Not that I want to advocate uniform retail pricing structures - my point is only that without such uniformity of retail structures such 'follow the money' arguments as Sean presents here quickly break down to a maze of twisty little passages.
I agree that following the money doesn't always work. Personality seems to play a key part. I don't know how else to explain some of the decision making that went into some of today's network operation. People tend to view the problem in different ways depending on their background. What I was trying to postulate, unsuccessfully, there is no such thing as an universal, optimal hierarchical addressing scheme. I thought I had chosen examples from the opposite ends of the spectrum. I guess I wasn't extreme enough in my examples. Perhaps I should have used the ISBN hierarchy, a combination of language group, country and publisher prefix. I'm going to publish a million books, so I should get a 'big' publishers prefix. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation