In a shareholder meeting, the only question being asked is "Does this raise or lower our income?"
while this is certainly true the vast majority of the time in practice, there's no particular reason it has to be. lots of people are interested in things other than making money, and shareholder's meetings are a way of expressing to the board all the shareholder's interests. this is why many corporations keep much of the stock off the market, so they can be sure to dictate at least some substantial portion of those interests.
uh, yeah? the moon's rotation and revolutions are synchronized such that one side is always facing away from the earth - we only ever see the same half of the moon. the other side is commonly (much to the dismay of pedantic astronomers) call the "dark side", despite the fact that it gets just as much light. if you were looking to hide a military base from earth, that'd be where you put it.
In rebuttal, do you really think that photoshop users are a majority of the desktop market?
no, of course not. but i think that "photoshop users + half life 2 users + developers + AutoCAD users + POVray (or modern equivalent) users + users of programs other than your typical PC bundle" represent a majority of users. the point is there's a lot of applications out there, many of which are simply very complex, and it's going to be a long time before the host platform isn't relevant for them.
Same argument for gaming, what percentage of the market are the power users with the maxed out PC running the latest monster video card, as compared to the number of people playing on a $300 dedicated game machine, and even more so, playing ultra light weight games like scrabulous on facebook?
in terms of statistically valid generalizations, i have no idea, and i don't really believe you do, either (i'd be happy with a cite to show me wrong). certainly from an anecdotal perspective, the $300 boxes are a minority still. what's more, there is an obvious skew away from those devices in terms of the money that goes into the industry and development, making the higher end (that is, higher than $300 boxes, not high in absolute terms) much more important even if the unit count is the same. watch the margins; there's a reason why Apple's done so phenomenally well financially on such a smaller unit count. Valve's got a few million Half Life 2 players that aren't going away any time soon.
Moore's Law isn't directly relevant to network speed. heck, the original formulation wasn't really relevant to processor performance directly, either, although subsequent renditions were. regardless, network speed certainly isn't doubling anything close to the rate cpu speed is. you're right that it's relevant to the web as a platform more generally, though, in the form of making interpreted languages more palatable (comparing them to compiled languages is more dicey, though, since those speed up the same way).
...yes, lightweight applications, but that's what a large percentage of the PC world is running.
i wish. you really think XP or Vista and Office qualify as "light-weight"? the reason Office is so ubiquitous is because it's got everything. people talk about the 80/20 split for users/features, but the problem is that the 20% of the features i care about might not be the same as yours. there's clusters (it's not hopeless, but something with only 20% of the features shouldn't count on having 80% of the addressable market), but more than two. Google's offerings (like OpenOffice and Apple's iWork) have a long way to go before they're suitable for 80% of Office's user base (and it's going to require more than 20% of the features).
but those interests are not (inherently) strictly financial, and certainly not inherently short-term. i may own (part of) a company for reasons other than simply making two bucks today (like making four tomorrow, or saving the whales in africa or whatever), and the board is equally responsible to act on those interests (assuming they represent any sort of significant portion of the ownership).
Microsoft made a huge error bidding on Yahoo. It was never worth that much, especially considering the time it would take to digest the acquisition.
i agree YHOO wasn't worth MSFT's bid to MSFT in revenue, but that's too simplistic a view. taking YHOO out of the picture would've had knock-on benefits for MSFT's ongoing war with Google, even if ingesting YHOO went horribly (which I fully expect it would have) and they got basically nothing out of it. there's also a very good chance that the bid itself was less about actually getting YHOO as hurting them (distracting management and shareholders, making the stock less attractive, making them make questionable deals with Google) and/or temporarily depressing their own stock.
Yahoo made an even bigger error not taking the offer.
i think YHOO is certainly worth more than what MSFT offered on its own, and YHOO's board was right to reject. they've got huge business problems, true, but lots of very strong assets and good potential. i'm not convinced YHOO's going to do really well, but it's not crazy to believe - and i'd certainly expect their management to believe they can do well.
