The video tag will work basically like any MS video setup does: If Windows knows how to play something, meaning the DirectShow codec is installed, then it'll do so.

That's actually not the case in IE 9: for security reasons (well, OK, a bunch of reasons, but reading between the lines, security's the big one), arbitrary codecs aren't supported within the browser. It'll ship only with H.264 support, and they've announced that WebM will be supported as an add-on, but that's it at the moment.

I don't really blame them. It sounds like sandboxing DirectShow codecs might not be as easy as it could be, and IE cops enough security flack as it is (mostly deserved, of course).

Hardware vendors, software (non-desktop) vendors, registrars, etc.

Which hardware vendors are you thinking of? One of the ongoing problems with native IPv6 deployment is that effectively no consumer-level CPE supports it -- Cisco don't exactly make stuff for Joe Sixpack, after all. As an example, Internode have been the first ISP here in Australia to offer native IPv6 (on a trial basis for now), but have basically had to tell interested people not using newer Cisco routers to use bridge mode, which is decidedly sub-optimal.

Fundamentally, we are going to run out of IPv4 addresses, and as other posts in this thread have said, it's going to be pretty soon in some regions, such as the Asia-Pacific. We need to be planning for this now, not when it actually happens, and if it takes "vested interest groups" to make it happen, so be it.

In certain contexts -- actual ESL classes being an obvious one -- what you say makes sense. But in the broader context of this discussion (IT/science classes and anything similar), I disagree; if a student's going to study at a university that teaches in English, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect them to be able to follow a presentation, even if said presentation is simply a talk around a set of blackboard examples and doesn't feature notes at all.

At any rate, lecture notes shouldn't really be primary written sources anyway. Some people simply learn better from a written text regardless of language: that's why there are textbooks and online references, and a student who's struggling with lectures should probably be looking at those rather than a collection of slides skimming over the material. The lecture notes should really be, at most, an adjunct to what's being said, and that's where the less is more mentality (rightly, IMHO) comes in.

Your Steve Fielding impression is disturbingly good.

Virgin Mobile here in .au are both official Apple partners and allow tethering, so it would have been pretty unusual if it had been disabled.

Um what? Why Adelaide?

Well, it's not like there's anything else to do there...