Brian> NAT has simply pushed us back to the pre-1978 situation.
On the contrary, NAT has allowed us to maintain global connectivity without requiring every system to have a globally unique address. NAT is what has prevented us from returning to the pre-1978 situation. That's not to say it wouldn't be better to have a million more globally unique addresses. Sure it would, unless that would stress out the routing system unduly. If adding a million more globally unique addresses will stress out the routing system, then one might argue that a solution which provides the addresses but doesn't change the routing system isn't really deployable, and hence doesn't really solve the addressing problem. I think this is the point that Noel keeps trying to drive home, and I'm not sure I understand what the answer is supposed to be.
