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Yeah, Ruby has a problem that you can do 1 thing in 1000 different ways.
I recently read how a guy proposed to make the nil object in Ruby something more than a nil object... Now that is horrifying maintainance HELL. Imagine if someone redefined + to mean - and - to mean + on an integer without telling you?
( http://coderoshi.blogspot.com/2007/08/cheap-tricks-v-pwning-nil.html )
(For the PHP crowd nil is like undefined var)

"The typical Facebookers are what you'd get if YouTube and Flickr went halves on a baby."

• Don't (make up slang): "Tie it up girl!"
• Do (use the original): "Oh, behave!"

• Don't (make up slang): "Whenever you lowchance it you get the lose."
• Do (use the original): "If it can go wrong, it will."

• Don't (make up slang): "Shigoo!!! Lowtails!!!!"
• Do (use the original): "OMG!!! Ponies!!!!"

• Don't (make up slang): "Viz or it wasn't!"
• Do (use the original): "Pics or it didn't happen."

• Don't (make up slang): "Man, the scoremasters must be hitting the big one hard today."
• Do (use the original): "Whoever mod'd this up is on crack."

If you are concerned about the use of coal and want to replace it quickly, renewables are really your only choice. Nuclear power takes a long time to build, and the approval process is a bottleneck. Solar and wind are growing at 45% per year. For solar, this means replacing all generating capacity in 22 years, for wind sooner because it has a head start. Nanosolar is coming on line this year with a wholesale price of $1/Watt and prices are expected to fall further and faster than any other power source so that converting to solar is going to have a big market push. At a system efficeincy of 17%, residential roof space is adequate to cover 46% of current generation http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/08/roof-pitch.htm l. Production of 40% efficient panels is planned for 2010 under a DARPA program, sooner than any new nuclear power can be built, and this makes residential roof space sufficent to cover 100% of current generation. Nuclear power just can't cut it when it comes to impacting CO2 emissions.

One obvious thing that the nuclear industry seems to miss is that sea level rise can impact site selection. Thus, they are leading their proposal for new a license for nuclear construction in a tidal region on the Cheseapeake. The need for expensive review seems pretty plain when the industry makes such obvious blunders. It is the industry which displays cluelessness. This may be a consequence of a regulation culture.

It is hard to be respectful when calling people stupid. Consider looking a little deeper into the issues people raise before coming on the way you do and you might learn faster.

I've just read a chapter on accessio (Wikipedia link) in a book I have. That is the principle (originally of Roman law) by which the owner of a greater thing (e.g.: a car) can derive possession and possible ownership of a smaller thing (e.g.: a tracking device) that has been attached to that greater thing. This would occur if a house (lesser) was built on a piece of land (greater), or something was written on, painted or stuck to another object such as a parchment, statue, garment or building. Note that the owner of the less thing doesn't even need to have attached it themselves for their property to fall under this rule. IANAL, but going by the examples that I've seen this seems to be just the kind of situation this rule was designed for.

(BTW, I'm talking about principles of Roman law that have been copied into the law of many modern jurisdictions--I don't know anything specifically about NZ law.) What is interesting is that, though the owner of the greater work usually has to indemnify/compensate the owner of the lesser work for their contribution, this is not the case if the owner of the lesser work was acting maliciously or in bad faith against the owner of the greater work (which would seem to be the case here).

There is also a principle called usucapio or usucaption (Wikipedia link) by which physical possession of a chattel eventually leads to the ownership being transferred to the possessor after a certain time (a year in Roman law). This originally applied to all property, but in many modern jurisdictions principally only applies to movable property (e.g.: cars).

In summary, I'd suggest the police really need to consult a lawyer before getting themselves any deeper.

Also, I found this interesting blog entry on this case that alleges this is part of a dispute over access to his children with his ex-wife in which the police are taking his ex-wife's side.

The IPCC is saying no more than a meter, more like 0.4 meters. Hansen has been misquoted in a few places saying 25 meters, but this is a misinterpretaion of this paper: http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/content/l3h462k 7p4068780/?p=0f73dea5b8974dfa837377d459559a91&pi=1 . There the authors point out that 25 meters is where sea level got to the last time the Earth was as warm as we expect it to be. In that paper they discuss a few meters of sea level rise by the end of this century, and Hansen, in his paper on scientific reticents discussed 5 meters, but that group has not predicted 25 meters that quickly. They do make a persuasive case that ice sheets are lost in centuries rather than millenia.

