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Comment Re:Faulty premise (Score 1) 139

Treat it methodically and there really isn't any difference. Snape is probably just as much of a scientist as any chemist. He just practices in a different domain. The same is probably true of Gandalf.

Make him a member of Psi-corps and suddenly it's all good and obviously sci-fi again.

Comment Re:Yet another out-of-control govt agency (Score 1) 299

Dogs have been eugenically engineered by humans for tens of thousands of years, and are therefore an artificial life form. They usually eat food that comes from a factory, and is artificial. Since you have an artificial life form eating artificial food, it's excreting artificial poop. Its urine is water that has been polluted by artificial processes. Hence the impact study.

By some definitions, anything created by a human is artificial, so all of our bodily wastes are artificial.

Comment vastly stronger symmetry effect is already known (Score 1) 120

As light passes by a sun it is subject to an asymmetric situation where the solar atmosphere is in a magnetice field closer to one pole than another, rotating and having a gradient both radially and with the azimuth. thus there's a strong symmetry breaking effect on this light. On average, for all light passing the sun it's an equal handed effect. But if your planet happens to be subject to light that cam from the left side of the sun versus the right, that light could have a net polarization.

this effect would likely be orders of magnitude greater than this weak force polarization effect.

Comment Re: Only the beginning (Score 1) 236

Fixating on the list of distributions that do or don't default to bash really is kind of pointless. The vast majority of impacted systems are going to be servers and especially corporate servers. The real question is what is the distro breakdown there.

So it's far more interesting that Redhat/CentOS/Fedora is on the "bad" list than any of the more obscure options.

SLES/Suse would also be a good one to include for relevant completeness.

Comment Re:Question about how this works (Score 1) 236

No. The problem is that bash allows functions to be defined AND run in a variable declaration. It's the classic case of muddling the line between data and programs. This is what allows a remote exploiter to feed anything they like into your copy of bash.

Defining functions in environment variables seems like a weird idea. Is anyone crazy enough to use that and if so then why?

Comment their theory isn't provable (Score 1) 120

All life we know about came from a single origin since all life is based on DNA, RNA and proteins. whatever the origin was it would have had left or right handed DNA and thus so did everything that followed. there's no reason to suppose the need for a bias for one or the other. one of them was going to win. it's like vhs and betamax.

Comment Re:patched my servers last month (Score 1) 236

> Of course, as a sysadmin I should also be a software engineer. How stupid of me.

Yes you are stupid. Being enough of a "software engineer" to patch bash is a pretty pathetically low bar for any computing professional anywhere. It doesn't matter if they are "only a sysadmin".

It's not exactly rocket science.

This is what you get when your OS vendor tells you that you can have trained monkeys manage your systems.

Comment Re:I love it. (Score 1, Flamebait) 318

No.

On Linux we have bugs.

On Windows you still have rampant malware that's taking your data hostage.

Despite Lemming attempts to conflate every software bug with a Windows virus that does actual damage, it simply isn't so.

The strong technical merits are still there. Windows is still a festering cesspit. Legacy apps remain the only real reason to run WinDOS.

Comment Re:Worse than Heartbleed? (Score 0) 318

This is an optional user level program with a number of alternatives. In terms of change impact and ability to patch, this has to be about the simplest vulnerability to patch possible.

There are a large number of systems where the fix for this is simply to delete the thing.

It's nothing like heartbleed.

Comment Re:Oh good (Score 1) 907

This is all well and good if you live in a city where one can rent a place with a shade-tree to practice your shade-tree mechanics, but many of us (like most of the of the country) live in areas with high populations and even less parking. Not to disagree, though, because my first car was a 1980 Toyota Corolla that I replaced the starter on on Christmas Day in the parking lot of a grocery storm during a sleet storm (no exaggeration). Lesson learned was to budget for car repairs because that shit sucks. But that was a different city with lower costs than Los Angeles.

Now, for my current situation, fuck a car. My neighborhood is metered parking, 1 hour limit, no way anyone can really work on a car under these conditions. So I ditched the car. Bicycles are even cheaper than cars, bus pass is cheaper than cars, walking is cheaper than cars, and while I now have a motorcycle, it's still cheaper than a car. I agree whole heartedly that one should try to just buy outright, and buy used if possible. Depreciation is a bitch.

Comment Re:Oh good (Score 1) 907

Being subject to grave bodily injury over a billing snafu is a little more serious than "not being given a car".

There should be some interesting Tort implications here. Although you sheep have been happily undermining that too. So these banks might KILL someone and get away with it.

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