OK, to rephrase: surely the ??AA cannot afford to buy a war? They might be rich, but they're nothing next to the oil firms.
Probably not, I was mostly joking.
Then again, the *AAs (the MPAA in particular) include a lot of the media powerhouses that also control broadcast and cable—that is, the people who control directly the resources that politicians seek money from other people to buy in the first place (the corporate parents or siblings of ABC, NBC, Fox, and CNN, among others, are part of the MPAA.)
If this is proven to be fact ( and i dont think this really *proves* anything. Its still theory ), how is this going to sit with the religions of the world that truly think we are the only ones 'god' created?
I'm not aware of any religions that have taken a firm stand that life can only exist on Earth, but then again, religions that have predicted a date certain for the end of Creation as unquestionable doctrine more than once (more than once during the 20th Century even) are still going strong, so I don't think that being wrong about a thing like whether or not there could be life on another planet is really going to be a big deal for the kind of religions that might have taken such a stand in the first place.
Allowed by the WTO. I will mean that if Antigua did pirate US stuff, the US would not be able to get the WTO to apply any sanctions. Which is pretty much all they could do, as Antigua is not in the Us and it would be awfully hard to convince anyone that you need a new war just cause of some pirate DVDs.
If that was true (and the history of US interventions around the world might make one question it, in the first place), all Antigua would have to worry about is the possibility of a US administration, at the behest of moneyed US interests, manufacturing false evidence relating to something like terrorism, or weapons of mass destruction, etc.
But no US administration would ever do that, right?
"behind" is not defined in relative terms, but in absolute terms; it's about keeping students up to the minimum for their grade. You can go past it.
When there are high-stakes funding consequences to failure on the bottom end, and no corresponding reward for performance above that, there is little incentive for school systems to expend any resources in promoting/enabling acheivement beyond the minimum.
When you impose funding consequences, you both encourage the things the funding consequences are tied to, and discourage everything else.
So why not let the brightest teach the "special-needs"?
Well, for one, because it takes skills that even most qualified "regular" teachers don't have (along with those needed to be a qualified teacher) to effectively teach those with learning disabilities ("gifted" students also are "special needs"), and because the particular talents of academically gifted students may or may not be in the right area, anyhow.
We can't say the classes are for smart students, they have to be for gifted students. Why is that? Because if some kids were smart, then that would imply that others were stupid (which, as it turns out, is the case).
Well, no.
Its because the classes are for kids that are academically talented compared to those of similar age, precisely like those for those with learning disabilities are for those that are comparatively disabled. Just like learning disabilities, that's not necessarily any kind of durable "smartness" compared to other kids -- sometimes it is, sometimes its a developmental differentiation that evens out or even reverses by the end of childhood (that's true on both ends, IIRC.)
Its probably most accurate to just label the whole bunch "special needs" and then distinguish far more particular special needs than "gifted" or "learning disabled" from there, "gifted" kids are not a homogenous group, and neither are those with learning disabilities.
However, calling them gifted mitigates this a bit, because it implies that everyone is inherently the same. Some people are just given "gifts" by some benevolent entity, apparently. It doesn't rule out that everyone else might get these gifts sometime in the future...
Which is fairly accurate (except for the unnecessary hypothesis of a gift-giving "entity"); people that have superior academic talents during some portion of their school age life don't always manifest them at the same time.
It seems that your main objection to the label is that it implies things which happen to be true.
For all the hysteria about the failure of the US educational system, going back at least to Sputnik and probably long before, it continues to generate the most creative, innovative people in the world.
I'd like to see the evidence that people educated in the US system are, per capita, more "creative" and "innovative" than those produced in every other educational system in the world. Really, this sounds to me more like nationalist mythology than anything resembling a fact, and contrasting it with "hysteria" is somewhat ironic.
Learning logarithms when you're 10 instead of 14 isn't going to make you significantly more likely to "cure leukemia or stop global warming".
I don't think the difference between "gifted" and "average" students is learning logarithms at 10 instead of 14. Its more like the difference between learning logarithms at 10 and having a vague idea as an adult that they are somehow connected to the Taco Bell chihuahua.
