Absolutely, and that's why the examples of 'change' you give are completely
trivial, such as a change of language, or even bogus (early Christians
would not have forced someone to starve if it was understood it would have
meant extreme sickness). Christians still work from books that are at least
2000 years old, are completely unchanged (besides translation) and yet have
been largely discredited. Your apologetics are, frankly, rather weak.
Ack! Have you not studied history? Look at the major and minor strains
of Christianity today: Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, Ethiopian, Protestant.
Jehovah Witnesses, Latter-Day Saints, Pentacostals, Quakers, Amish.
These are all decended from the same core. But they can be vastly different
religions. Not only does Christianity tend to fork into different beliefs,
but within the same branch of Christianity, changes happen over time
(The catholic church has changed its position on abortion and on priest
celibacy).
Sects of Christianity also succeed or fail. How many Cathars do you know?
Bogomils? Some "heresies" are successful (Protestant, Latter-Day Saints,
etc). Many die. In the end, its the survival of the fittest.
Arguing that Christianity is unchanging is a position that is rather ignorant
of history.
The next question should be, "How do we make them regret their
non-compliance?"
robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow:/the-site-that-never-ends/
Its trivial to write a script that will link back to itself to make
millions of bogus pages. If you include address rewriting, it won't
even appear to be a script.
The only downside is that while you are wasting their CPU and bandwidth,
you are also wasting your own resources. If your CPU is mostly idle, then
its mostly a waste of bandwidth.
For a more real-world example, black people tend to be taller than asian people (at least in my experience - I wonder if there is any hard data on this) But if we assume that is true, that doesn't preclude the existance of short black people (Gary Coleman) or tall asian people (that chinese basketball player - Yao Ming)
An anecdote: An (Asian) Indian coworker of mine, who lived most of his life in the US, stated that he was, on average, much larger than most people in his native Bengal.
Diet, not gender, may be the major factor. Don't discount the height of the mother either -- larger mothers tend to have larger children, so that full potential height may not be achieved until several generations.
(OTOH, when I was in Fargo, there was a large population of Somalian immigrants, most of which
were rather tall. So perhaps there is a genetic component. Or perhaps the somalian immigrants came from a class which had access to a good diet.)
Ah, yes, because science is wrong if the research suggests that aptitude for specific mental tasks differs with gender.
Remember when America used to criticize Russia for having politics influence science?
Now America condemns reports that second-hand-smoke's link to cancer is minimal at best, that teen pregnancy may not be any riskier than later pregnancy if good pre-natal care is available, and that men and women may think differently.
What's next? Calling anyone a racist who suggests red-heads sunburn easier than most other people? Condemning research that suggests pygmies may be shorter than most people?
Look at what happened when "The Bell Curve" came out. People decided that the study must be wrong because it wasn't politically correct. While I personally believe that the "Bell Curve"'s conclusion is flawed, I think its horrible that it was attacked for being contrary to public opinion.
I want my science to be divorced from politics, please.
What is your solution if a child likes a subject he isn't skilled in?
Should a class be restricted to learning at the rate of its slowest member?
Should a teacher just pass any kids that "really, really likes" the subject?
Perhaps we should remove any hard subjects from the schools so that the kids get upset ("I'm sorry, no calculus because Johnnie can't master algebra").
Yes, tutoring and extra study will help some children, but there will always be those who are unable to grasp a subject.
Personally, I believe that a kid should be able to choose to take any elective course he wants. However, that means the kid risks flunking out if he can't master the basics. Yes, there will be some "slow" classes, as well as some "fast" classes. There will be some children flunking.
The alternative is to create a world that is reduced to its lowest common denominator.
(Personally, I was always in the advanced math/science/history/economics courses, but only took average English courses, and didn't do so well in auto mechanics. I never took weight lifting, nor autobody, but I suspect that I would have done horribly in either. I do know I have a hard time with art as well, and while I've done "art" as part of my job description before, I know that there are individuals who have far greater abilities than my own.)
So challenging a claim which basically says "we're better than you, because our moms and dads were better than yours and you can never be as good as us" is politically incorrect?
Yes!
Political correctness has no relationship with reality. Saying something that annoys an important group is politically incorrect.
The average salary of a teacher is about $44k, according to http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos069.htm. Not bad for a job where the outlook is good to excellent, with employment in most locations and a high measure of job security and decent benefits. Plus there are three months of vacation.
I've been poor before, and there were times when I didn't have $20 in the
bank.
