In case I wasn't explicit enough: an IP number may be intended to indicate a particular "bill payer," but the presence of a particular "bill payer's" IP number on a packet is not evidence that the "bill payer" was in any way, directly or indirectly, associated with the creation of that packet.
And it's not clear at all from the reports whether the IP numbers in question were taken from packets supposed to have originated from that address, or from packets sent to that address. In the latter case, this is just like junk mail addressed to me---I do not take responsibility for it.
An IP number isn't even vaguely comparable to a license number. These IP numbers are taken from IP packets that could be written by anyone, anywhere. They are comparable to addresses on envelopes in the US Mail, except that there's no handwriting to analyze and no authoritative cancellation mark to identify the general location.
Anyone can write any IP number in the sender field on any IP packet and send it to any other IP number.
Even if you establish that a particular ISP has assigned a particular IP number for routing packets to a particular customer, you have no evidence that a packet marked with that IP number has anything to do with that customer, unless you can get much more stringent information from router logs and/or content that only that customer could have produced. I've never heard of any such evidence being presented.
If demand is high, prices rise. If demand is low, prices fall. Simple, but true;
Well known, and simple, and often false.
The textbook model of supply and demand curves works under a set of very stringent assumptions that are often false. It requires rational agents, fine granularity of transactions, fine granularity of agents on both the supply and demand sides, isolation of the market in question from other markets, durable goods that can be withheld from the market,...
The model ignores marginal costs, opportunity costs, asymmetrical knowledge, asymmetrical market power,...
E.g., in markets for commodities with large fixed costs and small marginal costs, a reduction in demand often yields an increase in price. The suppliers divide fixed costs over a smaller number of transactions. If the remaining demand is sufficiently rigid, they can get the higher price, at least for a while. This phenomenon can lead to a further reduction in demand, further price increase, and a market failure at the end of the spiral.
E.g., if there is a sufficiently flat segment in the supply curve, and a large buyer knows about it, the large buyer will pay a price at the low end of the flat segment, even though the a priori demand curve intersects at a much higher price. The large buyer will not consider the isolated value of the commodity, but the marginal value of paying more, vs. other uses for that money.
These are just two of myriad examples where the simple "law of supply and demand" that everybody knows is false.
The DNA molecule is life itself, and it’s astonishing that we’ve only known what it looks like for less than a century.
Sigh. No, DNA is not "life itself." It requires the copying mechanism and the interpretation mechanism. Even then, there is important life information carried in the immune state, and probably in other mechanisms that we haven't noticed yet.
"What it looks like" isn't really so important. The functional properties, in the complicated environment of a cell, are important. This quote from the Watson/Crick paper catches the important part:
The sequence of bases on a single chain does not appear to be restricted in any way. However, if only specific pairs of bases can be formed, it follows that if the sequence of bases on one chain is given, then the sequence on the other chain is automatically determined.... It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possibly copying mechanism for the genetic material.
The sequence of bases on a single chain does not appear to be restricted in any way. However, if only specific pairs of bases can be formed, it follows that if the sequence of bases on one chain is given, then the sequence on the other chain is automatically determined.... It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possibly copying mechanism for the genetic material.
Yes, it's the pairing of bases between strands, the freedom of ordering bases along each strand, and the implications for representing and copying arbitrary sequences of characters that are truly important.
For some reason the phrase "double helix" is always quoted. "Double" has some significance, but the helical shape is not particularly important. It's a natural result of the uniformity of the chain independently of the attached bases.
It seems that Watson and/or Crick understood what was important, but the biological community seemed to focus on the geometrical structure rather than the information processing capability.
If Speak for Yourself posts the source code under an open license, and make no money from it, then they are safe, right?
And since when does a hardware patent apply to software?
And doesn't prior tech void the patent?
