The right half of your brain is wired to the left half of your body (and vice versa). That's just the standard, go-to, basically harmless example of stupidity in the design of long-lasting systems.

From http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Unintelligent_Design :

> Unintelligent Design is the theory that the world was designed by some higher power, but this higher power did a piss poor job at it. There are many theories as to how the universe could have been so stupidly and half-heartedly spilt into existence.

Or from the slightly more serious http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintelligent_design :

Your optic nerve originates at the front of your retina and pierces through it, instead of more sensibly originating at the back:

> The retina sends electrical signals to the brain through the optic nerve and people see images. The optic nerve, however, is connected to the retina on the side that receives light, essentially blocking a portion of the eye and giving humans a blind spot. A better structure for the eye would be to have the optic nerve connected to the side of the retina that does not receive the light, such as in cephalopods.

You stupidly breathe through the same tube you eat and drink with, causing a staggering number of unnecessary deaths:

> If the [pharynx and larynx] were not connected and did not share a portion of their travel paths, choking would not be an issue, as it isn’t for most other animals in the world.

The product I work with has some protocols that is non-http. Some of our customers are complaining to us because _their_ users can't get through their own firewall (i.e the users own firewall, not our customers firewall). These users are often on corporate networks, and to get the users to convince their employer to fix their firewall is likely a waste of energy. In fact our customers may consider to switch to another vendor if we don't change to a HTTP based protocol.

Of cause the same firewall administrators may introduce deep packet inspection to only allow real web traffic later, creating more problems, but as someone delivering third party solutions now, you are forced to use HTTP or HTTPS.

On the contrary, the only reason the internet works is because it's robust enough to survive incompetent network admins.

Tunnelling will probably have to be HTTPS everywhere too as a countermeasure against both surveillance and DPI.

Arguably the internet is a hack around incompetence and power-hoarding; the phone companies potentially had the technology to deliver many of the things we see as internet services as early as the 1980s, but were too bureaucratic to deliver innovation and especially cost reductions. (Compare MINITEL, for example)

That the internet makes service-based billing hard is also a feature.