No. I'm sick of these comments.
Articles from sources like Washington Post, NYT, and The Economist, which are often high quality, constantly get branded with some form of this complaint.
It is so easy to avoid the paywall: any major browser's incognito mode will do it,
and you can just subscribe. Magazines and newspaper subscriptions are often on sale for free or extremely low prices.
There are some walls that suck - Quora comes to mind - but when it's this easy to read the article, you're just adding noise by complaining.
They're trivial to bypass for the technically literate, which group I'd expect every HN reader to belong to. If you can't be arsed, fine, but don't waste your time writing annoyed comments about it either.
I don't have an NYT subscription or use any sort of workaround to access NYT pages, so I am not a member of any 'club'. You can view something like 20 stories a month before they ask you to subscribe, and I don't feel bad about posting an interesting story from a site that uses a paywall once or twice month.
10 stories a month. Also, even though you may only post one or two as you say from these sites, others do the same adding to that total E.G. wsj.com Which doesn't allow viewing at all unless you browse in from a search engine or subscribe.
> and I don't feel bad about posting an interesting story from a site that uses a paywall once or twice month.
I don't want you to feel bad, I just want you to know that I think that it's obnoxious, and not very considerate towards others to expect them to bob-and-weave through pay-walls.
> You can view something like 20 stories a month before they ask you to subscribe
Sure, that's how it is at the moment. Next month it'll be ten views, a few months after 3 views, and so on, (effectively further reducing the archival worth of news publication links)
Also, how do you know that I haven't yet exceeded my monthly allotment?
Posting paid content excludes the poor who either lack the know-how to do so or refuse to side-step the pay-walls from discussion of the article until someone either copy/pastes the important parts or a freely available source is linked, and I just want people to be aware of that.
Wait, you think people shouldn't post and discuss interesting stuff because you're to cheap to help underwrite the (very reasonable) cost of decent journalism?!
I'm sorry, but this is a news site. People come here to read and discuss relevant news. And while this may come as news to you, those articles don't write themselves for free.
You want to lecture somebody on etiquette? Go find a journalist and tell them how "rude" they're being by expecting payment for their work. Find their editors, while you're at it, and see if they're willing to discuss their "entitlement issues". If you haven't had your head ripped off maybe you can tell us how the conversation went.
I already had my suspicions about Firstlook Media, and this just reiterates them.
Secondly, I am not too impressed with the way Greenwald has been guarding the leaks and his organisation is the sole benefactor of their contents as he trickles them selectively to the public. The documents should be accessible to all. Having said that I am an admirer of his work, but would love to have seen the documents given to Wikileaks
Greenwald is not the only journalist with access to the documents: this has been explained and mentioned several times. Several news organizations had access to the cache including The Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post and others. The idea was that the professional journalists would be better at figuring out what was both news-worthy and ethical to release. There are already people claiming Snowden personally gave an autographed copy to Putin and then we have folks on the other side like you who are misinformed and . Obviously, taking people like you and the people acting like Snowden forwarded everything to the FSB/Chi-Coms into consideration, there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to release this material in a fashion that some uninformed person won't complain about.
Wikileaks have claimed that they have Russian diplomatic cables just as explosive as the "Pentagon Cables" but it's been years without any release which leads me to think that they either: a) don't have them and are lying b) have them and are not releasing them for some political reason which would be even worse. I wouldn't trust them at all to release any important information in a thoughtful manner.
I guess I phrased my comment incorrectly. I am aware that other organization have the documents, but my problems is questioning journalist/news organizations as the gate keepers to what the public should know/should not know.
>"The idea was that the professional journalists would be better at figuring out what was both news-worthy and ethical to release"
I completely disagree with this.
Can you provide some a source for the claims about wikileaks?
As the others have said, and they have also given to the Washington Post, too. But they seem to have stopped writing about it. Perhaps too focused on trying to support Comey in his war on encryption, these days.
One another thing - I wouldn't trust Pando with these sort of things. Look at another ridiculous thing they've written a few months ago, as if it wasn't already know that Tor was made by the government and part of the funding still comes from it (more than half), now:
But Tor is open source and can be verified. I believe almost all of Dan Berstein's protocols are also funded "by the government". Does that mean we shouldn't trust his curves and protocols anymore?
I think we should all have a healthy dose of skepticism regarding these issues, but when it makes sense to do so.
Greenwald is not the sole possessor of the documents. The Guardian also has a copy. The reason the documents have not been given to Wikileaks is specifically because of a request Snowden made regarding the way the documents would be handled. He asked Greenwald and Poitras to be cautious about disclosures and to not just give away the whole cache to the entire world.
While I was very pleasantly surprised as I read the letter, I had this fleeting thought as well. But although the FCC has been an occasional nuisance in the last 25 years, they naively seem to me to have been a generally good force in broadcast competition.
Wow, the MNPD should be applauded for doing their job and following the rules, despite pressure from Federal Agents:
"In fact, the chief said that, as soon as officers arrived, they realized that the Secret Service agents did not have a legal basis to enter the man's house, and the man -- who had a legal permit to carry a gun -- had never actually threatened anyone."
I hadn't heard about that. That's awesome that the police chief is taking them on about this. It's becoming rare to hear about police chiefs doing the right thing when it comes to abuse of power.
I think that's selection bias creeping through. It's easy to remember the really negative events and less so the mundane, positive ones. Perceptions is reality and all that.
I'd think that the selection bias would make far it easier to remember the positive events in this situation. This event would not have made the news, and no one would have been aware of it except for the victim if the police chief hadn't raised an (apparently huge) stink. If it's difficult for the Nashville chief of police to get traction on an incident that happened within his jurisdiction, what chance do you have?
Not really. Negative and positive events do not balance each other out. If your local authorities go help kittens out of a tree, feed the homeless, then savagely beat minorities it is not a zero sum game. People in a position of power abusing their authority can jade entire communities against trusting them ever again.
