>>>If I just go to cnn.com - all these things together block over 80 things. I never see any ads anywhere. It's a shame that we have to go to so much trouble to avoid these things - but once you have it setup right it makes surfing the net a lot better experience.
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>>It's in the nature of advertising to destroy any medium it sets its foot on. Yesterday we just realized we don't have phone numbers to our daughters in the US, and guess what: they both cancelled their land phones. Reason: spam, i.e. telemarketers.
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>..and smart phones are even worse. I spent a LOT of time getting my Android phone ad-free. Have to root the phone, do all kinds of tweaks and hacks..then hack almost every single app you install to get rid of all the damn ads. ..Then of course every time one of the apps releases an update you have to go hack it all up again to get rid of the ads. I probably spend an hour a week messing with my phone to ensure I get no ads. It's a real hassle - but I'd rather spend the 1 hour a week doing that then see ads.

That's the reason I went for a Nokia E5 four years ago, when I finally bought a phone with a keyboard and a screen: it was about the time that Microsoft was installing its own, ahem, commissar to Nokia, and I expected it to have a Windows on every phone soon. So given the choice of an OS owned (pwned would be the correct spelling) by M$ or Google, I took this one because it has Symbian on it. If it ever breaks (and they say the first thing that dies on a Nokia is the owner), I'm not buying anything unless I can get a linux on it.