It's not simply the propensity of software to appeal to the lowest-common denominator that drives adoption. Wide-spread adoption enables monopolies which then force otherwise intelligent individuals to make poor decisions.

TL;DR Stupid people ruin it for the rest of us.

I fail to see how this will make any difference. Is it not the standard operating procedure of government institutions like Planned Parenthood to doll out as many abortions as possible?

wouldn't it be fair to say that the labor for profit game is antiquated by the propensity of labor to be automated? and by extension, the idea of copyright is rendered obsolete.

While your sentiment is a little premature, I can't agree with you more. The vast number of quirky behaviors in IE makes the task of web development a miserable chore. For that reason, web developers spend more time fighting with their own platform and consequently can't focus on elevating the overall quality of their applications. Such incompatibilities are what drive otherwise great developers away from the web to more conventional application platforms. The only developers that remain are those who have enormous patience, not those who are necessarily good at development. This has the net affect of slowing down the overall adoption and quality of web applications, not to mention burning out the bravest among us who persist in such endeavors.

About a year ago I lived in an two-bedroom apartment with two other people. My first roommate let the second move in the downstairs living room without consulting me. Eventually I agreed under the condition that the new roommate would pay us $300/mo, of which I'd receive $150. The new roommate turned out to be a total degenerate psychopath, who routinely stole from us and never paid his rent. He was also disposed to episodes of violence, rationalizing his behavior as a type of entertainment at our expense. After about 6 months and a sequence of increasingly severe incidents, I eventually drove him out.

Both my original roommate and I decided from there that we would keep as far away from him as possible, despite having a number of mutual friends. As much as it would have been utter ecstasy to see him in jail, we came to the conclusion that he would eventually destroy himself without our help and left it at that.

Ever since then, said individual has posted numerous messages on Facebook explicitly threatening to murder us. This culminated in a particularly threatening message last week where he stated something to the affect of "we better watch out, he's coming for us." Both myself and my former roommate have decided that despite our desire to remove ourselves from the situation, we cannot ignore it any longer and have contacted a lawyer. Our lawyer has arranged a preliminary hearing next week where we and a number of friends will testify as character witnesses and using his Facebook posts as evidence hopefully can convince a judge to incarcerate him.

IRC servers are still fairly popular, and there are more than enough of them to exploit. How is using a social-network any less a point-of-failure than IRC? What makes HTTP or UDP any more or less distinguishable than plain old TCP?

Who uses Twitter and IRC's ill-repute are irrelevant to the fact that it is useful for hackers.

Twitter is actually good for something after all

This makes sense, but the important fact you're overlooking is that corporations make reasonable arguments to do unreasonable things. By implementing such controls, would it not be ripe for abuse? Is there anyone who thinks that telecoms wouldn't abuse it?

I understand that the internet may in-fact be better off with throttling, prioritization, etc. However, can we really trust corporations to implement this system with the public's best interest in mind?

At the very least, look at it from an economic perspective. What incentive will telecoms have to upgrade their lower tier services when only their priority services make big money? How long before the speed disparity between tiers is so large that the lower tier services are no longer viable(given increasing bandwidth demand)?

I can't possibly agree with this more. This kind of mafia mentality needs to be strictly prohibited. The only thing that consumers can do is vote with their dollars(or pounds).

"If you are reading this, our women would like to say that your talents are formidable. We would like to offer you a blowjob — were it not for the fact that your genitalia are clearly not compatible with ours or our customers."

To ensure that entrepreneurs are cost-prohibited from entering the market and competing with the likes of Google, Facebook, etc.

No, they just had to kill a cow to make her clothes(in China).

Let's M$ charge an entire months wage in the US and see what happens. $3000 for XP home sounds reasonable, right?

A telecom telling the gov't that they have "overstepped their authority." That's rich.

The FCC advocating for net neutrality, on it's surface, may appear a genuine effort to sequester corporate control over our networks. I'm inclined to believe the opposite. In other words, this is a bait and switch tactic wherein the FCC invokes the valid concerns of net neutrality advocates to seize regulatory control. And then with their newly acquired purview betray the open internet groups by implementing draconian regulations that will inevitably consolidate control even further.

On the other hand, the idea of an internet controlled almost entirely by only two corporations doesn't exactly evoke warm fuzzies either, at least the FCC is somewhat beholden to elected representatives. Hopefully the court of public opinion can discern the lesser of two evils here.