Actually, his spelling was right. "Bogan" is an Australian English insult, basically. Not a particularly strong one... a bit like telling someone who's not trailer trash/a redneck that they sound like trailer trash/a redneck, I suppose. ("Bogan" doesn't acutally mean either of those things, though.)
That's got less to do with being a republic, and more to do with being an effective representative democracy. Nazi Germany and Saddam's Iraq were both republics, and I don't recall the legislators there having "some incentive to listen to the public, and respond when the public really wants something enough". On the other hand, in Great Britain and Australia and Canada (which are all monarchies), as well as in the US, the legislators there have had enough incentive to listen to the public. What groups these countries is being effective representative democracies or not, not being republics.
(Nazi Germany and Iraq were technically democracies too, but they were obviously ineffective. That conclusion is based on somewhat circular reasoning, but that's because we essentially need to beg the question. Why do the legislators respond? Because they're effective democracies. Why are they effective? Because the legislators respond. There's not much more to it than that. And as countless examples over history have shown us, being an effective democracy has nothing to do with the constitution and much more to do with culture & a concerned public. Your last paragraph is entirely correct.)
PS: I think your attitude is quite common amongst Slashdotters, which is why I felt the need to express mine; I fear yours is in the majority. I doubt you need a flame-proof suit any more than I do.
Or, I could be wrong, and they just express agreement/disagreement in different ways.
Because we all know that somehow OpenOffice is guaranteed to still be maintained 10 years from now!
True, but the format is documented so any future software can easily implement it, preserving the same formatting as the publisher intended. The same cannot be said about Word in spite of your assertions (or at least, OpenOffice.org doesn't yet maintain Word document formatting precisely). There's also other formats available; if you're really concerned about long-term preservation, I'd recommend something like HTML or plain text (for documents in which the prime concern is information); or TeX (for documents [incl. ppt slides] in whch formatting is important). I realise that TeX isn't especially fun for newbies, so OpenOffice.org documents (which are human readable even without software designed for it) in conjunction with PDF or PostScript is probably a successful compromise.
Also, Word is not the only format in Microsoft Office. One other format likely to be used with this plugin is PowerPoint. As I'm studying for my exams and reading the PPT slides released by my lecturer, I can assure you that OpenOffice.org is far from perfect in importing those, too. Some slides are quite unreadable till I've spent a few minutes fiddling around with them.
PS: I think your attitude is quite common amongst Slashdotters, which is why I felt the need to express mine; I fear yours is in the majority. I doubt you need a flame-proof suit any more than I do.
PPS: Sorry about my tone/language, I'm in a funny mood right now and I've been reading stuff written in a funny way, so I can't quite get rid of it...
I was at least as concerned about the future as I was about today. And I've never been happy with the output of imported Word files in OpenOffice.org and other similar software; the formatting's usually screwy in some way or another. (Obviously, HTML/CSS formatting is different from one program to another, but HTML/CSS at least doesn't try to be WYSIWYG.) If the content is essentially textual so the loss of formatting doesn't matter... why not just use HTML or plain text? It's easier, because your readers will probably find the file through their web browser, and HTML and plain text are just about guaranteed to be readable with a web browser. If the formatting does matter, then because OpenOffice.org and other platforms (and I'm told—but can't confirm—even other versions of Word) don't maintain the formatting with any precision, you're doing yourself (and your audience) a disservice by using this plugin. You're better off using a documented file format like TeX/PDF that will format the same on different computers.
Regarding filetypes in future versions of Office, that is of no interest to whether or not you should be using this plugin. This plugin works with versions of Office that are available today that use the proprietry file type that is available today. When the next version is released and if it's file type is a nice compressed XML file that can be retrieved & understood easily by other software, then my statement might not hold, and I'll be the first to admit it. But that's not the case today, and you still should not use this plugin.
Please don't use this plugin if you are releasing your content under a free Creative Commons licence. No document is free if it's encoded in one of Microsoft's proprietry formats. You are much better off to use the online Creative Commons licence chooser, and copy the text to a document written in OpenOffice.org, TeX, Gnumeric, HTML or the like yourself. This way, you will know that all your potential audience is able to read the document (even if they have to download some software first), even in ten years time when Microsoft Office XP is no longer supported and the current version makes a hash of old files.
Haven't heard of Foxit before, but I suppose I don't use Windows boxes I can control much. Looks like its interface is an Adobe clone, I really hate Acrobat Reader's MDI, particuly the latest version. Still, small and fast is good.
Last I heard Xpdf for Windows was limited to the command-line tools, and that's all I think I can see from the Xpdf website. Is there some other version for Windows, or do they have GUI stuff in the package on that site and lie? (I don't have access to a Windows computer ATM, so I can't see for myself.)
