A more accurate analogy would be replacing a company car with a taxi that was always available, but was only authorised to either drive only to certain locations (whitelists), or anywhere except certain locations (blacklists). If management starts off with a blacklist of the seedy parts of town, and then adds things like local entertainment venues, it's not going to affect your work much if you're a lowly corporate peon, or if you're in something like IT or engineering.
Sales, maybe - but they can trivially be issued different taxis which are allowed to drop them off at restaurants and bars to do the client schmooze thing.
(Plus, of course, if you're in IT or engineering, you already know how to make the taxis take you anywhere you want. Don't tell Sales.)
But without advertising, you frequently will never learn about products and services that are available to you.
And you know what? I'm OK with that.
Seriously. If I perceive that some aspect of my life isn't as great as it could be, then I'll go looking for a product or service to fix that. Otherwise, I get enough osmotic information on the state of the world and the products and services in it just by reading stuff (including stuff on the internet) and talking to people.
As an example, I know soft drinks are out there. I see them advertised on billboards, in the supermarket, on TV, in the local paper, occasionally mentioned on blogs in passing, and so forth. I don't need cola company representatives knocking on my door to deliver the Good Word, or waking me up by throwing cans at my window, or responding to every web page click with screaming, jumping pop bottles and jingles.
Sure, there are things which are aimed at very tiny specific markets, and which therefore don't advertise through general channels. But guess what - if I'm the kind of person they're aimed at, then I will ALREADY be reading the kinds of things and talking to the kinds of people which mention them. If I'm not, then I probably don't need them, no matter how desperately they want to get my attention.
I sometimes wonder how well-known rich people filter their daily experience to weed out the millions of attempted solicitations from products and companies aiming for a big sale or endorsement. Do Hollywood stars have to wade through a sea of "please read my script" encounters every time they walk down the street? Does Steve Jobs have a spam filter tweaked for people trying to sell to him personally everything from software to paperclips? Does everyone who controls significant amounts of money need legions of bodyguards, secretaries, and underlings to act as human firewalls?
We haven't gotten off this rock in any meaningful numbers. That's like saying a prisoner has gotten out of their cell because a couple of their skin flakes have drifted under the door.
Short of a full-hospital AI, there needs to be some way to allow doctors and other medical staff to call up any relevant information for a given case - potentially meaning anything at all which has been presented to hospital staff or approved external medical channels. Every question asked, every scan done with any instrument, every moment that a patient is on a security, ER, or ambulance camera, needs to be able to be summoned up with a snap of the fingers or a flicker of the eye. Information is no good if it never goes anywhere, or goes into a dead end in some physical or digital filing cabinet.
Staff could even have their infocloud viewpoint personalised based on their hospital function, personal qualifications, and previous patterns of search/use, edged with additional data drawn from likely helpful sources based on the use-patterns of other staff, the similarities between positions and processes between them, and even a patient's particular medical history. That way, a fresh newbie with a particular job title would start with a default set of views based on the averages of other people who have been doing the job for a while, and which would rapidly adjust and speed up as they establish personal methodologies.
Only if they can force TOR nodes to close faster than they can be re-opened elsewhere. Given that anyone on the planet can open a TOR node in minutes, law enforcement is going to have a tough time trying to ram through justification for closing each one they want shut down.
I wonder which will be the first country to pass a law against running anonymizer nodes of any kind? Then all they have to do is find a way to block all anonymizer traffic into and out of the country, even the stuff in encrypted tunnels...
If the internet kills international and national papers, leaving only local publications filled mainly with local stories, that could mean that stories become much more likely to be reported on, edited, and published by people who live locally to those same stories.
If they get something wrong, or present a biased political view, they're more likely to see circulation affected and people turning up at their offices in person. I wonder what it would do for journalistic integrity to actually be under scrutiny by the very people they write about - especially when they're trying to then sell the paper to those very same people, their friends and relatives etc.
Could be interesting to outfit it with PDA/smartphone/net capabilities linked to a couple of extra feedback wires. You'd be able to develop electronic senses such as orientation, absolute location, driving directions to a destination, knowing when someone had sent you an email, and the direction and distance of practically anything with a Whitepages/Yellowpages entry.
For bonus points, equip your car with a GPS+intertial tracker and cellphone, and you'll be able to find it anywhere on the planet to within a couple of dozen feet. Add in a radio transmitter which can pick up and replicate signals from things like car keys, and you'll be able to find it within that dozen feet, too.
