>You could give an IP address to everything that uses electricity and have plenty left over.
2^64 is about 18.4 quadrillion (billion billion). The Earths population is almost 6 billion that leaves about 3 billion IP adresses per person.
One thing to be carefull of is that we dont begin to be wastefull. The current system gives 2^32 addresses or about 4.3 billion. That was more than the population of the earth at the time and was thought to be more than enough. We can run into problems when we have distributed to many IPs thirty years from now. I don't think that we will have 3 billion devices per person but if we don't recycle and begin giving pagers and cell phones IPs (good idea) we need to be carefull not to distribute them in too large chunks. We cant give each device the equivalent of a modern class C. If each pager has 256 IP adreses (say for internal comunication between diferent ICs), then a paging service with 65,000 customers could be using 4.3 billion IP's for the pagers and the towers. This is tiny compared to how many total IPs there are but you can see how it could get out of hand.
Unfortunatly that's not how government regulation will work. Any plan pu tinto affect by the government will help big super-companies and hurt startups and free software. First anyone who wants to distribute software will need a license under your plan. How easy do you tink it will be for you to get a license as a private individual and moreover how much do you think certifcation will cost? The software industry was built by hackers programing in their garages regulatory legislation would make this all but illegal. There are many historic examples of regulation hurting the little guy and the consumer.
The Sherman anti-trust act was created to protect the consumer against illegal monopolies. In actuality the law was used to have police break strikes and effectivly outlawed laybor unions. Also think about effect of telephone regulation that we are just now abolishing.
I personaly believe that such regulation is unconstitutional. We would be giving the govenment authority over which software can be published an which cannot. If you believe as I do that software is a form of expresion, like speech, then you must agree that this would violate the first ammendment.
Finaly, cost. A $1,000 or even a $10,000 regestration fee would not slow prodution of buggy MS software but immagine trying to release a new open source program with that kind of overhead. For those of you who don't belive that it would be this much, consider how much a pattent application costs. This regulation would require the governmen to beta test software.
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What happened to IPv5?
>You could give an IP address to everything that uses electricity and have plenty left over.
2^64 is about 18.4 quadrillion (billion billion). The Earths population is almost 6 billion that leaves about 3 billion IP adresses per person.
One thing to be carefull of is that we dont begin to be wastefull. The current system gives 2^32 addresses or about 4.3 billion. That was more than the population of the earth at the time and was thought to be more than enough. We can run into problems when we have distributed to many IPs thirty years from now. I don't think that we will have 3 billion devices per person but if we don't recycle and begin giving pagers and cell phones IPs (good idea) we need to be carefull not to distribute them in too large chunks. We cant give each device the equivalent of a modern class C. If each pager has 256 IP adreses (say for internal comunication between diferent ICs), then a paging service with 65,000 customers could be using 4.3 billion IP's for the pagers and the towers. This is tiny compared to how many total IPs there are but you can see how it could get out of hand.
Unfortunatly that's not how government regulation will work. Any plan pu tinto affect by the government will help big super-companies and hurt startups and free software. First anyone who wants to distribute software will need a license under your plan. How easy do you tink it will be for you to get a license as a private individual and moreover how much do you think certifcation will cost? The software industry was built by hackers programing in their garages regulatory legislation would make this all but illegal. There are many historic examples of regulation hurting the little guy and the consumer.
The Sherman anti-trust act was created to protect the consumer against illegal monopolies. In actuality the law was used to have police break strikes and effectivly outlawed laybor unions. Also think about effect of telephone regulation that we are just now abolishing.
I personaly believe that such regulation is unconstitutional. We would be giving the govenment authority over which software can be published an which cannot. If you believe as I do that software is a form of expresion, like speech, then you must agree that this would violate the first ammendment.
Finaly, cost. A $1,000 or even a $10,000 regestration fee would not slow prodution of buggy MS software but immagine trying to release a new open source program with that kind of overhead. For those of you who don't belive that it would be this much, consider how much a pattent application costs. This regulation would require the governmen to beta test software.