A: Marketing
News has broken out that NASA has successfully tested a deep space version of the internet:
The US space agency NASA said it successfuly conducted a first test of a deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.
"This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet," Adrian Hooke, NASA's manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards, said in a statement.
The US space agency said Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA spacecraft some 20 million miles (32.4 million kilometers) from Earth.
NASA said the software protocol, which must be able to withstand delays, disruptions and disconnections in space, was designed in partnership with Vint Cerf, a vice president at Internet search giant Google.
DTN sends information using a method that differs from the normal Internet's Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, communication suite, which Cerf co-designed, NASA said.
Like many things in computing, there tends to be stupid "religious arguments" among geeks about certain things. Windows vs. Linux. MS SQL vs. Oracle vs. MySQL. You get the idea. People will even argue about whether GUID is supposed to be pronounced "Goo-id" or "Gwid". Now you can answer... neither! It truly is supposed to be a UUID... a Universally Unique Identifer.