I'm thinking - what about being able to put the hand into virtual mode, so that wrist and finger gestures aren't expressed by the mechanical hardware but are instead used as input to an interface linked to a bunch of macros for the electronics? Add an IR transmitter/recorder, point at the TV, go virtual, and sign the macro for switching on, calling up your favorite channel, and turning up the volume. Or with an IRDA channel, be able to send macro signals to your PC to do whatever you want. Heck, go the whole hog and install WiFi, Bluetooth, a USB port, an acoustic coupler... you'd have the most connected hand on the planet!
- is improving a product able to even be classed as a crime in and of itself in any reasonable society?
Altering a product which results in an illegal item (assembling bombs etc), OK. That's a separate area of law entirely. But producing an end product or system which can merely do more of something which is already allowed? Where there is no law against making an eleventh copy other than that the manufacturer would pretty-please like people not to? THAT'S how they're going to try and stay profitable?
Is manufacturing crowbars, axes, or knives going to become illegal because they can possibly be used for illegal acts? How about hammers, screwdrivers or rolls of duct tape? They let people repair stuff themselves instead of paying for a new one or an expensive repair service - BAN THEM!
What I'm interested in is where the physical lock industry is going to end up heading. How long has the design of better SOHO-scale locks languished because manual and automatic lockpicks have varying degrees of illegality? Why are the vast majority of modern house and car door locks able to be opened with devices which have been around for decades, if not centuries? It's known that security through obscurity is not a good philosophy, so why is so much physical access based on it?
Precisely. The people who read physical newspapers won't notice until the papers fold, come back from the dead, fold again, stagger back as zombies, merge with something else as they're going under for the third time, and then finally die.
The people who don't read newspapers will either get the international AP feeds via foreign internet sites, or continue to watch TV news.
Of course, even with local news, there are problems.
Firstly, it costs more to go find local news using reporters than to source non-local news off the wire. So local-news-heavy papers will have more costs per page. This is bad for them.
Local news can only usefully be shared amongst other local newspapers, increasing competition and decreasing uniqueness. This is bad for them.
If the local papers do _not_ share their gathered news with each other, then if it appears anywhere online at all, it's still easily snaggable by newscrawlers which don't respect robots.txt, meaning that it's got a good chance of appearing on other sites without being paid for - and Google will blindly index those sites. This is bad for the local papers in two ways, as they not only lose the exclusivity on their expensive local news, but they then have to try and launch and fight some kind of legal battle against any newscrawler site. Even asking Google to block that newscrawler site won't mean that the next one is blocked - or the one after that. It's expensive and time-consuming.
If the local papers try presenting their content in hard-to-index forms, like bitmaps of entire pages, it will make using the site more difficult and cumbersome than other news aggregation sites, and drive consumers away to competitors. Until some newscrawler sets up an OCR filter.
They can certainly try moving offline altogether and back to just the paper format, but that's already proven to be a shrinking market. Perhaps not to "completely vanished in 10-20 years" levels, but it will slowly go the way of the buggy whip. The industry will become less and less important as a member of the Fourth Estate, and will find it harder to attract new journalists and editors. As it shrinks, more advertisers will move away from it to electronic formats, until finally newspapers are reduced to specialist minipublications with names like The Geezer Weekly.
Associated Press will lose up to 30% of its revenue as newspapers become unable to afford to license AP stories. Someone somewhere in a country which is not particularly interested in the tantrums of American corporations will start operating unpaid-for AP feeds. The AP will thrash about wasting money on trying to either kill this source or at least block it on major search engines, and will threaten to sue anyone who gets their stories from this source instead of paying for them. Some years later, they will get lucky and after a major expenditure, manage to cripple the operation. A week later, five others will spring up in its place, with additional levels of legal and technical defenses. Before they too can be wiped off search engines, major blogs will report their existence, and the search engines will index the reports for perpetuity. Some people will start using the new free services for a number of reasons - redundancy, raw access to the full feed, as a source for Web 2.0 applications, and purely because they don't particularly want a local-newssite 'spin' on things. Someone will set up a super-friendly search engine for the raw feed, and will make internet headlines on non-AP sites. AP will try and get ISPs to block the search engine and the services, either directly or by getting unimplementable laws passed. Any degree of success in this endeavour will be short-lived as the blocked sites reinvent themselves and the ISPs tell AP to get bent. AP will become a snarling attack dog that sues anything that stands still long enough. Unfortunately, it won't die a quick death as it will continue to get propped up by TV stations which still enjoy strong profits and are not agile enough to get away with using bootleg AP feeds.
