That's a fucking contradiction by any definition of the word (albeit a contradiction that you constructed, and that only you can see). You are clearly deficient in your capacity to conduct a conversation, so I'll just leave off here.

In parting, and just because reading comprehension seems to be a shortcoming with you: I never once alluded to manpower. I referred to the 'pain' involved in replacing it. But you needed 'manpower' in order to construct that thing which you are adamant is not a perceived contradiction, so you can have it. If you can find the place where it fits... outside of your own imagined version of what I'm arguing, that is.

HTH HAND

You're talking right past me. Are you now saying that you do NOT see any contradiction? Because 'one the one hand... on the other....', used as you used it, generally implies a perceived contradiction.

Read the analogy and you have your answer. It's not about manpower. It's about role.

You seriously see a contradiction there? That a core part of a larger system has a new dependency, meaning that one is suddenly put in the position of considering whether it's more pain to keep it than to undo the damage? That this same core part could have been written by a very small group of people who have a track record of not playing nicely with the other children?

... Because if you can't even conceive of the nature of the problem, there's no point at all in responding to the rest of your quibbles.

As a gendankenexperiment, imagine one valve of your heart deciding it wants to change its rhythm. The others can choose to remain as they were, or adopt the new rhythm. Right and wrong are only peripherally part of the decision; what matters first and foremost is not falling out of step. The other components can reason all they like, but if the recalcitrant one doesn't budge, they're stuck either accepting the ultimatum or taking radical steps. The rest of the body parts are, for all intents and purposes, just along for the ride, no matter how the decision affects them.

And that, my child, is the choice the Debian had foisted on them.

I read that a few times and I still do do a Poe's Law double take at the end.

But by 'not systemd at all' you mean, 'by one of the few core packages that cannot be removed from systemd?

Yes, because unsafe code lying available on the system has never been made part of a compromise originating from another source. Or are you okay with losing the crown jewels as long as someone else takes part of the blame?

Google can't cure your brand of refusal to come to grips with reality, chum.

Yeah, that sucks. It's really juvenile and stupidly cruel.

No, it's a case of, 'I piss on my neighbours lawn every day. Yeah, there's a little dead patch on the grass where I do it, but now he's trying to shoot me.'

The first step in remedying this situation is, 'Call the cops.' The second step in this process is 'Stop pissing on your neighbour's lawn.'

No it fucking was not. It was taken up because the pain of living with it was judged to be less than the pain of excising it. Other, equally wrong developers decided to make it a requirement, with the effect that in order to stay with init, we would have to retrofit core elements of GNOME, which would have required significant manpower.

Make no mistake: systemd integration is a textbook example of antidemocratic approaches, of how the commons can be soiled by a very small minority of the people using it. The fact that there was a closely split decision on whether to integrate systemd into Debian should have been read as a damning indictment, and at very least should have given the developers pause. But no, it got chalked up as a victory - which is exactly the kind of thinking that got this shit into our operating systems in the first place.

Any self-respecting developer would have realised that the best way to move systemd forward would be to take an incremental approach, to offer it as an optional component. Any reasonable developer would have had the fucking humility to accept that something so integral to the system cannot be made mature and robust except over the course of time. And until that time, he should perhaps quit fucking saying how sweet his shit smells.

See, this, right here, is why people lose it when they deal with Lennart.

This is not a matter of 'like' or 'do not like'. If it were, we could tell Lennart his software sucks and move on. But no, he's so fucking clever he not only has to be right, he has to foist his rightness onto systems before it's anywhere near mature.

And then.... and then, to add insult to injury, he refuses to accept that integrating core software, which in his own words claims to offer a one-stop-shop for kernel-userland interaction, without extensive use in real world conditions, might reasonably be thought a little rash. No, he has to go and accuse the entire software establishment of bias, an unwillingness to change (without even beginning to address where that inclination comes from), and ultimately, of a simple lack of ability to see and accept just how fucking right he is.

Amazingly, astonishingly to abso-fucking-lutely no one, his actions give rise to more than a little rancour. And now he has the gall to say that he was right all along, that his opponents are irrational and that it's a problem with the rest of the world.

To which I can only reply: seek help.

I kind of got that, in spite of some random wanker modding me troll for my troubles.

My point, however, is that that is not actually how the process works. That's how the process is dressed up, but in actuality, the FCC has become a political creature, and will reliably support the party that appointed the majority of commissioners. This rather important element was only barely alluded to in the article.

You've got your cart on the wrong side of your horse, young man.

It's up to the ISPs to demonstrate to the people (via government) that they're using the resources —to which they have been granted limited monopoly rights— in the public interest, and that their pursuit of profits is not leading them into anti-consumer activity such as creating artificial scarcity for extortionary purposes when negotiating with other network operators, holding their users hostage, arbitrarily throttling bandwidth to customers whom they have testified are causing network congestion when in fact no such congestion exists.

For example.

Network Neutrality is the neutral position. It's not telling ISPs how to run their network - it's telling them to stop fucking with their customers' traffic. It's telling the ISPs to stop indulging in funny business and get back to making money the old-fashioned way: by providing an actual fucking service.

But yeah, fuck big government and Ayn Rand and America Fuck Yeah and all that because... Oh, I don't know, because who the fuck cares any more? This stopped being a dialogue years ago.

This is the part that grabbed my attention. The whole piece is pretty disingenuous in the way it frames the issue. Just check out this quotation from an FCC staffer:

It's a subtle bit of work, but the author of the piece implies not only that:

a) The FCC gets to ignore most comments because its rules require arguments to be made on technical grounds (true); but also that

b) The public opinion is not just wrong, it's 'hallucinating' (false).

The paternalistic tone of the article was a little much, too. Allow me to fisk it:

Not once - not once in this article does the author admit what's central to the entire fucking issue - this is a politicised process. It's not a popular issue only because the power brokers don't want it to be. Though truth be told, they're fine with appearing to support the popular will when it coincides with whatever's politically expedient for them.

Actually, that's per copy per picture. They're counting on Ansel Adams to pay down the national debt.

No fucking kidding, software has bugs. And this is a doozy. It's not the first WTF moment we've seen, and it probably won't be the last.

As with the Y2K problem, though, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. The real test will come when we look back and measure the impact. Will we see a digital wasteland, a web devastated by shellshock-ing predators? Will we find ourselves living in an online New Jersey of the soul, wretched, empty bit-badlands stretching out to the horizon in every direction? Will the Evil Bit finally be flipped? Or will this be like the day when the public library almost burnt down, but we saved all the books by forming a bucket brigade? It's too early to say, right now. But my guess is that, unlike Microsoft's legacy, the fall-out from this event will be the stuff of a cautionary tale for young systems developers, explaining how all the cleverness in the world won't save you from stupidity, so the only really good system is one that can be patched quickly, effectively and simply.

Kant might also have admitted that, while no straight thing was ever made, quite a few bent things were subsequently straightened.

No, you twit. Bash will read the environment variables sent to it by CGI, which populates the environment parameters before you can sanitise the inputs. By the time you're ready to begin parsing and sanitising, the damage is already (potentially) done.

The implications of this are far-reaching, and the only way to be reasonably secure is to patch the bash executable.