>>>On the odd chance that one in ten thousand ads worked on me, I should watch them all?
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>>You shouldn't watch *any* commercials. DVR, man! TV is not meant to be watched in real time!
>
>I'm not watching them. And I don't care for the latest and greatest - since the space is so fragmented, there's probably no two people by the water-cooler at the same time who were watching the same thing last night, and I'm a telecommuter anyway. So I don't have even that bit of peer pressure to be in sync with anything. I don't mind watching them a year or two later. Presently, Stage6 suffices ('s a website where you can watch pretty much anything that's old enough that the copyright owner says is OK to watch online for free). What's more, they don't bother to trick my AdBlock, so it's still ad-free (for me) - or maybe it is ad free, I wouldn't know :).
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>I don't mind ads if they're on the side, unobtrusive. Google tamed the web ads. Street ads - OK, as long as they don't hide the landscape (or specially OK if they hide some ugly parts of it ;). Newspaper ads - OK, if they don't force me to turn too many pages to find the rest of the article I was reading. Ads in the sequential media - where I can't look away, can't skip, and actually have to act to make them go away (anything that shouts, flashes, sings, dances, speaks in a falsetto or barreltone, says any of "hey", "check this out", asks a personal question like "have you ever" or "did you" and well pretty much does anything :), definitely no. Posts in spaces where one is forced to spend more time (toilets, transportation, waiting rooms), bad. Spam (email, telemarketing, SMS from your wireless provider, snail mail) - bad. Pretty much any push technology is bad.
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>Along these lines, what use is the capital punishment if it doesn't punish capital?
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>I mean, for capital offenses like spamming and telemarketing.

I have to factor in that your childhood was spent in the socialist cocoon so you didn't develop the immunity to advertising that many of us did <bg>

But there is kind of a problem for you with TV - you don't want ads but you don't want to pay for it. Do you expect the Big Government TV Fairy to provide free, live, spontaneous content? Maybe make TV producers, actors, writers, directors civil servants? (hey, that may be a plank in the Democratic platform so you may have hope <g> )

TANSTAAFL <s>