NoOOXML

Stop stupid calculations spinning in your *** heads!

You can get sued by calling other countries bananas…

Say No to discrimination and violation to basic human right. Dont add people to your list without asking them.

Let's stay with petition counting, you can get billions signatures with different IPs, if you want to

I do not think it is stupid, at least not more than putting Andorra on the same foot than China.
There is nothing against Andorra's people ! (just population numbers).
My own country population is just of the size of New-York city, so I know what is it to belong on a small nation ;-)

By the way, the title is indeed misleading and could be better rephrased as

'The NO against OOXML is supported by the representants of 3.2 billion people'

You can get sued by calling other countries bananas…

I really don't think so. Criticizing a country and its actions falls under the right of free speech. Criticizing persons can get you sued, but not that easily. Public debate is often ugly, and very few people, if any, get sued over simple name-calling in politics. While it is seldom an effective tactic in itself, it is still very common. To qualify for a case of slander, you really need to do worse thing than that, and it actually needs to be false accusations. I would say your attempt at intimidation was rather unsuccessful here.

Say No to discrimination and violation to basic human right. Don't add people to your list without asking them.

Who was added to what list without being asked? Please be more specific. The petition is based on real persons submitting a real e-mail address and then confirming their signature by e-mail. Is it really so hard to believe that 42,000 people care enough to sign their name on a petition? I signed it, I'm a real person, and there are a lot of people on the Internet, so I don't think it is that hard to believe that 42,000 individuals actually express their active support for saying "NO" to OOXML. If you do not, it's your choice.

I tend to agree. For example, I would not normally associate the opinions of any government official in China with the actual opinions of the Chinese people in general, and to say that 1 billion people in India actually care about OOXML and "voted no" is a bit far fetched. However, the main point is valid: many large and important countries did vote "no", and many small and relatively unimportant countries voted "yes". The parallel thread about corruption levels vs. the tendency to vote yes or no is also a healthy exercise in skepticism. Although China (a very corrupt country) voted "no" and USA (a relatively non-corrupt country) voted yes, there is definitely a general trend to be spotted, and that is the purpose of statistics.

Many small items of evidence and pointers to irregularities are piling up. It is getting very hard to pretend to not see them.

It's not as if the headline could possibly be taken literally. Obviously it's irony. Seems clear to me. Anyhow, when we say "China votes NO" we don't literally mean it, it's a convenient shorthand.

I wonder how many people voted YES, finally. Could anonymous 195.217.52.133 maybe count that?

Anyhow, when we say "China votes NO" we don't literally mean it, it's a convenient shorthand.

I do get the point. It's just that there is a clear difference between saying "China voted NO" and "One billion Chinese voted no", as there has obviously not been any democratic vote from the people, particularly not in China. I am not saying that the headline needs to be changed, though. It clearly attracts some attention, and that can't be all bad as long as the spin does not spill over into the article proper.

I suppose with "relatively" in there, that's some qualification, but the State governments, as well as the Federal government, are filled with men and women more than happy to receive money from Microsoft, and push for adoption of Microsoft's pet, despite the fact that they themselves are not competent to evaluate the virtues of OOXML - or the lack thereof.