People on Slashdot often exhibit a depressing lack of spirit when stories like this come up. Yes putting a monolith on the moon is pointless, but so was sending the Voyagers (or should that be 'V_ger') into space with a gold record and a picture of a naked man and woman on them (and don't tell me they'll be spotted by aliens in eons or something - a monolith on the moon is just as likely to be discovered by the next Neil Armstrong monkey astronaut). Big budget movies cost an insane amount of money and are mostly crap. I go and see them, but given the choice, I'd give my £15.00 ticket price to something like this - a lot more affecting, entertaining, and satisfying than Avatar or something. We (/. community) should support stuff like this! Rubbishing people's artistic ideas because they're not immediately practical or whatever is so easy, and lazy, and sometimes I reckon is down to sort of creative jealousy or something. Lift your nose from the keyboard, think of all the shit in the world, then think of the universe. Different scales - both important.

I have a personal interest in toasters, I would like to know which toasters in particular you can play doom with? ps. I'm serious. pps. I might be getting the wrong end of the stick.

I would guess that giving your time to a prestigous project that's used by millions (e.g. Firefox) is much more satisfying than working for free on some application used by a small number of people in back offices (e.g. ?). So you'd expect a lot more people to be motivated to work on wide use things like Firefox.

Education has it's own motivations - everyone wants to help da kids right?