"Good morning, Professor Wolling. During the last twenty-four hours there have been three priority-nine world news items, two regional alerts for Britain, and four on general topics from Reuters, your chosen neutral-bias news agency. None of the alerts were in categories listed by you as critical."Human nature often leads us to listen only to agreeable viewpoints. One of the hallmarks of intelligence, in my opinion, is learning to listen to and assess views we disagree with. I'm not saying we should pay for them. But complaining about them while supporting an equally-biased opponent seems a bit weird to me.
Citizens had to subscribe to a minimum news-input or lose the vote. Still, Jen was anything but a public events junkie, so her nine-or-greater threshold was set as high as allowed. She’d scan the headlines later.
"You have received six letters and thirty five-message blips from individuals on your auto-accept list. Sixty-five more letters and one hundred and twelve blips entered your general delivery box on the Net.
"In addition, there were four hundred and thirteen references to you, in yesterday’s scientific journals. Finally, in popular media and open discussion boards, your name was brought up with level seven or greater relevance fourteen hundred and eleven times."
It was clearly another case of human profligacy–this typical turning of a good thing into yet another excuse for overindulgence. Like the way nations suffering from greenhouse heat still spilled more than five billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. A prodigious yield that was nevertheless nothing compared to the species’ greatest harvest–words.
And to think, some idiots predicted that we’d someday found our economy on information. That we ‘d base money on it!
On information? The problem isn’t scarcity. There’s too damned much of it!
The problem usually wasn’t getting access to information. It was to stave off drowning in it.
People bought personalized filter programs to skim a few droplets from that sea and keep the rest out. For some, subjective reality became the selected entertainments and special-interest zines passed through by those tailored shells.
Here a man watches nothing but detective films from the days of cops and robbers–a limitless supply of formula fiction. Next door a woman hears and reads only opinions that match her own, because other points of view are culled by her loyal guardian software.
To avoid such staleness, Jen had hired a famous rogue hacker, Sri Ramanujan, to design her own filter. "Let’s see what happens to that list,” she said aloud, “when we use threshold seven, categories one through twenty."
"And the surprise factor, Professor Wolling?"
Jen felt in a good mood. "Let’s go with twenty percent."
That meant one in five files would pop up randomly, in defiance of her own parameters. This way she asked Ramanujan to unleash purposely on her a little of the chaos his devilish virus-symbiont had once wreaked on thirteen million Net subscribers in South Asia–jiggling their complacent cyberworlds to show them glimpses of different realities, different points of view.
TLDR: Cough up a buck, you cheap bastard(s).Did the NY Times stop selling advertising? The Old Gray Lady is not any different than any other newspaper *ever* - they are in the business of selling eyeballs to other businesses.
lupus_yonderboy, I'm sure a paragraph that essentially says "I don't want to pay for your content because we disagreed over whether going to war in Iraq approximately a decade ago was a good idea" will convince them to change course. Well done.Unfortunately said war, started on false pretenses a decade ago, is *still going on*. It is already the longest armed conflict in our nation's history. Thousands upon thousands of people have been killed or otherwise screwed by this "old" war.
If we want high-quality content, we have to pay, or we have to be exposed to advertisers who are willing to pay.
Canadian coder David Hayes has just released NYTClean, a bookmarklet that, in one click, tears down the Times’ paywall. “Released” is probably even a little strong — it makes it sound like there was an extended development process. All NYTClean does is call four measly lines of Javascript that hide a couple <div>s and turn page scrolling back on. It barely even qualifies as a hack. But it allows you access to any New York Times story, even when you’re past the monthly limit. (I just tested it out with a Canadian proxy server — works just like it says.)Can't stop the signal.....
"The whole idea of an American business trying to make a profit off of a product its hired professionals create on a daily basis is a truly brave and intrepid strategy," said media analyst Steve Messner, adding that NYTimes.com's extremely risky new approach to commerce—wherein legal tender must be exchanged in order to receive a desired service—could drastically reduce the publication's readership. "To ask NYTimes.com's 33 million unique monthly visitors to switch to a cash-for-manufactured-goods-based model from the standard everything-online-should-be-free-for-reasons-nobody-can-really-explain-based model is pretty fearless. It's almost as if The New York Times is equating itself with a business trying to function in a capitalistic society." In a statement released last Thursday, the newspaper's publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. said, "If this fails, I'd honestly rather The New York Times not exist in a world where people are unwilling to pay the price of a fucking movie ticket for a monthly online subscription.posted by Rhaomi at 10:49 AM on March 28, 2011
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posted by blucevalo at 8:30 AM on March 17, 2011 [1 favorite]