Yet you visited Slashdot long enough to not only click through to this article, but also post 7 comments.

For someone so keen on seeing the death of the web, you sure use it alot. Or when you said "Give everyone..." did you just mean "everyone else", because your rules don't apply to yourself?

In what way do you envision phones and tablets making the web go away? I browse the web on my tablet and phone much more than on my computer.

Headache inducing? Let's not forget people who are subject to epileptic seizures. I remember some of those pages that stabbed into my brain painfully. If I were an epileptic, I'm sure that some of them would have triggered a seizure. Think of MySpace as a prime example of the crap I'm talking about.

One thing about advertising - all of my efforts to block advertising still allow some ads to come through. I do see an occassional advertisement.

Every single advertisement that I DO SEE is hosted on the server which is serving up the content that I am looking at. If you are hosting your own blog, on your own hardware, and you serve up an advertisement with each page, I WILL SEE that advertisement. I may or may not LOOK AT the ad, but it will load, and I will see it, at least peripherally.

While it's true that I tend to click on the obtrusive ads much more than the low-key unobtrusive ones, that's only because I'm trying to click on the f'ing tiny little close button (which is even harder to hit on a tablet or phone). Then when I click on the add because I missed the close button by a pixel or two and the advertiser's page loads, I'm pissed off at whatever they are advertising, so I can't imagine that my click was worth paying for.

"But, it is an accepted social structure"

Accepted by whom?

I'm not even going to attempt to guess what percentage of us refuse to accept it. But, there are those of us who simply DO NOT accept that we must watch meaningless advertisements before we can get to the page contents.

If the advertisers COULD successfully target my interests, I might actually look at an ad now and then - before I did a search for that product, to compare it to other similar products. Then, when I've compared them, I often go to Ebay to see if the item is available at some huge markdown. I'm in the market for a megger, for instance. I don't SEE advertisements for meggers, despite the fact that I've already done a number of searches. Let's SUPPOSE that an advertiser were shrewd enough to catch on to my megger searches. He starts serving up megger advertisements, starting with Fluke. The prices in the ads start at over $1000, because the vendors who pay for advertising need to recoup their advertising costs. More reasonable prices are available directly from Fluke and Fluke approved vendors around $500 to $600. But, suppose that I don't NEED new and/or calibrated equipment - I just need a semi-reliable meter. I can go to those vendors who aren't advertising, and sell the same equipment at less than $500. If I'm willing to settle for a used piece of equipment, I can find my fluke megger multi-meter for AS LITTLE AS $200.

Keep in mind that I've researched and purchased a number of meters over the past few years. Not one time have I ever seen an advertisement for electric/electronic testing equipment anywhere other than Ebay, and a very select number of industrial sales sites.

In short - the advertisers are utter failures. Despite all their attempts at "targeted advertising", they have completely FAILED to identify my interests and needs. Utter failures.

Now - why should I tolerate their in-your-face advertising bullshit, when they so completely fail to offer things that I actually need?

Notice that I'm not even really bitching here that the items advertised are to high. That's just a peripheral consideration to the fact that they've not merely missed the target. The damned fools aren't even hitting the range! They are standing at the east end of the range, the targets are on the west end, but their bullets are flying out north, east, south, and west.

We should reward such gross incompetence? Why?

And, no, meg testers are not the only items I've needed, and searched for. Try it yourself - do a search for industrial grade fuse pullers. There are a small number of different brands on the market, with Ideal being the standard. Do several searches over a few days, and sit back to see how many advertisements you get. I have Ideal fuse pullers in three different sizes in my toolboxes. A couple years ago, I purchased a lot-sale off of Ebay, and got 18 of the smallest for a couple dollars each. I gave them to my work-mates for Christmas. Despite the fact that I have an established history of searching for, and purchasing these things, I've NEVER SEEN AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR THEM!

Sample ebay sale, currently priced around ten bucks: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Ideal-...

You mean more productive like popups from every website saying "Support our site! Now that all internet Advertising has been banned, you have to pay us 17 cents for every page you view".

All of the ads on the page should be loaded in parallel by your browser, unless it's some sort of weird ad within an ad.

You mean shifty shit like say right on their home page:

Unobtrusive ads aren't being blocked in order to support websites

And they also provide a checkbox right on the main options page that controls whether to Allow some non-intrusive advertising.

And - how does that differ from life in the US? Most people . . . niche talents . . . few doing nothing but leading. Especially now that young adults find it necessary to work two or more part time jobs to support themselves, most people do spend most of their time working their niche talents.

From TFA:

Those ships will include an extra mechanical device to prevent pilots from inadvertently unlocking the tail sections, known as “the feather” early, Virgin Galactic wrote in a report obtained by Discovery News.

I've included some notes from my own experience to help those (not necessarily parent poster) avoid similar failures.

- don't get locked in to single-vendor technology that might disappear on a moment's notice.
Realistically, evaluate if said technologies can survive company collapse or not. Languages / Technologies with heavy internal investment like C# are a lot more coupled to their companies than say PHP, Ruby, etc. That said, maybe the Mono/Apache/etc.. type groups out there could keep the lang alive if MS pulled the rug. Java could be better off if Oracle killed it to open up the ecosystem pieces they've kept ransom. HTML/Javascript are completely open (though standards keep things semi-coherent) but realistically 3-4 vendors control the narrative and if 2 decided to go in a different direction, you'll have a lot of chaos to keep things working.

- hide API's inside your own classes. That makes ripping them out and replacing them with something else so much easier.
Well, the general mantra of layering access to things certainly mitigates unnecessary coupling which is a good thing. This should be applied everywhere though, not just inner class scoping.

- stick to standards.
Yep, and invent some of your own if there's a lack of good standardization where there should be.

- invest in regular modernisation. Do it when reasonably can, not when you absolutely must.
A tricky proposition, but one that should certainly be striven for. Admittedly, saying lets drop all this stuff that produces more revenue to work on X which may eventually help us maximize revenue in the future is certainly not as clear cut, but in the ideal world, the code is always getting improved, polished, simplified, etc.. Writing (CS101 here) low coupled, high cohesion code will vastly simplify future improvements. Just make sure that you always consider 3rd party libraries / platform libraries / language quirks included into external dependencies that may evolve over time.

- refactor whatever stinks.
Whenever I try refacting crap (core piece of functionality), I write a TON of extra tests for before/after comparison because no matter how perfect your re-implementation, there will always be those bazaar corner cases that worked (possibly through fluke/magic) in the original spahgetti that violates the implied or explicit contracts in the future. Refactor for sure, but don't ripshod, or your eventual replacement will be refacting/fixing your POC for much the same reason you refactored.

- keep your own skills up to date. Apply as needed.
This is never bad advice, but just remember that just because you learn a new technique / technology, don't go running out to refactor everything to use it. Generally if it was popular 10-15 years ago, its probably stood the test of time and passed, while newer tech should be looked at carefully and evaluated for specific cases where appropriate.

Ghostbusters II?

The video ads are what I hate the most.

Autoplay was the beginning of the loss of audience for slashdot.

More tech, more geek. Polls that are actually funny and geeky.

That's what engages us.

Agreed, the lack of nerdish news threads makes one less likely to visit.

If I wanted reddit or some other clickbait slushpile, I'd be on reddit or some other clickbait slushpile.