Of course this is not a problem with OpenOffice per se, it's a problem of imperfect interoperability between OpenOffice and Word, i.e. the Word loader in OO is imperfect. But this shouldn't be a problem if all your documents are in OpenOffice format, and all your users use it - provided you don't need to exchange many documents with other organisations using Word. I have many large and complex documents created in OpenOffice (which is far nicer to use than Word), and because I have no need to ever load them in Word at all (they get distributed as PDF), the solution works well.
I've started playing around with the OpenOffice 2 beta and it's support for loading Word files has definitely improved (as has it's PDF export). Some of my older.doc files that I previously could not open in OO 1 I can now open perfectly. I hope it's good enough though to start being compelling enough to attract "converts". Converting to open formats costs money in the short term, of course, and will be a "painful" process for the world to go through, but the whole idea is that you save money in the long term, and ultimately it's necessary to move away from proprietary formats, because it's needlessly inefficient.
Of course not: Go to Start/Control Panel/System/Advanced, click "Settings" under "Startup and Recovery", then under "System Failure" uncheck "Automatically restart". Voila, you'll have blue screens again;)
And that is a great example of the kind of fuzzy, uninformed overly-sentimental pro-company feelings that no regular marking campaign can buy! Those donations are obviously worth every cent in PR value. (Now go research the other, unethical side of Microsoft, so you can perhaps have a more balanced view.)
The bitterness with Microsoft got old and stale 10 years ago.
Oh... and there I was under the impression that the anti-MS sentiment was about the fact that the company actually continues to behave unethically to this day, not about whether or not it was "fashionable" or "not fashionable" to be anti-MS... silly me. I didn't realise bashing Microsoft "was, like, so yesterday!"
Your post reminds me of how Nike successfully turned around rising negative sentiment against the company over their sweatshop labour practices by creating a clever youth-targeted ad campaign that manipulated young people into simply thinking it was no longer "cool" to whine about the sweatshop labour because the topic was, well, 'so yesterday'. Of course they never stopped the sweatshop labour practices.
Are we so divorced from reality that our opinions about serious, real-life problems are now mostly based on how "hot", "current" or "fashionable" a topic is, rather than on, you know, facts?
So Hubble proved something before 1953 that we still don't know today? Amazing... I guess they must have extremely recently dug up previously lost proofs of his.
I think you are confusing the relation of the Hubble Constant, and the calculation thereof, to equations which purport to predict whether or not the Universe is expanding infinitely.
We actually still don't know today if the Universe will contract or continue to expand.
You fail to understand in certain situations there is no clear "Right or Wrong", there are simply differing viewpoints. If your both arguments are factually correct, but viewpoints differ, why should one be downmodded?
This is difficult to respond to without actual examples, because it really depends on the particular situation... could you perhaps provide some?
That's a very telling notion of free speech you have there, partner.
OK, sorry, given the above sentence, I would definitely say that's both straw man and ad hominem. You know nothing about what my notion of "free speech" is, nor would you be able to provide (untwisted) evidence of what you imply is my notion of free speech if you were asked to.
Anyway, if you want to post what you refer to as "dissenting opinions" of the "hive-mind" (yeah right), and you really believe your opinions are informed, then why not pro-actively include in your post strong evidence to back up your claims. Right now you're basically saying that the people who read your posts are supposed to do the research and 'get back to you'. Do your own research, it's not my job to correct people after they make incorrect claims. If you really believe your opinions are well-grounded, then you surely must have done proper research already, and if you've done the research already, you should easily be able to provide evidence to back up your views when posting. Trust me, the "slashdot crows" respects (and moderates up) opinions that are amply backed up by proper references.
For example, if you want to post, say, that only a tiny minority of abortions are the result of rape, you could include in your post references to what that percentage is, proving to us just how miniscule it is. It may not convince many people, but it certainly would give a better impression and be less likely to be modded down.
(I suspect the truth is that most people just want the right to be ignorant, because they're too lazy to do any research themselves, and would rather just "absorb" opinions and "false memes" from their friends.)
So in other words, if I perceive the facts differently than you or the rest of the Slashdot hive-mind, I have no right to express my opinion?
Without looking at particular examples, I can't tell if you're just constructing a straw man here. Of course I believe that people may validly perceive a particular set of facts differently (based on their own past experiences and worldview etc.) but there is a VAST difference between "perceiving the facts differently" and "not even considering the facts". I'm talking about the latter. Show me some specific examples of what you believe to be unfair moderation, I'll tell you if I agree or not.
