Bad Writing

[Paul McFedries]

First of all, you don't have to pay for The Times online. It's free,
which strikes me as one of the great bargains of all time. Second, as
near as I can figure, the only alternative would have been to copy the
article and post it to the list, which would have been an egregious
copyright violation. Other people do this, I know, but I'm totally
against it. Finally, I was going to put some kind of parenthetical
"registration required" notice near the URL, but I figured everyone on
this list knew that this was Times policy. It has come up on this
before. I apologize for that, and will include the notice alongside
future Times URLs.

Paul

----- Original Message -----
> #|o| That URL produces no article, but a demand for ID, password,
and a lot
> #|o| of the kind of information that is used to target spam (plus
ad-stuff;
> #|o| this is already edited down):
> #
> #Well, you've got to pay one way or the other.  In this case, giving
up a bit
> #of information gains one access to an excellent reference source.
>
> My point was not to complain about the site. What annoyed me was
being
> told "there's an interesting article at this URL" and finding,
instead,
> that I have to see the ads, register, and pay if I want to see that
> article.