Most of the profits of news media come from advertising, not subscriptions. In television, the advertisers know that they will have a large audience when the news plays, and pay a heavy premium to put their ad in that timeslot. The same applies to newspapers. The Sunday paper commands a higher price for advertisers because more people read it.

I hope it's only a cookie, because that would be easy to circumvent. More annoying would be IP tracking, but that just requires a few seconds to reboot the modem. If you need to set up an account and log in then you can just set up multiple accounts. This is just annoying though. I like my news, but I don't like it enough to pay for it. I might only use such services twice a month.

A few years back I remember hearing about a bacteria that was being breed to produce electricity. It ate really nutrient-rich mucky dirt and produced electricity, and the structure of the bacteria was similar to a nerve cell branching out to other cells and carrying the current. They were trying to make a battery out of it. But for the life of me I could only find stubs of articles on it, and nothing that said anything about viability or even gave a measure of what has been achieved. Anyone else heard about that work? Wonder if the conductivity of these bacteria would be genetically added to the battery bacteria to improve the flow of electricity? Maybe the projects should be married.

Something about this has me wondering, isn't devolution easier for life than evolution? Usually life builds off of itself, becoming more complex as it goes, but retaining most of what was already there. From previous studies it seems as though lots of bacteria are able to adapt to space much more readily than was expected. http://www.infoplease.com/spot/spacefungus1.html (infoplease.com) Watch out for aggressive ads on that site. Doesn't this suggest that bacterial life was previously adapted for space?