Great logic. By your rationale, Wikipedia should just turn off the ability to add new articles. After all, if it were popular enough, someone would have posted about it by now.
Way to miss the point. Since your reading comprehension skills appear to be lacking, let me explain in simpler language: the idea is that you shouldn't post about stuff you created yourself, because if it has any actual importance or popularity, other people who didn't create it themselves will want to post about it.
In other words, you shouldn't post vanity articles about yourself, or your band, or your fantasy universe, because if they matter, other people will write them.
As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has some issues. As a model of how and where distributed intellect fails, it's almost shockingly comprehensive.
The first statement is true. The second is meaningless; it uses big words, but ultimately doesn't use them to say anything.
Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions.
This is simply untrue. Any persistent idiot who tries to obliterate genuine contributions will inevitably fall foul of some of the disciplinary policies that are enforced quite rigorously. For example, if someone undoes your changes more than three times in one day, they will receive a temporary ban; if they persist, or try to evade the ban, they may be permanently blocked. If you feel your contributions are defensible, it's trivial to ask others to support you, or to take the dispute to any number of dispute resolution systems with binding outcomes.
If I don't like it, why don't I go edit it myself? To which I reply: because I don't have time to babysit the Internet.
And? You don't have to babysit anything. You make your changes, and if they're worth having then there's a good chance that other people, who do have the free time (or choose to give up some other hobby, to make the time), will babysit them for you.
Tycho's just pissed off because his "contributions" (read: a silly hoax he was trying to spread) were obliterated without any need for persistence or idiots. The speed and efficiency with which ELoTH:TES was expunged from Wikipedia is a perfect demonstration of one of the wiki's advantages - by and large, it does manage to heal itself from vandalism. The only way Wikipedia could have failed would be if Tycho's "contribution" had not been identified as a hoax and swiftly deleted...
Really? Would you be so kind as to identify exactly who it was who proved that it has failed, and when? Because they clearly forgot to tell anyone apart from you.
Summing up recent articles that made the news, we have:
Evidence that Wikipedia has flaws: first, "the articles on Jane Fonda and Bill Gates aren't very good"; second, "one single vandal inserted a single libelious statement into an article about someone obscure that nobody actually cares about, and the subject overreacted".
Evidence that Wikipedia is actually doing pretty damn well: the Nature study.
Sun demonstrated a music program where you could add instruments to a song as tracks, and control their volume and balance by moving them in 3D in relation to your real life speakers. To make something softer, you could move it further "into" the monitor. To make it only audible on the left speaker, you could move it to the left side of the screen.
Who is supposed to find this useful? Every idiot understands about volume and balance controls, but I don't know many people who find it easy to physically position their speakers so that they get the proper surround-sound effects. Seems to me this is yet another example of a case where using a common abstraction - and one that everyone uses frequently on physical playback devices too - is much, much better than attempting to simulate something "real" that most people only ever do once, if at all.
This is the clause you use against those who claim "There is no Constitutionally guaranteed 'right to privacy'". Yes there is, the Founders just didn't bother to enumerate it.
Wait a minute - the Constitution doesn't mention eating babies, either! Wow, does that mean I have a Constitutionally guaranteed 'right to eat babies'?
Nintendo games have childish stories and themes as well, not just childish graphics. That's what turns people off --- you only want to save the goddamn princess so many times.
Right. Saving the goddamn princess.
Er... remind me again, which goddamn princess do you save in Metroid?
At least I remember the princess-saving bit of Killer7, that charming kiddie game. Um, that "M" on the box does stand for "mild"... doesn't it?
And thank God Nintendo never let anyone port nasty satanic titles like Resident Evil or Castlevania to their consoles. It's so nice to know that the Nintendo brand is a pure guarantee of games marketed solely at 8-year-olds, that no mother would ever worry about her precious children playing!
Not like Sony, whose consoles are filled with hideous and sick titles like "Katamari Damacy" where you go round squashing hookers and mutilating cows. And I gather the storyline in that game is so complex that only 500-year-old Zen masters have a hope of following it. Now that's mature gaming for you.
Wait, am I getting mixed up here...? Please, remind me which stereotype is which again?