Alas, they are not safe. Patent infringement applies to all use, whether profitable or no. Current patent policy applies to software, and even business process, as well as hardware. Whether there is legal infringement depends on the details of the claims, which are very hard to evaluate. If there is prior art, that may invalidate the patent. But the relevance of prior art to the specific claims is a fuzzy issue. Also, once a patent has been registered, the burden of proof is on the alleged infringer regarding prior art. OK, IANAL, and I'm writing from memory, so this should all be checked, but I'm pretty sure I've memorized these points correctly.
I read through all the head matter, and found no details on the timeliness of the material. The "Editor's Preface" brags about the timeliness ("the Britannica is never old"), but gives no careful details. Individual articles have no dates.
The edition with the 1946 copyright has an article on "WORLD WAR II" mentioning dates all the way up to the Japanese surrender "On Sept. 2, 1945." It mentions that "U.S. armed forces began to land... to assume their occupation duties."
The KU KLUX KLAN entry mentions "the World War," but it didn't need to be updated after the destruction of the 2d Klan. The WORLD WAR II entry has information on the Nazi party more timely than the information in the NAZI entry. But the NAZI entry does not cite any other article for more information.
I still like djl's longtitudinal comparison idea a lot (some other entries, eh?...), but the skew between different entries makes it more complicated. We're getting a snapshot of the presentation of a given topic before a given time, distorted by the priority with which it was revised. Lovely problem in signal separation. I wonder whether the bad odor surrounding the Nazi party was strong enough to make neglect preferable to revision. It will (assuming someone posts it) be interesting to compare to later NAZI entries.
So, I reread the NAZI entry carefully. It doesn't mention the Nazi accession to power, nor the war. It says that "Two points [of the original Nazi program] are still blocked by Germany's neighbors: the union of all Germans (outside of Germany) and more land, including colonies."
After supper, I'll check out entries on Germany and other things relating to the war, and hunt harder for the date of real compilation of the articles. I'm not sure whether I have the stamina to type in the whole 1/3 of a page on "NAZI," but this is getting real interesting...
Interesting that the '1946' set seemingly refers to the Nazis as a going concern, even though the end of WW2 and Hitler's death was the previous year. Goes to show you that they probably didn't revise the thing that often (or rather, that it took a long time for revisions to make their way into the actual published books).
I am soooo embarassed that I didn't catch that myself. I looked very carefully again, and the set is marked "Copyright 1946." I can find no other indication of the date, but I didn't read through all of the head and foot matter. The copyright and printing are US. It's possible that there was a delay between a UK edition and a US (can somebody check that out?). But they are already being "published with the editorial advice and consultation of the faculties of the University of Chicago," so if anything the reverse delay is more likely. I checked the first and last volumes, and the one with the NAZI entry, just in case I had bought an accidentally mixed set.
I got the set with yearbooks dated 1946 through 1949. The "1946" yearbook is also Copyright 1946, it is supertitled "A Rocord of the March of Events of 1945," and it contains the "Calendar of Events" for 1945 (by studying the day-to-day account of the end of WWII in the 1946 yearbook, I embedded the erroneous notion that the war had ended in 1946 instead of 1945).
So, I have a hypothesis, which I hope someone has the energy to check out: EB writes the encyclopedia (actually, mostly just revises older entries) in 1944, puts stuff together in 1945, and registers copyright at the beginning of 1946, perhaps to maximize the length of coverage. During 1946, they write up the "March of Events of 1945," copyright that later in 1946.
Thanks, that's worth keeping in my archives. But I don't find it offensive. If BSA behaved well otherwise, I'd give them a pass on this ad. Look at "Are you sure it wasn't a nail?" above for something more like what I remembered.
Do you know which companies were accused, or how big they were? On the face of it, such a response could indicate a decent discretion on the part of BSA, not pursuing a frivolous case. Based on other reports of BSA behavior, I tend to suspect the worse interpretation, but testimony is so much better than suspicion...
Only problem is that BSA only screws small/mid size companies. I'm sure someone can turn this into a conspiracy lawsuit against them - since when have they gone after large companies? Never.
I know of at least two people who reported piracy to BSA, and BSA's response to the person who reported it was "we do not see any evidence of piracy".
