Companies, goverment, planning bodies, etc, can make plans or products all they want, but it is (or at least should be in most cases) the consumer who makes the final decision about how those plans/products will ultimately be used.
An example - I have an old farm tractor that needed an ignition coil. I was unable to locate one through the manufacturer's distribution channel, but a trip to my local auto parts store resulted in me finding one that would work. It was manufactured for a model of truck that didn't look anything like a farm tractor. Using your logic, they should have refused to sell it to me until I certified that I was going to use it in the make/model of truck that it was manufactered for, or lacking that, to repossess it if they learned that I had installed it in a tractor and not in the appropriate model of truck. If they had done that, the only thing they would have accomplished would have been to not sell a product to me. Fortunately, they didn't have such ridiculous policies in place, they got the sale, and I got a part that I could use. There are a number of products that have come on the market over the years which did not sell well when introduced, but once the consumers found an alternative use for the product, one which the promoters/manufacturers/suppliers had not thought of but for which the product worked well and served to fill a need for consumers, the product took off. The consumers made the final decision about what the product was good for. Should we outlaw the use of refrigerators for the storing of beer because the inventor of the refrigerator invented it to store meat and milk in and never thought about it's uselfulness as a beer cooler? Should we outlaw the use of .net domains for anything other than the original purpose, just because the implementers of the namespace concept couldn't forsee just how useful consumers would find the .net TLD as a website domain name? A planning body that is overseeing a project whose purpose is to enhance usability for the general public should first look to see how the public *wants* to use it, and then make plans to maximize the usefulness in the way the public wants, rather than to attempt to tell the public they don't know what they are doing, and this small group of elitists knows much better than they do how it should be used, and try to force the public into using that way by prohibiting its use in the manner the public acutally wants. John [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Roger B.A. Klorese" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Swerve" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "opensrs discuss" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2003 4:30 PM Subject: Re: OpenSRS Live Reseller Update [.com/.net & .name] - 13/02/03 > Swerve wrote: > > >The work i do falls into artistic/activistic/commercial/and Net based > >activities. > > > Do you mean that you route packets? > > What's a "Net based activity"? > > Putting together an Internet community of humans isn't the sort of "net > based activity" that .net is here for, any more than having a Ph.D. > makes you able to write a prescription just because you identify as a > doctor. > > >Today the word Net or the Net is used by the general public as a short form > >of the Internet, not as a quick reference to the technical side of serving > >information. > > > > > Doesn't matter. Then work to create .online or something. .net was > created with a useful purpose which has been ignored for profit. > >