I assume your clients run on Windows, and that isn't changing. What good alternatives are there to Acrobat Reader for Windows? I love using Xpdf on GNU/Linux, but I thought on Windows my choices were limited to GView (thanks but no thanks) and Adobe?
I honestly don't know much about gridiron, but I do know that in soccer, you can score goals with your feet, head and chest (but I don't know if you could legally score a goal with your hands, e.g. the goalie chucking it all the way to the other end, or a throw-in, or the goalie scoring an own-goal or something). Seeing as the significant part of soccer is scoring goals (you don't win or lose on posession!) then surely soccer's more of a "bodyball" game, than "football". Better leave the name to a sport where you've gotta score goals with your feet, like Aussie rules football.
Or alternatively, given the exact significance of the "foot" in "football" is debatable, we could just call sports that have always been called football "football", using more specific terms like "soccer" or "gridiron" when it's appropriate, and get over ourselves.
Using a graphical editor? I edit my videos by converting them to a series of jpeg images (one per frame) and using ed to edit them! Damn efficient, quality results.
You were right in the first paragraph (using slightly misleading terms), and went wrong then after. The Brazilian's dominance of soccer is not genetic nor unearned. It's created through a culture of soccer. All three nations you mentioned of course have a strong culture of football, it's just that in Brazil, the major code is soccer; in America, it's gridiron, in Australia, it's split between Aussie rules and rugby based on region. Drive through the backstreets of Melbourne or down to the local parks and you'll see dozens of children playing football. Football obsession is not limited to Brazil and not limited to soccer.
Not surprisingly, the very best Aussie rules footballers come from Australia, and the very best gridiron footballers come from America.
Probably you're right that Australia and America will never win the World Cup. But that's because our very best athletes are playing the codes that they want to play, because of the culture they have behind them.
In addition, the grammar is appalling. Now, my German is obviously much worse than the writer's English, but one thing particularly stood out to me: "Customers will again benefit from the high reliable SCO products", which should be "... highly reliable...". As I said, my German's not worth speaking of, but ISTR that German has no adverbs (the -ly forms of adjectives), they just have adjectives...
Thing is, those of us who do stick to our distributions don't want to upgrade as we go along. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Updating regularly isn't what I want, it keeps changing things. Even if the change is for the better, it can still interrupt your workflow...
With Gentoo or Debian/Sid or the like, you have to continuously maintain your computer (as packages change) to keep it up-to-date with security (or even to able to upgrade easily in a few years time). With Slackware or Debian/Stable, you just sit around and once every few years, you upgrade. The upgrade might be a bit narky, but one day every few years is a lot less time than an hour every few weeks. It just works in-between times!
In Australia, it used to be the case that no party affiliations were on ballot (and still is at some elections). So we got "How to vote" cards instead. As you make your way to the local school (or wherever you vote), you get bombarded with them. It is of course illegal for them to do it in the voting centre, so they just form a perimiter round the place.
(And speaking from somewhere with compulsory voting—which, for the record, I view as a good thing—you're right that higher turnouts don't lead to better voting. It's not necessarily "along party lines", but it is essentially blind.)
I think the problem with your comparison is that it's more apt to compare music to software, not music to a specific piece of software. The vast majority of people want music; the vast majority of people want music. But just like only a limited group of people want Photoshop, only a limited group of people want to listen to Apocalyptica, but Apocalyptica CDs still, apparently, have digital restriction management stuff on them.
Regarding giving deaf people the ability to ear again, there's a much better approach: The bionic ear. Basically, you have a speaker which is attached to a device inserted partway into the cochlea and stimulates the nerves inside the cochlea directly. Obviously it only works if (a) the cochlea is at least partially functional and (b) the connection between the ear and the brain, and the temporal lobe of the brain are both functional. Also, for it to be useful, the patient generally will need to have lost their hearing sometime during their life, or be under about two years of age before the implant; people who've not had a sense at all generally find gaining it very disconcerting, hard or impossible to use, and potentially dangerous.
Amongst the advantages this has over your proposal is that it directly interfaces with the hearing apparatus, so your brain interprets the sounds as sounds rather than feelings (the parts responsible for dealing with feelings wouldn't have any idea what to do with sound), and it means you can hear all sounds, not just sounds from speakers. OTOH, your proposal might be useful to give people a feeling as to the level of background noise which might help them when crossing the road or something (if combined also with a speaker).
