02 November 2004

Regardless of your political leanings, if you are a <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />US citizen it is your civic duty to get out and vote, so please make sure to take the time today and make it to the polls.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />   If Minneapolis is any indication, allow extra time this year. There are already lines, and there are a lot people doing same-day registration as well.   I realize that we are all autonomous entities (to tie this to SOA). This means we have self-determination and can make our own choices to do or not do things. Just like the entities that make up services.   But self-determination is the secondary definition. Autonomy's primary meaning is self-governance. And if you don't vote today then you are giving up that primary meaning to the rest of America. You are allowing others to choose your future and the future of our nation.   Just think what will happen when SOA becomes reality in our software. We’ll have autonomous entities (the implementation behind a service) deciding whether it wants to do its “civic duty” or not. Because these entities are autonomous, they’ll be programmed with self-determination and self-governance. They can say “no, I don’t feel like waiting in that queue” and just blow off client requests.   For decades our industry has been trying to create software models of the real world. SOA finally acknowledges that software entities need to be autonomous to reflect the real world. Some 40% of US citizens are likely to exercise their autonomy today by choosing to avoid self-governance and to give that responsibility to the rest of us. If 40% of our software entities started exercising their autonomy in a similar fashion I wonder what would happen… The point being that service-oriented design might allow us to model the real world better than procedural or OO or component-based design. But maybe that's not all it is cracked up to be, because real world systems aren't particularly reliable and certainly aren't deterministic... Be a reliable and deterministic autonomous entity - get out and vote!