...this was one fabulous way for investors to cash out.
yes, it would've been, if you were looking to get out anyway. but what's with this idea circulating that management's job is to always provide finicky investors easy outs at every opportunity? most investors - particularly most institutional money, which absolutely dominates YHOO ownership at 71% - hold companies because they think they're good investments, not because of buyout rumors. the later cause big blips certainly, but the former dominate.
cite? i've heard this from lots of people now, but does anyone actually know it to be true? to be clear, i'm not questioning that some people bought more on the bid, but that it's "a number of their bigger shareholders", or any significant percentage of the current ownership. the volume was clearly up around Feb. 15, but do we know who was buying and who currently owns?
attributing this to "arrogance" is pretty stupid. take a look at YHOO's 2-year stock price; MSFT was barely offering their 52-week high (and nothing's really changed since then). take a look at their assets and their historical valuation. certainly YHOO's a risky bet, but it's far from crazy to think that they can do better than MSFT's last offer.
In five years no one will give a rats ass what local OS is running under the web browser that connects you to your office app server, or remote app server.
i assume this is meant to generalize to the irrelevancy of OSs generally, in which case it's quite false. a good clue is that we all heard the "five year" thing about, oh, ten years ago and it's still not here.
you (and here i'm using you as a whipping boy for everyone who makes these sorts of claims) really should stick to the (valid; observable and documentable) trends without going to the extremes which make you sound somewhat silly. clearly the rise of things like Google Apps is making the local specifics less relevant, and clearly that trend is accelerating. but we're going to have network-resident Photoshop in five years? or for your acid test, Half Life 3?
Give one more cycle of moore's law and these sorts of networked apps will be entirely usable for almost all business applications.
first of all, Moore's Law is about processing power, not networks. Moore's Law is not irrelevant, but it's only one of several factors, leading to the improvement curve being much shallower. second, if you were right it'd put you at 18 months out; is that really what you want to call out here? third, the "almost all" is empty since you don't define "business apps". you mean Office? okay, maybe (hopefully!), but how 'bout the apps people actually use to do real work? the actual product or service creation part of the "business apps"?
Does any user care what OS is running Facebook?
you're confusing client and server here. no, nobody cares what's running Facebook (not significantly, anyway), but that's the same as nobody caring what compiler's used to build Safari or what OS runs the 5ESS switch in my central office. those are not client-side operations. working with documents will always be a logically client-side operation (even in the case of Google Apps, where it's physically done on a server), dependent on client capabilities. similarly, i don't care what OS runs my central office, but i care about the capabilities of my phone.
nobody wants anything to do with AOL the service, but AOL the company still has a lot going for it. they've got a lot of huge assets, they just haven't figured out a good way to make money off of them yet. AIM is their biggest strong point; they've got software on about a hundred million PCs and an active user population around a few dozen million. that's a tremendous value right there; forget everything else about their backbone network, brand recognition, ad expertise, and so on.
they've got huge institutional problems, though. they still act like a very large, dominant company when they can't really afford to any more. a company i was with until about a year ago had a series of meetings with them about how they (or any other substantial IM network, really) could make a lot of money with that kind of asset. everyone we talked to was really interested, but in each of our roughly dozen large meetings (not counting the lunches and whatnot that just a few business-types had), we had an almost entirely new set of faces every time, almost none of whom knew anything about what had been discussed previously. part of this was a troubling turnover rate and part was abysmal internal communication (i'm not sure which was worse).
AOL (the company, not the service) still has enough going for them that they could be huge again, if they can fix their heads and corporate culture. that's a pretty tall order, though.
i was more amused by the claim that FreeBSD had been going since the '60s. i suspect the issue there is that all times before he was born might as well be the same.
false, at least as a blanket statement. people have this odd idea that corporations can only exist for the purpose of maximizing profit and/or stock price. that's simply not true. public corporations are required to state their objectives in their forming papers (or revisions thereof), and the board is responsible for achieving those objectives. i've not read Yahoo!'s paperwork, but i wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find things other than "jack our stock price". besides, even if what you were saying was true, there's still the short-term vs. long-term question. particularly given Yahoo!'s historical valuation, it's not at all hard to imagine that the board simply believes that, in a few years or so, they could achieve a much higher valuation.
