Are you telling me you never had a teacher who either didn't know their subject or couldn't communicate with students and used the same overhead transparencies for the last 15 years? They seemed to be plentiful throughout my academic experience. My point is that with math, it is possible to squeak by on just knowing the end result without knowing how to get there. Ah, but an important point is that mathematics is an incredibly layered subject. New material builds on the previous material in layer upon layer, and that means that if a student falls behind a little, they find themselves unable to catch up as the subject moves on away from them. They are essentially left chasing a horizon they can never quite reach. This is dispiriting and depressing and, to be frank, is much of the reason why so many students hate mathematics. With mathematics one single bad teacher can pretty much end your mathematics career - believe me, I've heard exactly that story from a vast number of people. Other subjects tend to have similar issues, but none are quite as unforgiving in this regard as mathematics. If you don't quite grasp a particular section in English or History your odds of coping with the next section are not appreciably diminished (barring the first couple of years of reading and writing), whil in mathematics it can be exceptionally detrimental. Bad math teachers have a huge impact on students.
If you're talking about teaching simple math, you're probably correct. Most people intuitively understand things like addition and subtraction. The point at where this is no longer valid is when you're talking about teaching advanced math concepts in high school, which is where the real shortage occurs. Actually I would like to point out that, in fact, simple math can actually be one of the areas where real depth of knowledge can actually make a difference. While most people have some intuitive grasp of simple mathematics, they often don't really understand it - if you pick apart the fundamentals you can often find things are not as well understood as you might expect. Even just numbers and simple arithmetic have more going on than you might think. A teacher who understands the deeper issues is going to be much better placed to truly explain the concepts to kids and actively engage them in the processes that are going on. That can make a difference when you come to the higher level abstractions like algebra and calculus.
Advanced mathematics isn't as simple as right/wrong, it's teaching a certain way of thinking. As much as that is true, I think, ultimately, part of the problem with current mathematics teaching is that we don't treat elementary mathematics the same way - it is just as much about teaching a certain way of thinking, and about developing abstractions and logical thought, as advanced mathematics. That is why, as I say, having skilled teachers at the early stages of mathematics education can be just as important.
You know, one of the proponents from the original article makes that very point: "He pointed out that an English teacher doesn't have to be a great writer to teach reading and writing, but that the same is not true of high-end math and science courses." I think this is an important point. It can be overstated, but real fluency in mathematics can make a great deal of difference to how well it is taught. Most students can appreciate the value of learning to read or write, but will more often tend to question the value of mathematics. It takes a teacher with good mathematical knowledge (often well beyond the level they are teaching) to provide the extra depth to mathematics that can help engage students. Finland noted this around 2000 and set up a series of reforms that saw strong encouragement for elementary school teachers to take advanced math classes. The result is that Finland is now ranked among the very top countries in the world with respect to the achievements of their students in mathematics.
Of course, at the higher levels of English, having a teacher well versed in literature can make all the difference with regard to engaing students in studying Shakespeare and the classics. I don't think you should sell short the value of a well educated English teacher - it is just that that value tends be increase later in schooling rather than earlier.
Personally, I see no other purpose in the design of Diebold voting systems other than to facilitate fraud. Seriously, there just aren't any really good protections built into the whole device. I have to say that quotes about attribution, malice, and incompetence come to mind. It is certainly true that the Diebold system is horribly insecure. On the other hand, it also bears a lot of the hallmarks of something thrown together by a few incompetent engineers in a couple of weeks. I mean really, the central tabulator running on a half assed little Access database? The insecurity of that is simply down to Access and how painfully cobbled together the system is - the sort of thing a VB programmer would whip up over the weekend. If you were designing things for fraud then presumably you'd build something that looks secure but has an elegantly hidden backdoor. I guess one can make arguments regarding "plausible deniability" and say that a shoddy and incompetent system can be denied as just shoddy and incompetent which an elegantly backdoored secure system is a smoking gun... but still. I'd like a little more than just the sheer cobbled together, half assed, done on the cheap, aspects of the system before I go concluding malice was involved. Right now incompetence still looks like a pretty good explanation.