(BTW: If you need to understand how the first paragraph works. Recall that the ear is composed of three portions, the outer ear (everything to the eardrum); the middle ear (the ossicles or tiny little bones); and the inner ear, which is basically the cochlea. The outer ear channels sound and alters the sound waves to some extent to help our directional hearing. In the middle ear, the ossicles convert ear-based sound waves to liquid-based sound waves (the cochlea is filled with fluid); it also dampens some sounds, probably the ones caused by you chewing and talking so you don't damage your hearing/get distracted. The inner ear converts these sound waves to nerve impulses; along the length of the cochlea are thousands of nerves that respond to gradually lower frequencies. From here the sounds are sent (indirectly) to the primary auditory cortex of the temporal lobe of the brain to be processed. Standard hearing aids require that everything's working, just to a lower grade than normal: They merely amplify sounds. Bionic ears bypass the inner and middle ears and interface with the cochlea. But they don't give their recipients anywhere like normal hearing; the cochlea is wound up on itself like a snail and so you can only go so far in, and even still its somewhat limited in its resolution.
Yeah, well that arrow was because I was abusing HTML and doing a UL with an OL inside it; at the time I thinke a UL added the arrow thingy. Seems by now the style sheet's changed.
You are wrong; I don't think you can get numbers by just writing:
this is wrong
maybe it's numbered
But probably it isn't (it wasn't—not even bulleted!).
(I'm slightly offended at being accused of writing improper HTML without actually having done it, which is why I might be a little curt in this reply. But I know you didn't intend to offend me, so I'm trying not to be;)
(Interestingly, I wonder if ul+ol+li formats an ordered list nicely until Slashdot fix their html: lets see.
is this indented well?
is it numbered alone?
it's certainly an abuse of html, regardless!
(It appears reasonably, still slightly odd; no point in using it.)
Slavery was abolished in the British Empire by 1838; it was not abolished in the US till 1865. Women had the right to vote in New Zealand from 1893; in the US it was not until 1920 (with legislation at a federal level overturning territory legislation as late as 1887. Desegregation is associated with the US because segregation was...
Don't fool yourself: America had some early innovations, but has been very conservative ever since. It's what happens when you teach yourselves you're perfect already.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, his spelling was right. "Bogan" is an Australian English insult, basically. Not a particularly strong one ... a bit like telling someone who's not trailer trash/a redneck that they sound like trailer trash/a redneck, I suppose. ("Bogan" doesn't acutally mean either of those things, though.)
(p) Conservative policies are supported by the (e) Liberal Party of Australia! :)
That's got less to do with being a republic, and more to do with being an effective representative democracy. Nazi Germany and Saddam's Iraq were both republics, and I don't recall the legislators there having "some incentive to listen to the public, and respond when the public really wants something enough". On the other hand, in Great Britain and Australia and Canada (which are all monarchies), as well as in the US, the legislators there have had enough incentive to listen to the public. What groups these countries is being effective representative democracies or not, not being republics.
(Nazi Germany and Iraq were technically democracies too, but they were obviously ineffective. That conclusion is based on somewhat circular reasoning, but that's because we essentially need to beg the question. Why do the legislators respond? Because they're effective democracies. Why are they effective? Because the legislators respond. There's not much more to it than that. And as countless examples over history have shown us, being an effective democracy has nothing to do with the constitution and much more to do with culture & a concerned public. Your last paragraph is entirely correct.)
PS: I think your attitude is quite common amongst Slashdotters, which is why I felt the need to express mine; I fear yours is in the majority. I doubt you need a flame-proof suit any more than I do.
Or, I could be wrong, and they just express agreement/disagreement in different ways.
Because we all know that somehow OpenOffice is guaranteed to still be maintained 10 years from now!
True, but the format is documented so any future software can easily implement it, preserving the same formatting as the publisher intended. The same cannot be said about Word in spite of your assertions (or at least, OpenOffice.org doesn't yet maintain Word document formatting precisely). There's also other formats available; if you're really concerned about long-term preservation, I'd recommend something like HTML or plain text (for documents in which the prime concern is information); or TeX (for documents [incl. ppt slides] in whch formatting is important). I realise that TeX isn't especially fun for newbies, so OpenOffice.org documents (which are human readable even without software designed for it) in conjunction with PDF or PostScript is probably a successful compromise.
Also, Word is not the only format in Microsoft Office. One other format likely to be used with this plugin is PowerPoint. As I'm studying for my exams and reading the PPT slides released by my lecturer, I can assure you that OpenOffice.org is far from perfect in importing those, too. Some slides are quite unreadable till I've spent a few minutes fiddling around with them.
(See also my response to your sibling.)
PS: I think your attitude is quite common amongst Slashdotters, which is why I felt the need to express mine; I fear yours is in the majority. I doubt you need a flame-proof suit any more than I do.
