Your perspective has me eating dog poop next to a pickle in a sandwich. I can't get behind that. I do notice, however, that there is a downside to everything being free. Today, as you and I sit here at our computers, we have access to more free stuff than you could have imagined just fifteen years ago. Free software, free music, free movies, books, porn... At first it's really cool. But they will not keep spending $100 mil on movies just to show them on youtube. Somewhere along the way we have to figure out how to pay for the content we most value.

That is a very good point. I thought it was just the newness factor. One killer used Myspace. One killer used texting. They forget killers also use parks and malls but warn you to be afraid of new technology. People who kill people can also use it. It will be the killer who used twitter next. They will call him the "twitter killer", as if twitter made it all possible.

Then we will observe you from afar and visit you once in a while.

Actually people pay for NPR through contributions. Commercial radio is crap. So we pay a little extra for the good stuff. WSJ is not free or funded by ads only. There are many good weekly journals and you would probably notice the quality if you read one. Sometimes free stuff costs more in the long run.

Do you currently pay for _any_ information? Do you expect good information for free? Will it be provided to you by trust-fund babies? Will the care-free rich write your articles? At some point an economy needs to consider how it pays for things it finds valuable or it will stop having them.

The BBC is a great news organization. Not always impartial, but who ever was? But aren't they funded by some tax dollars? How much does the gov't take from a hard working bloke's pocket to pay for this info? Is it really free then? What if you just paid for your news yourself instead of HM the Q handling the transaction?

I meant "an" editorial.

I remember reading in the Utne reader back in the 90's and editorial lauding the DOJ's attack on Microsoft that software providers should not charge for their product because it had no physical manifestation. I wondered at the time how a news magazine could make such a claim. Were they selling paper and ink? It is interesting and satisfying to see the value crisis come back around to their industry. Do you remember the movie with Ryan Phillipe saying "Human knowledge should be free!!!"? Most of us think that those who profited from Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme should have wondered why and how they profited from so little work. But now as we read news online, listen to free music, and enjoy all the open source free software at our finger tips shouldn't we too wonder how to support the producers of our rapidly expanding information wealth? Should we assume that these increases will continue of their own accord? Or will we look back on these days as a lost golden age and wonder where all the software developers and content providers went?

I like this guideline concept: "Officer I know I was doing 75 mph in a residential area, but I was only averaging 40." But I think the good old days you talk about had more arbitrary rulings. In LA you would have child murderers get 3 to 5 years for murdering a child because they had already sentenced 1000 people for similar crimes that day, while in Alabama some poor fool would get ten years for posession of a joint (marajuana) because it was really hot they day and they hadn't stuck it to anyone in a while. I think laws are like traffic lights. They are not there to slow us down, but to allow faster transport. And they should not be arbitrary.