OK. It seems that I am well rested, so let's see why you're an idiot:

1) NAT doesn't work. It only works properly for trackable connections (TCP/IP for example). Otherwise NAT requires hacks such as NAT-PMP and UPnP. Can you please explain to me why do we need the intervention of a complex protocol (like UPnP) just to get layer 3 working properly? Understanding NAT traversal and implementing it properly is more difficult than just understanding and implementing IPv6.

2) NAT is used as a security feature only by idiots (thus, my assumption that you're an idiot). Sane router defaults and enabling the firewall that comes with your operating system might do a better job. Even blondes have heard of a firewall. Not doing that is as inexcusable as not locking your car and then complaining that it got stolen/vandalised. In order to do some things (such as using a computer), you need to accept that you need to learn shit (such as enabling a firewall).

3) Getting IPv4 and IPv6 to play nice is not a problem. Getting both of them at the same time might duplicate some of the work, but that's what you get when you migrate from something old to something new. Some things still need to be done twice. However, since they are independent protocols (none assumes or requires the other one), you don't have to get them to "play nice" and you don't "default" to one or the other. Google "CCNA Semester 1" if you're missing the basics about IPv4 and IPv6 and the layered OSI model.

4) You make the ASSumption that if you have both protocols, somehow, all requests will first go through IPv6 and then, after timing-out will attempt IPv4. That ASSumes a few things that need to go wrong and usually don't.:
4a) the requested resource advertises both protocols (most only advertise IPv4)
4b) the application defaults to IPv6. Applications don't default! Applications do as they (or the OS in this case) are configured.
4c) your system is imagining that it's connected to both an IPv4 and an IPv6 network that can route to the requested resource when if fact it's only connected to an IPv4 network that can route to the resource. If your network doesn't provide IPv6, even if your system supports it, the applications will NOT use IPv6, let alone time-out. Same with IPv4. If your network only provides IPv6, your applications will not attempt to connect via IPv4. Actually, some applications will, but will instantly get a "no route to host" on the missconfigured protocol and only then will attempt to use the other protocol. But even in this scenario, you don't have a time-out, you get an instant exception.

5) Making IPv6 somewhat backwards compatible with IPv4 would make it IPv4.

6) Not having experience at something should be an incentive for us to get better at it, not a reason to stick with IPv4. We've already had almost 15 years to learn what IPv6 is all about, but some 'experienced' fucks are too damned lazy to give IPv6 6-12 hours of their life.

7) It's about time we move on and get rid of all the crap around IPv4 (such as: IPSEC not mandatory in all implementations, DHCP/BOOTp, ARP, RARP, 32-bit addressing, not-auto-configuring)

BTW, everybody should pray that we still use horses for transport as much as possible, because investing in tarmac is so expensive and time-consuming. God only knows what happens when the switch is flipped and we move to cars.
Thank God you're out of corp IT because you're definitely not able to adapt to the natural evolution of things.

This is a ridiculous argument. Over the internet you don't have any guarantee of the MTU. A common value is 1280, another one is 1500, but you might end up with the packets fragmented to a lot less than that (sometimes even 400 bytes). There are bigger differences in path MTU sizes over the internet than the 20 bytes that might be different between IPv4 and IPv6.
If you're talking about intranet, then I should remind you that Jumbo Frames have been around for about 10 years. If you're still not using at least Gigabit Ethernet, then it's your design that is at fault not IPv6.
Sometimes admins and developers need to suck it up and go with the wave. We can't keep using Lotus Notes 6, Windows 95 and IPv4 over PPP/POTS forever.
IPv6 is something that we need and you need to adapt your application to that. If you don't, it means that you're not doing your job. It's your duty to find out any hiccups and if you can't directly fix them, at least report them upstream as near-term risks for the infrastructure.
If developers did their job properly, IPv6 will work without any intervention from them. Microsoft introduced the IPv6 stack for testing back in Windows NT 4.0. If you use the correct APIs, you should be using IPv6, IPv4 or even IPX depending on your network conditions almost transparently. Apple also documented the correct APIs for looking up hosts and getting sockets that are protocol agnostic for a few years. Even if you didn't follow the OS vendor recommendations, IPv6 clearly visible at the horizon for 10-12 years. I will presume that your application is not 20 years old, so you have no excuse for ignoring compatibility with a disruptive upcoming technology that everyone knew was coming unavoidably.

