Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates [puzzlepirates.com] puts games like Tetris etc. in the context of a Pirate-themed MMP game, neatly eliminating your complaint; the game is intensely social (you puzzle with or against other Pirates) and lots of fun. Skill at puzzling actually means something to you and other players.
Well, I popped over, but I didn't download it yet. I don't have a vm on my linux box (other than Kaffe, which doesn't work too well), so I'll have to download Sun's before I screw with it.
But I did get a feeling like "Boy would I love to play a good pirate game right now!" I'll check it out.:) (Even if you're blatantly pimping your own game, heh)
Sometimes people play games to simply distract themselves and relax.
You've just hit on the only reason I still play video games. I don't have a fancy console, and I refuse to run Windows to play games (the most common reason I've seen for people continuing to run Windows even if they agree that it's "wrong", which is arguable). I find that the games that come with mandrake Linux are suitable to my purpose, which is to relax.
As far as the antisocial aspect, I used to have a couple of old Macs around, and there was an asteroids clone on 'em. My wife and I used to stay up for hours after the kids went to bed and blast asteroids in the 2-player team mode. We had great fun! (Then we had...well...uh...) For a 7-year marriage with two small children a good, quick-loading, fun, 2-player game can be much more relaxing and entertaining than sex. Consider that to play the game, privacy is not required, and the kids love watching us play the game! (No, we won't let them watch us have sex)
While that contributes, you have to remember that most of the pollution is caused by a very small percentage of the people (25% by the US, I seem to recall). So really we could get a handle on this problem by just cutting down a little, being just a little more efficient. We don't need to get pollution down to 0, just make it manageable. It wouldn't take all that much effort, and we could still live well...
How much does it take to support one person? Overpopulation by itself probably doesn't produce a significant amount of CO2 from breathing, realistically speaking. It may be a number easy to ignore, I mean.
But when each person drives a car, uses electricity in their house and at work, and so forth, the benefits of, say, slaughtering an individual become more marked. Now, there are problems with trying to use execution to get pollution in line, of course. The only real solution is to get as many people off this rock as possible, because the alternatives to controlling population are more horrifying than the dangers of colonizing outer space.
My point is, the overhead of each individual is huge. And there's so many individuals as to make efficient, environmentally friendly living almost impossible. Not completely impossible, but how easy is it compared to migrating off this rock? I'll bet you could get a million volunteers to leave the planet faster than you could get a million volunteers to give up their cars.
Reducing the population of the earth, in my opinion, is the only way out of this hole. If it's done through a war, there is the serious possibility of generating more pollution through the war than if nothing happened. Plague will only work if its a natural plague, rather than a disease created for bio-warfare. If it's a man-made disease, then we have serious moral implications (as with war, of course). Moreover, if using execution as a method, then *someone* would have to decide who lives and who dies.
Of course, there is that useless third of the population we could get rid of. We just have to convince them that some nasty disaster is going to destroy the planet so that they will get onto a big ark of some sort and migrate out without the rest of us.
Anyway, my point without the rambling is that an individual accounts for a lot more pollution besides what my original post was saying (exhaling CO2), and the only reason I mention it is because people seem to forget that people themselves produce CO2 as a part of natural living.
Of course, there's all kinds of things that people as a group have put a stop to, over the years. I still feel that nuclear power is better for us than other sources of power, even if its not perfect, yet various groups have managed to prevent its widespread adoption (last time I checked there was only one nuclear power plant running in North America. I could be wrong about that, though, I havent exactly done a lot of research in this area). Public transportation *can* be a good solution, but only if it's not politically motivated. Every public transportation system I've seen has been so caught up in politics that they haven't been able to address their original mission, and therefore haven't provided a decent alternative to driving cars.
Another good way to approach the problem, I think, is to look at cleaning up after ourselves. There's a LOT of work that's been done in this area, and I think it's good to pursue it.
Finally, of course, I think that computers have the potential to help our pollution problems a lot. I don't know what kind of pollution is generated while manufacturing computers, so I could be wrong. But there's so many things that can be eliminated, paper being one of them. If our power problems ever get solved, we can eliminate gas burning in the home (and woodburning fireplaces).
I don't know that an environmentally friendly rocket fuel is going to do much, but since every little bit counts, I think this is a good thing too.:)
In KMail (1.3.2 on KDE 2.2), highlight the URL. After one second, you'll be presented a context menu offering a choice of browsers (e.g. Konqueror, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera or Lynx) with which to open the URL. Should save the cutting and pasting.