AP will try poisoning the feeds and, after a few incidents in which genuine AP buyers publish/broadcast fake news and take AP to task over it, try to implement some kind of special key for its customers so they know what's valid news and what's not. Which means it will have to spend considerable time and effort to generate the fake news to a high enough
It's actually potentially even worse publicity if it's tried. "Come to us - we're so bad that one thousand top-ranking businesses wouldn't switch to us for a million dollars.."
It could be an interesting home diagnostic tool. Point the USB widget at the patient, get the results, maybe print them out and take them to the local doc to get a jumpstart on diagnosis.
GPs could even have more advanced versions for both preliminary assessments and to create a global baseline database.
How about passing a law which mandates that no laws can be passed which mandate the use of a particular product or process, only the desired end result?
In this case, why not pass a law which says that cars must be manufactured to reduce the average use of electricity, aircon gas, or whatever they were on about (or that internal cooling efficiency/effectiveness must be at least a certain minimum)? That way, car makers can either use the special glass, or find other (possibly better) ways to achieve the same ends.
I'd say: allow the lowest level of player that the game caters for to make it all the way through the game, even if at a reduced rate.
However, more advanced players should be able to access none-core parts of the game, whether these be items, abilities, story segements, additional characters, more complex and interesting locations and maps etc. What's more, it should be reinforced to the lower-level player that with practise, these things would become available - otherwise, they might just play through on the lowest setting and think "Well, that was boring."
There should also be cross-skill rubberbanding in games which offer multiple skill tests to proceed. There's already some forms of this, where (for example) great resource planning can counter weak button-mashing ability.
One option might be a time-based or counter-based seesaw, where the longer a player has bashed their head against a given game obstacle, the easier it becomes to overcome. Then, it's a matter of finding a balance relating to how _fast_ such a change occurs and to what minimum level it can drop. A number of counters might be available - time spent, miles travelled, opponents overcome, miniquests completed, etc - but remember, endless grinding doesn't suit everyone.
Or how about having several elements present in the game, and playing to the player's strength(s) in order to present a game which the player feels they can do well at? Alter the size of platforms to be jumped on, the number/level/placement of opponents, the emphasis on sneaking vs combat, intellectual puzzles vs smashfests, resource management vs grinding, hunts vs brawls.
Keep assessing and tweaking as the game progresses; players learn new skills at different rates, and it's fairly easy to game an adaptive system by pretending to be hopeless at one skill until the game offers an easy out or massive XP for any kind of use of the skill at all.
by trolling the same public records this report did and figured out what the common pitfalls are.
Or just having enough money to either hire people to be friendly and inquisitive around off-duty law enforcement staff, hire people to _be_ law enforcement staff as their day job, or bribe existing LEOs. Or all three. Plus have people pose as authors or TV program researchers who want 'accuracy' in their stories. Or just hire someone with a secretarial background to be part of an "internal investigative team" which is "making sure the local offices are following the regulations" by applying for filing/clerk work in the relevant offices and reporting back on how things are done.
Hell, go find a TV show which legitimately cross-checked its accuracy, find the people who had to listen to all the boring details of procedure from the official sources, get them drunk and offer to listen to their war stories.
Not to mention - some of us LIKE real news. You know, stuff that isn't about sports, or celebrities, or the horoscope, or the comics, or crap like that.
Picked up a national newspaper recently? Pull out the stuff you mentioned above, and the advertising, and how many column inches are actually left?
One of the things which always bugged me about newspapers, even before I first got on the net, was the sheer percentage of space devoted to advertising. And it wasn't even politely tidied away in its own section where it could be ignored. A page might have two column inches of story and I'd be trying to read it while the entire rest of the page was screaming "BUY WHIZZO COLA!" and "BUY KLEENO WASHING POWDER!"
There's a well-known state-level paper where I live which has been around for 176 years. I don't read it any more. Haven't for years. I got a cold-call the other day asking whether I'd be interested in a discounted subscription. I just said "I have internet," and the caller sort of collapsed. Couldn't even come up with a single reason for me to buy the paper. They could at least have asked if I owned a parakeet.
Slashdot Mirror
Current routing software stops before the "if".