A big problem for plants in tidal areas is that the London Dumping Convention does not allow nuclear waste to be dumped in the ocean, so existing waste, such as that stored at the decommissioned Humbolt 3 reactor will likely need to be moved. Humbolt 3 had a fairly quick decommissioning because it did not run all that long. Plants that have run longer may need a longer cool down time so getting a handle on how soon thier cores need to be moved to higher ground is something that needs to be done now so that their shut down can be scheduled. Building new plants in tidal regions seems pretty silly. I blogged on this not too long ago here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/08/cliffhanger.ht ml.

I am very optimistic about the possibilities of making science and math fascinating writing topics.

When I a kid, my father was into science and science fiction so I watched the Time Machine, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the wonderful Ascent of Man as well as Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Perhaps, it was inevitable that I would go into mathematics/computers when my favorite Sesame Street character was the Count. :-)

I think that the trick is to approach mathematics and science from multiple perspectives including:

(i) Historical (the major turning events -- Kepler's Equations, Thales invention of proof, Newton's Laws, etc.)

(ii) Biographical (Math and science are filled with interesting folks: Pythagorus, Sophie Germain, Leonhard Euler, and of course, Kurt Goedel)

(iii) Artistic (Take a watch of the movie Pi or even rewatch the Matrix -- numbers and mysticism have a charm even if their meanings go unexplored; fractals and chaos theory have really fascinating visuals)

(iv) Mathematics/Science for Poets (One of the best classes I ever took at UCLA, learned why Foucalt's Pendulum proved that the earth rotated and learned Maxwell's prediction of radio waves based on believing that eletricity and magnetism were two aspects of the same thing)

In my free time, I have taken the question very seriously of whether mathematics can be conceptually interesting independent of its problem solving applications. For the past two years, I have been working on a blog dedicated to this question and specifically to the history and people behind Fermat's Last Theorem:

http://fermatslasttheorem.blogspot.com

Thanks very much for bringing up this topic! :-)

-Larry

I am very optimistic about the possibilities of making science and math fascinating writing topics.

When I a kid, my father was into science and science fiction so I watched the Time Machine, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the wonderful Ascent of Man as well as Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Perhaps, it was inevitable that I would go into mathematics/computers when my favorite Sesame Street character was the Count. :-)

I think that the trick is to approach mathematics and science from multiple perspectives including:

(i) Historical (the major turning events -- Kepler's Equations, Thales invention of proof, Newton's Laws, etc.)

(ii) Biographical (Math and science are filled with interesting folks: Pythagorus, Sophie Germain, Leonhard Euler, and of course, Kurt Goedel)

(iii) Artistic (Take a watch of the movie Pi or even rewatch the Matrix -- numbers and mysticism have a charm even if their meanings go unexplored; fractals and chaos theory have really fascinating visuals)

(iv) Mathematics/Science for Poets (One of the best classes I ever took at UCLA, learned why Foucalt's Pendulum proved that the earth rotated and learned Maxwell's prediction of radio waves based on believing that eletricity and magnetism were two aspects of the same thing)

In my free time, I have taken the question very seriously of whether mathematics can be conceptually interesting independent of its problem solving applications. For the past two years, I have been working on a blog dedicated to this question and specifically to the history and people behind Fermat's Last Theorem:

http://fermatslasttheorem.blogspot.com

Thanks very much for bringing up this topic! :-)

-Larry

You forgot to translate something as "I'm high as a kite."

It's a standard:
http://daringfireball.net/2005/04/adobe_translatio n
http://daringfireball.net/2007/02/macrovision_tran slation
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/04/16/dhh-tr anslation
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/06/24/fm-tra nslation
http://waffle.wootest.net/2007/09/01/pr-speak-nbc- universal/
http://waffle.wootest.net/2007/05/02/pr-speak/
http://andersnorgaard.blogspot.com/2007/08/transla tion-from-pr-speak-to-english-of.html

Vermont limits the amount of net metering in the state no more than 1% of peak capacity http://www.dsireusa.org/library/includes/incentive 2.cfm?Incentive_Code=VT02R&state=VT&CurrentPageID= 1&RE=1&EE=1, while at the same time participating in the Northeast regional climate agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Perhaps the issues arising at Vermont Yankee will prompt Vermont to follow New Jersey and remove the cap, or at least follow Maryland and California and raise it.
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Rent solar power for you home: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Vermont Governor Douglas expresses reservations about the idea that governors of neighboring states could call for a safety review. He feels there may be jurisdictional issues. In the context of nuclear safety, border crossing effect would seem to make this provision pretty sensible. It should be remembered that New England has pushed for scrubbers for mid-western coal plants because of cross-border effects on water quality.
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Rent solar power for you home: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Entergy, the company that has been buying up old reactors to try to run them harder as they reach then end of their design lifetimes gets quite a few safety related criticisms. They use solo guards at security posts so it is not too surprising that one was found asleep at Indian Point last month: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/08/27/ap405783 6.html. They were recently reprimanded for for a worker taking a nap at the Pilgrim Reactor as well. The Simpsons is reality based television.