The fact is it's just not practical to spend time entertaining every single incorrect argument based on ignorance that one comes across. It also just isn't practical to spend time informing all those people by responding with facts, as you suggest I do, and in fact most of the time you do, instead of appreciating it, those people just flame you because they don't want to know the facts anyway. Moreover, it's ultimately not my 'job' to go around informing people - it's ultimately up to all people to inform themselves on any topic they are about to comment on. For example, I would never just make claims like, say, "the Iraq war was about oil" without actually first pro-actively researching this, digging up information about the oil deals that have come out of the war and which countries benefit and so on --- only then would I make claims about the topic, and if it turns out there were no 'oil deals' at all then I would adjust my view. Not just base it on what the people around me are saying (which sadly is where the vast majority of people get their "opinions"). I don't spout off about things I haven't researched, if I don't know anything about a topic I rather keep quiet.
Everyone is entitled to their own INFORMED opinions, but the problem is most people don't have informed opinions.
I think you missed the point. I've used MSDN a lot, and have for many years, and while there is a lot of documentation, it is frequently blatantly incorrect. The problem is so bad that I eventually also came to the conclusion that MS must be doing it on purpose, in order to slow down other ISVs. Microsoft actually has a huge fundamental "conflict of interest" - they are both an ISV for the Windows platform, and a major supplier of development tools to other ISVs for the Windows platform. In other words, they are supposed to make "quality development tools" for their own competition.
Therefore on your view, historical evolution is nor more of a hypothesis than I.D. is, because we lack the means to test it.
But we do have the means to determine whether proposed historical events were at least possible (or not) (and then likewise to see if that knowledge then allows us to make useful predictions).
As an example (if we go back in time a bit), one could hypothesise on, say, the mechanics of hybridisation in plants, derive tests for it, and prove that your hypothesis on the mechanics holds true. Then one can make predictions that have utilitarian value - e.g. "if this is true, we can make higher-yielding wheat by hybridising this and that and that". And we have in fact done these things, and virtually every single time you eat anything you are benefitting from known facts about these particular aspects of the mechanics of evolution.
This does not mean we can necessarily absolutely "prove" per se that any particular such events happened in the past - but we can prove that a particular explanation is at least possible, and eventually come to a conclusion that it's by far the most likely explanation for the past. And of course the ultimate test is when these theories demonstrate utility - e.g. building a better tomato plant. Such "proof" happens every day.
(Of course, at this point, there is still a lot of ongoing work where more is being learnt about the actual mechanics of the evolutionary process.)
Another example is selection - we may not be able to absolutely "prove", as such, that a particular species historically evolved along a particular path. But we can still hypothesise something called "selection", and derive tests to prove whether or not "selection" behaves as we think it does. And we did, and we proved it, and in fact our knowledge of selection has been used to create new vegetables, and to create "domestic dogs" from wolves and all the various kinds of domestic dogs. And EVERY SINGLE TIME anyone "tests" selection in a greenhouse, the theory's predictive value is again proved - it never fails. I have "faith" that I could show you selection in action, working as can be predicted from the theory, in a greenhouse or animal breeding facility - every time, without fail.
An analogy: We cannot "prove" that historically, before Newton existed, "f = ma" was really true*. But since Newton figured it out, we have definitely been able to use the knowledge to make useful predictions about e.g. whether structures that we build are going to hold up, and thus how to build structures that hold. And now everywhere you go in modern society, basically every building you use is built using "f = ma". It's proved its utility. Our entire society is built on it. * Yes I know f=ma is only an approximation that becomes less accurate as objects move closer to the speed of light --- I'm just oversimplifying for the sake of argument, it's close enough to still be useful in everyday society.
all people (well, all white men who owned property) were equally free
You've contradicted yourself. If Athens was not really a democracy because not everyone had the right to vote, then neither was the US. In fact, by your own definition of the modern "enlightened" form of democracy, the US has only really been a democracy since the 1960s. That makes it an extremely young democracy.
I'd like to see some hardline mullahs in Pakistan condemn terrorism
I guess you haven't really been following the news, but Pakistan authorities have rounded up more terrorists, Al Qaeda members etc. than almost any other country during this "war on terror".
- When muslims blow up Israeli or American women and children using suicide bombers, it's "terrorism", and is "wrong".
- When Israelis or Americans blow up Arab women and children using tanks and Apache helicopters, it's justifiable either as "self-defence" or "collateral damage", and is "right".
