we're off on the usual strange tangents. next will be whether it is ethical to walk in your neighbor's open house if they're running ipv6:-). ipv4 has some problems. the world has hacked around the major ones with things such as [holding nose] nat. the ivtf came up with a technically weak second system syndrome patch which has yet to show enough sizzle to sell against the hacks to ipv4. so the ivtf, a decade out, is trying to hack to make it work. a shim on top of second system syndrome. i am not holding my my breath. market physics will say whether scaling issues with nat et al. are sufficiently obnoxious to cause ipv6 to become sufficiently attractive; no amount of conjecturbation <tm> here will change that. if it becomes enabling and profitable, then folk will deploy and move. if not, they won't. life is simple. in the meantime, some pretty sharp old dawgs at the nsf food dish want to make a try for a next-gen vision. time will tell if they can come up with real fundamental change, or just third system syndrome. if i could predict this one, i would bet on the horses, not program computers. in the mean time, and these are mean times, we need to move the customers' packets. i definitely keep my eye on these futures, but maybe not too much of my wallet. randy