I think you should seriously consider using an ad-blocker. In instances like this where a site is both being abusive (showing ads after you've paid to block them) & knowingly wasting a limitied resource (mobile battery & bandwidth), there is no moral quandry. Block them.

Well, you must not be new here.

No automaker wins a race to the bottom. Every automaker wins a race to the top, because there's more profit on cars with added bullshit. They don't particularly care about the people.

Well, whether the situation fits the various definitions is a judgment call. It depends on whether you perceive what the property company is doing as productive, or exploiting their middleman position to extort fees they've done nothing to earn -- an activity which would fit all the definitions I listed. I'll leave that up to other readers, since we clearly differ on issues of substance as well as terminology.

a person who displays or demands of others pointlessly precise conformity, fussiness about trivialities, or exaggerated propriety, especially in a self-righteous or irritating manner

There is nothing "frivolous" about being clear when making economic and political statements,

Says the person who draws a distinction between "rent seeking" and "business decisions", as if one were not an instance of the other.

I see irony is not one of your strong suits.

I was aiming for insightful-funny and you know what? So far, that's precisely what I've got. And because this is slashdot, I also got a whoosh! Thanks for that.

Very few, because of those who would consider it, few have any credible options, and many have no options.

Yes. And it has been a point of contention all along.

I'm back at my computer so here you go:

"Rent seeking is the socially costly pursuit of wealth transfers" -- The Encyclopedia of Public Choice, Rowley, Charles, Schneider, Friedrich (Eds.), Springer-Verlag 2003.

"Definition of 'Rent-Seeking' When a company, organization or individual uses their resources to obtain an economic gain from others without reciprocating any benefits back to society through wealth creation." -- Investopedia, http://www.investopedia.com/te..., Accessed June 1 2014.

"The idea that resources are unproductively used in rent-seeking contests has much broader application than the original rent-seeking papers suggested[emphasis mine] The rent-seeking logic has been applied to issues in history, sociology, anthropology, biology and philosophy. The core has also been formalized and analyzed more rigorously, using the tools of modern game theory. The modern rent-seeking literature describes the rational decision to invest in contesting pre-existing wealth or income, rather than undertaking productive activity. [emphasis mine]" -- Congleton, Roger D., Arye L. Hillman, and Kai A. Konrad. "Forty years of research on rent seeking: an overview." The Theory of Rent Seeking: Forty Years of Research 1 (2008).

In other words while rent-seeking in the sense of Anne Krueger's 1974 paper still continues to be an active area of research, the term is used differently in wider areas of economic research.

Oh, yes, and one more citation for you:

"prig (n.): a person who displays or demands of others pointlessly precise conformity, fussiness about trivialities, or exaggerated propriety, especially in a self-righteous or irritating manner." -- "prig." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 01 Jun. 2014. http://dictionary.reference.co...>.

Not necessarily.

(crap, mylkeyboard ls now spewlng spuriouls pipe chalacters. sletimes in place lf a keystloke, somelimes jsut lxt to onl. lhis islabout thelweirdestlkeyboard flailure I'le ever exlerienced.l)

I did.

Source The Economist Magazine Dictionary of Economic Terms. I can cite many other sources, but I'm posting this from a phone so you can Google them yourself.

The Wikipedia article is about the rent seeking as described in Anne Kreuger's well-known 1974 paper. However that is only one example of how investors attempt to seek higher than normal profits without creating any utility, which is the more general sense of the word.

You mean stop disagreeing with Wikipedia.

You can buy a sensor package for your handheld now (there are others, this is just the first one I searched up and it looks pretty nice) but it's probably going to be more than a decade before you're going to get a terahertz scanner or anything else that interesting for a tolerable, pocketable price.

Is that what the pedants are playing these days? Or are we talking about handing it off to a child? Flawlessly is a bit of a strong word, but a classic DS (I prefer the larger size) with an Acekard (I have the 4i) is a pretty nice way to play a whole lot of classic games. If only the included browser were worth anything, it would really still be a cool platform for more than just games. You can build your own web gateways to give the browser purpose, but that seems excessive.

Right, that's why VMS is all but gone and Unix has taken over handling basically everything that's important to anyone. It's all so clear!

Yes, it looked really good to me, too. However, I stopped short of preordering, because it didn't look credible. I was entirely correct. They never managed to produce enough units in order to build a healthy community.