While slashdot might be considered a human-centric website, there are in fact many visitors from all species. Most websites acknowledge them, posting measurements in metric as opposed to imperial, and specifying which species are the topic without assuming. See the How Vulnerable Is Our Power Grid? article for a similar discussion in the comments regarding slashdot's US-centric nature, or and space article for comment discussions of slashdot's Earth-centric nature.

I will worry more when this project leads to a situation in which there is little or no diversity in the robot OS. Then the outsiders will be like us Linux users today, but worse off.

"Oh, you use Debian instead of Windows For Robots? We don't serve your kind here"

I expect this basement to stay nice and cool (read: inhabitable) so long as my parents keep paying the rent.

And when web searches fail to find what you need, Wikipedia often has you covered:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/58.44

This was more than social engineering. You should listen to the guy fighting with the couple and insisting when the man refused:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0803091pranknet1.html

Go down the panel on the right side of the page, there are recordings of the calls in Flash. It's funny, but it's sad and scary.

Write to Sony, Samsung, and the other TV manufacturers and ask _them_ which of their products work with Linux. Even though you will probably get a disappointing answer, you will have expressed interest in having consumer electronics work with Linux. If even one one-hundreth of the Linux community were to express interest in Linux-compatible hardware and Linux ports of software, you wouldn't even need to ask the question. Lets make things better for those of us who will be in the submitter's shoes five years from now: write to the hardware manufacturers and ask about Linux support!

Well, I am interested in the laws of my own country but often I find out about them by comparing to other nations. I will ask my lawyer about "unconscionable", thanks.

Prior art. Well, they're already going to have to outsource to Russia soon anyway...

What is that A in there for? Is there some part of this whole slashdot thing that I'm missing?

The issue here isn't "free" because nothing ever is. The issue here is who is going to pay the journalists and the webhost. Will it be the advertisers, or the readers? Because if nobody pays. and the webhost doesn't get paid, the site goes down. That should be simple enough to understand.

Thanks. It looks like that simply set precedent in the US, and may not apply in other countries. I specifically asked my lawyer about "contract inequity" and he had no idea what that is.

The best ending of any story, ever. Well, with the possible exception of Pink Floyd's "Vera".

The default MSO 2007 installation with the Ribbon takes up _less_ screen real estate for the UI than does the default MSO 2003 with toolbar, despite the larger icons.

First of all, TFM is available for free here:
http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/

Seceond of all, for non-trained users, the Ribbon is easier to use. So long as the menu-driven interface is optional (whether is it the default or not) then power users can continue as they always have.

As a casual user with no time or interest to do a full OOo course (or even RTFM usually) I welcome the Ribbon UI. I understand that experienced and advanced users may not like it, but assuming that the original interface is not removed then the addition of the ribbon would certainly help weekend users like myself.