The Depreciation of 'www.'

I think an appropriate question to ask about this subject is:

Why in the name of hell do we need the www. subdomain?

My view is that we don't. It makes the place look untidy, right? Well, sometimes. I always make sure that all of my websites use www. - even if it then redirects the user to the preferred domain. For my main blog, I've added the following lines to my .htaccess file, so that it redirects www.alanedwardes.com to just plain old alanedwardes.com.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.alanedwardes\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://alanedwardes.com/$1 [R=301,L]

With long domains It is a bit more user friendly, (well, friendly to lazy users).

Taking it too far

I can't express how much I absolutely HATE websites that don't actually offer support for their domain with/without the www. subdomain. I can't really tell if it is their dire disrespect for to "www.", or if they just don't know how to offer support for it. Either way a user of the site gets either the OpenDNS guide page (http://guide.opendns.com/?url=domain-without-www-support.com if they're with opendns) or the their browser's "could not load this page" shiz.

If that ain't deterring the visitors, I've no idea what will.