From the point of view of most users the internet address is a URL/URI, not an IPv4 or IPv6 sequence of bits.

The fact that some protocols work poorly over NATs is based on architectural aspects that we've known are wrong for years - most particularly the carriage of lower layer addresses within higher layer protocols. SIP, particularly its use of SDP, is an example of this and which is why SIP tends to have trouble with NATs and needs assistance from things like STUN. This may the reason why Skype use so greatly dominates SIP.

HTTP/HTTPS is becoming the new transport. And HTTP/HTTPs anticipates the kind of proxying and relaying that comes as the net evolves into a lumpy world of NATs, firewalls, and application level gateways.

This is a minor nit - ARP cache timeouts are normally on the order of 300 seconds, not two minutes.

A less minor nit is this: IPv6 does not help decrease the size of routing tables as seen by major providers. Nor does IPv6 reduce the burden of sending routing updates so that routing updates are propagated faster than the underlying rate of change of usable net paths. (Enterprise subnets, whether IPv4 or IPv6, don't generally propagate into the routing announcements as seen by the big carriers.)

The compelling argument, for me at least, is that IPv6 is really a new internet that runs along side of the existing IPv4 net - there is no direct interoperability. This means that pretty much any new expansion of the net is going to require IPv4 connectivity, and IPv4 addresses, to reach the legacy net. And that makes IPv6 redundant from the user's point of view. That sort of drains the oil out of the IPv6 crankcase.

Of course the biggest argument of all is that IPv6 does not solve the hard issues of propagating routing information and finding usable paths across the net, particularly as the demands of human-conversational traffic and the political acts of nations are (unfortunately) driving routing to become increasingly aware of the types of traffic being routed.

I'm waiting to be shown that I'm wrong - I helped do the very first calculation of IPv4 address consumption back in the mid 1980's. And I was in the group at Sun back in the very early 1990's where IPv6 took form. I spent time at Cisco wrestling with questions like how to efficiently mechanize 128-bit longest-prefix matching on 32 and 64 bit hardware. And my company currently has IPv6 testing products. So I've been watching IPv6 for what will soon be two decades.

To me one of the tilt-points of IPv6 will be when I can go into Frys Electronics and find IPv6 capable print servers and other widgets of that ilk on the shelves.

I saw ISO/OSI come and go (I was rather a fan of TUBA - which included the use of ISO/OSI CLNP for the new IP layer - when the various IPv4 alternatives were being considered in the early 1990's.) It would not surprise me to see IPv6 go the way of ISO/OSI.

Google blurred the satellite photo of the US Naval observatory in DC, a public building, in order to protect VP Cheney.

If Google is willing to protect the privacy of a public figure than it ought to be even more protective of the privacy of a private homeowner by burring a photo taken while being a non-invited intruder on that homeowner's own property.

As I read it Google was trespassing on private property and took photos while on that private property. The court says it is OK for Google to keep the photos.

OK, suppose now that I just happen to wander into Google 's offices in Mountain View while a receptionist is in the bathroom and go into the building and take photos of Google's stuff.

I guess under this ruling I would get to keep my photos?

I've had Motorola phones that have a micro USB connector but refuse to accept a charge from anything except a Motorola charger.

I would hope that this agreement to use USB goes further than simply adopting the physical connector.

It should be possible to attach to any convenient USB plug - without benefit of drivers - and recharge a phone.

There is a strong chance that many of the claims in these patents have predecessors in the Capability Based operating systems of the 1970's.

Check out the Intel 432 architecture.

Check out IBM's "SWORD" project.

Check out UCLA Data Secure Unix.

Check out the Plessy capability systems from that period.

SRI did a lot of work in this area as well. And so did we at System Development Corp. (SDC).

The idea of a capability is a descriptor that defines access rights in an extensible manner - for example one can say that the disk driver can't deal with tape hardware or that a text editor can only do certain things to a particular SQL database.

The person made his request under FOIA. That was not the best vehicle for this.

A much better law to use to get information about yourself is the Privacy Act.

The two laws have confusingly similar numbers: 5 USC 552 for FOIA and 5 USC 552a for the Privacy Act.

The Privacy Act is a much bigger hammer for getting information about yourself. Agencies have many fewer excuses and the deadlines are far shorter. And agencies generally can't make you pay for you to get their information about you.

Yes, the Privacy Act has many loopholes, but they are much fewer than those in FOIA.

So, if people are going to do this they should make sure that they make their request under the Privacy Act. They can still use FOIA, but they should do so under a separate cover because the agencies will intentionally conflate the two laws so that they can avoid fully complying with either.

See: http://www.cavebear.com/archive/nsf-dns/laws.htm