That only works if you have the Klipper app running, but with the Klipper running a menu would popup off the panel and steal focus while I was doing stuff that didn't involve Klipper, so I shut it off. That removed my wonderful choice of browser menu.:(
However, I am posting this from withing Konqueror, because when reading reply notifications from slashdot it's a lot faster to let Kmail load Konqueror rather than mozilla, even with that menu that I killed.
There's other problems with Konqueror as well, and in all honesty I expect they will get dealt with. It's a lot better now than it was in KDE2, and it keeps getting better. So I'm not trying to knock konqueror (although I do frequently describe it in poor terms), I'm just trying to relate my own experience with it. It's useful sometimes, other times it's a hindrance.
The only reason I'd be willing to switch to Gnome, actually, is because Galeon is such a nice browser. But all the other little things about Gnome that irritate me aren't present in KDE, so I have to settle with a compromise.:) Luckily, the compromise is a good one.
I question not so much the free software crowd's love of Mozilla, as the hate for KHTML. Why hate this _other_ free and excellent library for web rendering?
I don't hate KHTML, I should point out.
I use KDE 3 on my box, and I use Mozilla as my browser, because Konqueror is a piece of shit. I would use IE before Konqueror, if technical capability was my first priority (it's not, so never fear, I'd use Konqueror). I DO use Konqeror from time to time. For example, when I read email in Kmail, I can either copy a link to the clipboard and paste it in mozilla or I can just click it and see the link in konqueror. I usually click it and see the link in Konqueror, becuase Konqueror loads a lot faster. After they start running, I find Konqueror "feels" slow, although I haven't exactly done any benchmarking.
Suffice it to say, using both Mozilla and Konqueror side by side in KDE3, I find Mozilla to be a superior browser.
If Apple can make Konqueror better, then I would prefer to use Konqueror over Mozilla, just because it's well-integrated into my desktop of choice. Obviously, as much as I dislike Konqueror, I like KDE.
What exactly did Apple do wrong again?
Maybe they should've called it GNU/Safari? Seriously, I don't think they've done anything wrong.
I'd also like to point out as a Mozilla embedder that Mozilla hasn't exactly become cross-platform in the way that I'd define it. When you embed Mozilla on a UNIX platform, you have to link to GTK, because you have to pass a GTK widget to the rendering engine. This is not cross-platform, in my opinion. SUre, it works great on Windows, but you have to give it a HWND there, and there are other toolkits besides the winAPI. (Admittedly you should use the winAPI on Windows, the reason is self-evident) But how can I make a native Qt-based Mozilla if I have to link to GTK? Simple, I can't. With all the other cross-platform toolkits available for UNIX (and for Linux, of course) then it seems like Mozilla has ignored the others in favor of their own favorite widget set.
IMHO, instead of taking a widget pointer, they should take a rectangle of some sort instead, and let the embedder embed it first into their library, and THEN into their application. They could still provide handlers for winAPI and for GTK if they prefer, but those of us who want to use different toolkits under UNIX could embed Mozilla into our preferred toolkit without having to link to GTK.
Actually, it's interesting that this planet has likely been in high-CO2 states before -- just think about the dinosaurs.
Do we know that the dinosaurs didn't breathe CO2? Or rather, do we know what they breathed? So far as I know, we have no way to be certain, just like we don't know what color their hides were. I could be wrong, though, I'm not a paleontologist.
You'd need at least two, so the rocket isn't unbalanced at takeoff...
Not a serious issue, because an environmentalist hasn't the strength to carry something heavy enough that won't break under the initial force applied. Not that that matters, 'cause he'd be burned up by the first blast of fire out the bottom.
A more efficient way of using rockets to deal with environmentalists is to just herd a large group of them onto the flightpad and build a chainlink fence. Then you don't have to deal with weight issues on the rocket.
Remember, Carbon dioxide is what causes global warming in the first place
Carbon dioxide is also (coincidentally) the waste product of human breathing. Between thrashing all the trees and stuff that breathe in CO2 to build houses and crap, and also to make room for farms/cities, and the fact that humans (and other animals) exhale CO2, I'm getting more and more convinced that overpopulation, more than anything else, is the source of all of our problems.:)
Not that I've yet to offer a solution that doesn't sound like science fiction. I guess I'm just a romantic at heart.
