It seems to me that doing so would also require restrictions on ever printing the name of an informant in other publicly available documents. Probably some 1st amendment issues there...
So you're saying the US Founders were aware of the concept and rejected it?
No, I'm not.
If I was saying "the US Founders were aware of the concept and rejected it", I would say, "the US Founders were aware of the concept and rejected it".
Maybe in your country but that's not the theory of rights on which this one was based.
No, everywhere on earth that property rights exist in fact, they were created by fiat. Some people hold to myths that certain sets of "rights" were created by divine fiat, or at least have used that argument to derail debate about the merits of their contention that such rights should be imposed by human fiat, but nevertheless, whatever the myth justifying that fiat, real rights, in property or otherwise, exist, or not, through human fiat.
And yet, that's exactly what the aim of the concept is. Such as we now allow patents on "processes". Such as the "one click button" to buy something. That's an idea, not an expression of an idea.
No, its an application of an idea. No one stops you from sharing an idea, which exists only in intellectu. Patent law doesn't even restrict communicating the idea, which is why, for instance, many patented algorithms are described in intimate detail in many publications, within the law. The law allows the holder of the patent to control application of the idea, not the idea.
Somehow, I just knew Indians would end up being drug into this one at some point. They always are. Usually by people who've never so much as set foot on a single reservation. But that's one for another day.
Yes, drive by insinuations are much better...
Interesting, though, that'd you bring up societies that believe "property interests" in land are transient and revert to the commons in case of disuse, death, or other such. I'm not sure what you think you're arguing here.
Exactly what I said I was arguing there: "most societies distinguish quite strongly between the kind of rights associated with real property and those associated with tangible personal property."
You seem to think "property" implies a very narrow set of rights, and you also seem to confuse "should" with "can", and therefore argue that things you think should not have the set of rights you mistakenly associate with "property" therefore cannot be treated "as property".
If copyright and patent were to be treated as, say, the general Amerind language-culture supergroup (excluding for now the Innuit who lie outside my expertise... also, I should step lightly around Mesoamerica, I'm not that familiar) treated land, then you're arguing against the concept of "intellectual property".
No, actually, I wouldn't, but then, I didn't say that, anyway. What I said was that most societies, while not going to the extremes of some Native American groups or even the somewhat more moderate stance of Georgists, distinguish sharply between the exclusive rights associated with tangible personal property and those associated with real property. They also, if they recognize intangible personal property as most modern societies do, distinguish sharply between the rights associated with tangible personal property and various classes of intangible personal property.
That something is a class of property does not mean, for instance, that rights in it have unlimited duration. Therefore, the argument that exclusive rights in a particular thing should not last forever is not an argument that thing should not (much less "cannot") be treated as property.
Only an argument that no exclusive rights should exist in a thing is an argument that it should not be "property". And only an argument that no exclusive rights can exist in a thing is an argument that it can not be treated as "property".
They are both laptop computers designed for students.
Well, no. OLPC is an education project that includes laptops for students, school servers, satellite uplinks and access time, custom content and software (including things like development of fonts for some of the languages of target areas that have little to no existing support) designed to meet educational needs in target communities, content distribution systems, etc., all designed to work together.
The ClassmatePC is a laptop designed for students.
More books. How cheaply can you print a book? $2? 50 books per child?
Maybe, if its a small book. Still, printing costs aren't the only costs. It costs more to distribute 50 books than one laptop. And the books have a lot more limited functionality. And, if you get the laptops and the associated servers and satellite downlink stations from OLPC, you can use the laptops to eliminate both the printing costs and much of the distribution cost of textbooks. And distribution of large numbers of books in places that don't have great roads is probably a far more significant cost than the printing cost.
More teachers. 6 months teacher's salary per child, or maybe a month per child most places.
Which might be useful, if the main problem was a lack of teachers.
The laptops and the other associated products and services that are part of the OLPC system are infrastructure, particularly, they are communication infrastructure, among their other functions. So the laptops are not an alternative to improving infrastructure, they are a component of improving infrastructure.
The OLPC project (unlike things like the ClassmatePC) is not just about hardware. Its about communication, infrastructure, content, learning methods, content distribution, etc. The laptops are just the most visible, end-user component of the project.