Instead of just letting a company have their way with electronic voting, they really should have done research into the best voting method. I think on Slashdot we've reached a general consensus that there should at least be a verifyable paper trail that each voter can see their votes cast on paper. I think a paper trail is just the beginning. I think some other constraints should be: open source code, inspectable by anyone, that can be compiled and compared to binaries installed on machines. But that's just the start. I think having said code in a language like SPARK-Ada (a subset of Ada with annotations in comments that allow for formal correctness proofs), along with openly published correctness proofs for various properties (such as ensuring a vote will get tallied correctly) that can be verified is also a damn good idea. Yes, yes, correctness proofs don't absolutely ensure thing will work and can be expensive to do; however, they do provide considerable extra assurance that can be independently verified, and let's be honest, if there was a place where the extra expense of getting the code right with appropriate extra assurance was going to be worth it, then the software that underlies the democratic process of your nation would be it.
You'll never get 100% assurance of perfection for your software, but I think, in the case of voting software, it is reasonable to expect as much verifiable assurance as possible. That means complete open source code and published verifiable correctness proofs for any properties that matter.
Re:Installed Linux on a machine running linux?
on
30 Days With Ubuntu Linux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm not suggesting it is ready for prime time. I was merely trying to provide a description for the OP of how helping someone overcome initial difficulties/fears can pave the way. He was interested in helping his parents switch, and I was merely suggesting to him good ways to do that. I think the fact that you read everything as a "Linux is ready now!", whether it is or not, says more about you.
I find Word and PowerPoint files as bloated. The subdirectory or subfolder idea is much more flexable and reliable. Heck, you can even look and grab a picture in the Pictures folder without even opening the original document. Indeed, and you can clean it out just as easily. My fiancee does draughting and design work for an environmental engineering company, which includes putting together occasional powerpoint presentations which are often very graphics heavy (with maps, diagrams, aerial photos etc.) The catch is that Powerpoint has a nasty habit of keeping images stored in the.ppt file even when you've delected from the slideshow within powerpoint. That means that as you work with a presentation, adding and deleting different images and different versions of images, the presentation size continues to bloat. She managed to find a tool that you could use to remove the cruft and unused images and that could result in massive file size reductions (in the order of many megabytes). Of course if you could just unzip the file, delete any stray images that are for some reason still kicking around, and zip in back up again... well that's much easier than hunting the net for some shareware tool that will do who knows what to your.ppt file.
If, however, you mean Visual Studio, then there may be issues. There are several nice IDEs in linux (Eclipse, KDevelop, etc), but none are exactly the same as Visual Studio, and I don't know how well any of them deal with.NET. If you want an IDE for.NET on Linux then your best bet is MonoDevelop. It's not Visual Studio, but it is reasonably nice.
How much effort was there in you doing the 'switch' though. Windows usually comes with your PC, and if it isn't mostly just installs. When I moved from NZ to Canada I left my old machine behind with my parents. It was a Linux box, and they were a little daunted by that. I had all my data copied off the machine anyway, so I bought a copy of Redhat 9 for them and let them install it themselves (I was nearby in case nay problems came up, but they would dutifully read everything, click on help whenever they were uncertain, and found everything to be self explanatory). Once they had done that they found the whole things less daunting. My machine had been set up in parallel with their old machine which was running Windows (I figured leaving them a safe fallback option was a good idea). Over time they slowly moved more and more of their daily computer use over to the Linux box. These days they use that machine pretty much exclusively. Unless you're trying to install a particularly un-user-friendly distribution the install should work just fine - it is only the rarest of cases that seem to have problems.
I think it is worth noting that similar stuff was said about XP before it's release. Once XP was out it became pretty clear that the uptake was going to be very fast. Here we have slow uptake of Vista and comments made about switching after the release. It isn't entirely wishful thinking this time - though wishful thinking clearly come in to it to some extent.
