It's conceivable to turn an IP address into a physical location for US
hosts, because whois entries and UUCP maps traditionally contain
street addresses. Outside the US it becomes considerably more difficult.
It's not even obvious for US hosts anymore, though; not everyone from
aol.com is in Reston, Virginia.
This is getting kind of far afield from deschall, though, so I'll
finish by saying that it's interesting to think what a natural
topography for the net is, as opposed to trying to fit it into a
geographical space. There's a nice WWW site on this called The
Geography of Cyberspace
http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/martin/geography_of_cyberspace.html
PS - a couple of interested replies about a loosely coordinated
distributed computation mailing list, and no one saying one exists
already. Do the folks from distributed.net really not have a mailing
list? They have a specific one for RC5, but not a general one With a
clever name maybe I should create one..