Nigel, Our problem domain is a subset of signaling, obviously signaling between two or more, necessarily disjoint, parties. The problem domain has been around for a very long time, and instances of computer-to-computer communication, a subset closer to our present interest, greatly predate the adoption of iso3166-1, and also the conversion to IPv4. Were we to retain the initial problem point of view, any means to signal changes of state between two or more parties, a binary semaphore, would suffice. However, agreements for the representations of octal-valued, hexadecimal-valued, and eventually Latin script letters and Hindu-Arabic base10 digits developed autonomously, and some were adopted by those working on communicating systems. We can, without fear of contradiction, state that communication of information encoded generally as finite symbol sets corresponding to scripts in which human languages are communicated, is an interest which predates the invention of nation states, and is at the core of our little part of the signaling problem domain -- signaling between two or more devices, where the signaling is packetized and transmitted over the routing infrastructure (requiring allocation of address identifiers), and may, as an ancillary feature, consist in part or in whole, of text, some of which may be associated with an allocated address identifier as an allocated name identifier, for the convenience of the communicants. We can therefore, again, without fear of contradiction, state that restricting the support for finite symbol sets to exclude some scripts, and therefore some human languages, is inconsistent with the general design principle. Thus we have an interest which is general within the problem domain of distributed systems, in particular those which are DNS aware, for which no necessity exists to identify this interest with an iso3166-1 code point allocated actor. Eric Brunner-Williams Eugene, Oregon On 12/26/15 4:48 AM, Nigel Roberts wrote:
Public interest (except in an academic sense) is defined by what the relevant public authority thinks is the public interest. And the relevant public authority is a construct of the nation-state.