The problem I've experienced, is that I have an iPad using iMessage, and had an iPhone.
My phone number was attached to my iMessage account.
Once I no longer had an iPhone, anyone who previously sent me texts via iMessage (my phone number was still attached) went to my iPad. It's partially my fault for never using it, but it weighs approximately 35kg and feels like trying to hold my 46 inch TV in my hands. Though it is bloody beautiful.
Anyway, the message didn't fail, because it was successfully delivered (doh). It's not quite a bit bucket, but given my non-use of my iPad (and failure to turn the damn thing off), it may as well have been a bit bucket.
I had to disassociate my phone number from my iMessage account, which I could fortunately do from my iPad once the problem was identified.

This is actually somewhat stupid behavior, but I see little way around it other than notifying people that they must manually remove their phone number from their iMessage account if they switch to a non-iMessage phone.

No- it's not progress in that regard, and I absolutely agree with your idealism. I LOL at its disconnect from reality, though.

I'm a senior network engineer at a regional ISP who runs 5 colocation datacenters and connects approximately 10,000 residential customers, at speeds from DSL to gigabit fiber. We also believe in the earlier spirit of the internet, and as such, we don't limit serving from residential lines or block ports. A significant portion of my life is protecting my network from those people who are serving and infected. In a perfect world where perhaps security had been a basic underpinning of network protocols, that idealism could have come to fruition, but not this one.

This made me LOL really hard. Thank you.

There is most certainly value in some property of post-child rearing folk (grandparents?), otherwise natural selection would not have seen fit to suffer our relatively long life spans in relation to our metabolism and fertility age. I think evolution hasn't had time to account for the trend of young parents not being so close to their own parents. I also think that will change with time- our species will become better at having offspring later in life as it becomes less common to be very close to your extended family in our societies.

I couldn't agree more.
A lot of fault falls upon ISPs for not deeming their engineers salary worth wasting on hashing out standards.

Intelligence has little to do with not fully-thought out design.
Also, your refusal to believe is you taking a gut feeling on blind faith. I'm a professional in the field, implementing the specs on real networks with thousands of customers.
It is not uncommon for customer bases to be on shared broadcast medium. Currently existing network hardware in the small-to-midsize ISP range doesn't support the filtering of router advertisements from customers that is required for network stability. DHCPv6 is rife with bandaids and workarounds to make its functionality anywhere close to as operational as DHCPv4. (and still requires multicast router advertisements in conjunction).
Speaking from experience, getting IPv6 to work with customer premises equipment was far harder than setting up a shadow IPv6 network throughout our core, running Vyatta.
For extra credit, set yourself up a router with a SIT tunnel, enable DHCP-PD/IA/NA and SLAAC on it, and then try to make those PD leases useful on a network consisting of dozens of routers held together with dynamic routing protocols. Could just be i'm not "very smart people". Or you could google for all the problems ISPs are facing in the IPv6 front, and not scoff at them like an arm-chair network engineer. ;)

He's actually not the retard, he's informed. Money need not come from a fiscal year budget act. A great example is the $1.4T deficit of FY2008. The budget as passed had a $400B deficit between outlays and projected receipts. TARP and the ARRA were both passed after the FY2008 budget was passed, making them "off-budget", giving us a total deficit of 800B. Then, outlays came up $800B short of the amount projected on the budget. This was actually a systemic issue during Bush. Many budgets were passed with vastly optimistic receipt projections, making their budgeted deficits artificially low. It seems common for people to use absolute dollars when trying to hammer on Obama for the deficit, and then reducing it to mere percentages when talking about the reduction in the deficit that has occurred since FY2008. To put it in absolute dollars, the deficit today is $700B less than it was the year he took office, or said another way- Obama has presided over the largest spending reduction in US history. That's of course a slanted viewpoint, but so is the one being peddled trying to make him appear to be a spend-monger.

It's not a superior solution. I'm a senior network engineer at a local ISP. Our infrastructure is IPv4 and IPv6, with a chunk of fiber customers running on CGNAT. We're not even that big, but equipment that can route IPv6 with line-speed forwarding throughout the core and distribution side of the network (as well as supporting the dynamic routing protocols necessary to manage the network) is fantastically more expensive than either purchasing a CGNAT setup, or building one out of Linux (our solution). I can't even imagine the cost for someone with a large network.

That doesn't even get to the myriad of major problems with customer-facing IPv6. The specification with regard to deployment is frankly garbage (the people who wrote the spec[s] clearly had little background in actual customer distribution networks). We couldn't be more eager to get every single one of our customers running on it, especially given how quickly our ARIN allocations are drying up, and the unlikeliness of people our sized being able to acquire more, short of acquiring the blocks of ISPs that we purchase.

I think it's really easy for a lot of arm-chair network engineers to scoff at the speed of the ISP-side IPv6 roll-out, but the costs and technical limitations of the spec, which have required many bandaids and workarounds just to make function in a way that could even remotely be called reliable for residential customers, scales with the size and diversity of our customer base. It's a bitch.

With the exception of Plex, that plays content locally. Www.plexapp.com

Alright. Looks like I need to drop the HTC Sense keyboard.. lol.

Chromecast is pretty great, but as it is merely an extension on the pc/mac within chrome all you can do is view a single tab of the browser, or use one of the services. I'm not concerned with broadcasting my entire desktop or laptop environment to my tbs, I just want access to all of my tvs, movies and music in he. With plex media server and plex apps, I now have easy, user friendly access to all my media on my tvs or other devices (cell, tablet, and my roommates can access my media content on their devices as well).