SC - OED? -OT

[Jenne Heise]

> > What's wrong paying 300 $
> > for the work of 120 years or so of a whole team of specialists in word
> As you have asked, I will answer. Knowledge should be freely available. that 
> is my answer.

Well, it is freely available. All you gotta do is go to a library which
you have paid for through your taxes, and which has used that money to buy
an Oxford English Dictionary. Or, to get a subscription to the online one
(the subscription funds not only pay for the computer, the people to
maintain the computer, etc. but also the wages of the people who keep
doing the research for the new edition.)

A lot of librarians wonder what's going to happen to the scholarly
integrity of the Encyclopedia Britannica if it manages to subscribe on
advertisting funds. My library pays the minimal consortium price to get
the much better ad-free version-- but if the EB fails to make it on
advertising funds, will it fold? Will the major encyclopedia of the
English-speaking world simply vanish? It's a worrying prospect.

Ras, I hope that you've been contributing your expertise to the various
free, amateur-only Encyclopedia projects out there. The Web now provides a
format where someone with a minimal expenditure can make a framework for
experts to contribute content in their spare time while they do something
else to support themselves, so that others can access it for free.
Unfortunately, not enough of the experts' materials are making it onto
these cooperative projects to make them viable yet.

- -- 
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
"I do my job. I refuse to be responsible for other people's managerial 
hallucinations." -- Lady Jemina Starker