That being said, $20 is a trivial amount in the US today. Its accessable by
a donation of plasma, walking roads for recyclable cans, etc. If I valued my
anonymity and this scheme was around during one of my "poor" periods, I could
scrape up $20. It may take a month or two (yes, $20 is a trivial amount, but
a $20 expense can break a budget, especially if there are existing debts), but
I could have done it.
Does this burden the poor more? Of course. Yet the poor will also have to
take time to read the book, which is a loss of potential money. Self-education
takes a commitment of time, there is no way of changing that save for future
SF-ish advances.
Speaking of poverty, I grew up with 5 siblings in some pretty dire straits.
Due to a parental commitment to good education and hard work ethics, as well
as post-secondary education options in high-school, all of my siblings are
either in the middle class, or going to be in the middle class. (My
little-sister just graduated with a double major and honors -- and she had
her student loans paid off before her graduation date!). We all were heavy
users of the public library.
Being poor sucks in horrible, horrible ways. But the US is one of the better
countries in the world to be poor in. If you are willing to work, are willing/
able to learn, and of sound health/body, odds are you will do well. (Please
bear in mind that I'm not talking about services for the elderly and disable
-- that's outside the scope of this already tangental post).
Actually, my concern as a parent is not that "junior might discover what a woman looks like." My concern is that porn teaches teaches and reinforces the view that women are OBJECTS instead of PEOPLE.
Why don't you object to the portrayal of men as always strongly muscled, always wanting sex, always well hung, and always ready/able.
To be consistant, you should probably object to most media, porn or not porn. Pick up a magazine catering to women. The ads will tend to "objectify" them almost as much as porn. Look at the latest Hollywood blockbuster -- there are good odds that the male and female characters fit certain stereotypes. Check out a romance novel -- written by women, for women, yet many of them would be condemned if they were sold as porn.
Assuming that you are willing to use some sort of terminal reader for the blind, I would first suggest linux, since it runs well without a GUI, and the documentation/help also tends to be in text or easily converted to text.
Second: GNU screen. You can set it up to have a list of terminals at the bottom of the screen. So, lets say I'm running bash and w3m under GNU screen, I can have the bottom line of the terminal to say " 12:25 Jun 02 pyng : 0$* w3m 1-$ bash". (pyng is the system name). What is displayed is configurable.
Third: A bunch of CHUI apps. 'w3m' for web browsing. 'slrn' for newsgroups. 'emacs' for editing, or for all of the above.;) Emacs also has an emacs speak, which is supposed to be nice. There is even CHUI/TTY IM clients and IRC clients.
Fourth: Man doesn't live by bread alone. Telnet and MUDs. Try www.mudconnect.com to find a good list of them. The roguelike 'nethack' (and probably slash'em as well) has instructions on configuring it for the blind. However, roguelikes are incredibly frustrating.
Fifth: Some people claim festival is nice for reading text. I'm not sure. But there is always Project Gutenburg with its text files. Don't forget the many shoutcast servers out there as well. XMMS can be setup to be controlled by keyboard shortcuts, look at xmms-shell.
Disclaimer: I'm not blind. Perhaps the blind prefer voice software. Perhaps there are specialized solutions that work better. But in the end, the only way to know which solution is better is to let the end user try it out.
However, if you are a country interested in nuclear power, you can use breeder reactors to extend your amount of nuclear fuel.
Unfortunately, breeder reactors can also be used to create weapons.
OTOH, I've seen very valid proposals for extracting nuclear fuel from sea-water for long-term use. (Long-term being defined as "billions of years"). Unfortunately, the cost is too high -- its still produces cheap electricity (since the cost of fuel is a small percentage of electric cost), but who wants to spend millions on an experimental plant to obtain something that's ten times cheaper with current methods?
Installing Linux of a laptop is easy, especially with ditributions like Ubuntu. The fact that Linux comes preinstalled or not with the hardware doesn't matter IMHO.
The last several laptops I've delt with:
Gateway Solo 2500*: Required an hour's worth of googling to find out what sound driver would work with the neomagic audio chipset. (And one site was of the opinion that it couldn't work with OSS drivers). I finally found the full solution on a heavily-typoed post to usenet. Just to add to the confusion, most of the bios settings for sound had no relationship to the settings passed to the driver. Video-out doesn't work on the current install, but I haven't investigated that either.
IBM R40 Thinkpad: Cisco wireless minipci card needed a custom patched kernel to work. Patch was only available for an older 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernel, but worked with the current 2.4.x kernel.
