So basically you're saying let's have Peace, Freedom, and Love for everybody here on Earth. That's far more wishful thinking than dreaming of a million spaceships setting off for Mars.

What technology (gun, car, airplane, microchip, Internet, etc) has managed to eliminate the old ills of poverty, war, etc? We don't need money to fix those problems, we need a change in atittude as a species. We need to eliminate the old supersititions (religion, racial biases) and newer isms (communism, etc). And then we might just have enough time and resources to fix not just the Earth but to terraform Mars as well.

Redhat has patched the bug right down to RHEL 4, which has bash 3.0 which is even lower than Apple's bash version:

https://access.redhat.com/arti...

Since it's GPL I suppose Redhat has already released the source code for their GPL-2 bash versions at the same time as the installable binary updates?

"Oh, you think you're kidding ... but the problem isn't just bash ... it's that Apple uses bash in place of sh."

A long time ago I used a non-Intel version of MacOSX that had tcsh as the default shell. So the parent might not be joking if .cshrc was part of the tcsh installation (tcsh has its own config .tcshrc but also reads .cshrc). If that's the case, well, none of the c-shells suffer from this bug. I wonder why Apple made the change. tcsh is BSD licensed as it's (or was) the default NetBSD (FreeBSD?) shell. Are there any OSX services that actually depend on some bash bug/feature not implemented in say, tcsh, zsh or any of the other permissively licenses shells?

"The (ancient) version of bash that ships with OS X appears vulnerable."

Some really ancient versions of OSX shipped not bash but tcsh, which was (is?) the NetBSD default shell. So who's going to write the anti-bash rebuttal to the famous "Top Ten Reasons not to use the C shell": http://www.grymoire.com/unix/C...

I'm thinking of a future sci-fi scenario where a person who refuses to "cooperate" with a federal investigation is compelled to undergo a mind probe to ferret out the "criminal" data in his neurons. Seriously, we're already cybernetic in that a smartphone or PC can already be considered an extension of our brains, an additional storage pool for our memories. Where goes the right to remain silent? At most an uncooperative witness or suspect should be made to choose between jail time or unlocking his smart phone (which I see as the cybernetic equivalent of testifying).

"Help, help, we're being oppressed!!"

Well, son, you should report your teacher to the principal.

No, I thinks this would be more like those ancient multimedia encyclopedias that came out on CDROM. Or maybe like those kiddie edutainment titles where you click on characters/object to make them dance, jump etc.

It's downright retarded. China is more of a threat than Cuba is to US. Why not a trade embargo against China?

6 cents a book at current prices seems more like Amazon's discounted books business model. So it's not exactly free. Hell even brick and mortar stores conduct cut-price "sales". And at war time, reading books would have been a luxury both at home and at the battlefield. So selling them at the cost of production or at lost is more likely investing for the future loyalty of customers.

The significance of your list assumes that Country = Country's Government. That might be more or less the case for most Western countries with a democratically government. But what about the Arab states. We have no way of knowing if the masses of those countries are actually sympathetic to IS cause (sympathetic until they actually have the chance to live other it). So while a certain Arab government might condemn IS, their support for any US military action might be just that, fighting words without any bite. Who knows if this will turn out to be a coalition of one backed up by a peanut gallery of nations unwilling to contribute a single soldier or even let their territory be used as an operations base.

I don't know if the patents legitimate or not. They could be legitimate (ie approved by some patent office and not yet invalidated by a court) and still be bad patents. But a high-profile IT company that starts filing patent law suits can only mean one thing, the company has peaked and is on its way down. So maybe you should start looking for your graphic card and cellphones elsewhere? (AMD suing Intel is a different thing, since it concerns Intel's supposed monopolistic business practices.)

"A country of merely 140 million, this may well be Russia's last chance to expand its borders until the end of history, so if that is Putin's goal then now is the time to play his hand as hard as he possibly dares to."

And that is what I don't understand. Russia is probably one of the most underpopulated but most resource rich countries in the world. Why does it need to expand its borders when it's already the LARGEST country in the world?

I can understand if China wants the South China Sea to be its private oil field or fish pond so it can feed its billions. I can understand the Germany of old starting two world wars in a bid to increase their Lebensraum (living space). Ditto with Japan and Britain in their imperial wars of conquest. But Russia wanting even more territory? Or is it natural resources? Maybe the Siberia is too cold? Then Putin should be extending his dick south, not west.

This is plain nuts. They might as well send a space force to take over Mars. It's much bigger and the inhabitants are less hostile if any.

The reports (the Atlantic article is an opinion piece about the local reports regarding the incident) are too sketchy at this point to decide if there's a good probable cause for the teacher to be arrested (besides his having written a presumably controversial book, which is not a good reason for somebody in a presumably democratic country to get arrested).

What it does reveal is the attitude of the local reporters who appear to be somewhat supportive or at the very least neutral to the police action. I know, a news report is supposed to be objective. But I don't see any mention in the quoted parts of the news reports about the teacher's free speech rights. The "first ammendment" comment is in the Atlantic article not the news reports. Since these are local news reporters they probably also reflect local biases. Possible threats to safety are given more importance than any free speech rights.