The Balkan Yankee

I almost choked on my morning Banitsa when I read this article.

It sounds too good to be true. The way I see it there are three possibilites:

1) Verizon really is feeling the heat from Google’s impending Android coupled with not having the iPhone.

2) There is some other deeply sinister motive involved and Verizon is merely setting their trap.

3) We’ve slipped into a parallel universe like we did briefly on this day.

I’m guessing the penultimate is true, but we’ll see. As long as they don’t pull a complete head-fake, I’ll at least be able to benefit from their network quality over T-Mobile on short visits without buying new hardware.

Business as usual in the Balkans(cough - corruption - cough) as Microsoft gets some unusually strong regional support for OOXML. Not a single country in the region with voting rights came out against it.

What’s OOXML all about? Just more dirty tricks from Microsoft, trying to lock us into an inferior format so they can collect on patent licensing:

OOXML is an immature documentation of one vendor’s proprietary document format which depends on software patents held by this vendor, which block interoperability. It conflicts with existing ISO standards. More than three hundred technical comments have been raised by industry, academics, researchers, and experts. The ISO JTC-1 Directive p.48 section 9.8 requires national bodies to vote “NO with comments” if there remain unanswered technical problems. The accuracy and honesty of the voting process has been questioned in many countries.
-http://www.noooxml.org

Also, Here is a link to a map showing Global voting results.