The earnings from selling Stormtroper merchandise (and thus the damages Ainsworth can claim) have increased substantially in the 25 years since Lucas started doing it. Lucas is clearly in a more vulnerable position now than if Ainsworth had sued him in 1977.
Doesn't work that way. He can claim what it was worth 30 years ago, the same as everybody else got when they claimed it 30 years ago (still a fair chunk of money). No reasonable judge is going to give him what it's worth today. A mere increase in value is not sufficient for laches; the essential requirement is that the losing party must have made different decisions as a result of the delay, and that those decisions have left them in a worse position.
If Lucas had believed that he owed no royalties to anybody and then sold the rights to somebody else (who would now sue him for screwing up), that would be a case for laches - his position has been harmed by the delay. If the royalties would amount to more than it was worth then he could claim he wouldn't have gone ahead with the project if he'd known about this in advance, and that would also be one. But there's nothing like that here.
You might as well say that free software is a failure because there are consumer products on the shelves that don't cost much more, are more dependable, and can do useful work. It's true so long as you define "failure" in terms of "commercial failure", but it's missing the point.
The whole point of this machine is that it is user modifiable. By being able to replicate itself, it can produce variations on its own parts, and hence produce a machine that does something differently, better, more precisely, whatever.
Let's compare that to your vision of high-volume, consumer devices: you've got a box that can quickly and accurately produce plastic objects, but only in dimensions of 30cm x 30cm x 50cm or less, and only in fifteen standard colours from the feedstock supplied at an inflated price by the manufacturer, and you have to use their software package to do it (with an annual licensing fee), and it creates flaws if you lay down concentric circles because there's a bug in the firmware, and there's nothing you can do about it because the device is designed to ensure the manufacturer keeps making sales.
It's all the same problems that proprietary software has, and the solution is the same as with free software, because with these devices there's really no difference between the information and the physical object.
It doesn't matter that the commercial systems might be more accurate or effective, because no commercial system will ever result in a free device. The only way that we will get free devices is if we go through the process of having crude devices, and then progress towards more refined devices. The parallel development of commercial systems is irrelevant. The only way you will ever get a fully functional free 3d printer is if the free devices go through these early stages of development first.
Thus, as long as you're not modifying the schematics themselves, releasing them under the GPL is almost useless.
Since we're talking about a system that uses the schematics to create its own parts, that isn't really an interesting distinction. The whole point of the exercise is that you can modify the schematics to change the machine; if you particularly want to take a hacksaw to it instead, you're free to do so, but you're missing the whole point of the machine and there's no reason why you'd even have one.
The doctrine of laches applies only to cases where the delay has caused the other party to act differently, and are worse off with the case being brought now than they would be if it had been brought earlier. If this designer had asked for royalties 30 years ago, it should be presumed that they would have been paid them and otherwise the franchise would have continued unchanged, because that's what happened with a whole bunch of other people who did ask for royalties 30 years ago. Don't see how laches applies here, it sounds like a classic case of mistake (Lucas didn't realise he didn't own the rights, the contractor didn't realise he should have claimed royalties up front). Whether or not any money would be awarded for this will depend on the details.
These places don't usually have strong internal firewalls ("Windows has a built in firewall, why do we need another one?"). The infecting mail gets opened by some manager, and the virus promptly spreads itself directly to the local servers with the latest batch of remote exploits. Nobody has to do it on the server directly.
I've spent more than a little time working with actual users, and guess what: the users don't want applications that are "easier to use".
Why not? Well, because they can't tell the difference. Most users have no idea what is "easy" or "hard" to use. Either somebody has shown them how to use this particular application or they will not even try. If they have been shown how to use it then they will do precisely what they have been shown (maybe leaving out a few steps at random or giving the wrong answers to questions along the way), but won't otherwise deviate from this. Hence there is no "easy" or "hard" for them: there is only "I know how to do this" or "I haven't seen this before so I can't do it at all", with no space in between.
What the users want is for somebody to teach them the sequence of arm movements that makes the computer do what they want. What they do not want is any suggestion that they have to think at any point, or deviate from their fixed routine.
Make Linux and it's associated applications easier for average users to use and they will use.
I can guarantee that they will not. The only thing that will get them to use those applications, or any applications, is if somebody sets it up for them and shows them how to use it. That's the only thing that got them to use Windows in the first place, rather than a pencil, and it's the only thing that will get them to use anything else.
..."just works" under Windows. They don't want to have to open a terminal and deal with the command line to do anything.
