> hmm. So if the original and current NIST standard says
> that the meter was created for, and is intended solely
> for, measuring fields of play for football/soccer,
> then is that relevant in a world where the meter is
> used for much more.
Interesting question. I have no idea because it is rather far fetched. What are you getting at, anyway?
> How does that effect my cloth measurements? Are my
> cloth measurements no longer valid? Is any use of the
> meter outside of that context invalid?
You are hypothesizing a remarkably different world than the one we live in, so I really have no basis to constrain your imagination. However,
There are some aspects of physics where the choice of unit is contextual. For example, the unit of current in the classical world is the Ampere. When you deal with physics at the quantum mechanical level, this is an inapproriate unit to work with: you have reached the level where classical electrodynamics breaks down. I expect that NIST has dealt with these complexities and that you cannot measure the current in particle accelerators using Amperes. Were you to proceed on your merry way to do try to do this, I would expect a judge to eventually ask you how your measurements were traceable to NIST standards, to read the fine print of those standards, and conclude you were making misrepresentations.
The point is that standards organizations play a very important role in defining meaning. Those standards are usually not passed directly into statutes and there are good policy reasons for this -- Congress is good at politics, they are not good at science or innovation. In the case of the WWW, there was a conscious political decision to pass standards making authority for the web from the DoD to a non-politicial non-governmental organization (W3C). The fact that the DISA is a member of W3C is not an accident and is indicative of this policy choice. Courts should not be second guessing these policy choices by rewriting the definitions such standards bodies create.
> We all know that the network was not invisioned as a
> commercial venue and was not created as a commercial
> venue, but the .com tld is what pays most of the bills
> to keep this beast alive. The voice of the founding
> fathers sounds a bit hollow compared to reality.
As to what the world wide web was originally envisioned to be, I was the first person here to say that was not terribly important per se.
Contrary to your assertion, the world wide web was absolutely expected to be a place of commerce in ordinary goods when its specifications were drafted in 1992. Perhaps you would like to discuss HTTP response status code 402 in light of what "we all know". I'll let you look it up.
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