I'm one of those people who does "serious" spreadsheet work. By and large switching between the Excel and OOo/LO works pretty well. Occasional formatting issues and the odd formula incompatibility but mostly it works fine. I try to use macros as little as possible so I can't speak to compatibility there but I would expect it to be something of a creeping horror.

Sadly yes. Quite a few of them in fact.

I have and it generally works but probably not exactly the way you expect. Base isn't really the same thing as Access. It's more of a connector application than a standalone database product. I use it primarily to do ODBC connections between spreadsheets and a database. Unfortunately they tend to break their ODBC code between versions so I've been stuck on a pretty old version of OO for quite a while.

Bingo. If you have a heavily macro'd set of Excel spreadsheets or the like you probably aren't going to want to switch. Just way too painful. But most people could probably switch with only modest problems here and there.

Sadly that isn't really true. My company has standardized on LibreOffice and we use it for most things. However I get Word and Excel files all the time that cannot be accurately read by OpenOffice or LibreOffice. Particularly .DOCX and .XLSX files. Many are just fine but the more complicated ones tend to have moderate to severe formatting corruption. Sometimes to the point of unreadability. Google Docs and other doc viewers frequently don't do any better of a job of it. I have to keep a seat of Microsoft office available for those documents that I can't read any other way even to this day.

It isn't solved I assure you. EDI is useful but not easy or simple enough to be universally implemented. EDI generally only gets used by rather large organizations and it doesn't fit so well with the sort of spot buys that smaller companies tend to engage in. It tends to require a lot of process change rather than being an adaptation of existing processes. Setup is generally too hard and expensive. Think of it a little like using FTP vs email for file transfer. FTP better designed for the actual transfer of files but it's harder to set up, has more transaction handshake overhead for the user, not as useful for one time transfers, requires more training, and users already have email and know how to use it. Despite the fact that using email is technologically worse in a lot of ways it fits people's workflows a lot better so it gets used. Current EDI implementations suffer from basically the same problem.

That's why some sort of open software here would be a huge blessing. Few companies really want to be tied to some proprietary software if it isn't necessary. I would be delighted to see some EDI equivalent to Apache - an open source solution that works well for most and is relatively easy to put in place. Hell it could be as simple as emailing and receiving documents from some piece of middleware which requires relatively minimal changes by users.

Nothing wrong with that if it gets the job done. I certainly would prefer something that is based on something already well understood and preferably more open. No sense reinventing more wheels than necessary. In fact you would have to at some point implement some way to talk with existing EDI systems because a lot of them are already implemented and they aren't going to get torn out.

To be honest, if Intuit had a brain in their skulls they would implement some form of EDI directly into their software that made document exchange easier and reduced paper shuffling. But they don't seem to be interested. Hell their ODBC drivers were developed by a third party, even the ones they include with their more expensive packages. You would think that would be something they would want to control and use but they don't. Their internal databases appear to be some sort of non-standard home rolled junk.

Yep! Total chicken and egg problem though perhaps not an unsolvable one. You'd basically have to make something that is easy to start and easy to use and falls back gracefully for customers not using it yet. Plug in to popular accounting software packages and maybe a web interchange. Once companies start to use stuff like this they tend to stay with it so the user stickiness would likely be rather high if the experience is good.

Honestly I'd probably start with Quickbooks which has an active SDK as Intuit is actually the bigger player here. More small businesses use quickbooks than anything else. I do know that Sage works with a lot of third party software but I don't work with their products enough to know many details.

Of course they are. However that is not incompatible with a tool for exchanging documents and data more easily. I understand and respect your distaste for some of their business practices. I deal with Quickbooks all the time and some of the restrictions are just absurdly arbitrary. For instance you cannot do any sort of inventory costing except for Average Cost (no LIFO, no FIFO, no Standard Cost unless you buy expensive add ons from third parties). It's not like they don't know about these things either.

I am a Certified Management Accountant (another type of certified accountant somewhat like a CPA but focused on internal corporate accounting rather than public accounting). Short version is that companies care that it works. If you need accountants to review bits of it, that isn't hard to arrange. There are plenty of plug ins to software like Quickbooks (I'm a Quickbooks Proadvisor too) and the majority of small businesses use some form of Quickbooks with most of the remainder using Sage products. Quickbooks would seem to be the logical place to start but you might even be able to do most of the work through some sort of neutral online exchange.

Happy to chat on or off slashdot and share my perspective on things even if it comes to nothing ultimately. I'm quite serious about the problem though I can't promise the solution will be easy. The biggest challenge probably isn't actually writing the software, it's getting multiple parties to use it. Kind of a chicken and egg problem. However kind of like social networking sites if you can get it working and groups using it the network effects will be REALLY strong.

