conuly

Isn't there a parable about this?

Yep. Called the "parable of the labourers in the vineyard" (among other things, no doubt).

Something like that*.

Pretty close (though not so much with the "it's unfair, suck it up" comment -- more like "You agreed that a penny a day was a fair wage, didn't you? Well, you got a penny. Why do you care what anyone else got?", perhaps with the implication "if you thought that was too little, you could have negotiated something else" but more likely "if you thought that was fair wage then, what made you change your mind?"). Here's the appropriate passage (using the KJV translation) (http://scriptures.lds.org/matt/20/1-16#1).

And I have heard that applied to happenings in news -- several times; I remember the argument being made when the number of userpics for paid accounts was increased (from 15 to 30, IIRC), and people with add-on userpic space claimed they had paid for the privilege of having "85 more pictures than normal". Which they hadn't; they had paid for the privilege of having 100 userpics, which they still had.

I also thought of that during a discussion in Slashdot about how VMWare was starting to give away one of their products for free, and somebody complained about how he had bought it for several hundred dollars not long ago. And it was pointed out to him that he had obviously considered it worth the money or he wouldn't have spent it, and he still has his money's worth; just because it's now cheaper doesn't mean that the worth of the program he already has went down or something. Err. Not sure whether that paragraph made sense; I knew what I was thinking while I read the /. discussion, though.

At any rate. Yes. Paid and permanent accounts still all have at least all the privileges they had when you paid for/bought the account, so in that sense, nothing was taken away from you.

(Unless you consider that what you paid for was some kind of exclusivity, or that you paid for "having function X which nobody else has", rather than the advertised "having function X".)