Isn't "turning right" the main political theme across the world now? It's not just France.
But I will still put a disclaimer here that I am not French, just sharing my view since it seemed to be that most countries including mine are, ultimately, having the same problem. Feel free to correct me! Here goes:
I think, the general reason for this right-wing surge ultimately boils down to economics. People are obviously not satisfied with their current quality of life - see e.g. housing prices. Many blame it on things such as outside migrations or the geopolitical enemy of their country, etc etc. This is a hotbed for conservative-leaning mindsets.
Those factors I mentioned could have played a hand in this problem, but my opinion is that the biggest issue lies in unequal wealth distribution across the globe. That's why the GDP is growing, but people's standard of living (except for a minor few) is not. People directed their unhappiness at the wrong thing.
This is why I try my damnedest not to write in weakly typed languages.
string + object makes no logical sense, but the language will be like "'no biggie, you probably meant string + string so let's convert the object to string"! And so all hell breaks loose when the language's assumption is wrong.
I have a 64-bit computer, it can address up to 18.4 exabytes, but my computer only has 32GB, so I will never use the vast majority that address space. Am I "wasting" it?
You are using the addressing bits in the form of virtual memory. Right now. Unless you run a unikernel system, then in that case you could be right, but I doubt it.
Anyway, this is apples and oranges. IP addresses are hierarchical by design (so you have subnets of subnets of subnets of ...), memory addresses are flat for the most part, minus some x86 shenanigans.
Yes they are all "used" but you don't need them. We are not using 2^128 ip addresses in the world.
But we do need them! The last 64 bits of your IPv6 addresses are randomized for privacy purposes, it's either that or your MAC address is used for them. We may not be using those addresses simultaneously but they certainly are used.
Despite that, there still are plenty of empty spaces in IPv6, that's true. But they will still be used in the future should the opportunity arise. Any "wastage" is artificial, not a built-in deficiency of the protocol. Whereas if we restricted the space to 40 bits, there will be 24 bits wasted forever no matter how.
You're not "wasting" them if you just don't need the extra bits
We are talking about addresses, not counters. An inherently hierarchical one at that (i.e. it goes from top to bottom using up all bits). If you don't use the bits you are actually wasting them.
you can gradually make the other bits available in the form of more octets
So why didn't we make other bits available for IPv4 gradually? Yeah, same issue as that: Forwards compatibility. If you meant that this "IPv5" standard should specify compulsory 64-bit support from the very beginning, then why are you arbitrarily restricting the use of some bits in the first place?
If you're worried about wasting registers it makes even less sense to switch from a 32-bit addressing space to a 128-bit one in one go
Every time there's a "just add an extra octet" argument, I feel some people are completely clueless about how hardware works.
Most hardware comes with 32-bit or 64-bit registers. (Recall that IPv6 came out just a year before the Nintendo 64.) By adding only an extra octet, thus having 40 bits for addressing, you are wasting 24 bits of a 64-bit register. Or wasting 24 bits of a 32-bit register pair. Either way, this is inefficient.
And there's also the fact that the modern internet is actually reaching the upper limits of a hypothetical 64-bit IPv5: https://lemmy.world/comment/10727792. Do we want to spend yet another two decades just to transition to a newer protocol?
Oh come on, are you seriously suggesting that default-deny stateful firewall is not the norm??
Holy. Fucking. Shit. Indeed.
You keep on suggesting to me that you really have no idea how networking works. (Which is par on course for people thinking NAT == security, but I digress)
Let me tell you: All. Modern. Routers. include a stateful firewall. If it supports NAT, it must support stateful firewalling. To Linux at least, NAT is just a special kind of firewall rule called masquerade. Disregarding routers, even your computer whether Linux (netfilter) or Windows (Windows Firewall) comes built-in with a stateful firewall.
How is this "dropping packets" not applicable to firewalls, then? You are not just going to casually connect to my IPv6 device as we're speaking. The default-deny firewall in my router does the heavy lifting... just like what NAT did.
Honestly, it just sounds like you need to brush up on networking knowledge. Repeat after me: NAT is not security.