There is a big difference between "people no longer have a use for any of your products" and "people still want your products but have figured out how to avoid paying for them."

New distros and package formats hurt everyone:

1. The "Linux" community only has so many knowledgeable volunteers and developers at any one time. Maintaining a general-purpose distribution takes a whole fleet of people, each of whom understands the intricacies of one or more subsystems. When you create another distro, you are implicitly hoping that you can get a whole bunch of people to stop contributing to some other project and instead contribute to yours; and/or you are hoping to divert new volunteers from other projects. New distributions spread us more thinly.

        If you can make a newer distro that is significantly better than anything else, you might be able to kill off an older distro and/or grow the community enough to compensate for the above. But if you create a distro that is only marginally better than its predecessors, you will needlessly consume a section of the volunteer base. It would be better to take your ideas to an existing distro and improve that, instead.

2. If a programmer wants to write and test software for "Linux", the number of different distributions to target and test on keeps getting higher.

3. COTS vendors who are tempted to support "Linux" sometimes look at the mess of distributions and give up. When they do provide support for some Linux distros, their Linux customers sometimes whine that they aren't supporting $distro_of_choice, which makes COTS vendors hate us. Unnecessary distros make this worse.

4. New packaging formats, in particular, create additional burdens on cross-distro tools for package management and file browsing.

The folks who define the term "cyberwar" limit it to nation-state actions, to make it analogous to traditional war. Certain folks use this term with a very specific agenda: to justify expanding the scope and budget of military activities to include computer and computer network defense/offense. Most malware exists for vandalism or theft/fraud. From the perspective of jurisdiction, that means most malware falls under law enforcement rather than the military. As such, most malware is not in scope for "cyberwar". It's only "cyberwar" if it's the action of a nation-state.

It appears that a fair number of governments have used "cyberwar" type capabilities. "stuxnet" is probably the most famous example, and for good reasons: it was highly sophisticated and had physical-world implications. There have been other incidents, such as the attacks on Estonian and and Georgian websites. However, none these incidents has ever, AFAIK, been officially acknowledged by the perpetrating government.

The "oxOmar" incident was not directly initiated by a Palestinian government entity, but was publicly praised by a government entity, i.e. Hamas. That's the closest we've come to having an officially acknowledged cyberwar.

Cool, thanks. That's a good differentiator. Most other distros have mechanisms to add unofficial repositories. But that's a lot of bother for the packager.

Next question: why did Arch need to reinvent the package management wheel? deb and rpm already existed. What does the Arch package format (format, not the pacman front-end) give you that other formats could not have?

- OP

Russian President Medvedev threatened to prosecute those responsible for the space failures. No surprise that the individuals in question are now looking to blame someone else.

Good for you. But I've met plenty of fundamentalists with that view. They're typically called "Young Earth Creationists". And they're common -- the linked poll claims that 40% of Americans believe that the Earth is less than 10K years old. It was the basis of the Scopes Trial, and has been in an issue in a number of court decisions since then. This is very much an ongoing issue.

I have no illusions about people here reading TFA and TFS. However, since it was my submission, I felt compelled to defend it.

Specifically, no, it's not news that Tolkien was denied the Nobel 50 years ago. We have indeed known that for 50 years. The news is in why Tolkien was denied the Nobel. That information was only just released.

The decisions behind the Nobel Prize are kept secret for 50 years. The justifications were only just released. This is described in TFA, and mentioned in TFS.

- Morty

They didn't say it is terrorism, they said they would use the same tools as for terrorism. That is, they know it's not terrorism, but think that the same tools would be useful.

As a former fencer, I completely agree on the fight quality. During the lightsaber battles in the original three movies, the actors' movements were relatively slow and often didn't actually threaten their opponents. They're somewhat painful to watch: I keep thinking "stop thrust, stop thrust!" The actors in the newer trilogies look like they're mostly actually trying to fight each other. Although even in the new series, there still are plenty of moments when someone leaves themselves open to do something showy (i.e. swing their saber backwards) and their opponent doesn't press the advantage.

That said, in terms of fight choreography, what looks good isn't always what's most realistic.

Yes, a lot of folks just read the first part of the comment and the conclusion. But some people do read the entire comment before replying.

What is so preposterous about one Middle Eastern culture referencing another culture's actual uncompleted building in their legends?

The stele is about the reconstruction of the tower, not its initial construction. The original construction of the tower/ziggurat would have been considerably earlier.

Genesis is the first of the five books of Moses. It was legendarily attributed to Moses. That would make the legendary time of its writing less than a thousand years before the writing of the stele, when Babylon did already exist. [Of course, if you agree with modern scholarship, then Genesis was written/collated considerably after the time of Moses.]

The Hebrew is not "balal", it's BBL (two "bet" characters followed by a "lamed".) Hebrew is normally written without most vowels, and ancient Hebrew was always written without most vowels; the "nikud" dot systems used to teach Hebrew vowels are no more than 1500 years old. I don't know where you got your Akkadian transliteration from. If your Akkadian is as bad as your Hebrew, it's worthless. But if your Akkadian source was better than your Hebrew source, then it's interesting that Hebrew BBL is quite close to "babili". If you were going to write "babili" in Hebrew, it would look either like "BBL" or BBLY" (the Hebrew yud character can double as a vowel.)

And the linguistics are irrelevant, anyway. Hebrew BBL has long been considered a reference to Babylon. Even if the Hebrew and Akkadian place names were linguistically disparate, BBL would still have been an exonym referencing Babylon. Sort of like Japan vs. Nippon. A modern English article that describes a site in Japan is not incorrect or mythical just because the local name is "Nippon"/"Nihon" rather than "Japan". "BBL means "Babylon" just as "Japan" means "Nippon".

[Disclaimer: I personally don't believe in the Bible. However, that doesn't change the fact that it is an interesting collection of ancient documents that reference other antiquities.]