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Comment What about Debian Hurd & kFreeBSD? (Score 1) 555

If systemd is going to be the default init system on steroids, where will that leave the non-Linux ports of Debian, which prides itself in being THE "universal operating sytem" (go ahead Google for the phrase, first hit is Debian)? Insisting on hard dependency on systemd is going to creat problems for Debian Hurd and kFreeBSD, unless systemd has already been ported to those systems? https://www.debian.org/ports/h... http://www.debian.org/ports/kf...

Comment Fusion or fission? (Score 0) 571

From the linked article before Reuters edits/corrects it: "U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fusion reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle."

WTF Are the conspiracy theorists correct? The US military already has secret fusion reactors. Makes me wonder whether the article is just a poorly edited press release. Otherwise, why is there a need to spend Billion$ on ITER. Compared to ITER, the Lockheed project, if true, would be peanuts.

Comment The coming robotic divide (Score 1) 106

The problem isn't human pickers being replaced by robot pickers. I see that as progress. The problem is if, like in most fiction/movies/anime about a robotic future, the robots would wind up being controlled by a few gigacorporations or some central administration akin to the military. If every Joe or Jane can own his or her own private robot, great. However, news like this has me worried whether the dystopian future will be a technological divide between those who have robots and those who don't.

Comment Re:IN OTHER WORDS? (Score 1) 774

I assume you're mainly a Windows user who use Linux only for the non-graphical (server, etc) stuff. Systemd is bad but it's not the Metro of Linux. The Metro of Linux would be either Unity3D (Canonical/Ubuntu) or Gnome Shell (Fedora/Redhat). These are both GUIs analogous to Metro. The rise in the popularity of Ubuntu derivative LinuxMint can be attributed to its use of its own more traditional looking desktop environments (either Cinnamon or Mate) in place of Unity. So there's clearly been a an anti-Metro-like pushback in that area.

Systemd is something else. Most desktop users probably won't notice it. And that's what makes it worse. A Systemd bug is going to be way nastier than Shellshock.

Comment More improbable than a million spaceships to Mars (Score 1) 549

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.

Comment Re:Patches for 3.x bash versions? (Score 1) 208

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?

Comment Re:~/.cshrc (Score 2) 208

"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?

Comment Not all OSX versions affected (Score 1) 399

"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...

Comment Mind probes are next (Score 2) 354

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).

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