GRBs clearly haven't prevented life in *our* galaxy, so the Fermi Paradox still stands.

The caluculations probably rule out life in the core of our galaxy, but systems further out would be exposed even less often than ours is. And even though GRBs can periodically sterilize a planet, their directionality means that one burst would not likely sterilize all the planets in an intercellar civilization simultaneously.

So, to modify what someone said above, we can add another term to the Drake equation, but this doesn't do much to answer Fermi.

As pointed out in the article, the program must use gethostbyname() on a name supplied by the attacker.

A much more mitigating factor is that the bug is only exercised if the name looks like a numerical id, and according to their search most software first checks this using inet_aton() and only calls gethostbyname() if this fails, thus avoiding the bug.

I have yet to have one such buffer overflow bug in my code

Yea, right. You know the authors of this function probably thought that too. They had no counter examples until now, just like you and your code.

strncpy will not overflow the buffer provided you pass the size of the buffer (if you don't pass the size of the buffer, *none* of the safer functions are going to help). It's problem is that it will not write a nul at the end of the buffer, thus reading will read right off the end. It also wastes a huge amount of time filling the unused part of the buffer with nul.

strlcpy is far, far better and does pretty much what is wanted.

However in this case they really did try to figure out if the buffer would overflow, so neither strlcpy or strncpy should be needed. They did the calculation wrong, claiming it needed 4-8 bytes less than it really did.

Come on google! Scare em good, start the NYC and LA rollouts.

What's in a name? I also thought Bluetooth was idiotic when it came out, but there are only so many short and descriptive names. Getting a trademark is actually not that easy, and in the end the only thing that matters is that it is unique, and that your competition can't take it away from you.

Firefox, Chrome etc. aren't particular descriptive names but everybody now knows what they stand for.

So let me get this straight, you seriously don't know who Vivaldi was, and you think everybody else is as proudly ignorant as you are.

Obviously the name works perfectly. This browser is not for you.

OK, I see what you're saying. That there's really little reason for the operating system on a home computer to look and work exactly like the one at work.

I agree. I think as computer users, we're mature enough not to need this level of familiarity. This is one reason that at some point down the road, I hope to be able to use both Windows for my digital audio workstation in my home studio, and some form of "SteamOS" for playing games. Of course, with companies like EA/Origin and Ubisoft using their own game store platforms, I don't see all PC games being compatible with a SteamOS for some time to come.

what with the rabble's concerns boiling over and impinging on the fringes of their attention.

Only if the DoJ continues to look the other way in the face of continuing flagrant Sherman act violations

If you're a fan of any current computing tech, either mobile or on the desktop, you really don't want to be bringing up Sherman Act violations.

I can't think of a single major manufacturer of PCs, mobiles, or commercial operating systems for PCs or mobiles that isn't guilty of anti-trust violations.

Sorry... I was going for the joke and didn't pitch it very well. My actual views are more like yours.

As for the reality of the subject matter, I would borrow the concept of "probably approximately correct" from machine learning, and give it a 90-95% chance of being ~80% correct. (The 80% is lower to allow room for some more big discoveries like inflation.)

Unfortunately, people will be (hopefully) studying this for thousands of years on top of the <100 we have so far, and none of us will live to see how it turns out in the long term.

And I'm guessing that the publishers who use region codes cry like babies whenever governments impose artificial barriers to free trade.

I always heard it as: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

And of course, the word of choice usually wasn't "fool".

(Is this really a regional saying?)

That's actually what it's like at "Mojave Spaceport". Hangers of small aviation practicioners and their junk. Gary Hudson, Burt Rutan, etc. Old aircraft and parts strewn about. Left-over facilities from Rotary Rocket used by flight schools. A medium-sized facility for Orbital. Some big facilities for BAE, etc. An aircraft graveyard next door.

SS2 has not completed testing and it is probable that there will be a need for redesign of one or more components. So, this is a really bad time to have the hand-off. Publicity isn't a good reason.