From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat Oct 9 04:47:31 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i998lV205452; Sat, 9 Oct 2004 04:47:31 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 04:47:31 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410090847.i998lV205452@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: massis.lcs.mit.edu: ptownson set sender to editor@telecom-digest.org using -f To: ptownson Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V23 #477 TELECOM Digest Sat, 9 Oct 2004 04:46:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 477 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson EPIC Alert 11.19 (Monty Solomon) VOIP on Cisco 2620 (carverk@hotmail.com) 911 Address Display Delays Police Response (Wesrock@aol.com) Classic Components Removes Representative (distribution@eworldwire.com) OSP Identifiers / Verizon Repair (Lincoln J. King-Cliby) VOIP on Cisco 2620 (carverk@hotmail.com) Re: VOIP Home Connection (Marcus Jervis) Re: Cell Phone Attracts Lightning? (Rick Merrill) Re: Multipled Pairs: (was: VOIP Home Connection) (AES/newspost) Re: Vonage Upgrades Local Unlimited Calling Plan to Premium (M Roberts) Re: Paper Tape; Gates at Harvard (Craig Partridge) Re: Pennsylvania Railroad's Crew Communication System? (Bob Goudreau) Re: A New Phone and Techie Controversy at Verizon (Steve Sobol) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 18:04:05 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: EPIC Alert 11.19 ======================================================================= E P I C A l e r t ======================================================================= Volume 11.19 October 8, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Published by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) Washington, D.C. http://www.epic.org/alert/EPIC_Alert_11.19.html ====================================================================== Table of Contents ====================================================================== [1] Coalition Asks Congress to Deliberate 9-11 Comm. Recommendations [2] EPIC Urges Congress to Protect Social Security Numbers [3] Appeals Court Votes to Revisit E-Mail Interception Case [4] Business "Free Speech" Claims Fail to Block Do-Not-Call Registry [5] California Enacts New, Innovative Privacy Protections [6] News in Brief [7] EPIC Bookstore: Losing America [8] Upcoming Conferences and Events http://www.epic.org/alert/EPIC_Alert_11.19.html ------------------------------ From: carverk@hotmail.com Subject: VOIP on Cisco 2620 Date: 8 Oct 2004 15:14:58 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hello All.. I got a 2620 with a NM1E2W in the NM Slot and a WIC1B-ST ISDN WIC in a WAN port. ISDN line is a normal Res. ISDN line from local Telecom (1D-2B Channels). What I would like to do is get a Cisco VOIP phone installed into the local network and use it to make/recieve local calls over the ISDN WIC and use my internet Conx. for US/Canada/Other Calls via Vonage or some other VOIP Provider. What I'm looking to know is will the 2620 support this? and what Cards or modules I will need to do this. Since this is a Res. ISDN Line there is no PBX, just straight to the PSTN.. I have all the current IOS images (12.3.10) for this router so this part is not a problem. Thanks. ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 18:33:43 EDT Subject: 911 Address Display Delays Police Response --- From The Daily Oklahoman, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, for October 8, 2004-- Dispatch error leads police astray Officers were sent to the wrong place in response to a bank robbery Thursday when the system at the city's dispatch center displayed an incorrect address, a police spokesman said. About 3:45 p.m., an employee from the Bank of Oklahoma branch inside an Albertsons store on May Avenue near Britton Road called 911 to report a robbery, Oklahoma City Police Lt. Patrick Stewart said. Because of the bank's phone system and the way the call was routed, the address on the dispatcher's computer was for Bank of Oklahoma at 201 Robert S. Kerr, Stewart said. Nine minutes after the first call, officers were sent to the proper location, 9225 N May. The robber was described as a woman in her mid-30s, about 5 feet tall and 200 to 225 pounds, Stewart said. The woman was wearing a tan baseball cap, a black T-shirt with a U.S. flag on it and rubber gloves, Stewart said. [201 Robert S. Kerr is the address of the bank's headquarters for Oklahoma City. May and Britton Road (9225 N. May] is about 12 miles away.] Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com wleathus@yahoo.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This is unfortunate, but not unusual, since it would appear the bank branch was on the *bank's* telephone system (sort of like a foreign exchange on the bank's centrex) instead of on the *Albertson's* phone system. Of course there is no guarentee that the Albertson's phone system was not part of some phone system at Albertson's headquarters instead of based out of that local store as well. So this should be a good lesson to the telecom adminstrators in our readership. Make certain all *critical* phones at locations other than your main, directory-listed business location are correctly listed in 911 databases, etc. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 18:36:45 -0400 Subject: Classic Components Removes Representative From: distribution@eworldwire.com TORRANCE, Calif./EWORLDWIRE/Oct. 8, 2004 --- Effective August 24, 2004, Mario Schroder, is no longer a representitive of Classic Components Corp. or any of its subsidiaries. HTML: http://newsroom.eworldwire.com/wr/100804/10682.htm PDF: http://newsroom.eworldwire.com/pdf/100804/10682.pdf ONLINE NEWSROOM: http://newsroom.eworldwire.com/2923.htm LOGO: http://newsroom.eworldwire.com/2923.htm CONTACT: Michelle Dolbec Classic Components Corp. PHONE. 310-539-5500 http://www.class-ic.com Copyright 2004 Eworldwire, All rights reserved. Press Relase Distribution By EWORLDWIRE http://www.eworldwire.com (973)252-6800. ------------------------------ From: chsvideo@hotmail.com (Lincoln J. King-Cliby) Subject: OSP Identifiers / Verizon Repair Date: 8 Oct 2004 22:16:54 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hi All, Question I've pondered for a while: I live in Verizon (ex-GTE)'s service area in Southern California and for years I've noticed that the cross connect/terminal/whatever you want to call them boxes have a four character code down the sides and across the doors, in two groups of two characters, for example XT AI XT AT AA BA How is this code generated? The panel where I saw the AA code is a near by community served (almost positively) by a different CO. My other comment on the topic is Verizon is wonderful. Verizon repair sucks. In the 15 years we've lived here, we haven't had one problem with telephone service -- we've never called repair. About two weeks ago, I was driving by and I noticed that the doors on XT AI were _wide_ open -- like someone had been working on it and just decided to leave. I got home, called 611 and got the voice menu, roughly "Press 1 if this is billing, Press 2 if a problem with your phones, Press 3 if something else". I press 3 and get a human a short time later. I told her what I was calling to report, she says that she'll transfer me to repair. "I thought I called repair?" says I, "No, you called the call center." Voice-menu-hell later I get another human. "May I have the number of the line for which your reporting trouble?" "Actually I'm calling to report an outside plant issue, but I can give you this number if you like." "Uh, yeah, I'll take that one." "909-xxx-xxxx" "May I have your name" "Lincoln King-Cliby K i n g hyphen C l i b y" "Your name isn't on the account, can I speak with someone who is?" "No, they aren't available right now, but as I said, this is an OSP issue." "I won't be able to do anything to your line without speaking with the account holder" "That's fine. My line is fine. Your cross connect box at the intersection of and is wide open, and that's what I'm calling to report." (repeat this info four or five more times for him) "We'll get someone out to look at it. Thank you for calling Verizon." Four days later the box was still open. This time I find a 1-800 repair number on Verizon's website, hoping that would skip the call center detour. First call: "do dah dee. Thank you for calling Verizon. (silence)", hang up hit redial. Second call: "do dah dee. Thank you for calling Verizon Hawaii.", hang up hit redial. Third call: "do dah dee. Thank you for calling Verizon New York.", hang up hit redial. Fourth call: same as the first. Fifth call: do dah dee. Thank you for calling Verizon. (same menu as 611). [It's quite reassuring to know that Verizon -- the phone company -- can't even make sure that they give me the proper greeting. All were to the exact same number, using the redial button on my phone] This time, I choose the "trouble with phones" option and then 0'ed-out of the ensuing checklist menu, and I get a very plesant woman. Tell her what I'm calling to report. She asks for my phone number anyways, I give it to her, she also asks for my name." I give her all of the details I gave the original guy plus the ID# (XT AI) that I had confirmed in the meantime. While she's entering the details, I comment on how I had called it in earlier in the week and was concerned that it was still open due to the number of lines present [this is the ~5'x5'x2' size] and she agrees. She said that she would make sure it got fixed the next morning and asked "Would you like them to call you, or swing by your house or something when they're finished?" (!) I declined the offer saying that I'd know when I drove by and saw it closed up. The next morning it was, indeed, closed, and when I got home there was a voice mail from a Verizon lineman saying that it was closed and someone "probably just forgot to close it". Any ideas why Verizon would allow the thing to remain open for as long as they did? Do you supose I can now get a self-guided tour of my central office given their new plant security procedures? Lincoln [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The problem was you blew their customer service routine. Had you called the *right number* to start with -- and of course you could not, it is a non-published, secret number, to prevent telco from recieving 'crank calls' from cutomers who insist on 'speaking to someone who knows something about anything' -- the box would have been closed up within a few minutes of your first call. Telco has no provision for any subscriber to call them regards anything other than their personal phone line/number. Regards anything to do with any of their own infrastructure, you are only a customer, what would you know about any of that stuff ... This reminds me of a situation about 1970 or so: I called in to report that an inter-office trunk (between two central offices) was in trouble. I was making calls sort of regularly between my house and someone in another (local) C.O. Always very late at night. I would dial the number, not