I once had a job doing data entry. After I'd gotten used to the systems enough, I set up a bunch of macros to make myself more efficient (this was going over NCSA Telnet from a Mac to a VAX).
After I'd used them enough to think they'd help others, I told my boss about them and set them up for all the other data-entry drones.
Why did I do that, when I could have kept the macros to myself and been the most efficient data drone in the outfit while still getting a few hours of free time a day to read, train, e-mail, whatever I could do while appearing to work?
First, because it would have been unethical not to share the macros.
Second, because the people I worked with were nice enough I wanted to treat them ethically.
Third, because the company and my direct manager both made it clear that showing that kind of initiative would lead to less-tedious work and more opportunities.
So I'd say your manager was an asshat. Either for not creating a good enough environment to make you *want* to help the company beyond your specific tasks, or for hiring you in the first place if you weren't that kind of person.
How do you know how much work someone is supposed to "get done?"
In a lot of industries there are long enough histories to have a good sense of that. In some industries (and especially in small companies) it's very much a seat-of-the-pants calculation.
A lot of the time it's just whatever your people normally get done in 40 hours sitting at a desk where you can see them. If the person whose job your wife took over had been twice as efficient as your wife, would the employer be angry? Possibly.
The obvious solution of hiring good people and trusting them to be productive isn't always available. OK, it *is* always available, but managers and owners rarely have that talent, and naturally enough don't trust their own choices that far.
I'm not convinced Google is trying as hard as it should to combat click fraud, and I know how awful their customer service is, but...
When you sign up for AdSense or AdWords, you do agree to their terms of service, including things like (paraphrasing here):
They pay you whatever they think is fair.
If they suspect fraud, they do whatever they like (including not paying you); if you suspect fraud, they'll "work with you" to investigate it.
On AdWords, you pay for whatever clicks they say you got.
On AdSense, they pay you for whatever clicks they say you got.
On AdSense, they can advertise their products on your site as much as they want, for free.
Their records are authoratitive (though largely secret), yours are corruptible (though possibly interesting).
Evil/fraud is what Sergey says is evil/fraud.
All your base yada yada...
Seriously, Google ads have some great advantages on both sides, but if you go down that
path you should not bet more money than you can easily afford to lose. You've basically
agreed up front that they're always right - and yeah, maybe you can challenge that
in court, but don't forget they have twenty lawyers for every click-fraud investigator.:-)
I applied for two different jobs at Google, neither one of them really up my alley (but both things I could've done in my sleep, and hey, at that time I thought I wanted to work for them).
One went directly to a hiring manager, who got back in less than a week to thank me and say I wasn't really what he was looking for.
The other went through 'normal channels.' After a couple of MONTHS, I got an e-mail with an utterly ridiculous questionnaire (how many years of this, that, etc.) Apparently within the couple of months someone had sorted the CV's but there was no relation whatsoever between the questionnaire and my credentials.
I'd already decided I didn't really want to drink the Google KoolAid, but I filled out the questionnaire just to see what would happen. Despite it looking like part of an automated screening process, it took more than a week for them to send me a form letter brush-off.
Neither of these were fancy PhD-ish positions... they were mid-level, Perl-intensive, things I might be overqualified for but which sounded like fun in the context of Google.
So I think they have some smart managers - I bet the first guy has put together a great team by now. But they also have a big hairy HR department straight out of Dilbert, and I bet that monster is slowly crushing the soul of an ever-larger chunk of the company.
I do hope the future of Google is great things like Google Maps, but I fear it could just as easily be train wrecks like AdSense customer service.
Taking pics by point and shoot is to photography what using Windows and using a mouse to point and click is to computer literacy.
Sort of yes, sort of no.
A lot of great photographers point and shoot to get some of their pictures. As with any technology (including art technologies), the more you know how to do, the more your options. Ergo greater flexibility, and in the long run usually better results.
You can still come at it from a less-informed point of view and make great pictures; you're just significantly more likley to make lousy ones.
One of the long-term effects of that shift will of course be higher prices for all the materials and services.
It's also worth noting that photography's share of the art market (both galleries and auctions) has grown tremendously in the last ten years. A lot of people get into collecting through photography.
GMail as a service shouldn't be attractive to businesses for precisely that reason.
But what if Google sells a "GMail appliance?"
All the features of GMail, but on your own VPN, and nobody but you controls the data. Starting to look more interesting.
