he called the cops and reported the CL post.

*sigh* no. It's not illegal and he wasn't charged with "trying to sell his kids on CL." The title contradicts the body.

Most (all?) Ethernet hardware reads in an entire packet, looks at it, then sends it on to a destination. This makes building routers and switching hardware fairly easy but extremely slow.

First, Ethernet doesn't forward packets. It forwards frames.
Most (all?) ethernet switches read just the destination MAC and start forwarding it, just as you've described in the next paragraph. If it can't, because there's no bridge table entry for the destination, it floods the frame.

Ethernet is also extremely sloppy--Any switch along the way is allowed to throw a packet away and wait for the originator to resend causing a HUGE hiccupp in the communication stream (Most if not all routers do this whenever an address is not in it's forwarding table yet).

Don't start confusing people with L2/L3 comparisons. Routers will drop a packet that it can't forward, but most routers unknowlegable people deal with will have some sort of a default route, so that never happens. In layer 2 land, however, frames are FLOODED when the destination is unknown.

IIRC the faster protocols see a "Routing" packet in the stream and set up forwarding hardware before getting the actual packet/stream, then wait until the end of the packet (or entire stream) to tear the route down again.

I think I might have an idea what you're talking about here, but it's hard to tell.

Though their motivations may not be so philanthropic, at least consumer electronics corporations are on the side of the people like you and I. After all, they know that consumers will not purchase crippled, copy-protected products. Hopefully, this will result in a somewhat more balanced result when laws are passed. Call me cynical, but I feel that the Hollywood lobby's advantage is quite large and the laws will likely get passed.