Oh, then you absolutely should give AdBlock (the Mozilla extension) a try. It doesn't block anything by default; it merely allows you to do so yourself by specifying patterns against which objects (images, scripts, iframes etc.) are matched to determine whether they should be blocked or not.
It's quite handy - you can either block lots of advertising in one sweep by using patterns such as "*/ads/*", or you can be very specific by only blocking - say - "http://www.example.com/ads/*". The granularity really is up to you.
I've found it quite invaluable myself; I let Google's page ads through, for example, as they're unobtrusive and often interesting, but block flashy, annoying, or otherwise in-your-face advertising.
Like many people, you miss the point. The court did not rule that - in your analogy - it was legal for the gunman to demand you shop at Wal-Mart; rather, they said that if you *choose* to invite someone to your house who will then demand you shop at Wal-Mart, then Wal-Mart's *competitors* don't have a case, because it's your house and who you do or do not invite and what demands they make is none of their business.
Of course, it would've been nice to have a decision that installing spy-/adware without the user's knowledge or (informed) consent is illegal, but that wasn't what was being argued, and (I think) the court can't really go out and make a decision on something that isn't part of the case.
FWIW, it's still a victory, anyway - the court's ruling pretty much says that things like AdBlock or Greasemonkey etc. are legal to use.
Except for the fact that this is not what was ruled on. The court did not go into how this particular piece of adware was installed, whether the user knew about it, consented to it or anything; rather, it merely said that *assuming* that the user did, the competitor did not have a case, as, basically, the user is allowed to do what they want on their computer, *including* installing a program that displays competitors' ads when you shop for something online.
Staying in the analogy, the robot plastering those ads on the inside of your car would exist, but the court merely ruled that when you go to McDonald's and willingly and knowingly have a robot in your car that then displays Burger King ads to you, that *McDonald's* does not have a case.
Here's something that may help with accidental clicks: don't use mouse clicks to shift the focus back to your browser window, use a key combination like Alt-Tab (on windows - on Unix, consult your window manager's man page, or use a window manager that never shifts focus automatically).
Outside of that, be sure to use AdBlock, disable pop-ups and all that - I can't even remember the last time I saw a pop-up on my own computer.:)
Mmm. I admittedly don't know the details of the KHTML case, but if Apple was in compliance with the license, then it shouldn't really matter to them what people on - say - Slashdot say.
As for expecting more than to-the-letter compliance with the license... that's a difficult question. Personally, I'd say that while things like working with the community and giving back after you took in a manageable form instead of just giving back in the technical sense aren't required by the license, it's not entirely unreasonable to expect them, and I wouldn't automatically label someone who asks for that an idiot zealot, either (of course, someone who claims that Apple strictly *has* to do so is indeed an idiot).
But that's really another thing entirely - it's not about the technical side of the GPL, but rather about the social side, and, for that matter, about the social side of free software in general, no matter whether it's GPL-licensed, BSD-licensed or something else entirely. Clearly there are no strict requirements here, so a company is within their rights to not work with the larger development community, but it shouldn't expect to be liked if it doesn't, and I can understand developers who aren't happy with things like this [1], even though there is no actual license violation as far as the legal side of things is concerned.
1. Note that I'm not talking about the Apple/KHTML case in particular - I don't want to comment on that, since I don't have enough background information on what really went on to form an opinion.
Groklaw has some more on that story, as well as occasional updates.
That being said, the fact that noone so far has actually challenged the GPL in court does not mean that the GPL is weak; quite the opposite. It means that nobody so far has seen even so much as a remote chance to actually succeed in challenging it.
You've also got to ask yourself why and for who free software is developed, though. Contrary to what some (many?) people, seemingly including ESR, believe, it's not primarily done so that companies can use it for free; it's because the developers care about software that is free in the "freedom" sense as well. Companies, like everyone else, are allowed to use the code, but they do have to meet requirements - free (GPL'ed) software is NOT the same as giving software away for free without any strings attached.
The KHTML case may be a good example. Apple does have the right to use KHTML and incorporate it into their own products, but they do have to play by the rules and obey the license, and the community or the developers are not being unreasonable when they ask for that to happen. Free software may not cost money, but that does not mean that you can just take it and use it in any way you see fit - it still belongs to the developers, just like, say, Windows belongs to Microsoft.
