I just use the 50 or 100 point minimum feed in my reader, and skip articles that don't look interesting based on how much time I want to spend. Sometimes I only read articles if they're a day old and the first comment makes them look interesting.
When I was a kid I got caught sneaking on the subway. I was charged with theft of services. It makes sense to me - what I literally did was evade paying my $1 before stepping on the platform, and I was attempting to ride a train that wasn't full, so my being there or not wouldn't affect the operation of the train or the other riders. But gaining access to something against the wishes of the provider jeopardizes the provider's ability (or incentive, or willingness, whatever) to provide the service. That's why it's called theft.
This is all kind of off-topic to the OP, and doesn't address why people should or should not pay for their software, music, and movies, but I think theft or fraud is an accurate term to use.
It's a lifesaver for me. I normally run my emacsclient on my local X display, but in low-bandwidth situations I run nox emacsclients in terminals over SSH. I still get multiple buffers and the same emacs server session.
This is one thing that William Bernstein (I recommend his books) points out. You need to be able to calmly watch your portfolio halve in value and sit it out if you're going to be a buy and hold investor (or any investor, really). I have several friends who took their money out near the bottom of the latest crash and put it it cash or cash equivalents. It's the absolute wrong choice investment-wise, but it's understandable.
Selling before the bottom and buying before the climb is the right thing to do, but if you can do that, you're not spending time reading HN, you're either working hard as a trader or relaxing on your desert island.
I don't get this. The story has been in the NYT every day last week, and it's been front-page news there since the weekend, with articles on the Wikileaks cables' relevance and possible similar effects in Egypt.
Was the NYT 2-3 weeks late in giving this story a focus? Were they just waiting to see if it would become relevant among the US wars and domestic political violence? Or did they get caught off guard until Al-Jazeera scooped them? Either way, it doesn't look like they egregiously sandbagged the story, they were just later to it than they could have been.
