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NCSG-NCUC <[log in to unmask]>
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Dan Krimm <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 9 Aug 2010 12:20:43 +0900
Reply-To:
"Andrew A. Adams" <[log in to unmask]>
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From:
"Andrew A. Adams" <[log in to unmask]>
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In-reply-to Dan Krimm <[log in to unmask]> message dated "Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:05:47 +0900."
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> At 11:54 AM +0900 8/9/10, Andrew A. Adams wrote:
> >Avri Doria wrote:
> >> Hmmm, wonder how an application for .omg would do?
> >
> >I could definitely see the commercial possibilities in .rtfm and .wtf tlds as
> >well :-).
> 
> 
> The first is blasphemy, and the other two are profane.  Not a chance.  :-)

Profanity is in the mind of the hearer (blasphemy, too, IMAO), which of 
course brings us back to the topic of how anything, but particularly short 
sequences of letters, can be regarded as globally unacceptable. I'm reminded 
of the early days of networks (the Internet and walled gardens) when one of 
the walled-gardens had a profanity-filter but also had a significant 
Veitnamese user base. At the time, pre-Unicode, an ASCII encoding system for 
Vietnamese characters used two ASCII characters for each Vietnamese letter, 
two of the most common of which were IT and SH, providing obvious problems. 
Both RTFM aND WTF can obviously stand for very different things in other 
languages than English and might be as important as COM, ORG, EDU or similar 
in those languages.

Even in English, the World Taekwondo Federation has www.wtf.org registered. 
RTFM.com exists but does stand for the usual hacker jargon, while www.wtf.com 
is a "rant" site so stands for the well-known phrase.

I think the boat has sailed on any of these things in existing TLDs so why is 
anyone even considering trying to tie down new gTLDs any more than the 
existing system is?


-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams       [log in to unmask]
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan

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