Add the ability to plug in any service you want where the ads normally are... company announcements, whatever.
Now *that* would be really attractive, I think, to a lot of companies. I don't know how well their Search Appliance worked out, but a GMail appliance could indeed be a threat to Exchange.
frost@louddrunk ~ $ whois microsoft.com|grep MICROSOFT Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.WAREZ.AT.TOPLIST.GULLI.COM Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.WANADOODOO.COM Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.SUX.BUT.PYROFREAK.ORG.RULEZ.AND.DIOX YTECH.NET.DELETED.GANDI.NET Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.SMELLS.SIMPLECODES.COM Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.SHOULD.GIVE.UP.BECAUSE.LINUXISGOD.CO M Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.RAWKZ.MUH.WERLD.MENTALFLOSS.CA Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.OHMYGODITBURNS.COM Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.LIVES.AT.SHAUNEWING.COM Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.IS.NOT.AS.COOL.AS.SIMPLECODES.COM Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.IS.IN.BED.WITH.CURTYV.COM Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.IS.GOD.BECOUSE.UNIXSUCKS.COM Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.IS.A.STEAMING.HEAP.OF.FUCKING-BULLSH IT.NET Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.HAS.ITS.OWN.CRACKLAB.COM Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.HAS.A.PRESENT.COMING.FROM.HUGHESMISS ILES.COM Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.FLINGS.POO.AT.MONKEYCORE.COM Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.FILLS.ME.WITH.BELLIGERENCE.NET Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.CAN.GO.FUCK.ITSELF.AT.SECZY.COM Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.ARE.GODDAMN.PIGFUCKERS.NET.NS-NOT-IN -SERVICE.COM Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.AND.MINDSUCK.BOTH.SUCK.HUGE.ONES.AT. EXEGETE.NET Domain Name: MICROSOFT.COM Domain name: MICROSOFT.COM
Yes, but South San Francisco, where most of the biotech companies are located, has a pretty symbiotic relationship with San Francisco.
Almost nobody with a good job at any of those companies actually lives in South City - they either live in the 'burbs, in the Valley, or in the City.
And being a good corporate citizen in those parts means supporting things in SF proper. Genentech is a corporate sponsor of the SFMOMA, the opera and lots of other things.
In short, what's good for local (SSF) biotech is generally good for San Francisco too, at least as far as that equation can ever go with corporations.
Wow, the good old days. It sure was different then.
I recently had a popular web site (election-related) that was getting tons of hits, and I had a contact form that sent me e-mail on an "unlisted" account.
For a while - until there were too many comments, since I hadn't expected that level of popularity - I was replying personally to those mails, usually (when I remembered) from the "unlisted" account.
Now, several months after the site's relevance and traffic have passed, I started getting spam on that account. It's so bizarre - somehow an address that was only known to people I'd personally replied to found its way into the spamworld. My best guess is that someone had an infected machine that harvested addresses out of their mailboxes. (If that was the case, fortunately the harvester bot was not smart enough to remember anything about the context of the original conversation, so the spams are easy to spot.)
Another interesting thing: on that contact form I had a field for e-mail, and clearly stated that it was optional and you should only put in your e-mail address if you wanted a reply.
Almost everyone entered their real, non-junk address there, even if they just wanted to tell me I suck or Bush rules or whatever. A few people (mostly Europeans) would say something like "I entered my e-mail, please don't spam me or publish it."
I still find myself regularly giving up my private, thusfar spam-free e-mail address for things like blog comment registrations and whatnot. And that even though I'm running qmail and can easily use "me-yoursite@myhost.com" for safety. But I do come from that good old e-mail neighborhood you describe, and it just feels natural to give it out when the person taking it seems like a normal human being.
A friend of mine who gets about 500 spams a day (and has plenty of room for that on the mail server) has an interesting non-techie workaround.
He tells all his friends a secret nonsensical code word starting with "Z" to include as the first word of the subject line. The he sorts his webmail inbox by subject and ignores everything that doesn't start with that word.
He's not a big net user, so he doesn't need throw-away accounts or anything like that. For him, it's quite enough to be able to see what's from friends and ignore the rest.
Obviously, a more tech-savvy person could just set up a simple procmail script to send all the non-friend mails to/dev/null and make life easier, but the principle would still be the same.
This isn't a universally applicable idea, but for someone who just needs personal e-mail from people he knows I think it's a pretty interesting solution.