PPS: Sorry about my tone/language, I'm in a funny mood right now and I've been reading stuff written in a funny way, so I can't quite get rid of it...
Right now, today,
... why not just use HTML or plain text? It's easier, because your readers will probably find the file through their web browser, and HTML and plain text are just about guaranteed to be readable with a web browser. If the formatting does matter, then because OpenOffice.org and other platforms (and I'm told—but can't confirm—even other versions of Word) don't maintain the formatting with any precision, you're doing yourself (and your audience) a disservice by using this plugin. You're better off using a documented file format like TeX/PDF that will format the same on different computers.
I was at least as concerned about the future as I was about today. And I've never been happy with the output of imported Word files in OpenOffice.org and other similar software; the formatting's usually screwy in some way or another. (Obviously, HTML/CSS formatting is different from one program to another, but HTML/CSS at least doesn't try to be WYSIWYG.) If the content is essentially textual so the loss of formatting doesn't matter
Regarding filetypes in future versions of Office, that is of no interest to whether or not you should be using this plugin. This plugin works with versions of Office that are available today that use the proprietry file type that is available today. When the next version is released and if it's file type is a nice compressed XML file that can be retrieved & understood easily by other software, then my statement might not hold, and I'll be the first to admit it. But that's not the case today, and you still should not use this plugin.
Please don't use this plugin if you are releasing your content under a free Creative Commons licence. No document is free if it's encoded in one of Microsoft's proprietry formats. You are much better off to use the online Creative Commons licence chooser, and copy the text to a document written in OpenOffice.org, TeX, Gnumeric, HTML or the like yourself. This way, you will know that all your potential audience is able to read the document (even if they have to download some software first), even in ten years time when Microsoft Office XP is no longer supported and the current version makes a hash of old files.
Haven't heard of Foxit before, but I suppose I don't use Windows boxes I can control much. Looks like its interface is an Adobe clone, I really hate Acrobat Reader's MDI, particuly the latest version. Still, small and fast is good.
Last I heard Xpdf for Windows was limited to the command-line tools, and that's all I think I can see from the Xpdf website. Is there some other version for Windows, or do they have GUI stuff in the package on that site and lie? (I don't have access to a Windows computer ATM, so I can't see for myself.)
Thanks!
I assume your clients run on Windows, and that isn't changing. What good alternatives are there to Acrobat Reader for Windows? I love using Xpdf on GNU/Linux, but I thought on Windows my choices were limited to GView (thanks but no thanks) and Adobe?
"Your Milage May Vary. Brains Often Come Together After Omission of Errors"?
I honestly don't know much about gridiron, but I do know that in soccer, you can score goals with your feet, head and chest (but I don't know if you could legally score a goal with your hands, e.g. the goalie chucking it all the way to the other end, or a throw-in, or the goalie scoring an own-goal or something). Seeing as the significant part of soccer is scoring goals (you don't win or lose on posession!) then surely soccer's more of a "bodyball" game, than "football". Better leave the name to a sport where you've gotta score goals with your feet, like Aussie rules football.
Or alternatively, given the exact significance of the "foot" in "football" is debatable, we could just call sports that have always been called football "football", using more specific terms like "soccer" or "gridiron" when it's appropriate, and get over ourselves.
Yeah, I kinda wasn't going for the "easy to use" aspect.
Using a graphical editor? I edit my videos by converting them to a series of jpeg images (one per frame) and using ed to edit them! Damn efficient, quality results.
You were right in the first paragraph (using slightly misleading terms), and went wrong then after. The Brazilian's dominance of soccer is not genetic nor unearned. It's created through a culture of soccer. All three nations you mentioned of course have a strong culture of football, it's just that in Brazil, the major code is soccer; in America, it's gridiron, in Australia, it's split between Aussie rules and rugby based on region. Drive through the backstreets of Melbourne or down to the local parks and you'll see dozens of children playing football. Football obsession is not limited to Brazil and not limited to soccer.
Not surprisingly, the very best Aussie rules footballers come from Australia, and the very best gridiron footballers come from America.
Probably you're right that Australia and America will never win the World Cup. But that's because our very best athletes are playing the codes that they want to play, because of the culture they have behind them.
Wait a second, did you say a soccer field seems "too damn big"? And here was me thinking it was too damn small!
In addition, the grammar is appalling. Now, my German is obviously much worse than the writer's English, but one thing particularly stood out to me: "Customers will again benefit from the high reliable SCO products", which should be "... highly reliable ...". As I said, my German's not worth speaking of, but ISTR that German has no adverbs (the -ly forms of adjectives), they just have adjectives...
