latin & greek, literacy and numeracy, and the rest

so i suppose that geo. Bush is unaware
that when he counts
(e.g. votes, or American soldiers dead in Iraq)
he is using arabic numerals

just a bit ironic, in the style of the amusing San Quayle mis-speak
when touring central and south America, and apologizing that he
did'nt speak their language as he'd never studied Latin...

such is the stuff that Empires fall by

oh, gimme a break - back to xkcd

"but what has this got to do with the Internet?", I hear you cry.

Well once upon a time (true story) they we renumbering the telephone numbers
for london (once again, around the same time that they were
re-opening the shipyards, once again)
and a women wrote to the times and pointed out
that if only they'd kept the old dial phones
with letters and numbers on,
then 7 digits would have able to address
36^7, rather than just 10^7 phones

So if only we'd kept using those old IBM denary computers,
then the 32 digits in an IPv4 address
would let us reach 10^32 hosts. Easy as ABC :-) :-) :)

Of course, with our new
Sourceless Network Architecture, we will save the world. Well, ok, the Internet.
Well, ok, the NATted bits of the Internet. Well, ok, only if we can persuade several thousand geeks in the IETF to care. Well, ok, only if Microsoft and Cisco do it.

Oh, ok....what was that, I hear you cry?