According to TFA, this router comes with no password and also lets you get at the admin tools via http rather than https.
OK, most routers are utterly insecure in their default configs, but for something relatively high-end I don't see why they don't require a password. (Not to mention the SSL bit, which is standard on my much older D-Link).
It's not that hard. All you have to do is only allow access to the admin tools until a decent password has been set, and have a hardware reset button that gets you back to that state in case you forget your password.
I suppose you could have an option for a completely open wireless network, but you'd want to require a few confirmation clicks with big fat warnings.
Am I missing something? Is that really so hard?
(And yes, I know people don't normally associate "high-end" with "D-Link" but hey, mine cost $30 and works just fine.)
I understand your points, even if I don't agree with them all, except for this one:
we can't send you to the right clickthru!
Maybe the average banner ad system really is that stupid, but what's so hard about serving proper links to go with the ad content?
You make it sound like every banner click goes to exactly the same URL, and that destination only knows where to redirect you based on what the cookie says.
Like I said, maybe people are using that setup, but it's about as bad an idea as you could possibly think of.
I also use Y!'s search for that reason, and here's a personal observation.
I'm working on a "stealth mode" startup thingy (whatever; we haven't published the URL yet) and I noticed I was getting the Yahoo Slurper in my logs.
I thought about it for a minute and realized they were there because *we* linked to *them* -- ie, they're checking their referrer logs and going to index new sites they find there.
I searched for $SECRET_PROJECT on Yahoo and sure enough, we were there (but they were nice enough, or maybe unsophisticated enough, to index our "not ready for the public yet" page).
The only thing I ever really disliked about Yahoo was the clutter, and after they redesigned the My Yahoo interface I found I could live with it just fine.
Somebody (I forget who) made the observation that Yahoo is a media company and knows it, whereas Google is an advertising company that still thinks it's a technology company. I think that's telling.
The problem lies in defining "political organization" and "contribution" -- particularly because blogs are, as you say, so low-overhead.
For example, if I work for Fox News (say, as an editor) and I have a blog, and my boss knows about it and approves of it, is Fox "contributing" to my blog? What if the boss tacitly lets me take an hour off work each day to blog? And is Fox News a "political organization?"
In that case I think there's no way you could make Fox disclose its involvement, since it's not officially a political organization and the support is entirely under the table. But all the same, I'm receiving financial support from a Republican party activist (Murdoch) for my right-wing blog. (I assume here that I'm a right-wing blogger, since my boss at Fox approves of it...)
I think anybody with a little more brainpower than the GOPUSA folks (Gannonites?) would be able to spin it in a similar way, so that I as a blogger of a certain slant get no demonstrable financial support from any political organization.
Re:I wish I could make that much moola....
on
Yahoo buys Flickr
·
· Score: 1
I'm jealeous too of course, but I think these folks deserve it. And I take heart, as I too am working on a new web technology (sorry no link, "stealth" mode still) in a related area.
I don't take many photos but I finally signed up for a Flickr account simply because I think their app is really, really cool. A couple random notes from my notes file:
WHY FLICKR ROCKS (or at least seems to)
+ entered a *crowded* space (photo sites) + with a *new* trick (tag-based organization) + and a *non-sucking* version of a standard trick (sharing) + plus a *cool* twist (flash image annotations)
....proving once again that a good idea done well can still get far.
the image notes are just such a fucking great idea (wish i'd thought of it). i discovered these by just mousing over pictures (normal surfing behavior i think) and seeing the boxes appear. VERY natural.
I could be wrong about it all, but those things occurred to me a few days ago.
I read a lot of magazines and newspapers online. When I'm in the US I buy most of them in paper form (including the NYT every day) but I'm in Europe most of the time and the online versions are the only reasonably fresh way to get the content I want.
I actually have paid for an online subscription to the New York Review of Books but it was a bit pricey.
What I would like to see is one place where I could pay a single price and select several online content sites to subscribe to. Even if each one has a separate price, I still want one place to handle the subscriptions. I think the hassle barrier is higher than any (reasonable) price barrier. I should have one account that gives me access to several journals.
I would happily pay US$50/year for combined unlimited access to the NYT, the NYRB, the New Yorker, and Artnet Magazine. (Most of that content is currently free.) But I'm not going to bother with four separate subscriptions.
And I really don't think a micropayment or other per-article payment scheme will ever work. The fact that Fark makes money should be a pretty strong hint (and they're not even selling content per se, just better access to their site).