The other point is that Linux has come a long was since Windows XP was released while Windows has... well, just look at Vista. The difference between Ubuntu 7.04 and Vista will be very small in comparison to the difference between Redhat 7.2 and Windows XP, which, in turn, was small compared to the difference between Redhat 5.2 and Windows 98. This is the real concern for MS - that while Linux might have been behind in desktop user friendliness it has been improving much faster than Windows.
For example, how do you save an embedded image? An embedded audio clip? An embedded video? Base-64 encode them? Now we're talking bloat. Binary content like images, audio, and video, is simply included as binary files in the zipped package. In odt, for instance, images go in a subdirectory "Pictures" as whatever file type was imported. So no, it isn't bloated. It remains as tidy and compressed as one would expect. Indeed it becomes very easy to extract images, audio and video that has been embedded into a document - just unzip and grab the files you want. Contrast that with a binary format where you need a program to parse the binary file and rip out the appropriate material.
I guess I just don't see why an open binary format, which can store all this information much more precisely and efficiently, wouldn't be better. XML is dandy, sure, but the specs for these formats are going to be so complicated that nobody will be able to open the file in a text editor and just read through it. It isn't at all clear to me that a binary format is going to store the content any more efficiently than a zipped set of XML files and associated binary files. You might get a very marginal gain, but it's hardly going to be significant. As to precision - again, I see no inherent reason why some binary format is going to be any more precise. XML is simply a way to structure a document, what the tags actually specify is open to be defined, so XML can describe things with just as much precision as a binary format. As to specs for the forma - obviously the MS format is quite complicated: 6000 pages; on the other hand the ODF format seems relatively compact (700 pages is a lot, but considering how much there is to specify it is remarkably good). And with regard to whether a person can open the content.xml file of an ODF document and read it in a text editor - perhaps you should try it. I had no real difficulties (I did use Emacs sgml-pretty-print to format it nicely, but that's just a few keystrokes away). It is well organised and easy enough to make sense of.
The formatting instructions will be so verbose that they will completely overshadow any content. That's what xml-mode and syntax highlighting are for. Once you run it through pretty-print so that it is all nicely indented finding, reading, and interpreting the content amid the style information is trivial - it's all the material that is not tags. If it's really troubling you you can always use sgml-tags-invisible (that's bound to "C-c TAB" by default in xml-mode) to toggle tag visiblity, turn off the tags, and be staring at nothing but bare plain text content. Perhaps you just don't have a good text editor.
What's the big advantage of XML? It's standard, well defined, and there are already a billion and one parsers built for it in every language conceivable. More importantly, it is very reasonable to expect that XML parsers are going to be around, largely unchanged, for quite some time to come, so 20 years from now parsign these documents will be just as easy. I mean really, what's the big advantage of ASCII? Why not use EBCDIC? XML is extremely widespread and looks to become the standard for pretty much any kind of structured document. Sticking with what's mainstream is a good choice when you are looking for longevity.
"The answer is that an increase of CO2 did preede a temperature increase. CO2 increased, and temperature increased." This contradicts the actual data from the Vostok cores. CO2 level increases lagged the temperature increase by 200-1000 years. No, it doesn't, it simply means that CO2 wasn't responsible for initial warming. Temperature continued to rise for 1000 years or more after CO2 increased, and there are perfectly good reasons to expect that CO2 was a significant contributor to that rise. Just because CO2 wasn't responsible for part of the temperature rise doesn't mean it didn't have anything to do with the rest of it (and before you ask, yes, there is reason to believe that it was partially responsible for the remainder, that is the bulk, of the temperature rise).
