End result? We have to pay higher prices for everything due to less competition.

Not true in fact. When something becomes a standard it means that it's documented and anyone can deliver products that use that standard. That is a good thing.

The problem with OOXML is that it is a terrible format. It is so amazingly bad that the person who designed it should be pulled out back and given an extra hole to breathe through. OOXML is what you get if you put a set of comp sci students down and tell them to design the worst possible document format they can think of.

Another problem with this whole thing is that it is quite clear that Microsoft have spent quite a bit of time strong-arming and probably also paying off several of the ISO voting members. Several countries are pointing out that their technical committees voted against this, but they have still logged a "Yes" vote. Norway is one country that has logged a protest. In Poland there was also clearly some shenanigans going on.

That is obviously not part of getting good industry standards.

Thankfully this decision has been appealed and hopefully ISO will throw out this garbage format and vote yes on one that is actually functional.

Your aguments about competition are misguided

Utterly. A standard, be it industry or official, doesn't limit competition unless one of the players in the market gets an unfair advantage by the standardization.. When it comes to a document format (or a disk format, which has been discussed much in this forum) stating that standardization limits competition is absurd.

Ha-ha-ha! Speaking up is good.

I was involved with international standards for more than 20 years, and I can safely tell you that these are some of the more boring people you'll ever meet. And hardworking.

Endless junket committees? Standardization involves building a consensus, and just like political democracy it takes time.

As Winston Churchill put it so well, Democracy is the worst of all political systems. Unless you consider the alternatives.

Many people have suggested, both in politics and in product standards, that it's most efficient to just have the strongest player make all the decisions.

Microsoft is just one example, but it's a strong one. They have been selling MS Office at very high prices for a long time. Now there is price pressure from products with the document compatibility figured out, and Microsoft's response is to create a new document format that will force all the compatible products to start over again, and in the meantime MS can continue to get their usual $400-$500 per Office package, and they have structured the format so that they can continuously update it to make it harder for anyone else to stay compatible.

But you think that if ISO decided on ODF (Open Document Format) instead, so all software vendors were on a level playing field, you'd be paying more for any and all of those packages to cover the cost of ISO meetings?

My belief: MS would have to drop the price of their Office software by 60-70% to not be too far above the suddenly working and viable competition.

You can look at what happened to MS Office on the Mac side.

For years, MS was selling Office 2004 at their usual monopoly prices of $400+, and making a ton of profit from it per their income statement. Longstanding bugs remained unfixed, because they had a monopoly so there was no need to get stressed about customers' needs.

Then Apple came out with iWork as competition for MS Office. Initially just Pages (like MS Word + MS Publisher in one product, and format-compatible with MS Word) and Keynote (like PowerPoint but better, and with .ppt import). Then last year they added Numbers (like Excel minus much advanced functionality, but adding elegance and ease-of-use, and Excel-compatible file format). The whole package going for $70-80. Total!

Because Office 2004 was getting really long in the tooth, many people got iWork instead, to see if it was any good. Word (no pun intended :O) soon spread that it was just the ticket for the perhaps 75-80% of Office users who don't use all the thousands of features in the MS ultra-corporate product.

Microsoft suddenly saw a massive reduction in their very profitable sales of Office on the Mac platform, and they brought out Office 2008 to much fanfare.

But as usual with Microsoft, it was two steps forward and one step backward, sales kept dropping due to iWork and they had to reduce their prices...

All because of document format standardization (MS Office 1997-2003 file formats). If it wasn't for this standardization, customers would not dare buy the competitive products, because they know they will have to communicate with the overwhelming world community of MS Office users.

So no wonder MS is trying to leave the competition behind by getting ISO to standardize the more complicated (and easily changeable thanks to XML) Office 2007 format.

(That will also help slow down the competition from the pesky OpenOffice etc. open source alternatives on the PC platforms, by forcing them to start over with their development.)

I would MUCH rather have "standards" created by a strong company than a stupid standards committee. When I ran ShareVision back in the early 1990s, we were producing a desktop video conferencing product. All sorts of analysts and other know-nothings kept asking us whether we were going to support some of the upcoming H".somethingorother" standards. Well, we had people on those standards committees, and believe me, the standard for low-bit rate video that were adopted were absolutely horrible compared to what individual companies were able to do with their own proprietary codecs, and certainly worse than what we could do with our proprietary approach.