IBM A20 Thinkpad: Worked fine, but I haven't configured the sound yet.
2 Older Toshiba laptops: One worked fine, the other required manually setting resources for the sound card under linux.
Just to prove that it isn't all bells and whistles on the other side, my desktop machine has a bt848-based video capture/tuner card that I have yet to get working properly under linux. To be fair, hunting down the windows drivers for it was a PITA as well.
Does this prove that linux isn't ready for the laptop? Of course not! But linux, unsupported by laptop manufacturers and resalers, is probably not ready for 99% of users our there. Laptops often use some rather esoteric hardware which manufacturers don't go out of their way to support under linux.
* Just picked this one up used last weekend used for a nice price.
Unless I'm utterly wrong (which I might be), viruses are possible for OS X.
There are viruses which claim to be screensavers or other software. What is to prevent an unpriviledged user under OS X from running a program which sends outgoing mail? If your user can send email from his mail client, odds are that a viral script/program he runs will also send email.
Re: McVoy's statement of spending a half million to support Torvalds & co.
I think Larry must use the RIAA's accountancy methods for coming up with the cost of these things.
I would suspect that the half-million goes to supporting OS software that SCO packages and sells. Technically, it would be "supporting Torvalds and his programmers [work]". Ethically, its a rather dishonest statement to make in my opinion.
In other news, its cost my $almost_my_entire_net_income to support local and national businesses this year. I hope they appreciate it.
In certain animals (including, perhaps, humans), the quality of diet has a correlation with the gender of offspring.
Or, to put it bluntly: Healthier females have more sons.
The explanation behind this is simple: Females have an excellent chance of breeding, regardless of health. In many species, however, the healthier males have a higher chance of breeding than weaker males. Evolution thus favors healthy females to have male children, and weaker females to have female children.
I have no problems with installing fvwm, mutt, slrn, and vim under MacOS X, nor would I have any problems with installing the same programs under windows.
Heck, I could even emulate OS X under windows and install those applications under the emulated OS X interface.
But trying to turn MacOS into linux is as silly as trying to turn a Volkswagon Jetta into a 1 ton truck. With enough time and energy, it is possible, but why not buy a truck in the first place?
As for l33tness, I run mutt and slrn because both are fine apps, with scoring capabilities, and both will let me edit using vim (and both will run under GNU screen). I use vim because its one of the best editors in existance. I use fvwm because it allows me to do stuff such as map ctrl-j ctrl-k to switch to the page with the nearest rxvt terminal (or open an rxvt terminal if it can't find any).
I'm sorry if you think that the only reason to run certain applications/linux is to be l33t.
what is linux going to offer over OS X since you get OS X with a Mini anyway?
Some of us prefer linus to Mac OS X. In my case, I'm a bizarre, twisted individual that prefers FVWM to any other window manager, likes mutt, slrn and vim, and I don't want to spend hours on end playing with fink and trying to mimic a linux install when a true linux install is just a few minutes away with the right distro and boot CD.
Plus, it annoys the mac zealots.;)
Sorry guys, while MacOS X is a fine OS, its not all things to everyone.
In a strict vegan diet there is _no_ source of B12. It is an animal derived (or synthetic) material.
Technically, B12 is from bacteria (and bacteria aren't animals (shouldn't an RN know this?)). Eat enough dirty plants, and vegans would do absolutely fine without any other source of B12. (The amounts needed are miniscule).
For those of us who don't like dirt in our food (most of us in the modern world), or want to be on the safe side, there are vegan sources of B12 available.
If you want to criticize vegan diets, I'd suggest looking into omega 6/omega 3 ratios in vegan diets. However, the standard American diet also suffers from a similar problem, which is why (I suspect) this criticism isn't brought up more often.
For bonus points, why not look into the different conversion rates between the omega 6 fatty acids. (Vegans tend to only consume a limited subset of the omega 6 fatty acids and have to convert the omega 6 acids they eat into the other types they need).
For real data, backed up with statistics, google for "The Farm", which is a hippy vegan commune in Tennessee that has been a focus of several vegan dietary studies of adults and children. Or read "Becoming Vegan" which references more than a few studies on the health of vegans. Its not hard to build an argument that a balanced vegan diet is as healthy as a balanced omnivorous diet. Its also not hard to show that an unbalanced diet (meat eating or not) is unhealthy (just check out the growing obesity and diabetes rates in the US).
(Yep, I'm a vegan. And I did my research before choosing to become a vegan.)
