You're trolling. There is absolutely no connection between that and the point the GP made about welfare policy.
So when someone says we must choose between welfare and NASA its off topic to point out that its a bougs choice and the folk who are presenting it are either convicted criminals like Ney and Cunnigham, indicted criminals like Delay or would be indicted like Jerry Lewis if only the prosecutor had not been mysteriously fired?
The Osprey is a pretty fair comparison, $50 billion for a plane that Dick Cheney thought was such a disaster he tried to kill it after $30 billion had been spent.
Or take the farm bill, squillions for Archer Daniels Midland. Or lets cut out the tax break for hedge fund managers.
The real problem is, Congress can get more votes by paying Welfare than paying for celebrations for people taking our country forward.
The real problem is that corrupt Republican congressmen like Ney and Cunningham received millions of dollars in bribes while kicking hundreds of millions of dollars of business to their corrupt contractor friends.
And part of the reason it went on so long is the fact that Bush's Attorney General Gonzalez sacked the Federal Prosecutors who brought prosecutions against corrupt GOP pols (some were sacked for not bringing trumped up charges against Democrats).
And that is just the illegal corruption, there is also the legal corruption of billions of dollars wasted on 'defense' projects like the Osprey that simply do not work.
That said, the whole shuttle program is a farce at this point. The space station is pointless and should be shut immediately. Put the money in robotic exploration. Hubbel is worth the money and the risk, the ISS is not.
Mmm. That makes a lot of sense, since Toshiba, Microsoft, and a bunch of movie studios are *so* much more appealing than Sony.
The two issues I see being decisive here is that HD-DVD is region-free and the Sony system is locked to three regions. That for me is far more significant than whether I can get Sony or Disney content in HiDef today. I don't want a system that has been jiggered to allow the content providers to charge more for the same content in different locations.
The second issue that I expect to be decisive is that Sony refuses to allow porn on Blu-Ray, HD-DVD does not attempt to restrict the content produced. I don't think that any format is viable if the provider attempts to restrict the content. Even if you don't want porn, how can you be sure Sony won't make some new restriction you do care about?
So, in other words, you don't want to charge Bush and Cheney with a crime, because if you do, they may commit an even *worse* crime?
I don't want to charge them with a crime unless there is the prospect of conviction.
If Bush and Cheney are impeached and convicted, how are they going to start the war? If they are impeached and acquitted, how does that help them if they commit this even *worse* crime? (This worse crime being essentially identical to the first, BTW.)
Impeachment now would simply bracket Bush's real crimes with the ridiculous charges against Clinton. I think that use of Partial Drowning Interrogation (waterboarding) and other forms of torture rank rather higher than lying about a blow job. Lying about the justification for a war ranks higher than lying about a blow job.
And if the fear of impeachment is the only thing preventing a war with Iran, if they really want the war, won't they just wait until impeachment would essentially be "too late" from a practical standpoint?
There is only one shot, a failed impeachment now means no chance of an impeachment later when we might have the conditions to convict.
What is stopping Bush acting is the pressure from the GOP Senators who can say, one step further and we will support moves to convict.
The GOP is already rejecting Bushism. They just voted to override a veto in the House and they will do the same in the Senate in the next week or two. We want the GOP to get used to overriding Bush vetoes. After they discover that there is no outcry from their base we can get S-CHIP through.
Every veto override means less credibility for President Irrelevant.
Pelosi did our republic a great disservice when she said that "Impeachment is off the table."
Thats a mistaken attitude. Impeachment without the possibility of convicting is mere posturing. We don't have the votes in the Senate at this point so impeachment is off the table.
Impeachment has to be kept in reserve as the last recourse. There is a lot of very stupid talk going on in Washington and the only thing that seems likely to stop Bush from acting on it is the knowledge that history is not going to judge well, the first President to be impeached and convicted.
The current talk in Washington goes 'Iran is a dangerous threat to the whole region, therefore the US must bomb now, the US can bomb Iran with impunity as it is certain that they will not respond'. It is difficult to know if the speakers are merely delusional or stupid. If Iran is not going to respond to an act of war by the US it is absolutely no threat to the region.
It is a very dangerous situation. The governments in both countries have weak, unpopular leaders who would like to distract attention. Both governments would like a war, both would like the other side to start it.
When the US bombed Libya in 1986, Libya retaliated by bombing Pan-Am 103. If the US bombs Iran it seems much more likely than not that Iran will retaliate with a full scale war. Unlike the Libyans (or Serbs) the Iranians have a decent sized military and no shortage of US targets to attack. The have a massive arsenal of Chinese designed missiles, including surface to ship missiles that recently defeated Israeli countermeasures.