I want that version of Windows. It would vastly reduce the amount of work I have to do. Doesn't exist though.
(There is a reason GUIs are so ubiquitous)
Yes, there is. It's the same reason that there's a lot of violence and explosions on TV. They look flashy, so they're easier to hype, so salesmen sell a lot more of them. This is not a feature intended to make the product easier to use, it is a feature to make the product easier to sell. Any effect on usability is entirely coincidental. Microsoft knew this ten years ago and have designed every version of Windows with this in mind; Apple picked it up sometime around macosx.
Then why do they bother with the added cost and effort to twist the pair if it has no beneficial effect?
Because as I said earlier, it's actually cheaper, not more expensive - using the same cable as ethernet costs far less than using anything else at a similar grade of copper, thanks to the usual economy of scale effect and the immense amount of ethernet cabling in the world.
The wikipedia article could be clearer: what they're trying to say is that when using balanced or differential signalling, twisted pair is essential to prevent interference from screwing up the signal anyway. For other kinds of signals, the effect is not really significant (it makes the cable act like a whip antenna rather than a loop, which is slightly less efficient at broadcasting and receiving).
If the telecomms wanted to pick a cable that cost a little more and suppressed interference, they'd use shielded cat5.
But I think there's an ulterior motive here. As a part of Chip-and-PIN, the UK is testing a brilliant two-factor authentication system this year for cards that will cryptographically render browser, PC, and merchant security moot.
Unfortunately it was defeated a few years ago (more recent attacks have improved on this further), and it turns out that the system is designed to only protect the banks, and not the users. It has almost no security against credit card theft at all. Any one of those devices that you stick your card into each day might be silently duplicating your identity, you'd never know it, and the banks wouldn't care (it's "impossible", so it must be your fault).
No, I do mean self-shielding; the fact that it is fed balanced is a given.
Okay, then you're just wrong. Telephone lines are neither; their loop system is almost like a balanced signal, but not close enough to actually prevent interference, and they broadcast a very strong electromagnetic signal that you can pick up with sensitive radio equipment from a few tens of meters away (or with a couple of transistors and a 1.5v cell at a distance of a few cm). Whether or not the cable is twisted has no impact on this. Interference is a very real problem with telephone lines, and the only reason it doesn't affect radios is because it doesn't use those frequencies.
The Sonny Bono Act is the name of the law that effectively rescinded the concept of copyright expiry in the US, making them last forever; it was passed in 1998 and is still very much alive.
You mean "balanced line", not "self-shielding", and that only works when the devices are actually sending balanced signals. We use cat5 in telephone systems today because it's the cheapest thing on the market with a high enough grade of copper in it (thanks to the high demand for network cabling having drastically increased the production), not because it's twisted pair.
Telephone signals are almost balanced, but the electronics are kinda funky, so they actually give off large amounts of interference. This causes a major crosstalk problem on DSL lines at the exchange, which is why ADSL is more common: the interference limits the bandwidth of the weaker signal (upstream, because it's furthest from its transmitter) far more than that of the stronger signal.
Why don't we have better internet access than ALL of the third world, if not the best internet access, period?
Because bad internet access is more profitable. If everybody had gigabit lines to their homes, it would be very hard to sell "faster" business lines to businesses at an inflated cost. By artificially limiting the low end of the market, they inflate the value of the high end, and hold the whole thing together by passing laws to block any competition. Isn't capitalism grand?
I swear, people here are acting like putting real-life ads in the game requires squeezing blood out of babies or something.
The thing is that even if half the players filter out the ads, even if no real game content is changed, even if it's just a few changed textures... the company is now beholden to two masters: the players and the advertisers. The advertising companies are going to be saying to them: "We want you to promote X, Y, and Z, and we're going to pull our advertising unless you agree with us on political point Q". We've seen it so many times before, because the advertisers have a much louder and more focussed message, so they usually get what they want. The company goes along with them because they don't really care about any of those things - they just want the money so they can focus on their game - and then you have one more voice supporting the big media companies, throwing their weight behind anti-user movements like Sonny Bono and the DMCA.
Note that none of this is going to happen today. Putting the ads into the game is free. It's 12 months down the line, when all the noise has died down, that the advertising companies come back and say "Now... you've worked all that money into your budget, you depend on it... let's talk about what you're going to do for us". Keeping the ads is far from free.
