living in a material world

to quote someone who isn't a physicist,
we are all living in a material world,
and in that world we are limited to light cones
within which there are _causality_ principles
(as well as entropic) - hence relative locations have
a bearing on infrmation flow between objects

the ordering of messages on this mail list
(and the rate of increase of entropy in the universe)
Is bounded at least in part by latency
latency shows up quite a lot in distributed algorithms (routing,
location/mapping, memory/cpu speed/power, BFT schemes, etc etc:)

the internet to date lives in a virtual world and data oriented
mnetowkring likes to fool itself it is in some steady state in an
"infosphere" where we can plonk down copies of data willynilly, and
therefore see no latency.

reality bites - a lot more data goes in from, and even more usefully,
out to the real world. the points it goes in and out (ingress/egresss_
better be near people/devices/sensors/actuators that want the data

since some data ingresses from the real world (my typing) and out (you
reading on the screen >-here<-)
we better route messages on paths that don't spend too long going
arond the 13 dimensional infosphere too many times before they get
in/out

oh, and the folks "out there" (i.e. the 4billion cellphones) have a
better handle on how to do this than the folks "in here (the mere
1billion internet backwoodspeople)....

time to get more real...which is why i started
this thread on e2e which got led astray by some philosopher/wizard/physics/guru peeps:).

indeed if we think of this as an Onion
with RL as an outer layer, and SL as an inner layer
(and as many people have been doing, mining
interactions between RL and SL via footprints in the sand
in the SL) then one consideration about how one
creates mappings from id (in RL) to location (in RL/SL interface)
might be privacy, so the onion immediately brings to mind
Tor...

of course, if all you are interested is SL, then let me onion
route you this:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/youtube_contest_challenges_users