ISO approves the rejection of the vote on the relevance validity of some appeals…

So I am just back from vacation during which I unfortunately learnt about the war between Georgia and Russia. That is a complete madness and should be settled down as fast as possible otherwise I fear we will have a regional contagion. And remember, the war in Tchechenia is not over either. Caucasus is getting hot again, and that’s not because of global warming. Let’s hope for better things ahead.

Meanwhile, and while I was on vacation as well, the ISO did not lose its time fiddling with gentrifying concepts such a transparence and fairness. Nay, the ISO did what it had to do when they are harassed by hordes of undeads, communists, alien slime and malignant hogs of all kinds: They shut off the doors, closed the gates… and obeyed the Mighty. Remember, die Partei hat immer Recht. And that’s why the ISO refused to validate the appeals of four national standards organisations any further. Notice that the ISO did not actually answer to these appeals. It made up a list of existing P-countries (but not all of them were listed and besides, results would have been more clearcut with the P- “shooting stars”countries, the ones who got their P status and withdrew from it just after the OOXML ballot) asked them to vote on the relevance of the appeals, thereby refusing to decide on the appeals themselves and -watch this- for fear that these appeals might actually get through, they came up with that rule of the two-thirds. The rule states that you need two thirds of the concerned countries that actually vote yes to two oddly-phrased questions (more details here) . I don’t know where this rule comes from, and there is not even any rationale in favour of such a rule. But who are we to question the holy sanctions of the ISO?

Citizens, companies of various sizes, NGOs, and when put together, a lot of people. But I guess that does not matter at this stage. It is after all not that bad when you think about the war in Caucasus. What could be worse, of course, is that ISO could actually be in charge of solving the crisis between Russia and Georgia. Imagine how they would present their activity:

“ The ISO has successfully decided in favour of the transfer of the sovereignty of Siberia to Microsoft while allowing not two, but ten regions of Georgia to gain their full independence, regardless of their intent to become independent. Religious matters will be transferred to the Vatican except for the enclave of Zugdidi in Western Georgia and Iekaterineburg in Russia who will officially adopt the Church of Satan as their sole religion. After having conferred with Australia and the Imaginary Sultanate of Yareembada on Second Life, ISO declares that no conflict of interest thereby exists, has existed or shall exist between the Russian Federation, Georgia, Australia and any existing, past or future micronation on SecondLife in the matters pertaining to peace-keeping, fruit-groping, large-dog-petting, cookie-eating and computing.”

So what shall be done? Has OOXML finally won its way through the ISO? It obviously did buy its way through the ISO leadership, but there are still other ways to show the world how outrageous this process has become. Now OOXML is still left where it is: noone has seen it, or rather, many (including me) have reported to have seen it, but few, if no one, can actually say for sure where it is, as it simply has never been implemented. Conflicting reports exist about file formats called OOXML that do not seem to conform to the ISO/IEC 29500 spec. But the spec itself is rarely seen, and even more rarely witnessed as an implemented standard. Of course, it does not carry any obligation to be implemented. It’s just an ISO standard…