I don't get why this article is on slashdot. Is it because the average reader might think ESA has not contributed to NASA missions before? Because it is the first time a lander may be the contribution? I don't think these are the case, NASA rarely does any mission without collaborations.

Dark energy can also be measured from the CMB radiation, through the angular size of anisotropies and through baryonic acoustic oscillations in the large scale structure.
And the constraints from these *independent* probes are consistent with the results from supernovae, all pointing to the presence of an acceleration of the universe at late times. It is not so that we rely on a single tool here!
Also, TFA states that their finding that a different class of supernova is dominant at high redshift does not attack the presence of dark energy, only its exact value (of energy density).

How about without a gun? Then you really have to be determined.

"How does this happen, if a black hole exerts so much gravitational force that not even light can escape?"
The stars don't form inside the black hole, so I don't see how that is related. Instead they are at a distance of several light years, where some of the gas that falls towards the center stops (angular momentum; similar gravitational attraction of black hole and galaxy stars). The gas can collapse and form stars. These are called "nuclear star clusters".

If you want to go for avoiding ambiguity, go for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

AGPLv3 solves exactly this problem.

The question of open source is really -- do you have a secure upgrade path. If Windows goes away, and software you use depends on their software, you do not. If you use software based on a BSD/Apache2 license, and someone extends it and makes the result non-open source, and the software you use begins to require these extensions, you don't have a secure upgrade path anymore. GPL solves this problem and guarantees that you will always have an upgrade path, because derivatives need to be open source.

I think this is really the key point, and why purism in software licensing should not be laughed at by "pragmatists". Like for example distributions that do not include closed source software (Flash) or drivers (nvidia), because "pragmatists" want it to "just work". If you go down that path, you are making yourself dependent on a company going the path you want. You get into a situation 5 years down the line where even more software depends on closed source (e.g. mono/.NET), and it is out of your control. That's why I think purism in open source software is still relevant.

Pragmatically speaking, the upgrade path of open source software packages is not in your hands, but in those who are experts in that package's code, and those who invest time in it. The point is rather that if you get annoyed enough to pay someone, you would be able to get control back, while with closed-source extended BSD/Apache2 packages, you would not. You would need to re-invent that software.

For Web services, I think it depends. If the company provides proprietary data, then it doesn't really matter whether the software to access it, or the API is open source. You will have that dependency, until you have open data.

In summary, I think one should ask oneself: In 5 years, when this platform is outdated, and the company goes away or refocuses, what will I do, and am I prepared for that. Who am I dependent on? Having a community of millions of programmers which are in the same situation helps, because only one has to solve the problem and open-source it for an upgrade path.

Yes, and the authors of said algorithms (CS researchers) agree that that was ok (a security - speed/implementation tradeoff).

There is a difference between suspecting and being looked at as paranoid, and everyone knowing something as a fact.

And why can't they compile the c++ to ecmascripten or asm.js before they put it on the website?

That's gonna be difficult for a space station.

Actually each ArXiv section has an editor who screens the papers, checking if they have reasonable content. And it unfortunately happens that legitimate papers are withheld for several weeks, and the ArXiV administration is not responding reliably to emails (being understaffed and having many submissions). So unfortunately, ArXiV is not just a pre-print server anymore where everyone can upload, but has turned into a intransparently half peer-reviewed journal, which scientists read every day.

Having one solution does not suffice, you need to prove it. WIMPs have been proposed, but they require Supersymmetry (which is not proven), and also WIMPs have never been detected in particle accelerators. Dark matter is a weird thing, because one way or another, you need new physics which does not interact using the strong force or electromagnetism, is present already in the very early Universe (380000 years after the Big Bang).

I think you meant /dev/random, which gives you more entropy per bit. urandom is a PRNG on top of random, which gives fast throughput. urandom is also the default random source of sort.

Amazon also had incidents where natural disasters or human failure led to data loss for business customers, so I doubt they have distributed backups for 100% of the data.

For credit cards, frauds are nothing to banks. They just pay it from their profits, and the customer doesn't have to worry. Maybe it is the same here? Perhaps it still pays off for the banks and Apple to do that extra business, and it works out in their calculation.