Believe me, even Microsoft and Apple cannot dictate what we will all use. Did they want MP3? No, but it is still the de facto standard for compressed audio. We have MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4, but when you want to get the best possible compression for the web, you probably use DivX, Xvid or some other codec, some of which may have technology related to these standards, but which are not exactly within the limits specified by those committees.

So, speaking strictly for myself, this is not something I am going to spend any time worrying about, and that would certainly be my recommendation to others.

"All it takes for evil to prevail is good people doing nothing."

Wow.

You're applying that phrase to a document standard. Wow. Just wow.

"All it takes for evil to prevail is good people doing nothing."

No, I am applying it to a company that is trying to extend a monopoly that has kept prices very high for more than a decade.

But I guess you don't mind paying four times as much for your Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc.

And why is your cable bill so high? Monopoly.

And why is your broadband internet bill so high? Duopoly, your very limited choice of the phone company or the cable company is what has made the rates go up while speeds have remained the same (compared to Europe and Asia where, per a recent Associated Press report, broadband speeds are increasing as rates are decreasing, thanks to real competition).

I pay $23/month for very fast Internet access. How much lower than that do you think would be fair??

Internet can be purchased from satellite, phone companies, and cable companies. This is no monopoly, and the pricing is ridiculously cut-throat. My DSL rates have been lowered three times in the past two years because of competition from cable (even though our little homeowner's association actually can't get cable, but the rest of the county can, so we get the benefits of that competition).

Cable is not a monopoly, since I have both over the air and satellite to choose from.

Water, gas, and electricity are regulated monopolies; cable and Internet are not.

I like Microsoft products (Vista being the exception, but I'm sure that will get worked out in time, or the next OS will be fine).

Sometimes the ones who create monopolies are actually good at what they do. Office 2007 is a nice improvement from the 2003 version.

I think consumers recognize quality, too. It is too simplistic to reason that Office enjoys its position of prominence because of Microsoft's market share. If they make garbage, they get serious flack for it (a la Vista in its present situation).

Open Source programmers have had a long time to develop a better alternative to what MS offers, but Linux et al can't seem to win the day because their mousetrap isn't different enough or better than what MS does effectively well.

Internet can be purchased from satellite, phone companies, and cable companies. This is no monopoly, and the pricing is ridiculously cut-throat.

To quote my post above:
...why is your broadband internet bill so high? Duopoly, your very limited choice of the phone company or the cable company.

Did I overlook internet via satellite? No, that is not high speed internet imho. Satellite offers low 2G cell phone data speeds on the down link, and dial-up for the uplink. Sorry.

Most consumer DSL today is 768K/128K. Cable offers speeds of up to 6M, but that is not comparable with DSL, because your are sharing your cable internet link with up to 500 subscribers. If your neighbor's kids are downloading movies and music, you may feel lucky to get even dial-up speeds.

My brother in Sweden is thinking of cancelling the 24 Mbps fixed internet link for his home, for which he is paying $23/month, in favor of a similar speed 3G wireless connection with an unlimited data plan for about the same money ....

Can you get something similar here? No.

New apartment buildings there often now come with 100 Mbps internet access, while older buildings have to settle for ye olde 24 Mpbs....

Internet-based businesses in Europe have a competitive advantage, because they can get highly reliable true high speed internet access for every branch office or store nationwide at very low cost.

In the U.S., reliable business class data connections cost a mint. Fortune 1000 retail chains are very unhappy about the cost of interconnecting their stores for their inventory/order/information systems.

We'll get 3G here too, about 2-3 years after it got established everywhere else. That will move internet access from being a duopoly to being a tripoly.

Umm, maybe a duopoly still.

Why? Because The Phone Company is buying up the cellular companies nationwide.

What about the remaining cellular carriers who could potentially offer data plans in competition with The Phone Company?

No sweat. The Phone Company owns 100% of the T-1 lines those companies have to have to every single one of their cellular towers. Any future price pressure will lead to the T-1 rates going up "due to market conditions."

I'm currently paying $80/month for a 3M/768K Business DSL connection, because my business is dependent on having reliable internet access. In return for the higher rate, I get a higher service level, and to be on the safe side I get this connection through a local ISP that acts as a reseller, so I can pass on any service issues to a human being who spends full time dealing with the behemoth and has inside connections there.

