The argument is the old addressing scheme doesn’t have enough addresses to go around and it’s design subdivides it inefficiently. There are probably other more technical arguments but those are the reasons more often cites in favor of migrating to it: more address space, less waste. From Wikipedia:

In IPv4 an address consists of 32 bits which limits the address space to 4294967296 (232) possible unique addresses.

You’d think 4 billion addresses would be enough. Maybe so but then some people have been (mis)quoted as claiming the global market for computers was less than 10 or that no one would need a computer in their home. They could not have imagined either the network of today or the devices people use to access it.

IPv6 expands the pool a bit:

Mathematically, the new address space provides the potential for a maximum of 2128, or about 3.403×1038 unique addresses.

I self-host a couple of domains, complete with internet-connected email and web service so this may not apply to a lot of people.

The first thing I needed was access to the IPv6 internet. This doesn’t mean a new ISP so much as either having one that supports it already or using a tunnel service that encapsulates IPv6 packets in innocuous IPv4 packets, allowing them to be unpacked upon receipt. I have CenturyLink (née Qwest) and they don’t do IPv6 yet. So I went with Hurricane Electric and now have free access to services on IPv6. The folks at Hurricane have been doing this for quite some time and have probably answered your questions already. And there is an active forum community as well.

A handful of large public sites offer their content to both varieties — www.ipv6.apple.com, ipv6.google.com, ipv6.cnn.com, to name a couple. Lots of resources in the free/open source software world, as well. Microsoft requires it to be installed in some of its server products, even if you have no plans to use it.

So that’s all good. The equipment here all understands IPv6, from iMacs and MacBooks to a FreeBSD server and a Time Capsule used as a network interface to the ISP we use. So I set up the Time Capsule with the options I got from Hurricane Electric: you’ll need to use an older version of Airport Utility, as of this writing, since 6.0 doesn’t allow access to the IPv6 settings. Their setup page has the options you need for each dialog field:

In your network settings (here’s the Preference Pane in OS X Lion), turn on IPv6 and let it work it’s magic with auto discovery/autoconfig:
Apply those changes and you should be good to go.

To test it, use the Terminal/console app of your choice:

# ping6 ipv6.google.com
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2001:470:b:839:230:1bff:feaf:42c8 -->; 2001:4860:8005::69
16 bytes from 2001:4860:8005::69, icmp_seq=0 hlim=55 time=88.143 ms
16 bytes from 2001:4860:8005::69, icmp_seq=1 hlim=55 time=84.827 ms
^C?--- ipv6.l.google.com ping6 statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 84.827/86.485/88.143/1.658 ms

So you can now ride out on IPv6. Check out the sites listed up top and see if they work. Or try http://ipv6-test.com/ .
But what if you want to host services for an IPv6-enabled public? That’s a little trickier, with some previously undocumented gotchas.

1# bread flour (Gold Medal or whatever you prefer)
1/3 cup dry milk powder
1 tsp yeast
1 tsp honey
1 tsp salt
1 cup warm water

Mix as straight dough (combine dry ingredients except salt) until combined. Add salt, knead/mix until smooth dough is formed. Check for adequate gluten development with the windowpane test.

Allow to double in a buttered bowl, form into a loaf in a 9×3 pan until doubled. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes, remove for pan to cool.

The milk powder adds sweetness and color to the crust. Yields a nice crumb and a nice sandwich bread, suitable for toasting or just as it is.

The Thing is the disorder or problem and the idea is that the kid (or adult) has to overcome the power of The Thing. It wants you to hide behind it and blame it for problems or mistakes, as a way of keeping you in it’s power: you can’t let it. It wants to tell you what you can’t do, but you have to fight it off, ignore it, tell it to shut up and stop bothering you.

It could be funny, could be creepy, or all of the above. I should get a list of common disorders or issues and see what physical representations work for them: small, simpering creatures or large imposing things, distorted versions of the sufferer, etc.

And then there is the notion of buying power. How much of our daily/weekly needs are met by our daily/weekly income? The folks at the Economist offer the Big Mac Index [http://www.economist.com/node/21542808] as a handy way of mapping currency values and buying power across the overlaid continent of McDonaldstan. But what of places where that isn’t useful?

The basis of a complex society is the surplus, the bit left over when we left hunting and gathering behind in favor of agriculture and livestock. I would define buying power as the amount of time we exchange, what part of a day’s labor, for the wages that sustain us. At what point in our day could we knock off and go fishing?

For many of us, the first hour or two of a $500/hour attorney’s day might seem like enough. But what costs does he have to meet? Suitable office space with staff, either hired for himself or managed as part of of a partnership; clothes and personal grooming; entertainment/social obligations, business licenses and insurance — many of us don’t deal with any of that. Our workplaces are arranged by others, our appearance is not tied to the billing rate we command, etc.
In modern industrial society, we don’t have the freedom a hunter and gatherer would of taking it easy when the herds are at hand or the fruit is ripe. At the same time, we don’t have the stress of looking for food when it’s scarce. So what value is the surplus? I wonder if we don’t have the stress of the competitive hunter/gatherer without the downtime of nature’s harvest.

This should be on our minds as we look at the financial crises around the world and the job situation for many, where there are too few jobs or the wrong sort of jobs or where jobs have migrated to cheaper labor, leaving behind unemployed or unemployable people and stripping knowledge and intellectual capital from whole nations. I think we need every kind of job and every kind of worker but we don’t need to fit them to a 40 hour/week model. We need to value workers and the work they do for both work performed and the potential or promise of work to come.

Repurposed from https://m.google.com/app/plus/mp/433/#~loop:aid=z13fgnqycwewtjroa04ch1wgyrintj5wlqc0k&view=activity

In both of these narratives, who Stood Their Ground? The youth who refused to run? Or the chickenshit vigilante with the gun? The youth who fought back after being unlawfully harassed? Or a grown man with delusions of adequacy — and a gun?

The moral of this story is Stand Your Ground but Be Armed. We’re back full-circle to the Black Panthers enforcing their 2nd Amendment rights and the state of California (under Sainted Ronnie Reagan) signing gun control laws.

The conflict: this system is mothballed, decommissioned, and for awhile things are ok. But a sense of complacency creeps in, generations grow up feeling like they built their world, rather than accepting it as a legacy from thoughtful predecessors. The society is at risk of collapse when it is discovered that some people, families who were forced out of the mainstream, have been living in The Past, the old proving ground where generations came of age. They are tough, resourceful people who need nothing but may be the deliverers – if they are willing to take it on and if those who marginalized them can swallow their pride and ask.

No contact between these nations is permitted. The drone forces control all travel and communication.

The conflict: There is resistance to this control. Some people want to visit other nations in the region but cannot. What happens when one side in a contested/patrolled area finds a human on the opposing side? The core principles of the controllers and each drone prohibit harming humans. But this human is using that rule and the fact that it can operate outside the understanding of the systems to upset the balance. It can only be detected visually.

Humans do not show up on sensors, the sounds they make are too irregular to detect, and they have jamming tools that broadcast false information. How do the other nations respond? Field their own human fighters? Remove the ban on harming humans? Can they agree to allow travel? Or are the reasons for banning it forgotten?