Both of your concerns seem to relate to the possibility that the foundation will provide an advantage to some businesses and not others.

This is a vaild concern, but expressing it in the form of incoherent rants doesn't do anyone any good.

Why not try something like this in the main announcement thread:

"I'm worried that this foundation will use the Bitcoin name to provide an undue advantage to certain businesses at the expense of other businesses. As such I am not willing to support it until you can explain what steps you'll take to make sure this doesn't happen."

As a bonus, you could provide some constructive suggestions which, if adopted, would satisfy your concern.

Did this project die, or is it still in progress?

That's (finally) something specific.

Danger #1: The Bitcoin Foundation could use it's position to provide preferrential advertising for favored businesses.

What else?

When a user is ignored threads he started show up in a smaller italic font when viewing a particular forum but this style distinction is not applied in the "unread" or "watchlist" pages.

Could this behavior be applied to those pages as well?

I would understand this position if someone could explain what exactly the danger is.

I understand if someone doesn't like the business practices of Mt Gox, but that's not an existential threat to Bitcoin itself. A single entity with >50% can cause harm to the rest of the network in well-documented ways so I understand that concern.

What specifically could this foundation do if it was malicious that everybody's so worried about? So far all I can see is a superstituous fear of the word "centralization".

That's not an answer, it's a barely articulated expression of anxiety.

What specifically are you worried about?

How?

Over 9000

Isn't that's more of a current implementation detail than a fundemental limitation?

Is there anything in the protocol that would stop someone from starting a mining pool that only processed zero-fee transactions and allowed users who wished to perform them to directly connect to the pool instead of broadcasting on the network?

I'm currently undecided as to the importance of this announcement but at the same time I don't understand where all the hate comes from. People who don't want to participate don't have to participate. What's the big deal? Maybe the people who are protesting the "centralization" in an apparent knee-jerk fashion don't understand how easy it is to fork a git repository.

A hostile entity that gained control over those things could do some damage, but it wouldn't be irreperable.

The code is already out in the open. Someone seeking to stop distribution via copyright and patent lawsuits wouldn't have any more luck than the media industry. At worst it would just push future development into the darknet.

You can't trust anything you read on the Internet as being the genuine opinion of a real person. There are entire industries designed around the business of creating fake buzz via astroturfing various social networks.

True.

Using the threat of violence to coerce others is evil, regardless of how you dress it up.

Sure you can. Set your VM up for host-only networking and you can use iptables to do whatever you want to the packets.

The window of opportunity to do this lasts until there are enough things available for sale for Bitcoins that converting them to USD is no longer necessary.

I guess the first purchaser could avoid needing to trust Casascius but it wouldn't work if they ever want to give the coins away.

This will never work. The TLA people are never going to speak up.

Instead, everybody who doesn't work for the FBI, CIA, NSA or SEC should say so.

I found a clue:

Who knows?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=112881.0

There's probably a way to use multisig to completely eliminate the risk.