CDs and other dumb (non-transistor) media are already being replaced by Flash. MMS and CompactFlash are being replaced by SecureDigital (SD) and Sony MemoryStick, both of which have DRM built into them. Sony has enforced DRM on some MemoryStick products (Playstation sticks, mostly). But I expect they will draw the noose tight only once we've already let their harmless-seeming trojan horses into our storage collections, when they'll activate DRM too late for us to choose a different medium without DRM.
After all, why else would these Flash devices sacrifice capacity and manufacturing costs for DRM features they don't use to make money?
You understand power, but you don't understand impeachment.
First, the president (and arguably, the VP) cannot be tried for anything while they're in power, except by impeachment, according to the Constitution. Who will violate that? No one.
Second, impeachment doesn't have to take long. Republicans impeached Clinton in a few weeks.
Third, impeachment doesn't have to lead to conviction to stop a criminal president. Nixon resigned rather than allow a trial to expose even more of his criminal enterprise and his criminal associates. His Republican Party turned against him to cut their losses for exactly that reason. Clinton's impeachment wasn't for any criminal enterprise that could be further endangered (the Whitewater investigation tried exactly that, and produced only a white lie on TV about a blowjob), but it did interfere with the political leverage Clinton had over the Republican Congress. Bush would be crippled for the rest of his term, if he didn't resign, even if acquitted by his 49 Republican senators. Unable to stop Congress from winding down the Iraq War, taking over the Afghanistan War, and otherwise fixing both foreign and domestic policy.
Impeaching Bush for the warrantless NSA wiretapping, lying us into Iraq War, discarding habeas corpus, torturing, and a laundry list of cronyism and other crimes isn't merely "political vengence". It's justice. It's the only way to stop a criminal president, as specified in the Constitution. Tyrants like Bush are exactly who impeachment is designed to stop.
If Congress doesn't impeach Bush, then what does a president have to do to get impeached? Is it only for breaking into the Watergate hotel during an election campaign? Is it only for lying about a blowjob? Can criminal presidents get away with literal (mass) murder, even if they don't have a Congressional majority?
No one sells me my home WiFi bandwidth, since I own the equipment - I don't know of any residence that can't do the same. Those WiFi spots have to connect somehow to the Internet, but there are options, just like wired residential LAN IP access.
TANSTAAFL. But who's talking "free"? The wired phone networks used to be closed to competitive access. It's inevitable in wireless, especially because wireless doesn't even have the "natural monopoly" disadvantage to free access that comes with expensive wired networks, of which there used to be only one. I already have choice between DSL and cablemodem. I could even get another fiber from another ISP, and that's before they wire/radio my gas pipes and water pipes. The radio spectrum in the air has competitors already. And that's before phased arrays and smart radios level the "dynamic switching" field to encompass all of them.
We'll pay one or more of those competitors. It won't be free. And they'll use tricks to form cartels instead of competing, but they'll inevitably compete.
This logic is the essence of the Bush Era. The theory is entirely devoted to power. All that matters in life is to whom you defer in power. If Bush acknowledges that a court, a Congress, or a TV audience has any power over him, that's the end of the issue. Only after an apocalyptic fight with every resource possible, including illegal means, torture, spies, assassinations, exposing covert agents, bribes, anything to attack the force asserting power over them. Then, when it looks like the new power will win, they try to bargain for changes to allow them to do what they were doing in exchange for admitting they used to do it, then claim "we were right all along". If they still lose, they take whatever lumps are offered (until now, practically nothing except perhaps purely symbolic, from their Republican Congress), then just do it anyway in secret - or through proxies, either corporate or overseas.
These people will do anything for tyrannical powers, including use ones they don't actually have to get them. The Constitution is designed to stop such criminal tyrants: impeachment. It works only while the Constitution still has more power than the tyrants attacking it.
