Graduate-level? Why? I would congratulate the students on nice projects if this were their first hardware course, but they seem too simple for graduate students.

At Cal, we have an undergraduate course with a project of similar complexity for a given timeframe (CS 150). The only reason for the length is to become acclimated to FPGA design.

Once you get past the basics, you can do interesting projects. This semester, six undergraduates (including myself) worked on some much larger projects--a SPARC CPU, a GPU with vertex and pixel shaders (with very old-looking pipeline), and a FPU. These began from only a basic library of components (registers, shift registers, etc) and had well-developed test harnesses.

Sadly, our CPU didn't get finished in the ten weeks we had (exception handling working in simulation but not on board, some unimplemented operations like multiply-step, and a really lame branch prediction unit that predicted not taken). But we plan on continuing. ^_^

I believe it's slower because RPM has finer-grained package management (which is probably useless to most people). Someone can correct me on this, but I think RPM's dependencies are handled by file name, rather than by package name. The dependency checks tend to take longer, consequently.

On a modern system, the difference seems hardly noticeable now (in YaST, at least).

Why bother involving yourself with the existing parties or trying to seize a seat in Congress? There are far too many compromises down that road. Get involved in transforming your local politics away from a pathetic sideshow, and build sustainable institutions on the local level. Disregard what the national government is trying to do. It will collapse in upon itself.

Counterproductive, unsustainable, divisive policies like this one might appear to be the roots of dystopia to most people, but it really amounts to the last desperate thrashings of a dinosaur as it drowns in a tar pit.