[35622] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Statements against new.net?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Geoff Huston)
Wed Mar 14 01:24:38 2001
Message-Id: <4.3.2.7.2.20010314145628.00b55400@jumble.telstra.net>
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 14:59:39 +1100
To: Vadim Antonov <avg@kotovnik.com>
From: Geoff Huston <gih@telstra.net>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.04.10103131227380.17528-100000@kitty.kotovnik.c
om>
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At 3/14/01 07:56 AM, Vadim Antonov wrote:
>That is based on the assumption that consistency is necessary
>or desireable :) Of course, it is dear to an engineer's mind,
>but the case from the sociological point of view is far from
>clear-cut. In fact, way too many woes of human societies can
>be (at least indirectly) attributed to the misguided attempts
>to enforce consistency.
This assumption is explicitly addressed in the RFC - I quote:
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1.1. Maintenance of a Common Symbol Set
Effective communications between two parties requires two essential
preconditions:
- The existence of a common symbol set, and
- The existence of a common semantic interpretation of these symbols.
Failure to meet the first condition implies a failure to communicate at
all, while failure to meet the second implies that the meaning of the
communication is lost.
In the case of a public communications system this condition of a common
symbol set with a common semantic interpretation must be further
strengthened to that of a unique symbol set with a unique semantic
interpretation. This condition of uniqueness allows any party to initiate a
communication that can be received and understood by any other party. Such
a condition rules out the ability to define a symbol within some bounded
context. In such a case, once the communication moves out of the context of
interpretation in which it was defined, the meaning of the symbol becomes
lost.
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