This kind of patent abuse should be remedied with action against the abuser. At the very least the patent attorneys should be barred from filing or working on patents for a period of at least 10% of the duration of the patents they are abusing. And the filer (eg. Microsoft), if guilty of conspiracy to abuse (provable by repeated offenses) should be barred from filing or working on patents for a similar period.
That kind of consequences would force the filers to carry most of the responsibility for researching prior art and other patent invalidators, rather than the incompetent/overloaded PTO. And weed out many of the crooked patent lawyers who make money regardless of how badly they construct the artificial government monopolies they attempt to create.
What about H.264 vs GSM and G.729, in terms of MIPS:Kbps and quality at various Kbps? GSM is $freePL, but not such great quality at 8-10Kbps, while G.279 is pretty high quality, but $patented (even when GPL).
How does H.264 compare with GSM and G.729 codecs, in terms of performance (CPU MIPS:Kbps) and quality (at different Kbps)? GSM isn't patent encumbered ($free and freePL), but G.729 is patented and licenses cost at least $10 per codec instance (and up, up, up). Is a $freePL H.264 codec a good compromise between the two current favorites, or better/worse than both the current alternatives?
Thank you, Mr Anonymous Putin Coward. In fact it was confiscated. Though I don't think that it's in an entirely different category than 9/11/2001 "conspiracy" books, unless you're one of those coincidence theorists.
_Blowing Up Russia_ is detailed in its citations, including many references to news coverage corroborating it throughout the story it tells. A story that would of course include deniers astroturfing the biggest tech blog in the world's story about British police finding its author Litvinenko's poisoner, who is covered in the book as working for the KGB.
As detailed in Litvinenko's book (with Yuri Felshtinsky) published right after he was poisoned to death _Blowing Up Russia_, Russia's KGB (by whatever new name disguises it) has been working against the conversion to democracy, especially since KGB exec Putin replaced Yeltsin the drunken reformer. According to Litvinenko before he died (reported in the book), he was being chased and then killed for reporting on the faked 1999 "apartment bombings" in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia which the KGB staged to get Yeltsin to invade Chechnya on the pretext of "Islamic terrorism". The book is banned (and was confiscated) in Russia.
"Think. It ain't illegal yet." - George Clinton with Funkadelic
If the iPhone can break mobile "phones" away from the US carrier lockin to their original network, then it's worth every penny. We need to be able to switch networks dynamically on service price/quality, not this insane AOL monopoly business model. Every step towards opening the "last mile" to multiple access is worth taking.
Apple has been the main driver forcing record labels towards discarding their archaic "scarcity" bizmodel, however limited its own movement along that road. Let's see if Jobs can force the networks open the way Apple forced computing to be "for the rest of us".
What's most interesting about these mobos is that they're fanless. So they can be used in multiples around roomsful of normal people, especially driving TVs and stereos, without the annoying noise driving people crazy. But that's also true of some PII mobos.
These mobos support 1GHz CPUs, but they're Via C7. So what's the performance of these new mobos actually running, say, Linux (no X or desktop) and a streamplayer like madplay or even MythTV clients? Compared to their Pentium competitors, or even uCLinux running on these Blackfin DSP boards?
Everyone should prioritize their incoming email by who in their address book sent it, or it's unsolicited, probably commercial, email, "UCE", aka SPAM.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Accountants, or rather the CFO and Comptroller, haunt those meetings under a sheet of "boring", but of course their technical specialty is the reason everyone works there. They don't trot out their pets in exec meetings, at least not in the operational terms. They dumb down, oversimplify, lower expectations, and keep everyone away from the money as much as possible.
By which techniques they get along without concessions, or getting caught up in anyone else's domain where they might get distracted or worse, like take on more operations.
When technologists learn to keep up appearances of being "normal" like everyone else does, they'll operate more in the boardroom than in the datacenter, and get the power. People will trust them more, fear them less, and those CIOs will become CEOs more often.
Both phenomena demonstrate that products have to be sold - they don't sell themselves. And the better salespeople make all the difference, regardless of the quality of product.
