In Why Standards?, Jim Waldo points out the difference between de facto standards and de jure standards. The most important point to be made is that standards bodies are not a place for invention, but a codification of existing practices. Rushing to standardize before there's enought existing practice to learn from is a mistake.

A friend graciously offered to watch our kids after they went to bed last night, so we snuck out to catch The Matrix Reloaded. Reloaded doesn't seem to be as approachable as The Matrix. At the end of The Matrix, I felt a powerful connection with some of the themes in the movie -- most notably the questioning of whether what we see around is real. I didn't have that feeling about Reloaded. There are a host of questions about what happened and what meant what. I feel that I've seen half of a movie, which probably means that I won't really form my full opinion until Revolutions comes out in November. Maybe I'll come back to this in a few weeks when I've had chance to think about it some more (and more people have seen it)