Scott Parks wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:
 MB> Not below 1024, they're not.  It is the combination of local
 MB> and remote sockets which must be unique.
 SP> Thats what I get for taking my answer from a book rather
 SP> than experience ;)
There is no protocol definition which establishes this, but the tradition of 
the Unix operating system is to allow ports below 1024 to be used only by 
processes which have root privilege.  User processes get high-numbered ports 
starting at 1024 and counting upward.  As a result, the low-numbered ports 
are sometimes referred to as "well known" because they are reserved in the 
standards for specific purposes: port 21 for FTP, port 23 for telnet, port 80 
for HTTP, and so on.  Middling ports, such as 720, are not officially 
assigned the way truly well known low-numbered ports are, but they are still 
privileged on a Unix system and are therefore often used as if they were.
 
-- Mike
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