(Ie: Pro-War in Iraq) they will immediately mark a post as "Flamebait" or "Troll" when you may have a very valid arguement against the War
Hmm.. interesting, I assumed you had meant that slashdotters tend to be against the war, and that pro-war posts were being modded down. At least, that is the impression I had of slashdotters (on average). I've seen many anti-war posts get modded up. But perhaps I've based this perception as relative to the general US population, where (I suspect) pro-war sentiment is more widespread than slashdot, as opposed to, inversely, the more widespread anti-war sentiment in virtually every other country in the world. For a foreigner, slashdot may seem relatively pro-war, but compared to the general US population, it may seem relatively anti-war.
You are basically pushing the incorrect notion that "all opinions are equal", that all opinions should be treated with equal respect and never challenged, and that it is "biased" and "prejudiced" or even "offensive" to diss someone else's opinion if you believe it is wrong. This is Political Correctness run amok. People are NOT entitled to ignore facts and hold incorrect views, and they should be flamed if what they are saying is, in fact, incorrect, and does not take into cognisance all the facts.
For example, the astroturfers on/. keep pushing the (incorrect) idea that it represents a bias to seemingly apply "different standards" to different companies, based on the false implied premise that companies are like races, "all essentially equal and thus an unfair bias not to treat them equally" --- but this is nonsense because companies are not like races, companies really are very different from one another, and so it makes perfect sense to treat them differently. Many people here actually have a knowledge of what different companies have done over the years. It is not "biased" to thus dislike and distrust companies that really have behaved unethically for twenty odd years.
Likewise, the "differing views" you mention on the War on Iraq almost always ignore most of the facts that also happen to be kept out of the mainstream media. Nobody is entitled to hold particular views on a war if those views deliberately ignore significant facts.
OK true, "Troll" and "Flamebait" are the wrong moderations, sure, but that's only because there is no "-1 Ignorant" rating.
I'm tired of this "don't offend anyone" BS. People who speak rubbish should be flamed and offended.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course this is not a problem with OpenOffice per se, it's a problem of imperfect interoperability between OpenOffice and Word, i.e. the Word loader in OO is imperfect. But this shouldn't be a problem if all your documents are in OpenOffice format, and all your users use it - provided you don't need to exchange many documents with other organisations using Word. I have many large and complex documents created in OpenOffice (which is far nicer to use than Word), and because I have no need to ever load them in Word at all (they get distributed as PDF), the solution works well.
I've started playing around with the OpenOffice 2 beta and it's support for loading Word files has definitely improved (as has it's PDF export). Some of my older .doc files that I previously could not open in OO 1 I can now open perfectly. I hope it's good enough though to start being compelling enough to attract "converts". Converting to open formats costs money in the short term, of course, and will be a "painful" process for the world to go through, but the whole idea is that you save money in the long term, and ultimately it's necessary to move away from proprietary formats, because it's needlessly inefficient.
I don't think I've *ever* gotten a blue screen.
Of course not: Go to Start/Control Panel/System/Advanced, click "Settings" under "Startup and Recovery", then under "System Failure" uncheck "Automatically restart". Voila, you'll have blue screens again ;)
And that is a great example of the kind of fuzzy, uninformed overly-sentimental pro-company feelings that no regular marking campaign can buy! Those donations are obviously worth every cent in PR value. (Now go research the other, unethical side of Microsoft, so you can perhaps have a more balanced view.)
The bitterness with Microsoft got old and stale 10 years ago.
Oh ... and there I was under the impression that the anti-MS sentiment was about the fact that the company actually continues to behave unethically to this day, not about whether or not it was "fashionable" or "not fashionable" to be anti-MS ... silly me. I didn't realise bashing Microsoft "was, like, so yesterday!"
Your post reminds me of how Nike successfully turned around rising negative sentiment against the company over their sweatshop labour practices by creating a clever youth-targeted ad campaign that manipulated young people into simply thinking it was no longer "cool" to whine about the sweatshop labour because the topic was, well, 'so yesterday'. Of course they never stopped the sweatshop labour practices.
Are we so divorced from reality that our opinions about serious, real-life problems are now mostly based on how "hot", "current" or "fashionable" a topic is, rather than on, you know, facts?
How is the parent flamebait? It's a perfectly valid point.
So Hubble proved something before 1953 that we still don't know today? Amazing ... I guess they must have extremely recently dug up previously lost proofs of his.
I think you are confusing the relation of the Hubble Constant, and the calculation thereof, to equations which purport to predict whether or not the Universe is expanding infinitely.
We actually still don't know today if the Universe will contract or continue to expand.
You fail to understand in certain situations there is no clear "Right or Wrong", there are simply differing viewpoints. If your both arguments are factually correct, but viewpoints differ, why should one be downmodded?
This is difficult to respond to without actual examples, because it really depends on the particular situation ... could you perhaps provide some?
That's a very telling notion of free speech you have there, partner.
