in reply to Bitwise & with large numbers

Others have given explanation, but I thought that I'd add that Math::BigInt will give the answer that you desire
perl -MMath::BigInt -le ' $i=new Math::BigInt "4294967296"; $j=new Math::BigInt "4294967295"; print $i->as_hex(); print $j->as_hex(); print $i->band($j)->as_hex()'
0x100000000 0xffffffff 0x0