You surely deserve the hero award for finding this one. I distinctly remember a knife, and a whole body in a suit, rather than a nail and a tie. My memory may be off, or there may have been variations. They are both pretty nasty, and suggest revenge far more than justice.
This is a law firm that makes money defending businesses against BSA, so you can be as skeptical as you like. As far as I read, their claims agree with what I have learned elsewhere.
I distinctly remember in about 1999 I was walking through O'Hare airport and I saw an advertisement from the BSA posted on the wall. It had the caption, "Stab Your Boss in the Back," and a picture of a guy in a 3-piece suit with a knife in his back. I kick myself for not getting a photo of the sign. I have been hunting for a reliable record of this advertisement in vain.
So, anyone who can find a picture, or other testimony to that nasty BSA ad will be a hero.
There's a small chance that I remember wrong. Like Mark Twain, I have an excellent memory. I remember good things, and some of them happened.
Which I grabbed opportunistically at a library sale.
It calls itself "A New Survey of Universal Knowledge," and the founding date of 1768 is easier to find than the revision date.
Israel, quoted in entirety: "ISRAEL, the national designation of the Jews. The Hebrew name means "God strives" or "rules" (see Gen. xxxii. 28; and the allusion in Hosea xii. 4). It was borne by their ancestor, Jacob, the father of the 12 tribes. For some centuries the term was applied to the northern kingdom, as distinct from Judah, although the feeling of national unity extended it so as to include both."
Communist: no entry. There is an entry of 2+ pages on "COMMUNISM, a term often loosely used to denote different systems of social organization aiming at common property of the means of production, or at an equal distribution of weath and income, or at both...." The bulk of the article refers to the Russian revolution and subsequent communist government. It is fairly free with the author's negative opinion of Russian communism.
Ku Klux Klan: about 1 page. "KU KLUX KLAN. There have been two distinct organizations of this name in American history. The first Ku Klux Klan was an outgrowth of the tense feeling in the South during the reconstruction period succeeding the Civil War; the second was organized during the World War and attained is greatest strength in the period of social and economic readjustment which followed the restoration of peace...." I find this article more objective in tone than the one on communism. It refers to the "scalawags" and "carpet baggers," and appears to accept the view of an over-reaching reconstruction, and refers to the first Klan as "a more or less successful revolution against the reconstruction and an overthrow of the governments based on negro suffrage or 'Carpetbag' government."
Nazi: about 1/3 page. "NAZI, a popular abbreviation for a member of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workingmen's party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, commmonly designated by its initials, NSDAP)...." More objective in tone than the article on Communism, similar in tone to the one on Ku Klux Klan. I can't resist the last sentence: "Today, just as Christians draw their faith from the Bible and the words of Jesus, so Nazis find the expression of their faith and beliefs in Hitler's book,My Battle (Mein Kampf), and in his speeches and decrees."
Steel: only a reference to subsections. "STEEL: see Iron and Steel; Wire Rope; Bessemer Steel; Structural Engineering; Open Hearth Steel; High Speed Steel; Manganese Steel; Molybdenum Steel; Mushet Steel; Nickel Steel; Nickel Chromium Steel; Tool Steel; Tungsten Steel; Vanadium Steel; Nitrogen Hardening; Stainless Steel; Steels, Alloy; Alloys; Pressed Metal; Sheets, Iron and Steel; and other specific headings." "STEELS, ALLOY" covers more than 3 pages.
Transistor: no entry. I really checked, just to be sure. One should always confirm the obvious, since the surprise value of a contradiction would be so great. The enclopedia goes from "TRANSFORMER" (the electrical kind) directly to "TRANSIT CIRCLE or MERIDIAN CIRCLE." (Notice that I quoted the previous and following entries sorta like a DNS response for a nonexistent entry.)
I was acquainted with some people at Britannica in the 80s and 90s, and others in publishing (not well enough acquainted to be a leak, just to form an opinion that might have value). It seemed to me that Britannica was stuck on being the encyclopedia that everyone wished they could afford, rather than the encyclopedia that everyone used. Similar things happened in other domains where the effective price point changed suddenly. You go from being the dominant choice in a small but expensive market to being almost nobody's choice in a much larger and much cheaper market.
