The dogmatism on these issues is sufficient deterrent and frequently I would rather avoid stating the truth than face the wrath of the FSF enthusiasts.
We're all adults here, right? The fact that a for-profit company is a for-profit company is neither shocking nor novel.
Not to say that all FSF people write MSFT as M$FT -- it would only be a small subset. But getting angry, offended, annoyed by people that do this and then voting them down is childish.
If I starting my reply with "Look lhnz, you moron, ..." would you not downvote me or defend me if others did so?
I downvote people for things like M$ because I think that name-calling and inflammatory remarks aren't conducive to a worthwhile discussion.
A few days ago, I called out someone for making a pair of spelling mistakes in one name (spelling "Jimmy Hendricks" instead of "Jimi Hendrix"). I was downvoted because what I had to bring didn't add anything relevant to the conversation. And you know what? That's fine. I should have been downvoted. It was a totally pointless and irrelevant and smart ass thing for me to say, motivated by pedantry and affection for one of the best musicians to come from my home town.
Replacing the letter S with a dollar sign is the same sort of thing. At best, it's neutral and adds nothing, at worst, it's a distraction that will serve to discredit any valid point you're trying to make. It it ever had any novelty or cleverness, it wore off long, long ago.
One tactic for this situation is to post your truth then never look at the thread again. It might be rude to people who want to engage in honest discussion on your point, but if your post was a good one it will still benefit the hn community more than not posting at all, and you won't have to stress about troll replies.
Just be respectful. Assume the people reading your post are as smart as you and your post won't get hammered.
I think part of the problem is you get penalized pretty quickly w/ the shading differences, and people are happy to knock you down. Believe it or not, the post you are responding to go at least one downvote before the upvotes boosted it back to normal text color.
As for your tactic for "post[ing] your truth" this doesn't work so much if it does get downvoted, since it fairly quickly becomes near invisible.
For word processing however I've found OOo Writer a better alternative since it was renamed from Star Office.
(Ever tried sharing >25 page .doc with more than one person over a few weeks?)
As an aside, I really admire RMS for sticking to his guns, especially after reading his biography. I don't appreciate the approach of "the Free way or the highway" (hah, no pun intended) because it's so uncompromising and shuns people like you and me from the "club". However, not a lot of people in this world can say they never compromised their ideology in the name of practicality, and I definitely admire that.