They also try to cut costs by refueling quickly. They boast of 90% up-times because of their quick refueling, but with reduced staff, how can they manage to both refuel and to scheduled maintenance, or avoid deferring maintenance that cannot fit within the shortened down time window? In the present case they seem to even be willing to run at reduced power rather than to promptly address the broken cooling tower. Was the ungreased bearing that caused their SCRAM on a list that just got skipped to get more up time? They give the impression that controlling costs it their primary function. Installing required warning sirens at both Indian Point http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articl e?AID=/20070830/NEWS01/708300442/1025/NEWS09 and Vermont Yankee http://www.reformer.com/headlines/ci_6835609 has been lagging. In Vermont they want Boy Scouts to distribute warning radios rather than doing it themselves.

Nuclear power does have a safety culture, using systems like lessons-learned to attempt to improve safety. But, pushing aging reactors past their design capacity or refueling faster with fewer people seem like lessons learned just waiting to happen. Shoestring methods lack the kind of redundancy that provides for safety margins.
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Rent solar power for you home: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

The patent application that this refers to is NOT the original one-click patent that was used against Barnes and Noble, and was the subject of the Bountyquest contest etc. The one this post refers to is a much later but similar application filed by Amazon that hasn't issued yet. The original one-click patent was issued as patent number 5,960,411 and is currently the subject of a reexamination request filed by a blogger from New Zealand, Peter Calveley. See http://igdmlgd.blogspot.com/2006/05/united-states- patent-and-trademark.htmlfor details.

Web comic about this technology... http://dwheezy.blogspot.com/2007/02/look-but-dont- touch.html

I guess you're a regular visitor to http://ihatecrocsblog.blogspot.com/ then?

Unlike the baloney being spun by this character, I have, on my blog, a link to the actual FTC complaint, which accurately describes the law, here and a link to an excellent article by Maura Corbett on C/Net News, which is also much more accurate than the propaganda emanating from the know-nothings in the content cartel, here.

Unlike the baloney being spun by this character, I have, on my blog, a link to the actual FTC complaint, which accurately describes the law, here and a link to an excellent article by Maura Corbett on C/Net News, which is also much more accurate than the propaganda emanating from the know-nothings in the content cartel, here.

On my blog I have a link to the actual complaint here and a link to a good article by Maura Corbett on C/Net News about the case here.

On my blog I have a link to the actual complaint here and a link to a good article by Maura Corbett on C/Net News about the case here.

What I'm saying is that we should be able to codify this.

There has been work by anthropologists and philosophers of ethics on universal moral rules - consider such principles as The Golden Rule and other principles linked to from that page.

Yet, as far as I'm aware, we break down too often into preferences, usually religious, on defining morality, rather than attempting to discover what is most helpful and why. (Yes, that last sentence was awful, sorry about that.)

Because religion is another system for social unity, and so it's not surprising that underlying ethical behaviours get subsumed into religious frameworks when they arise. But religions are also a power structure, and once rules are codified they become subject to change and interpretation (even if the underlying basis for them remains constant).

Also, why, if it is evolutionary in nature (I'm not saying it's not), why do so many people not follow it?
Because as something that has evolved to enable social living, we naturally only naturally apply it our social group, ending up with "us and them". Better social cohesiveness makes for better warfare, and one of the things leaders always do in wartime is to make the enemy seem less than human, outside of our "moral circle" as it is sometimes called.

Over history we've expanded our moral circle to the point where we now abhor sexism, racism and other such "us and them" prejudices. But if you don't consider someone as part of your "moral circle" then it's easier to behave badly towards them.

OTOH the vast majority of people do follow these rules, and lead lives largely free of cheating, rape, murder and the like. It's easy to read the papers and think otherwise though *rolls eyes*

Maybe I'm asking for the impossible. It certainly seems so, judging by this thread.

The trick is in this expanding of the moral circle, and in realising that today's society makes it hard to have the kind of natural social group that we evolved under. Things like mobile technology and the internet are both enablers here, allowing people to form communities and keep in touch with each other, making them feel less alienated.