Once you have reliable hardware that won't trash your data, you can build your idiot-protection in software on top of that: simply take nightly snapshots of the filesystem contents onto a different region of the drive. I use rsync's hardlink-forest mode for this.
After that you only need to worry about area-destructive effects, like major fires - and at that point, you may well decide that your data is not important enough to protect it against your house burning down, because when that happens your mail is the least of your problems.
External backup media has its applications, but it is not universally required. It is also frequently unreliable due to the human element, while a fully automated system that solves the same problems can be far more reliable.
Now we hear that computers that could break these messages might be relatively just around the corner.
(Emphasis added)
You might die tomorrow. Hurricanes might devastate the western world. Aliens might show up and blow the planet to bits for housing such a greedy, self-centred species. Any number of progressively unlikely things might happen.
There's no real substance to the rumours of encryption-defeating quantum computers - it's a hypothesis somebody proposed a few years ago, which has never been proved or disproved. We don't know anything about it yet.
It only works for a while if you're the guy who thought it up. It doesn't work for anybody else, because by the time they hear about it, it's been fixed.
But I agree that team blackjack play can't be considered a scam, especially the part about having spotters waiting for a hot deck. If the casino offers a game where the player has the advantage, a savvy player will take advantage of that. The casino can always change the rules of the game, or choose not to offer it.
And what the infamous book didn't mention is that the casinos figured it out and changed the rules to break it. You're not allowed to sit down in the middle of a shoe, so there is no "team play" system any more.
The problem with all these tricks is that they're short term things. As soon as you start using them, the casinos will spot you and change the rules to block it. There is no way to beat the house in the long term.
Most of them aren't interested in "card counting". They just watch the patterns of winnings of players, and throw out the ones who consistently win. They don't care how it's done.
I take the opposite approach: I reduce cleaning up the messes to a minimal outlay of effort (less than a minute to kick off the network-boot-and-restore-from-image process) and make it clear to everybody that if they call me in, I'm going to be burning down anything they have on the system and not even trying to keep it, so they can either store everything on the servers and leave the local system alone (like they're supposed to) or leave me out of it entirely.
For the cases where user meddling with the workstation needs to be actively discouraged, just take it one step further and run the process automatically every night.
And if you want to accomplish something along those lines (proving that you had a document on a certain date) then that is precisely why notaries public exist in the first place. Take whatever it is along to your local notary and pay them their fee. In the eyes of the law, the document has now been proven to exist in your possession on that date. Unlike the ridiculous games with envelopes that you see in the movies, it actually works.
A handful of drug companies take things one step further. They produce a drug that is of value only to poor people (bad sanitation or whatever). Now, it's hard to sell things to poor people for large amounts of money, so what they do is declare that every dose is valued at $1k (or some similarly high figure) which they'd never be able to pay, and then always give it away - you can buy it on the open market, but they don't expect to sell any, they're making all their profit on the tax rebate.
It's a method for making some money out of a drug that they've developed but which trials have shown there to be no real market for. The only reason they don't do it more often is because you're not allowed to have a tax rebate that's larger than the total amount of tax you owe, so it's capped by the value of their primary revenue. But it does mean that some drug companies don't really pay taxes. There are supposed to be laws against this, but they have so many loopholes written in that it doesn't really matter.
Exactly that type of nonsense can be found in nearly every piece of paperwork filed by any prosecutor or police officer.
To be fair, half of that is regular old stupidity and incompetence, rather than actual corruption. Lawyers and police are much the same as everybody else: most of them are idiots who are not capable of doing their job correctly.
Not specific to computer evidence, government mooks have been planting drugs this way for decades. This is why you should know how to handle a search/seize warrant. The cops who show up are going to try to shove you out and leave them to do whatever they want on their own, largely by claiming that they can and getting in your face. They're lying. You're entitled to make them stand on the doorstep while you wait for a witness to arrive and observe them, and if they don't, or do anything out of sight of the witness, it's an illegal search and the whole lot is inadmissible in court (probably; some local laws are flawed, check yours).
Usual "reasonable" limits apply: you can call over your neighbour, you can't wait an hour for somebody to drive over from the next city.
The problem is, of course, that they are trying to transmit all of their hundreds of channels to your TV simultaneously, and let the decoder pick out the interesting bits. If they only sent the one that you were watching, there wouldn't be a problem.
Of course, then they'd have to discard their outmoded business model. So that won't happen. They'll just be marginalised and discarded in favour of internet distribution. It's the same thing that's happening to newspapers and bookstores - still around, but becoming less relevant every year.
