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."