I think that it's the same phenomenon that killed Apollo. They had the best (pretty much only) desktop research computer workstation, only affordable by very well funded labs. SUN Microsystems offered a much cheaper, inferior box, running a UNIX that was not yet as well engineered as the Apollo proprietary system. But the new, cheaper box, and the preponderance of UNIX on research minicomputers, provided a UNIX solution for almost everybody. Soon, even those who could afford Apollo found it more effective to buy lots of UNIX instead of a little bit of Apollo. I remember an almost tearful Apollo engineer, toward the end, promising that they were finally going to provide UNIX and cut their price. It was too late.
What if instead the TV advert, print advert, radio, etc were telling people to go to fg38gq4kuq234y0f283gfo4238624a3846ofgy.9247.asdli3? Sure, it might be a stable, eternal address unlike a raw IP... but it's hardly human-readable, and no marketing people in their right minds would ever allow their company to use such a name as their main means of customer contact. How do you build brand recognition into that?
You don't try to build brand recognition into that. You get it elsewhere.
1. With hashing, you can actually use shorter names, such as 61A38F9A3540B9 (I actually generated this one with a cryptographic key generator and a secure hash). That's not much worse than a credit card number. It's feasible to copy it by hand. But it's definitely not brandable, and I don't expect that it would be handed around literally very much.
2. Once you've made contact with a customer, you probably get your addressing information into a list trusted by the customer. This could be on the customer's host incorporated into a browser, or some intermediate level service. There are many possibilities to try.
3. The initial contact can use a search term, it can provide the cryptographic name in a form easy to cut and paste, it can provide a trigger for some software that grabs the cryptographic name automatically, the name can be in some scannable code such as the bar codes that people are scanning on their cell phones,...
4. You don't have to give up a regular old domain name. But you have something far more defendable and verifiable to fall back on if there is any sort of attack on, or error associated with, your domain name.
5. Mainly, when providing a low-level infrastructural service, it's neither possible nor desirable to anticipate the precise way in which it will be used. Better to put it out there, and let all sorts of unforeseen uses arise. It's possible (I think likely) that most uses of cryptographic gibberish names would not be on the direct communication path between customers and branded vendors. The service can be very cheap to provide---Google could do it in a flash, a number of academic departments could do it as an experiment. If there were no impact on conventional DNS, that would be OK. My hunch is that it would relieve some but not all of the pressure on DNS that causes so much energy to go into struggles for control, and would provide a useful safety net for those who get stomped on in the DNS game. I hope that we try it soon, and find out.
Kewl. I wrote a whole article in CACM on this proposal. I would have cited you had I known you'd mentioned it too.
I've gotten nowhere convincing anyone to implement the idea, although it would cost very little to provide an automatic registrar, and it doesn't have to be right below a TLD.
In fact, the basic service might end up being more useful for distributing public keys than for DNSish utility per se. I have a lot of notes regarding more detailed protocols, and the value as public key distribution infrastructure. Then I got too sick to finish. If you have any interest in co-authoring, you can look at http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/Citizen/Network_Identifiers/ and/or contact me as michael_odonnell at acm.org
Even if you just want to pursue the ideas on your own, I'd rather have them snitched than wasted. Everything I wrote is licensed Creative Commons Attribution/Share-alike, and I'd add a more liberal license if anybody wants it.
Perhaps it's time to move away from total dependence on domain names. Their value comes inherently from qualities that invite dispute.
With search services, it's quite possible to find hosts that have no domain name at all. I can't post my favorite example, because the server has insufficient power to handle lots of hits, but such things definitely exist. There's still some problem with control by the search companies, but there's a finer granularity of competition there.
Once you get to a given host, you can determine whether it's World Wrestling or World Wildlife. That doesn't have to be certified (very unreliably) by a DNS registrar.
Wouldn't this only be an issue with processing? I was talking about encoding for storage and transmission only.