Cue their attempts to get laws passed to ban the new competition...
ISO is (supposed to be) a consensus-making body, not some kind of paper certification mill. What's supposed to happen is that all the interested parties sit down and hammer out a specification for a common interoperability system that they can all agree on; the voting procedure is just to make sure that nobody has derailed the process, and is usually just a final footnote after a long process that has generated real, compatible products by the time it is finished. Given that, there's really no need for a recall procedure - you know it's working because you have a market filled with products that work together by the time the specification is released in its final form.
This nonsense with OOXML is a gratuitous abuse that makes a mockery of the whole thing. There is not and never has been any attempt to build interoperability here. There is absolutely no value in it. The only ones to benefit are Microsoft, who are using it as marketing.
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Doesn't work that way. He can claim what it was worth 30 years ago, the same as everybody else got when they claimed it 30 years ago (still a fair chunk of money). No reasonable judge is going to give him what it's worth today. A mere increase in value is not sufficient for laches; the essential requirement is that the losing party must have made different decisions as a result of the delay, and that those decisions have left them in a worse position.
If Lucas had believed that he owed no royalties to anybody and then sold the rights to somebody else (who would now sue him for screwing up), that would be a case for laches - his position has been harmed by the delay. If the royalties would amount to more than it was worth then he could claim he wouldn't have gone ahead with the project if he'd known about this in advance, and that would also be one. But there's nothing like that here.
You might as well say that free software is a failure because there are consumer products on the shelves that don't cost much more, are more dependable, and can do useful work. It's true so long as you define "failure" in terms of "commercial failure", but it's missing the point.
The whole point of this machine is that it is user modifiable. By being able to replicate itself, it can produce variations on its own parts, and hence produce a machine that does something differently, better, more precisely, whatever.
Let's compare that to your vision of high-volume, consumer devices: you've got a box that can quickly and accurately produce plastic objects, but only in dimensions of 30cm x 30cm x 50cm or less, and only in fifteen standard colours from the feedstock supplied at an inflated price by the manufacturer, and you have to use their software package to do it (with an annual licensing fee), and it creates flaws if you lay down concentric circles because there's a bug in the firmware, and there's nothing you can do about it because the device is designed to ensure the manufacturer keeps making sales.
It's all the same problems that proprietary software has, and the solution is the same as with free software, because with these devices there's really no difference between the information and the physical object.
It doesn't matter that the commercial systems might be more accurate or effective, because no commercial system will ever result in a free device. The only way that we will get free devices is if we go through the process of having crude devices, and then progress towards more refined devices. The parallel development of commercial systems is irrelevant. The only way you will ever get a fully functional free 3d printer is if the free devices go through these early stages of development first.
Since we're talking about a system that uses the schematics to create its own parts, that isn't really an interesting distinction. The whole point of the exercise is that you can modify the schematics to change the machine; if you particularly want to take a hacksaw to it instead, you're free to do so, but you're missing the whole point of the machine and there's no reason why you'd even have one.
The doctrine of laches applies only to cases where the delay has caused the other party to act differently, and are worse off with the case being brought now than they would be if it had been brought earlier. If this designer had asked for royalties 30 years ago, it should be presumed that they would have been paid them and otherwise the franchise would have continued unchanged, because that's what happened with a whole bunch of other people who did ask for royalties 30 years ago. Don't see how laches applies here, it sounds like a classic case of mistake (Lucas didn't realise he didn't own the rights, the contractor didn't realise he should have claimed royalties up front). Whether or not any money would be awarded for this will depend on the details.
These places don't usually have strong internal firewalls ("Windows has a built in firewall, why do we need another one?"). The infecting mail gets opened by some manager, and the virus promptly spreads itself directly to the local servers with the latest batch of remote exploits. Nobody has to do it on the server directly.
Why not? Well, because they can't tell the difference. Most users have no idea what is "easy" or "hard" to use. Either somebody has shown them how to use this particular application or they will not even try. If they have been shown how to use it then they will do precisely what they have been shown (maybe leaving out a few steps at random or giving the wrong answers to questions along the way), but won't otherwise deviate from this. Hence there is no "easy" or "hard" for them: there is only "I know how to do this" or "I haven't seen this before so I can't do it at all", with no space in between.
What the users want is for somebody to teach them the sequence of arm movements that makes the computer do what they want. What they do not want is any suggestion that they have to think at any point, or deviate from their fixed routine.
