"NEW YORK - Two jets came within 1,500 feet of each other on the same runway at Kennedy Airport this week after a mix-up caused by a shared flight number, federal aviation officials said.Sounds to me as if someone up in the tower needs to review our lesson on dependent relationships and inherited identifiers!Because Delta and American airlines jets each had the same flight number, Delta's Flight 153 mistakenly believed it had clearance for takeoff, when the clearance was actually meant for American's Flight 153 ..."
This is exactly what has been happening the last few days in the Northeastern U.S. as terrible weather has closeted all those eager knowledge workers home alone with their faxes, modems, and ISDN devices. Just like Christmas downtown when I was a kid. You couldn't edge sideways through Macy's; loosely held packages were liable to get jostled to the floor and trompled. Likewise all those packets on the net are blocked at the gate or timed out for lack of capacity.
Well, two things are constant. We humans always overestimate our willingness to adopt a new idea (the Internet is over 20 years old and so is the personal computer) and underestimate the rate of change once we get down to it (ISDN is too slow, even before it's widely available). Do you really want to bet that operating systems are dead and the net is everything?