A more accurate analogy would be replacing a company car with a taxi that was always available, but was only authorised to either drive only to certain locations (whitelists), or anywhere except certain locations (blacklists). If management starts off with a blacklist of the seedy parts of town, and then adds things like local entertainment venues, it's not going to affect your work much if you're a lowly corporate peon, or if you're in something like IT or engineering.
Sales, maybe - but they can trivially be issued different taxis which are allowed to drop them off at restaurants and bars to do the client schmooze thing.
(Plus, of course, if you're in IT or engineering, you already know how to make the taxis take you anywhere you want. Don't tell Sales.)
But without advertising, you frequently will never learn about products and services that are available to you.
And you know what? I'm OK with that.
Seriously. If I perceive that some aspect of my life isn't as great as it could be, then I'll go looking for a product or service to fix that. Otherwise, I get enough osmotic information on the state of the world and the products and services in it just by reading stuff (including stuff on the internet) and talking to people.
As an example, I know soft drinks are out there. I see them advertised on billboards, in the supermarket, on TV, in the local paper, occasionally mentioned on blogs in passing, and so forth. I don't need cola company representatives knocking on my door to deliver the Good Word, or waking me up by throwing cans at my window, or responding to every web page click with screaming, jumping pop bottles and jingles.
Sure, there are things which are aimed at very tiny specific markets, and which therefore don't advertise through general channels. But guess what - if I'm the kind of person they're aimed at, then I will ALREADY be reading the kinds of things and talking to the kinds of people which mention them. If I'm not, then I probably don't need them, no matter how desperately they want to get my attention.
I sometimes wonder how well-known rich people filter their daily experience to weed out the millions of attempted solicitations from products and companies aiming for a big sale or endorsement. Do Hollywood stars have to wade through a sea of "please read my script" encounters every time they walk down the street? Does Steve Jobs have a spam filter tweaked for people trying to sell to him personally everything from software to paperclips? Does everyone who controls significant amounts of money need legions of bodyguards, secretaries, and underlings to act as human firewalls?
We haven't gotten off this rock in any meaningful numbers. That's like saying a prisoner has gotten out of their cell because a couple of their skin flakes have drifted under the door.
Short of a full-hospital AI, there needs to be some way to allow doctors and other medical staff to call up any relevant information for a given case - potentially meaning anything at all which has been presented to hospital staff or approved external medical channels. Every question asked, every scan done with any instrument, every moment that a patient is on a security, ER, or ambulance camera, needs to be able to be summoned up with a snap of the fingers or a flicker of the eye. Information is no good if it never goes anywhere, or goes into a dead end in some physical or digital filing cabinet.
Staff could even have their infocloud viewpoint personalised based on their hospital function, personal qualifications, and previous patterns of search/use, edged with additional data drawn from likely helpful sources based on the use-patterns of other staff, the similarities between positions and processes between them, and even a patient's particular medical history. That way, a fresh newbie with a particular job title would start with a default set of views based on the averages of other people who have been doing the job for a while, and which would rapidly adjust and speed up as they establish personal methodologies.
There are sometimes lots of buttons, but they're not scary
Says the poster who has never taken a call from a relative who can't work out how to use the microwave at another relative's house.
Only if they can force TOR nodes to close faster than they can be re-opened elsewhere. Given that anyone on the planet can open a TOR node in minutes, law enforcement is going to have a tough time trying to ram through justification for closing each one they want shut down.
I wonder which will be the first country to pass a law against running anonymizer nodes of any kind? Then all they have to do is find a way to block all anonymizer traffic into and out of the country, even the stuff in encrypted tunnels...
If the internet kills international and national papers, leaving only local publications filled mainly with local stories, that could mean that stories become much more likely to be reported on, edited, and published by people who live locally to those same stories.
If they get something wrong, or present a biased political view, they're more likely to see circulation affected and people turning up at their offices in person. I wonder what it would do for journalistic integrity to actually be under scrutiny by the very people they write about - especially when they're trying to then sell the paper to those very same people, their friends and relatives etc.
Could be interesting to outfit it with PDA/smartphone/net capabilities linked to a couple of extra feedback wires. You'd be able to develop electronic senses such as orientation, absolute location, driving directions to a destination, knowing when someone had sent you an email, and the direction and distance of practically anything with a Whitepages/Yellowpages entry.
For bonus points, equip your car with a GPS+intertial tracker and cellphone, and you'll be able to find it anywhere on the planet to within a couple of dozen feet. Add in a radio transmitter which can pick up and replicate signals from things like car keys, and you'll be able to find it within that dozen feet, too.