only would the call not go through, I always would get a hideous and loud 'rattling' noise in my ear. Now and again, rarely I would get through on the first try. This never happened on calls I would make to that (inter-C.O.) number during the day, only late at night. It took me a *long time* to get anyone at telco to listen to me or act on it. Finally I got a tech who called me back. I described the problem to him, he asked if I had a second line there (I did), and he said 'please do me a favor ... the next time that happens, *put that line on hold, keep it on hold* and call me on (private, internal number) from your other line. It happened a few hours later; I kept the troubled line on hold and called the guy. He went in the frames, found the line, and repaired it. Something to do with a loose contact. He came back on line with me, and said 'okay, drop that connection and I will tell you what I found.' It appears it was the 'first selected trunk' in a group of several circuits running from the central office I was in to the central office I was trying to reach. Since it was the 'first selection', during the day in busy hours, it was always being seized. One seizure after another. When a subscriber tried to make a call (to that central office from my central office) it was only rarely the subscriber would land on that first selected trunk. When he did, he would always get that same hassle I did, but he would hang up and dial again (and land on some other circuit in the process) and his call would go though okay. In the meantime, some third person making a call would get the bad line, hang up and try again, etc. But late at night, when there was no inter-office traffic to speak of, the same subscriber (myself) would get the same troubled trunk over and over. The tech fixed it so no one had the problem any further. I do not know if he actually repaired it, or just busied it out, but there was no further problems with it. The hassle I had was finding someone -- anyone -- willing to listen and take action on it until that technician took pity on me. I suspect, Lincoln, that was your problem also. It was only when some clerk or call-taker realized that your inquiry was not the usual crank call they so often receive and decided to pass it along to someone who could cure the problem that it got handled. PAT] ------------------------------ From: carverk@hotmail.com Subject: VOIP on Cisco 2620 Date: 8 Oct 2004 16:01:32 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hello all, I got a 2620 with a NM1E2W in the NM Slot and a WIC1B-ST ISDN WIC in a WAN port. ISDN line is a normal Res. ISDN line from local Telecom (1D-2B Channels). What I would like to do is get a Cisco VOIP phone installed into the local network and use it to make/recieve local calls over the ISDN WIC and use my internet Conx. for US/Canada/Other Calls via Vonage or some other VOIP Provider. What I'm looking to know is will the 2620 support this? and what Cards or modules I will need to do this. Since this is a Res. ISDN Line there is no PBX, just straight to the PSTN.. I have all the current IOS images (12.3.10) for this router so this part is not a problem. Thanks. ------------------------------ From: Marcus Jervis Subject: Re: VOIP Home Connection Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2004 20:18:46 +0000 Rick Merrill wrote: >Andy G. wrote: >> I am considering signing up for VOIP service and have been reading >> websites of the various providers to try to figure out how to wire my >> whole house. According to Vonage, you can run a wire from the adapter >> to a phone jack and (as long as the line is disconnected totally from >> the phone co. and there is no curerent) all jacks would work. I asked >> Verizon about this, they said that it's not supported. > They cannot "support it" because it involves your inside wiring and > Because The Telephone Adapter (TA) can only drive 1 Ringer Equivalent. > Some TA may be able to drive 3 RE, according to my research. So you > have to add up all the RE in your house correctly or else you may blow > the TA when your phone rings. > Of course you have to make darn sure that your in-house wiring > connects to NOTHING else: unplug all phones until there is No > resistance whatsoever across the phone lines. Then plug in the TA and > one (1) phone. The solution to this is to use something like the Proctor Long Loop Adapter (46222 1 line or 46224 4 lines). Unfortunately, Proctor went out of business on 10/31/03. If you go to www.proctorinc.com you can look at details on those products, but I know they have none in the stock they may still be trying to sell off. Perhaps you can find one on a used equipment market. I've seen their stuff on Ebay occasionally. One of these will plug in to anyplace that supports a standard single-line phone and boost the DC current and AC ringing voltage up to standard telco line levels, so you can drive a standard 5 ringers over a 1900 ohm loop, if you wish. You might check Viking (http://www.vikingelectronics.com/) for a similar competetive product. Ohmygawsh! Just checked Viking's web site, and up front on their home page they are talking about replacements for Proctor products. I know in the past they had a "ringing amplifier" that would probably do the trick, as long as you weren't trying to extend the loop several miles off premises. It sounds like a new replacement will also have the standard 48vdc loop voltage, if you need it. ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: Cell Phone Attracts Lightning? Organization: Comcast Online Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2004 20:52:14 GMT Truth wrote: >>> In NO WAY can a cellphone being used at a gas station cause an >>> explosion. >> (The MythBusters TV show did an episode on cell phones and gas >> stations. Turns out that people getting in and out of the car sliding >> on the seat often generate a static charge, and that is the primary >> cause of most gas station fires, > Wrong. Even THAT theory is bullshit and they should have pointed that > out as well on the program since they apparently didn't make it clear > to ALL the viewers. > I purposely allow a static shock between me and the car when filling > up with gas just to show people with me how ridiculous and full of > shit the urban legend is. Yeah, and you're using a vapor control gas pump! ------------------------------ From: AES/newspost Subject: Re: Multipled Pairs: (was: VOIP Home Connection) Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2004 15:51:25 -0700 In article , Nick Landsberg wrote: >> wires) makes an appearance. Its very common in older outside plant >> (dating back, lets say to the 1940-50 era) in dense inner city areas, >> to do it that way: string one cable with maybe 500 pairs therein >> down the alley, open each pair at each possible location or house, >> and attach it to the demarc. In the 1940-50 era, things were 'different' For those of us not familiar with the hardware, did these "demarcs" somehow come with all 500 pairs already pre-attached somehow? Or was there some quick and simple one-step process that made it easy to attach all 500 pairs to each demarc in one step? I'm having a hard time visualizing the situation where an installer would laboriously connect all 500 pairs, one at a time, to each and every demarc at each and every house, when only one or a few pairs were likely to be needed in that house . . . ??? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You need to go back to the early years of the twentieth century, the early 1900's when not only was the telephone a new thing, but so were 'highrise' apartment buildings. Until elevators were common-place, you did not see office or apartment buildings more than three or four stories tall. But in the 1920's, in Chicago, for example, there was a renaissance of office/apartment building highrise construction; many huge, very tall (for their time) buildings. This was because the buildings built in the the 1870's following the Great Fire were now themselves over fifty years old and getting sort of decrepit. This early twentieth century reneissance of building happened likewise in New York City and other major metropolitan (read, 'dense' population) areas. Telco tended to build and install very large wooden 'cabinets' (with doors which could be lifted off). Actually, I think Western Electric built them and did the initial wiring. All older 'highrise' buildings (fifty to eighty or a hundred years old) still have vestiges of Western Electric wooden cabinets in their basement somewhere which serve as the 'demarcs' for that location. I say this mainly as a tribute to how good the workman- ship was in those long-ago times. You will still see a lot of these older buildings in metropolitan 'inner city' areas, buildings which have been there for decades, with the 'permanent' demarc cabinets in the basement. I am *not* speaking now about the 'newer' (less than twenty or thirty year old) residential developments, etc. In a time when labor was cheap (and for many years, Bell did not have any unions either; people talk about Sprint being a non-union shop, but for its first half century, 1878 through the middle 1920's) Bell was very *anti-union* as well.) Remind me to tell you sometime about Myrtle Murphy, the very first union steward for telephone operators in the Chicago Franklin office, and how the company harrassed her and made her life miserable. So anyway, all the cabling was done many years ago, before any of us can remember. Now the outside plant tech is told Mrs. Smith wants a telephone, we have assigned her pair 87 on cable 2037 out of the Rogers Park central office, and pair 87 also shows up on cable 2037 at (address) and (address) and (address). So the tech goes and takes pair 87 and 'punches it down on the block' as needed where Mrs. Smith is located and removes it from the punch down block at the other locations as needed. All the hard, laborious and time consuming work was done many years ago mostly by non-union labor. PAT] ------------------------------ From: markrobt@comcast.net (Mark Roberts) Subject: Re: Vonage Upgrades Local Unlimited Calling Plan to Premium Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2004 22:58:30 -0000 Organization: 1.94 meters Dave Close had written: > Dave Garland writes: >> Let us know when all numbers within the NANP can be dialed without any >> charge other than that for local phone service. > /I/ can dial all calls to anywhere in the US or Canada without extra > charge. The Caribbean is extra. I dial all of them as 11 digits, both > on my Sprint PCS and my Vonage lines. On your PCS, you should be able to dial them as 10 digits. On both SPCS and ATTWS, I am routinely able to dial all calls without the '1'. The local/zoned distinction is increasingly becoming irrelevant. It makes no sense on my Vonage service, and it increasingly makes less sense on the cellular services. On my SBC measured-unit service, there's a tangle between "local", "local toll" (provided by Sprint on one line, SBC on the other), and "long-distance". In fact, Vonage does make a local/long-distance distinction, but on most service plans, it doesn't make a difference. Strangely, Vonage does not consider "925" a local area code for me, even though it's about four blocks away from my home. I could have had an Oakland number for my Vonage service, but instead picked a Berkeley number for esthetic reasons. It mostly seems to matter with respect to who's "local toll" when calling me. I never thought I would advocate this, but the time may have come simply to require *all* calls to be dialed with 10 digits, thus dispensing with the '1'. Mark Roberts | "Money news, sponsored by Dame Edna." -- Oakland, Cal.