If the Bush administration was to launch an attack the US could easily suffer thousands of casualties in the first few days. The Iranian government is in a much stronger position because they really don't care how many of their people die. The US is not going to tolerate the loss of a capital ship or the casualties that would result from leveling the green zone. Not on top of the 4,000 deaths in the Iraq 'cakewalk', not when Bush as 25% approval ratings and even lower credibility ratings.
Thats why impeachment has to be kept in reserve. Without the threat of impeachment Bush and Cheney are fully capable of creating a far worse mess than they have created already.
That's a possibility. It's another possibility that those companies who are chained to MS fucked up formats [blather deleted
The problem here is that neither OOXML or ODF is what you would want a document standard to be. Both are essentially a schema dump on the internal memory representation used by existing programs.
Standardizing formats of that type does have value, just as having a standard for postscript or PDF has value. But the value is limited to creating content and add on applications for the programs they are based on. It is better than nothing.
The value of a standard of that type is no more than the amount of content produced in it. Sun started the ODF thing as a spoiler, which is a legit move, Microsoft has done the same, they did this on SSL when it was Netscape proprietary. But Microsoft also joined the SSL camp and killed their own PCT competitor as soon as Netscape gave change control to the IETF. Sun is continuing the pissing contest which does not serve anyone.
I would like to see a real open source office suite but only if it is better than Office. OpenOffice is not inovative or mould breaking. Its a conventional suite put together in a conventional way. It follows the same old concepts of separate programs poorly integrated, of a spreadsheet based on the three decades old VisiCalc model.
This fight is a distraction. Recognize both formats as legacy defacto standards and move on. This is actually a very common precursor in a standards process.
CDF provides an opportunity to do the job right. People should not be translating OOXML into ODF, there simply isn't the value there. It is much more likely that OOXML will be a live format in twenty years time than ODF.
We have a common standards based document language today - HTML. OK so I have a bias here but there is much more HTML than anything else. HTML is just a document format and it is somewhat presentation oriented but modern XHTML is changing those problems.
Rather than having a separate word processor and spreadsheet I would like a single tool that is a document editor, spreadsheet tool and scripting environment. Mathematica does this but it is fiendishly expensive and most people don't use the capabilities.
Building an open source Mathematica type environment would be a much more useful Open Source project than copying Office. The basic framework would only need to handle the basic editor and calculation engine, the community would quickly build out the analysis packages for stats and such.
Better yet we could build in type checking into the base so that when you specify a variable you can give it units, if you multiply 10 hr by $13/hr you get $130 and so on.
I can see a program of that type sweeping Office asside but not a lukewarm clone whose only advantage is cost. Office Home and Student costs $100 or so at Costco for two machines and there is no eligibility check for registration.
Real traditionalists would do this scientifically and measure dick size.
Audiophiles hate CD because it democratized the medium. There was no audible difference between a $300 player and a $3,000 player.
The car nuts did the same thing in the early 30s. As mass produced automobiles drove prices down they got sniffy about the fact that it was no longer an exclusive club for the mega-rich. Thats when the term vintage car was invented and the London-Brighton run. What they don't admit is that London-Brighton is about as far as you can expect a vintage car to go without breaking down or needing a complete service.
Long before those photographs were published many US soldiers expected to be tortured if they were captured. During some of the higher level Marine SERE training that was pretty well drilled into our heads.
I am aware of that, the Abu Graihb photographs look pretty much like the SAS course Resistance to Interrogation (R2I).
The point I was making however is that before the photographs that was pretty much the worst that captured servicemen could expect. Now it is the best.
Its even worse than that as the whole point of R2I is that everyone talks and what they say is complete garbage.
Name the last enemy we've fought against that *didn't* torture [military detainees]
Russia. Cuba. Iran.
Where in wingnutia do they teach folk that the US has ever gone to war against Russia, Cuba or Iran?
Nearest the US came to that would be the Spanish-American war of 1898. No US forces were captured in either the bay of pigs or operation Ajax as far as I am aware and the US was never at war with Russia either (OK there might have been some meddling during the reds vs whites era).
If our troops got captured in central America, they got tortured. If they got captured in the Gulf War, they got tortured. If they got captured in Vietnam, oh boy did they get tortured. If they got shot down over the Soviet Union, they got tortured. If they got captured in Korea, they got tortured. If they got captured in the Pacific, they got tortured. They occasionally got tortured even by the Germans, and even more typical treatment of American POWs would be considered "torture" today:
As you point out, the NAZIs only tortured allied POWs occasionally. The Soviets did use torture on their own people and on captured spies. I think you need to provide evidence to back your assertion that they tortured US pilots. Gary Powers did not alleged torture as far as I am aware.
