I think you're wrong. I think Facebook is definitely going somewhere soon. There is google plus on the horizon, and the discontent with Facebook is growing every day. You say that Facebook is popular. I'll give you that. But myspace was also popular at one time. And before that livejournal was popular and so on.

I call them out all the time. But the problem is that ever since Apple adopted a Unix-y OS for its OS X, a large number of geeks have become fans and thereafter switched their brains entirely off. It's sad.

Facebook adds little to no value. There are much better, smaller, more private blogging options, with less spam, more freedom, and less privacy rape.

Also group blogging sites are highly prone to disruption. Just witness myspace, which seemed unstoppable in its heyday. The barrier to entry on blogging is low. I don't see Facebook continuing in its current state unchallenged and indefinitely.

This sounds like a good option, or at least an option worth considering. I don't think the cost would be "top" though. It would be somewhere in the middle. I think the cheapest bargains would vanish, but so would the most excessive markups for the cutting edge.

There are two ways to look at the situation. One way to look at it is to say that bargain hunters will not buy a CPU unless it costs $200 dollars or whatever the bargain price point is at these days.

Another way to look at it is like this. Cutting edge performance enthusiasts are more than willing to pay absurd amounts of money just to be able to feel that they are at the very top of the performance heap, and to be able to brag about it online for a month or so. If that's the case, why not create a product structure to milk that money out of them, if they are so willing to part with it?

Either way we know that the CPU business is highly profitable with the tiered price structure that it uses. In other words, the bottom dollar CPUs still generate profit, or they wouldn't be sold just to please the bargain hunters, would they? So if we start charging people a fair price for what the CPU really is, without artificially crippling the CPU, I think the price would normalize somewhere in the middle instead of at the top.

Whatever big businesses are doing it's almost always for their own selfish benefit and not for the benefit of the consumer. Businesses are not charities after all. So if a business creates a tiered price structure, it does so not so that it can serve the consumer better, but to extract more money from the market.

That's one heck of a claim. You do realize that, right? How long do you think until we get a 0-day that breaks out of NaCl sandbox? At this point it's probably not worth the trouble since NaCl is not even slightly close to being popular. But once and if it gets popular I say it will take something on the order of a few months for an exploit to show up.

Most markets in USA have either an effective monopoly or a duopoly when it comes to ISPs. Or otherwise we have options that cost 3-5 times over the fair market rates which do not even try to compete for the residential dollar.

I'm on Charter and I've most definitely been randomly redirected to Charter's internal search page for no good reason. The last example of this I definitely remember is when I tried to visit www.gimp.org and instead I was sent to Charter's search page. Charter's search then displayed www.gimp.org as one of the search results. When I clicked on the search result I was sent to www.gimp.org without any further issues. This tells me there is no technical difficulty at all, it's just a corrupt tactic being used by Charter to try to milk their customers (as if they need even more profits, as being being a one of the companies in a duopoly is just not good enough for them).

Fuck everything about this practice.

I'm pretty sure this is simply the worth of all the outstanding shares added up. If I am correct, that's a worthless indicator. Try comparing revenue or profit instead of net worth. Stock prices are meaningless. If one company makes 1 bil in profit and another makes 1 cent in profit and the 1 cent company is hyped and has a 60 trillion net worth, what does that mean? It means the stock market is crazy. It doesn't mean the 1 cent company is actually better than 1 bil one.