Anyway, if they want to try they can start by checking the unidentified species growing under my bathroom sink. I tried killing it a few times but, uhhh... I've learned that it is a very very bad idea to make it angry.
*goes and looks under the sink*
Hey dude, that's my WIFE!
Re:Completing the task set for Adam in Genesis 2:1
on
Finding Every Species
·
· Score: 2
Life for Adam in the Garden of Eden was not an idle pursuit of berries and time with Eve. Adam was told to work the garden and care for it. The first task (see verse 19) though was to name the animals. Interestingly, modern-day scientists are now completing an extension of humankind's first job.
Aha, now we see proof that the bible was written by a geek. Otherwise, REPRODUCTION would've been mankind's first job, to be interrupted only for feeding.
One way this group might go about collecting samples from every species (particulary from the ocean, where the greatest variety resides) is to run a sort of filter through the water/atmosphere at various depths, catching all manner of critters. Then, dump all the animals into some sort of machine that grinds them up processes them to collect DNA information which could be sorted into a large database.
BTW can i patent myself, more specifically my dna? So that if it is found that i carry some weird mutated form of a gene that cures cancer or something similar, i will make profit off the use of such a gene to help other people.
Actually, I thought the only useful purpose of patenting your dna was so you could sue your kids for infringing your patent when they have kids of their own, or something like that.
But due to the short life of a patent compared to the realistic ages at which people seem to be reproducing these days, it seems like an unrealistic use to put a patent to.
There is hardly much point to the _point_ of the endavour. At best, it would be an archive of past splendor of life on Earth.
Oh come on, wouldn't you like to take a few years off, grab some funding, and go tramping around the four corners of the globe? Why else would someone come up with something like this? Heh.
I sense a movie about a scientist that goes wondering around South America looking for new species and getting chased by the headhunting natives for stealing a golden idol from a pyramid, only to run off to the middle east looking for species that were left behind by the jews to keep them out of Nazi hands...
In order to know how much biodiversity actually needs to be preserved to for instance keep speciation going, or to keep extinction at a minimum, we have to get some basic insight into current state of affairs. Again, just knowing what species you're dealing with is a prerequisite if you want to obtain a global picture.
This sounds suspiciously like "playing God". If that is the case, then carry on.
Usually people use the standard of recognition (i.e. "I know it when I see it") which works well enough for most purposes.
At the risk of going offtopic, here goes.:)
The problem with this standard is that it only works on an individual level. Take love, for example. The most common definition of love that I've run across is "You'll know it when you feel it." Using this definition, I have seen quite a few couples get together and then get un-together because their definitions of love didn't mix. Each one knew that they loved the other, but the other didn't live up to some standard.
The reason this type of standard of recognition can't be used in science is because it depends on an individual viewpoint, and one of the fundamental principals of science is duplication. Without being able to duplicate somethign (research, observation, experimentation, etc.) with predictable results, then you can only continue to observe without concluding. When it comes time to conclude, your conclusions must be able to be duplicated by other scientists with completely different viewpoints (or worldviews, if you prefer).
I kinda got the idea that the dude wrote that statement tongue-in-cheek. Which never seems to work on/.
It's a basic statistics problem, but I unfortunately lack the math to do it. It amounts to something along the lines of this statement:
In any group, there is a certain statistical likelihood that some percentage of the group will take offense at something said by an individual in that group. As the group gets larger, the likelihood increases. When the group reaches a certain critical mass, the likelihood becomes a certainty.
Slashdot has enough readers that there is a high likelihood that anything that gets said will find someone offended, even if it's anti-Microsoft.
This problem, of course, is why it's impossible for a person elected by the populace to satisfy all of the voters.
I found it on another thread (or perhaps its farther down in this thread) but I read it on a different computer, so I can't find it in my history (of course).
There's a project on sourceforge that provides the software and the project pages have links to manufacturers that can provide the hardware. The post you were responding to was posted before I read that.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates [puzzlepirates.com] puts games like Tetris etc. in the context of a Pirate-themed MMP game, neatly eliminating your complaint; the game is intensely social (you puzzle with or against other Pirates) and lots of fun. Skill at puzzling actually means something to you and other players.
Well, I popped over, but I didn't download it yet. I don't have a vm on my linux box (other than Kaffe, which doesn't work too well), so I'll have to download Sun's before I screw with it.