Your use of language is as careless as that you attribute to Wikipedia's editors. No proposition is "indubitably true", and no proposition can be proven by asserting its truth without providing any sort of argument to support the assertion.
It is plausible that Britannica presents facts more concisely. It is even likely. But unless someone actually
Defines a "fact", in the context of an encyclopedia article, in an objective and measurable way;
Devises a methodology for assessing the ratio of facts (thus defined) to words;
Applies this methodology to a statistically significant selection of articles from Wikipedia;
Applies the same methodology to a comparable set of articles from Britannica; and
Publishes their definitions, methodology, and results,
then you simply can not describe the proposition as "true". And even if such a study existed, you would have to be pretty damn sure that its methodology was unassailable before you could consider describing the proposition it supported as "indubitably true".
Note that study only picked 42 science articles. This does not mean that britannica has that rate of errors for other diciplines.
Note also that science is one of the few disciplines in which, by and large, there tends only to be one current scientific theory which is clearly stated and can easily be summarised encyclopedically. It is much, much, much easier to write a good article on the quark than on Hamlet.
And as you'd expect, Wikipedia's article on Hamlet is not very good. On the positive side, I can actually read it - unlike the Britannica article, which it seems you have to pay for. (They did let me read the first paragraph; it starts by presenting a contested theory as though it were an undisputable fact, an unimpressive opening that does not encourage me to part with $69.95 to see the rest.)
And if you're one of the many people with "click to play" enabled for Flash, you get all the text hidden behind rectangles with play buttons on.
No, actually it detects Flashblock and falls back to plain text, so everything works perfectly - and your desire not to see Flash you didn't ask for is respected.
Mods: the parent is not "informative", it is spreading misinformation in an inflammatory way. Please mod it down accordingly.
Terms are developed and the good ones stick around and the bad ones disappear (as happened with "fortnight").
Um, what? You're claiming "fortnight" is a recent neologism that failed to gain widespread usage?
Just for your information, it has existed as a word for as long as any form of speech that most people would recognise as English, and now, over a millennium since it developed, it is still alive, healthy, and used regularly by myself and everyone I know.
"Coldcocked", on the other hand, means absolutely nothing to me, and (unlike "fortnight") it isn't in any of the dictionaries I have to hand, so I've no idea what it's supposed to mean.
I would be surprised if the aggressive adware/spyware programs agreed with your self-assessment. But, then, how would you know you had spyware without an automated scan?
Um, what about with a manual scan? I do much the same as the other guy: I run Win2k, and I don't keep any AV, anti-spyware, or firewall software running. Every once in a while, I download the latest version of Spybot or AVG and let it have a look. I've been doing this for years, and I can state with absolute certainty that unless it's happened within the last month, I have never been infected with any viruses or spyware.
Again, "ignorance is bliss" is not the same as "I know I have no problems."
Nor is paranoia. Why waste processor cycles on buggy and unstable "protection" software when safe practices are enough, and their success can be confirmed with occasional checkups?
Failing to catch a heart problem or cancer in time can be fatal, but I don't believe anyone has a private doctor who performs exploratory surgery on them every hour. And eating poisoned or infected food can be fatal, but I don't believe many people bother to send samples of every meal they eat to a lab for testing. If you don't take precautions like that when it's your life at stake, why do you think you need to do the equivalent for a mere computer?
Assuming that all the dumb publishers fuck off and die, how will the reports get paid? Will advertising really magically pay for everything?
How do you think the reporters get paid today? Does that 30p for your paper really magically pay for everything, or could it just possibly be the case that the adverts that cover up to 50% of every page inside a printed paper are actually the only thing making it profitable?
When print newspapers die, all that advertising money will start going to the online services that replace them instead. Might just pay for a reporter or two, don't you think?
I suspect that the outcome of this "review" will be my descendants owning this post long after I am dead.
No, no... that would grant legitimacy to the idea that you can give something away for free and still hold copyright on it.
I suspect that the outcome of this "review" will be to create perpetual copyright for commercial, proprietary products, while anything given away for no or negligible financial cost will be declared to enter the public domain automatically, to prevent unfair competition from F/OSS harming the software industry.
