited use bundle, or a simple flat-rate per minute.

For that matter, many of the better ISPs still have some time-based variation in charging: my previous one only charged for usage during the working day, my current one has three tariffs, one of which is much much cheaper outside working hours. (The worse ISPs tend to offer "unlimited" service, and accept that their network is congested and slow at busy times.)

buying Galaxy Note tablets for the most part...

Wait, there's phones that *don't* let you listen to FM radio? In 2015?

This is making me seriously reconsider whether I should be upgrading my phone any time soon.

Demand is low at night? Perhaps at the equator.

Here it gets dark at 5pm in winter. Then people come home and start heating their houses. And cooking.

I have another solution that has worked well in some places:

3. Include high-capacity batteries with standard solar installations and put them between the panels and the Grid Tie Inverter. That way far less power is put back into the grid (which yields pitiful if any financial returns in many districts) and the home user get to use solar power at night.

They don't need script kiddies, they need social engineers. Question number one in the job interview should be "Is your native language Russian, Chinese, Farsi, Korean or Arabic?"

No, that's the beauty of global outsourcing: all they need's a Hindu accent. "Hello, I am being Sanj - I mean, Bob, from IT. I am needing you to be visiting TeamViewer to be fixing the Windows errors on your terrorist cell's PC..."

More seriously, I thought the offensive hacking was more an NSA/CIA operation: Army cybersecurity would be all about keeping the Windows systems patched and stopping generals replying to hot students who want naked sexy time over Skype in exchange for their passwords. (OK, it turned out that one should have been a CIA job too lately...) There's only a passing reference in TFA to the US having offensive capabilities, everything else is about securing DoD and contractor networks from attack, as I'd expect.