If somebody used Windows in a way that is not in compliance with the license - for example, by making free copies and handing them out to people -, and if Microsoft demanded that the licensing terms be obeyed, then nobody would think this unreasonable. It is their software, after all - you can use it under their license, but you don't have a fundamental RIGHT to using it (in any way at all).
The same goes for free software, but people seem to have difficulties understanding that.
Unless the police are asking for a warrant when there really and obviously is no case at all, a judge will pretty much always grant whatever they ask for. The reason for that is simple - judges fear that they might deny a warrant for a case that turns out to be real in the end after all, which likely would have a negative influence on their career (after the local media being all over it); issuing warrants in cases where they wouldn't have been appropriate does not carry a similar risk.
As such, most (if not all) judges will simply err on the safe side (from their perspective) and just trust that the police will not abuse their power too blatantly.
Since you're asking for it... here's the official English language handbook.:) It's not perfect in the sense that not everything's in there, but it should be all you need 99.9% of the time.:)
Huh? Germany still has lots of nuclear plants. There is *talk* about shutting them down within the next *30 years* or so; saying that they already have been "outlawed and disbanded" is so blatantly false that it's quite hard to even attempt to attribute your statement to naivity and stupidity instead of labelling you as a troll.
Actually, Germany *does* crack down on the use of Nazi symbols etc. only if they really appear in a Nazi context. You don't otherwise have to censor swastikas, for example; a book on symbols used in hinduism could include one without any problems, as could a documentary on the third reich, etc.
Of course, the police sometimes attempt to crack down on other uses; for example, when the well-known left-wing/anarchist artist Gerhard Seyfried used one in one of his drawings, he got the equivalent of a cease-and-desist letter, from what I recall. However, he could've chosen to fight that, and I'm pretty sure he would've won the case, too (of course, IANAL) - and unlike in the USA, you don't have to spend ridiculous amounts of money in order to go to court in Germany.
The other thing that you can't distribute legally in Germany is Hitler's "mein Kampf", but that's due to the fact that the state of Bavaria holds the copyright to it these days and disallows any reproduction.
That being said, the real problem with censorship and similar things is not different values, it's choice - or, rather, the lack of choice in certain countries. If I live in the USA, I can listen to Rush Limbaugh and watch FOX news all day if I want to; but the point is that (so far) nobody's forcing me to, so if I'd rather read Michael Moore's latest book, that's OK, too. Nobody says that people in Iran shouldn't be allowed to be hardline-theocratists; the point is that it should be possible to hold other opinions as well without fear of repercussions.
While I certainly agree that separation of church and state is pretty much necessary in order to have a functioning democracy, but here's something interesting I learned recently: there are countries (like Iceland and Sweden, for example) where there exists a state church but which still are functioning democracies (in fact, I'd even go so far as to say that they function better than other democracies in which there is a separation of church and state).
Of course, I don't believe that this is because they don't have this separation (if anything, it's despite the fact), but it does raise an interesting point: it obviously is possible to have a democracy even when a separation of church and state does not exist.
Which in turn makes you wonder what really lies at the heart of the problems we're seeing in countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and so on. I haven't found an answer to that yet - not in the slightest. But it's certainly interesting as food for thought.
There really should be an amendment like that, I think. Maybe it's just me, but I think the free exchange of information [1] is more important for a the advancement of a free state, democracy and all that than guns are.
1. Actual information, that is, not the latest Bitchney Spears crap...
But the real difference seems to be that in this case, the product itself becomes illegal just because of the advertising campaign. If a gun manufacturer decided to market their guns to gangs, then would guns (or guns from that manufacturer, at least) per se become illegal?
I think not. Rather, the manufacturer would get a metaphorical slap on the wrist; they'd probably have to pay a hefty fine, and maybe some of the people behind the campaign would actually go to jail. But the manufacturer would be allowed to continue to produce and sell guns - for legal use.
And *that* certainly does seem to be a new precedent (IANAL, of course).
There is no theoretical upper limit on text compression as far as I know (and I'd be rather surprised if there was [1]), but there *is* a (very basic) theorem from Kolmogorov complexity that says that there's always data that can't be compressed for any compression algorithm you devise (for a proof, simply consider the number of strings of length =n for a given n).
