Last update: 2002-01-14 21:48 UTC
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AaronSw: I ordered this book from Amazon about five years ago.
AaronSw: Somewhere along the way I got tired of waiting and downloaded it off MojoNation.
AaronSw: Last year, they sent us a letter saying that they'd ship the book to us in time for the holidays.
AaronSw: Unfortunately they sent it to our old address and I never got it. They sent us a new copy a few weeks ago.
AaronSw: The introduction mentions the delay but doesn't explain it.
AaronSw: Overall it's a really nice book. Liberarianism, crypto anarchy, virtual worlds and AI all mixed in for good effect. Some of the essays tend to repeat earlier ones, but overall they're very interesting.
AaronSw: And of course "True Names" itself is an incredible story.
AaronSw: Bob Frankston suggests we partition off a piece of the DNS for permanent, unchanable identifiers.
AaronSw: I think this is a great idea. We could create a TLD (.key or .id) and hand out random 40-character alphanumeric strings.
AaronSw: They'd look like this: a4fge6tha4odmg8915th57jw6j8yhf5w5h8rn87g.id and we'd have 178689910246017054531432477289437798228285773001601743140683776 of them. They're perfectly compatible wiith all existing technologies.
sbp: Why not have 10-char? They'd be practically memorable, and you'd have 3,656,158,440,062,976 combinations
AaronSw: Good point. We could start at 10 and add more as necessary.
AaronSw: It's a very nice combination of the persistence of UUIDs with the lookup service of DNS.
AaronSw: Great for XML namespaces, the W3C website, and plain old PURLs.
AaronSw: Ten characters would look like: http://nuwfg89w5g.id/
sbp: cf. PersistentDomains in DesignIssues, and MeRS
sbp: Winer plasters pictures (1, 2) of the mug everywhere, and entices you to buy one... but you can't! What a rip-off.
AaronSw: They're not yet at Store.UserLand but I'm sure they'll soon be CafePress
sbp: Ooh, here's a wonderful image of the mug
AaronSw: Here's a high-quality copy of Super Cactus for your enjoyment.
AaronSw: Personally, I prefer the spaced-out faceless cowboy.
AaronSw: But I originally voted for the cactus, so maybe I'm just suffering from cactus overload.
AaronSw: Tony Benn sounds cool.
sbp: This interview is about numerous things, but generally globalization - and how it's a new form of imperialism in Benn's opinion
sbp: """I'm interested in language. We used to call it the War Office. Then it became the Ministry of Defence. We used to talk about the hydrogen bomb, now we talk about a deterrent. And the language is very cleverly constructed to give the impression that it's not what it is. Humanitarian Intervention. World Peace."""
AaronSw: Sounds like Chomsky.
sbp: Chomsky is mentioned a couple of times in the interview
sbp: [on people moving right as they get older] """take the four members of the SDP - Jenkins, Owen, Williams and Rogers - they all became members of the House of Lords. I mean, that really is something isn't it?"""