i know replying to sigs is "not done"; whatever, mod me off topic.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
i assume you're asserting the civil war ended slavery. that's not accurate. the civil war ended slavery in some places (as a tactic, not an objective), while leaving it in others. it was reconstruction that ended slavery. oh, and only in the US. World War II was certainly at least the proximate cause of the Nazi's fall, but it's unclear what the underlying cause was. Hitler's arrogance cost them the war much more than anything the western powers did (the idea that he was going to kick Russia around in a few months was clearly the product of a deranged mind). WWII certainly saved the lives of many of the Holocaust survivors, but with leadership like that it's overwhelmingly likely the Nazi's would've fallen anyway. i don't know what you're on about with regards to communism. the USSR's fall wasn't the result of military action, nor was the liberalizing of the several other communist regimes. one can make good arguments that at least several were supported by "the west's" war-like stance. the Revolutionary War obtained American independence, but did very little to secure it. hence the constant struggle for the next century or so. very much of which wasn't military. regardless, the fact that good things may have come from war (i think they did, you just picked poor, simplistic examples) doesn't in any way justify the cost. good things sometimes happen by accident, but the most reliable result is more war.
so was i. tuition has continued its upward march since i graduated; kindergarten at my old school is now >$20k. i just checked a handful of other schools in the area and they're all about the same. so, again: what school are you referring to?
I think that you'll find that in the Real World......people generally are descriptive moral relativists, not prescriptive ones.
that has certainly not been my experience, no. in the "Real World" (as opposed to where?), i've found that most people don't have any concept that there's a difference and don't think clearly about the practical ways that difference plays out. they are guilty of exactly the error that your earlier post made. you do seem to grasp the issue, but i'd advise you to be more careful in your writing if you're sensitive to people attributing inappropriate (or not, i can't really tell; certainly what you describe as "moral nihilism" is entirely orthogonal to relativism) labels to you. right up front, you wrote:
[Moral relativism is] not about condoning others' moral beliefs, it's about acknowledging that they have them, and are sincere about them, and might even be rather attached to them, and then modifying your behavior so that you can get along with them.
but there you're explicitly restricting your definition to the descriptive variety, without any acknowledgment of the (in practice, more common) alternative. you can't really fall back on existing context here, either, since there's certainly nothing to suggest we'd been talking solely about the descriptive variety (although, honestly, i think the attribution of moral relativism to the original post in this thread was somewhat confused). as Pfhorrest said, descriptive moral relativism is a "trivial truism", so when it comes up in conversation it's reasonable to assume that either the prescriptive variety is being talked about or the speaker doesn't really understand the difference and implications.
Unless you want to convert the world to your own particular morality (i.e., destroy freedom), you have to live and let live to a certain extent.
moral relativism is really irrelevant here. an example: take two fundamentalist Christians with highly conservative world views (a statement which may or may not be redundant), both of whom believe that homosexuals are going to hell upon death. neither can claim to be a prescriptive moral relativist - they believe their reading on morality actually does apply to homosexuals - but both are likely to be descriptive moral relativists - acknowledging that the homosexuals have alternate beliefs ("they're just wrong"). you still have plenty of room for one to "want to convert the world", going out and trying to create ex-gays (hah.), behaving like the Rev. Jackass Fred Phelps, while the other sits back and says "live and let live; sucks to be them". from that point, one can even start to understand the view from which the first fundie's behavior is more moral, in that he's working for the (post-mortem) benefit of homosexuals whereas the second is writing them off. for my part, as very definitely not a moral relativist, Fred Phelps is a bigoted ass who makes me wonder why i don't keep a cat o' nine tails handy for driving vipers out of the temple, whereas the other fundie is simply a bigot with bad theology.
as an aside, i have this debate with linguistics folks frequently, too. a surprising number of folks who i'd expect to know better don't have a grasp of the difference between grammar as prescriptive vs. descriptive, for example.
wow, i wish i had mod points. that might be the best-written explanation of moral relativism to someone who's confused over prescriptive vs. descriptive statements that i've ever read, and i did philosophy in uni.
that's very interesting, but i don't think it's quite right.