The question was "If CO2 causes global warming, why does an increase of C02 [not] precede a temperature increase". The answer is that an increase of CO2 did preede a temperature increase. CO2 increased, and temperature increased. The fact that CO2 wasn't entirely responsible for the temperature increase in no way demonstrates that it wasn't responsible for any of it. Indeed, it is demonstrable that Milankovitch cycles are insufficient, on their own, to explain the amount of temperature increase during interglacials. That means that other causes are required. We know CO2 causes warming (its been tested in the lab and is a result of pretty basic physics regarding absorption spectra), and lo, the CO2 feedback caused by warming is enough to produce the extra warming that occurs during the interglacials. You seem to want to live in a world of black and white: either CO2 is entirely responsible for warming, or it has nothing to do with warming. The reality is that a lot of complex interactions are responsible for warming, but everything we do currently know points to CO2 having a significant effect. Feel free to ignore whatever tarnishes your black and white world view however.
The flip side of that is that as commodity beigeboxes, Dell and Gateway do great in the corporate world, which is a space Apple has yet to penetrate to any large degree, because the customer doesn't fit their product space. It gets scant mention in the article, but a valid point is made that, as far as the corporate world is concerned Linux is increasingly looking like a good option. When you don't have to worry about the latest webcams working, and have an IT staff to manage everything Linux on the desktop is very feasible. Indeed Novell and Redhat are making inroads in this area. What this means is that Microsoft could find itself getting squeezed if Dell and Gateway start co-operating with Novell, Redhat, and/or Canonical on desktop Linux for the corporate world and MacOS X takes over the home user market. The fact that, relatively speaking, Mac and Linux play nicely with each other (compared to Windows and Mac, or Windows and Linux) only makes such a scenario more interesting. In practice, of course, MS still has quite the stranglehold on the corporate desktop. Linux is, these days, good enough to take on MS toe to toe in market, but MS started with a massive advantage and aren't about to give an inch. It will take a long time before Linux makes enough of a dent in the corporate desktop market for ny of this to really matter.
Climate is the average of the weather in an area over a long period of time. Climate, therefore, does not equal weather, but is directly defined by it. Sure, and the tide height is average of wave height over a period of time. Tides, therefore, do not equal waves, but are directly defined by it. Despite this we can effectively predict tide heights despite the fact that we would have a very difficult time predicting the height of the next wave to wash ashore.
If there is causation then why do paleo climate records show increases in temperature proceeding increases in CO2 levels? Because changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration require some kind of driver or reason to occur - they don't happen purely spontaneously. When it comes to historical climate changes between glacial and inter-glacial periods the initial driver is, as far as we can tell, properties of the earth's orbit. The key point is that these are not sufficient to provide the warming that is observed during these periods. On the other hand warming induces increases in atmospheric CO2 since warmer oceans can contain less of it. This, in turn, can cause more warming in a feedback cycle and provides an explanation for the amount of warming that occurs in interglacials. We weren't messing with atmospheric CO2 hundreds of thousands of years ago, so something else, in this case temperature change from orbital variation, had to induce the change.
On the one hand, peer review and editing (things which closed journals often provide) are important. You do realise that refereeing for journals is often unpaid work work right? At its worst the article author does the research, writes the paper, typesets the paper (often according to journal guidelines, and journal provided LaTeX documentclasses), and then pays the journal (on a per page basis) for the privilege of getting published. The journal, in turn, electronically distributes the papers to referees who provide peer review for free, so that a unpaid editorial board can decide what to print, at thich point the publisher collects the already typeset articles into a single document, prints it, and then university libraries charges thousands of dollars a year per journal for subscriptions. Where do those thousands of dollars a year per journal go? Straight to the publisher. The editorial board may get a small token amount. There is nothing journals from publishers like Elsevier provide that open access journals can't provide for a token fee: the articles, the peer review, the editorial board, are often all free - it is a matter of prestige for those involved. Likewise, in this day and age, typesetting is provided by the authors (who use TeX), and distribution (both to referees for review, and final distribution as a journal) can be provided electronically for marginal cost. At worst you need to pay for an editorial board, and someone to compile the separate TeX articles into a single consistent document.