NO, NO, NO. Please, for the love of all that is good and holy, do not give dignity and legitimacy to the bastard concept of intellectual "property" by using it as a synonym for "work".
This is a fictional universe, or a work of fiction. It is not "an IP", because there is no such thing.
Remember - every time you use the term "IP", God patents a kitten.
I can go down to the store right now and purchase a complete laptop for $500. And that includes an LCD screen, profit for the dealer, profit for the manufacturer, etc.
But what it does not include is a top-end GPU of a sort that, if bought for a PC, would cost another $500 by itself.
Firearms are technology that have obvious bad uses which outnumber the good uses in the hands of police. Should we then disarm all police?
Funny you should say that. This is an article about events in Britain. You know what? Here in Britain, we can't disarm our police, because we never armed them in the first place.
There are specialist firearms squads, used in cases where the criminals are believed to be armed. But the average officer on patrol is armed with a baton and a radio - and that's it.
For some reason it works, by and large. Because the police aren't armed, and indeed most of the population isn't armed, the average criminal doesn't bother to carry a gun either. Here in Britain, when a cop kills or is killed, it's national headline news with calls for resignations and public enquiries. I gather it's not considered quite that newsworthy in the USA?
When guns are outlawed, most outlaws don't have guns either...
Well, I, for one, welcome our new CCTV-using overlords. As a member of "the people" in the country in question, I'd like to remind them that I could be of use in turning my neighbours in for suspicious activity...
Okay, tinfoil-hattery is easy. What isn't easy is arguing that anything that makes it easier to catch criminals is bad. I want to see a LOT more checks and balances in place to stop this system being misused. I want to see the data deleted within 24 hours if there is no CURRENT information that a given vehicle is involved in the violation of any laws. I want to see an extension to the Data Protection Act introducing heavier penalties for anyone caught using this system to track people's movements without an explicit warrant of some sort.
To the reading Americans: pause before you continue to post. Yes: our British government collects a lot of data on its citizens, and does so in a way that could potentially be abused. But we also have much better data protection laws than you Americans do. In our country, a company is not allowed to sell our personal information without our explicit permission. Last I heard, that wasn't the case in your glorious capitalist paradise.
Given the choice between being screwed by the government, and screwed by big business, you know what? I'll take the government, any day. At least that way I get to vote who I get screwed by.
Hang on, you're saying you believe that you would trust a FSF or OSDL-funded study to be impartial? You're saying that if the FSF funded a study comparing GNU to Windows, and the study came back saying "Windows saves you money in the long term, and Microsoft's Shared Source is as good as Free Software for 99% of users", that the FSF would then be happy to publish that study?
I don't think so, and I suspect you won't either, if you pause to think about it.
Nonprofits are not driven by motives which could be considered the mirrored opposite of commercial corporations. There is not the tremendous pressure to turn a profit (or some analog to monetary gain), and in your examples they're run by mere handfuls of individuals receiving very little compensation with only their reputations to fall back on.
But that doesn't make them impartial! All it means is that the profit motive is replaced by other motives. And there are plenty.
Think about how much time the major contributors to free software projects put into those projects. Hours, days, months, years of personal time, freely given. Time that could have been spent earning money, or doing charitable work, or even just spending time with their families. Time that was wasted, if it turns out that the software they produced is not actually going to help many people do anything at all.
When you reach middle age, and the end starts to heave into sight on the horizon of your life, you start to get very, very uncomfortable about the idea that you might have devoted your precious time to an unworthy cause.
Being so dismissive of FOSS organizations as to just say 'well, eveone's biased anyway' really doesn't seem like an acceptable attitude.
What's dismissive about that? Microsoft really does think that everyone ought to use Microsoft software, and the FSF really does think that everyone ought to use free software. Everyone is biased. Pretty much everyone does have a pre-existing investment, either of time or money, in one of the options. And human nature does dictate that when you have an investment in something, you are biased towards accepting studies that support it and disregarding studies that don't.
Java, while not as successful as Sun hoped (what is?) hardly "failed miserably." Prior to C#, what other options were there for object oriented, garbage collected high level languages?