1. Well, I'd be surprised as long as you don't make any assumptions about the statistical distribution of bits in the text you want to compress. In other words, if you define certain properties and conjecture that all texts satisfies these properties, you may well be able to prove certain things (I'm not sure about this), but I don't think it'd really be very practical, as I'd say it's relatively likely that among those 347 PB there'll be data which does not match these properties.
I don't know.. I think a better analogy would have Wikipedia as the school's football team, and Google and Yahoo competing to become quarterback, knowing that they'll both get respect from the larger community if they do. The only difference is that in this case, there is room for more than one quarterback.
Of course, one might still argue that the topic is too limited in scope to deserve a Wikipedia article of its own - it's a specific trolling phenomenon on a specific site only, after all. I'm generally very much for inclusiveness, but with this article, I always have the feeling that it blows the whole thing out of proportion and gives unfamiliar readers the feeling that they're really more important/widely-known/relevant than they really are.
I do agree that outside of that, the article's well-written and a good example of the differences between the Ivory Tower approach and the Bazaar approach, though.
But that's not public use, not even through a very convoluted argument. What they're actually saying is that it's for the public *good* (the general public, that is, without the one whose property is stolen).
It's still a rather artificial construct, of course, but it makes sense - a new Wal-Mart means tax revenues, which arguably are "good for the public".
However, public *use* does not mean that something is useful for the public - it means that it's *used* for/by the public. For example, a new road might be public use; a new Wal-Mart is private use, or at least will be until Wal-Mart merges with the government.
Maybe if you pulled your head out of your ass, you'd understand that
a) not everyone who has a Livejournal is an angsty teenager (unless you want to include, say, Bram Cohen, Dave Jones, Dave Airlie and similar people in that group) b) 7 million accounts *are* too much to just ignore when you want to do market research (of course, not all of these are personal accounts, and people may have more than one account, too, but I'd say it's still safe to say that the number of Livejournal users is a 7-digit figure).
I agree that you shouldn't be modded Funny, but that's about it. You're really just somewhere between troll and flamebait.
I think you missed the fact that I was talking about the long term - and the LONG long term, for that matter. How much do you want to bet that in 100 years, M$ will be long forgotten?
Well, there are other forms of ads that can't be blocked as easily. Text ads are a good example; while AdBlock allows you to block iframes and the like (which are used for Google's page ads, for example), you could also embed the advertising text/links directly in the (generated) HTML page, which would make blocking pretty much impossible.
The key question, which this guy is either missing or conveniently ignoring, is: why *do* people choose to block ads? And with a bit of common sense, the answer is easy: because they're often (literally) flashy, bright, blinking and similarly annoying - not to mention disruptive (for example, huge ads in the middle of a text, or "force the customer to view an ad and click another link instead of directly going to the page they wanted to" ads, like the ones that Yahoo is using on Yahoo Groups (and possibly elsewhere)). The key problem with all these is that they are made in a way that annoys the user; the advertisers probably subscribe to the "all attention is good for us" point of view.
Pop-ups and pop-unders, especially the more nefarious ones that open two more windows when you close one, are another example, as are flash ads, Java ads, ads abusing browser security holes to load spyware on your machine, ads with music/sound and ads that do attempt to get around popup restrictions etc. (typically flash-based ads, although I've also seen some CSS/Javascript floaters recently) are other examples.
The mantra of the advertising industry always has been "we only need to expose the user to the product, and they will unconsciously tend to favour it". In that sense, "all attention is positive" is true - but it only applies to things which the user is likely to encounter, anyway. If I see an ad on TV for a new laundry detergent, then the ad doesn't need to convince me that it's good; it's enough to make the product known so I'll recognize it when I'm at the supermarket the next time.
The same isn't true for most web ads, which often attempt to sell specific services or goods that are only available from the advertising company's website.
Of course, the advertising industry has realized this, too, which is why we have metrics like "click-through rate" etc. that attempt to measure the effectiveness of ads. What they have FAILED to do, though, is look at the bigger picture and draw the obvious conclusion that
a) you shouldn't annoy users and b) you should attempt to display relevant ads.
The only exception to this I can think of is Google, which gets BOTH these things right - and which, in turn, is about the only kind of advertising that I myself at least do not attempt to block. Quite the opposite - I often find that Google's ads are actually helpful, or at least interesting.