Thing is, those of us who do stick to our distributions don't want to upgrade as we go along. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Updating regularly isn't what I want, it keeps changing things. Even if the change is for the better, it can still interrupt your workflow...
With Gentoo or Debian/Sid or the like, you have to continuously maintain your computer (as packages change) to keep it up-to-date with security (or even to able to upgrade easily in a few years time). With Slackware or Debian/Stable, you just sit around and once every few years, you upgrade. The upgrade might be a bit narky, but one day every few years is a lot less time than an hour every few weeks. It just works in-between times!
In Australia, it used to be the case that no party affiliations were on ballot (and still is at some elections). So we got "How to vote" cards instead. As you make your way to the local school (or wherever you vote), you get bombarded with them. It is of course illegal for them to do it in the voting centre, so they just form a perimiter round the place.
(And speaking from somewhere with compulsory voting—which, for the record, I view as a good thing—you're right that higher turnouts don't lead to better voting. It's not necessarily "along party lines", but it is essentially blind.)
I think the problem with your comparison is that it's more apt to compare music to software, not music to a specific piece of software. The vast majority of people want music; the vast majority of people want music. But just like only a limited group of people want Photoshop, only a limited group of people want to listen to Apocalyptica, but Apocalyptica CDs still, apparently, have digital restriction management stuff on them.
Regarding giving deaf people the ability to ear again, there's a much better approach: The bionic ear. Basically, you have a speaker which is attached to a device inserted partway into the cochlea and stimulates the nerves inside the cochlea directly. Obviously it only works if (a) the cochlea is at least partially functional and (b) the connection between the ear and the brain, and the temporal lobe of the brain are both functional. Also, for it to be useful, the patient generally will need to have lost their hearing sometime during their life, or be under about two years of age before the implant; people who've not had a sense at all generally find gaining it very disconcerting, hard or impossible to use, and potentially dangerous.
Amongst the advantages this has over your proposal is that it directly interfaces with the hearing apparatus, so your brain interprets the sounds as sounds rather than feelings (the parts responsible for dealing with feelings wouldn't have any idea what to do with sound), and it means you can hear all sounds, not just sounds from speakers. OTOH, your proposal might be useful to give people a feeling as to the level of background noise which might help them when crossing the road or something (if combined also with a speaker).
(BTW: If you need to understand how the first paragraph works. Recall that the ear is composed of three portions, the outer ear (everything to the eardrum); the middle ear (the ossicles or tiny little bones); and the inner ear, which is basically the cochlea. The outer ear channels sound and alters the sound waves to some extent to help our directional hearing. In the middle ear, the ossicles convert ear-based sound waves to liquid-based sound waves (the cochlea is filled with fluid); it also dampens some sounds, probably the ones caused by you chewing and talking so you don't damage your hearing/get distracted. The inner ear converts these sound waves to nerve impulses; along the length of the cochlea are thousands of nerves that respond to gradually lower frequencies. From here the sounds are sent (indirectly) to the primary auditory cortex of the temporal lobe of the brain to be processed. Standard hearing aids require that everything's working, just to a lower grade than normal: They merely amplify sounds. Bionic ears bypass the inner and middle ears and interface with the cochlea. But they don't give their recipients anywhere like normal hearing; the cochlea is wound up on itself like a snail and so you can only go so far in, and even still its somewhat limited in its resolution.
Wow! It works now, a little. Thanks for submitting the bug report for me... Now we've just got superfluous bullets, but at least it's readable :)
Yeah, well that arrow was because I was abusing HTML and doing a UL with an OL inside it; at the time I thinke a UL added the arrow thingy. Seems by now the style sheet's changed.
this is wrong
maybe it's numbered
;)
But probably it isn't (it wasn't—not even bulleted!).
(I'm slightly offended at being accused of writing improper HTML without actually having done it, which is why I might be a little curt in this reply. But I know you didn't intend to offend me, so I'm trying not to be
(Interestingly, I wonder if ul+ol+li formats an ordered list nicely until Slashdot fix their html: lets see.
(It appears reasonably, still slightly odd; no point in using it.)
Slavery was abolished in the British Empire by 1838; it was not abolished in the US till 1865. Women had the right to vote in New Zealand from 1893; in the US it was not until 1920 (with legislation at a federal level overturning territory legislation as late as 1887. Desegregation is associated with the US because segregation was...
Don't fool yourself: America had some early innovations, but has been very conservative ever since. It's what happens when you teach yourselves you're perfect already.
Yes, that's the bug I was discussing. All I did was a normal HTML unordered list, and that's what I got.