At 11:00 PM -0500 8/29/03, J.A. Terranson wrote:
And the sheer expense may in and of itself be a controlling factor in such orders.
Bingo. You can't make a hierarchical network out of a geodesic one again. To mangle Gilmore's words a bit, a geodesic network sees centralization as damage and routes around it. One node cannot switch all traffic, and, at it's heart, that's what they're trying to do with this stuff. They may not care, but I doubt, even these days when unpriced "common" resources are being wasted to such a degree by viruses and spam, that the market's going to let them kill off the internet just so they can watch everybody. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'