So formatting is worthless, then? And why do we have so many languages, many of them domain-specific? Compilers don’t care about how understandable the metaphors are or how many lines are needed to do a specific thing.

decent languages support labeled for/while cycles and apropriate "break label" constructs.

You often cannot develop software with the language you want, but must develop it with the language you have. C has no such features and, therefore, goto is used more often than in languages that have them. Fit the strategy to the tool.

if you do this kind of thing, you are MUCH better off separating lookup code to method or function

This is reasonable, but it assumes some other function can do the needed cleanup code or other data massaging just as cleanly. If the goto is being used because finding the value is an error condition, you often have to do certain things as soon as possible in the code so you do not lose important debugging information.

And, no, exceptions are not part of C, and setjmp/longjmp is, if anything, even less likely to pass code review. An advantage of goto is that you can keep the cleanup code in the same function, visually close to the rest of the logic and sharing the same locals.

I use return for that.

This is conceptually no different from goto, but I agree that it could be more intuitive for some people.

I’m a goto-user, but this is a bad reason to use them: If you regard language features as ‘just’ syntactic sugar, why aren’t you programming in raw machine code? That is what everything eventually gets turned into anyway.

You use gotos when the normal control structures are inadequate somehow. It doesn’t matter what the compiler does; source code is for humans.

Breaking out of a deeply-nested loop, as can happen when you’re looking for a specific element in a multidimensional array. The alternative involves adding state variables and complicating the logic terribly.

The Internet is all about price. As you point out, quality is meaningless. If it isn't free, it is going to garner only a fraction of the interest.

I disagree. I think both iTunes and the experiences of Radiohead and Trent Reznor disprove this statement.

I think this article sums it up reasonably well: "The Great Apathetic Revolution". In summary, people will do whatever is easiest as long as it isn't absolutely insanely expensive. iTunes makes it easy to pay $0.99/track, so people do that. It's easier than finding what they want on the torrent sites. It's also easier than finding and buying the album that has the song they want, which is why Sony gets so jihaddy at them.

Today we have "clever hackers" getting their content for free and "noobs" paying the fare for everyone.

This is true. It isn't fair, but it's less unfair than it used to be: It's easier for a poor person to become clever than to become rich. The Digital Divide is self-imposed to a larger degree than previous divides have been.

The obvious solution is to block or severely slow down all encrypted traffic (that is, all traffic the ISP can’t interpret). This would have the obvious effect on online banking, which could be solved by the ISP’s computers handling it: The SSL tunnel stops at your ISP, which inspects the decrypted packets before handing them to you. You know the ISP isn’t going to do anything bad with the information because they told you so (in specific, there’s both a contract and fraud laws stopping them). This might hinder the adoption of new streaming video codecs and the like, but it’s a small price to pay for increased profits.

Mine can. w3m displays images just fine in both xterm and rxvt if it's built to.

Hitler came to power because he had a street gang, called the Brownshirts, ensuring he would. The existing Weimar government was “blind in the right eye”, meaning it came down hard on left-wing gangs but ignored right-wing gangs like the Brownshirts. Hitler’s rise to power came because the existing German government was broken and allowed intimidation to beat (literally) democracy.

But this information will never make much of an impression on people because people need A Moral Lesson. The Moral Lesson here, apparently, is “voting is evil”.