Why are people so quick to go to the sci-fi stories of the army of robots rising up to destroy humanity when there's still ample room for exploration of the robot's masters subjugating Earth to their will (a far likelier prospect, to boot?)

Weak. Cliché.

$10.69 in 2014 dollars, but it's worth noting that was at its peak and so a uniquely misleading selection if you're comparing the current minimum wage to historical norms.

Because different faces, or parties for that matter, tend to pursue similar policies?

Right! If we'd elected McCain instead of Obama in 2008, the Affordable Care Act as we know it today would still be more or less intact, we'd still have withdrawn American forces from Iraq on the same schedule, and we'd still be shaking hands with China over a miniature climate agreement. In smaller matters, the Keystone pipeline would still be in limbo (just because that's easier than killing it explicitly). Et cetera et cetera.

With all due disrespect to Uber's extant valuation projections, you've used airlines as an example. Besides the fact that people travel on the ground more than they travel through the air, airlines are notorious for having razor-thin margins, spotty track records of profitability and a tendency to go broke on short notice. Their capital stock is a double-edged sword. You may have heard a joke: "How do you become a millionaire in the airline industry? Well, you start out as a billionaire..."

The real questions about Uber are how big the new market they want to build actually is, and why some competitor won't grab substantial portions of that market from them.

Like others I found the headline confusing. I read it as "Researchers are predicting the use of Wikipedia as a vector for the spread of disease". This may mean that:

• Disinformation and ignorance are diseases.
• Memes and computer viruses are diseases.
• Wilipedia contains information that leads to depression.
• Instructions on Wikipedia lead to substance abuse.
• This is getting entertaining, fill in your own reason here.

Another thing about that spending, too -- election advertising this year ran about $3.7 billion overall. This is real cash, but it's about real issues and the future of our nation is at stake and many policy proposals could make a significant impact in the nation's $3 trillion-a-year economy. Proctor and Gamble spends about $5 billion a year advertising for the likes of laundry detergent, Nyquil, and diapers.

And about 90% of the difference is additional taxes that your government has placed on the substance -- so if you don't like it, whine to Parliament. :P

One of the definitions I found was:

One who makes great sacrifices or suffers much in order to further a belief, cause, or principle.

I am sure that fits. While SpaceShip II is mainly intended for a non-exploration purpose, the program has resulted in some significant advances in rocketry and White Knight II has significant non-tourism use. These pilots have been involved in other space efforts, I remember the one who was injured from the Rotary Rocket test flights. There are lots of safer ways for these folks to make as much money as a test pilot is paid. They do what they do to advance our progress in aeronautics and space.

Well, the US operates the GPS system itself, which is a distinct advantage in a time of worldwide military conflict.

Martyrs? Who killed them for their beliefs?

Go away, troll. They certainly died while pursuing something intensely important that they were willing to risk their lives for. The fact that you weren't around to pull the trigger makes them no less martyrs.

'Approved' isn't the right word.

OneGet has the notion of 'trusted' repositories. We're likely to expand this concept a bit in the future, but for now, that's what it is.

Built-in package sources from reputable sources may be marked as 'trusted' by default, but the majority of sources should be 'untrusted' until the user makes that change.

The real trick is getting package provider plugins to tell OneGet the truth if a repository is trusted or not.

I suspect that we're going to have to introduce a level of trust with the package providers too, and expose this to the user ... somehow.

You've got a really good point.

We're tossing around some notions about different factors that make a 'package' or 'repository' trustworthy.

I'm sure we can do some stuff with signed repositories and signed packages to detect when things 'change' and/or keep unsigned repositories 'untrusted'.

Really, our first target for this stuff is developers and admins, not my mom...

Well, considering that the chocolatey provider for OneGet points to the community-controlled repository, I'll have to take that as a win :)

The concept of curated repositories is one that we're really trying to come up without screwing it up.

Regardless, with OneGet, the *user* maintains control. Which repositories they connect to, what software they install.

Actually, to be perfectly clear, OneGet isn't really a package manager.

It's a package-manager-manager -- It's a unified way of installing packages of software regardless of the how-it's-implemented-on-the-back-end.

The first real package provider plugin is a Chocolatey one. Why re-invent the wheel when the wheel already works?

The purpose here is to leverage all these different sources of software using a common set of commands and APIs.

Anything that can be represented as a 'source' of software can be plugged in on the back end. I'm aiming for plugins for NPM, Ruby Gems, Python, on top of the expected MSI, Chocolatey, NuGet, etc...

Plugins can be written by anyone, and I'm going to great lengths to make it as simple as possible -- it's about ~15 or so functions to implement and we can plug in virtually any package format or service into OneGet.

[FYI -- I'm @FearTheCowboy everywhere else, my /. id is so old that my name got trimmed from "His Name Cannot Be Spoken" 15ish years ago when they did a database adjustment... ]

I have had thoughts on how to do this; I suspect that while we may not set up a repo to do that, I may hack out the instructions on how that could be done easily if one wanted to maintain their own.

It really boils down to how much time I can throw at that.

Of course, we also want it to plug into WU and WSUS, but that'll be a bit more down the road.