On the other hand, if you use a unit of bandwidth there's another unit waiting for you.

That's an irrelevant distinction as bandwidth is a scarce resource (in economic terms). Instead of being separated into physical units (e.g. liters, gallons, etc), bandwidth is separated into temporal units (e.g. KB/second). There are a finite number of these units at any specific time. If somebody is to use all those units at once (the full pipe), other users are deprived of bandwidth.

Therefore I agree with the GP as those who use more pay more (just as with everything else).

If the rates are fair, pay-per-use is a good idea -- certainly better than arbitrary data caps that might get enforced god-knows-when

I can't believe nobody has posted today's XKCD, it's highly applicable: http://xkcd.com/830/

You can talk and talk and talk all you want. In that sense you have freedom of speech. However, your right to speak ends where my ears begin (as they say). If you can find a way to broadcast your voice to the masses you can certainly do it. But you are not entitled to a way to broadcast your voice to the masses.

Fry: [smelling Saturn via the smelloscope] Pine needles. Oh, man, this is great... hey, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus.
Leela: I don't get it.
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
Fry: Oh. What's it called now?
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Urrectum. Here, let me locate it for you.

Technically speaking, getting a court order would be due process because the law would explicitly stipulate a court order as a legal way to require the website to be taken down.

However, many laypeople interpret "due process" as to allow the defendant the opportunity to provide a defense before the punishment is meted out.

I suppose I should clarify: A toner cartridge has electronics and a large mass of something that looks like it could be an explosive (toner).

Laptops and cell-phones contain electronics, but don't generally have a large quantity of anything that could be a potential explosive.

A toner cartridge is an effective screen for an explosives container because it has electronics built-in.

His quote about start-ups being under capitalized is spot on. Personally I prefer a windows desktop. And I prefer visual studio for C/C++ development (it's excellent). Unfortunately, all the MS solutions cost money and it adds up. I've been part of pre-venture-capital start-ups, and there's no any extra money. It just doesn't make sense to purchase a domain controller, or outlook server, or any of their other products when there are viable free alternatives.

A slow and inadequate standards process led to the browser wars. There were no standards for doing what people wanted to do with the web-- so instead of waiting for the WC3 committee (or whatever it was back then) to come up with a standard way, the two major browser manufacturers decided to do it anyway. And it's no surprise they did it differently. However, if the WC3 had provided robust standards early on for dynamic content, proprietary solutions would have been at a disadvantage.

However, flash fills the missing piece of the picture. In the late 90s, flash was not as robust or ubiquitous as it is now, and website developers had to use proprietary HTML extensions to provide dynamic content to their users. But now, with flash as widespread as it is (adobe claims around 95% of computers have flash10), website developers use it instead of proprietary extensions. Flash has become, in effect, the standard proprietary extension to HTML.

If you want websites to stop using flash, provide a standard that does what the websites need, and sooner is better.

Mr. Furious: [talking about Carmine the Bowler] Seems there was a little controversy there regarding your father's death.
The Bowler: Yes, the police said he fell down an elevator shaft. Onto some bullets.
The Blue Raja: You know, I've alwas suspected a bit of foul play there.
The Bowler: As have I.

What a nice skeletal structure!

"Software as a mass-market product is a failing business model, software as a service is the future"

There, I fixed it for you. When demand for a certain type of software is very high, open source will provide a suitable replacement. For niche markets, or markets involving high liability, or strict government regulation, open source replacements are not nearly as abundant. For example, how many open-source hotel management software suites are there? How many open-source flight control systems are there?

Your jokes bug me.

Will we hire him? I think he'll make the cut.

In response to Steve Jobs anecdotal evidence regarding Flash as the #1 source of crashes for OSX, let me present my own anecdotal evidence: In the last week, safari on my iPad has crashed 4 times. I think safari itself is the #1 source of crashes.