Look at those "geniuses" who get packed off to college in their early teens. Have any of them ever accomplished anything noteworthy?
Even assuming the answer is no, wouldn't that demonstrate that, indeed, the US educational system is, contrary to your argument, failing the gifted? I mean, if they weren't being failed, you'd expect them to acheive noteworthy things at the same proportion as the rest of the population.
It actually probably wouldn't. For one thing, there is a fairly limited supply of "really smart adults", and an even more limited supply of those in any given field in any given region. And they tend to have lots of high-paying alternatives open to them, so unless spending time with youngsters is what they happen to be interested in, would be very expensive to attract and retain for such a program.
Like developmentally disabled students, students that are gifted in one or multiple areas need resources (whether more or special lab gear, access to research tools, teaching staff with special talents, etc.) that don't produce as much return for the average student to reach their full potential. And, like developmentally disabled students, if they are instead treated like regular students, they don't perform as well as they could, and often become serious discipline problems and negatively impact everyone else.
The particular ratio in money is perhaps overplayed here; its one of those simple to measure but not necessarily all that relevant measures. But the issue is, nevertheless, a real and serious one.
The public education system has been failing gifted students since long before No Child Left Behind.
That's true, but its not true that NCLB doesn't matter. NCLB certainly encourages school systems to fail gifted students even more than they already were. With increased focus on the worst performing segment (and with funding tied to that), that's a natural consequence.
The problem existed before NCLB, but that doesn't mean NCLB hasn't exacerbated it.
Obviously anyone talking about any so-called "ocean currents" affecting the Earth's climate is in the pocket of Chimpy McBushitler and his cronies in Big Oil. We all know that only SUVs, incandescent light bulbs, and not listening to Al Gore cause changes in climate.
You know, lots of people are posting variations on this as if it were some kind of clever skewering of the Al Gore and others advocating policy change to address global warming, but all it really does is demonstrate that the people posting this and variations on it aren't paying attention; Al Gore and others taking similar positions point to climate engines like this (though not this particular one in the past, since it wasn't known, but the North Atlantic Current has always been pointed to) as areas of sensitivity because human-produced effects can change the conditions which make these systems operate the way they do, thus causing them to change how they operate, thus producing greater climate change than the human actions do more directly.
The whole idea that there is some kind of binary dichotomy between human activity and natural processes influencing the environment, and that anyone pointing to the former is stating that the latter is not a factor is just bizarre. Its sort of like arguing, of a typical interactive software program, that the output must be produced by either the input or the executable code, but not the two working together.
Part of the reason they can run such high speed trains there is that due to the nature of their governments they were allowed in the past to appropriate right-of-way for the tracks. In the US, private property rights kept them from doing that in many places.
Uh, no, were that true, the US wouldn't have the superhighway systems it chose to build instead of building more rail, which were also built by government appropriation of land (via eminent domain), and take up more land area than rail with similar capacity would.
The reason America doesn't have high-speed rail is more likely because America was less built out at the time the automobile became affordable, and thus it was much easier and more economical in the short-term to build out support for more cars than in Europe and, consequently, both auto culture and the auto industry became more politically significant in America, and both produce resistance to more passenger rail of any kind and serve to keep the priority on roads.
Sooo... unless our fascist government suddenly begins condemning private property in order to build straighter railroad tracks between cities, we aren't ever going to have the screamingly fast trains they have.
You mean the same way our "fascist" government keeps condemning private property for more and higer capacity freeways (sometimes including ones that become privately-owned, for-profit toll roads)?
The new formats are supposed to address these problems and deliver a fundamental promise of electronic editing: seemless collaboration.
The focus of Microsoft's collaboration effort with Office 2007 isn't just formats, it focusses on moving people from the plain-old-web to Sharepoint servers for collaboration, which wouldn't show up in Google indexes.
So, if Microsoft were successful, there would be zero OOXML documents found via Google on the web that were there for the purpose of "seamless collaboration".
I would, therefore, suggest that only finding small numbers of documents on the Google-indexed portion of the web is not a good measure of Microsoft failing in this regard.
So what you are saying is that OOXML has such poor support that people who use it feel compelled to save it in a more universal forma, while ODF is sufficiently universal that people feel comfortable posting it as is.