This is really a big issue! It started in the 93' when MS convince the US gov that a standard document processor was the answer to all budget ills. Now, MS needs this for big governments' contract software. not the individual user. This locks up most of EU future purchases, which locks up gov contractors, etc...... . The sad fact is the main government panel, not the subset that just voted, had rejected OOXML and had decided to stay with the "Sun, IBM & everyone" ODF. But, as usual, MS claimed that MS Office 2007 could not meet these standards and that Office 2007 is in most EU government offices as packaged OS systems that should count for something!

Its just a repeat of what happen with WordPerfect, MS couldn't handle pics & advance documents and work across multi of OSs. Solution---buy the market or FUD it to death MS is trying this now in smartphones, fortunately, MS lost the HD DVD battle, plus MS lost the first major round about shutting down linux( tho gain 3 years development time). Its not bad to be in different markets, but MS seeks to dominate and destroy everything in it's way. Most of the manufacturing and software developers have not grasp the massive PR and legal "stock voting and business network" MS has put in place since the 90's. MS has learned, like organized crime, spreading money around lawyers, big banks, cpas, etc..------ leads to easy, if not free access, to most big markets, back to boardrooms and technology.

A few points of clarification:

Satellite offers low 2G cell phone data speeds on the down link, and dial-up for the uplink. Sorry.Satellite offers low 2G cell phone data speeds on the down link, and dial-up for the uplink. Sorry.

That's old data and is the way satellite Internet worked many years ago. These days, it is bidirectional, with no need for a phone line back channel. Here is the information on speeds and cost:

Service Offerings

$60/month gets you 700k/128k. Not competitive with cable or DSL, but fantastic for those in the boonies.

Most consumer DSL today is 768K/128K.

I'm sorry but I can't remember if you live in the states or not. Here in the U.S., with AT&T you can get their most basic package for $20/month which is indeed 768K down, but 384K up, much faster than what you are quoting. For just another $5/month, you get 1,500K down and 384K up. Go to $30/month and you get 3,000K down and 512K up. And, if you want to break the piggie bank, you can pay a whopping $35/month and get 6,000K down and 768K up.

Wow!!

I have a tough time characterizing that as either slow or expensive.

My brother in Sweden is thinking of cancelling the 24 Mbps fixed Internet link for his home, for which he is paying $23/month

I would be interested in having him do a speed test, such as DSL Reports, to see if he gets anything even remotely close to that speed when connected to an actual, real Internet site. I bet he doesn't even come close. As to price, you can have the government subsidize anything, like with health care, and the direct price can be made to look like nothing. Of course, if you really want socialism, then that's a whole 'nother story. Let's see, how many people go to Cuba for their medical care? Michael Moore says it's great down there. Oh, sure ...

New apartment buildings there often now come with 100 Mbps internet access,

Well, a quick bit of research reveals no shortage of stories about fantastically high speed "Internet access" in various places, including here in the states. What it actually means is an interesting question to ponder. If you have ever done a trace of an Internet connection, you know that every connection goes through a crazy, twisted path to get to the computer that has the information you want. Unless every single path is able to support the speed of your final, fast connection, then all is for nought. Again, I would be interested if anyone reading this has a super-fast connection, run the speed test here:

DSL Reports Speed Test

and tell us what you get. I have one of the AT&T DSL packages I quoted above. I just did the test, and here's what I got (at 10:35 p.m. PDT on April 3):

1881K down/ 249K up

I used the Flash plugin and connected to Palo Alto.

I then tried Chicago, which is much further away:

2450K down / 405K up

I then tried NJ, which is on the other side of the country.

1429 down / 182K up.

But heh, it's New Jersey.

Finally, if you go to this site:

Speedtest.net

you will find tests from all over the world. I don't see anything that looks significantly better than what I just reported. So, I think most of this so-called high-speed access, if it even exists, is pretty much useless in practice.

But, if someone can give me their real test results, I'll certainly be willing to revise the conclusions I have made from my own tests and real-world observations.

Because The Phone Company is buying up the cellular companies nationwide.