| yes, that's really how KCBS "All-News 740" introduced NO HTML MAIL | its 6:55 am business report on September 15, 2004 ------------------------------ From: Craig Partridge Subject: Re: Paper Tape; Gates at Harvard Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 16:00:43 UTC Organization: The World : www.TheWorld.com : Since 1989 W Randolph Franklin writes: > BTW, I never talked to him. How many grad students talk to undergrads > who wander in and out? There may be a lesson here. But Gates was remembered. One of his faculty instructors remembered him as the guy who used to fall asleep in class, wake up, look at the blackboard and ask a cogent question. > The HW has certainly improved from the days of 10cps i/o (plus a line > printer), core memories with well under 1 MB, disks with 10MB, etc. > However, I can't say that the SW is much better today. Harvard > researchers had developed an object oriented language, EL/1, which had > comparable power to C++ (lacked a few features, but had a few other > features). Defining new classes in EL/1, including their interactions > with other classes, was just as hard as it is in C++. I think this is underselling EL/1's goals. As I recall it (along with PPL -- Polymorphic Programming Language) were attempts to create fully extensible languages -- such that you could (and in one class did) transform EL/1 into a programming language for a completely new computer language. (Very weird experience to morph a system that way). Craig Partridge AB '83 ------------------------------ From: Bob Goudreau Subject: Re: Pennsylvania Railroad's Crew Communication System? Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 22:21:21 -0400 [Please withhold my email address as usual.] Lisa Hancock wrote: > David Clayton wrote: >> Of course, I won't mention that a lot of these things seemed to have >> happened since the state privatised the train system about 10 years ago. > There are elements in the U.S. in think privitizing Amtrak will be > more efficient. They ignore the many experiences of the above in the > United Kingdom and other countries... Actually, it is the persistent critics of such privatizations that tend to conveniently ignore what actually happened. For example, neither Britain nor Australia has seen a decline in rail safety since privatization of various elements of their railway systems, contrary to the statist party line. See http://www.cts.cv.imperial.ac.uk/documents/publications/iccts00410.pdf and http://www.atsb.gov.au/rail/pdf/fatalities_international.pdf, for instance. Similar safety scares preceded and accompanied other loosenings of government-imposed straitjackets, yet they too proved to be bogus. Contrary to the popular perception of the uninformed, the US airline industry did not become more dangerous after airline deregulation in the late 1970s; the fatality rate per passenger-mile continued (and still continues) to decline. Likewise, blood-covered highways were predicted by some of the more strident "safety Nazis" when the 55 mph national speed limit was loosened to 65 mph in the mid-1980s and then rescinded entirely a decade later (which let states return to setting their own limits, most of which have reverted to 70 or 75 mph). Yet the US fatality rate per vehicle-mile traveled has continued the long secular decline that began in the early part of the 20th century. > We may end up with govt owned airlines given how so many are bankrupt. Fortunately, such an "Amtrak in the sky" seems extremely unlikely. Some airlines have pledged assets as security for their emergency government loans, and some or all of them could eventually end up in full bankruptcy liquidation (i.e., Chapter 7, not Chapter 11). In that case, the federal government would indeed end up with those assets (aircraft, maintenance facilities, etc.). But such foreclosed assets are usually auctioned off by the government, not reconstituted as government-run agencies. There are successful airlines that would be happy to pick up such assets at bargain prices, after all. Bob Goudreau Cary, NC ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: A New Phone and Techie Controversy at Verizon Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2004 12:20:00 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Truth wrote: > My cellphone doesn't HAVE a screen at all, Now, this is funny. What 50-year-old piece of junk do you have that doesn't have a screen? Even the old analog Motorola MicroTACs have screens. > It amazes me how stupid humans really are. No comment. :) JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, http://JustThe.net/ Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / sjsobol@JustThe.net PGP Key available from your friendly local key server (0xE3AE35ED) Apple Valley, California Nothing scares me anymore. I have three kids. ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, Yahoo Groups, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. 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