You need to pay for costs of disposal/recycling somehow, and the logical way is to make the full cost of item (inc;uding the costs of disposing of the item) payable by consumers at purchase time. In practice there are two ways to do this: (1) levy the extra costs as a tax; (2) force companies to pay the costs of disposal of products they manufacture. Both have pros and cons. The difficulty with option (1), as you point out, is that money levied as taxes has a tendency to just get sloshed into the general fund and not necessarily ctually end up paying for what it was originally designed to pay for. The difficulties with option (2) are going to involve the the massive extra bureaucracy required to track manufacture (because a lot of manufacturing goes though a variety of different shell companies, in many different countries, and such) and trying to enforce the companies to pay for disposal. Pick your poison, but one way or another you'll have to face the costs.
I don't care if the tax is no more than 10$ like the article says, it's an additional grievance that I certainly don't want to deal with. Either they have the means to recycle the sorts of material that are in electronics, in which case the fees I already pay for recycling can cover that, or they don't have the means to recycle this stuff. Recycling electronics is more difficult than other recycling, thus it costs more, and isn't generally done. Therefore to pay for recycling of electronics more money is required. If you like this money could be levied by raising the fees you already pay for recycling, or by putting a tax directly on electronics. That is, the means to recycle electronics exist in theory, but aren't running in practice because there isn't enough money to pay to run them. Right now electronics waste is a negative externality that we happily sweep under the carpet by shipping it to towns in China and India, where it degrades or is broken down in an unsafe manner, and the toxic materials leach into the water table. All the resulting suffering and human cost is in the back-blocks of China, however, which the Chinese government certainly doesn't care about and you can safely ignore. One way or another, however, those costs have to be paid. All this proposal is doing is making you pay the costs (or at least some of them) up front. So take your choice - higher recycling fees, a tax on electronics, or misery and suffering in far away countries. The easy option is clear; the right option on the other hand...
innovation isn't going to be present in the mere API spec. Do you know how innovatively obfuscated and difficult to reverse engineer those API specs are? Obviously not, because you've never seen them, but if you did...
So the customers don't want it, the music execs don't want it, the vendors don't want it, and I don't think he musicians are clamoring for it either... Why do we have DRM again? Oh the music execs want it. What this is all about is that they've started to realise that, in doing the deal they did with Apple, they are effectively stuck with Apple's DRM. Being the control freaks that they are, this is not an attractive prospect for them, and what they really want is their DRM where they get to define the standard, the restrictions and how it works so that they can dictate DRM to the vendors rather than having the vendors in control. What they want is an "open" DRM under their control that they can force all the different vendors to use, thus unifying on-line music DRM under them.
I think you make a disingenuous argument. Well, I'm making the deliberately disingenuous argument that I expect Microsoft to make. The simple answer is that not fully implementing the standard is, as you say, pretty much inevitable. That means that the partial implementations of OOXML provided by OpenOffice.org and others can be considered as on the same lavel as the various implementations of ODF - at least as far as the wording of the legislation is concerned. That means, from the point of view of the legislation, it can be argued that ODF and OOXML are equivalent in terms of interoperability and multiple implementations. Sure its a disingenuous argument that ignores the spirit of the legislation, but then when in the past has MS been unwilling to make disingenuous arguments and hew to the letter rather than the spirit of the law?
I think MS will take the tack that many of these points are arguable.
(1) Interoperable among diverse internal and external platforms and applications; "Diverse internal and external..." I think diversity would include Linux distros...MS products don't run natively on Linux-based OS's - Partial failure Sure, but OpenOffice.org will, and you know they're going to have at least a partial implementation of OOXML working which MS will then point to. I've discussed the issue with demanding a full implementation elsewhere.
2) Fully published and available royalty-free; I assume "Fully..." means no secret binaries, or API's..."available royalty-free" define what is a royalty... as in MS can't "choose" to whom to license it...and can it be passed on? - Partial Failure Here MS will point to their ISO standard document. Sure, you can debate the issue of whether that is fully published, given the issue of tags like <SpaceLikeWord95> that provide no explanation other than "use spacing like Word95". The point is that it'll be a debate, and you're arguing technical details, which will tend to be missed by most politicians. I think MS expects to squeak through on this point on sheer volume: "Surely a 6000 page document is fully publishing the standard..."