Microsoft would appeal for protection from harassment through petty lawsuits against them, and almost any judge would recognize that the interest of justice would not be served by a mass of frivolous lawsuits.
At best, assuming the individual suits were not entirely baseless, Microsoft might get the suits combined into one huge single suit. Which may be more convenient for them, but doesn't make things harder for the Open Source challengers. If anything, it reduces the resource imbalance.
And Microsoft's claims are about patents, not copyright or trademarks. Remember, the term "intellectual property" is nothing more than a fiction designed to confuse people about the patent/copyright/trademark trio.
Actually, being about 60% of the way through law school, I'm quite aware that "intellectual property" is a category of property that is no more a "fiction" than, say, "personal property". Like "personal property" (which includes very different things like "tangible personal property" and "intangible personal property", the latter of which includes "intellectual property" among other things), "intellectual property" includes different components controlled by different specific statutory provisions, but also with commonalities among them that make for a useful analytical category.
The whole "intellectual property is a fiction cooked up to confuse people" idea is one of those self-serving myths served up by people who are more concerned with selling an ideological point of view on the issue than dealing with reality.
The FBI/Attorney Generals are probably already monitoring their behaviors and provided their IPs or other identifying information to MySpace, making it easy to track and report on their myspace habits.
And how does the FBI no which public wireless hotspot a sex offender is accessing the internet through?
Step 1 starts with "Provide a digital signing key on a dongle" - any idea how to do that when your site has 150+ million accounts?
You obviously stopped reading after those 7 words of that sentence: it wasn't the site operator required to do that. It was the government, mandating the controls, that would do that.
The only thing the site would have to do is interface with the government ID system and provide the required email notifications and process the responses.
I figure if the government is going to require the verification, its going to need to provide the common infrastructure to enable it.
Is there actually a legal way to tell them to "put up or shut up"?
Sort of: someone who would be guilty of infringement if the patent claims Microsoft is asserting were true and has reasonable apprehension of a lawsuit could themselves bring suit for declaratory judgement.
It also may be possible that a suit could be brought for defamation by someone adversely affected by the claims; that would be a harder case to advance, but carries the possibility of actual damages.
Re:Does this "challenge" have any legal significan
on
Microsoft, Sue Me First
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· Score: 4, Informative
I remember stories about McDonalds and Disney taking aggressive action to defend their exclusive rights even against small-time infringers with the justification that refraining to sue could have been construed as abandoning their trademark. So, if microsoft does not sue these people, would it be tantamount to abandoning their right to sue later, or is it all just a bunch of meaningless hot air?
IANAL, and you shouldn't rely on this as legal advice, YMMV, etc.:
It might affect their ability to sue the particular people for reasons unrelated to abandonment (statutes of limitations, laches, and various estoppel theories), especially if it can be shown that Microsoft knew about the particular facts that it would allege are violations by the particular users early on and didn't act.
It probably won't affect their ability to sue other people, though.
But trademarks are very different from copyrights, and there is nothing in copyright similar to abandoning a trademark. Trademarks are protected based largely on use, copyrights are not.
I enjoy reading the repeated calls for age verification on social networking sites. Never does anyone making this demand suggest a feasible solution, they just pound their shoes on the table and say, "make it happen!" Even better are the calls for requiring parental permission for minors. Think for about 30 seconds about how one might accomplish that feat.
(1) Provide a digital signing key on a dongle, with an associated PIN to access it in person at a government agency with identification requirements similar to those needed to get a driver's license or passport (including, for minors, requiring their their parents or guardinas already have registered for the system, have a key, and be present and registered as linked to the minor's record.) Provide stern warnings that people will strictly liable for anything digitally signed with their key. Require those getting the ID key to provide a current email address for notifications. Publish open specification for the supporting encryption and signing software (or use existing standards), and provide a reference implementation for common platforms free (Free would be better, of course) if not using an existing standard with open specification and free implementations.
(2) Require users of sites where those kinds of restrictions you discuss are desired to identify themselves using their key by signing a challenge to confirm their identity.
(3) Send notification to the parents when the minor signs up using the key and require the parent to return an authorization for the minor to get whatever access is desired to be restricted.
That took me less than 30 seconds to think up, though longer to type. I'm sure there are better ways to do it.