Iraq mistreated servicemen during gulf war I - they paraded them on television which is degrading treatment. The US has done that repeatedly in the current conflict.
So on balance there is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that a large number of US servicemen would have been tortured or otherwise mistreated but for the Geneva conventions.
Please tell me you're kidding. Pissing on a holy book and wearing a leash while naked are not in the same league as having your head sawed off with a knife. Shees
In that culture it is worse.
Killing a person might begin a blood feud with their relatives. But pissing on the Koran is starting a feud with a whole religion.
Debating normative ethics with people who fly airplanes into buildings is pointless. But understanding the basis on which they form ethical judgements is essential if you are going to defeat them.
Or to just stop using passwords. Why can't I login with a USB key that has some piece of information which is signed using my private key on it?
Because you are using Linux instead of Windows which has supported smartcard login since Win2K?
Its a silly patent though since the idea of using a general purpose SIMD computer for a trivially paralizable task is obvious. Either the patent is much more specific or its junk.
So when is this guy gonna start blogging about what happens to American soldiers captured alive by Islamists?
That is entirely the point. If you talk to any member of the JAG corps about torture they will tell you that the reason the US did not permit its troops to torture others is that it is the only way that the US could protect its own troops.
Of course there are always enemies that do not respect the rules of war, that is why the Nurenberg trials were held.
Te Abu Graihb photographs and more importantly the conspicuous decision not to hold anyone in the chain of command accountable for them has demonstrated that the US does torture. And as a result US servicemen who are captured by Jihadis can expect to be treated as brutally as the Abu Graihb photographs.
More importantly the US has conceeded the moral case in the war on terror. It is the same mistake made by the British at the start of the IRA terrorist campaign. Internment without trial did nothing to stop the violence and the future leadership of the IRA emerged from the internees. Gerry Adams wrote his famous series of monographs under the name 'Brownie' which developed the Ballot-Bomb strategy.
As a result many US politicians who should have known better supported the IRA even as they were murdering civilians in the UK. People like Rudy Giuliani were attending IRA fundraisers right up to 9/11. Giuliani even gave Gerry Adams a 'humanitarian award' on behalf of NYC and expressed the hope that he would force Clinton to speak to Adams even without the renunciation of violence that Clinton demanded. A few months later Adams and Co blew up a shopping mall.
In the days after 9/11 everything changed. It was no longer hip to support the IRA. Rudy attended a NORAID fundraiser immediately after 9/11 but only after the IRA agreed the money would go to the 9/11 victims. After that US funding for NORAID disappeared entirely and the IRA finally accepted the demands that they had long resisted to disarm.
The reason the IRA had to pack it in was precisely because they had finaly lost the moral case that had been carelessly handed to them in the opening years of the troubles.
The model that HMG followed in defeating the IRA was to copy the West German authorities strategy for dealling with the Baader-Meinhof gang. The Germans refused to treat the RAF as political prisoners, they were always treated as common criminals.
Oh, that is the briliance of the scheme, when IBM gets sued for patent infringement they bring up all the prior art in front of the jury and show what a rotten system the patent system is.
Another effective reforem of the patent system would be to close the Texas federal patent court. A big part of the patent problem is that the plaintifs bar has worked out how to identify which Texans are never going to question a government decision, i.e. the patent grant. Or at least thats what my patent lawyer tells me.
I'd thought about that option: that the telcos were being granted immunity in exchange for testimony. If this is the case, then I'd rather see the administration punished for breaking the FISA laws rather than the telcos punished for breaking the laws. Now I'm not saying that the telcos should be excused for breaking the law, but I think it's more like an organized crime investigation: get testimony from a lower-ranking member in exchange for immunity in order to bring down the heads of the organization.
Seems that it is bit more complex. The WH is complaining that the new bill has a poison pill clause, not sure what. Also it turns out that they did turn over some papers describing some of the wiretaps.
Reid can schedule a vote, but the bill does not proceed unless they can get cloture which is 60 votes.
The hold is quite likely to stick because Dodd is also backed by Arlen Specter and Leahey.
Talk of the 'Senate' caving is somewhat overstated. Only the intelligence committee has cut a deal. Judiciary is still holding out for details of the crimes that the telcos are alleged to have committed.
That said, it is probably nothing to get too excited about. I don't think that the Bush administration is going to giveup the information demanded, and I think the telcos will eventually get immunity but only after the information has been released under another administration.
I expect some sort of truth and reconciliation commission in the end up.
He was being sarcastic. You are being rather dense.
The sarcasm was the attitude I was referring to.