Slightly off-topic aside: if we all use Firefox now, why the continuous grumbling about the NYT Free Reg Req? Whenever the cookie expires on my completely non-personal account, the Fox just logs me back in.
This could be really useful for TV broadcasts, particularly news.
I think anybody doing closed captioning already has the descriptive content they need. (Others could use a similar process to create it.)
That info, combined with relatively easily-detectable scene transitions, would make it possible to automate the searchable video file creation to a large extent.
So the CC or equivalent would still have to be done manually but you'd have this extremely useful, huge searchable archive of video.
Not so easy for things that depend on the visual content as opposed to the spoken content, but for news it could be amazing.
Then watch as politicians and captains of industry squirm at the thought that their every word and twitch is available for searching...
Slashdot Mirror
I'd call that suck-ass management.
I once had a job doing data entry. After I'd gotten used to the systems enough, I set up a bunch of macros to make myself more efficient (this was going over NCSA Telnet from a Mac to a VAX).
After I'd used them enough to think they'd help others, I told my boss about them and set them up for all the other data-entry drones.
Why did I do that, when I could have kept the macros to myself and been the most efficient data drone in the outfit while still getting a few hours of free time a day to read, train, e-mail, whatever I could do while appearing to work?
First, because it would have been unethical not to share the macros.
Second, because the people I worked with were nice enough I wanted to treat them ethically.
Third, because the company and my direct manager both made it clear that showing that kind of initiative would lead to less-tedious work and more opportunities.
So I'd say your manager was an asshat. Either for not creating a good enough environment to make you *want* to help the company beyond your specific tasks, or for hiring you in the first place if you weren't that kind of person.
I agree completely, BUT there is one catch.
How do you know how much work someone is supposed to "get done?"
In a lot of industries there are long enough histories to have a good sense of that. In some industries (and especially in small companies) it's very much a seat-of-the-pants calculation.
A lot of the time it's just whatever your people normally get done in 40 hours sitting at a desk where you can see them. If the person whose job your wife took over had been twice as efficient as your wife, would the employer be angry? Possibly.
The obvious solution of hiring good people and trusting them to be productive isn't always available. OK, it *is* always available, but managers and owners rarely have that talent, and naturally enough don't trust their own choices that far.
I hope one day we get high-definition video from these missions.
Imagine something like the the descent panorama but in the IMAX and later on your big fat TV.
I'm not convinced Google is trying as hard as it should to combat click fraud, and I know how awful their customer service is, but...
When you sign up for AdSense or AdWords, you do agree to their terms of service, including things like (paraphrasing here):
Seriously, Google ads have some great advantages on both sides, but if you go down that path you should not bet more money than you can easily afford to lose. You've basically agreed up front that they're always right - and yeah, maybe you can challenge that in court, but don't forget they have twenty lawyers for every click-fraud investigator. :-)
I applied for two different jobs at Google, neither one of them really up my alley (but both things I could've done in my sleep, and hey, at that time I thought I wanted to work for them).
One went directly to a hiring manager, who got back in less than a week to thank me and say I wasn't really what he was looking for.
The other went through 'normal channels.' After a couple of MONTHS, I got an e-mail with an utterly ridiculous questionnaire (how many years of this, that, etc.) Apparently within the couple of months someone had sorted the CV's but there was no relation whatsoever between the questionnaire and my credentials.
I'd already decided I didn't really want to drink the Google KoolAid, but I filled out the questionnaire just to see what would happen. Despite it looking like part of an automated screening process, it took more than a week for them to send me a form letter brush-off.
Neither of these were fancy PhD-ish positions... they were mid-level, Perl-intensive, things I might be overqualified for but which sounded like fun in the context of Google.
So I think they have some smart managers - I bet the first guy has put together a great team by now. But they also have a big hairy HR department straight out of Dilbert, and I bet that monster is slowly crushing the soul of an ever-larger chunk of the company.
I do hope the future of Google is great things like Google Maps, but I fear it could just as easily be train wrecks like AdSense customer service.
I believe the actual quote is Speak softly and carry a big stick.
. html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/tr26
Taking pics by point and shoot is to photography what using Windows and using a mouse to point and click is to computer literacy.
Sort of yes, sort of no.
A lot of great photographers point and shoot to get some of their pictures. As with any technology (including art technologies), the more you know how to do, the more your options. Ergo greater flexibility, and in the long run usually better results.