No, this is precisely a problem for playback. With sublinear encodings, there is no way to present a low amplitude component of a sound accurately in the presence of a high amplitude component. Since perception is sensitive to components at different frequencies fairly independently, the loss of accuracy in the smaller component can be quite perceptible.
In fact, nonlinear representations, such as floating point and phasor representations, are often good for certain parts of processing, but not for playback.
Slashdot Mirror
In case I wasn't explicit enough: an IP number may be intended to indicate a particular "bill payer," but the presence of a particular "bill payer's" IP number on a packet is not evidence that the "bill payer" was in any way, directly or indirectly, associated with the creation of that packet.
And it's not clear at all from the reports whether the IP numbers in question were taken from packets supposed to have originated from that address, or from packets sent to that address. In the latter case, this is just like junk mail addressed to me---I do not take responsibility for it.
An IP number isn't even vaguely comparable to a license number. These IP numbers are taken from IP packets that could be written by anyone, anywhere. They are comparable to addresses on envelopes in the US Mail, except that there's no handwriting to analyze and no authoritative cancellation mark to identify the general location.
Anyone can write any IP number in the sender field on any IP packet and send it to any other IP number.
Even if you establish that a particular ISP has assigned a particular IP number for routing packets to a particular customer, you have no evidence that a packet marked with that IP number has anything to do with that customer, unless you can get much more stringent information from router logs and/or content that only that customer could have produced. I've never heard of any such evidence being presented.
If demand is high, prices rise. If demand is low, prices fall. Simple, but true;
Well known, and simple, and often false.
The textbook model of supply and demand curves works under a set of very stringent assumptions that are often false. It requires rational agents, fine granularity of transactions, fine granularity of agents on both the supply and demand sides, isolation of the market in question from other markets, durable goods that can be withheld from the market, ...
The model ignores marginal costs, opportunity costs, asymmetrical knowledge, asymmetrical market power, ...
E.g., in markets for commodities with large fixed costs and small marginal costs, a reduction in demand often yields an increase in price. The suppliers divide fixed costs over a smaller number of transactions. If the remaining demand is sufficiently rigid, they can get the higher price, at least for a while. This phenomenon can lead to a further reduction in demand, further price increase, and a market failure at the end of the spiral.
E.g., if there is a sufficiently flat segment in the supply curve, and a large buyer knows about it, the large buyer will pay a price at the low end of the flat segment, even though the a priori demand curve intersects at a much higher price. The large buyer will not consider the isolated value of the commodity, but the marginal value of paying more, vs. other uses for that money.
These are just two of myriad examples where the simple "law of supply and demand" that everybody knows is false.
From TFA:
The DNA molecule is life itself, and it’s astonishing that we’ve only known what it looks like for less than a century.
Sigh. No, DNA is not "life itself." It requires the copying mechanism and the interpretation mechanism. Even then, there is important life information carried in the immune state, and probably in other mechanisms that we haven't noticed yet.
"What it looks like" isn't really so important. The functional properties, in the complicated environment of a cell, are important. This quote from the Watson/Crick paper catches the important part:
The sequence of bases on a single chain does not appear to be restricted in any way. However, if only specific pairs of bases can be formed, it follows that if the sequence of bases on one chain is given, then the sequence on the other chain is automatically determined. ... It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possibly copying mechanism for the genetic material.
The sequence of bases on a single chain does not appear to be restricted in any way. However, if only specific pairs of bases can be formed, it follows that if the sequence of bases on one chain is given, then the sequence on the other chain is automatically determined. ... It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possibly copying mechanism for the genetic material.
Nature, number 4356, April 25, 1953, p. 737.
Yes, it's the pairing of bases between strands, the freedom of ordering bases along each strand, and the implications for representing and copying arbitrary sequences of characters that are truly important.
For some reason the phrase "double helix" is always quoted. "Double" has some significance, but the helical shape is not particularly important. It's a natural result of the uniformity of the chain independently of the attached bases.