Writing standards is most of my job. Situations like this one in which we have partisan factions are not helpful to the process. At root the problem here is that people think that they can use the standards process to have ODF declared a standard and then have government offices and the like required to use Open Office (and probably Linux &ct.) as it is 'the' 'standard'.
It does not work that way. The US government has tried that in the past with pretty dire results. Believe it or not I still have to deal with the fallout from the 1980s decision to make OSI the federal standard. There are still folk plugging away trying to get X.500 (not LDAP) deployed in the hope that once that has been achieved it will form the hub that the rest of the OSI stack is deployed around. We had to wait for some people to retire to remove their schemes.
I could not care less whether Office or OpenOffice is the standard in ten years time. They are both relics of 1980s technology at best. If you want to beat Office write something better.
That what we did with the Web. The Web was not a clone of Hyper-G or Gopher, it was something better. People often overlook the fact that the Web was by any measure the most successful open source effort in history. We put the code into the public domain precisely so that others could use it.
It would not be at all difficult to write something better than Office which is a collection of five or six separate programs with not very good means of integration. Spreadsheets are a poor means of manipulating information, Mathematica and its ilk are much better but also limited.
Your choice to view the implementations in such a manner totally glosses over the fact that the Microsoft spec is woefully incomplete, there is no way for anyone besides Microsoft to actually implement it, unlike SPF and SenderID, which are relatively trivial network protocols.
There is something of a difference between facts and Slashdot assertions.
Most standards documents are not 100% accurate but there is a big difference between having something that is 95% correct and having to start from scratch. If someone implements the specification in good faith they will identify the errors and omissions from the spec when they try interoperation.
That is what we usually do at any rate. We did that with HTML which these days is pretty much at the same levdel of complexity as Office if you include all the secondary specs like MathML.
The objections are not being made because people think the spec is incomplete, the motivation is purely the continuation of Sun's anti-Microsoft jihad.
ISO 3103 is a standard method of brewing tea for use in sensory tests, which is not the principal purpose for which most restaurants brew tea. While it may be true that most ISO standards are ignored, a case where a standard is not generally applied outside of its area of intended application hardly demonstrates, or even illustrates, that point.
So how would you like your tea made, according to the method the taster used when blending the tea or according to some completely different method?
ISO 3103 is the English method of making tea, i.e. in a pot with BOILING water.
The standard American restaurant method is to present the customer with a cup of tepid water in a cup and ask them to select a teabag. Its cheaper to do that.
not that odf is much better but at least you can look to the openoffice source for cases where the spec is too vauge to be usefull
Which argues for neither being considered a standard.
Source code is not a good way to document an international standard. Source has bugs and changes over time. Experience has shown it to be even less reliable than English.
The best method of defining a standard is to use formal methods such as Z, VDM or CSP. The problem is that there are almost no people on the standards circuit that are familiar with them.
In my opinion, a standard without source really isn't a standard at all. English is not a sufficiently precise language to really adequately describe a standard for computers, especially a complex one. Source code is the only real standard.
That is why we use tools such as XML Schema.
The IETF knows this, which is why the rule used to be (maybe it still is) that there have to be two inter-operating implementations before they'll call it a standard. IMHO, they should go the extra step and require one of the implementations to be licensed in a manner that meets the Open Source definition, but they created the rule before the concept of Free Software was all that widespread.
I don't know if the ISO committee has that rule but there are apparently 6 non Microsoft implementations (including the iPhone reader).
It would be nice to have a full open source office implementation but its not necessary to go that far to show that someone can successfully write an implementation from the specification.
Before any vote, all members must stand and re-affirm their (legally binding) pledge to destroy Microsoft, Windows, and all that is associated with them
Well what do you expect if this is your attitude?
Both the document formats on offer are thin XML veneers on an existing code base. The only difference is that one code base is open source and the other is the market leader with 90% plus market share.
Word is a standard the way that FAT is a standard. Recognize it as such, embrace and extend. Everyone who wants to sell a word processor has to support Word document formats anyway so why be so snotty about it all?
If people turn the standards process into a pissing contest they end up hurting everyone. Microsoft made a perfectly reasonable request. They did not ask for exclusivity, they made the IPR openly available.
We had the same thing happen with SPF and SenderID, sticking their thumb in Microsoft's eye was much more important to some people than stopping the spammers.
The standards process is about recognition, not choice. Almost no standards bodies have the power to make a standard by declaration alone. Most ISO standards are (justly) ignored. Virtually no restaurant in the entire US provides ISO 3103 compliant tea (although they no longer make it with salt water).
A standards process must either recognize an existing de facto standard or establish a widespread consensus amongst the participants to succeed.