You clearly never did any programming:
A) Unicode is a beast if you don't use any libraries that take that complexity out. Doing something as complex as Unicode for the sake of 20 bytes is ridiculous. Doing something the Unicode way for anything other than charsets is idiotic to begin with.
B) Things that are of fixed width tend to work better as you just put a struct/record over them which is a cost-free thing. Things of variable length require additional complexity and work for the processing side (NIC or IPv6 stack or some ASIC).

A nicely done analysis. However, the argument that Europe or Asia or just about any other place except for Canada and Mexico is more difficult to reach than to an European is mostly invalid. Getting from any European Capital to any place in Asia is as difficult as it is for Americans. Same for South America. Futhermore, Europeans tend to travel to the US quite extensively. I know I went there about 4 times for a total of 7 months.

The rage is with the US for becoming a disgrace after 9/11. Everyone mourned the 9/11 tragedy. It still doesn't mean that it should be used as an excuse to bomb the hell out of everyone. The US policy is now ignorance for the sovereignty of other nations (like in this case). It's incredibly one-sided (and one could argue short-sighted) in the middle-east issues. It's lack of responsibility in some and meddling in others.
US soldiers, like any other soldiers screw-up on occasion around the world. However, the US is the only one that doesn't allow the soldiers to be responsible in front of the local justice system.

1) Fighting for civic liberties requires understanding them and that takes you to the major problem of education. The US education system is propagandistic on the "virtues" and "freedoms", but it does not really do a comparative assessment of all the options. It's just indoctrination, which leads to the two party system that is currently hurting you. Europeans being pissed at americans won't help your civil liberties issue, but it will create dangerous ripple effects in society.
2) I couldn't really say that the US and the EU are in any way close. They are about as developed, which means that the interactions are balanced, but not particularly close. The US is just as close with all the other countries of similar development (Japan, Australia, Canada, etc.).

Most americans will be quite happy with just seeing the Grand Canyon and Hawaii, once in their lifetime, in clear contrast with Europeans that make it one of their biggest achievements stepping on each continent and seeing a bit of each of the now 27 countries in the EU.
At least most of us can name more than half the EU states. Can't imagine Americans being able to name more than 10 of theirs.

There's a big difference between investing $100M into reducing the manufacturing costs of a printer cartridge by $.05 and investing $100M into fusion reactors or a space telescope. US investments are not in general directed towards fundamental research, although at the height of the cold war they mostly were. Furthermore, IMHO, such research should generally be government coordinated in order to make sure that it benefits everyone and to make sure that there are no duplicated efforts. Having multiple private labs investing in the same field duplicates a lot of effort and as such it wastes the precious funds available towards the field.

A war won't be needed. Economically they will be ruined soon enough.

1. They have a non sustainable debt (a budget deficit of 40+% with no end in sight).
2. They have no fundamental research left.
3. All their young are training to be either lawyers (to sue each other to oblivion), salesmen (to sell imported goods at a "profit"), marketing (need a description of that?) or managers (to stay in never ending meetings that create more confusion and reach no conclusion).

From (1), (2) and (3) we can clearly see how they will only be able to import and not design or produce anything in the future. Their economic success plan relies on never-ending movie/music copyrights and suing (maybe soon enough bombing) countries that don't pay the tribute to the all-mighty Hollywood.

Not really the largest GDP/capita, but point taken when compared to the EU.

What do you produce with that oil? More planes than Airbus? More electronics than Foxconn? The American industry is slowly fading away and I expect that trend to continue. Your investments in fundamental research (i.e.: not immediate profit oriented) are ridiculously small compared to the ones made by EU (CERN, ESA, etc.) and even China (indirectly by investing heavily in their education at this stage). This in turn leads to a technologically outdate America in the near future. You've already outsourced production, if you also loose the technological edge, you have nothing (except a "service based economy").

72% of your oil is used for transport and only 22% for industrial use. At this rate it's clear that your transport system is inefficient. By comparison, the EU-27 countries use 33% for transport, 24% for industry, 12% for services and 26% for households. Since 2007-2008 there has been a 10% decrease in consumption in Transport after a continuous increase according to Eurostat.

Consider that the EU is using less oil while at the same time having a larger population in a more climatically challenging environment. And while the GDP figures don't show it, I certainly wouldn't suggest that the US is the most advanced in the world at anything except a failing polarizing political environment.

You're using the GDP values to the fact that you're to comfortable to get your phat arses to work in anything lighter than 2 tons.