But I did get a feeling like "Boy would I love to play a good pirate game right now!" I'll check it out. :) (Even if you're blatantly pimping your own game, heh)
Sometimes people play games to simply distract themselves and relax.
You've just hit on the only reason I still play video games. I don't have a fancy console, and I refuse to run Windows to play games (the most common reason I've seen for people continuing to run Windows even if they agree that it's "wrong", which is arguable). I find that the games that come with mandrake Linux are suitable to my purpose, which is to relax.
As far as the antisocial aspect, I used to have a couple of old Macs around, and there was an asteroids clone on 'em. My wife and I used to stay up for hours after the kids went to bed and blast asteroids in the 2-player team mode. We had great fun! (Then we had...well...uh...) For a 7-year marriage with two small children a good, quick-loading, fun, 2-player game can be much more relaxing and entertaining than sex. Consider that to play the game, privacy is not required, and the kids love watching us play the game! (No, we won't let them watch us have sex)
While that contributes, you have to remember that most of the pollution is caused by a very small percentage of the people (25% by the US, I seem to recall). So really we could get a handle on this problem by just cutting down a little, being just a little more efficient. We don't need to get pollution down to 0, just make it manageable. It wouldn't take all that much effort, and we could still live well...
How much does it take to support one person? Overpopulation by itself probably doesn't produce a significant amount of CO2 from breathing, realistically speaking. It may be a number easy to ignore, I mean.
But when each person drives a car, uses electricity in their house and at work, and so forth, the benefits of, say, slaughtering an individual become more marked. Now, there are problems with trying to use execution to get pollution in line, of course. The only real solution is to get as many people off this rock as possible, because the alternatives to controlling population are more horrifying than the dangers of colonizing outer space.
My point is, the overhead of each individual is huge. And there's so many individuals as to make efficient, environmentally friendly living almost impossible. Not completely impossible, but how easy is it compared to migrating off this rock? I'll bet you could get a million volunteers to leave the planet faster than you could get a million volunteers to give up their cars.
Reducing the population of the earth, in my opinion, is the only way out of this hole. If it's done through a war, there is the serious possibility of generating more pollution through the war than if nothing happened. Plague will only work if its a natural plague, rather than a disease created for bio-warfare. If it's a man-made disease, then we have serious moral implications (as with war, of course). Moreover, if using execution as a method, then *someone* would have to decide who lives and who dies.
Of course, there is that useless third of the population we could get rid of. We just have to convince them that some nasty disaster is going to destroy the planet so that they will get onto a big ark of some sort and migrate out without the rest of us.
Anyway, my point without the rambling is that an individual accounts for a lot more pollution besides what my original post was saying (exhaling CO2), and the only reason I mention it is because people seem to forget that people themselves produce CO2 as a part of natural living.
Of course, there's all kinds of things that people as a group have put a stop to, over the years. I still feel that nuclear power is better for us than other sources of power, even if its not perfect, yet various groups have managed to prevent its widespread adoption (last time I checked there was only one nuclear power plant running in North America. I could be wrong about that, though, I havent exactly done a lot of research in this area). Public transportation *can* be a good solution, but only if it's not politically motivated. Every public transportation system I've seen has been so caught up in politics that they haven't been able to address their original mission, and therefore haven't provided a decent alternative to driving cars.
Another good way to approach the problem, I think, is to look at cleaning up after ourselves. There's a LOT of work that's been done in this area, and I think it's good to pursue it.
Finally, of course, I think that computers have the potential to help our pollution problems a lot. I don't know what kind of pollution is generated while manufacturing computers, so I could be wrong. But there's so many things that can be eliminated, paper being one of them. If our power problems ever get solved, we can eliminate gas burning in the home (and woodburning fireplaces).
I don't know that an environmentally friendly rocket fuel is going to do much, but since every little bit counts, I think this is a good thing too. :)
In KMail (1.3.2 on KDE 2.2), highlight the URL. After one second, you'll be presented a context menu offering a choice of browsers (e.g. Konqueror, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera or Lynx) with which to open the URL. Should save the cutting and pasting.
That only works if you have the Klipper app running, but with the Klipper running a menu would popup off the panel and steal focus while I was doing stuff that didn't involve Klipper, so I shut it off. That removed my wonderful choice of browser menu. :(
However, I am posting this from withing Konqueror, because when reading reply notifications from slashdot it's a lot faster to let Kmail load Konqueror rather than mozilla, even with that menu that I killed.
