[ppml] Policy Proposal: Decreasing Exponential Rationing ofIPv4 IP Addresses

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> So, now ARIN can't do math?

Sorry but no. ARIN is a corporation and last time I looked, corporations
can't do math. Only people with an education in mathematics can do math.
And since this is the ARIN *PUBLIC* policy mailing list, where a
mathematics education is *NOT* a prerequisite, math is rather out of
place.

> How do you competently and credibly claim to be able to do 
> network engineering without mathematical formulas?

I never claimed that. And I haven't any idea what network engineering
has to do with ARIN or its policies. The ARIN policy book is intended to
guide ARIN staff on dealing with number resource management, which is a
fancy term for keeping track of lists of unique numbers. In general,
policies of any sort, from federal laws down to the rules of the local
poodle owners club, are best expressed in plain English. 

A while back, I proposed an ARIN policy that involved logarithms. If you
want to look at how I did this, it is in ARIN's archive here
http://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/2004_2.html
Note that I didn't talk about "factors" but I did quote actual numbers.
I never said / but I did say "divided by".  And down at the bottom of
that page is a link to another page with a table showing the actual
numbers resulting from some sample calculations, a spreadsheet you could
play with to examine the results of fiddling with the numbers, and a
slide presentation with charts to display graphically just what it means
to divide two logarithms.

I didn't talk about picking a function from the family of e^(-x). In
fact, I'm not really sure what that means altough I suspect that my old
proposal may actually be a function in that family, or at least a
cousin, if nothing else.

>  I'd 
> suppose you were joking, but indeed there are those who 
> subscribe to Faith-based network engineering, and prefer 
> Intelligent Design over Evolution.

Actually, I prefer evolution of ARIN policy which is why I generally
oppose all these intelligent designs to make the IPv4 endgame somehow
better. And don't knock faith-based network engineering. If you
understood the statistics you would realize that overprovisioning a
network and praying is likely to produce a better quality network than
piling heaps of intelligent design work and close monitoring systems and
layer-2 switching into the mix.

But that's not any business of ARIN policymakers, is it?

--Michael Dillon