Yes, but practically it means on average once every x years as the darned things just die off. X is a known statistic for every ISP. It's how they budget equipment replacement costs. Over the span of a decade, it happens to just about everyone.

It's not going to happen. The US military is going to cut off any ISP that doesn't support IPv6 by, at latest 2011. Military paid for contracts to AT&T, Comcast et al are going to ensure that their off base officers are going to get IPv6. Once you've rolled that out engineering-wise, there's no way that people will stand for it being a military only facility. It just won't fly.

Aw, poor babies don't have a sufficient buffer in their wetware to manage an IPv6 address. They're going to have to write them down.

Cry me a river.

The requirement to remember IPv6 addresses is just going to make for geeks that can do more math in their heads. I don't necessarily see that as a negative.

I'm in an Indiana suburb of Chicago and I've got 3 residential options, not counting satellite. AT&T, Comcast, and Airbaud, a local point to point radio provider.

Actually, the free market means that you hear about this sort of thing and then you never, ever use verizon and laugh at the people who do.

The demographers are busy adjusting population growth estimates downward. There is no population bomb. We're very much more likely to hit a problem of birth dearth. Japan, Russia, China, these guys are in huge trouble.

So I should come over to, say, Ireland with my Romanian passport and expect to be able to land a job without a special work permit? The BBC had a story earlier this year on labor mobility restrictions that exist even inside the EU (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3513889.stm)

Welfare limits are being eroded by legislatures across the country. It no longer makes sense to talk about monolithic limits. They vary widely by state.

The government crowds out private solutions. It always has. Once it has crowded those private solutions out, statists announce that only government can do that function. In fact, human ingenuity has found private solutions to problems that in the past were deemed only solvable by the government. The area where government is the only solution should shrink over time as we don't forget past solutions and each generation has its own geniuses who find new private solutions for problem. But it seems like government tends to grow over time. I wonder why that is?

No, we couldn't pay for healthcare because the proposals up for consideration right now are a sinkhole for funds. No amount of money will make them work as they will goose medical inflation just as medicare did.

Social Security and Medicare are somewhat monolithic. The DoD is not. You can be a hawk and want to cut certain items out of the DoD. Look at SecDef Rumsfeld and his quest to kill off the Crusader artillery system

All the more reason to create applications clearly illustrating exactly how screwed they are.

K-12 education is generally not subject to a lot of updates and thus would be a better field, I think than college texts. But we don't pay for those textbooks directly, the costs are buried in our property tax bill in the US (where 1/3 of the whole bill often goes to primary/secondary education, the largest single chunk). That doesn't mean that we aren't paying, every year, for the textbook mafia's current stranglehold.

Open source can have meaning in the matter of textbooks though it's not clear from what I've read so far that actual open source is what they're doing. If you have a chart, for instance, an open source textbook will make available the underlying table of figures used to create that chart. A public domain textbook probably won't. A public domain textbook might be scanned from the original paper or might just be paper but an open source textbook will include the source files needed to build the author intended rendering of the book and will allow for superior use by the disabled for instance. I'm not entirely sure how you'd have an open source printed textbook. It would seem to be somewhat useless.

Stop trying to rehabilitate a bloody, failed ideology. The economics of abundance (sharing on the net where copying costs are virtually zero) are not the same as socialism because, like capitalism, socialism is an attempt to manage the economics of scarcity, a task at which it fails miserably. Capitalism does much better at managing the economics of scarcity and has a few interesting things to say about the economics of abundance but we really are in poorly charted waters. Abundance is simply not that common a condition so there's a lot of work that needs to be done to extend what we know about economics to this heretofore uncommon state (take a look at ESR's discussion of potlatch societies in the Pacific NW for an old style abundance society).

It's much more productive to take Adam Smith's concepts of benevolence, generosity, and charity (see his Theory of Moral Sentiments) as a starting point for abundance economics, not least because it lets you create a wider view of functional economics both on the scarcity and abundance sides.