I'm glad the parent comment got modded insightful. If you have a common name doing linkings like this could easily create some incredible horror stories.
Yeah. My mother in law has one of the most common names in the Western Hemisphere, and, unsurprisingly, has fun every time she flies because her name matches one listed on a security watchlist.
No desks? Folding stand. If the Screen and CPU are seperate units, you can have a small portable computer, with a box to keep dust and dirt out of it while not in use. Use said box as a stand while in use to keep it off the ground. Really if desks are the problem then these kids probably don't need computers, they need basic infrastructure.
Desktops are great, if they are going to be used in one place. Not so great to replace books and school supplies for homework, etc.
I think the only reason everyone is hooked on laptop is because it sounds catchy. What is really needed is a small, very low cost, fairly durable (especially for dust and debris) portable computer.
Which is, exactly, what the laptop is (though not just dust, but water is a concern, which is why the XO is designed to survive immersion). Making it into separate components doesn't make it any more easily portable, more easily usable, or more durable. It might make it less expensive at the expense of those other concerns.
This isn't a product of the corporate world. However, in this case the OLPC people seem ideologically opposed to providing the laptops outside of the 3rd world children market they're aiming at.
I don't think they are ideologically opposed to it, its just outside of the core mission, and takes resources to set up. They've constantly said they are interested in looking into it once things are further along on their core mission, but that it isn't a current priority.
If it works, there is no reason why they cant make desktop systems using the same code, optimised, open source components. Imagine an OLPC desktop with 512MB RAM and a hard drive, and perhaps an 800MHz chip. It could potentially change home desktop computing in developing worlds forever.
Well, certainly, there will be a huge instant market for compatible, more powerful machines, in places using the OLPC. But its even bigger than that: the OLPC also involves a ground up rethink of security model and software delivery and user interaction for massive organizations. It could easily shake up the enterprise if it proves successful, and if it does that, the Windows monopoly that Intel (though it has to compete with AMD) largely gets a free ride on could be in trouble.
A new model, with its premier implementation completely open source and tied to Linux, which isn't as tied to x86 as Windows is, would be a big risk for Intel. It might not hurt them: they are well positioned, after all, to compete making processors and chipsets for Linux boxes, after all. But it would make life more interesting and less predictable than life with the Windows monopoly.
Well a conventional power system with the same precautions would be equally hard to take down, but without the expense of topping off cryogenic coolant or the hassle of cooling-related downtime.
Isn't the point that a conventional power system with the same precaution would suffer too much transmission loss to make it viable?
(Anyhow, it seems to me that this just means that terrorists, if they want to take down the grid, attack closer to the generators rather than in the cities where the power is being used. The grid doesn't do you much good if there isn't enough juice pumped into it.)
That's rich -- toss in a reference to terrorism into the bid, and you get federal dollars for your project.
Hey, stop whining and find a way to make it work for good. Like come up with an excuse that free 100MB/s symmetric network connections to every home in America help fight terrorism.
Ah, yes. Unless the laptop in question has the mega resolution of the modern desktop - it's not useable. The fact that 800x400 (or 640x480) worked quite well for thousands (millions?) of PCs for years is simply irrelevant.
Those millions of PCs were not being marketed as a platform for reading to replace the paper books and the associated distribution costs in third-world countries, replacing them with electronic distribution and duplication. That's part of the vision of the OLPC, if not Classmate.
The role that the OLPC is aimed it is not the role that computers were used in when they first started to be used widely in US schools, so comparing them with, say, those computers isn't all that reasonable. The features ought to be viewed in light of the intended use. For reading in place of books, both the reflective mode and its high resolution are key features.
Look, since you seem to label anyone who doesn't agree with your irrational hatred and fear of all things wikipedian as a "wikicultist", I'm not at all surprised that you have decided that I'm one.
But, you know, for someone who bashes other people for simply labelling people who disagree with them as "trolls" or similar, you sure seem to be free with tossing out "wikicultist" or "wikitroll" anytime someone says something about wikipedia that you don't agree with, or mods a post that discusses wikipedia in a way you don't agree with.
You don't realize that Word documents will be formatted depending on the local printer, do you?
On screen formatting in MS Office programs (I've noticed this more in Excel than Word) varies considerably based on View Zoom as well. I'm not sure if this is the same in OOo (it may be, since I suspect at least part of it is how Windows renders fonts.)
