In the past couple of years we've seen the administration declare loudly that they'll refuse to enforce other laws, including immigration laws and the Obamacare employer mandate. Meanwhile, any court challenge to a law the administration doesn't particularly like is sure to succeed, since the administration will refuse to defend it.

Unless something turns around, the rule of law and the separation of powers are on their way out in this country, to be supplanted by the decisions of a dictator and of unelected officials he appoints.

In particular, there's no excuse for using < 300 dpi when using bilevel. Bilevel documents at 300dpi are 100kb or less when using reasonable lossless compression (lossless jb2/ jbig2, CCITT Group 4 TIFF, or even just PNG).

Using lossy jb2/jbig2 like these copiers were doing is at most going to save you a couple dozen kb per page. Not worth the problems in many cases.

(doing this reply again since I forgot slashdot eats less than signs unless you use html entities. Man, what an anachronism.)

In particular, there's no excuse for using bitonal. Bitonal documents at 300dpi are 100kb or less when using reasonable lossless compression (lossless jb2/ jbig2, CCITT Group 4 TIFF, or even just PNG).

My point was entirely relevant and you're just trying to weasel out of it with a false dilemma. Then you attempt to sweep inconvenient facts under the rug as "irrelevant," and you have the bombast to attempt to portray your willingness to do so as generosity. Such an argument is worthy of Schopenhauer's Art of Being Right; for you to argue in such a fashion and then perpetually loudly claim that everything anybody else says is fallacious is pretty laughable.

You were saying there are tons of LO contributions being dual-licensed for AOO inclusion because all those who "don't care about the license bullshit" are "happy to work with both projects." I countered that the dual-license contributors are not that numerous, and that an absence of philosophical objections to the Apache license does not entail a willingness to license LO related work for use by AOO-- in particular, some people have become unwilling to do so because of the caustic, acerbic, and rude behavior that has been exhibited on the AOO dev list and elsewhere.

Any search for your posts here, at lwn, or on the Apache mailing lists will turn up this kind of stuff. From the security list debacle two years ago to the present, just about any time you've opened your mouth you've alienated people, including many who might otherwise have contributed in some way to AOO's success. I haven't been following aoo-dev for a while, and I'm not on top enough of all the drama you generate to give an itemized list here, but it doesn't take much looking to find you behaving like an adolescent and people being disgusted by it.

In any case, I too am done talking with you. Maybe once you've driven AOO into the dirt with your toxic "leadership" and been let go by IBM you'll rethink your ways of dealing with people.

What rebuttal of what claim? Do you have me confused with someone else? I made no claims prior to what you're characterizing as an "ad hominem attack."

Ad hominem is only fallacious when it's an irrelevancy. In a discussion of community and contributions, the fact that you have turned many people away from the OpenOffice community with your behavior is acutely relevant.

Aargh, mistakenly submitted when I brushed off something that'd fallen on my keyboard.

Anyway, meanwhile LO may commit the oh-so-very-grievous sin of putting out some PR once in a while trying to promote their project, but they don't waste their breath continually trying to tear AOO down. Instead they've busily been putting out a stream of releases with features I needed. That's who's letting the code talk for them.

I'm not a Libreoffice developer, just a reader of these fora and a former OpenOffice user who is sick and tired of reading your bull. (I originally left OO because your license purge removed features I needed; so much for your silly attempt in another post to try to take the "pragmatic high ground" by characterizing LO's position as "that license bullshit.")

I'm not interested in hearing your eternal rationalizations about why your statistics are so much better than LO's. I've been hearing this crap for years now. You start frothing at the mouth any time somebody says something positive about LO, you don't release anything notable for 2 1/2 years, and you call this "letting the code speak for you."

Meanwhile LO may

There might have been a lot of people who were willing to dual-license most of their contributions, but you turned a *lot* of them off with your toxic attitude and the juvenile bullcrap you have been spewing for the last several years on mailing lists and fora. Now, years after flaming potential collaborators enough that they were unwilling to put up with you, you point to a token few dual-licensers as a resounding success.

As opposed to AOO, whose project lead spends his time writing juvenile insults and lies on Slashdot and LWN?

Nice try, Rob Weir.