Before Judge Green split the phone company in 1982, I knew what that statement meant. Even though many of the "Baby Bells" have re-consolidated, I sure as heck don't know what "the phone company" means. AT&T? Verizon? Sprint/Nextel? Qwest? T-Mobile? Vodafone? Vonage?

And how about Skype and other VOIP services?

The passing of this standard is a shining example of M$ work. Instead of being the market leader due to quality, they game the standards again (big surprise). One would think a company with the revenue and, supposed, top of the line products like M$, they would be able to get a standard approved with flying colors and it be the best standard on the books. Instead there are all these under the table deals, conflicts of interest within the ecma and other technical groups, an appeal and accusations of inpropriety. All this on a "standard" that won't work. Thats sounds exactly like the M$ that I know.

One thing to keep in mind is that just because ooxml is supposed to be a standard doesn't mean anybody (especially M$) has to implement it. It will be like the ugly duckling of file formats and stand as another example of M$ fine work. :p.

The problem with OOXML is that it is a terrible format. It is so amazingly bad that the person who designed it should be pulled out back and given an extra hole to breathe through. OOXML is what you get if you put a set of comp sci students down and tell them to design the worst possible document format they can think of.
===================
I agree.

According to Wikipedia:

Microsoft originally developed the specification as a successor to its binary Microsoft Office file formats.

John

Internet can be purchased from satellite, phone companies, and cable companies. This is no monopoly, and the pricing is ridiculously cut-throat. My DSL rates have been lowered three times in the past two years because of competition from cable (even though our little homeowner's association actually can't get cable, but the rest of the county can, so we get the benefits of that competition).

Cable is not a monopoly, since I have both over the air and satellite to choose from.

Water, gas, and electricity are regulated monopolies; cable and Internet are not.
========
Where I live, for the longest time all I could get was a terrible dial-up connection from the local monopoly phone company. As other ISPs began providing internet service at lower prices, Frontier Communications would refuse to allow them to have local access numbers. I would call that a monopolistic practice. They also would not allow other long distance service to have access either. You had to choose theirs.

Much of the time I would spend trying to get a connection that would drop suddenly with no way to re-connect. That happened usually in the evening when people were using it more. When AOL came around Frontier Communications allowed people to have AOL internet, but only if they paid the regular AOL rate AND a fifty percent fee to Frontier Communications as well. Thus, if you wanted the more reliable connection from AOL, you had to pay a fee to Frontier Communications of 50% of their regular rate plus AOL or be stuck with FC dial-up. The total came to $60 for that. I would call that a monopoly.

Finally Time Warner brought in cable internet. It started out as a $50 add on to your cable bill, but was like a dream come true in terms of reliability and speed. The modem cost $10 a month extra. When people started buying their own modems Time Warner knocked off $10 a month from your bill at first, but then changed that and gave people a one time $5 credit because too many people were doing it and because they held the cards..
So if you owned your own modem you then lost your $10 a month credit and you were back up to standard rates like everybody else who used their modem.

As usage rose the connections became slower but being a monopoly, TWC simply raised the rates and didn't upgrade the service. The television signals began falling to a pathetic noisy image that defied belief. Phone calls generated the same response for everyone. A tech would come out and claim that the problem was in your house
.
One time I called them up and complained about the lousy television signal so they scheduled a service call. This time I put the television on a table OUTSIDE my house with the cable connected to the television straight from the pole. When the tech arrived he saw the television playing outside in the yard with the bad signal, but still wanted to go into the house. I wouldn't let him in. I told him that he could see for himself that the problem was NOT inside my house. He reluctantly went around the neighborhood climbing up polls with his little meter and came back a half-hour later claiming that he couldn't find a problem. So he left. I followed up on this a week later and the girl pulled up the report. The tech wrote that the problem was INSIDE MY HOUSE anyway despite the fact that he never went into my house and he could see for himself that the problem appeared on a television sitting in the yard connected straight to the poll outside the house. I have no doubt that that is what he is instructed to do by his monopolistic corporate company TWC.

A few years later the neighbors constructed a letter to Time Warner in the neighborhood collectively saying that ALL 24 of us were experiencing the same lousy picture and that we felt the 40 year old cables needed upgrading. We sent the letter to several people in the chain of command at Time Warner.

