Stranger to me is why you would support the idea of a newspaper that trades news for advertising. You don't strike me as the type of guy who actually reads a newspaper.

People who subscribe to the New York Times, and a lot of others besides.

Well... it gets complicated, but a newspaper that is 100 percent ads is not a newspaper, it's a catalog.

The only control the law really has over that (because this is, after all, a free country with freedom of speech), is over postal rates. Newspapers and other media enjoy special rates for mass postage, provided they maintain a certain ratio of advertising to editorial pages. If they exceed the ratio, they can lose the favored shipping rates, which can incur significant costs.

If you don't ship your publication through the mail, though, or you don't care what you pay for postage, you can put whatever you want in it.

I dunno. I know it's not popular around here to like anything that smells like "social," but I find I like using Facebook far more than I ever liked using MySpace. Even if you assume they're both serving the same market with all of the exact same features (which isn't really true), one piece of software is not identical to everything else in its category. It may be that Facebook succeeds simply because it's better.

Believe it or not, there are laws about that, at least if you plan to sell your product through the U.S. Post.

I think it depends. If you're talking about the old-model, "throw one onto every porch" daily newspaper, then perhaps advertising is the only way it can survive (if it can at all). But I'm pretty sure The Economist, for example, makes a decent chunk of its money from subscriptions.

True to an extent, but if you have a cute local restaurant you're not going to want to put an ad for it right next to a write-up of a recent child murder. Around here, that kind of advertising goes into the weekly papers, along with the live music listings and the coupons for discount spa treatments. None of that stuff is underwriting the actual news reporting.

What's wrong with Warren Buffett? He's made a lot of money for himself, true, but he's made a lot of money for other people besides. And as for his own wealth, he's in the process of donating it all to charity, to the tune of billions going toward important causes that governments are too broke or shortsighted to fund. He was instrumental in convincing Bill Gates to do the same. If you're going to demonize some successful, wealthy American, I can think of a lot of better targets.

"I hate it... every time I come home, my roommate is always playing one of those first-person shooter games."

"You mean like Duke Nukem?"

"No, the other kind."