Why do you say it has to be for free? If I'm running a site as a hobby or to showcase my hobby, the cost of running that site would be part of the cost of the hobby. If I can't afford to showcase it that way - whatever the associated costs for operating are - and still do my own hobby, I don't need to be on the web.

The same goes for selling a product or service on the web. If my product isn't bringing in enough where I can pay for the costs of the server, domain name, and someone to put the site together for me (if I don't do it myself), then I'm not ready for the web and shouldn't be there, yet. Simple. The only reason for me to have ads displaying on my site is if I want to give a friend or direct affiliate exposure.

These rotating ads where you just run a script for an ad hosting service and you have no idea what the real ad source is...they need to die a fiery death and there's no legitimate excuse for their existence.

You probably could have gotten away with organizing under a 501c7 and set up a donation link on your site. You wouldn't be directly charging your users for access (as was against your agreement), you'd be giving your user-base a way to assist you with the operational costs of the site. If enough of your users found a substantial enough value in what your site offered, you would have been paid, even if you had to periodically send out help requests.

You could also have taken advantage of affiliate programs as I once did and display those links. I found that they quite often managed to get around AdBlock simply because they were generally static images or gifs located locally with a href pointed straight to an affiliate page on that remote site. The site would operate exactly as if the user went to the remote site's main URL, but depending on the affiliate agreement they had, you'd get paid a few cents for the user making the initial click, and if they bought anything through your affiliate link, they'd cut you a check for a small percentage of what that user spent

The community site I had back then made more than enough to cover monthly and yearly hosting costs using the affiliate method, though I concede that at its most popular I didn't have nor need more than 4 servers (one DB server, 3 redundant web servers) behind the domain. I also didn't have to go the 501c7 route since the site wasn't considered large enough to be more than a hobby. The site and community collapsed more for political reasons than financial (several of us got tired of the bullshit from trolls and felt it better to disband entirely).

Hindsight is 20/20, but there were ways you could have made money to support the site without necessarily resorting to ads that Adblock would have been able to block.

So in your experiment we'd have either inane stuff that people would put up as part of their side hobby and funded by their day job, or sites that make money directly by showcasing the site owner's product or service without hosting intrusive ads from 3rd parties, and the only "advertising" would be what I would directly and knowingly subject myself to by going to the URL or clicking a direct link in a search engine? I can live with that.

Which, for the very large portion of us on firewalled connections (Work, school, etc), was useless anyway. Congratulations, your lack of communication skills and attempt at using an external image to convey it meant that a good portion of your audience has no idea what you were trying to say. May as well have said nothing at all and we'd have just as much understanding of your position on the matter as we do right now anyway. Hence MechaStreisand's statement that "[image link posts are] idiotic here."

See you in 8 minutes... Or maybe I won't.

Wanna play a game? Find me a site where you think advertising is the only way and I'll tell you whether it could find a better way to monetize the info it has, should be a side site for a hobby, or if the example is good enough, I'll concede the point.

When I've run my sites in the past, I've never put a single banner on that page that wasn't my own... except for a single page that was specifically built just to allow access for my users to make use of my affiliate programs. That one page had one affiliate block each for Amazon, DigiKey, NewEgg, and TigerDirect. The rest of the page was banner links to friends' pages where they were selling their own products or services. I made dick on running that entire ad page (maybe 60 cents over the course of that 2 year run), and I never expected to make any money off of it. It was only there as a side service to customers that were already cruising the rest my site for my products/information. My direct revenue at that time was only ever from whatever product or service I was using that site to sell, not advertisements from 3rd party sources. If I was running a blog on a page of the site, I wasn't making money off of it. That was just a way to put my own opinions out there. If you went there, read through it, maybe left a comment... great. Not once on that page were you going to be subjected to any kind of advertising. The #1 compliment that my customers and site visitors gave me on the site design? It was a refreshing break from the rest of what they had to deal with on the web. Simple, sleek, great use of colors, and the fastest loading pages that they've ever seen since the inception of the commercialized web.

If you are a large syndicated news site, charge a subscription fee. That's fine with me. If I like a sampling of your articles, I'll probably pay for a subscription. If enough people feel you're worth the subscription fee...great, you get to live. If you're Joe Sixpack running a personal blog and putting your opinions out there with a ton of clickbait ads all over your page... Guess what; opinions are like assholes: Everyone has one and every single one stinks. You want to support yourself by putting yet another source of near useless information out there and rely on that for your only bit of income? You deserve to flounder when no one clicks your ads, blocks the ads, or just doesn't visit your site after the first go. If you're not truly insightful, you're offering nothing for society. If you were truly insightful, you'd be able to put your money where your mouth is and make something of all those wonderful ideas you have, and use that to make your money on...instead of bombarding me with garbage ads for enlarging my dick or what ever one neat trick pony they put up on your piece of shit site.

Basically it comes down to this: do something useful that I'm willing to buy into? I'll go to your site and buy all day. Use your blog to bullshit me like a damn street hawker and then flash all kinds of ads in my face? Fuck you, goodbye. I listen to enough bullshit all day, I don't need yours too.

Yes... yes he could have. And the trouble with "things could always be worse"? Making things worse is so much easier than putting effort into making things truly better.

Never. Ever. Do. That. Again.
Or I will mark you as a troll if I have mod points. And frankly, I hope somebody does that to this one.

If you're going to post an informative link from Wikipedia, go straight to Wikipedia; not that wikiwand crap. Using that link to a site pushing a formatting extension that changes the way wikipedia's UI format looks is trolling for users to hijack with a MitM attack. This is fucking /. The general population knows better than to install random extensions from unverified sources. Go pedal your crapware on reddit.

