OSNews

Yep, exactly. That, plus the $$$ that goes directly to the company whose product is being advertised, from the countless hundreds of megabytes (or even gigabytes) that are sent out in the form of millions of individual 100KB streams of data.

And then what do the companies do after they've suckered their audience into buying their products? Well, they pocket the change and raise the prices of their products, of course! You know, pass that extra wasted money they blew on advertising their products right back onto their customers to make us pay for their brainwashing of the masses.

I really hope no one thinks that advertising is free and that the sale surges that it causes will actually lower the price of a company's products... after all, the products by the name-brand mega corporations with mega marketing budgets tend to sell their prices at much higher prices than the rest of their competition. It's plain as day, right now, at any supermarket you walk into.

Edited 2012-11-10 08:04 UTC

According to the lawyer I just asked about this, I would be entitled to a portion of the revenue Microsoft gets from this since my machine, which is my own private property is being used by Microsoft to generate profit I never see.

Dude do you browser the web with lynx or something?

Because most websites have at least 20-30 background images.

Lynx? No. elinks? Sometimes. This post is from elinks, just to see how funcitonal osnews is these days from a text based browser. Its about as useful as viewing it from android.

Nah. But I would honestly prefer to use Lynx in short bursts over any typical web browser's default configuration with no extensions (I prefer Links, though...). The first ad usually sets me off, but to add insult to injury I usually see more than one on a web page at a given time; it irritates me like the old days of using Windows where sending a file to the recycle bin would ask for confirmation.

Just like changing that recycle bin setting first thing after a clean Windows install, adding my typical extensions and tweaking other privacy settings must be done before I will visit a second web site. For that reason, my browser choice is in fact limited by the ability to block advertising, tracking, scripting, third-party cookies, and all that stuff... but I don't necessarily need Lynx to do that.