You could counter this by giving the representative one proxy vote for each citizen who doesn't cast a ballot on each issue. This would however mean that the representative stays in control unless 50-75% of citizens cast individual ballots on an issue. So you could tweak it to dial down the weighting of representative votes as participation rates increase.

The security of online voting doesn't concern me as much. There is however an insoluble choice between anonymity (the secret ballot) and making it easy to buy and sell votes. But attendance at a polling booth isn't a perfect system either.

Most of the lying isn't in the articles, it's in the ads. Particularly lying by omission, which is the sine qua non of advertising.

Unlike newsprint, digital publications have index pages with many headlines (sometimes with short summaries) that are separate from full articles. I find these much quicker to scan than a layout of complete articles, particularly when articles in a printed paper are surrounded with ads that can't be automatically removed like they can on webpages.

The problem is that I'm usually only interested in one article in a hundred, which makes it hard to justify a subscription over an a la carte model.

Quite right.

But given the small fraction of readers who actually see a particular ad in a freely-distributed publication, the smaller number who are interested in it, and the even smaller number who are influenced by it, it's understandable why many advertisers are migrating to the better ROI platforms of search engine ads and their own websites, squeezing the money available for editorial, which is our only source of purchase information that has at least has some chance of being free from spin.

That's not going to happen with most newspapers and magazines. People won't pay extra for an ad-free experience when it's easy to ignore or block the ads. It may be another matter if unblockable animated ads start getting placed around content in publications such as tablet apps.

May I ask:

What are the main benefits you get out of this quality journalism? Making you a better citizen/voter? Making you a better conversationalist? Making you a more moral person? Making you better understand the world so you can make better decisions (purchases and other life choices)? Making it possible to comment and impress your views on the public debate?

And what use do you make of the ads in these quality publications?

Correct. There's no cost that justifies making authors pay for their publications. But there is a value. Prestigious journals get read by the right people; few will come across a random PDF. It's just like an app-store. Apple and Amazon can extract a good cut because discovery is at least as important as app cost and quality. Other publishers of software, books, and stock images get away with even larger cuts.

Submitting to a quality journal is marketing yourself to the ends of fame, power, and profit. Scientists are human.

But breaking away from an exploitative market leader is classic Prisoner's Dilemma. That's why there's all these attempts at collective action.

Quite right. The problem is that anyone can supply this service. Sure, the people who develop the software are often the best solution builders. But often the developers miss out on this work either because there's more work than the developers can handle, or because others can do it for less. The developers earn nothing from this work.

That's the most important benefit users get out of open software: the ability to tinker and to break away. And because it catalyses an ecosystem, the developer also benefits from making it easy for their software and its documentation to be extended.

If one's willing to break away from a pure FOSS licence, it's possible to retain these freedoms while making it feasible to charge for the software. All you need to do is to adopt a licence that (a), requires users pay a licence fee to run the software in a non-test system, and (b), requires those distributing a forked version pay that same per-copy licence fee back to you, keeping any premium their enhancements or marketing nous can attract. You not only get an army of developers riding your ecosystem, but an army of vendors trying to maximize awareness and sales. Not to mention happy users without that locked-in feeling.

If it's serious software put to serious use by entities with reputations to protect, you won't get too many dodging the licence fee, especially if you include a simple licence check/reminder facility that though easy to bypass (it's open source after all) still needs to be done as a conscious decision.

So I think the way to go is a licence that makes non-gratis libre software feasible, and which can support IOSVs (Indepenent Open Software Vendors). Here's one example.

That's one advantage of audio over text: one can consume it while working visually.

Perhaps SlashdotTV should become SlashdotRadio. Or the video player should have an "audio only" mode so that there's no wasted bandwidth for those who just want to listen.

In-stream audio ads should get Slashdot almost as good rates as the video ads.