Probably a little bit of a dumb question, .. But I was wondering why the domain names have to expire 12,000 blocks?
One of the biggest areas of future development and use case scenarios, seems to be that of the open transaction style issuance of stock, bond or for that matter any form of digital unique certificate and tracking of their ownership. At first glance this seems ideally suited to Namecoin, but obviously this breaks down if the certificate expires after a ~ 1year rather than being transferred indefinitely.
Names expire so that a) they can't become permanently unavailable if someone dies or loses their keys, and b) at least some fee is required to keep hold of names, so that people are incentivised to not squat and let go of names they do not intend to ever use (whether the fee is large enough is arguable, though).
Just updating a name every 36k blocks is enough to stop it from expiring, though, so I don't really see how that prevents stocks/bonds to be issued on Namecoin.