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 [[1]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'.

References

   1. mailto:ravage@EINSTEIN.ssz.com