On Mar 13, 2009, at 4:14 PM, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote: > On Mar 13, 2009, at 13:17 , Richard Chycoski wrote: >> Licensing to ensure a minimum level of skill (like drivers' >> licences - >> look how well *that* works! :-) is a public safety issue. > > Drivers' licensing is a joke; the public has spoken, any warm body > must be licensable, and there's hell to pay if someone who really has > no business on the road is denied the *right* (not, as it should be, > *privilege*) of driving. It's only an example if you're specifically > looking for something that is unfixably broken, and then I call > shenanigans.
It's interesting that driver's licenses have come up, because that's an example of establishing "Common Knowledge". We have Common Knowledge if you know you're supposed to disable ssh root logins, and I know that too, and I know that you know, and you know that I know, and I know you know I know, ad infinitum. [1, 2] Licensing serves a special purpose in many disciplines: it helps you know what *other* people know, and they know that you know what they know, and you know they know you know they know, etc. (And interestingly, it's been proven that you cannot establish common knowledge via ordinary message passing as you have with packet delivery in IP networks.) So licensing might be beneficial if there are things about system administration where it's critical that we all know that we all know something. For example, all electricians know that the green wire is NEVER the hot wire. And all drivers know that the person turning right has the right-of-way (unless you're at a red light in Philadelphia, where all the rules are different). For example, do we all know that a default route is supposed to point toward the Internet? Less trivially, do we all know that the root password shouldn't be 'root'? Can we all depend on everybody else knowing that? Would it be valuable for us to have some way of establishing -- among ourselves -- what we all know that we know? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic), [2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/common-knowledge/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
