Duration 11 years (02011-02022)
STAKES $1,000
will go to Bletchly Park Trust if Keith wins,
or The Internet Archive if Haughey wins.
Keith's Argument
"Cool URIs don't change" wrote Tim Berners-Lee in 01999, but link rot is the entropy of the web. The probability of a web document surviving in its original location decreases greatly over time. I suspect that even a relatively short time period (eleven years) is too long for a resource to survive.
I would love to be proven wrong.
Haughey's Argument
Though much of the web is ephemeral in nature, now that we have surpassed the 20 year mark since the web was created and gone through several booms and busts, technology and strategies have matured to the point where keeping a site going with a stable URI system is within reach of anyone with moderate technological knowledge. My oldest sites are going on 13 years old at the time of this bet and the original URL scheme still functions via 301 redirects to a final format we selected about six years ago.
Detailed Terms
On February 22nd, 2022 from 00:01 UTC until 23:59 UTC,
entering the characters http://www.longbets.org/601 into the address bar of a web browser or command line tool (like curl)
OR
using a web browser to follow a hyperlink that points to http://www.longbets.org/601
MUST
return an HTML document that still contains the following text: "The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years."
A 301 redirect from www.longbets.org/601 to a different URL containing that text would also fulfill those conditions.
If those conditions are met, Matt wins.
If those conditions aren't met, Jeremy wins.