You do NOT have absolute control over the look of your.doc when you email it out. For the purposes you listed there is PDF, and OO.org has native support for it, while MS Office does not (up to 2003 at least, dunno about 2007).
Office has had support to print to its own "document image" format and TIFF since 2003 or earlier, and has a free-downloadable plugin for XPS and PDF in 2007. But, yeah, sharing important business documents in word-processor format rather print-equivalent format, unless you are working on jointly editing drafts, is a bad idea.
But OpenOffice.org Writer is stunningly better than Microsoft Word, in many, many ways, unless you're one of those people that simply must have Word's outline view. Better bullets and numbering, better support for templates, support for conditional formatting, and better support for master documents are just a few of reasons why I use OpenOffice.org Writer instead of Word for my writing projects, despite having access to both at home.
First, none of those is really a stunning advantage. Its a few areas of small advantages. Second, Outline view isn't the only area Word was held up as the winner, in the article you point to. And, of course, the comparison there is between OOo 2.0 and Office 2003, so its a bit dated.
The reason it flies now is most people do not really pay full price for office and do not realize microsoft plans to put office on a rental basis with subscription fees.
I realize Microsoft plans that. I still bought Office Home & Student 2007. Heck, I realized that when I bought Office 2003. I think I'd heard talk of it about when I got Office 97 (I skipped 2000). Microsoft has planned software as service for as long as the internet has been popular. When Microsoft decides to put Office on a rental basis, I certainly won't buy that version. And I've already got OOo installed alongside Office on my computers at home.
And I find OOo about as nice to use as Office 97-2003, but not nearly as nice as 2007. And, since I've got the money, and need to use an office suite a lot at home, I'm willing to pay for 2007.
(I might switch for other reasons too, as I'm leaning toward switching over to MacOS and/or Linux as the main OS at home, but I'm not there yet, though I keep toying with different Linux distros on my main computer, which is dual boot WinXP and, right now, Fedora. Since I expect to see Microsoft Office for Linux about the time of Duke Nukem Forever, I expect that if I switch to Linux I'll also switch to OOo.)
Well...a couple hundred bucks for most home users is a lot just to do word processing, spreadsheets, etc. Compare that to OpenOffice, which is free.
Word is often bundled with Windows now, and—and, look, I'm pro-OSS—Office Home and Student 2007 has a lot more polish than OpenOffice.org, and OneNote is, at least to me, a big plus.
I'd say it's more likely that most users don't know the difference between Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, don't know there are alternatives, and assume that "free" means cheap and worthless.
I agree that the first two, though I don't think the last is a big factor. OTOH, the reason they don't know is that the competition gets little attention because its got no compelling non-price selling point. Plus, a couple hundred dollars every few years isn't that much money for most home users.
It's different for businesses, but, if we assume there is an exact clone of Office which is completely free...I think most people would switch rather than to continually pay Microsoft for new licenses and upgrades which are practically forced.
sure they would. But an "exact clone of Office" isn't what the competition is. What are available are basically similar products, with some adaptation curve, missing some things that MS Office users find important, but with some advantages in other areas that tend not be compelling selling points.
With Microsoft sitting in a dominant position, people aren't going to change in droves unless Microsoft tries to push the price outrageously high, or some competitor with a compelling differentiation by features comes out. I think the FOSS community can do that, quite easily: it doesn't lack skill or creativity. OTOH, people have to get out of the "how do we duplicate Office" mindset, and think beyond Office.
Yeah, but then how am I supposed to know the bias of whatever random sites get linked to as sources?
That depends on the site. If you really feel like you can't evaluate the quality of the source, then you treat the information, just as an unsourced bit, as "pulled out of the butt of some random guy on the internet".
The reason it's so useful to refer to things like the Times or the Economist or Ha'aretz or even the New York fucking Post is because you've established, through familiarity, what perspective your source brings to the subject.
Yeah, because newspapers mostly cover breaking news where you can't go for verifiability, having a minimal and known bias (though most have considerable variability from article to article, editor to editor, and reporter to reporter), it's nice to have that. And, you know, for news, that's your main ability to evaluate claims.