The problem with your tax form is that actually calculating the amount of income you had last year is actually pretty complicated for a pretty big portion of the population, particularly the wealthier folks. Seriously. 90% of the tax code not devoted to various tax exemptions is basically devoted to defining income. Why? Because it is not trivial or easy. There are countless corner cases and sources of income and financial instruments and other things to complicate what you income is. We could simplify the tax form quite a bit by eliminating most of the special tax exemptions but you will NEVER get a tax form as simple as the one you propose. It simply is not as easy as you make it sound.

What they want to do is stay in power. They'll change some things if they get the chance but that's a second order effect. What they really want to do is whatever will keep them in power and they will sell their soul to do it. They'll say whatever they think gives them the best chance to retain power and get re-elected but what they actually do is what shows you their real goals.

The government absolutely creates jobs. Lots of them. The government is something like 20-30% of the economy and a similar portion of the jobs. This is true for most of the governments on earth and it's actually not a bad thing. Remember that government jobs include things like the military, police, fire, teachers and the like which are all necessary and useful functions. Some amount of administration is useful too. Many important and necessary private businesses make their money contracting for necessary services to governments. Governments definitely create jobs and many of them are even worth creating.

The problem is that the government doesn't generally have a good way to prune back services that are no longer required and doesn't tend to be exposed to market forces forcing it to be efficient. It also means that those who are doing well with the status quo will try to keep it, even when that doesn't make economic sense.

I actually happen to be both an accountant and an engineer and actively practice both in my day job. I would LOVE to automate a lot of the paperwork shuffling I do as an accountant. Want to make a fortune? Come up with an EDI type system that doesn't cost an arm and leg and allows businesses to exchange invoices, delivery information, order acknowledgements, etc automatically between businesses of any size and that integrates with existing accounting systems. Start with Quickbooks and Sage. I probably spend 10-15 hours a week needlessly shuffling paperwork because email and the post office is the only standard way to exchange documents with every business. So does every other accountant in the known universe.

If you are a software engineer and want to hack back on administration and bureaucracy, I'll be happy to tell you the use cases and cost targets and whatever else I know. I'm not a programmer myself but there IS a huge opportunity for automation in accounting. Companies will trip over themselves trying to save a buck if there is a way to automate the paperwork that makes sense.

You'd think so but I'm an accountant and I do our company payroll. You would be *amazed* at how seldom many people look at their paycheck, particularly if it is direct deposit. I get asked all the time how much vacation people have left even though it is printed right on our paystubs every two weeks.

That said, I'd have no problem in principle with some sort of reasonable (yeah I know...) automatic payment system. The devil is in the details and to do it you can't have too many special tax exemptions. (or the government has to know WAY more about you than you probably want them to) There is however a pretty substantial portion of the population that has very simple tax returns so why not automate it where it makes sense?

Not to make this political but I'm pretty sure the republicans would bitch about it being another government intrusion and the democrats would bitch about lost tax collector jobs or something else that misses the big picture so we'll keep doing things the same stupid way we have for the last 80 years even though it makes very little sense to anyone and costs a fortune in the process.

There is NO vaccine that is 100% safe. There is no drug that is 100% safe. Does not exist and probably never will.

When you make distribution harder (whether due to cost or technical complications) you make it less likely to be administered and thus you get worse results overall. The best vaccine is the one that prevents the greatest number of infections, not the one that has the fewest side effects.

Minor pedantic quibble: ALL vaccines are unsafe for some subset of the population. No drug is 100% safe for all people.

It's an imperfect analogy but they are generally right. They are talking about two things. One is herd immunity. When you are vaccinated you not only cannot get the disease but you cannot transmit it to others either. This means you aren't just protecting yourself once, you are protecting others repeatedly. The other thing they are talking about is the fact that you probably aren't exposed to each virus just once. Odds are good you'll come in contact with a widely spread virus from multiple sources. So by immunizing once you are protected repeatedly. The cost of each vaccine (collectively) is a one time expense but the benefit of it is incurred repeatedly down the line.

It is FAR more economically efficient to vaccinate and prevent infection altogether than to treat infection after they occur. Not only do you save on medical expenses and reduce suffering but you also recoup a lot of opportunity cost from productivity that otherwise would have been lost.

Actually it does lead to that. That is EXACTLY why we vaccinate. We vaccinate because it saves lives, reduces medical costs (more expensive to treat than prevent), reduces suffering and enables a greater realization of human potential.

You're not "culling the herd". You're not weeding out the weak in most cases. You simply are allowing suffering to continue needlessly. Measles doesn't kill most people it infects before they reproduce so you aren't "culling the herd" in any meaningful way by withholding vaccines.

There are many pluses to increasing lifespans. The most obvious is that people are able to contribute productively to society for longer. More useful work can be done with a longer lifespan. Enabling longer lifespans does not eliminate evolutionary pressure - it merely changes the source of it.

You really are cold blooded aren't you? Do you realize the lack of empathy it takes to seriously ask that question? I hope no one ever has to depend on you for their well being.