Although legislated, there were some good reasons for the strictures of the day and I think they've actually been shown as wise. One man's seemingly artificial technical limitation is another's opportunity for industry growth and all that. Infrastructure doesn't happen in a vacuum and all that. Besides, it wasn't even 56k you could get for most of that time frame :) I'm not quite sold on your latter premise either. It has been shown lately that consumer products are already hitting plateaus. iPad launches with paltry (by *anyone's* standards) disk space but perhaps 'enough', plus branded so a less tech savvy person with chip in $400 more for a bigger number that is still funny. Laptops and even brand new desktops go out the door every day with paltry disk space. I mean where for $25 more one could in theory go from ~250GB to a TB plus. Not that a TB is big anymore but hey. Part of this is supply chain of course. We made and make one hell of a lot of these disposable, cheap, effective and useful drives. To piss off all the 250, 500, 650, 1TB or whatever drives is just stupid. On the SSD side it is the same with smaller numbers. The seemingly best answer is to use that tech in devices and keep the new gen parts for systems. This isn't a new idea nor has it been for 40 years.

Hang on a minute now. Property Law and Copyright Law (and by extension Intellectual Property Law de jure) are entangled in many ways. Property has always been held as the highest function of law in Western society and with some cause but to pretend that Copyright laws are simply unrelated is disingenuous. If the only property I can hold is physical, modern society is in for a lot of hurt and apparently what I spend my days doing holds no value. I understand your position and to some degree can even sympathize but your initial premise is terribly flawed.

Precisely. I have intentionally (and laughably) insecure passwords I use for certain sites that require an account to view content. I pair that with a throw-away email account and other general measures on purpose so I'll be conscious of my insecure state when accessing such sites and don't give out any information I care about. Now, for other purposes I have a dozen or so high to very high strength passwords that I rely on and by limiting their use I can limit their exposure. It is still a compromise but hey, for things that actually require extremely high levels of security I rely on physical means.