It seems that Watson and/or Crick understood what was important, but the biological community seemed to focus on the geometrical structure rather than the information processing capability.
If Speak for Yourself posts the source code under an open license, and make no money from it, then they are safe, right? And since when does a hardware patent apply to software? And doesn't prior tech void the patent?
Alas, they are not safe. Patent infringement applies to all use, whether profitable or no. Current patent policy applies to software, and even business process, as well as hardware. Whether there is legal infringement depends on the details of the claims, which are very hard to evaluate. If there is prior art, that may invalidate the patent. But the relevance of prior art to the specific claims is a fuzzy issue. Also, once a patent has been registered, the burden of proof is on the alleged infringer regarding prior art. OK, IANAL, and I'm writing from memory, so this should all be checked, but I'm pretty sure I've memorized these points correctly.
I read through all the head matter, and found no details on the timeliness of the material. The "Editor's Preface" brags about the timeliness ("the Britannica is never old"), but gives no careful details. Individual articles have no dates.
The edition with the 1946 copyright has an article on "WORLD WAR II" mentioning dates all the way up to the Japanese surrender "On Sept. 2, 1945." It mentions that "U.S. armed forces began to land ... to assume their occupation duties."
The KU KLUX KLAN entry mentions "the World War," but it didn't need to be updated after the destruction of the 2d Klan. The WORLD WAR II entry has information on the Nazi party more timely than the information in the NAZI entry. But the NAZI entry does not cite any other article for more information.
I still like djl's longtitudinal comparison idea a lot (some other entries, eh? ...), but the skew between different entries makes it more complicated. We're getting a snapshot of the presentation of a given topic before a given time, distorted by the priority with which it was revised. Lovely problem in signal separation. I wonder whether the bad odor surrounding the Nazi party was strong enough to make neglect preferable to revision. It will (assuming someone posts it) be interesting to compare to later NAZI entries.
So, I reread the NAZI entry carefully. It doesn't mention the Nazi accession to power, nor the war. It says that "Two points [of the original Nazi program] are still blocked by Germany's neighbors: the union of all Germans (outside of Germany) and more land, including colonies."
After supper, I'll check out entries on Germany and other things relating to the war, and hunt harder for the date of real compilation of the articles. I'm not sure whether I have the stamina to type in the whole 1/3 of a page on "NAZI," but this is getting real interesting ...
Interesting that the '1946' set seemingly refers to the Nazis as a going concern, even though the end of WW2 and Hitler's death was the previous year. Goes to show you that they probably didn't revise the thing that often (or rather, that it took a long time for revisions to make their way into the actual published books).
I am soooo embarassed that I didn't catch that myself. I looked very carefully again, and the set is marked "Copyright 1946." I can find no other indication of the date, but I didn't read through all of the head and foot matter. The copyright and printing are US. It's possible that there was a delay between a UK edition and a US (can somebody check that out?). But they are already being "published with the editorial advice and consultation of the faculties of the University of Chicago," so if anything the reverse delay is more likely. I checked the first and last volumes, and the one with the NAZI entry, just in case I had bought an accidentally mixed set.
I got the set with yearbooks dated 1946 through 1949. The "1946" yearbook is also Copyright 1946, it is supertitled "A Rocord of the March of Events of 1945," and it contains the "Calendar of Events" for 1945 (by studying the day-to-day account of the end of WWII in the 1946 yearbook, I embedded the erroneous notion that the war had ended in 1946 instead of 1945).
So, I have a hypothesis, which I hope someone has the energy to check out: EB writes the encyclopedia (actually, mostly just revises older entries) in 1944, puts stuff together in 1945, and registers copyright at the beginning of 1946, perhaps to maximize the length of coverage. During 1946, they write up the "March of Events of 1945," copyright that later in 1946.
This is all I can find...
Thanks, that's worth keeping in my archives. But I don't find it offensive. If BSA behaved well otherwise, I'd give them a pass on this ad. Look at "Are you sure it wasn't a nail?" above for something more like what I remembered.
