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.

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.