what about sends in a Groklaw alert warning that, by PJ’s reading, Microsoft might be trying to take over ODF via a stacked SC 34 committee. The article lists the attendees at an SC 34 meeting in July and gives their affiliations, which the official meeting materials don’t. (The attendees of the October 1 meeting, which generated a takeover proposal to OASIS, are not known in full.) “Why do I say Microsoft, when this is SC 34? Look at this… list of participants in the July meeting in Japan of the SC 34 committee. The committee membership is so tilted by Microsoft employees and such, if it were a boat, it would capsize… Of the 19 attendees, 8 are outright Microsoft employees or consultants, and 2 of them are Ecma TC45 members. So 10 out of 19 are directly controlled by Microsoft/Ecma… [I]f the takeover were to succeed, SC 34 would get to maintain ODF as well as Microsoft’s competing parody ’standard,’ OOXML. How completely smooth and shark-like. Under the guise of ’synchronized maintenance,’ without which they claim SC 34 can’t fulfill its responsibilities, they get control of everything.” A related submission from David Gerard points out that BoycottNovell has leaked the ISO OOXML documents, which ISO has kept behind passwords.

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Khemisty writes “Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that’s particularly void of matter. Scientists say this condition could account for the apparent acceleration of the universe’s expansion, for which dark energy currently is the leading explanation. Until now, there has been no good way to select between dark energy or the void explanation, but a new study outlines a potential test of the bubble scenario. If we were in an unusually sparse area of the universe, then things could look farther away than they really are and there would be no need to rely on dark energy as an explanation for certain astronomical observations. ‘If we lived in a very huge under-density, then the space-time itself wouldn’t be accelerating,’ said researcher Timothy Clifton of Oxford University in England. ‘It would just be that the observations, if interpreted in the usual way, would look like they were.’”

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Macomb County news briefs - Detroit Free Press
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