You're right to an extent (the news cannot be free as in beer), but the nation-wide non-profit online only experiment that I was referring to is really more aimed at the kind of reporting you are talking about. See: The Voice of San Diego, The MinnPost, and The St. Louis Beacon for examples. Non-profit, local newspapers going 100% online and depending on their communities for support (with maybe some ad sales on the side). All of them are doing hard news coverage and in some cases are doing it better than their city's major daily paper.

Also, your local NPR station has long operated on the model that you just described, providing the kind of coverage that you've described.

The model may not yet be proven for "print" but it is certainly being tested, and seems to be holding up pretty well.

The non-profit, online-only journalism model is being tested out across the country to some notable success. Granted, the orgs tend to partner with print and TV media to get their stories a wider audience (like ProPublica has done with the NYT, NPR and FrontLine), but the non-profit membership model of news gathering (like your local NPR affiliate or like ProPublica) is gaining steam.

Freedom of the press doesn't guarantee quality, which is what I think we all want. Put your money where your eyeballs are and throw a few bucks at ProPublica if you admire their work.

I don't work for them, btw... just a fan.

As chance would have it, Randy Cohen has been removed from the NYT magazine as of yesterday. A new writer will take over The Ethicist in March. Your wish, granted, to some degree or another.

You seem pretty certain about that, considering it's really not an issue with a lot of legal certainty at this point. If it was as simple as saying "DDoS is against the law", slashdot would quickly find itself in a world of painful litigation.

Because cyber-crime doesn't refer to a mere specialized type of crime, but an entirely different paradigm. This new paradigm of crime not only requires completely new types of training and skill-building, it will require well-written and clear laws that don't yet exist if we're ever going to get out of the "wild west" in which we currently reside.

Giving it a label helps to identify it and differentiate it, which is probably beneficial.

We call it cyber-crime because of the special skills and knowledge required to appropriately investigate and prosecute it. I really don't want a beat cop who makes arrests for street muggings responsible for investigating high-tech crime. Specially trained members of law enforcement will probably be required to enforce especially complex types of crime.

In the future:

Desktops will be dead. No one will have them.
Laptops will be your workhorse. Many will have them for work.
Netbooks will be your casual computing device. Some will have them for novelty.
Phones will be your go-to interface for day-to-day needs. Everyone will have one.

Which is why they should be damn sure of their accusations before they issued the warrant, otherwise they may end up causing irreparable harm to the victim of the false accusation. If there is a process for reviewing a lower-prosecutor's decision to issue a warrant, that process should be completed PRIOR to the issuance of the warrant.

If a man can be publicly accused of rape, a warrant issued for his arrest, and his name splashed all over the international media PRIOR to you being 100% sure you want to bring him in on those charges, then I would say something is seriously wrong with your system of justice.

Music to Google's ears.

For those interested in the study, you can find it on IHS Global Insight's page: pdf here.

someone needs to teach the US gov how to micromanage their units better. fortunately for us we seem to have early expansion down pretty well.

maybe the koreans can help?

You know between this and the Education speech, Obama must be getting kind of tired of having radical extremist political parties censoring his otherwise basic and principled messages. Good thing that kind of thing doesn't happen over he... wait...

Why can't open-source, verifiable software be part of your hallowed PROCESS? It can. And ought to be. Software engineers have a legitimate seat at this table.