i love my country. i want it to do well. i care about its success. i believe that makes me patriotic. that said, however, i'm under no delusion that we can do no wrong (we've done, and continue to do, plenty), nor that we're inherently better than others (we do some things better, some worse, and those lists change over time). nor am i willing to strive for the success of my country at the expense of the rights of others.
i believe patriotism can be dangerous, as it's easily and often manipulated into racism and nationalism. but they are not equivalent things, and "dangerous" doesn't mean inherently bad.
hold a referendum. secession is kinda a big deal, so it should require some significant effort; say two consecutive two-thirds votes or some such. hold these on a regular basis (say, every five years) in every state. if Hawai'i would like to be independent, there's their mechanism. same for any other state (Vermont has a secession movement that would like to re-create the independent Republic of Vermont).
it's notable that after the Civil War the Supreme Court decided the legality of the confederate states' succession based on the fact that the national legislature wasn't involved, thus meaning some states impinged on the rights of others, which wasn't okay. the decision left open the question of whether a succession approved by the Congress would be legally valid under the Constitution. the Constitutional theorists i know are divided (with a key issue being whether the Constitution formed the government, or formed the country).
where/what school are you referring to? i'd be very surprised to find a good school that can run things for â$5k/student in the US. the one i went to was around $20k/year tuition when i graduated, has gone up since, and that didn't cover all the costs. granted, they were on the high end of things, but i've never seen anyone do it for $5k.
i have to disagree. under an oppressive regime, everyone (except potentially those in the regime itself) suffers, regardless of whether you support the regime or not. not evenly, and not always in the same ways, as your personal example illustrates, but overall.
take modern America as an example. middle-class Bush supporters are, in fact, suffering under that regime, they just don't realize it. our economy is a disaster; foreclosures and inflation don't care about political affiliation, nor (for the most part) did the massive job loss at the beginning of the Bush presidency nor the lower average wage of the jobs gained back in his second term. these are measurable ways in which his supporters still suffer. they either think those costs are worth it or are simply scammed into not seeing them (or not attributing them to his policies). broadening it to hypothetical future abuses in the US is a bit harder, because we don't know what those abuses will look like. myself, i object to the concentration of power in the executive branch regardless of who's in office, largely because we don't know who's going to be in office a decade from now (which, on a personal aside, is why i support Obama instead of Clinton: i believe he's got a much better respect for the Constitution and our principles of government, whereas i believe Clinton's more likely to continue the centralization, although using that power for more positive things in the short term). we could imagine a regime where the federal government is explicitly targeting political/ideological rivals, but i think that's much further down the road (if we were to ever get there). in the shorter term, we'd see things like a chilling effect on media and dissent. the general repression of the free exchange of ideas hurts everyone both in abstract terms (weakening your society by creating a monoculture and constricting vision) and concrete (reduced global competitiveness compared to countries where free exchange is more valued).
take a less political example, in the other direction: public schools. i have no kids, yet i pay taxes to support public schools. i myself went to private schools my entire academic career (except a brief stint in a state university). still, i benefit from having a minimum level of literacy and education in the country. i happen to support taxes for education, but i know lots of people who don't; they still benefit from the system. same with roads (except for not really being able to avoid them): you might not like your taxes being taken (some people just object to taxes out of hand, after all), but you still benefit from the results.
this is a really good point i don't think i've seen mentioned before. it's analogous to the differences in average quality of programming between broadcast and pay television. with the former, i'm not the customer: advertisers are. shows are designed to fit ads conveniently, so the story gets broken up nicely for commercial breaks. the delivery is also tweaked to favor the customers (advertisers): ads are often broadcast louder than the actual programming. with pay television, i'm the customer. HBO makes quality shows because they want my business; they want me to pay for the shows. HBO produces Six Feet Under, The Riches, and so on; broadcast television produces "who wants to marry a jackass" and the 49th season of Survivor.
also, what you're suggesting for the QoS billing situation is entirely reasonable from an architectural point of view, and in terms of the transit, the technology has existed for a decade. the problem is it (a) requires ISPs to support two billing/accounting methods instead of one, (b) requires application and/or OS cooperation to differentiate services (again, tech's there, but there's the old "installed base" problem), and (c) requires a critical mass of ISPs to agree that's how they're going to do it (or get told that's how they're going to do it by a regulating body). i think you've got a technically desirable solution that simply won't come to pass due to market reasons.