Wikipedia, while it may have articles on current events topics, is not a newspaper. Most of its sources on current events topics (except for background) are newspapers, and all the advantages they have come with that. For background info, at least they source the information: many newspapers just, if they report background at all, do so in general terms, as if it was unquestioned fact, and without reporting where they got the information.
(Wikipedia often fails to source things, too, but as a matter of policy it requires sources.)
Of course, Wikipedia articles have edit trails and are often linked to non-anonymous users, whose other edits you can quickly access and make a judgement about direction and degree of bias.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, 5th and 6th Amendment issues.
No, I'm not.
If I was saying "the US Founders were aware of the concept and rejected it", I would say, "the US Founders were aware of the concept and rejected it".
No, everywhere on earth that property rights exist in fact, they were created by fiat. Some people hold to myths that certain sets of "rights" were created by divine fiat, or at least have used that argument to derail debate about the merits of their contention that such rights should be imposed by human fiat, but nevertheless, whatever the myth justifying that fiat, real rights, in property or otherwise, exist, or not, through human fiat.
No, its an application of an idea. No one stops you from sharing an idea, which exists only in intellectu. Patent law doesn't even restrict communicating the idea, which is why, for instance, many patented algorithms are described in intimate detail in many publications, within the law. The law allows the holder of the patent to control application of the idea, not the idea.
Yes, drive by insinuations are much better...
Exactly what I said I was arguing there: "most societies distinguish quite strongly between the kind of rights associated with real property and those associated with tangible personal property."
You seem to think "property" implies a very narrow set of rights, and you also seem to confuse "should" with "can", and therefore argue that things you think should not have the set of rights you mistakenly associate with "property" therefore cannot be treated "as property".
No, actually, I wouldn't, but then, I didn't say that, anyway. What I said was that most societies, while not going to the extremes of some Native American groups or even the somewhat more moderate stance of Georgists, distinguish sharply between the exclusive rights associated with tangible personal property and those associated with real property. They also, if they recognize intangible personal property as most modern societies do, distinguish sharply between the rights associated with tangible personal property and various classes of intangible personal property.
That something is a class of property does not mean, for instance, that rights in it have unlimited duration. Therefore, the argument that exclusive rights in a particular thing should not last forever is not an argument that thing should not (much less "cannot") be treated as property.
Only an argument that no exclusive rights should exist in a thing is an argument that it should not be "property". And only an argument that no exclusive rights can exist in a thing is an argument that it can not be treated as "property".
Well, no. OLPC is an education project that includes laptops for students, school servers, satellite uplinks and access time, custom content and software (including things like development of fonts for some of the languages of target areas that have little to no existing support) designed to meet educational needs in target communities, content distribution systems, etc., all designed to work together.
The ClassmatePC is a laptop designed for students.
Maybe, if its a small book. Still, printing costs aren't the only costs. It costs more to distribute 50 books than one laptop. And the books have a lot more limited functionality. And, if you get the laptops and the associated servers and satellite downlink stations from OLPC, you can use the laptops to eliminate both the printing costs and much of the distribution cost of textbooks. And distribution of large numbers of books in places that don't have great roads is probably a far more significant cost than the printing cost.
Which might be useful, if the main problem was a lack of teachers.
The laptops and the other associated products and services that are part of the OLPC system are infrastructure, particularly, they are communication infrastructure, among their other functions. So the laptops are not an alternative to improving infrastructure, they are a component of improving infrastructure.
The OLPC project (unlike things like the ClassmatePC) is not just about hardware. Its about communication, infrastructure, content, learning methods, content distribution, etc. The laptops are just the most visible, end-user component of the project.
Nothing but the law of "I'd like to have the most effective advocacy possible for my position."
At best, assuming the individual suits were not entirely baseless, Microsoft might get the suits combined into one huge single suit. Which may be more convenient for them, but doesn't make things harder for the Open Source challengers. If anything, it reduces the resource imbalance.
Actually, being about 60% of the way through law school, I'm quite aware that "intellectual property" is a category of property that is no more a "fiction" than, say, "personal property". Like "personal property" (which includes very different things like "tangible personal property" and "intangible personal property", the latter of which includes "intellectual property" among other things), "intellectual property" includes different components controlled by different specific statutory provisions, but also with commonalities among them that make for a useful analytical category.
