http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,111420,00.asp
IP v6 has blown hot and cold over the past few years, with many taking the position that the need for this version was rendered moot by the use of NAT and private addressing. Now the USA DOD is taking an interest, by making contractors to its Global Information Grid support IP v6.
There is surely something worth looking at here -- the common joke that IP v6 would enable everyone on Earth to have a separate IP address for each of the cells in their body looks a lot less funny when you link this to military support for sensors the size of dust motes -- because there could be "billions and billions" of these in operation at any one time, and IP v6 might be the only way to actually address them, should such addressing become necessary.
In the meantime, we can comfort ourselves with the realization that while hex representation of bit values in IP v6 makes subnet masking much more complex, it also renders it a lot less necessary....
Posted by jho at July 2, 2003 07:47 PM