What if when your car stops at a red light, your license plate displays ad banners? What could possibly go wrong?

Quoth the person(?) who wrote this bill:

"We're just trying to find creative ways of generating additional revenues," he said. "It's an exciting marriage of technology with need, and an opportunity to keep California in the forefront."

The forefront of annoying the hell out of people. Certainly what I need is more distractions on the road. I mean, what if there's a new brand of toothpaste and I didn't find out yet? Someone somewhere needs to earn a dime for telling me about it by any means necessary.

I'm just waiting for the first company to propose paying new parents a few hundred dollars to tattoo ads on their babies.

As further evidence that there are no depths to which companies won't stoop when it comes to advertising, HP has come up with a great idea: Get people to hook their printers up to the internet and then spew advertisements out of their printers.

Well, it's a win-win situation for the companies doing the advertising: Not only will people see your ads, they'll pay for the ink and paper to print them. Maybe not such a great situation for the end-user though.

And then there are the privacy implications of targeting ads based on geolocating the IP address of the printer. Which I find a bit disturbing, but I guess advertisers already do that with online ads. But wait, there's more:

Ads can also be targeted based on a user's behavior as well as the content, said Vyomesh Joshi, head of the HP's Imaging and Printing Group.

Looking at what I'm printing so you can try to sell me things? Just a bit creepy.

Most troubling to me is the intrusiveness of the whole thing. They're taking control of a physical object in my house and using it against me. May as well kidnap my cat and train him to spell out "BUY PEPSI" in his cat litter.

Quote some slimeball at HP:

"What we discovered is that people were not bothered by it [an advertisement]," Nigro said. "Part of it I think our belief is you're used to it. You're used to seeing things with ads."

Translation: "We know this is a really horrible idea, but if people are complacent enough to sit there and take it without complaint, what's stopping us?"

He's right though, people are used to it.

I guess TV, radio, internet, phones, product placement in movies and games, print media, billboards and the postal service just aren't enough. Clearly what the world really needs is another ad-delivery mechanism.

There's an interesting article on Ars Technica about how blocking ads is somehow unethical, and "devastating to the sites you love". The idea that I have a moral obligation to stare at an advertisment, the thought I have an ethical obligation to voluntarily annoy myself for the sake of a company's profits... it would be hilarious if it wasn't so repugnant.

Let's talk about ethics. How about some ethics for businesses?

1. Stop making the world a garish and hideous place to live by flooding it with ads.
2. Stop trying to grab my attention, evoke emotional responses in me, manipulate my mind, and trick me into spending money on crap I don't need. This is what advertisement is. Stop disrespecting me and insulting my intelligence. Stop viewing me as an anonymous, money-spending piece of cattle.
3. Stop trying to track my every move online. How many people understand tracking cookies? How many companies make it clear that every click is being recorded and data-mined? How is this ethical?

Here's the state of the world today: I can't drive down the street without seeing billboards everywhere. The radio is literally 25 to 50% ads, which is why I don't listen to the radio. Television is what, 20 minutes of commercials per hour? Which is why I haven't had television in 6 years. Newspapers and magazines are saturated with ads, and of course I don't read them either. Even then, ads are nearly unavoidable.

(By contrast, books (for example) are awesome. I pay for a book, and then I read the book start-to-finish with no ads, no distractions. A few pages at the back maybe, but I can ignore those. Books are nice.)

The internet is also a wonderful thing. FIRST a person or company puts a lot of information somewhere that everyone can read it effortlessly for free, and THEN they sometimes expect me to look at their ads. And I can simply choose not to.

If you want to force me to look at your ads, make me sign a contract or consent to an agreement before you display your site to me. Otherwise I owe you nothing. If your business is about to go bankrupt, and your business is so important to me that I want it to stick around, I'll give you money. Real money. I've done it before. But I will never give you my attention for free. No business has a right to that.

Businesses are not your friends. Businesses are not ethical entities. Businesses do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Businesses exist to milk you of as much of your money as possible. The only sane reaction for the average person is a similar one: I want to deprive businesses of my money. I want to get as much from them as I can, while giving up as little as possible.

If I politely suggested that it's "unfair" for a business to have such a huge profit margin, and "if they cared about their customers, they would lower all their prices", I'd be laughed at. Why would a company do anything less than the absolute most they can do to bleed money out of me, after all? I laugh at any business (e.g. Ars Technica) which says the same thing to me. I will bleed you of product, as far as it's legal to do so. It so happens that advertisements are devastating to my well-being. Up to this point I have rarely read Ars Technica, and from now on I'll make it a point not to. If I do read it, I will block ads with the greatest feeling of malice I can manage.

I run my own website(s) at a loss specifically because I'd rather pay out of my own pocket than force people to look at ads. Admittedly my sites are so small that it's not much money. But there you have it. If I had to generate revenue to keep my sites going, I would find a way other than advertising to do it. Or I'd shut them down.

I love my ad-blocker. The only thing better would be an internet where I didn't need to use it.

Email is such a fragile thing. It's nerve-wracking setting up an email server properly. If you set it up wrong, emails disappear into a black hole and it's sometimes not readily obvious that there's even a problem, especially if the emails don't even bounce. Same goes with setting up a procmail filter, for example.

