From: lacos@caesar.elte.hu   
      
   Hi,   
      
   please excuse the naive question:   
      
   It is my superficial understanding that one reason of "running out of free   
   IPv4 addresses" is that the blocks that were issued were in part wasted on   
   the requestor's end, on average, because one could only obtain ranges with   
   powers-of-two element numbers.   
      
   What is the reason that unconstrained ranges (cutting back on waste) did   
   not spread wide? I believe there are efficient (as in, space & time) data   
   structures for the representation of intervals (nested/distinct/etc), and   
   for seeing which intervals contain a given element. I feel the "netmask"   
   concept is completely arbitrary.   
      
   Thank you,   
   lacos   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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