It is often more important to recognize a de facto standard than propose improvements. For example, in the US almost all lightbulbs use the flawed Edison Screw mount. From a technical point of view it is inferior to the European Swan Bayonet fixture in almost every way. The Edison screw was chosen as the standard in the Us because it was widely supported and the patents had expired.
Heck, it's still common to see computers sold with 256 MB of RAM, which wasn't a particularly large amount 5 years ago... that it's even salable today speaks volumes. I have an "end of life" Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz that I picked up this w/e for like $50. 20 GB HDD, 512 DDR RAM, CD, Sound, etc.
In like vein I just pensioned off a machine I built in 2002: 512Mb RAM, twin CPU (forget how many MHz), 64Mb 3D Graphics, 4 32Gb disks. Apart from the CPU speed and the disk storage the machine is pretty much the same as today's low end Dell. Apart from the size and amount of noise made, that is. Price has dropped from $5,000 to $500 in the five years but thats nothing like the rate prices were droping ten years back, the machine was built to the spec of a $50K workstation I had used at MIT.
The reason I can justify spending as much as I do on machines is that if a machine lasts me five years instead of three I save the inevitable downtime when bringing a new machine up.
The machine that replaced it is faster and better of course, (quadcore 3GHz, 4Mb RAM, 1.5Gb Video RAM) but the forcing function on making the replacement was finding a machine that could drive a couple of 30" displays. I don't think I will be replacing that in the very near future.
I am currently trying to decide what to do with the old one, one path would be to stick some large drives on it and turn it into a file server. Thats the path I would take if I didn't want to find out what is going on with Microsoft Home Server and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
So when someone says we must choose between welfare and NASA its off topic to point out that its a bougs choice and the folk who are presenting it are either convicted criminals like Ney and Cunnigham, indicted criminals like Delay or would be indicted like Jerry Lewis if only the prosecutor had not been mysteriously fired?
The Osprey is a pretty fair comparison, $50 billion for a plane that Dick Cheney thought was such a disaster he tried to kill it after $30 billion had been spent.
Or take the farm bill, squillions for Archer Daniels Midland. Or lets cut out the tax break for hedge fund managers.
The real problem is that corrupt Republican congressmen like Ney and Cunningham received millions of dollars in bribes while kicking hundreds of millions of dollars of business to their corrupt contractor friends.
And part of the reason it went on so long is the fact that Bush's Attorney General Gonzalez sacked the Federal Prosecutors who brought prosecutions against corrupt GOP pols (some were sacked for not bringing trumped up charges against Democrats).
And that is just the illegal corruption, there is also the legal corruption of billions of dollars wasted on 'defense' projects like the Osprey that simply do not work.
That said, the whole shuttle program is a farce at this point. The space station is pointless and should be shut immediately. Put the money in robotic exploration. Hubbel is worth the money and the risk, the ISS is not.
The two issues I see being decisive here is that HD-DVD is region-free and the Sony system is locked to three regions. That for me is far more significant than whether I can get Sony or Disney content in HiDef today. I don't want a system that has been jiggered to allow the content providers to charge more for the same content in different locations.
The second issue that I expect to be decisive is that Sony refuses to allow porn on Blu-Ray, HD-DVD does not attempt to restrict the content produced. I don't think that any format is viable if the provider attempts to restrict the content. Even if you don't want porn, how can you be sure Sony won't make some new restriction you do care about?
I don't want to charge them with a crime unless there is the prospect of conviction.
If Bush and Cheney are impeached and convicted, how are they going to start the war? If they are impeached and acquitted, how does that help them if they commit this even *worse* crime? (This worse crime being essentially identical to the first, BTW.)
Impeachment now would simply bracket Bush's real crimes with the ridiculous charges against Clinton. I think that use of Partial Drowning Interrogation (waterboarding) and other forms of torture rank rather higher than lying about a blow job. Lying about the justification for a war ranks higher than lying about a blow job.
And if the fear of impeachment is the only thing preventing a war with Iran, if they really want the war, won't they just wait until impeachment would essentially be "too late" from a practical standpoint?
There is only one shot, a failed impeachment now means no chance of an impeachment later when we might have the conditions to convict.
What is stopping Bush acting is the pressure from the GOP Senators who can say, one step further and we will support moves to convict.
The GOP is already rejecting Bushism. They just voted to override a veto in the House and they will do the same in the Senate in the next week or two. We want the GOP to get used to overriding Bush vetoes. After they discover that there is no outcry from their base we can get S-CHIP through.
Every veto override means less credibility for President Irrelevant.
Thats a mistaken attitude. Impeachment without the possibility of convicting is mere posturing. We don't have the votes in the Senate at this point so impeachment is off the table.