We produce smaller cars that are simply more efficient. A normal European 2004 diesel sedan car will easily do 50 (US) MPG without being a hybrid. A normal European car is anywhere between 1.2 and 1.5 metric tons and the engines tend to be between 1.3 and 2 litters in capacity. That is the reason why even in eastern Europe a (US) gallon of Diesel is $7.5

Since the electric grid actually benefits from night charging cars by flattening the load curve, I expect that soon enough we'll have small electric city cars everywhere for zero transport emissions.

Not usually, but I needed to see if it's even possible to dent my excellent karma. I'd like a fresh start in 2012.

I happen to see it with different eyes. I see the UK as being in trouble next (after Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy) since they are the only country in the EU that plays on both sides.

Romania either had visionaries for it's executive (and honestly, I can't see the sailor and his crew as visionaries), or it just made the right bet in 2009 by accident. That being said, it used it's loans mostly to increase the reserves of the central bank in order to increase confidence, as opposed to using them to stimulate the governmental spending in infrastructure projects or others. How they got that part mostly right is beyond me, but I guess good things happen to undeserving politicians.

Investing in real estate is always a smart thing to do after the bubble bursts. It pays off to invest in construction when builders don't have enough projects to feed their employees. An apartment in Central Park in Bucharest that was €230.000 now goes for half that and with a second parking place. The old blocs of flats in Victoriei Square are moving from targeting small business offices to residential and there are a lot of examples like that.

I wouldn't be so dramatic. Except for the Brits, all the other EU countries would loose too much if the Euro went bust. They are taking their time coming up with the fixes for two reasons:
1) not to put too much pressure on the population (given the social impact in Greece as an example).
2) This uncharted territory for the EU and especially uncharted territory for a currency that is not (yet) tied together by a fiscal and executive union. They want to take it slow to make sure that there are no unintended consequences.

If the Euro does however break up, make sure that all your banknotes have an X in the serial number. The Bundesbank will only exchange the ones with an X to Deutsche Mark.

My point about the EU not being in as much danger as the US comes from comparing the industry. Sure, they have Apple and Google, but it's hard to compare the other aspects of the industry:
a) Airbus kicks Boeing arse bigtime (1378 orders vs 778 orders)
b) The car industry can't even be compared (heck the small italian Fiat actually is buying Chrysler)
c) EU infrastructure is doing a lot better. Better and newer highways in most of the EU (except for the newly joined). The US hasn't touched it's highway infrastructure from the 50s. The EU has a better, much faster, ever-growing train infrastructure (you just can't compare the two). And fortunately, in the EU we still have public transport.
d) Furthermore, the value of the debt is not even the real problem. The problem is the prospects of the debt. The US debt is ever increasing while the EU is moving slowly to a 0 debt policy (thus decreasing it). In the end, this is the big difference. If you have a constant (GDP wise) rolling debt, it's still acceptable and it means that you're living within you means, but having a 43% budget deficit certainly doesn't put that into any good prospects.

Then again, I'm just an IT guy, what do I know?

At least we're cleaning up our own problems back here. How are you guys doing with your debt? How's your deficit? For us (snotty Europeans) a 5% deficit is huge. For the former rebellious colonies 45% still seems to be acceptable. Don't worry, we'll be happy to hire your grandsons to do our laundry and lawns in half a century. Anyway, things here are still better than in the States for now. The future? Nobody can tell, but Wall St. keeps trying (and failing).

Joking aside, while the Euro is having it's puberty phase right now, it will most probably work quite well for a long time. There's a a simple reason: it's way cheaper to fix it than to ditch it.

It's easy, if nobody else helps you with fiber make a neighborhood association and invest in your own last mile. You own it, operate it and can easily get a 1Gbps connection from a large carrier in most places for less than $5.000, now divide that to the 200 households and they each pay $25 for 5Mbps if they all use all the available bandwidth at once (CIR) or more likely 100+Mbps (synchronous) in normal home usage patterns. You can upgrade the bandwidth by renegotiating the contract every 1 year. The real cost of bandwidth at the carrier (excluding the circuit to your POP) is currently at $2-5/Mbps. In Romania the bulk price for guaranteed bandwidth is €2.5 for 100Mbps and lower for higher capacities. The real question when you do this is where do you get a service provider to give you IPTV. Internet is easy to solve, just like voice. ATT probably will refuse to come and provide IPTV over your own infrastructure in order to protect their monopoly. This would be a great business opportunity, to help communities build their own infrastructure and provide them with IPTV, Telephone and Internet at their POP with bulk pricing and letting them figure it out further.

Don't equations imply an equal somewhere?