For NASA, DTN means not having to send exact signals at an exact time to a spacecraft. A missed connection can be tried again until it succeeds. If you've been around long enough, it sounds conspicuously like USENET back in the acoustic-modem days. NASA touts the technology's usefulness in communicating with deep-space robotic craft. Who are they kidding? The real win is that when human beings inevitably go back into space, they'll be able to keep up on Earthbound puppycams. (Illustration by NASA)

Please don’t attribute anything to me (not that I’m giving you that much), but the person for the CTO job was decided at least a week ago. Not surprising, but you guys are right again … though you doubted yourself!!

Does that mean it's Internet godfather Vint Cerf?

(Photo by eralon)

Well, to be honest, I suppose we should have picked either variable length IP addresses or 128 bit but we didn’t. And we bound the TCP/UDP endpoint identifiers very strongly to the IP address which resulted in less flexibility for multi-homing and mobility. Nor did we make better (generalized) use of broadcast media with protocols that take advantage of such media to deliver the same transmission to multiple recipients (multicast is a weaker, less efficient alternative).

On the other hand, the system has scaled by about 6 orders of magnitude over the last 25 years and I think that’s not a bad record.

What we've actually learned from this: Google keeps Vint Cerf so underemployed as chief guy-who-invented-the-Internet officer that he has time to respond to Twitter engineers.

It's all about net neutrality. What's "net neutrality"? As far as we can tell, it's a bunch of rhetoric that amounts to regulations that affirm Google's God-given right to avoid giving Internet service providers a cut of advertising revenues. An Obama presidency would mean Google can save money on lobbying fees. Well, times are tough, and every penny counts. It's good to know that even the saintly Vint Cerf votes on pocketbook issues. He's the father of the Internet, and he approved this message.

The press release also quotes Google's Internet evangelist Vint Cerf declaring, "there isn't any privacy, get over it," though from the context of the cited article, it seems he was jokingly parroting former Sun Microsystems CEO Scot McNealy from 1999.Any commenters care to name the executive who lives in the walled compound pictured here? If you're worried Eric Schmidt will blackball you, feel free to send us a tip instead. Update: Of course, it's Larry Page's house (which Valleywag had earlier revealed). And the NLPC didn't do a great job of obfuscating the address — opening the PDF in Illustrator or Acrobat Pro makes it easy to remove the redactions.

Right. As if frequent fliers don't already view air travel as a fantastic voyage into hell. There are screaming toddlers, 8-year-olds kicking your seat, and that damn guy who won't share the armrest. Phone calls might actually help muffle the din. No, any real road warrior's concern will be the new scramble for scarce power outlets. Using Wi-Fi nonstop will drain a laptop battery faster than just watching a porn video you downloaded before takeoff.

Well, sir, there must be some mistake. I sent an email your way at 10:33 a.m. Pacific Standard Time asking for an official statement within an hour confirming your ability to deliver an official statement within an hour. And here it is, more than an hour later. There must be a bug in the system somewhere! Maybe Gmail failed to deliver the email. Don't worry, Dr. Schmidt. I still believe in you. Just get someone on that Gmail bug, will you?

In total, Cerf is writing five books while on Google's payroll. Only one of them will spread the good word on the Internet. Besides that and the book of poetry, he's writing a book anecdotes, a biography of his wife and a book on the concept of bindings.

The rest of Cerf's time is spent as honorary chairman of the IPv6 Forum and assisting NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And where does all this timewasting go down? Cerf is based in northern Virginia, but he also has an office in the Googleplex, two doors down from Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt might want to have Cerf spend a bit more time in the latter. (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Yesterday at Google's Analyst Day, Cerf told the crowd of 300 financial analysts and press that in the next few decades, scientists will have created an "interplanetary Web," connecting spacecraft, satellites and distant planets. Google will "help to organize it just like we organize" everything else, Cerf is quoted as saying, referring to Google's mission of organizing the world's information.

I'm sure its all true. But other than help inflate Google's share price relative to its earnings — there's a lot of room to grow in space, analysts might think — what the hell does it have to do with Google's third quarter? And now that we think about it, Google's mission is to organize the world's information, not the solar system's. So typical. He's doing that thing geeks always do to avoid work: Talk about how great the next version is going to be.

Vint Cerf, founding father of the Internet and Google's underemployed Net evangelist, has a theory: The Internet will kill the television set. The problem is that online-video initiatives are focused on streaming media. Cerf proposes a shift towards downloadable, Internet-delivered content — called "IPTV," after the Internet Protocol Cerf helped invent. IPTV would work more on the TiVo model of record now, watch later. According to him, it would then be possible to serve content faster than real-time — it would take 16 seconds to download an hour's worth of video on a 1 gigabit-per-second connection — which would eliminate strain on service providers and placate consumers seeking videos without jagged images and distorted sound. Or we could all just use BitTorrent.

Name: Vint Cerf
Age: 63
Schtick: Cerf invented the TCP/IP protocol in the 70s, making the Internet possible. He now chairs ICANN, the organization that decides, for instance, when to release a new top-level domain like .biz or .xxx. He's also a VP and "chief internet evangelist" at Google. And the dude knows how to dress, often wearing a well-cut three-piece.
Verdict: All that power makes Cerf seem like a Tolkein-style wizard or the Matrix's Architect. He's badass.

Name: Steve Jobs
Age: 52
Schtick: Apple's founder has always been cooler than the nerdier Bill Gates, but he still had a dorky hairdo and outfit. But how has he held up? Well, in the past decade, he's recaptured his own company, released the slickest looking personal computers and mp3 players, and adopted a casual uniform that copycat nerds try (and fail) to pull off.
Verdict: Okay, he does have an embarrassing love for U2. But that can't stop Steve from earning an overall rating of cool.