(3) Implemented by multiple vendors; I assume "implemented" means "used as a native data format to the application, not something that requires a "filter" to open or save it... Failure Again, MS will point to the numerous incomplete implementations from other vendors who need to be compatible with the dominant standard. Sure, they won't be fully compatible, but then I expect you'll find most ODF implementations won't be fully compatible - closer than any non MS implementations of OOXML, but now we're down to quibbling over degrees...
(4) Controlled by an open industry organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard. 'nuff said...Complete Failure. This is an interesting one because it is not clear to me how this should be interpreted. Presumably MS could claim, if OOXML gets accepted by ISO, that ISO controls the standard and they are "an open industry organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard". Whether that argument would actually fly I don't know - IANAL.
The point is that MS can make arguments for every single point, and there's a reasonable chance that, with enough money to grease the wheels, they'll squeak through on every criterion.
And, of course, the price of journals have been skyrocketing lately... There has been some effort to fight this, for instance the formerly pretigious journal Topology has the entire editorial board resign after negotiations over lower pricing with the journal publisher, Elsevier, failed. The members of the editorial board then founded the Journal of Topology with the London Mathematical society as publisher with a much lower price. In general, however, you are correct - the price of journals has been increasing steadily. Historically expensive journals made some sense; there was significant cost in typesetting and printing, particularly for any articles that had significant mathematical content, since typesetting mathematics was considerably more difficult and expensive than plain text. Nowadays, however, journals can publish electronically, and article submissions are often required to be in TeX which reduces the formerly expensive task of typesetting to the relatively simple task of merging several TeX files into a consistent document. The high cost of journals really is no longer justified. Indeed, some of the most significant papers in mathematics in the last few years (Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture) were not published in any journal but simply placed on arXiv.org as preprints.
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"He pointed out that an English teacher doesn't have to be a great writer to teach reading and writing, but that the same is not true of high-end math and science courses." I think this is an important point. It can be overstated, but real fluency in mathematics can make a great deal of difference to how well it is taught. Most students can appreciate the value of learning to read or write, but will more often tend to question the value of mathematics. It takes a teacher with good mathematical knowledge (often well beyond the level they are teaching) to provide the extra depth to mathematics that can help engage students. Finland noted this around 2000 and set up a series of reforms that saw strong encouragement for elementary school teachers to take advanced math classes. The result is that Finland is now ranked among the very top countries in the world with respect to the achievements of their students in mathematics.
Of course, at the higher levels of English, having a teacher well versed in literature can make all the difference with regard to engaing students in studying Shakespeare and the classics. I don't think you should sell short the value of a well educated English teacher - it is just that that value tends be increase later in schooling rather than earlier.
You'll never get 100% assurance of perfection for your software, but I think, in the case of voting software, it is reasonable to expect as much verifiable assurance as possible. That means complete open source code and published verifiable correctness proofs for any properties that matter.
I'm not suggesting it is ready for prime time. I was merely trying to provide a description for the OP of how helping someone overcome initial difficulties/fears can pave the way. He was interested in helping his parents switch, and I was merely suggesting to him good ways to do that. I think the fact that you read everything as a "Linux is ready now!", whether it is or not, says more about you.
I think it is worth noting that similar stuff was said about XP before it's release. Once XP was out it became pretty clear that the uptake was going to be very fast. Here we have slow uptake of Vista and comments made about switching after the release. It isn't entirely wishful thinking this time - though wishful thinking clearly come in to it to some extent.
The other point is that Linux has come a long was since Windows XP was released while Windows has... well, just look at Vista. The difference between Ubuntu 7.04 and Vista will be very small in comparison to the difference between Redhat 7.2 and Windows XP, which, in turn, was small compared to the difference between Redhat 5.2 and Windows 98. This is the real concern for MS - that while Linux might have been behind in desktop user friendliness it has been improving much faster than Windows.
