They live longer than a charge on a battery powered flying vehicle.

When you say "wheeled bomb" I assume you've gone back to talking about gasoline (and diesel) fuelled cars. They're the only one you fill with an explosive substance.

No, it's more like "Buck Feta".

MediaWiki has a tool called "common.js" to let an admin edit the sitewide JavaScript. Wikimedia Foundation staff are trying to push unpopular user interface changes onto Wikipedia. The admins are using common.js to override the changes and restore the previous behavior for anonymous visitors. So WMF staff have superprotected the pages to keep even local admins from editing them.

That's assuming there is only one ad per page.

This page here has 4. That's only reading 50 ./ stories
Until you take into account going back to the main page between stories. That's another 4 ads, so only 25 stories.

I just took a quick look at my local news website, 13 ads on the main page, 8 on an article.
200 ads is less than 10 articles.

At $36 per article, which I've seen on several sites, I don't think a lot of people will bite.

People also like to spread hoaxes, whether knowingly or unknowingly. That's why I specifically mentioned reliable sources, those "with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy."

Should have said Monsanto v. Schmeiser.

It is the same way with travel. Rather than give you a per diem of $100, they want itemized receipts, which you have to collect, enter into the system, submit, your manager has to review and approve, and then Travel has to audit and approve. All because they don't want you to go eat Ramen and pocket the other $97. They spend thousands of dollars of company time to save a few hundred dollars on travel expenses.

Companies would love to give you a $100 per diem for meals. As you point out, in addition to being easier for the employee, it saves them money.

The reason they require you to itemize receipts is because if they're ever audited by the IRS, they need to be able to produce the receipts to prove those were real incurred business expenses. Not imaginary numbers made up to pad the expenses and scam the IRS out of tax revenue.

We also tried it the laid back way - we'll give you a $100 per diem, you don't have to itemize, just collect all your receipts and hand them in after your trip. The accountant who was going to double-check your numbers anyway will just do the itemizing. Net result was that employees forgot to save their receipts or "lost" them. They'd already been paid $100 for the meals, so there was no incentive for them to be careful with the receipts. So back we went to having the employee itemize if they wanted reimbursement.

My guess is that without advertising, content providers would have to turn to a subscription-based model. I would actually like to see this, because it means a lot of sites would finally die off. Take any website (IGN, Gamespot, Gamefaqs) that does videogame reviews and/or guides. Most of these websites are dinosaurs - they come from a time before the Wiki model and streaming video, when people had to go to them to get reviews.
[...]
Nowadays, if I want to find out how to do something in a game or whether a game is worth playing, I can go on Youtube and look it up - usually resulting in better quality than a published guide or review on one of those sites.

That's all well and good. But without advertising, YouTube wouldn't exist. At least not in the form it currently does. Someone ha to pay for all that video storage and bandwidth. Same with Google, Bing, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, even slashdot. Advertising provides market fluidity, where the tiniest action by a visitor (a click or even pausing on a page to read it) can be translated directly into additional revenue to the site for providing content visitors find "interesting." Maybe there's a better way to provide this fluidity than ads - if you find it you'll probably become the next dot-com billionaire. But ignorance of this beneficial side of ads does not negate their usefulness.

On the receiving end, as much as I dislike ads, I do acknowledge that they free me up to try out different sites at no cost. With a subscription model, I'd have to pay to subscribe to a site to try it out (or get in on a limited-time free trial, which would probably involve me giving the site my mailing address and phone number which they could sell to marketers - probably worse than seeing ads online). There's also a small informational benefit to ads. I found that out when I got rid of my TV. A year later I was hanging out with some friends and we decided to go see a movie. That's when I realized I had absolutely no idea what movies were playing, and even when I was told the titles I couldn't classify them into categories I might find interesting (sci-fi, action, etc). My friends had to take the time to give me a 10-second summary of each movie before I could tell them if I was voting yea or nay on it.

In the time it took me to read that, I could look up a video on Youtube and see the same thing done in less than thirty seconds and without terrible ASCII art - and without ads plastered all over.

I think your gripe is more about artificially limiting the FAQs so they can't include pictures. Except for linear 3D guides (e.g. jumping puzzles), video is also a terrible format for guides. Video is a time-dependent format, whereas a written page with pictures allows you to quickly skim forward and back to find the section you want. It's the same reason you can quickly browse a directory full of unnamed pictures to get an idea of what's there, but you can't do the same for a directory full of MP3s. The pictures are time-independent and you can quickly scan through them. MP3s (and video) are time-dependent, and you have to sit there and listen/watch them at something close to real-time to figure out what the content is.

Actually, given the prices practised by some ISP, if this number is correct
ads cost you, the end user, *MORE MONEY* (in terms of bandwidth, specially the "video" kind of ads) than earn money back to the ad-supported website.

And then you wonder why I prefer using Adblock/Noscript, etc. and donating a few bucks (bitcoin,etc.) to website I like the most.

Yet you're posting this on Slashdot, which continues to operate from the .org TLD after having been sold to Andover, VA Linux, and Dice.

Ad blockers that allow the ad to render and then cover it up exist, but they eliminate the bandwidth and CPU time savings of a normal ad blocker. Like normal ad display, a cover-up ad blocker slows down rendering, drains your device's battery (as its CPU has to come out of sleep mode more often), and runs up a higher data bill with your ISP compared to a normal ad blocker. And as I mentioned above, a cover-up ad blocker fails with interactive advertisements.