Doubleclick, on the other hand, doesn't get it, and is now bemourning the fact that the world doesn't play the way they'd like it to. However, that's capitalism: it's adapt or die, and if you're too stupid to adapt, then, well, you die. And in the case of Doubleclick at least, I think noone will shed a tear.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, then you absolutely should give AdBlock (the Mozilla extension) a try. It doesn't block anything by default; it merely allows you to do so yourself by specifying patterns against which objects (images, scripts, iframes etc.) are matched to determine whether they should be blocked or not.
It's quite handy - you can either block lots of advertising in one sweep by using patterns such as "*/ads/*", or you can be very specific by only blocking - say - "http://www.example.com/ads/*". The granularity really is up to you.
I've found it quite invaluable myself; I let Google's page ads through, for example, as they're unobtrusive and often interesting, but block flashy, annoying, or otherwise in-your-face advertising.
Like many people, you miss the point. The court did not rule that - in your analogy - it was legal for the gunman to demand you shop at Wal-Mart; rather, they said that if you *choose* to invite someone to your house who will then demand you shop at Wal-Mart, then Wal-Mart's *competitors* don't have a case, because it's your house and who you do or do not invite and what demands they make is none of their business.
Of course, it would've been nice to have a decision that installing spy-/adware without the user's knowledge or (informed) consent is illegal, but that wasn't what was being argued, and (I think) the court can't really go out and make a decision on something that isn't part of the case.
FWIW, it's still a victory, anyway - the court's ruling pretty much says that things like AdBlock or Greasemonkey etc. are legal to use.
Except for the fact that this is not what was ruled on. The court did not go into how this particular piece of adware was installed, whether the user knew about it, consented to it or anything; rather, it merely said that *assuming* that the user did, the competitor did not have a case, as, basically, the user is allowed to do what they want on their computer, *including* installing a program that displays competitors' ads when you shop for something online.
Staying in the analogy, the robot plastering those ads on the inside of your car would exist, but the court merely ruled that when you go to McDonald's and willingly and knowingly have a robot in your car that then displays Burger King ads to you, that *McDonald's* does not have a case.
And that seems quite reasonable to me.
Here's something that may help with accidental clicks: don't use mouse clicks to shift the focus back to your browser window, use a key combination like Alt-Tab (on windows - on Unix, consult your window manager's man page, or use a window manager that never shifts focus automatically).
:)
Outside of that, be sure to use AdBlock, disable pop-ups and all that - I can't even remember the last time I saw a pop-up on my own computer.
Mmm. I admittedly don't know the details of the KHTML case, but if Apple was in compliance with the license, then it shouldn't really matter to them what people on - say - Slashdot say.
As for expecting more than to-the-letter compliance with the license... that's a difficult question. Personally, I'd say that while things like working with the community and giving back after you took in a manageable form instead of just giving back in the technical sense aren't required by the license, it's not entirely unreasonable to expect them, and I wouldn't automatically label someone who asks for that an idiot zealot, either (of course, someone who claims that Apple strictly *has* to do so is indeed an idiot).
But that's really another thing entirely - it's not about the technical side of the GPL, but rather about the social side, and, for that matter, about the social side of free software in general, no matter whether it's GPL-licensed, BSD-licensed or something else entirely. Clearly there are no strict requirements here, so a company is within their rights to not work with the larger development community, but it shouldn't expect to be liked if it doesn't, and I can understand developers who aren't happy with things like this [1], even though there is no actual license violation as far as the legal side of things is concerned.
1. Note that I'm not talking about the Apple/KHTML case in particular - I don't want to comment on that, since I don't have enough background information on what really went on to form an opinion.
Groklaw has some more on that story, as well as occasional updates.
That being said, the fact that noone so far has actually challenged the GPL in court does not mean that the GPL is weak; quite the opposite. It means that nobody so far has seen even so much as a remote chance to actually succeed in challenging it.
You've also got to ask yourself why and for who free software is developed, though. Contrary to what some (many?) people, seemingly including ESR, believe, it's not primarily done so that companies can use it for free; it's because the developers care about software that is free in the "freedom" sense as well. Companies, like everyone else, are allowed to use the code, but they do have to meet requirements - free (GPL'ed) software is NOT the same as giving software away for free without any strings attached.
