Sean Connery was born in Scotland and is a huge fan thereof.

Ironically, in Highlander, Connery played an Egyptian. The title role went to Christopher Lambert, a French man born in the US.

Conveniently, NASA's latest budget request quadruples the asteroid detection budget.

However, this asteroid is too small to have been in scope for NASA's asteroid detection. NASA's asteroid detection is focused on objects 1 kilometer or larger. As others pointed out, the much smaller obejcts that NASA does track are in Earth orbit. Tracking small objects in Earth orbit is both more achievable (they're always relatively close to Earth!) and more important (they pose a ongoing hazard to spacecraft, both manned and robotics.) Small asteroids pose relatively little threat -- they burn up in the atmosphere in a single pass. And they're really hard to detect. So NASA doesn't even try.

[Posting in part to undo a bad moderation.]

The average number of comments per post seems to be declining. slashdot articles are less germane. The code is rotting. The new videos are useless and/or slashvertisements.

Looks like slashdot is dying.

Sure, Steve Jobs made big mistakes, too. Not just the NeXT, either. During his original stint at Apple, the Apple Lisa was a total faillure. And he did some pretty nasty things in his personal life. He certainly wasn't perfect, and he made some pretty collosal mistakes. All that said -- Apple's major succcesses have come to significantly outweigh their failures, as evidenced by the current market for iPhones, iPads, etc. A lot of that success can be attributed almost directly to the vision and ideals of Steve Jobs. I'm not an Apple fan myself, but I can understand why the Apple fans revere him.

Engineers design to specs and requirements. Jobs tended to specify the high-level requirements. The engineers who worked for him are very clear on this -- Jobs was a micromanager who pushed hard for certain elements of design and usability. The Jobs approach was unique, and resulted in the distinctive Apple products of the 70s, 80, and 2000s. Unlike most CEOs, Steve Jobs had a close personal hand in the the successes and failures of Apple.

NB: I'm not a big fan of either Jobs or Apple. But his contributions are pretty clear.

The guy's video came after the Newton, but his (documented) push for a tablet dates back to 1981, per TFA. That's well before Apple came out with the Newton. The two companies were next door neighbors and collaborated on this tablet concept.

I deliberately did not provide my list of queries, for three reasons:

(1) As I said, the queries are relevant to me, personally. All queries include my first and last name. I have never posted my last name on slashdot, and do not intend to. I prefer not to have slashdot come up on searches for my name.

(2) I assume shills for both sides are present here. I don't want my test queries to become special cases.

(3) The point of my post is to test what is relevant to myself. Your needs could be different, and testing is easy. So you don't need to take anyone else's word for it, and shouldn't. Test for yourself.

That said, if you want to see my list of queries, post an email address (a throwaway email address is fine) and a promise not to post the list to the web or any public location.

verbatim is a google feature. GP was praising google, not bing.

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.