No, I think that it was an attempt to claim that no criticism should
ever be directed at that individual.
As is the case with the British monarch, those who leap to the defense
of the honor of the Queen are more often as not attempting to put
criticism of their own position beyond the bounds of acceptable
debate.
In theory we have a consensus based organization. In practice we have
a system where it is rather easy for some people to take strategic
offense as a tactic to shut down debate.
Are the I18N issues that were raised in the earlier thread being
treated appropriately? Maybe, maybe not. The problem here is that a
consensus based approach is a lousy way to deal with large complicated
problems where the number of stakeholders is very large and only a
tiny minority of them are able to participate in the IETF process in
an effective manner.
We do have a structural problem dealling with inconvenient news. Take
DNSSEC for example which has been in development for fifteen years and
is still not even close to deployment. Instead of looking at the delay
and aggressively seeking out the barriers to deployment, the IETF
approach has been to shoot each messenger who dares suggest that there
might be a deployment obstacle. Instead of looking at real world
requirements caused by things like European Union laws and changing
the specification to suit, the group wasted three years arguing over
whether there was a problem. This is on top of the three years wasted
as a result of refusing to accept that deployment would not happen as
long as it was a requirement to sign every NXT record in .com.
I recently pointed out that we are going to have a really big problem
when SHA1 is no longer considered trustworthy. Instead of actually
addessing the issue we had a stupid flame war. And of course we have
done nothing to fix the fact that moving from SHA1 to SHAn is going to
be orders of magnitude harder than the move from MD5 to SHA1 for the
simple reason that every browser supported SHA1 while almost none
support SHAn today.
It seems to me that part of the problem here is that ICANN should not
have farmed out responsibility for DNS standards to IETF and then sat
back as if it absolved them of all responsibility in the matter.
The DNS infrastructure is no longer a technical infrastructure, it is
largely a social construct. ICANN might not be the right place to
discuss issues such as I18N, but IETF is worse. And worst of all would
be to have a situation where IETF is defacto ratifying decisions that
are actually being deliberated in IACNN process.
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 12:03 AM, Joel Jaeggli <joelja(_at_)bogus(_dot_)com>
wrote:
Bernard Aboba wrote:
Here is a dictionary definition of "Beyond reproach":
Beyond reproach: So good as to preclude any possibility of criticism.
Last time I looked, RFC 3777 did not include this definition as a
requirement for the nomcom in selection of I* candidates.
Good thing, too. We seem to have "gotten by" with candidates with
occasional imperfections over the years.
One might also simply conclude that that the statement that an
individual was beyond reproach was baseless or rooted in hyperbole
rather than on some epistemological fallacy that asserts that there
exist individuals who are beyond reproach.
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