ISP Information:
A term that refers to a group of TCP/IP addresses defined by a subnet mask. A subnet mask determines how many addresses are in the same subnet as a particular TCP/IP address. Addresses in your subnet are reachable without going through a router, and thus can be reached by broadcasts. To reach addresses outside of a particular subnet you must transmit through a router. This is all part of the TCP/IP protocol.
ISP Glossary:
Subnet - http://comment.silicon.com/0,39024711,39122623,00.htmby Declan McCullaghIf the US Congress has its way, yes ...New US legislation would require businesses to pay taxes for offeringinternet chat and collaboration -- even if they're located outside theUS. CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh asks: Does the government haveany right to do this?Tiago Bittencourt Silva started an ambitious programming project lastmonth: an open-source utility that lets small groups of internet userscommunicate through instant messages, video links and audio chat.Silva's project, called p2pCommunity, is designed to appeal to groupsof 2 to 100 people who want to collaborate on writing papers ordesigning software applications. He's already made a pre-alpha releaseavailable at no cost on the SourceForge distribution site.Thanks to a bizarre move by the US Congress last week, p2pCommunityand hundreds of similar projects could end up paying taxes to stategovernments to prop up the antediluvian scheme of running copper wiresto rural households for analog phone service.Existing law imposes those taxes on cellular and landline customers tosubsidize rural customers, and state officials are hungrily eyeing theinternet as a rich additional source of untapped revenue."Open-source software like mine can't pay any taxes, so the audio chatfeatures of the program may need to be taken off of the program, orthe users will need to pay the tax to use it," Silva says.It's not clear why programmers like Silva and companies offeringcommercial voice software must subsidize rural telephone companies. Bythat logic, Congress should have forced Henry Ford to pay for horsetroughs. It should have also extorted cash from laser printermanufacturers on behalf of the dying manual-typewriter industry.Full story at:http://comment.silicon.com/0,39024711,39122623,00.htm
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