I can guarantee that they will not. The only thing that will get them to use those applications, or any applications, is if somebody sets it up for them and shows them how to use it. That's the only thing that got them to use Windows in the first place, rather than a pencil, and it's the only thing that will get them to use anything else.
I want that version of Windows. It would vastly reduce the amount of work I have to do. Doesn't exist though.
Yes, there is. It's the same reason that there's a lot of violence and explosions on TV. They look flashy, so they're easier to hype, so salesmen sell a lot more of them. This is not a feature intended to make the product easier to use, it is a feature to make the product easier to sell. Any effect on usability is entirely coincidental. Microsoft knew this ten years ago and have designed every version of Windows with this in mind; Apple picked it up sometime around macosx.
Because as I said earlier, it's actually cheaper, not more expensive - using the same cable as ethernet costs far less than using anything else at a similar grade of copper, thanks to the usual economy of scale effect and the immense amount of ethernet cabling in the world.
The wikipedia article could be clearer: what they're trying to say is that when using balanced or differential signalling, twisted pair is essential to prevent interference from screwing up the signal anyway. For other kinds of signals, the effect is not really significant (it makes the cable act like a whip antenna rather than a loop, which is slightly less efficient at broadcasting and receiving).
If the telecomms wanted to pick a cable that cost a little more and suppressed interference, they'd use shielded cat5.
Unfortunately it was defeated a few years ago (more recent attacks have improved on this further), and it turns out that the system is designed to only protect the banks, and not the users. It has almost no security against credit card theft at all. Any one of those devices that you stick your card into each day might be silently duplicating your identity, you'd never know it, and the banks wouldn't care (it's "impossible", so it must be your fault).
Okay, then you're just wrong. Telephone lines are neither; their loop system is almost like a balanced signal, but not close enough to actually prevent interference, and they broadcast a very strong electromagnetic signal that you can pick up with sensitive radio equipment from a few tens of meters away (or with a couple of transistors and a 1.5v cell at a distance of a few cm). Whether or not the cable is twisted has no impact on this. Interference is a very real problem with telephone lines, and the only reason it doesn't affect radios is because it doesn't use those frequencies.
The Sonny Bono Act is the name of the law that effectively rescinded the concept of copyright expiry in the US, making them last forever; it was passed in 1998 and is still very much alive.
You mean "balanced line", not "self-shielding", and that only works when the devices are actually sending balanced signals. We use cat5 in telephone systems today because it's the cheapest thing on the market with a high enough grade of copper in it (thanks to the high demand for network cabling having drastically increased the production), not because it's twisted pair.
Telephone signals are almost balanced, but the electronics are kinda funky, so they actually give off large amounts of interference. This causes a major crosstalk problem on DSL lines at the exchange, which is why ADSL is more common: the interference limits the bandwidth of the weaker signal (upstream, because it's furthest from its transmitter) far more than that of the stronger signal.
Because bad internet access is more profitable. If everybody had gigabit lines to their homes, it would be very hard to sell "faster" business lines to businesses at an inflated cost. By artificially limiting the low end of the market, they inflate the value of the high end, and hold the whole thing together by passing laws to block any competition. Isn't capitalism grand?
The thing is that even if half the players filter out the ads, even if no real game content is changed, even if it's just a few changed textures... the company is now beholden to two masters: the players and the advertisers. The advertising companies are going to be saying to them: "We want you to promote X, Y, and Z, and we're going to pull our advertising unless you agree with us on political point Q". We've seen it so many times before, because the advertisers have a much louder and more focussed message, so they usually get what they want. The company goes along with them because they don't really care about any of those things - they just want the money so they can focus on their game - and then you have one more voice supporting the big media companies, throwing their weight behind anti-user movements like Sonny Bono and the DMCA.
Note that none of this is going to happen today. Putting the ads into the game is free. It's 12 months down the line, when all the noise has died down, that the advertising companies come back and say "Now... you've worked all that money into your budget, you depend on it... let's talk about what you're going to do for us". Keeping the ads is far from free.
Once you have reliable hardware that won't trash your data, you can build your idiot-protection in software on top of that: simply take nightly snapshots of the filesystem contents onto a different region of the drive. I use rsync's hardlink-forest mode for this.
After that you only need to worry about area-destructive effects, like major fires - and at that point, you may well decide that your data is not important enough to protect it against your house burning down, because when that happens your mail is the least of your problems.
