Re: Competing Domain-Name Registries Creating Tower of Cyber-Babel

[Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu]

On Sat, 07 Jul 2001 08:16:28 +0200, Anthony Atkielski <anthony at atkielski.com>  said:
> Who said anything about users of a service?  I want to reach my parents'
> machine.  They are not geeks, and I am not looking for a "service."  Therefore I
> must be able to address their machine unambiguously, and this means that their
> machine (and mine, for that matter) must have a unique address.

If *you* want to reach your parent's machine, you walk into the room it's in
and smack it with an open hand until it reboots.

If however you are talking protocols, *YOU* don't want to reach the
machine.  You want some software running on one of your computers to
interact in a specific manner with some software running on one of
their computers.  And in general, you really don't care how the interaction
happens - there may be a proxy or routers or other devices in between.

Your use of the telephone network as an example is another demonstration
of just how poorly you understand the basic concepts here.

If you dial my office number, you might get me to answer on the Rolm
phone in my office.  But that's unlikely.  More likely, you'll get
my phone mail - which isn't even in the same building.  I won't discuss
how many devices answer at my house. ;)  I won't go into the issues of
a telephone line run over copper that has call forwarding to a cell phone
in a different time zone.

But see? What you cared about is that you talked.  You didn't care about
how the connection was made.  And until you demonstrate that you understand
this distinction, I'm gonna have to add my <plonk> to the list.

/Valdis (who is almost as anti-NAT as Keith, but happens to *LIKE* the
ability to play games with IP-host mappings ;)

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