Um... you mean apart from Smalltalk, Python, Dylan, Common Lisp, Objective Caml, and the dozens of other object-oriented garbage-collected high-level languages that existed before C#, and, in several cases, before Java either?
Not to mention Objective-C and C++ itself with the Boehm garbage collector...
Don't bother reading the comments, though. If you thought Slashdot was a mess of trolls and predictable in-jokes that stopped being funny five years ago, then TDWTF takes it to the next level.
As for the distinction between "banned for document creation" and "banned" and the availability of.doc-to-ODF converters, they seem pointless to me -- what about state employees who create documents and have accessibility needs?
Amazingly enough, the policy explicitly addresses this question. The answer is that their accessibility needs are prioritized over all other considerations: if MS Office is the software package that is most suitable for a state employee with disabilities, then that state employee continues to use MS Office, period.
The distinction between "banned for document creation" and "banned" is critical here. Since it is the former, and not the latter, then anyone who wants to use MS Office is welcome to do so, provided they release the documents they create in the ODF format. Hence, the existence of Office-to-ODF convertors would also be critical, since it permits this kind of use.
Nobody is going to get screwed. Nobody is going to be forced to use software that is not accessible to them. And anybody who prefers MS Office + conversion over a native ODF-supporting suite will be able to request that they be permitted to use that combination. What's the problem? Honestly, what on earth is wrong with this scenario?
Hello. While in my country we use the phrase "English major" to refer to officers of a particular rank and nationality in the British Army, I did read English at university, which I assume is the sense in which you were using the word.
You will observe that I'm also a techie. The two are not mutually exclusive, whatever you may like to think.
Slashdot Mirror
Great logic. By your rationale, Wikipedia should just turn off the ability to add new articles. After all, if it were popular enough, someone would have posted about it by now.
Way to miss the point. Since your reading comprehension skills appear to be lacking, let me explain in simpler language: the idea is that you shouldn't post about stuff you created yourself, because if it has any actual importance or popularity, other people who didn't create it themselves will want to post about it.
In other words, you shouldn't post vanity articles about yourself, or your band, or your fantasy universe, because if they matter, other people will write them.
It's not rocket science.
As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has some issues. As a model of how and where distributed intellect fails, it's almost shockingly comprehensive.
The first statement is true. The second is meaningless; it uses big words, but ultimately doesn't use them to say anything.
Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions.
This is simply untrue. Any persistent idiot who tries to obliterate genuine contributions will inevitably fall foul of some of the disciplinary policies that are enforced quite rigorously. For example, if someone undoes your changes more than three times in one day, they will receive a temporary ban; if they persist, or try to evade the ban, they may be permanently blocked. If you feel your contributions are defensible, it's trivial to ask others to support you, or to take the dispute to any number of dispute resolution systems with binding outcomes.
If I don't like it, why don't I go edit it myself? To which I reply: because I don't have time to babysit the Internet.
And? You don't have to babysit anything. You make your changes, and if they're worth having then there's a good chance that other people, who do have the free time (or choose to give up some other hobby, to make the time), will babysit them for you.
Tycho's just pissed off because his "contributions" (read: a silly hoax he was trying to spread) were obliterated without any need for persistence or idiots. The speed and efficiency with which ELoTH:TES was expunged from Wikipedia is a perfect demonstration of one of the wiki's advantages - by and large, it does manage to heal itself from vandalism. The only way Wikipedia could have failed would be if Tycho's "contribution" had not been identified as a hoax and swiftly deleted...
Actually, it's a "failed experiment".
Really? Would you be so kind as to identify exactly who it was who proved that it has failed, and when? Because they clearly forgot to tell anyone apart from you.
Summing up recent articles that made the news, we have:
Evidence that Wikipedia has flaws: first, "the articles on Jane Fonda and Bill Gates aren't very good"; second, "one single vandal inserted a single libelious statement into an article about someone obscure that nobody actually cares about, and the subject overreacted".
Evidence that Wikipedia is actually doing pretty damn well: the Nature study.
Evidence that Wikipedia is a failure: none.
Sun demonstrated a music program where you could add instruments to a song as tracks, and control their volume and balance by moving them in 3D in relation to your real life speakers. To make something softer, you could move it further "into" the monitor. To make it only audible on the left speaker, you could move it to the left side of the screen.
Who is supposed to find this useful? Every idiot understands about volume and balance controls, but I don't know many people who find it easy to physically position their speakers so that they get the proper surround-sound effects. Seems to me this is yet another example of a case where using a common abstraction - and one that everyone uses frequently on physical playback devices too - is much, much better than attempting to simulate something "real" that most people only ever do once, if at all.
This is the clause you use against those who claim "There is no Constitutionally guaranteed 'right to privacy'". Yes there is, the Founders just didn't bother to enumerate it.
Wait a minute - the Constitution doesn't mention eating babies, either! Wow, does that mean I have a Constitutionally guaranteed 'right to eat babies'?
Nintendo games have childish stories and themes as well, not just childish graphics. That's what turns people off --- you only want to save the goddamn princess so many times.
Right. Saving the goddamn princess.
Er... remind me again, which goddamn princess do you save in Metroid?
At least I remember the princess-saving bit of Killer7, that charming kiddie game. Um, that "M" on the box does stand for "mild"... doesn't it?
And thank God Nintendo never let anyone port nasty satanic titles like Resident Evil or Castlevania to their consoles. It's so nice to know that the Nintendo brand is a pure guarantee of games marketed solely at 8-year-olds, that no mother would ever worry about her precious children playing!
Not like Sony, whose consoles are filled with hideous and sick titles like "Katamari Damacy" where you go round squashing hookers and mutilating cows. And I gather the storyline in that game is so complex that only 500-year-old Zen masters have a hope of following it. Now that's mature gaming for you.
Wait, am I getting mixed up here...? Please, remind me which stereotype is which again?
Your use of language is as careless as that you attribute to Wikipedia's editors. No proposition is "indubitably true", and no proposition can be proven by asserting its truth without providing any sort of argument to support the assertion.
It is plausible that Britannica presents facts more concisely. It is even likely. But unless someone actually
- Defines a "fact", in the context of an encyclopedia article, in an objective and measurable way;
- Devises a methodology for assessing the ratio of facts (thus defined) to words;
- Applies this methodology to a statistically significant selection of articles from Wikipedia;
- Applies the same methodology to a comparable set of articles from Britannica; and
- Publishes their definitions, methodology, and results,
then you simply can not describe the proposition as "true". And even if such a study existed, you would have to be pretty damn sure that its methodology was unassailable before you could consider describing the proposition it supported as "indubitably true".Note that study only picked 42 science articles. This does not mean that britannica has that rate of errors for other diciplines.
Note also that science is one of the few disciplines in which, by and large, there tends only to be one current scientific theory which is clearly stated and can easily be summarised encyclopedically. It is much, much, much easier to write a good article on the quark than on Hamlet.
And as you'd expect, Wikipedia's article on Hamlet is not very good. On the positive side, I can actually read it - unlike the Britannica article, which it seems you have to pay for. (They did let me read the first paragraph; it starts by presenting a contested theory as though it were an undisputable fact, an unimpressive opening that does not encourage me to part with $69.95 to see the rest.)
And if you're one of the many people with "click to play" enabled for Flash, you get all the text hidden behind rectangles with play buttons on.
No, actually it detects Flashblock and falls back to plain text, so everything works perfectly - and your desire not to see Flash you didn't ask for is respected.
Mods: the parent is not "informative", it is spreading misinformation in an inflammatory way. Please mod it down accordingly.
Terms are developed and the good ones stick around and the bad ones disappear (as happened with "fortnight").
Um, what? You're claiming "fortnight" is a recent neologism that failed to gain widespread usage?
Just for your information, it has existed as a word for as long as any form of speech that most people would recognise as English, and now, over a millennium since it developed, it is still alive, healthy, and used regularly by myself and everyone I know.
"Coldcocked", on the other hand, means absolutely nothing to me, and (unlike "fortnight") it isn't in any of the dictionaries I have to hand, so I've no idea what it's supposed to mean.
