NASA hasn't stopped funding "meatbags in space". The ISS is still up there and receiving lots of NASA funding for operations and training. NASA is paying the Russians for rides to and from the ISS. NASA is paying SpaceX to send cargo to the ISS. NASA hopes to eventually pay SpaceX and other COTS providers to ferry humans to and from ISS. And the SLS is funded with lots of money to restore NASA's capability to send meatbags beyond Low Earth Orbit.

For better or for worse, NASA continues to fund both manned spaceflight and robotic spacecraft.

Historically, slashvertisements at least seemed to be mistakes. They were normally some editor accepting a story from a third party where the third party made a press release about their product look like news. Slashdot had plusible deniability: the editor had been duped. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

But this little incident seems blatant. There is no other explanation. Slashdot is posting an advertisement as a story.

Has slashdot fallen this low?

At least where I live, in MD, larger supermarkets have a nice selection of magazines. To include Linux magazines.

[posting to undo a bad moderation.]

Augh. Correct.

Mod parent down, please. The definition of NP above is circular -- if NP actually stood for non-polynomial, then P!=NP by definition. That would be begging the question.

Rather, NP means "nondeterministic polynomial time." It is the class of problems whose solutions can be verified in polynomial time. NP-hard are the "hardest" problems in this class. All algorithms known to solve problems in this class are super-polynomial. The question of "P==NP?" really amounts to "is there an undiscovered polynomial solution to every problem that we currently think is NP-hard?" or even more simply, "if a problem's solution can be verified in polynomial time, can the solution be discovered in polynomial time?"

If every act of lobbying resulted in bribery, then indeed, lobbying would imply bribery. However, most acts of lobbying do *not* involve bribery. Most lobbying by volume is the legal, non-bribing, grass-roots kind of lobbying. When you get 25000 signatures on a petition, that's lobbying. There are a whole lot of such petitions on the whitehouse petition site.

Not even all paid lobbyists are doing bribes.

+1.

Lobbying just means asking a legislator to do something. At a basic level, lobbying is part of the process of having a republic with representatives. When you mail your representative about SOPA or some other issue, you are lobbying. If enough people do it, that's a grass roots lobbying effort, and could be successful. That's a good thing. It's how the system is supposed to work.

Of course, some people have more influence than others. When you, as an individual, mail your representative and say "this bill is bad for the computer business", the representative is probably not going to pay that much attention. If a major business person who lives in the representative's district/state -- say, Bill Gates calls Senator Murray -- the business person is much more likely to be listened to.

Another common type of lobbying is the professional. Various organizations hire lawyer specialists, former politicians/staffers, and other folks whose job it is to figure out how to get access to legislators or their staff and buttonhole them on the sponsoring company's issues. It's awfully hard to legally distinguish between private citizen lobbying and paid lobbyists. And it's not clear that paid lobbyists are that much of an abuse of the system.

The problem here is that lobbyists -- both paid and private -- can attempt to bribe politicians and staffers in various (legal) ways. These can vary from picking up the lunch tab to donations, and often is equivalent to bribery. But lobbying by itself is not inherently bribery.

In the case of film photography, the demand is gone. Legislation cannot recreate that demand.

In the case of music, the demand for music is still there, but is being met by illegal suppliers at below the legal suppliers' rates. The legislators hope to suppress the illegal suppliers through appropriate regulation. This makes economic sense. Their actual implementation may not make sense from the perspectives of how the Internet works, or due to constitutional / free speech concerns. But what they're doing does make economic sense.

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.