[cap-talk] Capability accounting

[David Mercer]

On 6/25/06, Norman Hardy <norm at cap-lore.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 24, 2006, at 11:43 PM, Nick Szabo wrote:
> > But detailed instruction is just what a software agent requires.
> > The software can't be expected to have such experience or
> > empathy, and will often not even be able to acquire detailed
> > instructions as they are often tacit preferences that the user can't
> > readily articulate more easily making the decision(s) herself.
>
> See the scheme at <http://cap-lore.com/Economics/meter.html>
> for a scenario where we battled the real issues you raise.

On that linked page you write that "It was partly a reaction to an
imagined event where someone leaves a video channel open all weekend
which starves an accounting application which causes salary checks to
be late. Fears such as these were preventing some large institutions
from integrating their various data networks."

I have seen where a converged data network was causing real problems.
A very large bank in Mexico had collapsed all of their different data
networks onto an ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) network. All of it.
Their frame relay traffic, tcp/ip, weird old X.25 circuits,
everything.  And then the Dancing Baby email went around, and the spam
problem got really, really bad.  And because everything was on one
backbone, excessive email attachment and spam traffic was causing ATM
(automated teller machine) transactions to timeout, and people to not
get their money.  Thank god that was all done with a proper
transactional commit so that folks weren't charged when the cash
didn't come out.

My consulting firm got to clean up the mess that was their email
infrastructure.  My relevant point is that they had no means of
reserving bandwidth, and that any means of doing so would have been
better than what happened.  Auction based or not.  Such fears as Norm
mentions are not always unfounded.

-David Mercer
Oakland, CA
(formerly of Tucson, AZ)