"I was saddened (though not surprised) to read that the Justice Department opposes net neutrality saying that it could "hamper development of the internet." While it may seem counter-intuitive to me, they argue that allowing ISPs to provide different levels of service/speed for different content will benefit consumers.

I don't see service/speed benefiting consumers. In fact I'm hearing more people are complaining of being terminated by a certain Internet provider. It does nobody any good and America is turning into the caveman of the Internet with super slow speeds.

Besides, if we already paid for high speed internet then why don't we have it?

The untold story of the MER rovers is the triumphant vindication of Steve Squyres' then unprecedented decision to allow the raw imagery to be automatically thrown up on the net virtually as they came in - so that in some cases, the amateur mosaics, panoramas and other post-processed images were sometimes out before the official JPL team had even seen the raw data. Indeed someone even wrote an application specifically to pull down, process and render the raw data. (Yeah, it's GPL'd :) )

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/hail-caesar -by-digby-ive-been-getting.html

Interesting reading...

Start with a Bang - It's vital to hook the audience almost immediately.

Okay, I hate to tout my game review site, but this is exactly the thing I've been focusing on lately. Every week, I've been playing the first hour of different games from different genres and judging them entirely on this notion. I whole-heartedly agree that the first few moments of a TV show (Battlestar Galactica or even comedies with cold opens - like The Office - have been pulling this off pretty well lately) and the first few minutes to the first hour of a video game is crucial to capturing your audience's attention while developing the foundation for the rest of the experience. I've reviewed games with really good first hours like God of War 2 and Indigo Prophecy and games with really awful first hours.

Some of the best first hours of video games that I've played throw you right into a boss encounter: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and Beyond Good and Evil come to mind immediately. This is almost as good as you can get when trying to start your game off with a bang.

http://thefirsthour.blogspot.com/

There you go if you're interested.

Contrary opinion: The Seven Deadly Sins of Erlang

Red Square is located just outside the Kremlin, along it's Eastern wall. In the late 15th Century, people came to this square, called Torg or Market Square, to purchase food, livestock, or other wares. By the late 16th Century, it was renamed Trinity Square, and served as the main entrance to the Kremlin. It got the name Krasnaya Ploschad (Red Square) in 17th Century. In this sense Krasnaya (Red) means beautiful. The Pokrovsky (St. Basil's the Blessed) Cathedral, the Lenin's Mausoleum and the State History Museum are located on Red Square.

Hotel-Rates.com page for Maxima Irbis hotel in Moscow

This sites for a bell foundry in Russia states "Krasny" means "red", and "red" means "beautiful".

Photo tour of Moscow, in which the phrase "Red Square (meaning beautiful square in Russian)" is written.

Another tourist of Moscow reports, "Our first stop is St Basil's Cathedral at the end of Red Square. In Russian, it is Krasne square meaning red or beautiful."

Russian traditional costume seller says, "The word "krasnoye" meaning "red" became identified in the people's minds with "prekrasno-ye" meaning "beautiful". Moscow's most beautiful central square is called "Krasnaya Ploshchad" (Red Square)."

You may notice that Red Square isn't really red...it is paved with black and grey stones. In the Russian language, "Krasny"("red") also meant "beautiful", so "Krasnaya Ploschad" can also be translated as "Beautiful Square". The translation "Red Square" which is now used, was established in the 20th century.

talks about the modern link that still exists between "red" and "beauty"

Eduard Shevardnadze relays to the US State Department Chief of Protocol that krasny can mean "beautiful" as well as "red" -- in 1987.

Russia

Ripped off from http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/09/steveys-te ch-news-issue-1.html.

And it wasn't that funny or topical when he first posted it, earlier this week.

That "in theory" part is important. Examine ODT documents actually produced by OpenOffice, and you'll find a ton of application-specific elements that are not covered in the standard, that you have to understand in order to accurately represent the documents.

Credit where credit is due -- this is an excerpt from Stevey's Tech News, Issue #1.

Also a while ago, someone notable in the Java world (Gafter? Bloch? Can't seem to find the link) blogged about how he had discovered that one of the core textbook examples taught the last 30 years in the courses about proving code was in fact incorrect...

Found it... Extra, Extra - Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken. I like his final paragraph:

"We programmers need all the help we can get, and we should never assume otherwise. Careful design is great. Testing is great. Formal methods are great. Code reviews are great. Static analysis is great. But none of these things alone are sufficient to eliminate bugs: They will always be with us. A bug can exist for half a century despite our best efforts to exterminate it. We must program carefully, defensively, and remain ever vigilant."