I kindof agree about 2K4, but you underestimate the power of the corporate media that is all most voters know about the candidates, especially until a couple-few weeks before the election.
2K6 was about as good as a party can do. They took the House with an almost 10-point majority. They didn't lose a single Senate race, and took 6 new ones (of only 11 available), the most any forecaster predicted.
Both of those are against the simple stats that 95-98% of incumbents are reelected. Incumbency is much more powerful than party ID, than position on the issues, or anything else.
We'll see how Democrats do in 2008. The House should gain by at least another dozen or so seats, because they now have power to do the most popular things, and are aiming at the trifecta (Senate/House/president). The Senate should gain by at least 2-4 seats, because Republicans face an even worse asymmetry than what protected Republicans in 2006: something like 15 Republicans, including some of the least popular, and only about 9-10 Democrats, including some of their most popular, are defending. And since Democrats have that 10 point House margin, they can focus on the Senate races, where they've got only a 1-vote majority (named "Lieberman", who's really a Republican). While the presidential races each take care of themselves, there are so many Senators running for president that the Senate will be their battleground for the next 2 years, with Democrats in charge. I'd love to be the Democratic fundraiser, or Chuck Schumer.
If the execs running Red Hat or another Linux distro had the killer instinct that Gates and other Microsoft execs have always had, then every single obstacle to "upgrading" Windows to Vista would be greeted as an offramp to Linux. Packages that reinstalled Linux would be marketed as "Windows recovery tools" to people evaluating Vista. Bundled with Office workalikes and training videos, and clickable data conversion tools.
It's easy to blame MS for being bad. It's harder to blame Linux distros for being bad at being as good at being bad.
I didn't propose replacing URLs with URNs entirely. I proposed using URNs for finding things by name rather than domain names or other URL components which find things by location, which is a catch-22 for people who just know what something is called, and what kind of thing it is.
URN parking is harder, because trademark laws can stop it in well-known trademark practice, which is based on disambiguation by the kind of thing with that name. Domain names are by nature ambiguous to what kind of "thing" they point to, because they point to a virtual domain of computer hosts. It's hard to stop someone from using ambiguous domain names when domain names are ambiguous. When trademark or other laws are used, they're often abused to create artificial monopolies on terms much broader than the legitimate mark owner is entitled either by law, or just to disambiguate in the market for their specific kind of thing.
Like I said, googling for a name is closer to using a URN than using a URL through DNS. ISBN is similar, but restricted to a single kind of thing: books. A real URN system would solve a lot of these problems, without relying on Google or different techniques/APIs for searching for names in different databases. Like when different networks and host naming systems were converged to DNS/TCP/IP.
Just like a URL alone is useless without an infosystem like the Web to use it in, so is a URN useless on its own. The purpose of a URN infosystem is to return URLs. Either interactively to disambiguate, or several for redundancy, or other solutions to other problems the limited URL creates in its limited solution.
The ISBN is used with infosystems like bookseller or libarary databases to return the equivalents of URLs to find instances of the book, among other info about the class of copies of that book.
A URN like (nabisco) entered into a system like Google returns its URL(s). Pretty useful, but not a complete solution.
Just because your "joke" gets something wrong in order to be funny, but isn't funny, though I got your reference to "biscuits", doesn't put it over my head. It puts it beneath my contempt.
When I'm in meetings with CEOS, bankers, "investors" and other purely "business" people, with no production merit, they usually roll their eyes whenever someone mentions something technical, or even just relating directly to the technology, as if it were important to the business. These businesspeople have social skills, even if limited to boardroom power games, and sometimes technical skills in finance, marketing, or the law. But they never let their own "techinical" skills or jargon show in these meetings with "outsiders". They have instead learned to dumb down their expertise to talk purely colloquially with nontechnical people.
