> (2) That said, I basically consider pop-up ad blocking something shy of but akin to stealing, as loading pages from RinkWorks costs me money, and blocking ads is a purposeful circumvention of something I've set up for the purpose of compensating me for that cost, plus the time and effort I put into creating content in the first place.

See, I agree with you, Sam. I dutifully view RW in IE and freaking suffer through the pop-ups. Well, that's not entirely true: at work I use Ghostzilla (based on Mozilla) which kills pop-ups automatically, but makes it look less like I'm goofing off on the Web. My point is that fundamentally I agree with you on this point and I dislike depriving Web content creators of revenue.

But aren't you the same guy who's told people to use Netscape since it doesn't pop up that stuff? I know you think pop-up ads are crap, and frankly the ones at RW are among the worst and most annoying out there (they don't make sounds, thankfully, but these recent Expedia ads that pop crap up all the damn time are driving me batty).

The real fact of the matter here is that pop-up advertising is an awful way to generate revenue for your work -- *nobody* likes it, and from what I can tell it doesn't generate very much revenue anyway. I, for one, would much rather be able to just buy a RW subscription (or something) and not have the damn ads. Everyone would be happier: I wouldn't have to put up with your ads, you'd get more money.

As it stands, people are going to circumvent what is essentially a flawed business model. All the more reason to move to something better.

Ste "As for stealing, let's not talk about downloading movies off the 'Net..." phen