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2009/12/picture-63.png
Can you provide a link to the Wired article, too? I should complete my notes and avoid hunting for this again during some other discussion.
Do you know which companies were accused, or how big they were? On the face of it, such a response could indicate a decent discretion on the part of BSA, not pursuing a frivolous case. Based on other reports of BSA behavior, I tend to suspect the worse interpretation, but testimony is so much better than suspicion ...
Only problem is that BSA only screws small/mid size companies. I'm sure someone can turn this into a conspiracy lawsuit against them - since when have they gone after large companies? Never.
I know of at least two people who reported piracy to BSA, and BSA's response to the person who reported it was "we do not see any evidence of piracy".
You surely deserve the hero award for finding this one. I distinctly remember a knife, and a whole body in a suit, rather than a nail and a tie. My memory may be off, or there may have been variations. They are both pretty nasty, and suggest revenge far more than justice.
While hunting for material on BSA, I found the most concentrated anti-BSA material here: http://www.bsadefense.com/main/index.aspx
This is a law firm that makes money defending businesses against BSA, so you can be as skeptical as you like. As far as I read, their claims agree with what I have learned elsewhere.
At least, it was in 2009 according to these guys: http://scottandscottllp.com/main/BSA_Dirty_Tricks_Update.aspx
http://www.bsa.org/country/BSA%20and%20Members/Our%20Members.aspx
I distinctly remember in about 1999 I was walking through O'Hare airport and I saw an advertisement from the BSA posted on the wall. It had the caption, "Stab Your Boss in the Back," and a picture of a guy in a 3-piece suit with a knife in his back. I kick myself for not getting a photo of the sign. I have been hunting for a reliable record of this advertisement in vain.
So, anyone who can find a picture, or other testimony to that nasty BSA ad will be a hero.
There's a small chance that I remember wrong. Like Mark Twain, I have an excellent memory. I remember good things, and some of them happened.
DIODE: 1 sentence.
TRIODE: nothing.
Which I grabbed opportunistically at a library sale.
It calls itself "A New Survey of Universal Knowledge," and the founding date of 1768 is easier to find than the revision date.
Israel, quoted in entirety: "ISRAEL, the national designation of the Jews. The Hebrew name means "God strives" or "rules" (see Gen. xxxii. 28; and the allusion in Hosea xii. 4). It was borne by their ancestor, Jacob, the father of the 12 tribes. For some centuries the term was applied to the northern kingdom, as distinct from Judah, although the feeling of national unity extended it so as to include both."
Communist: no entry. There is an entry of 2+ pages on "COMMUNISM, a term often loosely used to denote different systems of social organization aiming at common property of the means of production, or at an equal distribution of weath and income, or at both. ..." The bulk of the article refers to the Russian revolution and subsequent communist government. It is fairly free with the author's negative opinion of Russian communism.
Ku Klux Klan: about 1 page. "KU KLUX KLAN. There have been two distinct organizations of this name in American history. The first Ku Klux Klan was an outgrowth of the tense feeling in the South during the reconstruction period succeeding the Civil War; the second was organized during the World War and attained is greatest strength in the period of social and economic readjustment which followed the restoration of peace. ..." I find this article more objective in tone than the one on communism. It refers to the "scalawags" and "carpet baggers," and appears to accept the view of an over-reaching reconstruction, and refers to the first Klan as "a more or less successful revolution against the reconstruction and an overthrow of the governments based on negro suffrage or 'Carpetbag' government."
Nazi: about 1/3 page. "NAZI, a popular abbreviation for a member of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workingmen's party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, commmonly designated by its initials, NSDAP). ..." More objective in tone than the article on Communism, similar in tone to the one on Ku Klux Klan. I can't resist the last sentence: "Today, just as Christians draw their faith from the Bible and the words of Jesus, so Nazis find the expression of their faith and beliefs in Hitler's book,My Battle (Mein Kampf), and in his speeches and decrees."
