No, that's not how market forces work. They will spend more money on the car than they would have, OR they will decide to buy a car rather than fix their own.

What a load of statist crap. You do not get to decide how I run my family. You are not smarter than me. You are not better than me. Your morality is not superior to mine. Get the fuck out of my family matters and my morality.

This plan is part of the stimulus package to create jobs.

These are awesome questions. I'm not really on board with this green tech stuff, because I think there is so much bad science out there right now (probably due to the politicization). But your comment almost inspired the geeky excitement I get over other areas of science. Good thoughts...

They are still criminalizing research. I agree with you, but I don't agree with the law. Stealing is the crime.

You forgot the part about blaming the rising temps on man-made CO2 emissions!!!

Brilliant!

Um, what? Why are you saying gold would not be worth much? Are you talking real or nominal dollars? Sure there would probably be some price deflation in real terms, but for the most part it would hold its real value.

This is clearly the result of man-made CO2 emissions.

You people are ridiculous. I could think of about 9 million better ways to get a higher number of people installing Silverlight per dollar spent. Even targeting the geek population (which this does) is stupid from that perspective because that is the most concentrated area of people who dislike Microsoft and wouldn't install Silverlight on principle. It's also the group who would be most likely to be able to install the alternative.

Seriously, do you really think that Bill Gates cares at all whether you install Silverlight?

The dude is way past the money grubbing phase and has turned to philanthropy in order to pay for his sins. It is textbook psychology.

We have documents that protect individual liberties against the good intentions of the ignorant masses.

I didn't RTFA and I immediately knew this was a logical reaction to completely illogical bureaucracy. What's ridiculous is that I had to go 3/4 down the comment page in order to find the first person pointing this out in a comment! Oh, Slashdot...

> There is no way of monetising that will keep geeks happy. It's a myth
> peddled by people who want to justify the morality of blocking every
> ad, no matter how unintrusive. ...
> advertising - adblock. Only cast iron method of getting around it is
> by putting ads before videos and not displaying any videos until the
> ad has played through. But not every news site does videos.

Look, I don't have any interest in advertisements, even targeted ones. I have no use for them. None. Not on TV, not on the Web, not on billboards. I am not interested in what some company thinks I should buy.

You have completely missed the issue by focusing on how people are keeping their own computer from annoying them with ads (those bastards!) and ways to "defeat" these methods. Even if you "defeat" these methods and display an ad to me, like in the case of videos where I can't get around it, it still doesn't work. All I do is flip to another tab or do something for 10 seconds until what I actually want comes on. You do not control the content I see. If you want compensation for your content, then ask for it. But forcing me to stare at an advertisement I have no interest in, will never click on, and will never be influenced by will never result in any increased revenue for you.

The business model of forcing people to look at stuff they aren't interested in was never solid enough to stand upright. If the "defeat" you mention becomes much more popular, I or someone else will write a quick plug in that plays video in the background into a buffer and then when the user really wants to watch the video, playback will start right after the ad ends (this is basically the TiVo solution).

All of these people who trying to get users to play content they don't want on their own computers are shocked that it doesn't work.

Really?

> Subscription - few people are willing to subscribe to a single site.

If a site offered true, un- or minimally-biased investigative journalism, I would pay for it. I don't know whom this site would hire, though, because these journalists don't currently exist.

I am not interested in paying for content aggregation, though. And I am not interested in paying for exaggerating misrepresentations of minor scientific advancements. And I am not interested in paying for half-truths and talking points from the likes of Fox News of MSNBC.

Like anything else in the world, if you offer something of value, I will pay for it.

Again, I think you are missing the point. The issue with subscriptions is not that people aren't willing to pay anything. The issue is that the value provided by a single site is so small that the transaction costs of collecting a fee would make the transaction unprofitable. You seem to understand that below, but do not point out the reasoning:

> You pay $4.99 a month and the money gets divided up between sites based on
> page views. However this is a nightmare to set up and get people on board
> and you may find it's about as successful as regular subscriptions

The reason that it would work for a collection of sites for a larger fee is because of the transaction cost issue. Even then, it only works if the collective value is $4.99 or higher. If I only care about 1 of those sites, then I will not pay the fee.

You don't necessarily need to do this bundle model. As long as you can establish a third party payer with low enough transaction costs, where I can put $25 in my account and it gets debited in small amounts as I access content, it could work. This is similar to the model that nearlyfreespeech.net's hosting service uses (although there is no third-party there).

> But Google maps sure as hell increased my local knowledge. I like staring at maps.

Yeah, but you can't really generalize because not everyone's like that. For example, I like having a girlfriend.

Thank you! I wish I could mod you up to 11.