Nowdays, in addition to the fast-as-mercury, dumb-as-rocks backbone routers, there are reliable-as-telecom, smart-as-firewalls edge routers...
eh, sorta-maybe. the edge routers on the half-dozen cable and DSL services i've used haven't been up to anything i'd call traditional telecom grade reliability (and i say that having worked on a next-gen converged telecom switch project).
what? allowed by whom? speed things up for whom? who's on the other end of the fiber?
if you own your own facilities network, nobody has to "allow" you to turn it on. Level 3 buys and lays fiber and lights it up. job done. i just don't get what you're saying here.
that's a reasonable assumption. what's not reasonable is the unspoken assumption you're making on intent. the fact that the lawyer's an expert in law speaks to his ability to understand and use it, not to what he's doing that for. you don't believe that lawsuits are ever filed for reasons of simple financial gain?
Slashdot Mirror
uh, yeah? the moon's rotation and revolutions are synchronized such that one side is always facing away from the earth - we only ever see the same half of the moon. the other side is commonly (much to the dismay of pedantic astronomers) call the "dark side", despite the fact that it gets just as much light. if you were looking to hide a military base from earth, that'd be where you put it.
Moore's Law isn't directly relevant to network speed. heck, the original formulation wasn't really relevant to processor performance directly, either, although subsequent renditions were. regardless, network speed certainly isn't doubling anything close to the rate cpu speed is.
you're right that it's relevant to the web as a platform more generally, though, in the form of making interpreted languages more palatable (comparing them to compiled languages is more dicey, though, since those speed up the same way).i wish. you really think XP or Vista and Office qualify as "light-weight"? the reason Office is so ubiquitous is because it's got everything. people talk about the 80/20 split for users/features, but the problem is that the 20% of the features i care about might not be the same as yours. there's clusters (it's not hopeless, but something with only 20% of the features shouldn't count on having 80% of the addressable market), but more than two. Google's offerings (like OpenOffice and Apple's iWork) have a long way to go before they're suitable for 80% of Office's user base (and it's going to require more than 20% of the features).
but those interests are not (inherently) strictly financial, and certainly not inherently short-term. i may own (part of) a company for reasons other than simply making two bucks today (like making four tomorrow, or saving the whales in africa or whatever), and the board is equally responsible to act on those interests (assuming they represent any sort of significant portion of the ownership).
cite? i've heard this from lots of people now, but does anyone actually know it to be true? to be clear, i'm not questioning that some people bought more on the bid, but that it's "a number of their bigger shareholders", or any significant percentage of the current ownership. the volume was clearly up around Feb. 15, but do we know who was buying and who currently owns?
attributing this to "arrogance" is pretty stupid. take a look at YHOO's 2-year stock price; MSFT was barely offering their 52-week high (and nothing's really changed since then). take a look at their assets and their historical valuation. certainly YHOO's a risky bet, but it's far from crazy to think that they can do better than MSFT's last offer.
installed base is worth a lot.
you (and here i'm using you as a whipping boy for everyone who makes these sorts of claims) really should stick to the (valid; observable and documentable) trends without going to the extremes which make you sound somewhat silly. clearly the rise of things like Google Apps is making the local specifics less relevant, and clearly that trend is accelerating. but we're going to have network-resident Photoshop in five years? or for your acid test, Half Life 3?first of all, Moore's Law is about processing power, not networks. Moore's Law is not irrelevant, but it's only one of several factors, leading to the improvement curve being much shallower. second, if you were right it'd put you at 18 months out; is that really what you want to call out here? third, the "almost all" is empty since you don't define "business apps". you mean Office? okay, maybe (hopefully!), but how 'bout the apps people actually use to do real work? the actual product or service creation part of the "business apps"?you're confusing client and server here. no, nobody cares what's running Facebook (not significantly, anyway), but that's the same as nobody caring what compiler's used to build Safari or what OS runs the 5ESS switch in my central office. those are not client-side operations. working with documents will always be a logically client-side operation (even in the case of Google Apps, where it's physically done on a server), dependent on client capabilities. similarly, i don't care what OS runs my central office, but i care about the capabilities of my phone.
