On Sun, 2 Sep 2007, Ellis Wilson wrote:
This is all very true, and also very contingent upon the fact that the postal service, roads, and phones are public items that each and every one of us pays for (even though there are phone companies, they pay taxes to the government heavily and follow its rules). Whether or not it is readily quantifiable, we all most certainly pay for one government with one set of rules to police these commonwealth resources and ensure their proper use. However, as Thomas Paine puts it, "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one." Unlike roads, mail, and even perhaps telephones, I do not feel that the Internet is such a necessary means of communication (yet) that the government need interfere.
Actually, IIRC the phone companies "are" the internet, and the internet "is" at least originally a government project (the latter being well known -- DARPA and all). The internet is composed of e.g. fiber optic trunk lines interconnecting switches that almost without exception belong to phone companies. Use traceroute to follow the path of your packets nearly anywhere. Use whois (if necessary) to resolve just who a lot of the core links are. Recognize anyone? And most of the exceptions are things like NCREN -- government funded organizations as well (who still lease the actual lines outside of their own organization. Don't get me wrong -- I too love (being a "romantic" after all) a lot of the things about the way the Internet evolved as a mostly unregulated utility that slipped between the overt regulation cracks in government and was in fact governed by the young idealists who ran (and in many cases still run) the core switches. They created an anonymous resource that the world has somehow managed to avoid monetizing, at least at the price per packet level that would spell doom in many ways. But that model has broken down to some extent, largely because at any given instant a signficant fraction of the attached client systems are "infected", largely because the operating system they are running is a piece of crap that openly invites invasion (nowadays it actually FORCES you to DELIBERATELY have it invaded by things like the Genuine Windows Authentication Tool, and whazzup with the spyware thing? Do they actually try to engineer in holes that can be exploited by the corporate masses)? I can't really do another rant today, though -- gotta teach (sigh) and really must prepare. I'm just a bit more optimistic that "the people" can, when they must, craft things LIKE speed limit and Do Not Call laws that actually work, mostly, sort of. I'm also a true believer in the virtue of "dynamic tension" that permits the laws to be crafted in their imperfect way and then gradually fixed until they do what we want. What I'm NOT optimistic about is that this is a self-healing problem or self-limiting problem, and the extrapolation of its observed growth should be very troublesome from the sheer viewpoint of engineering if nothing else. rgb -- Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