Impeachment has to be kept in reserve as the last recourse. There is a lot of very stupid talk going on in Washington and the only thing that seems likely to stop Bush from acting on it is the knowledge that history is not going to judge well, the first President to be impeached and convicted.
The current talk in Washington goes 'Iran is a dangerous threat to the whole region, therefore the US must bomb now, the US can bomb Iran with impunity as it is certain that they will not respond'. It is difficult to know if the speakers are merely delusional or stupid. If Iran is not going to respond to an act of war by the US it is absolutely no threat to the region.
It is a very dangerous situation. The governments in both countries have weak, unpopular leaders who would like to distract attention. Both governments would like a war, both would like the other side to start it.
When the US bombed Libya in 1986, Libya retaliated by bombing Pan-Am 103. If the US bombs Iran it seems much more likely than not that Iran will retaliate with a full scale war. Unlike the Libyans (or Serbs) the Iranians have a decent sized military and no shortage of US targets to attack. The have a massive arsenal of Chinese designed missiles, including surface to ship missiles that recently defeated Israeli countermeasures.
If the Bush administration was to launch an attack the US could easily suffer thousands of casualties in the first few days. The Iranian government is in a much stronger position because they really don't care how many of their people die. The US is not going to tolerate the loss of a capital ship or the casualties that would result from leveling the green zone. Not on top of the 4,000 deaths in the Iraq 'cakewalk', not when Bush as 25% approval ratings and even lower credibility ratings.
Thats why impeachment has to be kept in reserve. Without the threat of impeachment Bush and Cheney are fully capable of creating a far worse mess than they have created already.
Today Microsoft announced that it would be helping to make OpenSocial suceed in any way thet they can.
The problem here is that neither OOXML or ODF is what you would want a document standard to be. Both are essentially a schema dump on the internal memory representation used by existing programs.
Standardizing formats of that type does have value, just as having a standard for postscript or PDF has value. But the value is limited to creating content and add on applications for the programs they are based on. It is better than nothing.
The value of a standard of that type is no more than the amount of content produced in it. Sun started the ODF thing as a spoiler, which is a legit move, Microsoft has done the same, they did this on SSL when it was Netscape proprietary. But Microsoft also joined the SSL camp and killed their own PCT competitor as soon as Netscape gave change control to the IETF. Sun is continuing the pissing contest which does not serve anyone.
I would like to see a real open source office suite but only if it is better than Office. OpenOffice is not inovative or mould breaking. Its a conventional suite put together in a conventional way. It follows the same old concepts of separate programs poorly integrated, of a spreadsheet based on the three decades old VisiCalc model.
This fight is a distraction. Recognize both formats as legacy defacto standards and move on. This is actually a very common precursor in a standards process.
CDF provides an opportunity to do the job right. People should not be translating OOXML into ODF, there simply isn't the value there. It is much more likely that OOXML will be a live format in twenty years time than ODF.
We have a common standards based document language today - HTML. OK so I have a bias here but there is much more HTML than anything else. HTML is just a document format and it is somewhat presentation oriented but modern XHTML is changing those problems.
Rather than having a separate word processor and spreadsheet I would like a single tool that is a document editor, spreadsheet tool and scripting environment. Mathematica does this but it is fiendishly expensive and most people don't use the capabilities.
Building an open source Mathematica type environment would be a much more useful Open Source project than copying Office. The basic framework would only need to handle the basic editor and calculation engine, the community would quickly build out the analysis packages for stats and such.
Better yet we could build in type checking into the base so that when you specify a variable you can give it units, if you multiply 10 hr by $13 /hr you get $130 and so on.
I can see a program of that type sweeping Office asside but not a lukewarm clone whose only advantage is cost. Office Home and Student costs $100 or so at Costco for two machines and there is no eligibility check for registration.
Real traditionalists would do this scientifically and measure dick size.
Audiophiles hate CD because it democratized the medium. There was no audible difference between a $300 player and a $3,000 player.
The car nuts did the same thing in the early 30s. As mass produced automobiles drove prices down they got sniffy about the fact that it was no longer an exclusive club for the mega-rich. Thats when the term vintage car was invented and the London-Brighton run. What they don't admit is that London-Brighton is about as far as you can expect a vintage car to go without breaking down or needing a complete service.
I am aware of that, the Abu Graihb photographs look pretty much like the SAS course Resistance to Interrogation (R2I).
The point I was making however is that before the photographs that was pretty much the worst that captured servicemen could expect. Now it is the best.
Its even worse than that as the whole point of R2I is that everyone talks and what they say is complete garbage.
Where in wingnutia do they teach folk that the US has ever gone to war against Russia, Cuba or Iran?
Nearest the US came to that would be the Spanish-American war of 1898. No US forces were captured in either the bay of pigs or operation Ajax as far as I am aware and the US was never at war with Russia either (OK there might have been some meddling during the reds vs whites era).
As you point out, the NAZIs only tortured allied POWs occasionally. The Soviets did use torture on their own people and on captured spies. I think you need to provide evidence to back your assertion that they tortured US pilots. Gary Powers did not alleged torture as far as I am aware.
Iraq mistreated servicemen during gulf war I - they paraded them on television which is degrading treatment. The US has done that repeatedly in the current conflict.
So on balance there is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that a large number of US servicemen would have been tortured or otherwise mistreated but for the Geneva conventions.
In that culture it is worse.
Killing a person might begin a blood feud with their relatives. But pissing on the Koran is starting a feud with a whole religion.
Debating normative ethics with people who fly airplanes into buildings is pointless. But understanding the basis on which they form ethical judgements is essential if you are going to defeat them.
Because you are using Linux instead of Windows which has supported smartcard login since Win2K?
Its a silly patent though since the idea of using a general purpose SIMD computer for a trivially paralizable task is obvious. Either the patent is much more specific or its junk.
That is entirely the point. If you talk to any member of the JAG corps about torture they will tell you that the reason the US did not permit its troops to torture others is that it is the only way that the US could protect its own troops.
Of course there are always enemies that do not respect the rules of war, that is why the Nurenberg trials were held.
Te Abu Graihb photographs and more importantly the conspicuous decision not to hold anyone in the chain of command accountable for them has demonstrated that the US does torture. And as a result US servicemen who are captured by Jihadis can expect to be treated as brutally as the Abu Graihb photographs.
More importantly the US has conceeded the moral case in the war on terror. It is the same mistake made by the British at the start of the IRA terrorist campaign. Internment without trial did nothing to stop the violence and the future leadership of the IRA emerged from the internees. Gerry Adams wrote his famous series of monographs under the name 'Brownie' which developed the Ballot-Bomb strategy.
As a result many US politicians who should have known better supported the IRA even as they were murdering civilians in the UK. People like Rudy Giuliani were attending IRA fundraisers right up to 9/11. Giuliani even gave Gerry Adams a 'humanitarian award' on behalf of NYC and expressed the hope that he would force Clinton to speak to Adams even without the renunciation of violence that Clinton demanded. A few months later Adams and Co blew up a shopping mall.
In the days after 9/11 everything changed. It was no longer hip to support the IRA. Rudy attended a NORAID fundraiser immediately after 9/11 but only after the IRA agreed the money would go to the 9/11 victims. After that US funding for NORAID disappeared entirely and the IRA finally accepted the demands that they had long resisted to disarm.
The reason the IRA had to pack it in was precisely because they had finaly lost the moral case that had been carelessly handed to them in the opening years of the troubles.
The model that HMG followed in defeating the IRA was to copy the West German authorities strategy for dealling with the Baader-Meinhof gang. The Germans refused to treat the RAF as political prisoners, they were always treated as common criminals.
Oh, that is the briliance of the scheme, when IBM gets sued for patent infringement they bring up all the prior art in front of the jury and show what a rotten system the patent system is.
Another effective reforem of the patent system would be to close the Texas federal patent court. A big part of the patent problem is that the plaintifs bar has worked out how to identify which Texans are never going to question a government decision, i.e. the patent grant. Or at least thats what my patent lawyer tells me.
Seems that it is bit more complex. The WH is complaining that the new bill has a poison pill clause, not sure what. Also it turns out that they did turn over some papers describing some of the wiretaps.
Reid can schedule a vote, but the bill does not proceed unless they can get cloture which is 60 votes.
Talk of the 'Senate' caving is somewhat overstated. Only the intelligence committee has cut a deal. Judiciary is still holding out for details of the crimes that the telcos are alleged to have committed.
That said, it is probably nothing to get too excited about. I don't think that the Bush administration is going to giveup the information demanded, and I think the telcos will eventually get immunity but only after the information has been released under another administration.
I expect some sort of truth and reconciliation commission in the end up.
The sarcasm was the attitude I was referring to.
Writing standards is most of my job. Situations like this one in which we have partisan factions are not helpful to the process. At root the problem here is that people think that they can use the standards process to have ODF declared a standard and then have government offices and the like required to use Open Office (and probably Linux &ct.) as it is 'the' 'standard'.
It does not work that way. The US government has tried that in the past with pretty dire results. Believe it or not I still have to deal with the fallout from the 1980s decision to make OSI the federal standard. There are still folk plugging away trying to get X.500 (not LDAP) deployed in the hope that once that has been achieved it will form the hub that the rest of the OSI stack is deployed around. We had to wait for some people to retire to remove their schemes.
