Re: [ga] Re: Proposal: ICANN should cease acceptance of PDF, DOC and other attachments from public comments

["James S. Tyre" <jstyre@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 05:40 PM 1/25/2010 +0100, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 08:04:35AM -0800,
>  James S. Tyre <jstyre@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote
>  a message of 22 lines which said:
>
> > MS has always offered free viewers for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and the
> > like.
>
> All of them work only on MS-Windows and I am not aware that Microsoft
> offers gratis copies of Windows

Then use Open Office.  It's free, it can read Word files (both the 
older .doc format and the newer .docx format) and it runs under 
Linux, as well as other operating systems.
You may think I'm making too much of this, and perhaps I am, but for 
a very specific reason.  I am, and for a long time have been, 
significantly blind.  I "look" constantly for tools that might better 
assist my computer usage, and friends (including dedicated Linux 
users and dedicated Mac OS X users) do the same for me.  But it's 
just a fact that the tools that best enable me are Windows tools, not 
Linux, not Mac OS X.  I'd switch to Linux in a heartbeat if there was 
software that runs under Linux that helps me as much as software that 
runs under Windows.
So shall we ban a piece of proprietary software that you don't like 
but for which you have a quite suitable alternative, or shall we 
disenfranchise (loosely speaking) folks like me?


--------------------------------------------------------------------
James S. Tyre                                      jstyre@xxxxxxxxxx
Law Offices of James S. Tyre          310-839-4114/310-839-4602(fax)
10736 Jefferson Blvd., #512               Culver City, CA 90230-4969
Co-founder, The Censorware Project             http://censorware.net
Policy Fellow, Electronic Frontier Foundation     http://www.eff.org