[Gllug] RE: [Glut] Official country code for Britain = GB or UK?

[Nix]

On Mon, 15 Apr 2002, Alain Williams stated:
> At some stage, IP will cover more than just this planet. Do we have a new set
> of top level domains or what ? So would I become: phcomp.co.uk.ghia, or being
> chauvenist will the rest of the universe be other TLD domains, eg:
> 	moonbase.demos.mars.sol

Definitely not the last link; DNS's lookup mechanism requires
low-latency any-to-any links, which is very unlikely to be practical for
interstellar (or even interplanetary) comm.

See Vinge, _A Fire Upon the Deep_ and _A Deepness in the Sky_: given
low-bandwidth low-latency fixed point-to-point interstellar links (as in
the first) the appropriate mechanism is batched UUCP-like; given
high-latency links (as in the Einsteinian universe), the appropriate
mechanism is continuous-communication, like a sort of really slow tagged
command queuing protocol mixed with batched UUCP :)

(Vinge has also published serious papers on this, as have other
luminaries from Dyson to Drexler, but I don't have the references here.

I really should bibtex up my references and stick 'em online, then this
silliness wouldn't happen again.)


The largest domain over which the Internet as currently constituted will
be practical is a few light-seconds. So Earth/Luna, nearby space
habitats and currently nearby spacecraft could participate.


(Imagine a three-way handshake to Venus: ten minutes to an hour to bring
up a single TCP session! --- and everywhere else is *worse*.)

-- 
`Unless they've moved it since I last checked, travelling between
 England and America does not involve crossing the equator.'
   --- pir


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