I'm not defending the guy in the car, or Volvo, or any of the idjits casually standing in the forward path of the car with this post, but car manuals don't always make clear what special features are actually equipped on specific vehicles. I haven't RTFM for this particular vehicle, but often times manufacturers will save money by making a standard Manual that spans all trim classes and features of that vehicle model with little footnotes to say which trim package has a particular feature, or just "check with your dealer/manufacturer for specified feature."

My Manual for my Chevrolet Traverse gives all the possible features that the model could have for every trim package available, with blurbs specifying "check with your dealer to see if your vehicle has this feature." Being a used vehicle, my dealer couldn't tell me what features the thing was supposed to have. Even though it has the LT trim stickers, being that it was originally a fleet vehicle (found that out after extensive searching of the VIN, beyond what even CarFax had access to) many of the standard LT features (proper sensors for the OnStar system, automatic mirror adjustment for viewing the wheels while backing up, etc) were not found anywhere on the vehicle. On a side note: At the time of sale having three known non-working features that an LT model was supposed to have before I even knew that it was a fleet vehicle, I was able to get the dealer to cut almost $10K from the price and have them sell an AWD LT model for the same price they offered as the 2WD LS base model. If I had been able to prove it was fleet before the sale, I could have had even more knocked off. Also, came to find several more trim discrepancies later on; but there's more important things about that PoS that piss me off more than what trim features it's missing (dear god, I can see more around my 1990 G20 Conversion Van than I can see around this PoS). From someone who's been brand loyal to Chevy for 20 years, this will be my last GM vehicle newer than 2000.

That said, playing devil's advocate it could have been that the dealer told him that this vehicle had the pedestrian safety feature as part of the automation package, and he felt he was getting a great deal for the extra features...that the car didn't really have. And depending on how the manual was written, it could be very ambiguous as to whether the feature was really in the package or not, telling the person to check with the dealer or manufacturer to see if said feature was available.

I've often thought of building a "Power Suit" to wear on my motorcycle. Transparent OLED HUD in the helmet connected by bluetooth to my phone, along with touch inputs in the fingers to behave like a mouse with clickers where I could just "draw" on my tank to move a cursor on my HUD. The whole purpose for this was only to further the Enlightenment territories. I dropped the whole thought process, and the game, within a week... though, I can still think of some viable uses for the setup. Ingress was quickly shaping up to be much more of a time-sink than I had the desire to spend.

Now if that link were only in English.

Seriously though, why couldn't THIS link be in the summary instead of the Facebook one? There's 2 reasons for this: #1) Slashdot is full of users who refuse to get a Facebook login as a matter of pride; #2) There are some of us who cruise Slashdot during the downtime at their jobs, where Facebook is firewalled out, while they're waiting for code to compile, a problem to come up, or coded themselves into such a place that most maintenance issues have an automated solution already in place and it's a matter of waiting for the next authorized project (it's coming, we swear!). Think of the bloody audience of the site you're posting for when you make a submission!

FTFY

Get off your high and mighty horse of justice. In many jurisdictions it's very easy to get your license revoked, and you won't necessarily know about it until it's too late (not saying it's necessarily the case here). There's also the fact of if he didn't admit to the police that he had driven himself there, there'd be reasonable doubt to say that someone else drove for him in his vehicle. He didn't have to tell the police anything. "You have the right to remain silent" applies even before you're placed under arrest.

In the case of not knowing about one's licence getting suspended/revoked, an anecdote that can be extrapolated into many other scenarios: I had a speeding ticket that I was using a lawyer to fight. At that point all communication between the parties goes through that Lawyer. He was handling it and was given multiple court continuances. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy that handled tickets in that county didn't log the continuances of trial and extend the date of the ticket to match, like they're supposed to. Next thing I know, I'm getting a letter that I'm in contempt of court and as a result my license was suspended. I received that notification letter 15 days after they applied the suspension, and luckily the route I traveled to and from work at that point is normally devoid of police forces. I notified my lawyer, who told me not to worry about it and if I ever run into a problem, tell the police nothing and call him straight away. He called the court and explained what the solicitor's bureaucracy had done, and provided the court with all the communication documentation between him and the Solicitor's office(telephone recordings of attempted contacts times and all associated letter correspondence). He wound up getting the contempt of court removed and was given a set firm date for the solicitor's office to make a settlement by or else the case would be summarily dismissed. Even after the solicitor dropped the ticket, it still took the bureaucracy 2 months to stop sending me contempt of court notices, which my lawyer accepted but reassured me that firm judgement was placed in my favor, providing me a copy of the letter of dismissal to keep in my car as an amendment to my license in case it was ever re-suspended due to the mishandling of the county. The letter of dismissal had the same case number as the suspension flag indicating that the license was reinstated by court order and the DMV was behind in their processing. Using the state's DMV site, I was able to confirm that through the ordeal, my license was suspended twice. As a safeguard I now check the status every month to make sure that the ghost of tickets past has truly stopped haunting me.

The point of that story was simply this: It's very easy to fall on the wrong side of the law even when you're following the letter of the law. Yes, I allegedly broke the law by speeding 12 miles above the posted limit. It was never confirmed in court, and I had GPS tracked and vehicle computer recorded evidence to the contrary on top of time discrepancy evidence (time on the ticket was three minutes after the time printed on my receipt from Burger King ten miles back on the road, which called the calibration of the radar in general into question). Officially, I've never broken the speeding law. However, it was during the course of legal procedure that I fell outside of the law, even though the entire fault of my suspended license lie on the bureaucracy alone for not following procedure. Of course, whose head rolls when the bureaucracy fucks up? Only the victims'.