This may seem funny, but there is more truth to this than you think... just not the way you expect:

1) There was an actual company that wanted to charge gamers for special network routes that would get you lower ping times. You know what happened to them? No one wanted the product and they shut down. The free market at work.

2) A very similar scenario to what you describe can happen if net neutrality is taken to the extreme... without the ability to tamp down some of the most extreme consumers of bandwidth, you will likely see bandwidth caps and tiering come into play. Sure, it won't be site-specific, but I hope you like paying by the bit.

Bill Snyder writes a long post, with meticulous footnotes, criticizing certain AT&T ads, but not once does he link to the actual AT&T ads! Where are the ads so we can judge for ourselves?

Hmmm... commenter doesn't RTFA and makes judgment based on previous bias, and gets moderated +5 Insightful? Wow.

I read the article and was amazed at the great use of technology, that we could beam video and aircraft commands across the world to do surveillance and attacks. But then I saw a special on PBS last night where our ground troops can't even talk with the Afghans. The interpreter didn't speak good english, and his face was blurred out -- no doubt due to fear for his life and his family's safety. So, I wondered, why can't we use the same UAV technology to facilitate better translation?

Simply, give ground troops a video camera, mic, and speaker. Video and audio would be relayed to a translator sitting anywhere in the world. The translator could translate from Afghan to english, speaking into the troops' earpiece. English to Afghan would be broadcast over the speaker the troop carries. It's not nearly as personal, but I'd bet we'd get better and more translators. They can work anywhere and don't have to fear being shot or their family being threatened.

I don't know if you were being sarcastic, but it actually is pretty special that these drug companies had the profit motivation to develop a drug like this. You have to ask yourself if these drugs would've been developed under a socialized drug development system. Would government researchers have been funded to develop these drugs? I can imagine that politicians would have found "better" things to spend taxpayer money on than the "remote" chance of a pandemic flu.