probably a joke, but still...
nobody wants anything to do with AOL the service, but AOL the company still has a lot going for it. they've got a lot of huge assets, they just haven't figured out a good way to make money off of them yet. AIM is their biggest strong point; they've got software on about a hundred million PCs and an active user population around a few dozen million. that's a tremendous value right there; forget everything else about their backbone network, brand recognition, ad expertise, and so on.
they've got huge institutional problems, though. they still act like a very large, dominant company when they can't really afford to any more. a company i was with until about a year ago had a series of meetings with them about how they (or any other substantial IM network, really) could make a lot of money with that kind of asset. everyone we talked to was really interested, but in each of our roughly dozen large meetings (not counting the lunches and whatnot that just a few business-types had), we had an almost entirely new set of faces every time, almost none of whom knew anything about what had been discussed previously. part of this was a troubling turnover rate and part was abysmal internal communication (i'm not sure which was worse).
AOL (the company, not the service) still has enough going for them that they could be huge again, if they can fix their heads and corporate culture. that's a pretty tall order, though.
i was more amused by the claim that FreeBSD had been going since the '60s. i suspect the issue there is that all times before he was born might as well be the same.
false, at least as a blanket statement. people have this odd idea that corporations can only exist for the purpose of maximizing profit and/or stock price. that's simply not true. public corporations are required to state their objectives in their forming papers (or revisions thereof), and the board is responsible for achieving those objectives. i've not read Yahoo!'s paperwork, but i wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find things other than "jack our stock price".
besides, even if what you were saying was true, there's still the short-term vs. long-term question. particularly given Yahoo!'s historical valuation, it's not at all hard to imagine that the board simply believes that, in a few years or so, they could achieve a much higher valuation.
World War II was certainly at least the proximate cause of the Nazi's fall, but it's unclear what the underlying cause was. Hitler's arrogance cost them the war much more than anything the western powers did (the idea that he was going to kick Russia around in a few months was clearly the product of a deranged mind). WWII certainly saved the lives of many of the Holocaust survivors, but with leadership like that it's overwhelmingly likely the Nazi's would've fallen anyway.
i don't know what you're on about with regards to communism. the USSR's fall wasn't the result of military action, nor was the liberalizing of the several other communist regimes. one can make good arguments that at least several were supported by "the west's" war-like stance.
the Revolutionary War obtained American independence, but did very little to secure it. hence the constant struggle for the next century or so. very much of which wasn't military.
regardless, the fact that good things may have come from war (i think they did, you just picked poor, simplistic examples) doesn't in any way justify the cost. good things sometimes happen by accident, but the most reliable result is more war.
so was i. tuition has continued its upward march since i graduated; kindergarten at my old school is now >$20k. i just checked a handful of other schools in the area and they're all about the same. so, again: what school are you referring to?
for my part, as very definitely not a moral relativist, Fred Phelps is a bigoted ass who makes me wonder why i don't keep a cat o' nine tails handy for driving vipers out of the temple, whereas the other fundie is simply a bigot with bad theology.
as an aside, i have this debate with linguistics folks frequently, too. a surprising number of folks who i'd expect to know better don't have a grasp of the difference between grammar as prescriptive vs. descriptive, for example.
wow, i wish i had mod points. that might be the best-written explanation of moral relativism to someone who's confused over prescriptive vs. descriptive statements that i've ever read, and i did philosophy in uni.
wtf is this doing on slashdot?
that's very interesting, but i don't think it's quite right.
i love my country. i want it to do well. i care about its success. i believe that makes me patriotic. that said, however, i'm under no delusion that we can do no wrong (we've done, and continue to do, plenty), nor that we're inherently better than others (we do some things better, some worse, and those lists change over time). nor am i willing to strive for the success of my country at the expense of the rights of others.
i believe patriotism can be dangerous, as it's easily and often manipulated into racism and nationalism. but they are not equivalent things, and "dangerous" doesn't mean inherently bad.