I'm thinking - what about being able to put the hand into virtual mode, so that wrist and finger gestures aren't expressed by the mechanical hardware but are instead used as input to an interface linked to a bunch of macros for the electronics? Add an IR transmitter/recorder, point at the TV, go virtual, and sign the macro for switching on, calling up your favorite channel, and turning up the volume. Or with an IRDA channel, be able to send macro signals to your PC to do whatever you want. Heck, go the whole hog and install WiFi, Bluetooth, a USB port, an acoustic coupler... you'd have the most connected hand on the planet!
If you are not good enough to be using CAD software professionally than you are 99% of the new market this thing just created.
"Kids get on internet; flog the dolphin"
- is improving a product able to even be classed as a crime in and of itself in any reasonable society?
Altering a product which results in an illegal item (assembling bombs etc), OK. That's a separate area of law entirely. But producing an end product or system which can merely do more of something which is already allowed? Where there is no law against making an eleventh copy other than that the manufacturer would pretty-please like people not to? THAT'S how they're going to try and stay profitable?
Is manufacturing crowbars, axes, or knives going to become illegal because they can possibly be used for illegal acts? How about hammers, screwdrivers or rolls of duct tape? They let people repair stuff themselves instead of paying for a new one or an expensive repair service - BAN THEM!
What I'm interested in is where the physical lock industry is going to end up heading. How long has the design of better SOHO-scale locks languished because manual and automatic lockpicks have varying degrees of illegality? Why are the vast majority of modern house and car door locks able to be opened with devices which have been around for decades, if not centuries? It's known that security through obscurity is not a good philosophy, so why is so much physical access based on it?
Precisely. The people who read physical newspapers won't notice until the papers fold, come back from the dead, fold again, stagger back as zombies, merge with something else as they're going under for the third time, and then finally die.
The people who don't read newspapers will either get the international AP feeds via foreign internet sites, or continue to watch TV news.
Of course, even with local news, there are problems.
Firstly, it costs more to go find local news using reporters than to source non-local news off the wire. So local-news-heavy papers will have more costs per page. This is bad for them.
Local news can only usefully be shared amongst other local newspapers, increasing competition and decreasing uniqueness. This is bad for them.
If the local papers do _not_ share their gathered news with each other, then if it appears anywhere online at all, it's still easily snaggable by newscrawlers which don't respect robots.txt, meaning that it's got a good chance of appearing on other sites without being paid for - and Google will blindly index those sites. This is bad for the local papers in two ways, as they not only lose the exclusivity on their expensive local news, but they then have to try and launch and fight some kind of legal battle against any newscrawler site. Even asking Google to block that newscrawler site won't mean that the next one is blocked - or the one after that. It's expensive and time-consuming.
If the local papers try presenting their content in hard-to-index forms, like bitmaps of entire pages, it will make using the site more difficult and cumbersome than other news aggregation sites, and drive consumers away to competitors. Until some newscrawler sets up an OCR filter.
They can certainly try moving offline altogether and back to just the paper format, but that's already proven to be a shrinking market. Perhaps not to "completely vanished in 10-20 years" levels, but it will slowly go the way of the buggy whip. The industry will become less and less important as a member of the Fourth Estate, and will find it harder to attract new journalists and editors. As it shrinks, more advertisers will move away from it to electronic formats, until finally newspapers are reduced to specialist minipublications with names like The Geezer Weekly.
Associated Press will lose up to 30% of its revenue as newspapers become unable to afford to license AP stories. Someone somewhere in a country which is not particularly interested in the tantrums of American corporations will start operating unpaid-for AP feeds. The AP will thrash about wasting money on trying to either kill this source or at least block it on major search engines, and will threaten to sue anyone who gets their stories from this source instead of paying for them. Some years later, they will get lucky and after a major expenditure, manage to cripple the operation. A week later, five others will spring up in its place, with additional levels of legal and technical defenses. Before they too can be wiped off search engines, major blogs will report their existence, and the search engines will index the reports for perpetuity. Some people will start using the new free services for a number of reasons - redundancy, raw access to the full feed, as a source for Web 2.0 applications, and purely because they don't particularly want a local-newssite 'spin' on things. Someone will set up a super-friendly search engine for the raw feed, and will make internet headlines on non-AP sites. AP will try and get ISPs to block the search engine and the services, either directly or by getting unimplementable laws passed. Any degree of success in this endeavour will be short-lived as the blocked sites reinvent themselves and the ISPs tell AP to get bent. AP will become a snarling attack dog that sues anything that stands still long enough. Unfortunately, it won't die a quick death as it will continue to get propped up by TV stations which still enjoy strong profits and are not agile enough to get away with using bootleg AP feeds.