Why can't OO embrace and extend the.doc format, rather than inventing something new?
Have you tried to open a complex.doc file from an older version of office in a newer version?
If Microsoft, with the source code, can't figure out how to support the.doc formats completely, it seems to be unreasonable to expect the OO.org team to reverse engineer a perfectly working copy of the.doc format.
Heck, for some documents, OO.org is less likely to mangle the result than MSOffice2k3.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the point that the Jedi seem to have recordings of Palpatine's chamber.
Ack! Have you not studied history? Look at the major and minor strains of Christianity today: Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, Ethiopian, Protestant. Jehovah Witnesses, Latter-Day Saints, Pentacostals, Quakers, Amish.
These are all decended from the same core. But they can be vastly different religions. Not only does Christianity tend to fork into different beliefs, but within the same branch of Christianity, changes happen over time (The catholic church has changed its position on abortion and on priest celibacy).
Sects of Christianity also succeed or fail. How many Cathars do you know? Bogomils? Some "heresies" are successful (Protestant, Latter-Day Saints, etc). Many die. In the end, its the survival of the fittest.
Arguing that Christianity is unchanging is a position that is rather ignorant of history.
robots.txt:
Its trivial to write a script that will link back to itself to make millions of bogus pages. If you include address rewriting, it won't even appear to be a script.
The only downside is that while you are wasting their CPU and bandwidth, you are also wasting your own resources. If your CPU is mostly idle, then its mostly a waste of bandwidth.
An anecdote: An (Asian) Indian coworker of mine, who lived most of his life in the US, stated that he was, on average, much larger than most people in his native Bengal.
Diet, not gender, may be the major factor. Don't discount the height of the mother either -- larger mothers tend to have larger children, so that full potential height may not be achieved until several generations.
(OTOH, when I was in Fargo, there was a large population of Somalian immigrants, most of which were rather tall. So perhaps there is a genetic component. Or perhaps the somalian immigrants came from a class which had access to a good diet.)
Ah, yes, because science is wrong if the research suggests that aptitude for specific mental tasks differs with gender.
Remember when America used to criticize Russia for having politics influence science?
Now America condemns reports that second-hand-smoke's link to cancer is minimal at best, that teen pregnancy may not be any riskier than later pregnancy if good pre-natal care is available, and that men and women may think differently.
What's next? Calling anyone a racist who suggests red-heads sunburn easier than most other people? Condemning research that suggests pygmies may be shorter than most people?
Look at what happened when "The Bell Curve" came out. People decided that the study must be wrong because it wasn't politically correct. While I personally believe that the "Bell Curve"'s conclusion is flawed, I think its horrible that it was attacked for being contrary to public opinion.
I want my science to be divorced from politics, please.
What is your solution if a child likes a subject he isn't skilled in?
Should a class be restricted to learning at the rate of its slowest member?
Should a teacher just pass any kids that "really, really likes" the subject?
Perhaps we should remove any hard subjects from the schools so that the kids get upset ("I'm sorry, no calculus because Johnnie can't master algebra").
Yes, tutoring and extra study will help some children, but there will always be those who are unable to grasp a subject.
Personally, I believe that a kid should be able to choose to take any elective course he wants. However, that means the kid risks flunking out if he can't master the basics. Yes, there will be some "slow" classes, as well as some "fast" classes. There will be some children flunking.
The alternative is to create a world that is reduced to its lowest common denominator.
(Personally, I was always in the advanced math/science/history/economics courses, but only took average English courses, and didn't do so well in auto mechanics. I never took weight lifting, nor autobody, but I suspect that I would have done horribly in either. I do know I have a hard time with art as well, and while I've done "art" as part of my job description before, I know that there are individuals who have far greater abilities than my own.)
Yes!
Political correctness has no relationship with reality. Saying something that annoys an important group is politically incorrect.
Didn't Lucas base a lot of Star Wars on Campell's study of myth?
If so, a lot of legends/myth take place "a long time ago" and more than a few of them happen "far, far away"
Thank God that is sarcasm. The average starting schoolteacher's salary is $30k according to http://www.aft.org/salary/2003/download/2003Table2 .pdf.
The average salary of a teacher is about $44k, according to http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos069.htm. Not bad for a job where the outlook is good to excellent, with employment in most locations and a high measure of job security and decent benefits. Plus there are three months of vacation.
I've been poor before, and there were times when I didn't have $20 in the bank.
