This is one example of a devastatingly common category of assumptions. Never assume that the set of people who care about something is the same as the set of people who know how to fix it. Similarly, distrust statements of the form, "Anyone who is/does/has X already knows about Y."

I myself have been bitten by this assumption when I discovered a new subject for study (e.g. math, entity formation, physics, a new programming language, etc.), but found most of the web pages related to the subject assumed that all those interested in the subject were already fully knowledgeable about it.

I've had problems with this using the X buffer copy / paste on Ubuntu. It also makes copying just parts on the URL less intuitive.

Personally I don't see the benefit of removing the "http://. If this trend continues we may end up with something similar to AOL Keywords.

Yeah, I just tried it, and apparently typing a protocol in front replaces the hidden 'http://.

As long as you can assume that the protocol is always http:// when hidden, I think I'm ok with this.