AP will try poisoning the feeds and, after a few incidents in which genuine AP buyers publish/broadcast fake news and take AP to task over it, try to implement some kind of special key for its customers so they know what's valid news and what's not. Which means it will have to spend considerable time and effort to generate the fake news to a high enough
Because when Microsoft tries that, it ends up with Bing.
It's actually potentially even worse publicity if it's tried. "Come to us - we're so bad that one thousand top-ranking businesses wouldn't switch to us for a million dollars.."
I'm feeling lucky:
having to shift the pile with a pitchfork
It could be an interesting home diagnostic tool. Point the USB widget at the patient, get the results, maybe print them out and take them to the local doc to get a jumpstart on diagnosis.
GPs could even have more advanced versions for both preliminary assessments and to create a global baseline database.
Point, but didn't all the Waltons get theirs through old Sam, who was self-made?
How about passing a law which mandates that no laws can be passed which mandate the use of a particular product or process, only the desired end result?
In this case, why not pass a law which says that cars must be manufactured to reduce the average use of electricity, aircon gas, or whatever they were on about (or that internal cooling efficiency/effectiveness must be at least a certain minimum)? That way, car makers can either use the special glass, or find other (possibly better) ways to achieve the same ends.
If your goal is to actually spread the human race out from Earth,
Not to mention all over the landscape. Ew.
you might as well make your money with toilet paper or hamburgers.
That's some creative counterfeiting, Lou. Also: ew.
However, more advanced players should be able to access none-core parts of the game, whether these be items, abilities, story segements, additional characters, more complex and interesting locations and maps etc. What's more, it should be reinforced to the lower-level player that with practise, these things would become available - otherwise, they might just play through on the lowest setting and think "Well, that was boring."
There should also be cross-skill rubberbanding in games which offer multiple skill tests to proceed. There's already some forms of this, where (for example) great resource planning can counter weak button-mashing ability.
One option might be a time-based or counter-based seesaw, where the longer a player has bashed their head against a given game obstacle, the easier it becomes to overcome. Then, it's a matter of finding a balance relating to how _fast_ such a change occurs and to what minimum level it can drop. A number of counters might be available - time spent, miles travelled, opponents overcome, miniquests completed, etc - but remember, endless grinding doesn't suit everyone.
Or how about having several elements present in the game, and playing to the player's strength(s) in order to present a game which the player feels they can do well at? Alter the size of platforms to be jumped on, the number/level/placement of opponents, the emphasis on sneaking vs combat, intellectual puzzles vs smashfests, resource management vs grinding, hunts vs brawls.
Keep assessing and tweaking as the game progresses; players learn new skills at different rates, and it's fairly easy to game an adaptive system by pretending to be hopeless at one skill until the game offers an easy out or massive XP for any kind of use of the skill at all.
Or just having enough money to either hire people to be friendly and inquisitive around off-duty law enforcement staff, hire people to _be_ law enforcement staff as their day job, or bribe existing LEOs. Or all three. Plus have people pose as authors or TV program researchers who want 'accuracy' in their stories. Or just hire someone with a secretarial background to be part of an "internal investigative team" which is "making sure the local offices are following the regulations" by applying for filing/clerk work in the relevant offices and reporting back on how things are done.
Hell, go find a TV show which legitimately cross-checked its accuracy, find the people who had to listen to all the boring details of procedure from the official sources, get them drunk and offer to listen to their war stories.
Picked up a national newspaper recently? Pull out the stuff you mentioned above, and the advertising, and how many column inches are actually left?
One of the things which always bugged me about newspapers, even before I first got on the net, was the sheer percentage of space devoted to advertising. And it wasn't even politely tidied away in its own section where it could be ignored. A page might have two column inches of story and I'd be trying to read it while the entire rest of the page was screaming "BUY WHIZZO COLA!" and "BUY KLEENO WASHING POWDER!"
There's a well-known state-level paper where I live which has been around for 176 years. I don't read it any more. Haven't for years. I got a cold-call the other day asking whether I'd be interested in a discounted subscription. I just said "I have internet," and the caller sort of collapsed. Couldn't even come up with a single reason for me to buy the paper. They could at least have asked if I owned a parakeet.