Very true. I've seen that hack before, but I guess I mentally settled on my first example (probably due to the irksome possibility of x=0\False).
Unfortunately, there were probably more hacks than our two examples. Thank goodness Guido (etc) settled on a real ternary semantic -- we were heading into Perl more-than-9000-ways-to-do-something territory!
I would argue that this is still an implementation issue w/Vista's networking stack. The RFC assumes that the DNS resolver (the client) has a public IP. This is usually not the case with most clients, and Microsoft (etc) knows this. It's just an edge case that is now brought to light.
The solution to this is pretty simple (at least in the case of IPv4): identify and use the public IP of a session instead of the private one. I know that public IP identification behind a NAT is problematic, and certainly not that robust (SOAP-based UPnP IG is pretty ooky), but if it doesn't work, fall back to round robin. Not too hard.
Of course, while the solution is not too hard, it's up to a handful of large enterprises to deal with (people who make operating systems). And the rest of us are the ones having to hack around the problem in the meantime, which kinda sucks.
I would argue that while this certainly sucks for the US in the short term, it's awesome for the world in the long term. This is exactly what globalization is good for -- expose talented people from all over the world to the free market, get them to our level of expertise, and then have them go back home and start the arduous process of improving local standards of living.
Allright, Lispers -- take the joke...