Pure technologists rarely learn to dumb down like that. Partly because the knowledge itself is the most valuable, not the person who has it. Partly because tech is a language itself, which suffers from obfuscation and euphamism. So do the other technical communications, like finance and management, but those execs have long ago learned to ignore the imprecision and downright coverups, unless they feel their own power directly threatened by it.
CIOs are much more like other execs than like other technologists. The most successful ones are those least competent in tech itself, preferring instead to work on social competence like the rest of the execs with whom they deal. But the other execs still don't trust the CIOs, because they are still more likely to tell the truth about the core business, or just something else the rest of the execs don't understand, which would make the majority of the power holders look bad.
Eventually CIOs will become as disconnected from the technology and its culture as are the rest of the execs from wherever they draw their power. Then CIOs will become CEOs more often, like CFOs and CMOs (though marketing execs hide their pedigree for exactly the opposite reason, confirming the duplicity). Eventually no one will know what they're talking about when they spout expertise, but they will know each other very well. CIOs will win, and the products, the company, and the customers will all lose.
Domain names are an artifically scarce commodity. Extra toplevel domains like ".biz", ".xxx" etc (".etc"?) don't really help, as most people can't remember the toplevel extension to the domain name they remember, assuming it's ".com" and going (googling) from there, unless tricked astray.
The real solution is to move from misleadingly narrow URLs, locators of the precise info resource, to the URNs, names like "Nabisco" means "biscuits" in the real world. Trademark means competing suppliers of the same product/service can't use the same name, but has not been well implemented to guide Internet consumers.
The closest we've got is googling for a name. Which isn't bad, especially since Google itself has competition (though its name has ironically become generic for "Internet search"). Wikipedia's disambiguation techniques seem effective, but probably haven't been tested by the kind of system games swindlers attack the wide-open Net with.
Slashdot Mirror
CDs and other dumb (non-transistor) media are already being replaced by Flash. MMS and CompactFlash are being replaced by SecureDigital (SD) and Sony MemoryStick, both of which have DRM built into them. Sony has enforced DRM on some MemoryStick products (Playstation sticks, mostly). But I expect they will draw the noose tight only once we've already let their harmless-seeming trojan horses into our storage collections, when they'll activate DRM too late for us to choose a different medium without DRM.
After all, why else would these Flash devices sacrifice capacity and manufacturing costs for DRM features they don't use to make money?
You understand power, but you don't understand impeachment.
First, the president (and arguably, the VP) cannot be tried for anything while they're in power, except by impeachment, according to the Constitution. Who will violate that? No one.
Second, impeachment doesn't have to take long. Republicans impeached Clinton in a few weeks.
Third, impeachment doesn't have to lead to conviction to stop a criminal president. Nixon resigned rather than allow a trial to expose even more of his criminal enterprise and his criminal associates. His Republican Party turned against him to cut their losses for exactly that reason. Clinton's impeachment wasn't for any criminal enterprise that could be further endangered (the Whitewater investigation tried exactly that, and produced only a white lie on TV about a blowjob), but it did interfere with the political leverage Clinton had over the Republican Congress. Bush would be crippled for the rest of his term, if he didn't resign, even if acquitted by his 49 Republican senators. Unable to stop Congress from winding down the Iraq War, taking over the Afghanistan War, and otherwise fixing both foreign and domestic policy.
Impeaching Bush for the warrantless NSA wiretapping, lying us into Iraq War, discarding habeas corpus, torturing, and a laundry list of cronyism and other crimes isn't merely "political vengence". It's justice. It's the only way to stop a criminal president, as specified in the Constitution. Tyrants like Bush are exactly who impeachment is designed to stop.
If Congress doesn't impeach Bush, then what does a president have to do to get impeached? Is it only for breaking into the Watergate hotel during an election campaign? Is it only for lying about a blowjob? Can criminal presidents get away with literal (mass) murder, even if they don't have a Congressional majority?
No one sells me my home WiFi bandwidth, since I own the equipment - I don't know of any residence that can't do the same. Those WiFi spots have to connect somehow to the Internet, but there are options, just like wired residential LAN IP access.