Name: Craig Newmark
Age: 54
Schtick: Newmark (who, by the way, looks 45 tops) has gone from being famous for starting Craigslist.org to being famous for not turning it into a billion-dollar business. He and his CEO Jim Buckmaster land in several news stories a year just for not gouging their millions of users for money; Craigslist only collects fees for employer postings and certain real estate ads. Craig represents the live-and-let-live half of San Francisco liberalism without the annoying babysitter-state part.
Verdict: Dig Craig's man-of-the-people flair; he works in Craigslist's unassuming office in SF's remote Sunset District, and he lives in the city's Cole Valley neighborhood where he holds court at the Reverie Cafe among the yuppies and their kids. But most importantly, Craig is the ultimate self-effacer; he likes to compare himself to George Costanza. Craig is subtly cool.

Name: Terry Semel
Age: 64
Schtick: Yahoo's always wanted to go Hollywood, and so has its CEO. Semel tries harder than any other tech exec to look cool, even arm-wrestling with Tom Cruise in front of an audience of his employees. Dude, look how tense Semel is in this admittedly pasted-out-of-context shot! Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whom I've heard is awkward enough himself, reportedly called Semel an embarrassing uncle.
Verdict: Sorry Terry, you've been rejected from the frat. Maybe you can star as the clueless uncle in an Apple Jacks commercial.

Name: Larry Ellison
Age: 62
Schtick: Oracle's founder is married to the lovely and witty (at least at this party I snuck into at the Ellisons' guest house last summer) romance novelist Melanie Craft. (People also allege that he fools around on the side, but we get the feeling Melanie doesn't mind.) The dude looks like the lost brother of Chuck Norris and George "You're gonna like the way you look" Zimmer from Men's Wearhouse. He recently joined his own yachting team; he owns more of Malibu than Mel Gibson. His son's a Hollywood actor. Steve Jobs took the photos at his wedding.
Verdict: As the kids say, dude is peeeyamp!

Name: Geriatric1927
Age: 79
Schtick: Peter Oakley doesn't live in the Valley or run a tech company; he's the most famous elderly person on YouTube. He's posted seventy videos, mostly stories from his long life.
Verdict: Wikipedia says he's been called "the coolest old dude alive." I've no idea who said that, but they were right.

Photos courtesy of Getty Images; photo of Geriatric1927 from Wikipedia. Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag and Look Shiny. Editor Nick Denton pitched this story to Douglas with, "Your best items are written from the perspective of callow youth."

At the Web 2.0 Summit, host John Battelle is moderating a debate between Internet god Vint Cerf (pictured; he invented the main protocol used on the Internet) and Cisco exec and former FCC adviser Bob Pepper over Net Neutrality. Battelle has introduced the debate by explaining how hard it was to find anyone who's against net neutrality.

9:45: Bob Pepper starts. Not to make fun of two older guys, but this looks like a really calm fight between Gandalf and Saruman. Pepper says, "We have this dichotomous false choice: tyranny vs. chaos." Says the government isn't the best entity to help.

9:48: Pepper talks about a broadband consortium that listed rights of Internet users.

"Networks are managed. It's not black-or-white." In other words, the Internet as a network shouldn't be fully regulated or fully chaotic, but managed.

9:51: Vint Cerf: "Let me remind everyone that the Internet's success has been partly because of its architecture." Incidentally, Cerf looks exactly like the Matrix Architect.

Cerf: If there was real choice in broadband, then we wouldn't need regulation. Dial-up was easy to change providers; you just changed the number your computer dialed. Cable and DSL are tougher, someone has to hook you up.

Cerf explains that customers want broadband providers to take advantage of their control over the physical layer of the Internet only to affect services provided by them — if your broadband provider handles your e-mail, you may want them to virus-scan it. You don't want them to touch your webmail and "reach into those packets." Neutrality legislation would extend this principle to outlaw broadband providers throttling speed for content providers.

9:58: Cerf: Three elements of neutrality protection: Competitive action, consumer action, and one I didn't catch.

10:03: Pepper: The best solution is a strong case-by-case approach. One of our best bragging points is that our country doesn't regulate Internet providers like phone companies. We'd lose that by legislating net neutrality, by telling providers how to handle traffic.

Cerf: "I don't think regulation will lead to price control."
Pepper: "Because you've never been a regulator."
Cerf bristles. "I have to disagree...in my current role at ICANN...I am a regulator."

10:06: Pepper uses example of "turbo-zones": video-on-demand service. Lower-bandwidth subscribers could get boosted bandwidth for a few hours, and the content provider paid BellSouth for that extra bandwidth. "It's a double market." In other words, there are cooperative services that would be banned under net neutrality.

Cerf looks uncomfortable, a touch disdainful, but appreciates Pepper's point.

10:12: Cerf: "What it boils down to is focus on a constructive effort." Everyone wants Web 2.0 companies to pursue their goals unimpeded.

That's the end, stay tuned for the next talk.

• Steve Jobs, Apple CEO
• John Chambers, Cisco president and CEO
• Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard prez and CEO
• Hector Ruiz, Advanced Micro Devices chairman and CEO
• Jonathan "Does this ponytail make me look edgy" Schwartz, Sun Microsystems prez and CEO
• Vint "I really invented the Internet" Cerf, Google VP
• Gavin Newsom, San Francisco mayor
• A robot

British prime minister visits with execs in Silicon Valley [Mercury News]
Blair visits Delancey Street cafe, world events a phone call away [SF Chronicle]
Photo: Jobs, Chambers, and Blair try to bite each other at once