OK, sorry, given the above sentence, I would definitely say that's both straw man and ad hominem. You know nothing about what my notion of "free speech" is, nor would you be able to provide (untwisted) evidence of what you imply is my notion of free speech if you were asked to.
Anyway, if you want to post what you refer to as "dissenting opinions" of the "hive-mind" (yeah right), and you really believe your opinions are informed, then why not pro-actively include in your post strong evidence to back up your claims. Right now you're basically saying that the people who read your posts are supposed to do the research and 'get back to you'. Do your own research, it's not my job to correct people after they make incorrect claims. If you really believe your opinions are well-grounded, then you surely must have done proper research already, and if you've done the research already, you should easily be able to provide evidence to back up your views when posting. Trust me, the "slashdot crows" respects (and moderates up) opinions that are amply backed up by proper references.
For example, if you want to post, say, that only a tiny minority of abortions are the result of rape, you could include in your post references to what that percentage is, proving to us just how miniscule it is. It may not convince many people, but it certainly would give a better impression and be less likely to be modded down.
(I suspect the truth is that most people just want the right to be ignorant, because they're too lazy to do any research themselves, and would rather just "absorb" opinions and "false memes" from their friends.)
So in other words, if I perceive the facts differently than you or the rest of the Slashdot hive-mind, I have no right to express my opinion?
Without looking at particular examples, I can't tell if you're just constructing a straw man here. Of course I believe that people may validly perceive a particular set of facts differently (based on their own past experiences and worldview etc.) but there is a VAST difference between "perceiving the facts differently" and "not even considering the facts". I'm talking about the latter. Show me some specific examples of what you believe to be unfair moderation, I'll tell you if I agree or not.
The fact is it's just not practical to spend time entertaining every single incorrect argument based on ignorance that one comes across. It also just isn't practical to spend time informing all those people by responding with facts, as you suggest I do, and in fact most of the time you do, instead of appreciating it, those people just flame you because they don't want to know the facts anyway. Moreover, it's ultimately not my 'job' to go around informing people - it's ultimately up to all people to inform themselves on any topic they are about to comment on. For example, I would never just make claims like, say, "the Iraq war was about oil" without actually first pro-actively researching this, digging up information about the oil deals that have come out of the war and which countries benefit and so on --- only then would I make claims about the topic, and if it turns out there were no 'oil deals' at all then I would adjust my view. Not just base it on what the people around me are saying (which sadly is where the vast majority of people get their "opinions"). I don't spout off about things I haven't researched, if I don't know anything about a topic I rather keep quiet.
Everyone is entitled to their own INFORMED opinions, but the problem is most people don't have informed opinions.
I think you missed the point. I've used MSDN a lot, and have for many years, and while there is a lot of documentation, it is frequently blatantly incorrect. The problem is so bad that I eventually also came to the conclusion that MS must be doing it on purpose, in order to slow down other ISVs. Microsoft actually has a huge fundamental "conflict of interest" - they are both an ISV for the Windows platform, and a major supplier of development tools to other ISVs for the Windows platform. In other words, they are supposed to make "quality development tools" for their own competition.
An infinite universe doesn't imply an infinite number of 'chances' to produce our current universe.
.. as if to a child: "An infinite universe implies an infinite number of 'chances' to produce life on one of its planets somewhere."
.. but it is still not known if the Universe will expand indefinitely.
Therefore on your view, historical evolution is nor more of a hypothesis than I.D. is, because we lack the means to test it.
But we do have the means to determine whether proposed historical events were at least possible (or not) (and then likewise to see if that knowledge then allows us to make useful predictions).
As an example (if we go back in time a bit), one could hypothesise on, say, the mechanics of hybridisation in plants, derive tests for it, and prove that your hypothesis on the mechanics holds true. Then one can make predictions that have utilitarian value - e.g. "if this is true, we can make higher-yielding wheat by hybridising this and that and that". And we have in fact done these things, and virtually every single time you eat anything you are benefitting from known facts about these particular aspects of the mechanics of evolution.
This does not mean we can necessarily absolutely "prove" per se that any particular such events happened in the past - but we can prove that a particular explanation is at least possible, and eventually come to a conclusion that it's by far the most likely explanation for the past. And of course the ultimate test is when these theories demonstrate utility - e.g. building a better tomato plant. Such "proof" happens every day.
(Of course, at this point, there is still a lot of ongoing work where more is being learnt about the actual mechanics of the evolutionary process.)