Steel: only a reference to subsections. "STEEL: see Iron and Steel; Wire Rope; Bessemer Steel; Structural Engineering; Open Hearth Steel; High Speed Steel; Manganese Steel; Molybdenum Steel; Mushet Steel; Nickel Steel; Nickel Chromium Steel; Tool Steel; Tungsten Steel; Vanadium Steel; Nitrogen Hardening; Stainless Steel; Steels, Alloy; Alloys; Pressed Metal; Sheets, Iron and Steel; and other specific headings." "STEELS, ALLOY" covers more than 3 pages.
Transistor: no entry. I really checked, just to be sure. One should always confirm the obvious, since the surprise value of a contradiction would be so great. The enclopedia goes from "TRANSFORMER" (the electrical kind) directly to "TRANSIT CIRCLE or MERIDIAN CIRCLE." (Notice that I quoted the previous and following entries sorta like a DNS response for a nonexistent entry.)
I was acquainted with some people at Britannica in the 80s and 90s, and others in publishing (not well enough acquainted to be a leak, just to form an opinion that might have value). It seemed to me that Britannica was stuck on being the encyclopedia that everyone wished they could afford, rather than the encyclopedia that everyone used. Similar things happened in other domains where the effective price point changed suddenly. You go from being the dominant choice in a small but expensive market to being almost nobody's choice in a much larger and much cheaper market.
I think that it's the same phenomenon that killed Apollo. They had the best (pretty much only) desktop research computer workstation, only affordable by very well funded labs. SUN Microsystems offered a much cheaper, inferior box, running a UNIX that was not yet as well engineered as the Apollo proprietary system. But the new, cheaper box, and the preponderance of UNIX on research minicomputers, provided a UNIX solution for almost everybody. Soon, even those who could afford Apollo found it more effective to buy lots of UNIX instead of a little bit of Apollo. I remember an almost tearful Apollo engineer, toward the end, promising that they were finally going to provide UNIX and cut their price. It was too late.
What if instead the TV advert, print advert, radio, etc were telling people to go to fg38gq4kuq234y0f283gfo4238624a3846ofgy.9247.asdli3? Sure, it might be a stable, eternal address unlike a raw IP... but it's hardly human-readable, and no marketing people in their right minds would ever allow their company to use such a name as their main means of customer contact. How do you build brand recognition into that?
You don't try to build brand recognition into that. You get it elsewhere.
Kewl. I wrote a whole article in CACM on this proposal. I would have cited you had I known you'd mentioned it too.
I've gotten nowhere convincing anyone to implement the idea, although it would cost very little to provide an automatic registrar, and it doesn't have to be right below a TLD.
In fact, the basic service might end up being more useful for distributing public keys than for DNSish utility per se. I have a lot of notes regarding more detailed protocols, and the value as public key distribution infrastructure. Then I got too sick to finish. If you have any interest in co-authoring, you can look at http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/Citizen/Network_Identifiers/ and/or contact me as michael_odonnell at acm.org
Even if you just want to pursue the ideas on your own, I'd rather have them snitched than wasted. Everything I wrote is licensed Creative Commons Attribution/Share-alike, and I'd add a more liberal license if anybody wants it.
Perhaps it's time to move away from total dependence on domain names. Their value comes inherently from qualities that invite dispute.
With search services, it's quite possible to find hosts that have no domain name at all. I can't post my favorite example, because the server has insufficient power to handle lots of hits, but such things definitely exist. There's still some problem with control by the search companies, but there's a finer granularity of competition there.
Once you get to a given host, you can determine whether it's World Wrestling or World Wildlife. That doesn't have to be certified (very unreliably) by a DNS registrar.
Wouldn't this only be an issue with processing? I was talking about encoding for storage and transmission only.
No, this is precisely a problem for playback. With sublinear encodings, there is no way to present a low amplitude component of a sound accurately in the presence of a high amplitude component. Since perception is sensitive to components at different frequencies fairly independently, the loss of accuracy in the smaller component can be quite perceptible.
In fact, nonlinear representations, such as floating point and phasor representations, are often good for certain parts of processing, but not for playback.