Don't think of it as getting hit by your own irony stick... think of it as getting hit by your own "we we".

I agree with the spirit behind this idea in that companies should be required to justify costs to prevent price fixing but I'm sorry, this just wouldn't work in the real world. The companies would make the cost breakdowns nearly impossible to reasonably interpret to hide the $10,000,000 worth of "consultant fees". (For people not familiar with business, a "consultant fee" is the cash that goes into the pockets of the CEOs and their buddies who come and hang out at the office for a few days a year.)

I really don't think we're going to fix problems like this until there's no such thing as greed in society anymore... which isn't going to happen until we achieve a perfect utopia where money is no longer really required anyways.

Not to be disagreeable but saying that it's a "waste of space" implies that space is specifically supposed to be used for something. (Your statement implies that its purpose is to contain life but that's not entirely relevant here.) What you're essentially doing is assigning a meaning to space itself, but "meaning" (not to be confused with cause-and-effect as it so frequently is in philosophical arguments) is a totally human created concept so the "waste of space" argument is unfortunately invalid.

That said, I really, REALLY hope that life is abundant in the universe. I just don't think that much can be said to predict whether or not it is until we get out there and look for it which is exactly what they're doing here.

What practical steps would your readers recommend to prevent this information from hurting me?

Step 1. Don't post the story about what happened to you on Slashdot.

And yet you still got first post... my faith in fax machines has suddenly been revitalized.

Yeah... not a homophobic troll at all.

I'd bet there was a more personal confrontation, possibly with a superior, and that email was simply seen as a better excuse to get rid of her than the real reason.

My thoughts exactly. I don't see this as a story about someone being fired for using caps lock. I see it as a story about a manager who was too stupid to have a legitimate reason to fire her prepared ahead of time and has cost their company $17k as a result. One of my coworkers was fired several months ago because he didn't have one of the certifications that's required of everyone in my department. He'd never had the certification of course but that hadn't stopped my company from hiring him and letting him work there for a year. But he was *really* fired for getting into a very long, personal argument with our supervisor. Clever managers will always have some excuse stashed away to get rid of anyone if needed. Sounds like this manager wasn't nearly clever enough.

Good! Driving while drunk and driving while texting are both negligent choices. If that choice leads to someone's death, they certainly should be treated equally. If anything driving while texting is worse since your decision making abilities are not hindered by an altered state of mind.

buy real books and support real trees

If by "support" you mean "dismember and ground up," then yes.

They're trying to compete with Youtube?... Compete for what? The privilege of losing $1.65 million per day? If the MPAA was smart they would help The Pirate Bay set this up!

I see so many articles about ISPs hiking up their rates or beginning to use bandwidth caps but what I want to know is why?

Yes, a customer who downloads 300 GB a month is more expensive than someone who doesn't but that sort of customer behavior is something that all service businesses have to deal with. I work in the webserver management department of my company. For a flat monthly rate, we will fix, upgrade, secure, and do whatever other odd jobs you want to your server. Some customers make fifty (stupid) requests per month and take up tons of our time but they get billed the same amount as the customers who only make one or two requests. But at the end of the month, both customers are getting the same level of service. How did my company figure out how to reasonably deal with this sort of overuse and underuse behavior while large ISPs can't?

Another problem I have with raising rates and imposing limits is the lack of justification. The only thing I've ever heard is "It's those evil pirates! They're making your bills go up!" Yeah, right. There was a time when illegal media downloading was pretty much the only kind of media downloading that existed but now we have Netflix and iTunes and a whole slew of completely legitimate streaming sites. So let's say I do pay $150/month for unlimited bandwidth. Where is my $150 going? I'm sure there is an answer to this and I would be much more willing to pay it as long as it doesn't include "into the pocket of our CEO". Anyone have a link to an article (preferably written by an unbiased third party) that would explain this?

(Warning: link contains strong language and vivid imagery.)

Oh god, a 500 error! MY EYES! THEY BURN!