Time Warner Cable's response...........They sent out 24 separate service calls to claim that the problem was in EACH of our houses instead of with Time Warner. They are a filthy monopoly that screws the public because there is no oversight. Typical of what is going on all across the nation thanks to Republican legislation that protects them by "private-public" partnerships. We saw that yesterday with the Democratic party's hearings on the FAA and the airlines and public safety being thrown out the window (but only if you watched them live on C-Span. The news media corporations like Time Warner's CNN lie about Republican practices regularly as I have demonstrated over and over again).

Time Warner then reduced the number of channels in the "basic" package and repackaged them so that many of the channels you were getting that were included in it were now "extra". Price went up to get the same thing. No satelliteoffered yet.

Then came digital television service from Time Warner. That too came with an increase in price, but with the same lousy picture in the neighborhood. All you got were extra bad looking channels for the digital package at a higher price.

Then came satellite television to the area. So some people who were fed up decided to get satellite instead because they were fed up with both Frontier Communications and Time Warner's monopolistic high-priced bad service. At that point people with Time Warner Cable Internet and Time Warner basic non-digital cable were averaging around $103 a month. Those with digital were averaging around $140 a month.
But those with satellite could only choose from Direc TV because the Dish Network signal wouldn't work without a 30 foot mast. They were paying an average of $160 a month with NO internet.

If you wanted internet through them you had ONE CHOICE...............you guessed it............Frontier Communications DSL. Now if you chose that route you either took their "triple package" of phone-DSL-long distance at over $100 a month or be stuck with their bad dial-up.
Let's say you decided to get satellite TV and keep ONLY the Time Warner cable internet. For that you pay $80 a month for just the internet because you chose to drop their bad TV cable service (or dis-service) so they charged more. Some "choices".

Now we're talking about an average of $200 a month if you want "decent television and internet" no matter which monopoly you chose.

I have no idea what they will charge next year when the federal government's mandated all-digital signal goes into effect in Feb 2009. We get NOTHING over the air here except some religious station and the HD antennas also pull in nothing. So we are stuck with two monopolies that give us bad service at high prices and practice monopolistic practices with NO OVERSIGHT and it will only get worse when John McCain is president (as I predicted four years ago). I'll post the link if you would like now that the search function is working.

So please spare me the talk about how "cable is not a monopoly" and the "internet is not a monopoly".

John

I would MUCH rather have "standards" created by a strong company than a stupid standards committee.

I fully agree with this one. Standards created by companies are workable, they already have solutions and they are in use. Standards created by w committee are typically not workable solutions (anyone remember OSI? Probably not, no networking experts in here I guess) and they are difficult, and at times actually impossible to implement.

All "standard" created by companies are not good though, and OOXML is one of those that are really bad. As I said, the Microsoft developers who concocted this horrible, horrible, horrible document format should be given an extra breathing hole in their head. For the good of humanity.

There are better open document formats out there, Open Document Format being the most notable. This is another standard originally developer by a company (Sun) and that has since been made into an ISO standard. It is a very flexible, excellent document format, light years ahead of the crud that Microsoft muscled through the committee.

The only reason MS pushed OOXML is that they can avoid supporting ODF if OOXML becomes a standard. In that way they can stifle competition as usual. You can bet your butt that Microsoft support of ODF will be dismal in it's office products. That is how MS is trying to limit competition with OOXML, by not having to support real workable standards like ODF.

OOXML is junk, everybody knows it, and just about every technical committee in every country on ISO voted against it. Somehow it still made it through. There must be a lot of people with fatter wallets and/or broken arms out there in ISO land these days.

this is not something I am going to spend any time worrying about,

Well, it would be nice to have real competition to the MS Office products, but I am don't think having this would change the world in a material way.

There's a fundamental problem. XML itself has flaws.
I knew nothing about XML and had to implement an XML interface. Didn't take me very long at all to run into at least one major hole. Wouldn't surprise me at all that OOXML is a mess. Using a human readable format to create a schema to hold human created objects is flawed.

Bob.

all I could get was a terrible dial-up connection from the local monopoly phone company.

and then later ...

Finally Time Warner brought in cable internet.Woops, I guess the phone company DIDN'T have a monopoly, did it? By definition, if they did, Time Warner couldn't have developed a competing product or service, and certainly couldn't have done it in just a few years.

So, to be clear, there is competition, and your own account proves it.