No, what I'm saying is that people using Office 2007 to post documents on the Web (hardly its primary use) are usually targetting an audience where Office 97-2003 is a more useful interchange format (since lots of people have older versions of Office), while people posting ODF documents on the web are mostly targetting people who are likely to have an ODF software.
That doesn't mean that "ODF is sufficiently universal" for anything; I suspect that if you looked at where those specific ODF documents are offered they would be: 1) Sites targetting specific narrow communities where Microsoft Office is not likely to be used (i.e., Linux users), or 2) Sites where ODF is one of several formats offered, and one of the others is Microsoft Office 97-2003 format
Anyone who can use OOXML documents (i.e., that has MS Office 2007) can use Office 97-2003 documents equally well, the reverse is not true. Therefore, for public interchange on the Web, Office 97-2003 makes more sense, whether as a sole format, or alongside other formats for people who don't can't use any MS Office format. The same is not true of ODF (while some ODF software handles MS Office 97-2003 formats tolerably well, not all of it does.) So it makes sense that there would be more ODF than Office 2007 on the web, not because ODF is more universal, but because there is no more widespread "fallback" format that is available everywhere ODF is that delivers a substantial subset of ODF functionality.
For other uses that are important in the selection of office suites and associated storage formats, the concerns that influence what is used for public interchange on the web are less relevant. These numbers don't really tell a lot about adoption of ODF vs. OOXML overall, just one specific application where it is unsurprising and says nothing really interesting or useful. And that's even before considering that they include all ODF, but exclude the macro-enable versions of Office 2007 formats.
In any case, your first point, that people save in PDF, is of no real issue.
The real issue it embodies is that "public interchange on the web" isn't a primary focus of editable office document formats.
First, the study, as flawed as it may be, is meant to indicate formats that are universal enough to be predictably exchanged.
So? How important is the portion of the web indexed by Google to that interchange for editable office documents? I would suspect that either portions of the web behind login walls or email are more important avenues for editable office document interchange. Sure, they are harder to measure, and this is easy. But "easy to measure" and "meaningful" aren't the same thing.
Second, the same argument applies to ODF, only more so. I, for instance, seldom post in ODF as OO.org saves to PDF without any complex spyware ridden third party hacks.
The fact that the same argument applies to office suites generally reinforces, rather than undermines, it. Also, the implicit comparison you make is invalid, as MS Office 2007's PDF/XPS plugin is simple, from the user perspective, and comes from Microsoft, not a third party, leaving aside questions of whether it is "spyware-ridden" or a "hack".
It's measuring the usage of a particular standard.
No, its not. It's measure the usage of a particular standard for interchange on the portion of the web indexed by Google. It doesn't measure what's used for interchange by different paths than the web, by log-in based sites on the web, or what is used for non-interchange (i.e., archive) use.
Since one of the main motives for choosing a standardized format for office documents is future-proof archiving of internal documents, and since it doesn't measure that use at all, its next to worthless as a measure of the use of the standard.
OTOH, unfortunately for Microsoft (not that they don't often benefit from this effect, so its not entirely unfair to Microsoft), its exactly the kind of meaningless-but-precise measure that all too often motivates business decisions.
It's pretty clear that nobody uses OOXML, anyone using MS Office simply continues to use DOC.
That's not clear at all.
What may be clear is that people aren't using OOXML for public interchange on the web, which isn't the same thing.
(Actually, even that's not all that clear, though it may well be true: it appears that the comparison in TFA only measures DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX. It doesn't count the macro-enabled versions of the Office 2007 formats [XLSM, DOCM, and PPTM] which are still, I believe, OOXML.)
In eight months since Office 2007 was released to the general public (10 months since release to enterprise customers), there are fewer than 2,000 of these office documents posted on the Web.
Probably because most people creating documents with Office 2007 for the web are either: 1) Converting them to PDF or XPS if they aren't meant to be edited, or 2) Converting them to Office 97-2003 format if they are meant to be edited, since the majority of the Microsoft Office-using audience will be using older versions of the office suite.
