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The United States owns 74 percent of the 4 billion available Internet protocol (IP) addresses. China's stake amounts to little more than that of an American university. Not surprisingly, China is championing the next wave of the Internet, which would accommodate 340 trillion trillion trillion IP addresses.

But there is this little tiny problem. Mandarin Chinese, one of so many Chinese dialects, has over 64,000 pictograms, not letters as in the English 26. It is highly inconvenient to deal with Chinese pictograms, particularly when you're typing on a keyboard.

Welcome to the world of the round-eyed.

Welcome to the world of the round-eyed.

Remember back in the 80's when terminals displayed eighty columns of text in a fixed format? I visited Japan in the early nineties and saw them using high resolution monitors and fancy text editors that supplied "kanji" ( literally "chinese writing" ) when you typed in phonetics. It occurred to me that the proliferation of hi-res monitors got a big push from this usage.

Recall that in the sixties people were predicting that the Chinese and Japanese would have to adopt an alphabet so that they could use typewriters. Word processing with kanji is still not the most convenient, but its good enough to extinguish the talk of abandoning it.

"Mandarin Chinese, one of so many Chinese dialects, has over 64,000 pictograms,"

That's a 16 bit value per character (65,536 different combinations)... that should represent all of them :)!

"Not surprisingly, China is championing the next wave of the Internet, which would accommodate 340 trillion trillion trillion IP addresses."

This is probably IPv6 they are referring to...I can see the day where packets are always taxed with more header than data :). What's sick is that typically packets sent are IP wrapping TCP wrapping Ethernet...lots of overhead :)! (no, I don't have a better solution...I just like to complain :) :) I always liked ATM more ).

I know there are many different ways of doing what's described above, but it's funny how things are taxed more as they grow. Of course, if you grow the packet payload size, the tax rate of packet header decreases (i.e. you accomplish the same thing with lower taxes)....of course, with Dems in charge, they will probably push for a 64 byte payload limit to keep the internet fair for all to use resulting in a substantial packet header tax increase....I mean, it is not fair that some applications use payloads of 1500 bytes while others are restricted to 64 byte payloads.

eh, I am tired...long day...cannot think straight :P