The whole "intellectual property is a fiction cooked up to confuse people" idea is one of those self-serving myths served up by people who are more concerned with selling an ideological point of view on the issue than dealing with reality.
And how does the FBI no which public wireless hotspot a sex offender is accessing the internet through?
You obviously stopped reading after those 7 words of that sentence: it wasn't the site operator required to do that. It was the government, mandating the controls, that would do that.
The only thing the site would have to do is interface with the government ID system and provide the required email notifications and process the responses.
I figure if the government is going to require the verification, its going to need to provide the common infrastructure to enable it.
Sort of: someone who would be guilty of infringement if the patent claims Microsoft is asserting were true and has reasonable apprehension of a lawsuit could themselves bring suit for declaratory judgement.
It also may be possible that a suit could be brought for defamation by someone adversely affected by the claims; that would be a harder case to advance, but carries the possibility of actual damages.
IANAL, and you shouldn't rely on this as legal advice, YMMV, etc.:
It might affect their ability to sue the particular people for reasons unrelated to abandonment (statutes of limitations, laches, and various estoppel theories), especially if it can be shown that Microsoft knew about the particular facts that it would allege are violations by the particular users early on and didn't act.
It probably won't affect their ability to sue other people, though.
But trademarks are very different from copyrights, and there is nothing in copyright similar to abandoning a trademark. Trademarks are protected based largely on use, copyrights are not.
(1) Provide a digital signing key on a dongle, with an associated PIN to access it in person at a government agency with identification requirements similar to those needed to get a driver's license or passport (including, for minors, requiring their their parents or guardinas already have registered for the system, have a key, and be present and registered as linked to the minor's record.) Provide stern warnings that people will strictly liable for anything digitally signed with their key. Require those getting the ID key to provide a current email address for notifications. Publish open specification for the supporting encryption and signing software (or use existing standards), and provide a reference implementation for common platforms free (Free would be better, of course) if not using an existing standard with open specification and free implementations.
(2) Require users of sites where those kinds of restrictions you discuss are desired to identify themselves using their key by signing a challenge to confirm their identity.
(3) Send notification to the parents when the minor signs up using the key and require the parent to return an authorization for the minor to get whatever access is desired to be restricted.
That took me less than 30 seconds to think up, though longer to type. I'm sure there are better ways to do it.
Yeah. My mother in law has one of the most common names in the Western Hemisphere, and, unsurprisingly, has fun every time she flies because her name matches one listed on a security watchlist.
Desktops are great, if they are going to be used in one place. Not so great to replace books and school supplies for homework, etc.
Which is, exactly, what the laptop is (though not just dust, but water is a concern, which is why the XO is designed to survive immersion). Making it into separate components doesn't make it any more easily portable, more easily usable, or more durable. It might make it less expensive at the expense of those other concerns.
I don't think they are ideologically opposed to it, its just outside of the core mission, and takes resources to set up. They've constantly said they are interested in looking into it once things are further along on their core mission, but that it isn't a current priority.
Well, certainly, there will be a huge instant market for compatible, more powerful machines, in places using the OLPC. But its even bigger than that: the OLPC also involves a ground up rethink of security model and software delivery and user interaction for massive organizations. It could easily shake up the enterprise if it proves successful, and if it does that, the Windows monopoly that Intel (though it has to compete with AMD) largely gets a free ride on could be in trouble.
A new model, with its premier implementation completely open source and tied to Linux, which isn't as tied to x86 as Windows is, would be a big risk for Intel. It might not hurt them: they are well positioned, after all, to compete making processors and chipsets for Linux boxes, after all. But it would make life more interesting and less predictable than life with the Windows monopoly.
Isn't the point that a conventional power system with the same precaution would suffer too much transmission loss to make it viable?
(Anyhow, it seems to me that this just means that terrorists, if they want to take down the grid, attack closer to the generators rather than in the cities where the power is being used. The grid doesn't do you much good if there isn't enough juice pumped into it.)
Hey, stop whining and find a way to make it work for good. Like come up with an excuse that free 100MB/s symmetric network connections to every home in America help fight terrorism.
Those millions of PCs were not being marketed as a platform for reading to replace the paper books and the associated distribution costs in third-world countries, replacing them with electronic distribution and duplication. That's part of the vision of the OLPC, if not Classmate.
