The downside of this is that the publisher then needs to have direct contact with advertisers, which may influence their editorial unless they have old-school Chinese wall policies, not strong in new-media players.

Yes, I'd say what will happen is that ad blockers will end up making page scripts see an unaltered shadow DOM, but display the page with ads removed.

But this won't work with (closed) apps, which are increasingly squeezing out the (open) Web.

The dichotomy in Facebook posts I mentioned above has communist parallels — denunciations, painted-on smiles, and nothing in between. Do you see a similarity?

This need to be too nice is also true of non-anonymous forums like Facebook, where there's a split between anodyne comments and over-the-top complaints. The former comes about because no-one wants to be accused of being a hater or a whinger, and wants to maximize their "likes", so nearly all comments are content-free sunshine and roses. But once the target is a corporation or a prominent person who may have done something wrong, everyone smugly gangs up and lets loose. The middle path of polite and measured criticism is lost, which is where the meat is in any discussion.

Amazon probably won't (initially) force service suppliers to be exclusive to Amazon, though they could offer a fee reduction for those who do.

What Amazon are doing however is forcing any offer on Amazon to be no worse than any other offer, so providers can't charge Amazon customers more to cover the fees. Providers must yield some of their margin to Amazon but hope to make it up through greater volume.

Interesting. At least they dealt early with the "don't be evil" question.

Still it indicates Jobs' fondness of using price appearance as a marketing tool.

The $10,000 model? That's the first Apple price I've seen without a "9". Pricing of non-mass-market luxury products is usually more classy, which is why I think they're tainting their mainline products with such pricing.

Wall-to-wall "9" pricing is unusual in tech companies, though Apple are encouraging a trend. It's more common in discount retailers.

At least on me, such pricing doesn't have the intended effect of reducing the headline digit by one and making it seem like prices have been precisely cut to the bone. Instead they make prices seem more what-the-market-will-bear than cost-plus.

Apple really is queen of the 9s. Do any of its prices not have a 9 in it?

It's hard to have respect for a company that doesn't respect your intelligence through ubiquitous use of a dumb pricing trick.

They didn't like you, now they're riled up and more dangerous.

...but makes it more likely that something bad will happen to you. While you lay dying or nurse a permanent disability you can comfort yourself that you were able to give the police a list of your enemies.

I'm advocating a nearly-Free licence where the purchaser can indeed distribute the software willy-nilly (altered or unaltered), but the recipient cannot run it until they pay the development chain. To ensure this point is brought to the software recipients' attention, you would need a licence condition that prevented removal of a small bit of code that checked for the presence of a licence file, plus non-distribution of those licence files. (Easily hacked, but it takes an act of will that brings the law and conscience into play.) Small restrictions, but big benefits to funding the development ecosystem.

And why a thousand as many companies still charge for their software (but stuff things up by keeping it closed).

A paid open source development model that distributes payments down derived work chains should increase the re-use of software because it combines unhindered redistribution & modification with a work incentive for programmers. Because it doesn't pay well, often Open Source software is usually either done as a hobby or as a way to gain employment (ironically, developing proprietary software).

But sure, charging for software will make it unaffordable for some. But that's how capitalism works in order to make open software development a viable job. There no stopping licence discounts being given to worthy recipients like non-profits, students, small business, and contributors to the software.

I don't know why more open source projects don't just charge for their software. Sure this removes Freedom 0 (the freedom to run), so it's not (big-O) Open Source. But it preserves all the important tinkering freedoms, especially if original authors get a cut from sale of derived works.

What you wrote above implies that most users will pirate anything not completely locked down. I don't think that's true, especially for business users, and especially if a purchase comes with support. Charging is better than a donation model, where donors are made to fee like chumps, usually gaining nothing more than karma, and freeloaders haven't done anything wrong.

Quite true. You can't make money from Open Source software in itself. But you can from software that's free in every way except price.

I really appreciate LibreOffice's existence in making Linux a complete desktop OS. However do I find it hard to use due to the lack of live updates or an "Apply" button when making changes in character, paragraph, and, page dialogs. I must estimate the change I want, press "OK", and bring the dialog up again if it's wrong. It's still this way in 4.4.

Yes, the "good enough" films will mostly be viewed at home, with premium cinemas like IMAX still getting business for the eye-candy blockbusters.