Hate to see that guy when he *is* trying to be racist. Wow.

"It's pretty clear that he considered it a joke at the beginning, and then he went bat-shit insane."

No, and then he realised that there really was a load of money to be made.

On a more serious note, what are the chances of bringing back a Woolly Mammoth? The ticket sales for that at a zoo (or a series of exhibitions at major capitals around the world) would bring in incredible amounts of money to finance further research in related fields.

And it's not dissimilar to region-encoding on DVD players - artificially limiting a product to engineer more revenue (in that case, for a related industry).

What MS are doing is called 'versioning' in marketing terms and it's something they have done for years. The concept is that a company provides a range of product/service options (budget to premium) and lets the customer choose what level of customer they consider themselves to be.

Bennett, TL;DR.

On the high volume as mentioned by the parent, it's that they can't handle it profitably. If you set up a site designed to make money from user-generated content, be prepared to support it professionally, or don't bother.

Agree completely and especially for local newspapers. They need to be making advertising accessible to the many local companies who would love to get in front of nearby customers but I think they're missing a significant opportunity.

Does insurance cover anything these days?

Funnel some of the defence expenditure across! Think long term rather than short term (warmongering).

Obviously not many, but very few will pay for that sort of watchdog role. I've actually wondered in the past if that responsibility couldn't fall to universities in some way - student journalists cutting their teeth. Better than no watchdog at all.

Why do you think selling ads doesn't work?

Or do you mean selling a certain type of ad (annoying ones, for one thing)?

I doubt ad blockers are used by a majority of people. And statistics on the web are better than they are in newspapers. While the current economic climate is impacting spending, businesses will always need to reach their targets. Anyone hosting eyeballs (popular websites) will have the option to capitalise on that.

IMO, the money being spent on advertising in newspapers and radio will gradually start to shift to the web. I still have clients spending $15,000/year on their ad in the Yellow Pages which is an absolute waste of money and gradually they'll wake up to new opportunities. I have seen campaigns on AdWords and radio see the former outperform the latter by a factor of 100 to 1, for similar expenditure.

Of course, the form of advertising may change; things like co-branded ventures, side-projects/tools, sponsorships, etc are harder to block and less annoying for users.

The tip of the tail will change and data (rare songs or live recordings) will slip off the available net unless a couple of organisations start cataloguing every single piece of such information.

How? If their revenue dropped 50%, they'd just double their efforts. They're using scrapers, so it costs them nothing to harvest more content.

Look at spam. If the amount of clicking recipients halves, the spammers double their mailing list to compensate as their cost-per-message is still virtually nothing.

It's not the right solution.

"homosexuals, or a socialist nation"

No way - the comments would be full of jokes, just as they are for this story.

Why are return tickets for human missions a problem? Surely there'd be people who'd put their hand up for a likely-one-way-mission if it meant a nestegg for their family and their name immortalised in exploration books as being the first on Mars or to orbit another star?

"Slightly offtopic: why the hell does youtube autoplays the movies when you open up a page?"

Probably because 95% of their visitors would prefer that. Ever browsed a non-autoplay movie site with an average internet user? Sometimes a fair amount of time will pass before they realise that they have to click play to start.

Note that a DVD player will generally autoplay a DVD on insertion. Most CD players work in the same way, game consoles by default, etc.