By my count, there are now four announced Yes votes, with comments, two abstentions, and seven public No with comments votes for OOXML in ISO/IEC JT1.

There have been reports on far more votes. See this blog post for the current standings.

Yes, the collective hive-mind of /. does care and in the latest newsletter there was the quote "we want this voted down!".

You see, a few years ago governments all around the world started realizing that when they send ".doc" files to the public they're asking people to go spend money with a particular company to read that file. Governments shouldn't say "People with FIRESTONE tyres get to stay on the road!" ...or.. "People with Microsoft Office can talk to the government!". So there's been a raising of consciousness around how file formats cost countries tens or hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

What Governments should do is say "People whose cars pass certain tests can stay on the road!" or "People with an Office Suite that uses a published standard can talk to us!". That way it encourages competition, "innovation", and cut-throat pricing.

Microsoft could tell where the wind was blowing, and they began trying to get the International Standards Organisation (ISO) to rubber-stamp their 6000 page proposed standard... a standard called OOXML. An Open Standard sounded like a great idea but the question was: Had Microsoft really told everyone their secret mix of herbs and spices? Well, no, because as it turned out many things in OOXML were left undefined and the only vendor capable of implementing OOXML was Microsoft.

(and even they're having problems ... let alone the problems other vendors have)

Now although ISO haven't announced anything it looks like it's going to go "No" for Microsoft.

This doesn't affect what software individuals or the private sector choose, but people who should use standards (government and government vendors) do care about this decision. Actually, individuals and the private sector probably should care because more competition in the office suite market may lower the cost of Microsoft Office.

A country's "no" can turn into a "yes" when an issue is addressed at the ballot resolution meeting (I think) so the more "no"s the better because otherwise a single country could just swing it in favour of OOXML. The more "no"s the larger the safety net, so it'll be interesting to see what the final vote is.

So I'd expect that in the coming days there'll be a lot of analysis of whether the actual comments in the "No, with comments" from each country are fundamental problems or superficial quirks. Can any particular country be swung to vote yes easily?

Still, it's a great start. The noooxml crowd are predicting 18 "no"s.

There's pretty good vote tracking going on here, and as of a little while ago they're calling the vote failed: too many "no" votes to get the 2/3 majority needed to pass.

That doesn't mean it's over: there's a resolution process over the next few months, culminating in a vote in February, to address the comments submitted with "no, with comments" votes. If the comments are resolved to the voter's satisfaction, the "no" vote can be changed to a "yes".

Expect Microsoft to pull out all the stops to get countries to change there votes even without the comments being resolved. You thought there were dirty tricks before? You ain't seen nothing yet.

Or perhaps they'll just fix the standard. Ha ha ha ha...er, sorry.

...Yeah, they are for Target, but notice especially the REQUIREMENTS about allowing a customer to leave or to have been actually observed stealing.

http://targetfiling.blogspot.com/2007/05/target-ap -directives-revision-01-2006.html

The person arrested here did NOT break the law, and should not have been arrested.

The store manager and Asset Protection person DID break the law, and the police officer seriously bent it if not actually breaking it.

I doubt a city attorney will choose to prosecute the person arrested.

--
Tomas

I don't know if it would work for you, but you could try using Google's Bookmarks.

With Firefox and Google Toolbar, you've got the star button.
And in Opera, though a toolbar might be better, it looks like you can use a javascript bookmarklet. Only problem is quickly accessing them again in Opera.

One of the systems sounds close to mine. FC works on this with just a few issues with the video driver (answered here on slashdot). This sounds like a smart move.
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The GPL doesn't attempt to regulate third parties; only those engaged in licensed distribution. The fact that licensed distribution ensures rights for third parties is irrelevant. The Jacobsen v. Katzer case involves the artistic license and is unlikely to impact a courts interpretation of a less broad license such as the GPL.

Is the grass green on your planet?

Because nerds view technocracy as being the closest to meritocracy and technocracy is very close to libertarianism. But it's not quite the same. For example, most nerds would disagree with libertarianists on education. Here we go: http://dasuperwiz.blogspot.com/2007/05/progress-an d-nihilism.html

"Oh, you're right. But please supply a better system if you can. I'm all ears."

Sure, but first things first.

To me items protected by copyrights and patents do not trade in a free market but rather are items protected by government granted monopolies.