The role that the OLPC is aimed it is not the role that computers were used in when they first started to be used widely in US schools, so comparing them with, say, those computers isn't all that reasonable. The features ought to be viewed in light of the intended use. For reading in place of books, both the reflective mode and its high resolution are key features.
Look, since you seem to label anyone who doesn't agree with your irrational hatred and fear of all things wikipedian as a "wikicultist", I'm not at all surprised that you have decided that I'm one.
But, you know, for someone who bashes other people for simply labelling people who disagree with them as "trolls" or similar, you sure seem to be free with tossing out "wikicultist" or "wikitroll" anytime someone says something about wikipedia that you don't agree with, or mods a post that discusses wikipedia in a way you don't agree with.
On screen formatting in MS Office programs (I've noticed this more in Excel than Word) varies considerably based on View Zoom as well. I'm not sure if this is the same in OOo (it may be, since I suspect at least part of it is how Windows renders fonts.)
Office has had support to print to its own "document image" format and TIFF since 2003 or earlier, and has a free-downloadable plugin for XPS and PDF in 2007. But, yeah, sharing important business documents in word-processor format rather print-equivalent format, unless you are working on jointly editing drafts, is a bad idea.
First, none of those is really a stunning advantage. Its a few areas of small advantages. Second, Outline view isn't the only area Word was held up as the winner, in the article you point to. And, of course, the comparison there is between OOo 2.0 and Office 2003, so its a bit dated.
I realize Microsoft plans that. I still bought Office Home & Student 2007. Heck, I realized that when I bought Office 2003. I think I'd heard talk of it about when I got Office 97 (I skipped 2000). Microsoft has planned software as service for as long as the internet has been popular. When Microsoft decides to put Office on a rental basis, I certainly won't buy that version. And I've already got OOo installed alongside Office on my computers at home.
And I find OOo about as nice to use as Office 97-2003, but not nearly as nice as 2007. And, since I've got the money, and need to use an office suite a lot at home, I'm willing to pay for 2007.
(I might switch for other reasons too, as I'm leaning toward switching over to MacOS and/or Linux as the main OS at home, but I'm not there yet, though I keep toying with different Linux distros on my main computer, which is dual boot WinXP and, right now, Fedora. Since I expect to see Microsoft Office for Linux about the time of Duke Nukem Forever, I expect that if I switch to Linux I'll also switch to OOo.)
Word is often bundled with Windows now, and—and, look, I'm pro-OSS—Office Home and Student 2007 has a lot more polish than OpenOffice.org, and OneNote is, at least to me, a big plus.
I agree that the first two, though I don't think the last is a big factor. OTOH, the reason they don't know is that the competition gets little attention because its got no compelling non-price selling point. Plus, a couple hundred dollars every few years isn't that much money for most home users.
sure they would. But an "exact clone of Office" isn't what the competition is. What are available are basically similar products, with some adaptation curve, missing some things that MS Office users find important, but with some advantages in other areas that tend not be compelling selling points.
With Microsoft sitting in a dominant position, people aren't going to change in droves unless Microsoft tries to push the price outrageously high, or some competitor with a compelling differentiation by features comes out. I think the FOSS community can do that, quite easily: it doesn't lack skill or creativity. OTOH, people have to get out of the "how do we duplicate Office" mindset, and think beyond Office.
That depends on the site. If you really feel like you can't evaluate the quality of the source, then you treat the information, just as an unsourced bit, as "pulled out of the butt of some random guy on the internet".
Yeah, because newspapers mostly cover breaking news where you can't go for verifiability, having a minimal and known bias (though most have considerable variability from article to article, editor to editor, and reporter to reporter), it's nice to have that. And, you know, for news, that's your main ability to evaluate claims.
Wikipedia, while it may have articles on current events topics, is not a newspaper. Most of its sources on current events topics (except for background) are newspapers, and all the advantages they have come with that. For background info, at least they source the information: many newspapers just, if they report background at all, do so in general terms, as if it was unquestioned fact, and without reporting where they got the information.
(Wikipedia often fails to source things, too, but as a matter of policy it requires sources.)
Of course, Wikipedia articles have edit trails and are often linked to non-anonymous users, whose other edits you can quickly access and make a judgement about direction and degree of bias.