This contradicts the actual data from the Vostok cores. CO2 level increases lagged the temperature increase by 200-1000 years. No, it doesn't, it simply means that CO2 wasn't responsible for initial warming. Temperature continued to rise for 1000 years or more after CO2 increased, and there are perfectly good reasons to expect that CO2 was a significant contributor to that rise. Just because CO2 wasn't responsible for part of the temperature rise doesn't mean it didn't have anything to do with the rest of it (and before you ask, yes, there is reason to believe that it was partially responsible for the remainder, that is the bulk, of the temperature rise).
The question was "If CO2 causes global warming, why does an increase of C02 [not] precede
a temperature increase". The answer is that an increase of CO2 did preede a temperature increase. CO2 increased, and temperature increased. The fact that CO2 wasn't entirely responsible for the temperature increase in no way demonstrates that it wasn't responsible for any of it. Indeed, it is demonstrable that Milankovitch cycles are insufficient, on their own, to explain the amount of temperature increase during interglacials. That means that other causes are required. We know CO2 causes warming (its been tested in the lab and is a result of pretty basic physics regarding absorption spectra), and lo, the CO2 feedback caused by warming is enough to produce the extra warming that occurs during the interglacials. You seem to want to live in a world of black and white: either CO2 is entirely responsible for warming, or it has nothing to do with warming. The reality is that a lot of complex interactions are responsible for warming, but everything we do currently know points to CO2 having a significant effect. Feel free to ignore whatever tarnishes your black and white world view however.
You need to pay for costs of disposal/recycling somehow, and the logical way is to make the full cost of item (inc;uding the costs of disposing of the item) payable by consumers at purchase time. In practice there are two ways to do this: (1) levy the extra costs as a tax; (2) force companies to pay the costs of disposal of products they manufacture. Both have pros and cons. The difficulty with option (1), as you point out, is that money levied as taxes has a tendency to just get sloshed into the general fund and not necessarily ctually end up paying for what it was originally designed to pay for. The difficulties with option (2) are going to involve the the massive extra bureaucracy required to track manufacture (because a lot of manufacturing goes though a variety of different shell companies, in many different countries, and such) and trying to enforce the companies to pay for disposal. Pick your poison, but one way or another you'll have to face the costs.
"Diverse internal and external..." I think diversity would include Linux distros...MS products don't run natively on Linux-based OS's - Partial failure Sure, but OpenOffice.org will, and you know they're going to have at least a partial implementation of OOXML working which MS will then point to. I've discussed the issue with demanding a full implementation elsewhere. 2) Fully published and available royalty-free;
I assume "Fully..." means no secret binaries, or API's..."available royalty-free" define what is a royalty... as in MS can't "choose" to whom to license it...and can it be passed on? - Partial Failure Here MS will point to their ISO standard document. Sure, you can debate the issue of whether that is fully published, given the issue of tags like <SpaceLikeWord95> that provide no explanation other than "use spacing like Word95". The point is that it'll be a debate, and you're arguing technical details, which will tend to be missed by most politicians. I think MS expects to squeak through on this point on sheer volume: "Surely a 6000 page document is fully publishing the standard..." (3) Implemented by multiple vendors;
I assume "implemented" means "used as a native data format to the application, not something that requires a "filter" to open or save it... Failure Again, MS will point to the numerous incomplete implementations from other vendors who need to be compatible with the dominant standard. Sure, they won't be fully compatible, but then I expect you'll find most ODF implementations won't be fully compatible - closer than any non MS implementations of OOXML, but now we're down to quibbling over degrees... (4) Controlled by an open industry organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard.
'nuff said...Complete Failure. This is an interesting one because it is not clear to me how this should be interpreted. Presumably MS could claim, if OOXML gets accepted by ISO, that ISO controls the standard and they are "an open industry organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard". Whether that argument would actually fly I don't know - IANAL.
The point is that MS can make arguments for every single point, and there's a reasonable chance that, with enough money to grease the wheels, they'll squeak through on every criterion.
I can definitely vouch for the quality of the St. Ambroise beers.