I don't think counting documents on the web is particularly a useful way to try to measure the dominance of office suites or their associated file formats. Its, perhaps, an easy measure, but not a meaningful one.
Not very far, I'd say. After all, "Embrace" is the first step in the traditional Microsoft strategy. Or, perhaps, the description of the EEE strategy needs extended with a preamble to something like "Discount, Denounce, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", in which case we have come a little ways...
I dont see why I or anyone here would want to use a proprietary MS thing that makes people dependant on MS, when we have an open source, open protocol, decentralised system such as Open ID.
The same reason people make software that runs on Windows rather than Linux, or even that relies on MS Office applications: they want to target the people already using the Microsoft platform in question. Given that Microsoft has been and will continue using its popular (whether it deserves to be or not) software and other offerings to push Live, there will probably be lots of people that already have Live IDs.
I think ISP's fall more along the lines of something like a telephone company. Does the telephone company get in trouble if you use their service to make prank calls?
No, they are protected as common carriers.That's also why they have all kinds of legal obligations to let people, including competitors, use their lines in a non-discriminatory manner.
ISP's, particularly the telcos, have fought very hard, and largely successfully, not to be burdened with the obligations of common carriers when it comes to internet service. They also, of course, always claim to be still entitled to the same kind of benefits and protections that go along with common carrier status, and haven't been entirely unsuccessful at lobbying for that position, either.
Not to nitpick your logic or anything, but, uh...."if you buy a newspaper"....might want to read that phrase again. Hint: third word. Slight difference.
Not really. Its just as true if you pick up a free copy of an advertising-supported newspaper. "Buy" or not is not really relevant: you are under no obligation to read the ads in newspaper. You can even, presuming you have acquired ownership of the copy of the paper legally, cut out the ads and pass it around to your friends to read.
Having a computer program "cut out the ads" from your legally-acquired free copy of the content of a web page before you read it is, arguably, no different.
Now, I suppose if you had to click through a website-license-agreement in which you agreed to view the ads in exchange for free access to the other content, the site owner's hysterical complaints that people viewing the site while blocking ads were "stealing" something might make sense. But that's a very different case.
What people should really be looking for is quality of typesetting. We need beautiful documents more than we need beautiful interfaces...
Beautiful (that is, in the "productive" rather than "eye candy" sense; the two are at best orthogonal, and perhaps actually opposed) UIs get more done. Better typography makes things look better. I'd say the former is far more important than the latter, really.
People don't know to look for this stuff, which is why they put up with it.
Yes, for some reason people aren't concerned about aesthetic details that neither they nor most consumers of their documents will notice.
if a Company is going to use an other office suite it will need to be 100% compatible.
More likely, if significant businesses are going to use another office suite that alternative will need truly compelling advantages over MS Office that make less than 100% compatibility worth accepting.
We get to the airport, only to be told that we would have to go through extra security because my wife is on the "Watch List"
Here's the kicker, Both my wife and I hold valid Maine State CHRC Certificates, meaning that we have passed state background checks, and that our fingerprints are on file. Both with the Maine State Police and the FBI, and that the state trusts us to work with children in public schools.
The extra security for being "on the watch list" is, as I understand it—and certainly my wife not getting the extra screening after she took my name despite getting it consistently before that lends credence to this—extra verification to make sure you aren't, in fact, the person with a similar name on the watch list. The matching is some kind of similarity matching on a list of names of people who are suspected of posing a threat. If you are actually on the list, you aren't going to get to fly at all. If you just get additional screening and are let on the plane, you've provided documentation that adequately demonstrates that you are, despite the similarity, not the person whose name or known alias showed up on the list as similar to the name you are travelling under.
So, its not that your wife is on the watch list, its that your wife's name is similar to someone's name/alias that is one the watch list.
It's not really about the FUD, though. The real question is whether Novell will sue Sun or not for misappropriating their intellectual property by open sourcing OpenSolaris.
As I understand it, Sun's "rights equivalent to ownership" claim relates to a purchase of rights from AT&T that predates either the SCO or Novell claims on Unix IP; while sun officials may have stated opinions about the validity of SCOs claims, I don't think those statements (or, for the same reason, the ruling against SCO) have any bearing on the validity of Sun's claimed rights to Unix, which are essentially independent of the rights claimed by SCO (or those now held by Novell).
