I like LWN. It is great. They do a bang up job. One of the few online offerings that provides a value-noise-ratio akin to some of the great publications of the

I like LWN. It is great. They do a bang up job. One of the few online offerings that provides a value-noise-ratio akin to some of the great publications of the 80's (Byte, etc). I was a subscriber in the past. That employer made it easy. My current one, it would be a hassle not worth it. I could easily pay for it myself just on professional betterment grounds. But the minute I did that, there's a number of "a few dollars here, a few dollars there" great value-for-money services that I should participate in, and I'd bankrupt myself chasing them all. I lament that micro payment pay as a go has never really caught on in the world of the internet. When I was a kid, you could get the paper delivered to your house daily. But you could also run down to a local box, put a quarter in, and get a one off that way. If you were going to do the newsbox run every day, the subscription paid off as a volume discount. On the flip side, it allowed you to participate in multiple papers at a casual rate easier. You could grab the (relatively expensive) WSJ when it looked really interesting.