I'm more of a Trekkie than a Jedi master, so just wondering if you'd enlighten me about the title. The Force Awakens? Doesn't that make this a prequel? Now if knowledge of the Force was lost after Return of the Jedi (along with the smarts on howto build a proper light saber), then we're talking about a RE-awakening of the Force. Of course The Force Reawakens sounds quite awful, but hey the Wachowskis did come up with a rather clever title for their Matrix sequel, even if the actual move left much to be desired.

Well yeah copying isn't stealing ...

But I've heard rumors of really big time players in the bitcoin "market" who sell large volumes of bitcoin to THEMSELVES, a very real possibility given the anonymous nature of bitcoin addresses. This causes the value of bitcoin to rise, which then attracts the attention of the smaller players, who buy into the hype thinking, "OMG, bitcoin's going to rise to $$$$ again!". Which of course isn't likely since only a few people are buying and selling bitcoins, each through multiple addresses that artificially inflate the number of people apparently buying and selling bitcoins. When these big time players decide to bail out, the price of bitcoins sinks back to its normal market level (whatever that is).

"Any claim that this "saved lives" is complete fabrication. It was the murder of 250,000 people that people try and justify with a false claim. We happened to win the war which means our side did not face a tribunal for war crimes. Numerous Germans were put to death for killing far fewer people."

I wouldn't go so far as to call it complete fabrication. Could a better way have been found? Most probably. But think of it this way. This was the nation that invented the concept of "kamikaze". You conveniently forget that the death and destruction that Imperial Japan inflicted across Asia and the Pacific. This isn't the infantilised Japan of Sailor Moon and Hello Kitty. Google Rape of Nanking or Bataan Death March.

The news report just confirms what Ray Kurzweil has been say all along about the hierarchical structure of the mind. What makes for thought happens at both lower and higher levels of the mind. Basically, if something gets recognized at the higher level, the lower levels don't kick in. If something is difficult to recognized at a higher level, then the lower levels start working until some pattern or part of a pattern emerges.

A rough example of how this works: suppose you see the back of a curly haired woman at a supermarket near your house. Your wife is curly haired. Mistaken identity occurs when you assume that the curly haired woman is your wife because:

(1) The woman you saw was curly haired.
(2) You saw the woman in a place your wife is likely to frequent.

You'd be less likely to instantly presume the curly haired woman is your wife if you happened to see her, say, in a topless bar (if you know your wife doesn't visit or work at such places). Now if you see a curly woman in an unfamiliar place, your mind works harder at trying to recognize the woman, until maybe you figure out the woman isn't your wife but a drag queen wearing a curly wig.

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...

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.

"Not in my lifetime or yours."

Don't jinx it, man.

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.

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.

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...

You're a developer so you should know more ;) I mostly use zsh myself, but I'm curious as to what benefit or convenience feature this behavior gives to bash? Also are "normal" uses vulnerable or just web servers?

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).