Give the Gift of Slashdot
It's time to blatantly plug a recent addition to Slashdot's Subscription System: just in time for the holidays, you can now give a subscription to any other user. You have the choice to give your gift anonymously, or take credit for your fabulous selfless generosity. If that isn't enough, we still have assorted Slashdot Merchandise available at ThinkGeek... the more T-Shirts you buy, the less often you need to do laundry.
Members see ads too. We just get to suppress 1000 of them for $5. Though some pages always have ads.
A nice benefit of membership is being able to see new articles an hour or so before non-members, allowing you to see sites before they get slashdotted and prepare a well thought out response before the comments page fills with didn't rtfa nonsense.