External backup media has its applications, but it is not universally required. It is also frequently unreliable due to the human element, while a fully automated system that solves the same problems can be far more reliable.
(Emphasis added)
You might die tomorrow. Hurricanes might devastate the western world. Aliens might show up and blow the planet to bits for housing such a greedy, self-centred species. Any number of progressively unlikely things might happen.
There's no real substance to the rumours of encryption-defeating quantum computers - it's a hypothesis somebody proposed a few years ago, which has never been proved or disproved. We don't know anything about it yet.
It only works for a while if you're the guy who thought it up. It doesn't work for anybody else, because by the time they hear about it, it's been fixed.
And what the infamous book didn't mention is that the casinos figured it out and changed the rules to break it. You're not allowed to sit down in the middle of a shoe, so there is no "team play" system any more.
The problem with all these tricks is that they're short term things. As soon as you start using them, the casinos will spot you and change the rules to block it. There is no way to beat the house in the long term.
Most of them aren't interested in "card counting". They just watch the patterns of winnings of players, and throw out the ones who consistently win. They don't care how it's done.
I take the opposite approach: I reduce cleaning up the messes to a minimal outlay of effort (less than a minute to kick off the network-boot-and-restore-from-image process) and make it clear to everybody that if they call me in, I'm going to be burning down anything they have on the system and not even trying to keep it, so they can either store everything on the servers and leave the local system alone (like they're supposed to) or leave me out of it entirely.
For the cases where user meddling with the workstation needs to be actively discouraged, just take it one step further and run the process automatically every night.
And if you want to accomplish something along those lines (proving that you had a document on a certain date) then that is precisely why notaries public exist in the first place. Take whatever it is along to your local notary and pay them their fee. In the eyes of the law, the document has now been proven to exist in your possession on that date. Unlike the ridiculous games with envelopes that you see in the movies, it actually works.
A handful of drug companies take things one step further. They produce a drug that is of value only to poor people (bad sanitation or whatever). Now, it's hard to sell things to poor people for large amounts of money, so what they do is declare that every dose is valued at $1k (or some similarly high figure) which they'd never be able to pay, and then always give it away - you can buy it on the open market, but they don't expect to sell any, they're making all their profit on the tax rebate.
It's a method for making some money out of a drug that they've developed but which trials have shown there to be no real market for. The only reason they don't do it more often is because you're not allowed to have a tax rebate that's larger than the total amount of tax you owe, so it's capped by the value of their primary revenue. But it does mean that some drug companies don't really pay taxes. There are supposed to be laws against this, but they have so many loopholes written in that it doesn't really matter.
To be fair, half of that is regular old stupidity and incompetence, rather than actual corruption. Lawyers and police are much the same as everybody else: most of them are idiots who are not capable of doing their job correctly.
Not specific to computer evidence, government mooks have been planting drugs this way for decades. This is why you should know how to handle a search/seize warrant. The cops who show up are going to try to shove you out and leave them to do whatever they want on their own, largely by claiming that they can and getting in your face. They're lying. You're entitled to make them stand on the doorstep while you wait for a witness to arrive and observe them, and if they don't, or do anything out of sight of the witness, it's an illegal search and the whole lot is inadmissible in court (probably; some local laws are flawed, check yours).
Usual "reasonable" limits apply: you can call over your neighbour, you can't wait an hour for somebody to drive over from the next city.
The problem is, of course, that they are trying to transmit all of their hundreds of channels to your TV simultaneously, and let the decoder pick out the interesting bits. If they only sent the one that you were watching, there wouldn't be a problem.
Of course, then they'd have to discard their outmoded business model. So that won't happen. They'll just be marginalised and discarded in favour of internet distribution. It's the same thing that's happening to newspapers and bookstores - still around, but becoming less relevant every year.
Cue their attempts to get laws passed to ban the new competition...
ISO is (supposed to be) a consensus-making body, not some kind of paper certification mill. What's supposed to happen is that all the interested parties sit down and hammer out a specification for a common interoperability system that they can all agree on; the voting procedure is just to make sure that nobody has derailed the process, and is usually just a final footnote after a long process that has generated real, compatible products by the time it is finished. Given that, there's really no need for a recall procedure - you know it's working because you have a market filled with products that work together by the time the specification is released in its final form.
This nonsense with OOXML is a gratuitous abuse that makes a mockery of the whole thing. There is not and never has been any attempt to build interoperability here. There is absolutely no value in it. The only ones to benefit are Microsoft, who are using it as marketing.