Since I won't even see the ad in the first place, it will appear to me that the site is broken and I will just move on to a site that isn't broken. These people have already lost me. For the people that do see the ad, I expect that the reaction of many people will be to immediately start seeking a circumvention. So, this escalation is just going to result in higher market share for ad blocking equipped browsers.

When pop-up ads got to be so obnoxious that people were abandoning IE for pop-up blocking browsers, even Microsoft put in a pop-up blocker. This proposal is so obnoxious that if it becomes widespread, you might even see Captcha circumvention built into the next version of Windows.

No, actually the fifth amendment does not protect you from being compelled to turn over a diary or other personal files. You can be jailed for failure to turn over papers and files even of a personal nature. You can be jailed for concealing evidence and refusing to permit access. In this respect, a password is no different than the location of a concealed diary, which you can be compelled to disclose.

You can not be compelled to admit guilt, but you can be compelled to provide access to physical or documentary evidence that may prove guilt.

Mine works fine and I am not returning it. I can only get the bars to drop by wetting my skin and squeezing firmly at the joint in the band. I won't be doing that when I make a call. You shoud activate yours and get some real world use out of it.

Do you even have one? My iPhone4 works fine, at least as good as my Blackberry and at least as good as the old KRZR it replaced. I have to work pretty hard to replicate the drop in "bars." But then, I don't have sweaty palms.

Even when I try to hold it with my hand at covering the bottom corners, I see a drop in bars and still I get working service everywhere except in the same dead spots where my old phone dropped calls. I think the haters without iPhones are making more of this than its practical effect warrants.

Sure you can. However, it is shorter to use "but."

"To watch as many times as you like but only on your PS3 and only for as long as you keep your PS3 and don't erase the file or the hard drive fails or something else goes wrong" does not sound as snappy as "to own." But, I don't mind the idea of paying for content with limitations and that won't necessarily last forever, as long as the pricing is in line with the limitations. This pricing scheme provides no reason to buy from PSN.

So true. I get a dead tree newspaper and a few journals. The ads in these publications support them and don't annoy me at all. Sometimes I even learn something useful from an advertisement. I'm used to it. If ads in online journals didn't really annoy me, I'd never have bothered to figure out how to block them.

If Ars wants us to view ads to support their content, make it look and act like an ad in Science or Nature, seen but not detracting from the content. Show me ads as text boxes or non-animated gif/jpeg/png that stay in one place on the page.

Don't serve ads from any domain that serves blinking, animated, noisy, moving, flash, or most especially deceptive adds. Any advertiser that delivers deceptive ads WILL be blocked at the firewall. Adblock/Noscript takes care of the rest.

Really, Ars, we were fine with adverstiment supported publications for a long time. Poisoning that covenant was your own making. Now, it's just easier to block 'em all. So, if you want our eyeballs on your ads again, find another way to deliver ads so unobtrusively that maybe people won't bother adjusting their filters.