Bad Microsoft. No fast track!

In excellent news relayed by ithildae, it appears Microsoft's ballot-box stuffing on the ISO voting on Microsoft's "Open"-XML document "standard" will avail them naught — the ISO committee has rejected it for fast-track status.

Critics, led by open-source advocates and rival International Business Machines Corp., pushed back. They said the Office file format, called Open XML, is flawed and so laden with Microsoft-specific features that only Microsoft would be able to use it fully.

And though Microsoft's vote-stuffing came close to succeeding, there's a proverb that says "close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades".  By recruiting sock-puppets, MS was able to muster 74% of the total of ballots cast across all ISO member countries, where it needed 75%, but managed only 53% of a key sub-group of ISO members from which it needed 67%.  MS-XML will get a second chance, but MS will have to address the numerous shortcomings and technical issues before it gets a second chance at approval — and by the time the second chance comes around, everyone involved should be fully aware of the dirty tricks Microsoft has been pulling to try to cheat in the approval process.  These have ranged from simple ballot-box stuffing to advertising incorrect times and dates for votes and comment submissions, and deliberately setting up sessions in too-small venues then pre-packing them with sock-puppet supporters in advance of the scheduled meeting time so that opponents arriving at the advertised time could not get in.

Just in case you thought it was just our government ....

....nope, it isn't.  The UK government are a bunch of rotten, crooked liars too.

The [UK] government was accused yesterday of covering up the full extent of the gun crime epidemic sweeping Britain, after official figures showed that gun-related killings and injuries had risen more than fourfold since 1998.

The [actual] Home Office figures - which exclude crimes involving air weapons - show the number of deaths and injuries caused by gun attacks in England and Wales soared from 864 in 1998-99 to 3,821 in 2005-06.  That means that more than 10 people are injured or killed in a gun attack every day.

Meanwhile, the British Home Secretary has been claiming all along that violent crime was falling.  For the last year alone, the statistics released by the Home Office in July purported to show a 13% decrease in criminal shootings, while in actual fact firearm homicides increased by 18%.