NYT is trying to make a flexible paywall system which still allows limited linking to articles. It's a lot better than current systems like the Wall Street Journal Online. What do the users of the internet do? Try and abuse it to get stuff for free. What's going to happen is not that free speech on Twitter will be chilled. What will happen is that the NYT will go behind a tougher paywall, monetization be damned. Net users have to work with companies some, they can't pounce on every single attempt to make distribution cheaper and easier and try to make content free.

If you are giving it to Wikileaks, it's only fair Bradley Manning gets the Nobel. He was the one who made it all available to him, and he is suffering in obscurity while Assange contemplates book deals and becomes an international darling of the media and people in the know. He also is the one who actually broke the law, and that needs to be acknowledged as well as transparency. Plus, it would force a spotlight on his treatment.

Slashdot honestly doesn't seem to get content creation or business sometimes. By constantly lowering prices and conditioning customers to accept them, you actually stifle innovation and drive out businesses. In the bricks and mortar world this is what Wal-mart does, and they've managed to destroy and dominate markets while offering less overall quality and selection. For media, there is less barrier to entry, but the sheer number of crapware games competing at artificially low pricepoints are eventually going to start killing a lot of midrange developers as they simply can't make enough money in a reasonable timeframe. What the low price does is benefit AGGREGATORS not developers, who take a long tail approach and try and get tremendous amounts of content to make pennies on over time. And, of course there are no end of eager lemmings to help push themselves off the cliff. The low price points may make Apple and Steam rich, but not devs.