TANSTAAFL. But who's talking "free"? The wired phone networks used to be closed to competitive access. It's inevitable in wireless, especially because wireless doesn't even have the "natural monopoly" disadvantage to free access that comes with expensive wired networks, of which there used to be only one. I already have choice between DSL and cablemodem. I could even get another fiber from another ISP, and that's before they wire/radio my gas pipes and water pipes. The radio spectrum in the air has competitors already. And that's before phased arrays and smart radios level the "dynamic switching" field to encompass all of them.
We'll pay one or more of those competitors. It won't be free. And they'll use tricks to form cartels instead of competing, but they'll inevitably compete.
This logic is the essence of the Bush Era. The theory is entirely devoted to power. All that matters in life is to whom you defer in power. If Bush acknowledges that a court, a Congress, or a TV audience has any power over him, that's the end of the issue. Only after an apocalyptic fight with every resource possible, including illegal means, torture, spies, assassinations, exposing covert agents, bribes, anything to attack the force asserting power over them. Then, when it looks like the new power will win, they try to bargain for changes to allow them to do what they were doing in exchange for admitting they used to do it, then claim "we were right all along". If they still lose, they take whatever lumps are offered (until now, practically nothing except perhaps purely symbolic, from their Republican Congress), then just do it anyway in secret - or through proxies, either corporate or overseas.
Because all that BushCo has learned from politics is the Nixon philosophy "it's only a crime when you get caught". Because the Bush admin made its bones in the Nixon admin.
These people will do anything for tyrannical powers, including use ones they don't actually have to get them. The Constitution is designed to stop such criminal tyrants: impeachment. It works only while the Constitution still has more power than the tyrants attacking it.
In BushWorld, only serial killers are murderers. Mass murderers who go straight are OK.
That specific example will probably show up in court. If not in this spy suit, then at the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Neocon war crimes trials.
This kind of patent abuse should be remedied with action against the abuser. At the very least the patent attorneys should be barred from filing or working on patents for a period of at least 10% of the duration of the patents they are abusing. And the filer (eg. Microsoft), if guilty of conspiracy to abuse (provable by repeated offenses) should be barred from filing or working on patents for a similar period.
That kind of consequences would force the filers to carry most of the responsibility for researching prior art and other patent invalidators, rather than the incompetent/overloaded PTO. And weed out many of the crooked patent lawyers who make money regardless of how badly they construct the artificial government monopolies they attempt to create.
What about H.264 vs GSM and G.729, in terms of MIPS:Kbps and quality at various Kbps? GSM is $freePL, but not such great quality at 8-10Kbps, while G.279 is pretty high quality, but $patented (even when GPL).
How does H.264 compare with GSM and G.729 codecs, in terms of performance (CPU MIPS:Kbps) and quality (at different Kbps)? GSM isn't patent encumbered ($free and freePL), but G.729 is patented and licenses cost at least $10 per codec instance (and up, up, up). Is a $freePL H.264 codec a good compromise between the two current favorites, or better/worse than both the current alternatives?
Thank you, Mr Anonymous Putin Coward. In fact it was confiscated. Though I don't think that it's in an entirely different category than 9/11/2001 "conspiracy" books, unless you're one of those coincidence theorists.
_Blowing Up Russia_ is detailed in its citations, including many references to news coverage corroborating it throughout the story it tells. A story that would of course include deniers astroturfing the biggest tech blog in the world's story about British police finding its author Litvinenko's poisoner, who is covered in the book as working for the KGB.
As detailed in Litvinenko's book (with Yuri Felshtinsky) published right after he was poisoned to death _Blowing Up Russia_, Russia's KGB (by whatever new name disguises it) has been working against the conversion to democracy, especially since KGB exec Putin replaced Yeltsin the drunken reformer. According to Litvinenko before he died (reported in the book), he was being chased and then killed for reporting on the faked 1999 "apartment bombings" in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia which the KGB staged to get Yeltsin to invade Chechnya on the pretext of "Islamic terrorism". The book is banned (and was confiscated) in Russia.
