Agreed. My understanding of Hettinga's (and this list's, for the most part) use of the term "geodesic" is to indicate the accomplishment of a shortest path between two elemnts via increased individual capabilities and reduced reliance on low-efficiency centralized control, as opposed to the concept of eliminating or reducing centralized control in general just for the sake of itself. I am only part of the way through the geodesic economy texts, myself, but I like to think of the particular form of geodesic architecture implied therein as incorporating some distributed infrastructure as a means to an efficiency gain end. But then, I know fuck all. Am I mistaken?

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Choate [mailto:ravage@EINSTEIN.ssz.com]
Sent: Saturday, December 09, 2000 10:49 AM
To: cypherpunks@EINSTEIN.ssz.com
Subject: Re: Hettinga does *nothing* but hand-waving, folks...

On Sat, 9 Dec 2000, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

> dropped packets, or time or something, and the network certainly *looks*
> like a geodesic one, with multiple nodes plugged into lots of lines
> routing packets in arbitrary directions instead of up and down a
> hierarchy.

That's not geodesic, that's a distributed systems with stochastic
management algorithms. The epitomy of 'free market' thinking applied to
communications engineering. It's certainly non-hierarchical but it isn't
'minimum distance'.