Wait, so once the bank robbers are running away, the police should stop chasing them? After all, they aren't showing any signs of hostility. Ok, that's a strawman because shooting is not the same as chasing, but you get the idea. Everybody's heard "run away and live to fight another day" (emphasis mine), but there is a flip side to that - if your enemy gets to run away, they also get to live to fight (and kill your friends) another day. While the attack may have been unwarranted in whole, preventing the enemy from escaping makes absolute sense.

From Ubisoft concerning the announcement of the crack:

So, apparently, this inability to play is the feature that those who pirate the game are missing out on...

No, but the revenue paid to the content providers based on advertising might diminish, thus impacting the quality of programming. If you thought the reduction of quality due to network greed was bad, just wait until they had to deal with genuine financial issues as well.

Currently, advertising rates are calculated based on the expectation that a certain percentage of viewers will make a snack or hit the head during the commercial break. They perform studies to fine tune the percentage rates used for such calculations and it varies based on time slot and programing type. Chances are, if they could suddenly get an accurate count of actual commercials viewed, the revenue wouldn't change too much.

This may be an option for larger sites, but for smaller sites the overhead would likely eat up any revenue that the ads themselves would provide. And I'm not just talking about bandwidth, but interfacing with the clients and vetting their ads to make sure that they meet your standards. The latter part is still required even if you use ads provided by some third party ad agency (you would likely just have some automated script downloading their ads to your server nightly). And even then, the unscrupulous advertiser will simply set up the ad to behave well when you view it, but behave obnoxiously when viewed by others, preventing you from properly vetting it. You can block all ads from that agency or company, but most of these are probably random fly by night organizations and a new one will just crop up, owned and operated by the same people, to continue their atrocious practices.

The point is, hosting the ads on your site only solves the problem of slow ad servers holding up the page loading. It provides additional overhead that is costly to the larger sites and unmanageable to the smaller ones without significantly improving ad quality. Disallowing Flash and JavaScript ads may work, and I can support such an initiative, but ads that are easy to ignore don't generate revenue, and thus become less attractive to advertisers, eventually cutting off the revenue streams of your favorite sites.

And sometimes when you run computer software you just have to accept that it will crash. So you should probably just log off the Internet and never come back. In other words, what I think he was trying to convey is that such ads occasionally slip through - not that they are intentionally accepted by Ars. Ars could drop the offending ad provider, but the reality is that it probably isn't their fault either. They deal with thousands of ads per day and so can't have a person inspect each and every one that they accept for distribution. They rely on their clients to follow their guidelines, which prohibit creating certain types of ads. They probably also have technical measures that help to reduce the odds of accepting such ads. But unscrupulous clients will occasionally break those rules. The (reputable) ad company usually pulls them from rotation as soon a they are reported, but the fact is that you will still, on rare occasion, see one slip through, just like your spam filter isn't perfect (unless you, as you suggest above, just block ALL email).

If you can't accept anything less than perfection, then you have bigger issues than web advertising. By far.

Just what every advertiser loves to hear!

This is why they continue to get more intrusive. Also, Slashdot gets more money when you click on the ads (I suspect, anyway). The best thing to do would be to occasionally click on an ad link so that the click through rate remains high so the advertisers don't decide that unobtrusive ads aren't effective enough. Of course, at some point they will begin tracking conversion (if they aren't already) - the percentage of clicks that result in revenue - and then it becomes a little trickier as you would then have to start giving the advertisers due consideration, possibly resulting in a purchase.

However, since most people aren't necessarily impulse buyers (beyond small items which require a level of instant gratification that web purchases don't typically satisfy), this would be a poor idea on the advertisers part, since most of the value of advertising is to plant the brand in the consumers mind, possibly resulting an revenue months later when the customer eventually finds himself in the market for what you are selling. I think advertisers realize this, and so I don't forsee conversion tracking being a major issue.

You mean like cable television where I pay $40/month for the two channels I watch simply because it is part of a package with 75 other channels I could care less about?

Great plan! Where do I sign up?

Yes, I see your idea where you get to choose who you like and don't like (hello Twitter generation!), but again, this is the reason why I pay for 3 channels of ESPN and the Golf Channel - lots of people like sports, and I couldn't care less about them. This is why TV is chock full of reality TV. The point is, most people don't mind the ads much (which is why this model continues to work - so far), and so if you go by popular vote, things are much moe likely to stay the same. Since you are viewing Slashdot, it is a safe bet that you are largely in the minority of Internet users. Most people on the Internet are the tweens using MySpace and Twitter or the Average Joes managing their fantasy football league. You want them choosing what you pay for in your network?