Previously GMail's disk quota was slowly increasing over time. I assume that now that they have entered the business of selling online disk space, such increases are now a thing of the past?
Apparently not (at least not yet): the "Lots of space" counter on the login page is still counting up.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably not, I was mostly joking.
Then again, the *AAs (the MPAA in particular) include a lot of the media powerhouses that also control broadcast and cable—that is, the people who control directly the resources that politicians seek money from other people to buy in the first place (the corporate parents or siblings of ABC, NBC, Fox, and CNN, among others, are part of the MPAA.)
I'm not aware of any religions that have taken a firm stand that life can only exist on Earth, but then again, religions that have predicted a date certain for the end of Creation as unquestionable doctrine more than once (more than once during the 20th Century even) are still going strong, so I don't think that being wrong about a thing like whether or not there could be life on another planet is really going to be a big deal for the kind of religions that might have taken such a stand in the first place.
If that was true (and the history of US interventions around the world might make one question it, in the first place), all Antigua would have to worry about is the possibility of a US administration, at the behest of moneyed US interests, manufacturing false evidence relating to something like terrorism, or weapons of mass destruction, etc.
But no US administration would ever do that, right?
Seamonkey is, rather expressly, an integrated suite of applications, not "an application".
When there are high-stakes funding consequences to failure on the bottom end, and no corresponding reward for performance above that, there is little incentive for school systems to expend any resources in promoting/enabling acheivement beyond the minimum.
When you impose funding consequences, you both encourage the things the funding consequences are tied to, and discourage everything else.
Well, for one, because it takes skills that even most qualified "regular" teachers don't have (along with those needed to be a qualified teacher) to effectively teach those with learning disabilities ("gifted" students also are "special needs"), and because the particular talents of academically gifted students may or may not be in the right area, anyhow.
Well, no.
Its because the classes are for kids that are academically talented compared to those of similar age, precisely like those for those with learning disabilities are for those that are comparatively disabled. Just like learning disabilities, that's not necessarily any kind of durable "smartness" compared to other kids -- sometimes it is, sometimes its a developmental differentiation that evens out or even reverses by the end of childhood (that's true on both ends, IIRC.)
Its probably most accurate to just label the whole bunch "special needs" and then distinguish far more particular special needs than "gifted" or "learning disabled" from there, "gifted" kids are not a homogenous group, and neither are those with learning disabilities.
Which is fairly accurate (except for the unnecessary hypothesis of a gift-giving "entity"); people that have superior academic talents during some portion of their school age life don't always manifest them at the same time.
It seems that your main objection to the label is that it implies things which happen to be true.
I'd like to see the evidence that people educated in the US system are, per capita, more "creative" and "innovative" than those produced in every other educational system in the world. Really, this sounds to me more like nationalist mythology than anything resembling a fact, and contrasting it with "hysteria" is somewhat ironic.
I don't think the difference between "gifted" and "average" students is learning logarithms at 10 instead of 14. Its more like the difference between learning logarithms at 10 and having a vague idea as an adult that they are somehow connected to the Taco Bell chihuahua.
Even assuming the answer is no, wouldn't that demonstrate that, indeed, the US educational system is, contrary to your argument, failing the gifted? I mean, if they weren't being failed, you'd expect them to acheive noteworthy things at the same proportion as the rest of the population.
It actually probably wouldn't. For one thing, there is a fairly limited supply of "really smart adults", and an even more limited supply of those in any given field in any given region. And they tend to have lots of high-paying alternatives open to them, so unless spending time with youngsters is what they happen to be interested in, would be very expensive to attract and retain for such a program.
Like developmentally disabled students, students that are gifted in one or multiple areas need resources (whether more or special lab gear, access to research tools, teaching staff with special talents, etc.) that don't produce as much return for the average student to reach their full potential. And, like developmentally disabled students, if they are instead treated like regular students, they don't perform as well as they could, and often become serious discipline problems and negatively impact everyone else.
The particular ratio in money is perhaps overplayed here; its one of those simple to measure but not necessarily all that relevant measures. But the issue is, nevertheless, a real and serious one.
