Jesus H! You'd think that someone that knows *anything* about IPv6, much less in charge of IPv6 transition for the Pentagon would be smart enough to keep his CDs at home.

A-mazing! 

Oh, wait!  I just reread the article.  He didn't just have kiddie-porn on his desktop, he was running a P2P client!  How dumb can you get?  Seriously, I really think the the White House's policies have created an environment where anything goes and no one feels obligated to follow the rules.

Kiddie-porn, hubris and cronyism all in the same article.  How much worse can this get?

Watching from just above the water line. . . .

http://www.dragonflyeye.net 

IPv6 was designed because we are supposedly running out of IP addresses because nobody envisioned in the early days of the Internet that everybody with a PC would be on it. Currently the Net runs mostly on IPv4, which uses 32 bits to hold an Intenet device address. IPv6 will have 128 bits, more than enough to handle any likely number of devices. As Wikipedia puts it:

"In theory, there would be exactly 2x128, or about 3.403 × 1038 unique host interface addresses. If the earth were made entirely out of 1 cubic millimeter grains of sand, then you could give a unique address to each grain in 300 million planets the size of the earth. This large address space will be sparsely populated, which makes it possible to again encode more routing information into the addresses themselves."

In the meantime, various measures were taken to ameliorate the problem, including the development of Network Address Translation (NAT) and several classes of "private" Internet addresses (if you are behind any kind of organizational firewall or you have a router "appliance" at home, your PC is using a private Net address probably in the 192.168.0.0 subnet). These measure were quite effective in reducing the need for distinct Net-accessible addresses, so much so that there are still people who think IPv6 is not necessary at all, leading to the slowness in uptake by many organizations.

Most operating systems today have support for IPv6 built in, although it may not be turned on by default. Linux has been supporting it for some time, for instance.

It's really irrelevant to virtually everybody but network technicians. 

As for the "robot rebellion", we Transhumanists would basically be rooting for the robots, given that they can hardly make more of a mess than humans have.  except for the fact that we expect technology to transmogrify humans into entities that basically ARE the "robots".
 
So the issue boils down to, as Bush would put it, "you're either with us - or you're against us - or we make you like us whether you like it or not." The most likely outcome, as I've said elsewhere, is all of the above - some humans will convert willingly, some will be converted, some will be exterminated, and some will be ignored. Your choice - if you make one.

Richard Steven Hack

www.computerproblemssolvedcheap.com 

As a network technicain I can tell you that IPv6 is pretty well used in Asia due to the lack of IPv4 space, with interconnetions proxied much like NAT through I firewall. And it should work fine with most existing inter-domain routing protocols. No need to worry about it until you need to learn hex to enter your IP address.