The current model isn't perfect, but at least I only pay for what I actually enjoy, rather than paying twice as much (or more) in order to support everybody else's crap. You might say that because my interests are niche, that the things I like receive insufficient funding under this model, but I can prove otherwise (by the fact that they exist and continue to flourish). In your model, I would be forced to join (and thus pay for) potentially dozens of networks that each contain only one or two sites that I like. Sure, the Slashdot bundle would probably be worthwhile, but I also visit a wide variety of web comics and news sites that are distinct enough that they would be highly unlikely to be profitable in the same network unless I can customize my own network, a la the micro-payment plan discussed earlier.

Also, how would your plan (or the one I just linked) work when I go looking for information using Google - I will likely hit dozens of sites that aren't in any of my networks, are hidden behind paywalls thanks to the abolition of ad revenue, and that I don't want to sign up for (at $10/month because I have to buy a whole package) because I will probably never visit them again (and they might not even have the info I was looking for anyway)?

Your logic in your sig is highly flawed, which might explain the view espoused in your comment.

1. 1^2=1; good so far

2. (-1)^2=1; yes, yes

3. 1^2=(-1)^2; I'm with you so far

4. 1=-1; wait, what? You just said that (-1)^2=1, now you are saying it equals -1? Shouldn't the previous statement evaluate to 1=1?

5. 1=0; Um, that's not how this works (though it might explain the mistake in step 4), even if we took that last statement at face value - you are supposed to add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc each side the same (simply removing the exponent, as you did in step 4, is not a valid operation), so you would either add 1 to each side, or subtract one from each side (or multiply/divide both sides by 1 or -1), not add one side to the other. So you would end up with either 2=0 or 0=-2

I suspect you know this, which is probably why you felt this was humorous enough to include as your sig, but in a cutthroat community like Slashdot, having a logic error in your sig does not foster confidence in your comments. Especially when your comment is a perfect example of such logical fallacy.

YOU chose to view their free content, so the ad is not unsolicited - just like radio and TV and newspaper and magazine ads. THAT is the difference between web advertising and fax/cold calls. Since your basis has just been shown to be invalid, the rest of your argument crumbles.

It is here on Slashdot - we change the world without ever leaving our moms' basements!

Oh no! It's almost as if advertisers are completely unaware of statistics and thus fail to adjust the price paid for viewed ads to compensate for the expected skew. Oh, wait. Crisis averted; they do.

I don't know what advertisers (or financiers) call it, but scientists call it the "margin of error", and I'm pretty sure that it is taken into account that some ads will be served that aren't viewed. Just like your (the hypothetical you, if you were a webmaster) web site's page hit counter would count me as two unique viewers if I viewed your site both from home and from work, but that the small percentage of users that viewed your website from multiple locations, and the corresponding few that share a computer or browse from behind the same proxy or NAT server, cause an acceptably small impact on the accuracy of your data.

I think that the point Ars is trying to make is that while yes, the ad blockers were created to block the truly hideous ads, they over-zealously also block the more acceptable ads, thus punishing the sites that refuse to run the obnoxious ads, even though they aren't contributing to the problem. His argument that sites are lured into running those such bad ads is a little more flimsy, however, as it seems to me that such a decision would only accelerate an already existing death spiral as more customers are either turned away or convinced to use ad blockers. I guess if the ad hosting companies that serve those ads pay more per click or view or something, then this might make some sense, but I don't have any experience with ad revenue structuring, so I don't know how much more financially tempting it is to run one ad over another.

Probably because you block ads, therefore preventing the ad hosting companies from developing a history of your browsing habits with which to create better targeted content. So when you do finally unblock ads you have to suffer whatever random ads their confused algorithm throws your way. It's a vicious cycle, I know, but if you are genuinely open to targeted advertising then you have to sacrifice a little of your privacy. If you want to continue to enjoy free content on the Internet, you (maybe not you personally, but a significant percentage of the population) have to accept some level of advertising. I hate the obnoxious ads just as much as the next person, but the problem also is that ads that stay conveniently and quietly out of the way are also easy to ignore, and thus ineffective. Obnoxious ads annoy users and so perform the opposite of their intended function, so there is a very fine balancing act where everybody (well, most everybody) has to make some sacrifice for the system to work.

Slow ad servers, however, are unforgivable. Or, more accurately, poorly designed websites that require ad content to be loaded before the page can be properly rendered that are then tied to slow ad servers, are unforgivable. If I could view the page content while the ads are being downloaded, then I could obviously care less if they ever finish loading. Waiting for 30 seconds to see the content I originally came to see while watching a commercial (like on TV) is one thing, waiting 30 seconds TO EVEN watch a commercial AND the content I originally came to see (as with a slow ad server) is quite another.

I do appreciate your argument that an algorithm, knowing nothing else about you, and thus just beginning to build its database on you, should take note that you are browsing a tech site and provide tech targeted ads like video games and computer hardware. But then again, personal grooming products and magazines that frequently feature scantily clad females is not all that unexpected of an (stereotypical) interest for that demographic.