That's true, but its not true that NCLB doesn't matter. NCLB certainly encourages school systems to fail gifted students even more than they already were. With increased focus on the worst performing segment (and with funding tied to that), that's a natural consequence.
The problem existed before NCLB, but that doesn't mean NCLB hasn't exacerbated it.
You know, lots of people are posting variations on this as if it were some kind of clever skewering of the Al Gore and others advocating policy change to address global warming, but all it really does is demonstrate that the people posting this and variations on it aren't paying attention; Al Gore and others taking similar positions point to climate engines like this (though not this particular one in the past, since it wasn't known, but the North Atlantic Current has always been pointed to) as areas of sensitivity because human-produced effects can change the conditions which make these systems operate the way they do, thus causing them to change how they operate, thus producing greater climate change than the human actions do more directly.
The whole idea that there is some kind of binary dichotomy between human activity and natural processes influencing the environment, and that anyone pointing to the former is stating that the latter is not a factor is just bizarre. Its sort of like arguing, of a typical interactive software program, that the output must be produced by either the input or the executable code, but not the two working together.
Uh, no, were that true, the US wouldn't have the superhighway systems it chose to build instead of building more rail, which were also built by government appropriation of land (via eminent domain), and take up more land area than rail with similar capacity would.
The reason America doesn't have high-speed rail is more likely because America was less built out at the time the automobile became affordable, and thus it was much easier and more economical in the short-term to build out support for more cars than in Europe and, consequently, both auto culture and the auto industry became more politically significant in America, and both produce resistance to more passenger rail of any kind and serve to keep the priority on roads.
You mean the same way our "fascist" government keeps condemning private property for more and higer capacity freeways (sometimes including ones that become privately-owned, for-profit toll roads)?
The focus of Microsoft's collaboration effort with Office 2007 isn't just formats, it focusses on moving people from the plain-old-web to Sharepoint servers for collaboration, which wouldn't show up in Google indexes.
So, if Microsoft were successful, there would be zero OOXML documents found via Google on the web that were there for the purpose of "seamless collaboration".
I would, therefore, suggest that only finding small numbers of documents on the Google-indexed portion of the web is not a good measure of Microsoft failing in this regard.
No, what I'm saying is that people using Office 2007 to post documents on the Web (hardly its primary use) are usually targetting an audience where Office 97-2003 is a more useful interchange format (since lots of people have older versions of Office), while people posting ODF documents on the web are mostly targetting people who are likely to have an ODF software.
That doesn't mean that "ODF is sufficiently universal" for anything; I suspect that if you looked at where those specific ODF documents are offered they would be:
1) Sites targetting specific narrow communities where Microsoft Office is not likely to be used (i.e., Linux users), or
2) Sites where ODF is one of several formats offered, and one of the others is Microsoft Office 97-2003 format
Anyone who can use OOXML documents (i.e., that has MS Office 2007) can use Office 97-2003 documents equally well, the reverse is not true. Therefore, for public interchange on the Web, Office 97-2003 makes more sense, whether as a sole format, or alongside other formats for people who don't can't use any MS Office format. The same is not true of ODF (while some ODF software handles MS Office 97-2003 formats tolerably well, not all of it does.) So it makes sense that there would be more ODF than Office 2007 on the web, not because ODF is more universal, but because there is no more widespread "fallback" format that is available everywhere ODF is that delivers a substantial subset of ODF functionality.
For other uses that are important in the selection of office suites and associated storage formats, the concerns that influence what is used for public interchange on the web are less relevant. These numbers don't really tell a lot about adoption of ODF vs. OOXML overall, just one specific application where it is unsurprising and says nothing really interesting or useful. And that's even before considering that they include all ODF, but exclude the macro-enable versions of Office 2007 formats.
The real issue it embodies is that "public interchange on the web" isn't a primary focus of editable office document formats.
So? How important is the portion of the web indexed by Google to that interchange for editable office documents? I would suspect that either portions of the web behind login walls or email are more important avenues for editable office document interchange. Sure, they are harder to measure, and this is easy. But "easy to measure" and "meaningful" aren't the same thing.