Second, as I showed in my last post, prices have gone down -- a LOT.

Third, the prices you are quoting are for packages that include TV and Internet, and they include all sorts of extra packages like HBO, etc. The basic package is priced MUCH lower.

Finally, I don't know what remedy you want. I guess since you brought up the White House elections, you must want some sort of government regulation. However, since any government is notoriously inefficient at providing anything, and since their oversight stinks (the current mortgage problems are largely the result of botched government oversight that spans both Democratic and Republican administrations and congresses), I don't think that will buy you much.

Also, exactly what price do you think is fair? You want it for free? If not, what it the "right" price? Do you have even the remotest idea of the cost of installing the infrastructure required to deliver all this stuff? Do you know that the copper wires that carry your old analog phone signal had to have amplifiers every mile, and that all those have had to be replaced? And, to get really fast service, like the 100 Mbps described in earlier posts, requires pulling millions of miles of fibre optic cable and installing countless amplifiers, splitters, etc. Published estimates of this cost, in densely populated areas, are $1,000 per subscriber.

For a city of one million people, that's one billion dollars.

There are fifty metropolitan areas in the U.S. alone with metropolitan populations greater than one million, with L.A. at sixtenn million and the NYC metro area at twenty-one million. As is often said: you do the math.

These companies -- and the good people that work for them -- invent the technology, figure out how to manufacture it, make the investments, hire and train thousands of people, actually do all the work of installing millions of things, get the service running, fix the problems that happen along the way, and in the end deliver a product (Internet service) that is one of the most amazingly useful and transforming things developed in the past twenty years.

And yet, from some people, all they get is the one finger salute.

Folks, you really have to get a grip on life and deal with all this crazy hatred of big companies, whether it is the cable company, the phone company, Microsoft, or the oil companies. Who and what do you like??? Even Apple is getting bashed these days!!

Anyway, I can see that I am once again getting in the way of another venting ritual. Very, very strange ...

Woops, I guess the phone company DIDN'T have a monopoly, did it? By definition, if they did, Time Warner couldn't have developed a competing product or service, and certainly couldn't have done it in just a few years.

So, to be clear, there is competition, and your own account proves it.

Second, as I showed in my last post, prices have gone down -- a LOT.
=================
You got that from reading my post?
Should I have made it shorter like this one?
A phone company monopoly vs a cable company monopoly is "competition"? You got that from my post? Prices have gone down? Steadily increasing costs for a bad TV signal with nowhere else to turn except Satellite at which time I have to pay either the cable company monopoly or the telephone company monopoly $80-$120 a month for the internet or go with a bad dial-up from the same company?

Start reading from the middle of my post if it is too long. If you personally have "choices" where you live - Great. Good for you. But don't presume to speak for the rest of the country when you don't know what you are talking about. I know what we have to deal with where we live and we are not that far from from the major NYC metropolitan area.

John

you must want some sort of government regulation. However, since any government is notoriously inefficient at providing anything, and since their oversight stinks (the current mortgage problems are largely the result of botched government oversight that spans both Democratic and Republican administrations and congresses), I don't think that will buy you much.
========
That's right, I expect that for my tax money the government will establish agencies that are independent from the corporations they oversee in order to protect us from abuse. I don't believe in the Republican approach which is to let the industries regulate themselves and put people from those industries in charge of the federal agencies so they can look the other way when it will cost them money to protect the public which is what has happened since Bush took office with the Republican congress rubber stamping every public screwing move and refusing to provide the check and balance required of them by the US Constitution all camouflaged by complicit news media corporations that gain from it financially.

Oversight investigations first began in January of 2007 when the Democrats took over the committees. I watch them on C-Span all the time and they always show the same thing I just described whether it be the FCC, FDA, FTC, or the FAA it's been the same. Corporations in charge of their own oversight which is NO oversight while the public is poisoned by bad food, left with no port security, crumbling infrastructuire, dangerous toys, unsafe airplanes, etc, etc. ANYONE regardless of party affiliation would come away with the same conclusion if they watched the hearings or the legislative sessions of the US House and Senate live all the time as I do, but alas few do.

