Funnier if it were true: Guy King, the founder of RetailMeNot, a site which lists online coupons for discounts on e-commerce sites, is mocking the effort to rescue Wall Street with a 25-percent-off offer when taxpayers spend $700 billion or more. Seriously, though: Getting 25 percent off the price at which the banks want to offload their mortgage-backed securities on the government sounds like a great deal — as long as it doesn't wreck their balance sheets further.

The New York Times has done away with its for-pay pages, realizing the folly of trying to charge for online content. But it still insists, to the annoyance of many Internet users, on requiring registration. BugMeNot has long helped users bypass such measures by storing a database of disposable usernames and passwords. (And a good thing, too; annoying registration requirements just lead users to falsify the information they're forced to share.) Fearing the wrath of media websites, which use registration data to target ads, BugMeNot's creator has long sheltered in anonymity. Now, at last, he's stepped forward. The 29-year-old Guy King created the site after getting fed up with demographic-seeking inquiries from the likes of nytimes.com and YouTube. So why did King out himself? For the lone purpose of promoting his new company Stateless Systems and website RetailMeNot — a coupon repository. Time may be money, but given the choice, I'd rather keep BugMeNot.