> The latest version of Netscape on my mac gives
>me the option of disabling pop ups. I did :)
>Well, except on a few sites that I know need the
>income.

With things being how they are in internet land these days, I'm sure almost every site that uses pop-ups needs them to some extent.

Pop-up ads (or any ad that opens a new browser window on me) are my biggest dilemma when it comes to web surfing. On the one hand, I hate them. Hate them, hate them, HATE them. I can't say this enough. They're annoying, intrusive, arrogant (DID I GIVE YOU PERMISSION TO OPEN A PROGRAM ON MY COMPUTER SIR?? NO I THINK NOT!) and all around sucky. On the other hand, I have a real desire to keep the internet "free", as in "I don't have to pay to look at crap" and pop-ups are one of the only things left that allow sites to maintain break-even or profitibility on ad revenue alone. So I'm torn. I don't want to deal with these damn things, but I also don't want to have to pay for most of the stuff I surf online. So I just take the lazy route, and do nothing. I've never bought a single thing from a pop-up ad, but if they rope in enough suckers so that I don't have to pay for stuff, I guess I can deal with that.

But then I think about TV. TV has ads. I'm not nearly as pissed off about ads on TV as I am about pop-up ads on websites, though. TV ads are intrusive (they stop the flow of the program you are watching) and often annoying, but either my life long conditioning to accept ads on TV stops me from hating them as much as pop-up ads on web sites or pop-up ads really *are* that much more annoying, I don't know which.

-- Dave