At 08:14 PM 5/1/03 -0400, zem wrote:

...

Why would Bob's "clients" care if the cost was low enough, or just casually traded?

Spam.

The reason clients pay Alice or Bob to receive their approval ratings is to avoid downloading bogus files - incomplete, poorly encoded, misnamed, or deliberately spoofed files (cf Madonna's "what the fuck?" example).

Zem, the editor need not be a single or static entity. Consider slashdot, which uses its readers as ephemeral editors. Consider the (new) KaZaa ratings system which does the same. Consider ebay's user rating system. So yes, the editing *function* is valuable, but it needn't be implemented by a paid individual. --- E pur si muove -G Galilei