I would be surprised if the aggressive adware/spyware programs agreed with your self-assessment. But, then, how would you know you had spyware without an automated scan?
Um, what about with a manual scan? I do much the same as the other guy: I run Win2k, and I don't keep any AV, anti-spyware, or firewall software running. Every once in a while, I download the latest version of Spybot or AVG and let it have a look. I've been doing this for years, and I can state with absolute certainty that unless it's happened within the last month, I have never been infected with any viruses or spyware.
Again, "ignorance is bliss" is not the same as "I know I have no problems."
Nor is paranoia. Why waste processor cycles on buggy and unstable "protection" software when safe practices are enough, and their success can be confirmed with occasional checkups?
Failing to catch a heart problem or cancer in time can be fatal, but I don't believe anyone has a private doctor who performs exploratory surgery on them every hour. And eating poisoned or infected food can be fatal, but I don't believe many people bother to send samples of every meal they eat to a lab for testing. If you don't take precautions like that when it's your life at stake, why do you think you need to do the equivalent for a mere computer?
So you are saying you don't need tabs at all and will be happy just with maximized windows and taskbar-on-top.
Only if you only ever have one application open at a time.
(Or one per desktop, if you're a virtual-desktop type.)
They've introduced some new editors recently that just aren't very good
Um, dude, this story was posted by CowboyNeal... I'm reasonably certain he's not new here.
Assuming that all the dumb publishers fuck off and die, how will the reports get paid? Will advertising really magically pay for everything?
How do you think the reporters get paid today? Does that 30p for your paper really magically pay for everything, or could it just possibly be the case that the adverts that cover up to 50% of every page inside a printed paper are actually the only thing making it profitable?
When print newspapers die, all that advertising money will start going to the online services that replace them instead. Might just pay for a reporter or two, don't you think?
I suspect that the outcome of this "review" will be my descendants owning this post long after I am dead.
No, no... that would grant legitimacy to the idea that you can give something away for free and still hold copyright on it.
I suspect that the outcome of this "review" will be to create perpetual copyright for commercial, proprietary products, while anything given away for no or negligible financial cost will be declared to enter the public domain automatically, to prevent unfair competition from F/OSS harming the software industry.
Not that I'm at all cynical or anything.
this is a fictional IP
NO, NO, NO. Please, for the love of all that is good and holy, do not give dignity and legitimacy to the bastard concept of intellectual "property" by using it as a synonym for "work".
This is a fictional universe, or a work of fiction. It is not "an IP", because there is no such thing.
Remember - every time you use the term "IP", God patents a kitten.
I can go down to the store right now and purchase a complete laptop for $500. And that includes an LCD screen, profit for the dealer, profit for the manufacturer, etc.
But what it does not include is a top-end GPU of a sort that, if bought for a PC, would cost another $500 by itself.
Guess what? The XBox 360 does.
Firearms are technology that have obvious bad uses which outnumber the good uses in the hands of police. Should we then disarm all police?
Funny you should say that. This is an article about events in Britain. You know what? Here in Britain, we can't disarm our police, because we never armed them in the first place.
There are specialist firearms squads, used in cases where the criminals are believed to be armed. But the average officer on patrol is armed with a baton and a radio - and that's it.
For some reason it works, by and large. Because the police aren't armed, and indeed most of the population isn't armed, the average criminal doesn't bother to carry a gun either. Here in Britain, when a cop kills or is killed, it's national headline news with calls for resignations and public enquiries. I gather it's not considered quite that newsworthy in the USA?
When guns are outlawed, most outlaws don't have guns either...
Well, I, for one, welcome our new CCTV-using overlords. As a member of "the people" in the country in question, I'd like to remind them that I could be of use in turning my neighbours in for suspicious activity...
Okay, tinfoil-hattery is easy. What isn't easy is arguing that anything that makes it easier to catch criminals is bad. I want to see a LOT more checks and balances in place to stop this system being misused. I want to see the data deleted within 24 hours if there is no CURRENT information that a given vehicle is involved in the violation of any laws. I want to see an extension to the Data Protection Act introducing heavier penalties for anyone caught using this system to track people's movements without an explicit warrant of some sort.