The fact that the same argument applies to office suites generally reinforces, rather than undermines, it. Also, the implicit comparison you make is invalid, as MS Office 2007's PDF/XPS plugin is simple, from the user perspective, and comes from Microsoft, not a third party, leaving aside questions of whether it is "spyware-ridden" or a "hack".
No, its not. It's measure the usage of a particular standard for interchange on the portion of the web indexed by Google. It doesn't measure what's used for interchange by different paths than the web, by log-in based sites on the web, or what is used for non-interchange (i.e., archive) use.
Since one of the main motives for choosing a standardized format for office documents is future-proof archiving of internal documents, and since it doesn't measure that use at all, its next to worthless as a measure of the use of the standard.
OTOH, unfortunately for Microsoft (not that they don't often benefit from this effect, so its not entirely unfair to Microsoft), its exactly the kind of meaningless-but-precise measure that all too often motivates business decisions.
That's not clear at all.
What may be clear is that people aren't using OOXML for public interchange on the web, which isn't the same thing.
(Actually, even that's not all that clear, though it may well be true: it appears that the comparison in TFA only measures DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX. It doesn't count the macro-enabled versions of the Office 2007 formats [XLSM, DOCM, and PPTM] which are still, I believe, OOXML.)
Probably because most people creating documents with Office 2007 for the web are either:
1) Converting them to PDF or XPS if they aren't meant to be edited, or
2) Converting them to Office 97-2003 format if they are meant to be edited, since the majority of the Microsoft Office-using audience will be using older versions of the office suite.
I don't think counting documents on the web is particularly a useful way to try to measure the dominance of office suites or their associated file formats. Its, perhaps, an easy measure, but not a meaningful one.
Not very far, I'd say. After all, "Embrace" is the first step in the traditional Microsoft strategy. Or, perhaps, the description of the EEE strategy needs extended with a preamble to something like "Discount, Denounce, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", in which case we have come a little ways...
The same reason people make software that runs on Windows rather than Linux, or even that relies on MS Office applications: they want to target the people already using the Microsoft platform in question. Given that Microsoft has been and will continue using its popular (whether it deserves to be or not) software and other offerings to push Live, there will probably be lots of people that already have Live IDs.
No, they are protected as common carriers.That's also why they have all kinds of legal obligations to let people, including competitors, use their lines in a non-discriminatory manner.
ISP's, particularly the telcos, have fought very hard, and largely successfully, not to be burdened with the obligations of common carriers when it comes to internet service. They also, of course, always claim to be still entitled to the same kind of benefits and protections that go along with common carrier status, and haven't been entirely unsuccessful at lobbying for that position, either.
Not really. Its just as true if you pick up a free copy of an advertising-supported newspaper. "Buy" or not is not really relevant: you are under no obligation to read the ads in newspaper. You can even, presuming you have acquired ownership of the copy of the paper legally, cut out the ads and pass it around to your friends to read.
Having a computer program "cut out the ads" from your legally-acquired free copy of the content of a web page before you read it is, arguably, no different.
Now, I suppose if you had to click through a website-license-agreement in which you agreed to view the ads in exchange for free access to the other content, the site owner's hysterical complaints that people viewing the site while blocking ads were "stealing" something might make sense. But that's a very different case.
Beautiful (that is, in the "productive" rather than "eye candy" sense; the two are at best orthogonal, and perhaps actually opposed) UIs get more done. Better typography makes things look better. I'd say the former is far more important than the latter, really.
Yes, for some reason people aren't concerned about aesthetic details that neither they nor most consumers of their documents will notice.
This seems fairly rational.
More likely, if significant businesses are going to use another office suite that alternative will need truly compelling advantages over MS Office that make less than 100% compatibility worth accepting.
As I understand it, Sun's "rights equivalent to ownership" claim relates to a purchase of rights from AT&T that predates either the SCO or Novell claims on Unix IP; while sun officials may have stated opinions about the validity of SCOs claims, I don't think those statements (or, for the same reason, the ruling against SCO) have any bearing on the validity of Sun's claimed rights to Unix, which are essentially independent of the rights claimed by SCO (or those now held by Novell).