You can still come at it from a less-informed point of view and make great pictures; you're just significantly more likley to make lousy ones.
Your point about photography as art is spot on.
One of the long-term effects of that shift will of course be higher prices for all the materials and services.
It's also worth noting that photography's share of the art market (both galleries and auctions) has grown tremendously in the last ten years. A lot of people get into collecting through photography.
I have a Canon S300 ink(bubble?)jet printer, and I buy ink cartridges made by Pelikan, a company that knows a thing or two about ink.
I get *more* ink per cartridge, the black ink is *much* better than what Canon sells, and it costs *half* as much.
If Pelikan makes cartridges you can use, and you don't want to go through the hassle of refilling your own, I highly recommend them.
It's not the cheapest way to go, but hey - half price, more product, better quality. Not bad.
GMail as a service shouldn't be attractive to businesses for precisely that reason.
But what if Google sells a "GMail appliance?"
All the features of GMail, but on your own VPN, and nobody but you controls the data. Starting to look more interesting.
Add the ability to plug in any service you want where the ads normally are... company announcements, whatever.
Now *that* would be really attractive, I think, to a lot of companies. I don't know how well their Search Appliance worked out, but a GMail appliance could indeed be a threat to Exchange.
I just tried Microsoft. Hilarious.
Yes, but South San Francisco, where most of the biotech companies are located, has a pretty symbiotic relationship with San Francisco.
Almost nobody with a good job at any of those companies actually lives in South City - they either live in the 'burbs, in the Valley, or in the City.
And being a good corporate citizen in those parts means supporting things in SF proper. Genentech is a corporate sponsor of the SFMOMA, the opera and lots of other things.
In short, what's good for local (SSF) biotech is generally good for San Francisco too, at least as far as that equation can ever go with corporations.
And let's not forget UCSF.
Speak for yourself. I'm an expert. My job goes to Bangalore.
The linky got me a proxy error, so here are some others.
...and what is up with OperaMan?
Product page with download links etc.
The Register
The Google
I think Pearl Harbor already has plenty of SPAM. And they like it.
Wow, the good old days. It sure was different then.
I recently had a popular web site (election-related) that was getting tons of hits, and I had a contact form that sent me e-mail on an "unlisted" account.
For a while - until there were too many comments, since I hadn't expected that level of popularity - I was replying personally to those mails, usually (when I remembered) from the "unlisted" account.
Now, several months after the site's relevance and traffic have passed, I started getting spam on that account. It's so bizarre - somehow an address that was only known to people I'd personally replied to found its way into the spamworld. My best guess is that someone had an infected machine that harvested addresses out of their mailboxes. (If that was the case, fortunately the harvester bot was not smart enough to remember anything about the context of the original conversation, so the spams are easy to spot.)
Another interesting thing: on that contact form I had a field for e-mail, and clearly stated that it was optional and you should only put in your e-mail address if you wanted a reply.
Almost everyone entered their real, non-junk address there, even if they just wanted to tell me I suck or Bush rules or whatever. A few people (mostly Europeans) would say something like "I entered my e-mail, please don't spam me or publish it."
I still find myself regularly giving up my private, thusfar spam-free e-mail address for things like blog comment registrations and whatnot. And that even though I'm running qmail and can easily use "me-yoursite@myhost.com" for safety. But I do come from that good old e-mail neighborhood you describe, and it just feels natural to give it out when the person taking it seems like a normal human being.
A friend of mine who gets about 500 spams a day (and has plenty of room for that on the mail server) has an interesting non-techie workaround.
/dev/null and make life easier, but the principle would still be the same.
He tells all his friends a secret nonsensical code word starting with "Z" to include as the first word of the subject line. The he sorts his webmail inbox by subject and ignores everything that doesn't start with that word.
He's not a big net user, so he doesn't need throw-away accounts or anything like that. For him, it's quite enough to be able to see what's from friends and ignore the rest.
Obviously, a more tech-savvy person could just set up a simple procmail script to send all the non-friend mails to
This isn't a universally applicable idea, but for someone who just needs personal e-mail from people he knows I think it's a pretty interesting solution.
According to TFA, this router comes with no password and also lets you get at the admin tools via http rather than https.
OK, most routers are utterly insecure in their default configs, but for something relatively high-end I don't see why they don't require a password. (Not to mention the SSL bit, which is standard on my much older D-Link).