To the reading Americans: pause before you continue to post. Yes: our British government collects a lot of data on its citizens, and does so in a way that could potentially be abused. But we also have much better data protection laws than you Americans do. In our country, a company is not allowed to sell our personal information without our explicit permission. Last I heard, that wasn't the case in your glorious capitalist paradise.
Given the choice between being screwed by the government, and screwed by big business, you know what? I'll take the government, any day. At least that way I get to vote who I get screwed by.
I think many here would disagree.
Hang on, you're saying you believe that you would trust a FSF or OSDL-funded study to be impartial? You're saying that if the FSF funded a study comparing GNU to Windows, and the study came back saying "Windows saves you money in the long term, and Microsoft's Shared Source is as good as Free Software for 99% of users", that the FSF would then be happy to publish that study?
I don't think so, and I suspect you won't either, if you pause to think about it.
Nonprofits are not driven by motives which could be considered the mirrored opposite of commercial corporations. There is not the tremendous pressure to turn a profit (or some analog to monetary gain), and in your examples they're run by mere handfuls of individuals receiving very little compensation with only their reputations to fall back on.
But that doesn't make them impartial! All it means is that the profit motive is replaced by other motives. And there are plenty.
Think about how much time the major contributors to free software projects put into those projects. Hours, days, months, years of personal time, freely given. Time that could have been spent earning money, or doing charitable work, or even just spending time with their families. Time that was wasted, if it turns out that the software they produced is not actually going to help many people do anything at all.
When you reach middle age, and the end starts to heave into sight on the horizon of your life, you start to get very, very uncomfortable about the idea that you might have devoted your precious time to an unworthy cause.
Being so dismissive of FOSS organizations as to just say 'well, eveone's biased anyway' really doesn't seem like an acceptable attitude.
What's dismissive about that? Microsoft really does think that everyone ought to use Microsoft software, and the FSF really does think that everyone ought to use free software. Everyone is biased. Pretty much everyone does have a pre-existing investment, either of time or money, in one of the options. And human nature does dictate that when you have an investment in something, you are biased towards accepting studies that support it and disregarding studies that don't.
What's wrong with telling the truth?
Java, while not as successful as Sun hoped (what is?) hardly "failed miserably." Prior to C#, what other options were there for object oriented, garbage collected high level languages?
Um... you mean apart from Smalltalk, Python, Dylan, Common Lisp, Objective Caml, and the dozens of other object-oriented garbage-collected high-level languages that existed before C#, and, in several cases, before Java either?
Not to mention Objective-C and C++ itself with the Boehm garbage collector...
Don't bother reading the comments, though. If you thought Slashdot was a mess of trolls and predictable in-jokes that stopped being funny five years ago, then TDWTF takes it to the next level.
(And the real WTF is the forum software. [pi])
The principle is clearly that if you can do absolutely everything in 20 indecipherable characters, your code will never need to be maintained.
Then the future of programming must be HQ9+!
As for the distinction between "banned for document creation" and "banned" and the availability of .doc-to-ODF converters, they seem pointless to me -- what about state employees who create documents and have accessibility needs?
Amazingly enough, the policy explicitly addresses this question. The answer is that their accessibility needs are prioritized over all other considerations: if MS Office is the software package that is most suitable for a state employee with disabilities, then that state employee continues to use MS Office, period.
The distinction between "banned for document creation" and "banned" is critical here. Since it is the former, and not the latter, then anyone who wants to use MS Office is welcome to do so, provided they release the documents they create in the ODF format. Hence, the existence of Office-to-ODF convertors would also be critical, since it permits this kind of use.
Nobody is going to get screwed. Nobody is going to be forced to use software that is not accessible to them. And anybody who prefers MS Office + conversion over a native ODF-supporting suite will be able to request that they be permitted to use that combination. What's the problem? Honestly, what on earth is wrong with this scenario?
Hello. While in my country we use the phrase "English major" to refer to officers of a particular rank and nationality in the British Army, I did read English at university, which I assume is the sense in which you were using the word.
You will observe that I'm also a techie. The two are not mutually exclusive, whatever you may like to think.