One of my old CS professors said there are three kinds of programming bugs:

1. Bugs that break things in obvious and catastrophic ways, causing a complete crash of the program.
2. Bugs that break things without causing a full crash; the program keeps running. But you know about it.
3. Bugs that break things without causing a full crash; the program keeps running. And you don't know about it.

In that order, they increase from bad to worse. By far the worst is when things look like they work, but they don't. You can't even begin to fix a problem until you know a problem exists. (Programs' sweet debug-info-filled death-cries are programmers' best friends.)

Emails vanishing without being delivered or bounced is the third kind of bug, i.e. really really bad. My host's email system is very hard to work with and leads to many of this kind of bug; mysterious vanishing emails. All I want is all emails to both of my parked domain names to go to a single address at a single one of my domains. I'm pretty sure I got it right this time, but I always think that and then two weeks later someone calls me and says "Hey, how come you never responded to my email?" and it turns out the server ate it for dinner. But I will admit, it's very likely my troubles are PEBKAC-related.

If I get this set up, I'm going to stop using Gmail once and for all. I'm tired of 1) being advertised at while I read emails, 2) the Gmail servers being either down, non-responsive, or dead-set on not giving me my emails, 3) having stupid extra options to wade through like Google Talk and Google Calendars and "Invite your friends to use Gmail! We need more ad-reading monkeys!". And consarnit, I miss real folders. Labels don't do it for me.

Email providers are really in a good position. Once you start using an email address, it's REALLY hard to stop using it. So once people are hooked into using your service, you have them in your claws and you can start milking them for all they're worth. Imagine how many people, organizations, mailing lists etc. out there have your current email address and how long it would take to get them all to switch over. The only good thing is if you can forward from your old address to your new, and slowly do the transition that way.

Do you know what's worse than seeing advertisements everywhere you look?

Nothing.

I remember before the intarwebs had any ads. I shall refer to this timeperiod as The Day. Back in The Day, web sites sucked, but they sucked without ads. Many sites were terrible Geocities-hosted animated-gif-chucking embedded-midi-blaring atrocities, but most of them didn't have ads. Many companies didn't even have websites. I recall hearing about pepsi.com one day, and thought "Even Pepsi has a website now! Heh, what'll they think of next. How neat." Oh how foolish I was! Oh the ignorance of youth.

One day the serpent approached the webmaster and said "Behold the forbidden Tree of Punch-The-Monkey. Eat of its fruit and you shall be like unto God!" And so man Fell. You could tell some companies didn't really know what they were doing. First they started putting mandatory FRAME-based ad-things on the top of all their pages that basically broke things horribly. Then sites like Geocities and ilk experimented with floating Javascriptish things the moved around as you scrolled your web page. I think a lot of ads at this time were still prety obvious. "BUY A DIGITAL CAMERA!" sorts of things. Sometimes they put a scantily-clad woman on it, but hey, that's a pretty obivous step. But you still had the weird and (I must admit) clever ones. At this time, stupid things like "Punch the monkey and win a prize" still WORKED. No one had seen them before. An ad banner with Windows98-ish decor that stated "Warning! Click OK" probably fooled 95% of everyone who saw it. There was great innovation here. Alas that such genius was put to evil uses.

What followed can only be called The Dark Ages. Everyone realized that ads make money. Lots of money, apparently, because there sure were lots of ads. And there were at that time no tools to block ads or popups. It was carnage on a massive scale. How fondly I remember popups which spawned more popups as you closed them, causing an endless cycle of popups. If your reflexes were fast enough, you could close one popup, and quickly click to close the next popup before it loaded entirely, thus breaking the cycle. Windows' semi-random window placement policy ensured that this game never got old. How clearly I remember having the proverbial crap scared out of me when I heard my first talking Flash ad. My first thought: "Hey, look, someone made an ad with embedded voice!" My second thought: "...someone made an ad with embedded voice." My third thought is not repeatable in polite company.

I believe we are now in a Post-Apocalypse era. The weak are ravaged by wandering mobs of ad-wielding psycopaths. The strong have a chance of survival, using technical savvy and know-how, but it is a never-ending battle. We defeat pop-ups, they create pop-UNDERS. We block ad GIFs, they create Flash. We block those, they create full-page click-throughs and floating flying Javascript ads that pretend to be popups. We manage to ignore all those, and so they highlight words in the content itself in bright green, making every individual word of human speech into an ad unto itself. And then we have those who do battle ninja-like via concealment and ambush, such as Google, who are only successful because they make their ads look as little like ads as possible.

What does the future hold? I forsee things getting much worse before they get better (if they ever get better). Computers will come with dedicated APU chips. (Ad processing units.) If you think about it, giving people a CHOICE is the weakness of ads. Perhaps when you open a webpage, a robotic arm will shoot out of your computer and grab you by your genitals and refuse to let go until you buy a fake Rolex filled with Viagra from a man claiming to be a dead South African prince's mortage broker. Perhaps we will be implanted with microchips which feed relevant ad data directly into our central nervous system at all time, so we see them even when we close our eyes. And may God have mercy on our souls.