>>>> Someone on $20k a year will be spending essentially all their income; someone on $200k a year is much less likely to be.

Provide rebates for people who make $whateverAmount. It also encourages tax filing, which is always good. In Canada, if you make less than a certain amount, the government will send you cheques quarterly for what your GST expenses would be.

VAT Taxes are a good, useful tax, but they should not be the only tax. Income taxes are better at targeting high value targets with more appropriate tax rates, but they're ass backwards in that they target the generation of income, which the government always wants to encourage.

What we most need across most of the west is a better way to prevent money from pooling the way it does into the pockets of certain individuals and corporations; or to pull it out of those pools when it does. Each dollar or euro or peso or whatever is a little bit like matter, they create wells which attract similar objects. When you have 0 dollars it's very difficult to get more, when you have $10,000,000, it's very easy to get more. Money forms pools, it's the government's job to break up these pools and keep the money flowing.

VAT taxes tax the flow of money, which is ok in small amounts, but shouldn't be used in large amounts.

How is this, in any sense of a safe, sane, rational world; a good thing?

I love building, creating, discovering. The first thing that the ability to self-produce a meaningful firearm, should produce though is a limitation on the right to do so.

No one needs the ability to exercise lethal force, much less the ability to casually produce the tools that do so.

I also read the Economist. It's a very informative magazine, packed with information on any given week. I do still read the dead-tree edition of it too. One of it's strengths is the near complete lack of advertising. Well worth killing a few trees over.

We've seen this all happen before.

Back in 1999, I co-founded allakhazam.com A gaming database site which was specific to one game, and eventually grew to cover others. We witnessed the complete collapse of the online ad industry in 2000/2001, and as a result we worked very hard at establishing alternative monetization strategies. It worked, it worked very well, and in 2006 we sold the company doing very well as a result.

I then spent 3 years arguing against focusing on an Ad-focused revenue model, and renewed focus on the user experience.

Ad focused revenue models on websites are lazy, and very very broken. With a couple minor exceptions, most people are not swayed by the presentation of random imagery on the sides of the page they're trying to look at. Tech savy users either block the ads in the browser or they are just used to the ads and block them out internally. Most sites use 3rd party ad networks to sell the ads they're going to display, and as a result we get useless context-free ads displaying at the wrong time in a users day. Ads for Hyundai cars are pretty useless to someone reading a video game review for example.

Furthermore, having an ad-focused revenue model means that your customers are not your users. Your customers are now the ad networks or your directly sold advertisement. Your users are just a means to getting your customers to pay you more, and as a result the users often find that their user experience degrades. From articles which take multiple clicks across many pages, to invasive and irritating advertising, to vending of the users browsing habits, negatively impacting the user experience results in dollars for the operator.

Switching to a subscription model allows you to focus on developing content for the users as your customers. You no longer need to have the dichotomy of negatively impacting your users for money. Now you want to please them with a positive user experience, good compelling features and content. Good content is hard though. There are 10001 bloggers out there willing to write content for nearly nothing to free. So you can't assume that putting up a couple articles a week is going to be enough reasoning to get people to subscribe. Also many sites over value the value of a subscription. Make it small and I might be interested ($3/month), if you're going to charge me $20/month you're probably not going to get my money at all.

Subscription revenue is rewarding though. We had 50,000 subscribers paying us $3/month. We strove to constantly add features to the subscribed users. Ad revenue wasn't even a shade of that, despite doing over (at that time) 5 million uniques / day.

I do do my part.

I bought cable and HBO for the 2 months it was on.

Last monday, I canceled cable, because it was over.

I also download it every week, but I don't believe that I count amoung pirates as I have paid to watch it.

They should allow digital streaming (in 1080) the moment it airs for $price/episode tho.

Simple grade 3 math explained why the shares went down. It's hard to justify that kind of multiple of earnings. Their income growth rate makes it unlikely it'll ever sustain that kind of value. It's got nothing to do with generational shifts to mobile.

Facebook is different than Google, very different. Facebook is one well developed web app, with remarkable popularity. Google is founded on the strengths of their search engine. Search is key, search is where you start. Search means you're looking for something, and susceptible to being introduced to something else that you might not have been looking for. Facebook is a tool, an application. Ads in applications diminish my experience with my application, ads in my tools make me not use said tool.

