As I write this, a troy ounce of Gold will set you back one thousand, one hundred and seventy nine of your hard earned US dollars. For our English readers – and those who can't think in troy ounces – 31 grams of gold will cost you the best part of 708 pounds. If you look back to January 2008, you could have got yourself that ounce for just $800 (a bit over £400 with exchange rates as they were). Sticking to dollars for the moment, that's about a 50% increase. But why?

A few of you might remember a brief debate a while back about whether it would ever be acceptable for Facebook to charge it's users if it was unable to make a profit from advertising. I was strongly of the opinion that if they couldn't make enough money from advertising – and I didn't believe they could – then it would be reasonable for them to ask users to pay a usage fee.

It looks like my fears may have been groundless. On Tuesday Facebook announced that it had reached 300m users and was now – a year ahead of schedule – cash flow positive. Whilst this isn't quite the same as being in profit – it means they are making more from advertising than it is putting into capital expenditures – it's the main hurdle which has to be passed for a business model like Facebooks to be profitable long term.

The rumours of charging for using Facebook have been circling for some time, but is there any truth to them? Is Facebook in need of more money, is it running at a loss as it is suggested of Youtube? The crux of the matter is that (nearly) every website wants to make money and, as Ben suggests, since we live in a Capitalist society, this is only to be expected. So, what is the next step for Facebook, are we going to end up paying to use it? And what will we get when we do?

In his kindly titled article “Hitting Ben is FREE” Scott, with an eloquence I cannot hope to match, completely misses the point. If you haven't yet read it I suggest you do so now(http://www.moneywhatmoney.co.uk/index.php/Scotts-Articles/Hitting-BEN-is-FREE.html ). He starts off with two good points, firstly that a tax on windows is a silly idea – couldn't agree more – secondly that if Facebook started charging their users, there is a very high chance everybody would simply stop using it and find somewhere else to waste time.

Whilst the story about William the Orange was entertaining, it is hard to see how it bears any relevance to the problem of revenues from social networks. William the Orange imposed a tax on windows purely to get some “money for nothing,” people having windows or looking out of them cost him nothing and so the tax had no real basis, economic or otherwise. Websites are a a little different.

William of Orange, or William III, was King of England between 1672 and 1702. He didn’t really do anything remarkable, except think of ways to make money because he was a bit skint after knocking seven bells out of the French. His most famous way of making money was the ‘Window Tax’, the bigger and more windows you had the more you got taxed. The idea was to tax the use of freely available things like air, water and in this case sunlight.

As far as getting something for free go sunlight is right up there with wind and rain. People got a bit fed up of paying for actual windows, so they just left holes in the wall or had a brick lattice instead. Now back in 1690 when the tax was introduced central heating didn’t as such exist and the winters were probably colder etc etc, so people jus got cold and wet instead of paying.

SO what on earth would possess my compadre Ben to think that by making people pay for facebook that they would still use it?

Most things which seem to be free are actually funded by advertising, along side the service we want there will be adverts and the payment for those covers the cost of us getting the product without ourselves paying. The advertisers in turn believe that the sales they will get from the adverts will be sufficient to make a profit on their payment for the advert in the first place. Great in principle and something Google have successfully built an empire on.

Facebook claim to have a similar model, they provide the service entirely for free (the end users don't have to pay anything) and then display adverts along side the content. Similar to Google, but with one crucial difference; when was the last time you clicked on an advert on Facebook? I thought about this for a while and concluded never, I have Facebook open for a fair part of the day, every day and yet not once have I clicked on an advert.

In my last article, written in response to the pirate bay verdict, I suggested that the traditional business models of the music and film industries had passed their best and that if such firms wanted to survive, they would have to come up with something new and better. It's easy to look at their models from outside and point out that they have failed, it's much harder to come up with suggestions for what they should do to fix them.

The below article is written to try and explain why I find the Pirate Bay Verdict so unfair, all comments appreciated, please either use the comment system below or email them to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . I'll happily post other peoples versions or other opinions as separate articles if you submit them.  

Today the four men responsible for the torrent indexing site The Pirate Bay, were sentenced to 1 year in jail for assisting making available copyrighted content, they were also order to pay around $3.6 million in compensation to various record and film companies including Warner Bros. Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures Industries, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI.

This ruling drew a lot of anger from a lot of people, myself included. Some peoples reasoning is very simple, they like being able to download for free content they would normally have to pay for and dislike anything which interferes with that. For other people including myself, our support for the Pirate Bay and outrage at this verdict is a little more complicated.

I started writing my second article about support and resistance, intending to talk about cognitive biases, self fulfilling prophecies and the like. Then, while writing a fairly simple Excel simulation to illustrate a point I was making, I came across something quite odd. Read on to find out more.

I’ve read on quite a few occasions about the practice of putting a failed hard drive into the freezer for a few hours in order to make it spin up and work for long enough to make copies of the most important documents on it. I vaguely understood the logic behind it but never really thought it could work, it was far too simple. After all, hard drives don’t break because of simple mechanical failures; they break because they hate you and want you to suffer. Then, one day, my flatmates 250 Gb external hard drive (a Seagate FreeAgent) failed; suddenly this old trick seemed worth looking into. Here’s what happened.