"Think. It ain't illegal yet." - George Clinton with Funkadelic
If the iPhone can break mobile "phones" away from the US carrier lockin to their original network, then it's worth every penny. We need to be able to switch networks dynamically on service price/quality, not this insane AOL monopoly business model. Every step towards opening the "last mile" to multiple access is worth taking.
Apple has been the main driver forcing record labels towards discarding their archaic "scarcity" bizmodel, however limited its own movement along that road. Let's see if Jobs can force the networks open the way Apple forced computing to be "for the rest of us".
What's most interesting about these mobos is that they're fanless. So they can be used in multiples around roomsful of normal people, especially driving TVs and stereos, without the annoying noise driving people crazy. But that's also true of some PII mobos.
These mobos support 1GHz CPUs, but they're Via C7. So what's the performance of these new mobos actually running, say, Linux (no X or desktop) and a streamplayer like madplay or even MythTV clients? Compared to their Pentium competitors, or even uCLinux running on these Blackfin DSP boards?
Everyone should prioritize their incoming email by who in their address book sent it, or it's unsolicited, probably commercial, email, "UCE", aka SPAM.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Accountants, or rather the CFO and Comptroller, haunt those meetings under a sheet of "boring", but of course their technical specialty is the reason everyone works there. They don't trot out their pets in exec meetings, at least not in the operational terms. They dumb down, oversimplify, lower expectations, and keep everyone away from the money as much as possible.
By which techniques they get along without concessions, or getting caught up in anyone else's domain where they might get distracted or worse, like take on more operations.
When technologists learn to keep up appearances of being "normal" like everyone else does, they'll operate more in the boardroom than in the datacenter, and get the power. People will trust them more, fear them less, and those CIOs will become CEOs more often.
Both phenomena demonstrate that products have to be sold - they don't sell themselves. And the better salespeople make all the difference, regardless of the quality of product.
I kindof agree about 2K4, but you underestimate the power of the corporate media that is all most voters know about the candidates, especially until a couple-few weeks before the election.
2K6 was about as good as a party can do. They took the House with an almost 10-point majority. They didn't lose a single Senate race, and took 6 new ones (of only 11 available), the most any forecaster predicted.
Both of those are against the simple stats that 95-98% of incumbents are reelected. Incumbency is much more powerful than party ID, than position on the issues, or anything else.
We'll see how Democrats do in 2008. The House should gain by at least another dozen or so seats, because they now have power to do the most popular things, and are aiming at the trifecta (Senate/House/president). The Senate should gain by at least 2-4 seats, because Republicans face an even worse asymmetry than what protected Republicans in 2006: something like 15 Republicans, including some of the least popular, and only about 9-10 Democrats, including some of their most popular, are defending. And since Democrats have that 10 point House margin, they can focus on the Senate races, where they've got only a 1-vote majority (named "Lieberman", who's really a Republican). While the presidential races each take care of themselves, there are so many Senators running for president that the Senate will be their battleground for the next 2 years, with Democrats in charge. I'd love to be the Democratic fundraiser, or Chuck Schumer.
If the execs running Red Hat or another Linux distro had the killer instinct that Gates and other Microsoft execs have always had, then every single obstacle to "upgrading" Windows to Vista would be greeted as an offramp to Linux. Packages that reinstalled Linux would be marketed as "Windows recovery tools" to people evaluating Vista. Bundled with Office workalikes and training videos, and clickable data conversion tools.
It's easy to blame MS for being bad. It's harder to blame Linux distros for being bad at being as good at being bad.
Something better than the wrong one when you're looking for the other, like delta.com, and a bunch of SEO results like now.
I didn't propose replacing URLs with URNs entirely. I proposed using URNs for finding things by name rather than domain names or other URL components which find things by location, which is a catch-22 for people who just know what something is called, and what kind of thing it is.