Tho I feel I'm not actually pirating it.

I paid for the Cable Subscription required to get access to HD HBO for the period of Game of Thrones.

I like the show and want to pay for it, I want them to make more of it.

I also download it every week to archive a copy, because it's less hassle than pulling it off my PVR.

It bugs me that AMC also gets money for my liking Game of Thrones, and that HBO gets money for other crap from my liking Game of Thrones. I don't want gritty political dramas, I don't want witty comedies; I want good Fantasy and good Sci Fi. I will pay for it.

I hope everyone out there that only downloads it, finds a way to contribute to the economic success of the project; to encourage it to keep going. Rather than the way of Rome.

There is a fundamental shift in the underlying business models. (Thank goodness)

a) No longer is the only source of getting a song, buying an album. Now, if you like a song, you buy the song for 1.29, rather than the album for $20 from HMV or wherever.
b) Social media and word of mouth trumps advertising and corporate presentation. It's much harder to convince your audience to spend the $20 for the album with 1 mediocre song, and it's much easier for your audience to talk amongst them selves and realize that the album isn't worth it.

c) Thanks to the digital age, the industry is shrinking. Same for newspapers.

A large portion of the size of the industry was the overhead necessary to distribute physical media. I'm not sure what %, but I'm certain it was significant. This business value is gone and/or going now. What you're left with is the value of the purely creative side, some marketing, some overhead.

If the value of a newspaper in 1990 was $100M, and $60M of that could be attributed to the capital & overhead required to actually produce and deliver the newspaper; now it's 2012, and after inflation the same company finds itself worth $40M because they've lost the need to maintain the infrastructure to do the physical delivery. The same is true for Music (tho not yet for movies, although coming) A very large portion of the value of a music distribution company was the distribution part. That's gone now, thank goodness.

We just need the industry to adapt to the new mode where creation is harder than delivery, because right now I feel like we're not being served well by record company A&R.

But that's just me

Ultima, Bards Tale, how many of these games are franchises bought by EA which sits on them and doesn't develop the franchise?

Because MS has done such a good job of all their online offerings to date?

I'm afraid that MS grabbing yahoo would mean the death of yahoo. Mind you, I haven't used yahoo in any meaningful way really ever. The internet, and the world are better off with Yahoo being Yahoo. We need more companies driving the internet, not less.

MS buying yahoo would be a bad call for MS as well. They don't need to spend more billions down a path of online presence than they're already haemorrhaging billions down, MS needs to dramatically re-think it's commitment to the interconnected world or face their own crisis eventually; but that's another story...

First business (independent ISP in 1996) didn't go so well, but cashed out for what I put in. Later on it failed and some people lost money.
Second business (Internet Consulting) also didn't go so well, belly up in 1998
Third business sold for $10M in 2006.
Starting fourth company now. Hope to sell it in 3 to 4 years, once the viability of the business plan is proven.

If you have an idea, DO IT!!! Manage your risk exposure appropriately, but really - you can always start small. Just DO IT.

The war in Afghanistan is a direct result of american soil being attacked. I'm Canadian, and our troops are (rightfully) there in support of our American friends. The taliban government harboured Al'Queda, including those who did the 9/11 attacks. By allowing their territory to be used in the attack they committed an attack on all of Nato. The only surprising thing (to me) about all of this is that instead of devoting the bulk of your military resources to nailing down and hunting for the perpetrators of these attacks, your government went off and invaded Iraq instead.

The taliban still need to be destroyed. Afghanistan still needs massive amounts of reconstruction. For all the resources that have been applied, more still need to be applied. We are not in Afghanistan to prop up a fledgling democracy, we are not there to promote human rights. We are there to destroy a fundamentalist movement, and more effort needs to be spent in order to succeed.

Or we can let Afghanistan fall, again. They'll harbour enemies of the west, again.

No doubt MS's tactics during the height of the v4 browser wars were low, but...

A web browser is an integral part of the operating system of any modern user-based computer.

Sure, ship Windows without IE. Ship it without any browser, or for that matter http tool. The Microsoft implementation of the ftp command line tool should probably be removed too.

IE bites, but a browser *is* an integral part of an operating system. (I won't buy a cell phone without one!)

I just wish anti-virus was too.