There's other problems with Konqueror as well, and in all honesty I expect they will get dealt with. It's a lot better now than it was in KDE2, and it keeps getting better. So I'm not trying to knock konqueror (although I do frequently describe it in poor terms), I'm just trying to relate my own experience with it. It's useful sometimes, other times it's a hindrance.
The only reason I'd be willing to switch to Gnome, actually, is because Galeon is such a nice browser. But all the other little things about Gnome that irritate me aren't present in KDE, so I have to settle with a compromise. :) Luckily, the compromise is a good one.
I question not so much the free software crowd's love of Mozilla, as the hate for KHTML. Why hate this _other_ free and excellent library for web rendering?
I don't hate KHTML, I should point out.
I use KDE 3 on my box, and I use Mozilla as my browser, because Konqueror is a piece of shit. I would use IE before Konqueror, if technical capability was my first priority (it's not, so never fear, I'd use Konqueror). I DO use Konqeror from time to time. For example, when I read email in Kmail, I can either copy a link to the clipboard and paste it in mozilla or I can just click it and see the link in konqueror. I usually click it and see the link in Konqueror, becuase Konqueror loads a lot faster. After they start running, I find Konqueror "feels" slow, although I haven't exactly done any benchmarking.
Suffice it to say, using both Mozilla and Konqueror side by side in KDE3, I find Mozilla to be a superior browser.
If Apple can make Konqueror better, then I would prefer to use Konqueror over Mozilla, just because it's well-integrated into my desktop of choice. Obviously, as much as I dislike Konqueror, I like KDE.
What exactly did Apple do wrong again?
Maybe they should've called it GNU/Safari? Seriously, I don't think they've done anything wrong.
I'd also like to point out as a Mozilla embedder that Mozilla hasn't exactly become cross-platform in the way that I'd define it. When you embed Mozilla on a UNIX platform, you have to link to GTK, because you have to pass a GTK widget to the rendering engine. This is not cross-platform, in my opinion. SUre, it works great on Windows, but you have to give it a HWND there, and there are other toolkits besides the winAPI. (Admittedly you should use the winAPI on Windows, the reason is self-evident) But how can I make a native Qt-based Mozilla if I have to link to GTK? Simple, I can't. With all the other cross-platform toolkits available for UNIX (and for Linux, of course) then it seems like Mozilla has ignored the others in favor of their own favorite widget set.
IMHO, instead of taking a widget pointer, they should take a rectangle of some sort instead, and let the embedder embed it first into their library, and THEN into their application. They could still provide handlers for winAPI and for GTK if they prefer, but those of us who want to use different toolkits under UNIX could embed Mozilla into our preferred toolkit without having to link to GTK.
Actually, it's interesting that this planet has likely been in high-CO2 states before -- just think about the dinosaurs.
Do we know that the dinosaurs didn't breathe CO2? Or rather, do we know what they breathed? So far as I know, we have no way to be certain, just like we don't know what color their hides were. I could be wrong, though, I'm not a paleontologist.
You'd need at least two, so the rocket isn't unbalanced at takeoff...
Not a serious issue, because an environmentalist hasn't the strength to carry something heavy enough that won't break under the initial force applied. Not that that matters, 'cause he'd be burned up by the first blast of fire out the bottom.
A more efficient way of using rockets to deal with environmentalists is to just herd a large group of them onto the flightpad and build a chainlink fence. Then you don't have to deal with weight issues on the rocket.
Umm, YOU output CO2 and water....
Umm, actually I output CO2 and beer....
Remember, Carbon dioxide is what causes global warming in the first place
Carbon dioxide is also (coincidentally) the waste product of human breathing. Between thrashing all the trees and stuff that breathe in CO2 to build houses and crap, and also to make room for farms/cities, and the fact that humans (and other animals) exhale CO2, I'm getting more and more convinced that overpopulation, more than anything else, is the source of all of our problems. :)
Not that I've yet to offer a solution that doesn't sound like science fiction. I guess I'm just a romantic at heart.
But you're on the right track-
Um, why can't we use alcohol, again? Isn't it distilled from vegetables and/or fruits?
Anyway, if they want to try they can start by checking the unidentified species growing under my bathroom sink. I tried killing it a few times but, uhhh... I've learned that it is a very very bad idea to make it angry.
*goes and looks under the sink*
Hey dude, that's my WIFE!