Instead they tune in to their favorite "news" station and "catch" the lies which in most cases consists of no reports at all about those hearings or edited and "interpreted" versions. Same with the legislation and which party argued what.
The biggest problem facing this nation is the news media that lies and covers up for Republicans and determines who will be president. They chose John McCain in 2004 for the 2008 election.
I predicted that he would win as recently as 2006 (see link above) and there is not a thing anyone can do about it because they don't know what is going on thanks to the news media. A majority of voters will fall right in line just like they did in 2000 and 2004.
So either I can forsee the future (in which case I will give you this Saturday's lottery numbers because I like you) or I know how things work because that is mostly what I spend my time doing. The challenge is always open to argue my news media claim using specific examples giving the non-believers the choice of subject, dates, etc for a handicap advantage which I can give because it is so pervasive it happens every single day of the week on every network news station. If you like Republicans running things, then be happy they have the entire news media to help them cheat and screw the public. At least they will retain control of things even if it is dishonestly.

John

...like the 100 Mbps described in earlier posts, requires pulling millions of miles of fibre optic cable and installing countless amplifiers, splitters, etc. Published estimates of this cost, in densely populated areas, are $1,000 per subscriber.

$1,000 per subscriber in densely populated areas?

That sounds more like "I don't wanna do it, therefore it is impossible."

My brother also has a vacation house on a remote island. This is a small island, perhaps 2 miles x 20 miles, in an archipelago several hours boat ride east of Stockholm. Guess what, the island has broadband Internet.

There is not one cent of government subsidy for broadband, and the many suppliers specify speed as a band, not as the maximum theoretically achievable speed.

I just did a video call to my brother in Sweden (I live in L.A. since more than 25 years), using Skype and iChat (got a better picture with the latter). He said he has run the usual speed tests you mentioned, and got close to 24 Mbps on his home DSL.

Sweden a socialist country? I think your information is quite old (and arguably it was never true, but that's a longer story than I have time for right now).

In the U.S., we have government-run post offices.
In Sweden, they closed all post offices and outsourced their functions to private business.

Sweden even outsourced the entire Stockholm subway system to a multi-national company, and broke up the equivalent of Amtrak to add private railroads.

They have outsourced schools, the phone company of course (like here), and much more. Etc., etc.

The entire wealth of the country was based on private industry with minimal regulation, particularly throughout the entire 20th century.
Volvo cars/tractors/trucks, SAAB cars/air liners/jet fighters, SKF ball bearings, Bofors cannons, Kruger safety matches, AGA automated lighthouse technology and famous stoves, ASEA power transmission and distribution, and much much more. All totally capitalist and cheered for it.

How did they become successful on such a large scale? Most of the credit would have to go to one single meeting in Saltsjobaden in 1932(?), between the heads of the largest association of employers and the heads of the largest unions.

Europe was in turmoil at the time, crippled by massive strikes everywhere.

The top capitalists in Sweden at the time saw that this was about to arrive in Sweden, and that power simply did not work in quenching the strikers. They added up the numbers, and took a big gulp, delivering a unique proposal to the unions.

The companies would commit to paying a fair wage, and adult education would be made available at a very low cost so that the labor force could educate itself to become more valuable and make even more money.

In return, the unions committed to not strike, but to always go to negotiations instead.

Did it work? The numbers say so. Sweden was #1 in GNP per capita for a very long time after this (I think about 60-70 years before rot set in).

doesn't matter to me if MS's format is adopted: I'm still using open office. Got most people I know to go from photoshop to gimp because of exorbitant costs & non-backwards compatible file formats, it's only a matter of time before the people I deal with on a regular basis drop MS office too for the same reason.

EDIT: i also find the file format name stupid. If Sun named their file format reversed of MS's then MS would take them to court.

XML itself has flaws.

Not that I am a die-hard XML fan, but I'd be interested to know something about what you mean with flaws here.

had to implement an XML interface. Didn't take me very long at all to run into at least one major hole.

XML is a document format and as such doesn't have holes or back-doors or bugs.

Using a human readable format to create a schema to hold human created objects is flawed.

That's an absurd statement. Anything that can be expressed can be described in a human-readable format. Images etc are not, they are just referenced.

Honestly, blaming XML for the mess that is OOXML is absurd given the relative beauty of the ODF format, which is also XML. I am also looking forward to what you mean by your statements, they ring of ignorance more than anything else, but I am willing to be shown otherwise.