I could not care less whether Office or OpenOffice is the standard in ten years time. They are both relics of 1980s technology at best. If you want to beat Office write something better.
That what we did with the Web. The Web was not a clone of Hyper-G or Gopher, it was something better. People often overlook the fact that the Web was by any measure the most successful open source effort in history. We put the code into the public domain precisely so that others could use it.
It would not be at all difficult to write something better than Office which is a collection of five or six separate programs with not very good means of integration. Spreadsheets are a poor means of manipulating information, Mathematica and its ilk are much better but also limited.
There is something of a difference between facts and Slashdot assertions.
Most standards documents are not 100% accurate but there is a big difference between having something that is 95% correct and having to start from scratch. If someone implements the specification in good faith they will identify the errors and omissions from the spec when they try interoperation.
That is what we usually do at any rate. We did that with HTML which these days is pretty much at the same levdel of complexity as Office if you include all the secondary specs like MathML.
The objections are not being made because people think the spec is incomplete, the motivation is purely the continuation of Sun's anti-Microsoft jihad.
So how would you like your tea made, according to the method the taster used when blending the tea or according to some completely different method?
ISO 3103 is the English method of making tea, i.e. in a pot with BOILING water.
The standard American restaurant method is to present the customer with a cup of tepid water in a cup and ask them to select a teabag. Its cheaper to do that.
Which argues for neither being considered a standard.
Source code is not a good way to document an international standard. Source has bugs and changes over time. Experience has shown it to be even less reliable than English.
The best method of defining a standard is to use formal methods such as Z, VDM or CSP. The problem is that there are almost no people on the standards circuit that are familiar with them.
Yes, 4Gb RAM.
The first computer I owned/built had 1Kb RAM. The big machine at school had a whacking 32Kb.
That is why we use tools such as XML Schema.
The IETF knows this, which is why the rule used to be (maybe it still is) that there have to be two inter-operating implementations before they'll call it a standard. IMHO, they should go the extra step and require one of the implementations to be licensed in a manner that meets the Open Source definition, but they created the rule before the concept of Free Software was all that widespread.
I don't know if the ISO committee has that rule but there are apparently 6 non Microsoft implementations (including the iPhone reader).
It would be nice to have a full open source office implementation but its not necessary to go that far to show that someone can successfully write an implementation from the specification.
Well what do you expect if this is your attitude?
Both the document formats on offer are thin XML veneers on an existing code base. The only difference is that one code base is open source and the other is the market leader with 90% plus market share.
Word is a standard the way that FAT is a standard. Recognize it as such, embrace and extend. Everyone who wants to sell a word processor has to support Word document formats anyway so why be so snotty about it all?
If people turn the standards process into a pissing contest they end up hurting everyone. Microsoft made a perfectly reasonable request. They did not ask for exclusivity, they made the IPR openly available.
We had the same thing happen with SPF and SenderID, sticking their thumb in Microsoft's eye was much more important to some people than stopping the spammers.
The standards process is about recognition, not choice. Almost no standards bodies have the power to make a standard by declaration alone. Most ISO standards are (justly) ignored. Virtually no restaurant in the entire US provides ISO 3103 compliant tea (although they no longer make it with salt water).
A standards process must either recognize an existing de facto standard or establish a widespread consensus amongst the participants to succeed.
It is often more important to recognize a de facto standard than propose improvements. For example, in the US almost all lightbulbs use the flawed Edison Screw mount. From a technical point of view it is inferior to the European Swan Bayonet fixture in almost every way. The Edison screw was chosen as the standard in the Us because it was widely supported and the patents had expired.
In like vein I just pensioned off a machine I built in 2002: 512Mb RAM, twin CPU (forget how many MHz), 64Mb 3D Graphics, 4 32Gb disks. Apart from the CPU speed and the disk storage the machine is pretty much the same as today's low end Dell. Apart from the size and amount of noise made, that is. Price has dropped from $5,000 to $500 in the five years but thats nothing like the rate prices were droping ten years back, the machine was built to the spec of a $50K workstation I had used at MIT.
The reason I can justify spending as much as I do on machines is that if a machine lasts me five years instead of three I save the inevitable downtime when bringing a new machine up.
The machine that replaced it is faster and better of course, (quadcore 3GHz, 4Mb RAM, 1.5Gb Video RAM) but the forcing function on making the replacement was finding a machine that could drive a couple of 30" displays. I don't think I will be replacing that in the very near future.
I am currently trying to decide what to do with the old one, one path would be to stick some large drives on it and turn it into a file server. Thats the path I would take if I didn't want to find out what is going on with Microsoft Home Server and the like.