Life for Adam in the Garden of Eden was not an idle pursuit of berries and time with Eve. Adam was told to work the garden and care for it. The first task (see verse 19) though was to name the animals. Interestingly, modern-day scientists are now completing an extension of humankind's first job.
Aha, now we see proof that the bible was written by a geek. Otherwise, REPRODUCTION would've been mankind's first job, to be interrupted only for feeding.
Scientists are still finding new species of ants frequently. The last number was 11,006 according to Antbase
Does that include my Aunt Janet?
eventually there may be only 1 species.
That'd make for a real short menu. Hm...
An impossible undertaking is to show that we haven't missed any in the process.
This isn't entirely true. We could just nuke the world, in which case there wouldn't be any life left.
Conversely, we can just let the boy bands...
Ok, I couldn't figure out how to make a boy band joke out of this. Time for bed.
One way this group might go about collecting samples from every species (particulary from the ocean, where the greatest variety resides) is to run a sort of filter through the water/atmosphere at various depths, catching all manner of critters. Then, dump all the animals into some sort of machine that grinds them up processes them to collect DNA information which could be sorted into a large database.
Or,
I can just point my tricorder at it.
Don't forget to put "humans" and "niggers" as different species.
Doesn't matter a whole lot when they show up on the menu side by side...
BTW can i patent myself, more specifically my dna? So that if it is found that i carry some weird mutated form of a gene that cures cancer or something similar, i will make profit off the use of such a gene to help other people.
Actually, I thought the only useful purpose of patenting your dna was so you could sue your kids for infringing your patent when they have kids of their own, or something like that.
But due to the short life of a patent compared to the realistic ages at which people seem to be reproducing these days, it seems like an unrealistic use to put a patent to.
There is hardly much point to the _point_ of the endavour. At best, it would be an archive of past splendor of life on Earth.
Oh come on, wouldn't you like to take a few years off, grab some funding, and go tramping around the four corners of the globe? Why else would someone come up with something like this? Heh.
I sense a movie about a scientist that goes wondering around South America looking for new species and getting chased by the headhunting natives for stealing a golden idol from a pyramid, only to run off to the middle east looking for species that were left behind by the jews to keep them out of Nazi hands...
Or perhaps an inanimate carbon rod will save us all.
Please don't talk about my penis in this fashion. Thank you.
In order to know how much biodiversity actually needs to be preserved to for instance keep speciation going, or to keep extinction at a minimum, we have to get some basic insight into current state of affairs. Again, just knowing what species you're dealing with is a prerequisite if you want to obtain a global picture.
This sounds suspiciously like "playing God". If that is the case, then carry on.
Usually people use the standard of recognition (i.e. "I know it when I see it") which works well enough for most purposes.
At the risk of going offtopic, here goes. :)
The problem with this standard is that it only works on an individual level. Take love, for example. The most common definition of love that I've run across is "You'll know it when you feel it." Using this definition, I have seen quite a few couples get together and then get un-together because their definitions of love didn't mix. Each one knew that they loved the other, but the other didn't live up to some standard.
The reason this type of standard of recognition can't be used in science is because it depends on an individual viewpoint, and one of the fundamental principals of science is duplication. Without being able to duplicate somethign (research, observation, experimentation, etc.) with predictable results, then you can only continue to observe without concluding. When it comes time to conclude, your conclusions must be able to be duplicated by other scientists with completely different viewpoints (or worldviews, if you prefer).
In a lush environment, individuals with all sorts of different characteristics can be equally successful.
Thanks, dude. You've just explained to me why rock music has sucked so much since the early '90s.
I kinda got the idea that the dude wrote that statement tongue-in-cheek. Which never seems to work on /.
It's a basic statistics problem, but I unfortunately lack the math to do it. It amounts to something along the lines of this statement:
In any group, there is a certain statistical likelihood that some percentage of the group will take offense at something said by an individual in that group. As the group gets larger, the likelihood increases. When the group reaches a certain critical mass, the likelihood becomes a certainty.
Slashdot has enough readers that there is a high likelihood that anything that gets said will find someone offended, even if it's anti-Microsoft.
This problem, of course, is why it's impossible for a person elected by the populace to satisfy all of the voters.
I found it on another thread (or perhaps its farther down in this thread) but I read it on a different computer, so I can't find it in my history (of course).
There's a project on sourceforge that provides the software and the project pages have links to manufacturers that can provide the hardware. The post you were responding to was posted before I read that. :)