Even if your argument held water (which I don't think it does in a properly managed network), it seems rather silly to trade global end-to-end connectivity and other IPv6 niceties such as autoconfiguration for the convenience of being able to memorize network addresses or pass them over the phone.

The grandparent is not talking about static addresses, he/she is talking about public addresses which are not the same thing.

Except that in this case you are creating a market to deal with artificial scarcity, which is just plain evil. Remember, there is no physical reason for there being only 2^32 addresses. Only the completely accidental fact that someone picked the number 32 some decades ago.

And how is this any different from IPv4, where the residence gets a public address from the ISP? Unless your ISP is using carrier-grade NAT, that is.

I believe the reason the host part has so many bits does not have to do with expected subnet size, but rather serves to ensure the probability that two autoconfiguring hosts coincidentally choose the same address is kept low.

Try reading what I said again.

I never said that the embassy guards do not have the authority to retaliate. I'm just contesting the notion that the actions of independent citizens translate as a formal declaration by their nation state. The United States, of course, are free to interpret such an attack as an act of war and declare war on Libya; but to say that Libya have declared war on the United States when the embassy was attacked flies in the face of international laws and conventions.

citizens of Libya technically declared war on the US.

Citizens do not declare war. States do.

Are you suggesting that, if a bunch of Americans vandalized a foreign embassy on US soil, that shold technically count as a declaration of war on that country by the United States of America?

And that was precisely my point.

A bit late in the discussion, but still. I have it you never implemented a TCP/IP stack on a barely capable embedded device, or you would understand why I call v6 a full bloat protocol rewrite.

Indeed, I haven't. I take it you have. Could you elaborate? Is the bloat due to having to support a dual stack on a tiny device, or are there concrete features/quirks in IPv6 that are difficult to implement in a constrained device? Pointers would be okay; I searched the web but nothing terribly relevant turned up.

You're right, but no solution is perfect. In this case I would be totally supportive if governments forced ISPs to deploy IPv6, but I would really like their involvement to end right there. It's complicated, I know.

Geez, why would you set up a market over such a resource as Internet addresses, which are scarce only by accident (i.e., the fact that someone chose the number 32 sometime in the past) and not by sheer necessity? I can understand a market as a way to efficiently allocate resources in the face of scarcity, but artificial scarcity is just evil.

Here's a hint: maybe not all problems in the world can be solved efficiently by a free market. Maybe in some cases you need some kind of external intervention to make sure the difficult decisions are made...

It becomes particularly not-so-funny when you have to constantly make the distinction between American and European billions (as is the case e.g. with money). If everyone agreed on using the giga and tera prefixes, that would never be a problem.

Well the speed of light can be measured fairly precisely

Actually, the speed of light is not the result of a measurement, because the meter is defined in terms of the speed of light. The speed of light, by definition, is always 299,792,458 metres per second.