How IKEA Patched Shellshock

By making the customers do most of it themselves.

Write it in a Babbage Analytical Engine simulator: the copyright has expired by now, and it's Turing Complete.

We really need a better term for "back-end developers", for what should be obvious reasons. Nerds have enough social cred problems as it is. Sometimes "server side" is used, but that doesn't quite cut it because some UI dev is also done on the server side in many cases.

I don't really understand your gripe. Slashdot covers many technology specialties. Very few article topics will fit the entire audience, and many will fit only a small subset. That's expected. I've seen embedded programming articles also, for example, which a web developer will typically not care about. Should web developers gripe about articles on embedding?

You seem to have a set of unstated assumptions about the domain of slashdot and the domain of its readers that doesn't match mine. Perhaps you are arguing there are too many articles related to web development compared to other domains. But web development is a large and growing domain such that it's a frequent area of change and growing pains, which is usually what "news for nerds" would cover. You don't see many articles on the COBOL language because it no longer changes very often, for example. That's not necessarily a bad thing; but it doesn't generate "news".

We may have to come to grips with the idea that it's just a hard sell. The long-term average death/illness rate may be much lower than say oil or wind, BUT people remember the "spikes" of accidents such as 3-Mile-Island.

It's just easier to sell an idea that kills lots of people gradually in a predictable rate than one that kills nobody for many years, but occasionally hiccups in a newsworthy way.

That's just the way it is. We can't change human nature, and mass nagging usually backfires. We probably have to just live with that fact unless somebody invents breakthrough persuasion technology.

It's rare that somebody is a jerk in all ways: we all have flaws in some area(s) or another, and being in certain situations magnifies them.

I'm glad Bill's good side is coming out now.

We in the west like to view people as either "good guys" or "bad guys", perhaps because it makes for more drama in media, which reinforces that view. But reality is often more nuanced.

Maybe if the art academy had accepted the young Adolf, he'd only be known as a "decent German artist of the mid 20th century". Disaffected by the art world, he turned to a different "career" instead.

requires us to make much bigger lasers, and probably also bigger sharks.

We have 'em; they're called "bankers".

Isn't periodic full-drive scanning an optional feature that the security admins can switch on or off?

In this case, add a "shutdown for the day" button, that does the updates, scanning, etc. before shutdown.

I believe they try to stagger the updates so that the network is not flooded. A smart system would coordinate all that to balance energy, bandwidth, night scans, security updates, etc.

Seems a nice niche to exploit by entrepreneurs. Sure, it may be scriptable like you pointed out, but some security teams either are not good at it, or management is more comfortable with a purchased product.

Or use an OS that can apply updates silently and doesn't require scanning for viruses, etc...

That's an org decision that is far far beyond my control. For now, I just want to persuade them to invest in update and scan coordination tools rather than leave them all slow.

I suspect the WSJ editorial section is written by similar mimic-based AI.

We can put a nuclear reactor in space to power a colony ship if we really wanted to. True, we lack practical practice, but there is no known barrier to doing it (money & treaties aside).

Don't new & changed files get scanned automatically? I don't think that's the bottleneck. I'm talking about sequential (more or less) general scanning, which is what is going on in our case during work hours. Even if I'm doing nothing on the PC, McAfee is still chugging away on the disk.

Too many people shut off their machines at night

We have a similar scan problem, but our co's policy is to not shut down PC's at night so that they can get Windows updates. But the scanning still happens during the day even if one leaves it on.

Couldn't a scan rule be put in place that only scans during the day IF the night scan didn't complete? Anybody know of a tool like that for McAfee? Does McAfee have a scripting language or scheduling rule engine? Or, a 3rd party add-on?

That way ONLY those who turn it off at night get "punished" by sluggishness. (Or if a Windows update interrupts an anti-virus scan, which may happen from time to time, but that's better than always day-scanning.)

McAfee could make a nice profit even by selling such a rule tool. It's like being paid to create a problem and being paid again to solve it: Kinda like Congress :-)

Perhaps I'm not explaining the tradeoffs I perceive well. We should put our humans-in-space research toward interstellar ships similar to the original Orion project (early 60's), for reasons given in nearby replies.

I'm not convinced going to Mars is the best way to get such research and experience. We need more experience with spin-based gravity ships and NON-chemical propulsion. Doing a slightly-bigger Apollo-to-Mars is not in that direction.

I tend to agree, and that's why I said "if we make it that far" near the end.

However, we don't need near-light-speed (near c) ability to colonize extra-solar planets. The ships can be multi-generational and use something like the original Orion project's propulsion to get roughly 5% of c. We perhaps have the technology even now if we spent enough. FTL is merely a bonus.

The key unknown here is whether AI *or* extra-solar travel ability (EST) will move faster. Existing AI is still a far cry from human-like general intelligence (HLGI). Whether HLGI is 20 years away or 20,000 is hard to say. Our current AI is still lame in most regards. (It's just fast & big-ass databases & statistical processing that makes it seem "smart" sometimes. High-level goals and abstract thinking still elude it.) We don't know how hard the problem really is. Evolution had a lot of time to optimize brains.

If EST progresses faster than HLGI, then we may be okay. EST is just about possible now, just very very expensive. HLGI is not possible EVEN if we had $100 trillion to try to build one instance (excluding "base" R&D). In that sense, EST looks like it may be feasible first. But past pace is no guarantee of future pace.

Interesting to speculate about...