It's not that hard. All you have to do is only allow access to the admin tools until a decent password has been set, and have a hardware reset button that gets you back to that state in case you forget your password.
I suppose you could have an option for a completely open wireless network, but you'd want to require a few confirmation clicks with big fat warnings.
Am I missing something? Is that really so hard?
(And yes, I know people don't normally associate "high-end" with "D-Link" but hey, mine cost $30 and works just fine.)
I understand your points, even if I don't agree with them all, except for this one:
we can't send you to the right clickthru!
Maybe the average banner ad system really is that stupid, but what's so hard about serving proper links to go with the ad content?
You make it sound like every banner click goes to exactly the same URL, and that destination only knows where to redirect you based on what the cookie says.
Like I said, maybe people are using that setup, but it's about as bad an idea as you could possibly think of.
I also use Y!'s search for that reason, and here's a personal observation.
I'm working on a "stealth mode" startup thingy (whatever; we haven't published the URL yet) and I noticed I was getting the Yahoo Slurper in my logs.
I thought about it for a minute and realized they were there because *we* linked to *them* -- ie, they're checking their referrer logs and going to index new sites they find there.
I searched for $SECRET_PROJECT on Yahoo and sure enough, we were there (but they were nice enough, or maybe unsophisticated enough, to index our "not ready for the public yet" page).
The only thing I ever really disliked about Yahoo was the clutter, and after they redesigned the My Yahoo interface I found I could live with it just fine.
Somebody (I forget who) made the observation that Yahoo is a media company and knows it, whereas Google is an advertising company that still thinks it's a technology company. I think that's telling.
The problem lies in defining "political organization" and "contribution" -- particularly because blogs are, as you say, so low-overhead.
For example, if I work for Fox News (say, as an editor) and I have a blog, and my boss knows about it and approves of it, is Fox "contributing" to my blog? What if the boss tacitly lets me take an hour off work each day to blog? And is Fox News a "political organization?"
In that case I think there's no way you could make Fox disclose its involvement, since it's not officially a political organization and the support is entirely under the table. But all the same, I'm receiving financial support from a Republican party activist (Murdoch) for my right-wing blog. (I assume here that I'm a right-wing blogger, since my boss at Fox approves of it...)
I think anybody with a little more brainpower than the GOPUSA folks (Gannonites?) would be able to spin it in a similar way, so that I as a blogger of a certain slant get no demonstrable financial support from any political organization.
I don't take many photos but I finally signed up for a Flickr account simply because I think their app is really, really cool. A couple random notes from my notes file:I could be wrong about it all, but those things occurred to me a few days ago.
Nice trick, but how much money does that number of unbounded knapsack problems represent?
Or did you mean GBP?
I read a lot of magazines and newspapers online. When I'm in the US I buy most of them in paper form (including the NYT every day) but I'm in Europe most of the time and the online versions are the only reasonably fresh way to get the content I want.
I actually have paid for an online subscription to the New York Review of Books but it was a bit pricey.
What I would like to see is one place where I could pay a single price and select several online content sites to subscribe to. Even if each one has a separate price, I still want one place to handle the subscriptions. I think the hassle barrier is higher than any (reasonable) price barrier. I should have one account that gives me access to several journals.
I would happily pay US$50/year for combined unlimited access to the NYT, the NYRB, the New Yorker, and Artnet Magazine. (Most of that content is currently free.) But I'm not going to bother with four separate subscriptions.
And I really don't think a micropayment or other per-article payment scheme will ever work. The fact that Fark makes money should be a pretty strong hint (and they're not even selling content per se, just better access to their site).
Slightly off-topic aside: if we all use Firefox now, why the continuous grumbling about the NYT Free Reg Req? Whenever the cookie expires on my completely non-personal account, the Fox just logs me back in.
This could be really useful for TV broadcasts, particularly news.
I think anybody doing closed captioning already has the descriptive content they need. (Others could use a similar process to create it.)
That info, combined with relatively easily-detectable scene transitions, would make it possible to automate the searchable video file creation to a large extent.
So the CC or equivalent would still have to be done manually but you'd have this extremely useful, huge searchable archive of video.
Not so easy for things that depend on the visual content as opposed to the spoken content, but for news it could be amazing.
Then watch as politicians and captains of industry squirm at the thought that their every word and twitch is available for searching...