I dearly wish I had a screeshot of this, but since I still haven't got the required cable for the Video-In for my TV Tuner card, I wasn't able to even get a snapshotof the offending scene when I saw it. If anyone can find one, I beg of you to post it in here.
Anyway, it was a season 7 episode of Law and Order: SVU. I think the episode title was "Web". About some minor who was making porn of himself and selling it online. Anyway, at one point to go the the "Computer Crimes" division, an they do the typical "Trace the IP Adress!". Of course, whenever they do this in a television show and we get a look at it, the IP address is always impossible for IPv4 (either because they don't want watchers to them bombard a real IP address, or out of ignorance. Take your pick). This normally happens in the form of at least one octet having a value higher than it's maximum possible value.
Now I think I can safely say that we've all seen impossible IP addresses in media before. I remember loudly disclaiming "What the fuck!?" during Big Momma's House 2, when an octet had a value of 258. In an episode of Millennium, an octet had a value of 300-something. But what I saw in this episode was unprecedented. I forget which octet it was (first or last), but it had a value I had never expected to see, even in my wildest dreams. What was the astonishing value of this octet?
3042. You read that right. Three thousand and forty two.
That's right. Normally when they fudge an IP address, it's still the right number of digits. But they went above and beyond.
Sorry if anyone thinks I'm making a big deal out of this, but this just left me flabbergasted. This just wowed me more than nearly any error or mistake I've ever seen. Even possibly more than the infamous "I'll make a GUI Interface in Visual Basic, see if I can trace an IP address".