Largely on Jeff's recommendation, my boss got 10 developers 256 GB SSDs (for about $750 each) ~ 2 years ago. They were blazing fast, but only one survived to see its first birthday. He even gave up sending them back to Crucial; since after the first few were replaced and failed again, it became clear that any replacements with SSDs would inevitably cause yet another unexpected half-day down time for that developer within in the next year, and most likely at least some lost work even with daily drive image backups. Despite my begging for another SSD, he won't let us touch them now. Some things are just too crazy for some people, no matter how hot they are. I think a major contributing factor to early failure was the mandatory whole-disk-encryption; but based the nature of our business this is not negotiable. If they could encrypt natively on the drive using a managable key scheme that kept our sysadmins happy, the drives might last longer and we would pay a premium for such drives.

More Challenges to the Lessig-Zittrain-Wu Thesis: http://techliberation.com/2011/02/27/more-challenges-to-the-lessig-zittrain-wu-thesis/ (Technology Liberation Front)

Jeff, I respect Lessig too, but I think he's off in the woods with this this concern, and he's misguided too many techies with him. There is some excellent background on both sides of the story here: http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/11/the-rise-of-cybercollectivism Please read that Jeff, and post a follow-up if your position changes even subtly. It boils down to your whether you believe competition delivers better results than the "intelligent" designs of bureaucrats. If you look at the track records of each, yes markets have their friction and their occasional pathologies, but asking the FCC (or any regulator) to keep it fair is trusting the fox to guard the hen-house. You took the wrong lesson from Hush-a-Phone. It wasn't the maniacal actions of a monopoly that stifled this innovation and limited consumers choices it was the initially-well-intentioned regulation of these networks that invited this lunacy.