URN parking is harder, because trademark laws can stop it in well-known trademark practice, which is based on disambiguation by the kind of thing with that name. Domain names are by nature ambiguous to what kind of "thing" they point to, because they point to a virtual domain of computer hosts. It's hard to stop someone from using ambiguous domain names when domain names are ambiguous. When trademark or other laws are used, they're often abused to create artificial monopolies on terms much broader than the legitimate mark owner is entitled either by law, or just to disambiguate in the market for their specific kind of thing.
Like I said, googling for a name is closer to using a URN than using a URL through DNS. ISBN is similar, but restricted to a single kind of thing: books. A real URN system would solve a lot of these problems, without relying on Google or different techniques/APIs for searching for names in different databases. Like when different networks and host naming systems were converged to DNS/TCP/IP.
Good thing they didn't have to tangle with a jaguar shark. That's the kind of thing that can give you crazy-eye.
Just like a URL alone is useless without an infosystem like the Web to use it in, so is a URN useless on its own. The purpose of a URN infosystem is to return URLs. Either interactively to disambiguate, or several for redundancy, or other solutions to other problems the limited URL creates in its limited solution.
The ISBN is used with infosystems like bookseller or libarary databases to return the equivalents of URLs to find instances of the book, among other info about the class of copies of that book.
A URN like (nabisco) entered into a system like Google returns its URL(s). Pretty useful, but not a complete solution.
Just because your "joke" gets something wrong in order to be funny, but isn't funny, though I got your reference to "biscuits", doesn't put it over my head. It puts it beneath my contempt.
When I'm in meetings with CEOS, bankers, "investors" and other purely "business" people, with no production merit, they usually roll their eyes whenever someone mentions something technical, or even just relating directly to the technology, as if it were important to the business. These businesspeople have social skills, even if limited to boardroom power games, and sometimes technical skills in finance, marketing, or the law. But they never let their own "techinical" skills or jargon show in these meetings with "outsiders". They have instead learned to dumb down their expertise to talk purely colloquially with nontechnical people.
Pure technologists rarely learn to dumb down like that. Partly because the knowledge itself is the most valuable, not the person who has it. Partly because tech is a language itself, which suffers from obfuscation and euphamism. So do the other technical communications, like finance and management, but those execs have long ago learned to ignore the imprecision and downright coverups, unless they feel their own power directly threatened by it.
CIOs are much more like other execs than like other technologists. The most successful ones are those least competent in tech itself, preferring instead to work on social competence like the rest of the execs with whom they deal. But the other execs still don't trust the CIOs, because they are still more likely to tell the truth about the core business, or just something else the rest of the execs don't understand, which would make the majority of the power holders look bad.
Eventually CIOs will become as disconnected from the technology and its culture as are the rest of the execs from wherever they draw their power. Then CIOs will become CEOs more often, like CFOs and CMOs (though marketing execs hide their pedigree for exactly the opposite reason, confirming the duplicity). Eventually no one will know what they're talking about when they spout expertise, but they will know each other very well. CIOs will win, and the products, the company, and the customers will all lose.
The "national" in "National Biscuit Company", later "NaBisCo", is an American company, even larger than the UK.
Domain names are an artifically scarce commodity. Extra toplevel domains like ".biz", ".xxx" etc (".etc"?) don't really help, as most people can't remember the toplevel extension to the domain name they remember, assuming it's ".com" and going (googling) from there, unless tricked astray.
The real solution is to move from misleadingly narrow UR L s, locators of the precise info resource, to the UR N s, names like "Nabisco" means "biscuits" in the real world. Trademark means competing suppliers of the same product/service can't use the same name, but has not been well implemented to guide Internet consumers.
The closest we've got is googling for a name. Which isn't bad, especially since Google itself has competition (though its name has ironically become generic for "Internet search"). Wikipedia's disambiguation techniques seem effective, but probably haven't been tested by the kind of system games swindlers attack the wide-open Net with.