[Vogue State]

Let me go out on a limb here. What's the beef with ads, anyway?

Sure, most of them are ugly. Annoying. Insulting to your intelligence. But remember: ads for for stupid, easily influenced (read: bought) people. If you find yourself above this level -- ignore them. On the other hand, they make money. Someone paid money to show you a picture of their logo. You don't have to look at it, but we all enjoy the benefits the advertising industry provides.

We shouldn't discourage all advertising. If there were no advertising, would there be as many great free web pages as there are? Would there be a google? Popup ads are the best thing since sliced bread. Compare them to banner ads, which take up space and slow down the loading/rendering in the main page -- popups have their own window, and you can simply block the JavaScript window.open() function in Mozilla to prevent them from being shown at all (as opposed to keeping a complicated list of filters and running a proxy to avoid banner ads). It doesn't get better, folks.

Do you really miss the gray steel sides of a bus that much? Does the part of the wheel obscured by the Toyota ad need to be out in the open that much? Think about it -- some guy got paid to wire it with those LEDs, write that software ... that's a lot better than being paid to break your back in a mine for 12 hours, say. Yet we all (and I've been guilty myself quite often) complain about this relatively benign and actually benefitial ad industry. Y'know, how about the oil barons who stifle organic fuel research, keeping us reliant on lunatics in the Middle East for energy when we could be running cars on CORN or HEMP and have them ten times as efficient while being one-tenth as harmful to the environment?

That's worth fighting against ... ad people just generate insane amounts of revenue finding new ways to show pictures and the like. So why don't you learn to draw, and get 'em to pay you too?