Hi, I've worked in two restaurants that have been extorted by yelp salespeople. Also, I'm friends with managers of other restaurants and bars that have had similar experience. Your salespeople consistently claim to be able to get rid of unwanted reviews. They tend to call with a pitch that starts with something like "So I see you got a 2 star review on your page, wouldn't you rather that wasn't the first thing your potential customers saw when they research your business?"

I don't believe that DRM has ever increased the revenue of a product. Do you know of any examples where it has been shown to do this?

Well said! Why do I never find posts like this when I have mod points?

I've become mostly a lurker lately too, especially since I switched most of my /. reading to google reader. Anyways, I've always enjoyed your comments and it's good to see you back.

The greedy corporations don't sound forgotten to me. Are you somehow excluding them from the group of liars, cheats and grifters?

I think the AC was saying that the easy access would have been created one way or another, and I agree on the point.

Nice sig, BTW.

Do you his argument that his problem is obscurity rather than piracy? How exactly do his smaller sales figures counter that?

There's at least one model that you didn't mention: sites that sell something that is relevant to the content on their site. An example is http://www.breadtopia.com/ a site about breadmaking that also sells breadmaking supplies. Given time, other business models would appear as well.

To answer your first question, yes I do think it would be a positive thing if we had an ad-free internet.

(Sorry, there is more to this thought that I should flesh out here, but I'm having trouble putting it together in a way that communicates it properly and I have to go out right now).

No, I don't whitelist sites. One reason I don't is that I find the ads distracting, and even if I didn't, I have no desire to increase the amount of advertising I'm exposed to every day. It has an effect. If it didn't, companies wouldn't bother doing it. Another reason is that I don't want the big web ad companies to track my browsing habits. What I look at is my business, not theirs.

That said, some sites host their own ads. If those ads don't blink or move (and my settings in FF don't allow GIFs to animate) then I don't bother blocking them, and my ABP settings have nothing in there by default block them either.

I'll agree with all your requirements and add this: No ads served by advertising companies. I have no desire to allow companies like Doubleclick or Yahoo to track my movements across the web.

If a site hosts their own ads and they don't blink or move, then I will consider turning ads on on their site.

Also, the ad should be text or a simple image, no scripts. unnecessary scripts slow the browser down too much

I don't know where you got the idea that Noscript is adware. Where exactly do you see these T&Cs that describe the ads that NoScript will show? As far as I know, they don't exist, as NoScript is not adware.