When I learned of some of the details of the upcoming The New York Times‘ paywall, I thought of a way around it.

I did not envision that the paywall implementation would be so unprofessionally done that it would be as easy to circumvent as described in the article That was quick: Four lines of code is all it takes for The New York Times’ paywall to come tumbling down.

The method I imagined is spelled out in one of the comments (not a comment authored by me) about the above story posted on the Nieman Journalism Lab site where this story is posted.

In my previous post Monetizing Internet Content, I have explained why the effort of The New York Times is doomed to failure. My post explains how the modern technology changes the calculation on what a person is willing to pay for a subscription.  It then suggests a method of micro-payments that is the solution that will work in this new environment.

I have offered my suggested solution  to Google and to The Boston Globe. As far as I know, nobody has paid the slightest attention to my obvious answer to how to monetize internet content.  If you are attending MIT, Harvard, Stanford, or Berkeley and want to become the next drop-out billionaire, read up on my suggestion, have your classmates implement it, then drop out of school,  and run with it.

I have found that some complaints about the new Firefox 4.0 User Interface are easily fixable by the user.  After making my own set of complaints known and seeing hundreds of others make the similar complaints, I saw a note that one person found out how to fix them.  Of course there was no hint as to how.  Well here is the missing info.

The first complaint is that the back and forth button are far separated from the refresh button in the URL window and the home button far to the right.  I had tried grabbing the button and pulling, to no avail.

You have to  right click on the menu bar, and then select customize.  That’s not hard to figure out, but then what?  I found that you have to drag the home page button off the menu bar into the customize window.  The you can drag the home button from the customize window to where you want it in the menu bar.

I also did not like the placement of the tabs.  Unselecting the “tabs on top” option puts the tabs back where they should be.  Previously I erroneously thought that unselecting this option would doing something weird that I would not want.