There have been suggestions that if this leak had happened in the Arctic, it could have an environmental impact for centuries, quite apart from being a lot more difficult to fix. I was wondering how the environmental impact compares with nuclear accidents. As a child, I remember reading of the Windscale leak poisoning pastures with radioactive iodine, so that a month's milk was thrown away. The Deepwater Horizon leak has already closed down shrimping and other fisheries for an extended period, with no end in sight.
Chernobyl, as I recall, has turned into a kind of wildlife refuge (disappointing legions of Farside fans with an absence of 3-eyed deer and size-legged wolves)

The practice of using a single privileged account for everything - banking, reading slashdot, downloading porn - may be doomed, and about time too. But I still think there's hope for using a single piece of hardware and a single network. Even if it comes down to using not just separate accounts, but separate cores, for play and work. Last time I looked (a while back) some CPU manufacturers were adding features for process separation but the OS had not yet implemented support. End-to-end encryption should protect your data in transit, if not your usage pattern, though there a a few things to fix in SSL implementations to prevent MITM.

I saw a documentary a while ago about a plane flying through an ash cloud at night over the Andes - all 4 engines quit. There was also abrasion of
the windshield as I recall, plus electrical discharges around the plane that probably affected radio communications.
Several media articles have explained the effects of ash on jet engines, and it seemed prudent not to fly following the volcano eruption. There were initially no standards on safe levels from the engine manufacturers, so zero tolerance as a first response was sensible. Later, some testing was done, and measurements of ash density determined that some airspace could be opened. The last report I read said that planes were flying but engines were being inspected before and after every flight. One might argue that the tests should have been done sooner.

Adobe Acrobat will do some of this, if not all. It does not require a central document repository and works across platforms - at least, as I recall, documents can be signed and verified on Linux though must at present be created in Distiller on Windows. As PDF is a somewhat open standard there is at least the possibility of other tools supporting the digital signatures.
A document may have multiple signatures placed in the document body in a natural way - i.e. where you might have an ink signature box. You need a certificate authority of your own to issue certificates to signers - after all, anyone can get a Verisign certificate, and who's to say that Joe Bloggs, even he is the real Joe with passport to prove it, can sign off on your reactor design ?
There are some options to set when the document is created that control whether it can be signed by the free cross-platform reader or only by the paid-for Distiller.
Drawbacks vs. GPG digital signatures - only works on PDF files, must be created on Windows.
Advantages - natural signing/verification mechanism built into the reader.

what's this "You failed to confirm you are a human. Please start from the beginning and try again. If you are a human, we apologize for the inconvenience" thing ?

So, reading this backwards, I presume we need new cable modems for native IPv6 support ?
And if Comcast's doing a trial, I guess they are in production somewhere.

From a presentation by Tata Communications: "the promises of IPv6"
Restores p2p communication
Mobility
  * Much easier roaming
  * Better spectrum utilization
  * Better battery life!
Security
  * IPsec mandatory
Multicast
Better QoS (flow labels)
Auto configuration
  * Mobile Ad-Hoc networking
  * Mobile networks
  * Sensor networks
  * Plug and Play networks
Permanent addresses
  * Identity (CLID)
  * Traceability (RFID)
  * Addressability!
  * IP address based billing

But yes, staying in business. Even if you have enough IPv4 to last you for years, you will start to find new services and businesses that you can't use, or can't get to without going through some kind of tunnel/proxy

Request IPv6 records only:
bash-3.2$ host -t aaaa ipv6.google.com
ipv6.google.com is an alias for ipv6.l.google.com.
ipv6.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2001:4860:800b::67
ipv6.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2001:4860:800b::68

bash-3.2$ traceroute6 ipv6.google.com
  doesn't work from here :-( no tunnel set up

It's not Google restricting the use, it's the .org registrar. I just happened to choose google.org as an example. Whois was never designed as a general search engine, and it seems reasonable to me that the operators can throttle access to their service if that allows it to continue to run for free. If they did not, the service would crash or the pipe saturate under the load of spammers looking for email addresses, and then everyone would complain that whois was broken and stop using it.

Well, yes. But I quote, from jwhois google.org: "..under no circumstances will you use this data to..enable high volume, automated, electronic processes that send queries or data to the systems of Registry Operator or any ICANN-Accredited Registrar, except as reasonably necessary to register domain names or modify existing registrations." I have an idea I had seen one whois server apply throttling, and not return more than N responses/hour. I forget the value of N.

Whois providers get pissed off if you start making millions of queries. I used to analyse logs with thousands of entries, and carefully cached netblock ranges in a database to avoid hitting them too often, but that might not scale to millions.

I remember seeing one of these things on a thing like an R/C model car on a wire, dropped down from under the police car to run forward under the suspect's car and zap it from underneath. Crazy. I aso recall, I think, a HERF gun described by Winn Schwartau at DEFCON 7 that used explosives to move a conductor *really fast* through a magnetic field, generating a huge EMP. I have my doubts about using anything like this in a city - too much chance of getting innocent bystanders, traffic light controllers etc. Maybe they could mount one in a helicopter and zap someone fleeing on the highway.

A comment from an IPv6 workshop I attended last year, from (I think) Tata.com : content providers need to get on IPv6 else they will be left behind. As customers start to move to v6 (perhaps starting in Asia, but it doesn't really matter), any org that puts hurdles in the way of customers connecting at full speed is going to lose out.