So they cross the border, grab a bunch of cash, and go back.
Hell, that's worse than immigrating and staying.

I'm a social person. I rather like the way I communicate through the Internet with a lot of different people in different areas of the world, none of which would find much use from a 1994-era Internet. I'd rather not just be chatting with a bunch of techies.

On the other hand, I do remember those days, and the overall level of discussion was usually more mature before the Endless September. And newsgroups were the bomb (pre-spam). Fuck website forums, Slashdot not withstanding. >_>

Most people I know have rejected the old commercial TV format and use DVRs to skip the commercials. Advertisers have countered by creating commercials that still attract the attention when fast-forwarded, especially movies which put black bars at the top and bottom of the screen with text with the movie title, release, and a twitter hashtag. I'm totally fine with that.

There are a number of sites I'd like to blacklist which have "sponsored links" from my newspaper's website, from cracked, etc. Some are terribly written, some (like answers.com) have adopted an unbelievably annoying, advertising-heavy slide-show design. Click on something like "10 Actors who didn't deserve their Academy Award" and you'll find you have to click 30 times, because each topic gets three slides.. the first a picture and the next two with text (usually just a sentence or two) overlaid over that picture. The slide is, naturally, surrounded by ads, and clicking "next slide" reloads the page with the ads (fortunately quickly from what I've seen).

I have seen this design practice explode in popularity over the last few months. Of course, all the users hate it, and the comments sections have plenty of people complaining about the shitty format. But it does let the website owners claim they delivered lots of ads to the reader!

Also, if "you pay when you click" takes off, look for malware that hijacks browsers and simulates clicks to become prevalent.

You would still get ads.
See, you get ads because most people are willing to put up with ads, not because content would be impossible without them. Remember when you just had ABC/CBS/NBC (and maybe FOX) and then cable came around? Oh, we were do dizzy with the promise.. we would subscribe to cable, that would pay for the content, and we could do without advertising, like those Brits and PBS watchers did!

Except that's not what happened. We paid for cable AND we got the ads. Because we were willing to.

I will always use flashblock. I don't use any sort of Adblocking other than that. For websites that complain "please don't block my ads!" I respond "Then don't use flash ads." It's as simple as that.

Wow, bizarre. I would have laughed at that, but I just saw that for the first time tonight trying to create an account on avsforums. At first I thought "Oh, capcha embedded in a video flash, that's probably a good way to foil spambots... wait. Wait, that's just an ad, the capcha is in plain text just below."

Ugh.

Please don't tease.

Hey now, I'd like to ride shirtless in the warm weather on the back of a horse. Who wouldn't?

I am pretty gay, though.

A childish come-back is not a good refutation of a childish argument.

Wow, just... wow.

Nearly all of them are nicely associated with Karen Allen's character from Raiders of the Lost Ark (when she wasn't shouting "IIINDYYYYYYY!!")

Or hell, promote Lady Sif to full Thor.

That's true. It feels like the "Death of Superman" situation again. Every once in awhile Marvel and DC have to make a controversial announcement to try to attract attention, but give it a little while and the most important rule of all will be invoked: Status Quo is God. Almost no big hero (and few big villains) can have anything that changes their fundamental nature in the long run. Like the others, this change will be short term. See: Death of Jean Grey, Civil War, House of M, etcetc.

To be fair, the Thor retcon had little to do with Hollywood and happened decades ago in the comics.

It was the only way to have the Norse gods, and the Greek gods, the South American gods, the Japanese gods, etcetc all exist in the same universe without much narrative conflict.. to say they weren't REALLY gods in our modern conception, but that they were super-powerful beings originally worshiped as gods by earlier cultures.

In other words, Thor is a position/rank as much as it is a proper name.

And it happened before: Beta Ray Bill -> Beta Ray Thor.