Exactly! And it's not even difficult to make the chain of links explicit or to give people the environment they want. There's software for the first one, which should just be standard and automatic everywhere. And there's also a solution for the second issue. Slashdot has been using it for years. Give people the option to see different levels of grossness. If I want my world squeaky clean, I have my settings at "5." Or, at the other end, at "0." No censorship involved, and yet people can control at least that part of their own world.

Of course, that would require the big 4 browsers and the big search engines to cooperate in open source, transparent rating/moderation schemes, and everyone who puts anything on the web to be at least vaguely honest in their initial self-rating for where they fit in the scheme of things. And, yeah, I know, what are the chances of that?

Exactly. (But kindly don't correct me if I have my facts wrong.)

(P.S. I know some are free. I'm talking about the ones that aren't.)

"I used to work for a large magazine and their printing and postage costs are insane."

Okay. OT, I know, but I've figured this was the case. So why aren't their non-print subscription costs insanely less? I don't get it. And I don't see something else making up the difference. Server costs? Not bloody likely. Super-highly paid web designers? Yeah, right.

Oh, and get the money to pay the creators from a small fee, 0.1%?, on paper, drives, sdcards, anything used to store and use the works in question.

Reduce the friction. Get rid of it entirely. Then count the usage levels of any given work. (Yeah, yeah, I know That's not simple, but it would be a whole lot more straightforward than the current mess.) Then pay the artists / authors / coders / whatever based on how much their work is used or enjoyed.

Then the reduced friction would be in everyone's interest, both the users' and the creators'.

Of course, the publishers would still go fairly extinct. Is that a problem?

I mean how refreshing would it have been for them to say "We make money from ads and searches and Mozilla brings us more revenue, what's to understand?' and left it at that?

Seconded, thirded, fourthed. Bloody Mobius-stripped! If MSFT-Bing wasn't around to snap at GOOG's heels, the world's internet advertising agency would love to make Firefox die. If most traffic went through Chrome, they could finally get serious with tracking. And when the /. crowd cried foul it wouldn't matter. There'd be nowhere else to go.

You know, in the high and far off times, toasters used to be two panels of heating elements and two covers with hinges at the bottom. You kept it on the table. Bread went in, toasted on one side while you ate other things or sipped coffee. You were right there, so very easy to keep an eye on it. Actually, a nose. You could smell the nice toasty aroma when it was time to flip the bread and start the other side. Never any problems. Even better than a grill (unless you're talking about one of those electric, tabletop things). My grandmother had one those toasters, and if I saw one at a garage sale, I'd probably pay whatever they wanted for it.

Selecting options on install, with a default to block everything, would be the way I'd want them to go too. My comment a bit earlier was just to say that you couldn't really call it loss of control when you have the option to customize a complete block. More inconvenient, but not less control.

I guess part of it is that I feel such a deep debt to Adblock for making the web usable this last decade that I'm willing to cut them a lot of slack.

Back in Stone Age, we had one, two, many! words. Plenty for Ogg. Who need more?

Let me tell you the story of me and my $35 toaster. You know the old joke about "they can land someone on the Moon, but they can't make a toaster that doesn't burn the bread"? It's totally true. After many years, I shouted, "Enough!"

I researched toasters. (Yeah, I know. I must not have enough to do.) After a couple of hours crawling all over everywhere, reading negative reviews first, evaluating positive ones for whether there was anything interesting or useful said, etc., etc., etc., I settled on one. Kind of expensive, but you have to remember I was really sick of burned toast.

And, damn if the thing doesn't work! So, if you're crazy enough, you can actually make the system function (sometimes). I agree that most people aren't going to or don't do any of that. But if I'd driven to the mall and picked from the available, normal, bread-burning toasters, that would have taken a couple of hours, too. And cost gas money.

Come on, now. You merely have to go into options and select total block. That strikes me as "having control." It's just a teensy bit less convenient. So long as they don't run away with it, and wind up with an add-on that requires an hour of customizing, I kinda want to say, "Get over it."

Exactly. And a commenter who shows so little understanding of what condescension is doesn't inspire me to believe that they'd have a clue about which UIs condescend.

Just for the record, I'm a user who completely agrees with the post. Make it easy for me to customize the UI to suit my workflow = Not Condescending. Shove big shiny buttons at me that mean my work takes more clicks to accomplish = Condescending. (Why, yes, I do hate Unity. Why do you ask?)

Seriously. The OP may want to climb into comments and explain his point. What takes more time to do? What takes less (if anything)? How would it be if you didn't have the extra keyboard? That seems to me to make it a de facto laptop, so you're not really using a "tablet as your primary computer." Or do you not use the keyboard much? Is it more or less convenient to have a separate keyboard? Etc., etc., etc.