hold a referendum. secession is kinda a big deal, so it should require some significant effort; say two consecutive two-thirds votes or some such. hold these on a regular basis (say, every five years) in every state. if Hawai'i would like to be independent, there's their mechanism. same for any other state (Vermont has a secession movement that would like to re-create the independent Republic of Vermont).
it's notable that after the Civil War the Supreme Court decided the legality of the confederate states' succession based on the fact that the national legislature wasn't involved, thus meaning some states impinged on the rights of others, which wasn't okay. the decision left open the question of whether a succession approved by the Congress would be legally valid under the Constitution. the Constitutional theorists i know are divided (with a key issue being whether the Constitution formed the government, or formed the country).
where/what school are you referring to? i'd be very surprised to find a good school that can run things for â$5k/student in the US. the one i went to was around $20k/year tuition when i graduated, has gone up since, and that didn't cover all the costs. granted, they were on the high end of things, but i've never seen anyone do it for $5k.
i have to disagree. under an oppressive regime, everyone (except potentially those in the regime itself) suffers, regardless of whether you support the regime or not. not evenly, and not always in the same ways, as your personal example illustrates, but overall.
take modern America as an example. middle-class Bush supporters are, in fact, suffering under that regime, they just don't realize it. our economy is a disaster; foreclosures and inflation don't care about political affiliation, nor (for the most part) did the massive job loss at the beginning of the Bush presidency nor the lower average wage of the jobs gained back in his second term. these are measurable ways in which his supporters still suffer. they either think those costs are worth it or are simply scammed into not seeing them (or not attributing them to his policies).
broadening it to hypothetical future abuses in the US is a bit harder, because we don't know what those abuses will look like. myself, i object to the concentration of power in the executive branch regardless of who's in office, largely because we don't know who's going to be in office a decade from now (which, on a personal aside, is why i support Obama instead of Clinton: i believe he's got a much better respect for the Constitution and our principles of government, whereas i believe Clinton's more likely to continue the centralization, although using that power for more positive things in the short term). we could imagine a regime where the federal government is explicitly targeting political/ideological rivals, but i think that's much further down the road (if we were to ever get there). in the shorter term, we'd see things like a chilling effect on media and dissent. the general repression of the free exchange of ideas hurts everyone both in abstract terms (weakening your society by creating a monoculture and constricting vision) and concrete (reduced global competitiveness compared to countries where free exchange is more valued).
take a less political example, in the other direction: public schools. i have no kids, yet i pay taxes to support public schools. i myself went to private schools my entire academic career (except a brief stint in a state university). still, i benefit from having a minimum level of literacy and education in the country. i happen to support taxes for education, but i know lots of people who don't; they still benefit from the system. same with roads (except for not really being able to avoid them): you might not like your taxes being taken (some people just object to taxes out of hand, after all), but you still benefit from the results.
this is a really good point i don't think i've seen mentioned before. it's analogous to the differences in average quality of programming between broadcast and pay television. with the former, i'm not the customer: advertisers are. shows are designed to fit ads conveniently, so the story gets broken up nicely for commercial breaks. the delivery is also tweaked to favor the customers (advertisers): ads are often broadcast louder than the actual programming. with pay television, i'm the customer. HBO makes quality shows because they want my business; they want me to pay for the shows. HBO produces Six Feet Under, The Riches, and so on; broadcast television produces "who wants to marry a jackass" and the 49th season of Survivor.
also, what you're suggesting for the QoS billing situation is entirely reasonable from an architectural point of view, and in terms of the transit, the technology has existed for a decade. the problem is it (a) requires ISPs to support two billing/accounting methods instead of one, (b) requires application and/or OS cooperation to differentiate services (again, tech's there, but there's the old "installed base" problem), and (c) requires a critical mass of ISPs to agree that's how they're going to do it (or get told that's how they're going to do it by a regulating body). i think you've got a technically desirable solution that simply won't come to pass due to market reasons.
what? allowed by whom? speed things up for whom? who's on the other end of the fiber?
if you own your own facilities network, nobody has to "allow" you to turn it on. Level 3 buys and lays fiber and lights it up. job done. i just don't get what you're saying here.