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From: huitema@jerry.inria.fr (Christian Huitema)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains
Subject: Re: CS top-level domain and its impact on the UK?
Message-ID: <1990Aug8.103532@jerry.inria.fr>
Date: 9 Aug 90 07:59:32 GMT
References: <9008072016.AA15169@bel.isi.edu>
Sender: news@mirsa.inria.fr
Reply-To: huitema@jerry.inria.fr (Christian Huitema)
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Organization: INRIA Sophia-Antipolis
Lines: 27

I was amazed by the whole debate. It started from one simple
constatation, i.e. that the introduction of a ".cs" country code would
break the heuristics which currently allow a Janet user to send a mail
to either "user@edu.foo.bar.cs" or "user@cs.bar.foo.edu". Obviously, one
does not need much thinking to discover that one only needs to list all
the ".cs" subdomain in the gateway to fix the heuristics; has there are
probably a dozen such domains, this is no big deal.
And, no, this is not a prerequisite to connecting Czechoslovakia.

But then, one see a number of people discovering that the Brits live in
an island, that they drive on the wrong side of the road, that their
screw are screwed in the wrong way, that they have all sorts of exotic
metrics (like, how many grains do you count in a stone?), and that their
universities are registered under ".ac.uk" rather than ".gb" (why not
".en" + ".we" + ".sc" + ".ni", by the way?). The funny thing is that
they believe that there is nothing wrong with that, that driving on the
left side is not any more dangerous than driving on the right side of
the road; they probably start eating their eggs the wrong way too... At
a time when all cities of all industrial countries look more and more
alike, we should be glad of their efforts to maintain some diversity!

Still, one may observe that allowing both "user@edu.foo.bar.cs" and
"user@cs.bar.foo.edu" is akin to driving both on the left side and on
the right side simultaneously. No doubt that the heuristic will be
stressed again and again...

Christian Huitema