Chris Messina take two LOL

First of all it’s boooring. The same old stuff again, the same old set of arguments namely no arguments what so ever.

It’s soo much alike the first posting that even the characters so carefully chosen seemingly to support the argument remain the same, only this time it gets uglier. Wishing poor Dustin Moskovitz dead just for the sake of argument, just because someone’s lack of writing skills prevents this someone from articulating his thoughts using some other idiom. That’s a bit over the top to me… And now Tim O’Reilly once again! I understand that quoting someone out of context is an implicit acknowledgement of his or her guru status as well as an attempt to sanctify your own ideas by invoking higher authority. There is a bit of a problem here though. It might actually disappoint you as well but Tim O’Reilly is alive and well and being so he might just as well read some of your writings. Why don’t you just go straight to Tim himself and ask him to assess the depths of your intellectual insights. I’m sure every one of your readers will be all but excited by the results.

If nothing changed in the second article itself the reality change dramatically. Facebook is abandoning the ugly CGI calls. I’m sure you must have been in some kind of Don Quixoteian mood writing this piece: fighting the lost cause and being abandoned by the strongest ally ever. But please, please, could you save the situation from becoming completely farcical: lamenting about Facebook’s change of policy seems to be a bit… how should I put it? Uninvited, to say the least. Facebook is nay stupid. They are not in business of defending some ideological stands which they never had by the way, even less they are in business of defending your poorly articulated ideas. They are in business of running successful social networking resource and this purely business logic makes them to do what they do as soon as they have an opportunity to do this.

Apparently since there is no idea to argue because you are unable to put forward working idea which would allow people using their real names on the web and being known by their real names only. I simply have to revert to the same counterargument. Show some compassion and imagine for a second that you, yes you, were not so lucky to have almost unique name/surname combination (ChrisMessina) but were born into Smith’s family and given a rather more widespread but no less attractive name John. Not too difficult, isn’t it? Now count the number of John Smiths currently leaving and those who ever lived and you will quickly see how it is impossible to claim almost any real names to be yours. The fact is that it is not yours, far from it - it’s a shared name. Your real name with very small exceptions is shared! There are as many me under name John Smith as there are John Smiths. So I don’t own my name, admit it! You as John Smith are very very unfortunate. You owe a very very very small part of this name/surname combination, if you think about it. Divide whole of John Smith name by the number of John Smiths who ever lived and living, as they all have equal rights to this combination of name and surname and therefore must get their equal share. Chris Messina – you are a bit more lucky but again the same old argument - I can go and legally change my name to Chris Messina and your share in this name/surname will immediately drop from 100% to just 50%. That is reality, Chris. What you want is not workable. To be more precise you are simply unable to articulate what you actually want LOL What do you want Chris Messina? Put forward some meaningful proposition. Please! At least some proposition dealing with the situation when most name/surname combinations are not unique and are not owned by just one individual (setting aside legal conundrums of ownership of legal names for a moment). Well, do something about this, Chris Messina. How do we deal with this single problem? How do we sort it out? As soon as you clarify what you really want we can start a discussion. In fact there are several different ways of lessening the probability of namespace conflicts I can think of. You can do this by adding some more personal information to this simple name/surname combination i.e. date of birth, gender, place of birth, current residence or whatever. Is this what you are up to? Stretch it a bit further and you’ll get Digital ID... Biometrics… Hellooo! LOL Well, then let’s agree on Universal Biometric Hash – why don’t use this instead? WHATEVER, Chris! Just something meaningful or… what you really want LOL :-)