First of all, it's Bourne shellcode and bash has extensions to it. Second of all, whether the programming language is bad or not is totally not relevant. It's the parser in the shell itself that has some fundamental flaws because it executes code inside environment variables that are totally unchecked. You could have a brilliant programming language and still make the exact same mistake.
While you may say that is "by design" it is not common for Bourne shell to do so and most of shell scripts are written to be Bourne shell compatible. By choosing to allow this to happen, Bash programmers made a giant hole in shell security.
Intel has I believe all their Linux drivers fully open sourced. However, they're not really fast compared to AMD or NVidia. AMD has two driver versions, their closed source catalyst driver and the open source one. The catalyst driver is much faster, energy efficient and can do more tricks than the open source one. NVidia is sort-of supporting Nouveau and has their own binary driver as well. The "sort of supporting" is much limited compared to the amount of AMD is pouring in the open source version of their drivers, but it has improved greatly recently.
Depending on what you are looking for in terms of bang for buck, speed or features each of these might be "the best solution" for your needs. If you want CUDA or openCL, you'll be looking at closed source though, there's no serious support for open source drivers for relevant hardware (yet).
How easy is it to lock someone's account and access to all of their data in the cloud, by simply throwing 5 bad logon attempts at their account name? How would you feel if someone were to do that every hour, using a botnet, forcing you to go to an apple store, show your ID and have your finger print scanned just to unlock your account?
Yes, this may be slightly exaggerating the situation, but simply locking someone's account because someone else made 5 attempts to log on to it isn't going to work in practice. You'd be having to deal with oodles of users that got locked out of their stuff and tarpitting only slows the brute force attempts down.
While you may be right about the current use we have for DNA, it's very likely that medicine will have many more uses for it in the future. Prices on genome sampling are going down rapidly too, so it's reasonable to use this as an example why we might want to store data error free for at least a century.
There will be many more things we want to store. Remember all those old city records and paper books? The news paper archives? early 20th century cellulose film? All those data sources have their problems and we have already lost a lot of information that is valuable to us now. Your parents and grand parents color photographs have lost a lot of the color in them already. Not just the prints, but also the negatives. Those VHS video tapes of your dad growing up? They're turning into noisy images right now.
People have plenty of reasons to come up with a proper way to store data in such a way that it's still accessible for future generations, or themselves later in life.
UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker