I just tried bing on a list of sample (obscure, complicated) queries that are relevant to me, personally. google found the correct page in 3 out of 4. bing got 1 out of 4.

I wouldn't make any grandiose claims on a sample size of 4. But from a "quick and dirty check" perspective, I won't be trying bing again anytime soon.

BTW: since when are vendor competitiveness claims newsworthy? It always annoys me when stories like this show up on slashdot. Yes, the high-powered $vendor_X executive whose livelihood depends on $product_X has publically claimed that it is equivalent. This is a story? I don't care which vendor you're talking about: the vendor's own claims about relative competitiveness are not newsworthy. Wait for an (impartial) third party to declare that $vendor_X's products, which historically were viewed as inferior to $vendor_Y, are now equal or superior. Or wait for $vendor_X to announce a new feature. Then you have a story.

Todd McCaffrey is a son rather than a grandson of Anne McCaffrey.

30 years ago, people weren't expected to be reachable. Now, IT folks, doctors, managers, and others are expected to reachable on their cell phones. Parents are expected to be reachable by their kids' schools.

Even your journal article has been downmodded. I think someone is gaming the system.

If you think it's me vs. Madison, you've missed the point. Saying "Wasn't James Madison against this" conveniently leaves out that there were a number of his peers who were all for it. Ben Franklin was one such. Madison succeeded to the extent that the President isn't "His Royal Highness", but he lost to the extent that the President, Senators, and others do have titles that clearly differentiate them from regular citizens -- as Ben Franklin wanted. Madison's side lost to Franklin's side. If you want to reopen the issue, that's fine, but presenting just one side of the argument is misleading. Our Founders were not unified on this topic.

Referencing the Founding Fathers' individual beliefs and opinions is illogical. We have a democracy. We have voting and majority rule. Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, and others had many beliefs, and often ended up disagreeing with each other. That's why the Constitutional Convention took months to write a relatively short document. That's why the US Constitution is full of compromises.

The three brances of government create the current state of law and custom. Until they intervene, the differing opinions of individuals, even individual founders, does not matter.

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.