Another example is selection - we may not be able to absolutely "prove", as such, that a particular species historically evolved along a particular path. But we can still hypothesise something called "selection", and derive tests to prove whether or not "selection" behaves as we think it does. And we did, and we proved it, and in fact our knowledge of selection has been used to create new vegetables, and to create "domestic dogs" from wolves and all the various kinds of domestic dogs. And EVERY SINGLE TIME anyone "tests" selection in a greenhouse, the theory's predictive value is again proved - it never fails. I have "faith" that I could show you selection in action, working as can be predicted from the theory, in a greenhouse or animal breeding facility - every time, without fail.
An analogy: We cannot "prove" that historically, before Newton existed, "f = ma" was really true*. But since Newton figured it out, we have definitely been able to use the knowledge to make useful predictions about e.g. whether structures that we build are going to hold up, and thus how to build structures that hold. And now everywhere you go in modern society, basically every building you use is built using "f = ma". It's proved its utility. Our entire society is built on it. * Yes I know f=ma is only an approximation that becomes less accurate as objects move closer to the speed of light --- I'm just oversimplifying for the sake of argument, it's close enough to still be useful in everyday society.
Oh God, someone else whose entire knowledge of philosophy is derived from "The Matrix". "Welcome to Philosophy 101", etc.
all people (well, all white men who owned property) were equally free
You've contradicted yourself. If Athens was not really a democracy because not everyone had the right to vote, then neither was the US. In fact, by your own definition of the modern "enlightened" form of democracy, the US has only really been a democracy since the 1960s. That makes it an extremely young democracy.
Well, bigwavejas, I guess that proves your point - somebody (incorrectly) assumed my post was pro-war and modded me down!
I'd like to see some hardline mullahs in Pakistan condemn terrorism
I guess you haven't really been following the news, but Pakistan authorities have rounded up more terrorists, Al Qaeda members etc. than almost any other country during this "war on terror".
So just to make sure I understand:
- When muslims blow up Israeli or American women and children using suicide bombers, it's "terrorism", and is "wrong".
- When Israelis or Americans blow up Arab women and children using tanks and Apache helicopters, it's justifiable either as "self-defence" or "collateral damage", and is "right".
OK, I think I got it, thanks.
Moderators sometimes use "-1 Flamebait" for non-flamebait posts simply because there is no "-1 Ignorant" option.
(Ie: Pro-War in Iraq) they will immediately mark a post as "Flamebait" or "Troll" when you may have a very valid arguement against the War
Hmm .. interesting, I assumed you had meant that slashdotters tend to be against the war, and that pro-war posts were being modded down. At least, that is the impression I had of slashdotters (on average). I've seen many anti-war posts get modded up. But perhaps I've based this perception as relative to the general US population, where (I suspect) pro-war sentiment is more widespread than slashdot, as opposed to, inversely, the more widespread anti-war sentiment in virtually every other country in the world. For a foreigner, slashdot may seem relatively pro-war, but compared to the general US population, it may seem relatively anti-war.
You are basically pushing the incorrect notion that "all opinions are equal", that all opinions should be treated with equal respect and never challenged, and that it is "biased" and "prejudiced" or even "offensive" to diss someone else's opinion if you believe it is wrong. This is Political Correctness run amok. People are NOT entitled to ignore facts and hold incorrect views, and they should be flamed if what they are saying is, in fact, incorrect, and does not take into cognisance all the facts.
For example, the astroturfers on /. keep pushing the (incorrect) idea that it represents a bias to seemingly apply "different standards" to different companies, based on the false implied premise that companies are like races, "all essentially equal and thus an unfair bias not to treat them equally" --- but this is nonsense because companies are not like races, companies really are very different from one another, and so it makes perfect sense to treat them differently. Many people here actually have a knowledge of what different companies have done over the years. It is not "biased" to thus dislike and distrust companies that really have behaved unethically for twenty odd years.
Likewise, the "differing views" you mention on the War on Iraq almost always ignore most of the facts that also happen to be kept out of the mainstream media. Nobody is entitled to hold particular views on a war if those views deliberately ignore significant facts.
OK true, "Troll" and "Flamebait" are the wrong moderations, sure, but that's only because there is no "-1 Ignorant" rating.
I'm tired of this "don't offend anyone" BS. People who speak rubbish should be flamed and offended.
What if it gives something meaningful to humanity, but it will also bring someone to some harm if released - the Windows source code, for example
I agree, it will cause great harm to humanity if the Windows source code is released ;)
Straw man rhetoric.
China unpegged the Yuan a couple weeks back ... it has (of course) begun appreciating already ... eventually this should help rein in the deficit.
How long until we start seeing little icons saying "this site only works with Google Firefox"?
With IE still having close to 90% market share, can anyone really afford to try such a thing? I don't think even Google could.