How bout this?
A national endowment from the arts to keep updating free, open source word processing software for use in government and academic publishing?
You'd get to bust open Adobe and feed on its innards and you'd give Bill Gates a hernia by killing MS Word.
Every 5 years you'd do an office update and it would be the "official" office templating standard for the US government?
I don't think there are going to be any major break throughs in legal documents or academic papers anytime soon.
Unless, of course, you start using standardized form templates and scantron input sheets to fill out standard paperwork like I requested.
Or create some sort of universal electronics standard that determines what information should be on each of our drivers licenses. (Good luck with that, have fun with the 9th amendment, lol)
You know our government doesn't require you to carry any form of identification at all? I mean, cops would be VERY mad if you had no ID, but they would still have to process you and it would be a headache for everyone involved.
First off, when you are brought in, they will have to fingerprint you. If you don't have a drivers license and have never been fingerprinted, they will be forced to ask your name and country of origin.
If you can't provide a country of origin, they have to determine if you are mentally deficient or if you are from another country.
Could you imagine if somebody went public with an AYYLMOA? Like if somebody tried to have them deported?
I don't mean like coneheads, i mean a full on Grey.
sorry, i'm a little stoned.
Combat Lesbian Operators Liscense?
Presenting duty rosters instead of campaign medals?
License to ballbust?
Form A
Template 0000
Name and Address
Form A
Template 0000
"Name and Address"
I feel like i am celebrating my own genius with some Jerkins and a box of tissues. C'mon! Somebody assent, contribute, or disagree
Your idea requires the government to specify targets and standards for the work being funded. Can you name a single IT project they've successfully done that?
Maybe you should kick it up to the UN?
Why settle for a national standard when you can have a global one?
Microsoft, in partnership with Google, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, is proud to present...
>un standard
>worth anything
Apart from that, trying to make this idea a national standard would be an expensive nightmare. Trying to make it a global one would be a great way to simulate hell for everyone involved.
Its just a government standard, not a national one. You can still use whatever program you like. You just make it so that the government ONLY budgets for this software and anything else comes out a different expense account.
If anything, we are promoting an already existing standard over other already existing standards.
How many word processes programs are there? dozens? hundreds? Why don't we pick the one with the best proven track record?
You can roll the staff of Libre office and MS Word into an international staff.
Google chromebooks would appreciate it and probably see a boost in sales if they weren't forced to choose between an open source standard which they may be liable for like Libre-Office, or have to negotiate for a proprietary model that has name recognition like MS Word.
Langauge changes and evolves over time. Using a sloppy standard for our spellcheck libraries makes office documents seem either outmoded, old fashioned or stylistically untenable.
Go on. Give the grammer nazi's a uniform.
i see you have no idea the undertaking changing one program across a single department let alone a whole government is. simple things are rarely ever simple.
fuck word processing software
everyone should be forced to use markdown for everything
anything that can't be handled in markdown should get put into LaTex
fuck "office software", it's a gigantic productivity black hole
>use markdown for everything
lol
maybe while their at it they should make calculus required for a business degree
-Signed Someone Who Still Reads Books
Maybe we should call it "Publishing Software" instead of "Office Software"
We still need books, training manuals, pamphlets, flyers, and the like.