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no, you cant take the exact same physical train all the way to beijing. but you can jump from train to train like a ip package jumps from router to router.
somhow i think that tcp/ip would still be the international standard as its a software solution, and fully free to implement for anyone out there (iirc that is).
the concept of railroad is the same the world over, while the physical implementation have slight variations depending on what nations and where inside the nations your at.
hell, they managed to build a phone system that allows me to call someone on the other side of the globe without goverment intevention outside of their national borders, didnt they?
the trick is to agree to a comprimise that have some positives for each side, not force your view on the other side.
I think that Thom analogy works.The rail gauge may be different, but the end result is the expected one: a person or a load of freight reaches destination no matter what differences exist among the networks.Sure,there is dead time when you have to load/unload the freight from one network to the other,but so it is in networks when you pass from one region to the other. You can't expect all regions to have the same infrastructure. What is important is the link between these networks.Together,they form a big (somehow controlable) network. Last time I checked that is the internet too.




Member since:
2005-07-08
Sorry Thom, but I think Arpan has a point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_gauge
In fact railways a vastly different between countries.
It's highly unlikely that you can take the same train to different countries. It's like power plugs in this respect. Your electrical equipment will work, but only after conversion, adding to ineffeciency and cost.
Just imagine that the internet works the same. It would mean you need to have conversion to get your packet to another country.
It's more likely we have so many railroad standards because England did NOT control the railroads.
Maybe the internet standards are already so strong that it doesn't matter anymore who controls them as they won't change anymore (no I am not talking about HTML standards but about lower level protocols like TCP/IP)