That being said, $20 is a trivial amount in the US today. Its accessable by a donation of plasma, walking roads for recyclable cans, etc. If I valued my anonymity and this scheme was around during one of my "poor" periods, I could scrape up $20. It may take a month or two (yes, $20 is a trivial amount, but a $20 expense can break a budget, especially if there are existing debts), but I could have done it.
Does this burden the poor more? Of course. Yet the poor will also have to take time to read the book, which is a loss of potential money. Self-education takes a commitment of time, there is no way of changing that save for future SF-ish advances.
Speaking of poverty, I grew up with 5 siblings in some pretty dire straits. Due to a parental commitment to good education and hard work ethics, as well as post-secondary education options in high-school, all of my siblings are either in the middle class, or going to be in the middle class. (My little-sister just graduated with a double major and honors -- and she had her student loans paid off before her graduation date!). We all were heavy users of the public library.
Being poor sucks in horrible, horrible ways. But the US is one of the better countries in the world to be poor in. If you are willing to work, are willing/ able to learn, and of sound health/body, odds are you will do well. (Please bear in mind that I'm not talking about services for the elderly and disable -- that's outside the scope of this already tangental post).
Screw that.
Imagine what happens when DNA manipulation gets in the realm of being cheap enough for interested parties.
No more hiding pot plants in the cornfield: The corn itself will be full of THC. Want some cocaine? Have a genetically manipulated carrot.
The drugwar should be rather interesting when this happens.
Why don't you object to the portrayal of men as always strongly muscled, always wanting sex, always well hung, and always ready/able.
To be consistant, you should probably object to most media, porn or not porn. Pick up a magazine catering to women. The ads will tend to "objectify" them almost as much as porn. Look at the latest Hollywood blockbuster -- there are good odds that the male and female characters fit certain stereotypes. Check out a romance novel -- written by women, for women, yet many of them would be condemned if they were sold as porn.
Assuming that you are willing to use some sort of terminal reader for the blind, I would first suggest linux, since it runs well without a GUI, and the documentation/help also tends to be in text or easily converted to text.
Second: GNU screen. You can set it up to have a list of terminals at the bottom of the screen. So, lets say I'm running bash and w3m under GNU screen, I can have the bottom line of the terminal to say " 12:25 Jun 02 pyng : 0$* w3m 1-$ bash". (pyng is the system name). What is displayed is configurable.
Third: A bunch of CHUI apps. 'w3m' for web browsing. 'slrn' for newsgroups. 'emacs' for editing, or for all of the above. ;) Emacs also has an emacs speak, which is supposed to be nice. There is even CHUI/TTY IM clients and IRC clients.
Fourth: Man doesn't live by bread alone. Telnet and MUDs. Try www.mudconnect.com to find a good list of them. The roguelike 'nethack' (and probably slash'em as well) has instructions on configuring it for the blind. However, roguelikes are incredibly frustrating.
Fifth: Some people claim festival is nice for reading text. I'm not sure. But there is always Project Gutenburg with its text files. Don't forget the many shoutcast servers out there as well. XMMS can be setup to be controlled by keyboard shortcuts, look at xmms-shell.
Disclaimer: I'm not blind. Perhaps the blind prefer voice software. Perhaps there are specialized solutions that work better. But in the end, the only way to know which solution is better is to let the end user try it out.
It seems that I'm used to living in a state where the definition of "wilderness" does not include being in reach of a cell tower.
I'd mention the no-electricity thing as well, but I don't want to scare other slashdotters.
Seriously though: Divorcing yourself from TV/Computers/Internet only works if you can find something to fill your time that you enjoy more.
However, if you are a country interested in nuclear power, you can use breeder reactors to extend your amount of nuclear fuel.
Unfortunately, breeder reactors can also be used to create weapons.
OTOH, I've seen very valid proposals for extracting nuclear fuel from sea-water for long-term use. (Long-term being defined as "billions of years"). Unfortunately, the cost is too high -- its still produces cheap electricity (since the cost of fuel is a small percentage of electric cost), but who wants to spend millions on an experimental plant to obtain something that's ten times cheaper with current methods?
The last several laptops I've delt with:
Gateway Solo 2500*: Required an hour's worth of googling to find out what sound driver would work with the neomagic audio chipset. (And one site was of the opinion that it couldn't work with OSS drivers). I finally found the full solution on a heavily-typoed post to usenet. Just to add to the confusion, most of the bios settings for sound had no relationship to the settings passed to the driver. Video-out doesn't work on the current install, but I haven't investigated that either.
IBM R40 Thinkpad: Cisco wireless minipci card needed a custom patched kernel to work. Patch was only available for an older 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernel, but worked with the current 2.4.x kernel.
IBM A20 Thinkpad: Worked fine, but I haven't configured the sound yet.
2 Older Toshiba laptops: One worked fine, the other required manually setting resources for the sound card under linux.
Just to prove that it isn't all bells and whistles on the other side, my desktop machine has a bt848-based video capture/tuner card that I have yet to get working properly under linux. To be fair, hunting down the windows drivers for it was a PITA as well.
Does this prove that linux isn't ready for the laptop? Of course not! But linux, unsupported by laptop manufacturers and resalers, is probably not ready for 99% of users our there. Laptops often use some rather esoteric hardware which manufacturers don't go out of their way to support under linux.
* Just picked this one up used last weekend used for a nice price.
Unless I'm utterly wrong (which I might be), viruses are possible for OS X.
There are viruses which claim to be screensavers or other software. What is to prevent an unpriviledged user under OS X from running a program which sends outgoing mail? If your user can send email from his mail client, odds are that a viral script/program he runs will also send email.
Aw dangit.
Please ignore -- I need my coffee....
Re: McVoy's statement of spending a half million to support Torvalds & co.
I would suspect that the half-million goes to supporting OS software that SCO packages and sells. Technically, it would be "supporting Torvalds and his programmers [work]". Ethically, its a rather dishonest statement to make in my opinion.
In other news, its cost my $almost_my_entire_net_income to support local and national businesses this year. I hope they appreciate it.
You don't hang out in the right IRC channels.
I've been banned for criticizing windows (including an observation about the limitations of MS Paint).
If that isn't rampant windows fanboyism, I'm not sure what is...
In certain animals (including, perhaps, humans), the quality of diet has a correlation with the gender of offspring.
Or, to put it bluntly: Healthier females have more sons.
The explanation behind this is simple: Females have an excellent chance of breeding, regardless of health. In many species, however, the healthier males have a higher chance of breeding than weaker males. Evolution thus favors healthy females to have male children, and weaker females to have female children.
I have no problems with installing fvwm, mutt, slrn, and vim under MacOS X, nor would I have any problems with installing the same programs under windows.
Heck, I could even emulate OS X under windows and install those applications under the emulated OS X interface.
But trying to turn MacOS into linux is as silly as trying to turn a Volkswagon Jetta into a 1 ton truck. With enough time and energy, it is possible, but why not buy a truck in the first place?
As for l33tness, I run mutt and slrn because both are fine apps, with scoring capabilities, and both will let me edit using vim (and both will run under GNU screen). I use vim because its one of the best editors in existance. I use fvwm because it allows me to do stuff such as map ctrl-j ctrl-k to switch to the page with the nearest rxvt terminal (or open an rxvt terminal if it can't find any).
I'm sorry if you think that the only reason to run certain applications/linux is to be l33t.
Technically, B12 is from bacteria (and bacteria aren't animals (shouldn't an RN know this?)). Eat enough dirty plants, and vegans would do absolutely fine without any other source of B12. (The amounts needed are miniscule).
For those of us who don't like dirt in our food (most of us in the modern world), or want to be on the safe side, there are vegan sources of B12 available.
If you want to criticize vegan diets, I'd suggest looking into omega 6/omega 3 ratios in vegan diets. However, the standard American diet also suffers from a similar problem, which is why (I suspect) this criticism isn't brought up more often.
For bonus points, why not look into the different conversion rates between the omega 6 fatty acids. (Vegans tend to only consume a limited subset of the omega 6 fatty acids and have to convert the omega 6 acids they eat into the other types they need).
For real data, backed up with statistics, google for "The Farm", which is a hippy vegan commune in Tennessee that has been a focus of several vegan dietary studies of adults and children. Or read "Becoming Vegan" which references more than a few studies on the health of vegans. Its not hard to build an argument that a balanced vegan diet is as healthy as a balanced omnivorous diet. Its also not hard to show that an unbalanced diet (meat eating or not) is unhealthy (just check out the growing obesity and diabetes rates in the US).
(Yep, I'm a vegan. And I did my research before choosing to become a vegan.)
Have you tried to open a complex .doc file from an older version of office in a newer version?
If Microsoft, with the source code, can't figure out how to support the .doc formats completely, it seems to be unreasonable to expect the OO.org team to reverse engineer a perfectly working copy of the .doc format.
Heck, for some documents, OO.org is less likely to mangle the result than MSOffice2k3.