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Dear Frank,

interesting position you are taking towards avoiding to pay for content that was obviously created by institutions and/or people that need money to fulfill their task (if you don’t think they’re spreading “fake news” anyway) and to live. Would you object to people that attend your lectures by sneaking in without paying? Should creating content/writing etc. be without reward in this age of “everything free”on the net? Just wondering.

Wolfgang

That’s an interesting thought, and if all one was getting was learned copy, then it would be a fair comment.  However, I buy the Times newspaper, which is £1.60 Mon-Fri and £2 on a Saturday.  I doubt if I read 10% of it.  Around 50% is advertising, 99.9% for things I’m never going to do or buy.  The remaining 40% is sport, share prices, business, and celebrity news.  As there are only so many things you can do with rolled up copies of the Times, such as building model bridges and towers with your grandchildren, I find this a dreadful waste of trees and energy, so perhaps on-line news is a good idea, but how do you get rid of the advertising and the associated ‘long running scripts’?  Also, I’m not really interested in 20 Stars that look like their dogs, or 20 things I didn’t know about Adolf Hitler.  I couldn’t have waited long enough to read much with my previous 10-year-old laptop with only 2GB of RAM in any case, because of the ‘long running scripts’.  My new one is faster, but I do rather object to an advert between every paragraph.  So, my question is, if you register, do you get rid of the ads?  That would be worth it.  Otherwise, I kind of agree with Frank; the newspaper’s getting their fee by recording me within their ‘hits’ figures and are thus able to charge more for their advertising.  DaveP

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