It was a deb. Which means the installation script, on the vast majority of users systems, is going to run as root. Which means the ease of removal can, depending on how clever the malware author is, be anything up to and including "practically impossible unless you have a lot of experience removing clever rootkits from a livecd".

The malware in TFA on gnome-look was packaged as a deb file, and so (on the vast majority of systems) would need elevated privileges to install, and so have its installation script run as root.

Which means it's not just gnome startup programs you'd have to check, its every complicated, optimised-for-fast-startup-to-the-point-of-obfuscation (remember, Grandma's going to be running Ubuntu, not Slackware) startup script on the system. And you'd have to know it when you see it, which is not necessarily trivial if the malware author was clever. Maybe you could manage it; I certainly couldn't, I'd be installing from scratch.

As far as I can tell: Mandriva's name for NEPOMUK. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEPOMUK_(framework) , http://nepomuk.kde.org/

Oh, bah. If I hand you a contract which I've pre-signed, is the contract itself, "on the behalf of the owner and as a proxy", attempting to enter into the contract with you? No, of course not; I am, I'm merely pre-agreed with it. Analogously with software EULAs (up to maybe not strictly being a contract etc.).

...As does apt-get, since quite a few versions ago. Alias "apt-get remove" to "apt-get autoremove" to get it to automatically uninstall x when y gets removed.

Office 2007 OOXML files *are* a published standard -- the published standard in question being ECMA 376.

If what you actually meant was "...not OOXML, the Published ISO Standard", then say what you mean. But your original comment could be understood as saying that the spec Office 2007 uses is unpublished, wihch is obviously wrong.

(Not to mention that even saying that is ambiguous -- does "The ISO standard" refer to ISO 29500/Transitional or ISO 29500/Strict? The former is practically identical to ECMA 376, with the exception of minor tag semantic cleanup; whereas the latter is significantly different).