The free market may or may not be able to come up with a better solution to this problem. You would think that free market types (and I mostly consider myself one) would be calling for the government to stop interfering in this market. And in my experience, market players like to pretend they are for the free market when people suggest that the government step in and fix abuses of the copyright or patent situation and they make noise about letting the market decide.

To me, to push for the market to decide is to push for copyrights and patents to be abolished.

Now to the better system. I consider the one enacted by the founders of the US to be better than the one the US has today. Simple enough really.

Now for some of my real thoughts on making this better, see my "Some thoughts on a "Copyright Offensive" at this link:

http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/

If you are interested, please comment there as such things here get locked after a while. I tried it already here:

http://slashdot.org/~zotz/journal/154538

Could a free market not come up with better ways to encourage and protect creators than government granted monopolies? I am not sure in this case, but I certainly see little willingness to try on anyone's part.

all the best,

drew

LinkScanner from Exploit Prevention Labs protected against this. http://explabs.blogspot.com/ How? It looks only for known exploits, and it stops the driveby download from occuring. Solutions like this are the only way to reliably stop driveby downloads from sites like Bank of India, because a trusted site can be clean one minute and dirty the next. Reputation filters can't react in real time. You need an anti-exploit scanner.

I think you'll find it's not possible to use MOOXML unless you're Microsoft.

I would think one criterion would be subject matter, being personal or not. I write about hockey online, and would definitely call that a blog, not an online diary...

Just because Vista is stable for you, doesn't mean it is for everybody. I know plenty of people - including myself - who had bad initial experiences with Vista. Sure, it's shiney, but that's as good as it got for me. I dunno, maybe trying to unzip an eclipse download isn't something an OS like Vista should have to handle... :rolleyes:

and we're still running a deficit! It appears to me that the conservative movement is over funding government.

... just not the right parts of it. How is it that schools seem to be going down the toilet, and that even with all this war-mongering and "surge, surge, surge" BS from the White House, our troops still need to be creative in their own fundraising efforts (c.f. this post about a reservist posted to Afghanistan and advertising a local beer brewery to raise money for his unit)? So that leads me to wonder -- rather pointedly -- where in the devil's briefcase all this military spending is going? How much of a kickback is Cheney getting from Halliburton, I wonder...

Am I the only one finding it ironic that Microsoft is demanding that Fair Use be recognized, while shutting down Autopackager and infringing on the right of first sale, even in cases where the software isn't even opened?

Sorry, I'm just frustrated that I spent thousands on two MSDN subscriptions and have been trying to activate them for a week, and have spent over 115 minutes on the phone, with the last two calls assuring me with 100% certainty that the problem is now resolved, only to discover they are STILL not activated and I have to call them yet AGAIN. GRRRRRRRRR!!! This is why I run Linux for everything except for client projects. Ugh.

Microsoft does not intend for anyone to actually use this "standard", least of all themselves. If you read the critique of OOXML posted on ./ a few days ago, you'll see that the standard is not much more than a text version of the binary Office files -- but worse, because it contains redundant information, balloons the file size, and will be much slower to read and write. It may be a text-based format, but it is not easily human-readable or -modifiable, and several aspects are poorly specified or rely on unspecified Office or Windows behavior. So anyone running Office will continue to use the native Office formats, and anyone not running Office will not be able to implement the standard -- and it wouldn't matter if they did, since the Office users won't be generating OOXML files.

What does Microsoft gain from pushing through a specification, then? If they succeed, then customers like Massachusetts will not be able to complain about a lack of an "open standard" format that can theoretically be used by other applications after their current version of Office has been end-of-lifed. But, more importantly, if the Microsoft standard passes, then when ODF comes before standards committees, the Microsoft-packed panel can argue that a standard format already exists, so they don't need to pass another. And this saves Microsoft from having to handle *two* (possibly conflicting) document-handling code paths through all of their applications. If ODF passes, it doubles the work for Microsoft to comply, but if OOXML passes, it doubles the work for Open Office and others.

So, what if Microsoft's proposal doesn't pass? In that case, they can argue on subsequent standards committees that no one is interested in open document formats. With their huge, poorly written standards document, they have bought themselves time to manipulate large "uncertain" customers like the State of Massachusetts. And, even by losing, they have confused and clouded the issue of whether open formats necessary and which one is best. (Why do you think they called it "Open Office XML"?) So, really, Microsoft wins either way.

Whether the OOXML standard passes or not, we can expect that Microsoft will not support any other "open" format, since "one already exists". Likewise, I wouldn't be surprised if Office 2011 or so removes the format, with the rationale: "Our user studies showed that no one was using it."