Rather than picking winners and losers and setting arbitrary limits they should be using carbon and fuel taxes.

Under Obama's plan, operations that could pollute less will pollute exactly their limit, places where higher output and thus higher emissions would be actually more efficient in terms of greenhouse gases per MW will instead operate at lower efficiency, the government will spend billions of dollars subsidizing Solyndra wannabes, and actual gas use by consumers will change little no matter how they try to regulate the auto industry.

With carbon and fuel taxes, consumers and corporations would all have better incentives to improve their emissions, the market would decide the best way to allocate resources, energy innovation would be encouraged, there would be tremendously less deadweight loss, and the government could either reduce other taxes or reduce its absurdly large deficits.

People from all across the political spectrum who are informed and honest agree that this, not hard caps or cap-and-trade, is the way to go. But politicians like Obama would rather trash the nation's economy and not actually accomplish any climate progress than touch the third rail of fossil fuel taxes.

In a "town hall" conversation where I brought this up with my Congresscritter- a Tea Party diehard who I'm frequently frustrated with- I was shocked to hear him admit that raising gas taxes and using the revenue to either reduce deficits or reduce taxes on productive behavior is a very good idea. But, he said, it'll never fly, so I'm not going to try to push it. If everybody who knew it's the right thing to do got behind it and tried to educate the populace rather than hiding behind a smokescreen, pretty soon the idea would fly, with bipartisan support.

Rather convenient Slashvertising, comparing total downloads for AOO with unique downloads for LO.

AOO has been too busy removing functionality (my personal favorite: the wpd filter), having a license inquisition, and taking potshots at LO to get much done.

Here it's now almost 2.5 years since OO 3.3, the last Oracle version, and the latest AOO version has no significant advances over OO 3.3-- instead it's got reduced functionality. In the meantime LibreOffice 4 has come a long way.

Don't know why anybody bothers giving press to OO anymore.

Well, things would be cleaner to re-implement this time around if they had to do another rewrite, because cross-platform development is now a basically solved problem.

In 1998, getting one codebase that would work on things like various ancient Unices, "DOS-based" Windows (95/98/Me), and Mac OS 8/9 was a very difficult task. Beyond the lower-level concerns, few good libraries would work across all targets. C++ itself was a mess when trying to work across different systems and compilers- many things could not be counted on to work everywhere until some years after the first C++ standardization in 1998.

So Mozilla wrote their own 'toolkit' (kinda) and portability/compatibility stuff, their own code that did much of what the C++ standard library really ought to do, and a lot of other stuff.

With modern operating systems, modern cross-platform libraries, universal C++03 support and widespread support for most of C++11, a rewrite would be a very different story today.

Right, "broken companies" like Staples, Sports Authority, Domino's, Experian, etc etc. Oh wait, all of those are doing a heck of a lot better than they were before.

Bain took risky buys, companies that were failing, and turned a healthy number of them into successes. Not all their buys worked out but you don't blame the doctor by complaining that his patients have all been sick.

You know, Obama won the election; you can quit with the falsehoods and slander already as it doesn't serve any purpose any more.

Not only are subsidies why service is so expensive in the USA, they're why many phones don't do simple things that consumers want. Since the consumer is not the customer- the phone company is- features which matter to some consumers but which don't make the carrier any profits are left out. Carrier control is the name of the game.

As one example, cell phones in the late 90s/early 00s often had decent computer connectivity, allowing you to transfer your text messages to pc, synchronize things, etc over a serial cable. Sometimes you could install trivial programs on your phone that way too. But carriers realized that if they cut that stuff they could retain more control and squeeze a few more cents out of their customers. Want an extremely basic application on your phone? Sure, that'll be a $5/mo subscription. Want to transfer text messages to PC? Sure, buy our more expensive phone that requires a data plan. In Europe, where phones are normally unlocked and unsubsidized, that didn't happen as much.

Smartphones esp. Android have succeeded in returning some control to consumers. But the situation is still awful for feature phones and not great for non-Cyanogen smartphones. Making the consumer the MFR's customer will change things.

BTW I believe their streams for iOS, PS3, etc are h.264 these days, but their desktop Silverlight player still uses VC-1 last I heard.