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.

Most of the older set seem to search Google for the domain they want to go to anyway.

Google doesn't need them that much as there's enough else out there.

I'm sure the summary or articles mention it somewhere, but AP and Google actually have a deal where Google pays them money for the right to host their news content?

Slashdot's links to large, mainstream, traditional news sources would probably be about 5% of story summary links. I doubt Slashdot would miss that 5% were it gone and not replaced. I had already been aware of this current spat and out of the coverage of maybe 15 or so sites, just one would be considered mainstream/trad.

Newspapers are dying and so they should. What can hopefully be saved (I think it can only be out of advertising, philanthropy or research/universities/watchdogs) will be the writers themselves.

I disagree. How often do the majority of people still read big-brand, traditional news sources? And that will drop further if they opt out of aggregating services. I check my local daily briefly, but get the majority of my news from other sources.

Fred Wilson makes the point here:
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/04/you-cant-take-the-paper-out-of-the-newstand.html

On Friday, an asian online games company called ChangeYou went public here in the US and had a very successful offering. This is interesting to me on many levels as you might imagine. Google shows three stories on the ChangeYou IPO; the lead story from SeekingAlpha, a story from Forbes, and a story from the FT. Note that there is no story there from the WSJ.

And I could care less. I had the option of all three links and I selected the SeekingAlpha link. SeekingAlpha is a network of stock bloggers. It is slowly but surely building a brand as a trusted source of stock news and opinion.

Newspapers dropped the ball on classifieds and this is only going to be another example of management making another dreadful mistake.

Quit the jibberjabber and opt out, I say. If major papers don't want to participate, opt out and leave it for those publishers and readers who do.

Depends on the size of the company. If it's more than a handful of people and the directors are raking in cash, then I'd encourage them to take a more legal path. If they're small and making a modest living, I'd be more likely to get the CYA-note (explaining your position) and potentially turn a bit of a blind eye if necessary. I'd rather see a business employing people and worrying about 100% software legality when possible than a small business having to make cut backs on staff in order to perfectly toe the line.

Might not be a popular perspective on here, but I don't have a huge problem with a design hopeful/freelancer pirating the Adobe suite in order to teach themselves or get their first few jobs through and then gradually working towards an ideal situation as their business grows.

As a small business expands, staff and hardware are enough of an expense as it is - minimise that added load until the incoming work picks up to cover further costs.

I like how there are some Young Earth Creationists who try to explain light from a distant star having travelled billions of years as having been created by god as 'already en route'!

Is this guy still alive? I swear I read that he died from some sort of toe infection. Or maybe I heard about it. Or smelled about it.

Stephen Conroy has since said that the leaked list is not the actual/current ACMA blacklist.

Either way, the blacklist is a fucking stupid idea and I'm ashamed that any mainstream group are pushing for it.