Vakkotaur

Sometimes one runs across a link to a New York Times article and upon clicking the link winds up not at the article but at the wretched registration page. While a person could fill in the registration page, yet again, it's a tiresome bother. Most times some newspaper site wants registration I simply give up and figure anything important will show up somewhere else with less hassle.

There is a way around this, and it isn't bugmenot.com which seems not to work very often. There is the New York Times Link Generator. If you have registered and are looking at an article you'd like to link to, feed the URL of the article to the link generator and it will produce a link unencumbered by registration hassles. Your readers might actually read the article now.

Or if you encounter a registration demanding link, you can recover. Open the link in a new window and remove all the registration crap in the URL. This is two parts. The real article URL is sandwiched between a registration page URL and an identifier. Cut out the registration URL, everything from the very start of the URL up to the "h" (of http) in the real URL. Then after the trailing .html in the real URL, cut that trash out as well. Copy the remaining real URL and feed it to the link generator. This is a bit of a hassle, but for me it's been much more reliable than trying to register yet again.

The only problem is that the article can't be too new or the link generator won't be able to produce a link. It will at least inform you of that, however. While in an ideal world this gyration would be unnecessary, at least this solution exists. Too bad it doesn't exist for other registration-happy papers.

I expect this will be spun as something more than what it is, especially by those who like to use words like quagmire and try to scaremonger by making poor comparisons to Vietnam. One important bit would be overlooked if, or rather when, they do.

The Selective Service as it is now known started in the early 1980s. I remember that. I was around and had to register not just too long after it started. That was nearly 20 years ago. And here's the important bit from the page linked above (emphasis mine):

Once identified as qualified candidates for appointment, prospective Board Members are recommended by the Governor and appointed by the Director of Selective Service, who acts on behalf of the President in making appointments. Each new member receives 12 hours of initial training after appointment, followed by 4 hours of annual training for as long as he or she remains in the position. They may serve as Board Members for up to 20 years, if desired.

So all that's going on is that the original 20 year terms of service have ended or will soon be ending. So now replacements are needed to keep things in a state of presumed readiness, just like the last twenty years.