The KHTML case may be a good example. Apple does have the right to use KHTML and incorporate it into their own products, but they do have to play by the rules and obey the license, and the community or the developers are not being unreasonable when they ask for that to happen. Free software may not cost money, but that does not mean that you can just take it and use it in any way you see fit - it still belongs to the developers, just like, say, Windows belongs to Microsoft.
If somebody used Windows in a way that is not in compliance with the license - for example, by making free copies and handing them out to people -, and if Microsoft demanded that the licensing terms be obeyed, then nobody would think this unreasonable. It is their software, after all - you can use it under their license, but you don't have a fundamental RIGHT to using it (in any way at all).
The same goes for free software, but people seem to have difficulties understanding that.
Unless the police are asking for a warrant when there really and obviously is no case at all, a judge will pretty much always grant whatever they ask for. The reason for that is simple - judges fear that they might deny a warrant for a case that turns out to be real in the end after all, which likely would have a negative influence on their career (after the local media being all over it); issuing warrants in cases where they wouldn't have been appropriate does not carry a similar risk.
As such, most (if not all) judges will simply err on the safe side (from their perspective) and just trust that the police will not abuse their power too blatantly.
Since you're asking for it... here's the official English language handbook. :) It's not perfect in the sense that not everything's in there, but it should be all you need 99.9% of the time. :)
Huh? Germany still has lots of nuclear plants. There is *talk* about shutting them down within the next *30 years* or so; saying that they already have been "outlawed and disbanded" is so blatantly false that it's quite hard to even attempt to attribute your statement to naivity and stupidity instead of labelling you as a troll.
No torrent?
Actually, Germany *does* crack down on the use of Nazi symbols etc. only if they really appear in a Nazi context. You don't otherwise have to censor swastikas, for example; a book on symbols used in hinduism could include one without any problems, as could a documentary on the third reich, etc.
Of course, the police sometimes attempt to crack down on other uses; for example, when the well-known left-wing/anarchist artist Gerhard Seyfried used one in one of his drawings, he got the equivalent of a cease-and-desist letter, from what I recall. However, he could've chosen to fight that, and I'm pretty sure he would've won the case, too (of course, IANAL) - and unlike in the USA, you don't have to spend ridiculous amounts of money in order to go to court in Germany.
The other thing that you can't distribute legally in Germany is Hitler's "mein Kampf", but that's due to the fact that the state of Bavaria holds the copyright to it these days and disallows any reproduction.
That being said, the real problem with censorship and similar things is not different values, it's choice - or, rather, the lack of choice in certain countries. If I live in the USA, I can listen to Rush Limbaugh and watch FOX news all day if I want to; but the point is that (so far) nobody's forcing me to, so if I'd rather read Michael Moore's latest book, that's OK, too. Nobody says that people in Iran shouldn't be allowed to be hardline-theocratists; the point is that it should be possible to hold other opinions as well without fear of repercussions.
While I certainly agree that separation of church and state is pretty much necessary in order to have a functioning democracy, but here's something interesting I learned recently: there are countries (like Iceland and Sweden, for example) where there exists a state church but which still are functioning democracies (in fact, I'd even go so far as to say that they function better than other democracies in which there is a separation of church and state).
Of course, I don't believe that this is because they don't have this separation (if anything, it's despite the fact), but it does raise an interesting point: it obviously is possible to have a democracy even when a separation of church and state does not exist.
Which in turn makes you wonder what really lies at the heart of the problems we're seeing in countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and so on. I haven't found an answer to that yet - not in the slightest. But it's certainly interesting as food for thought.
There really should be an amendment like that, I think. Maybe it's just me, but I think the free exchange of information [1] is more important for a the advancement of a free state, democracy and all that than guns are.
1. Actual information, that is, not the latest Bitchney Spears crap...
But the real difference seems to be that in this case, the product itself becomes illegal just because of the advertising campaign. If a gun manufacturer decided to market their guns to gangs, then would guns (or guns from that manufacturer, at least) per se become illegal?
I think not. Rather, the manufacturer would get a metaphorical slap on the wrist; they'd probably have to pay a hefty fine, and maybe some of the people behind the campaign would actually go to jail. But the manufacturer would be allowed to continue to produce and sell guns - for legal use.
And *that* certainly does seem to be a new precedent (IANAL, of course).
There is no theoretical upper limit on text compression as far as I know (and I'd be rather surprised if there was [1]), but there *is* a (very basic) theorem from Kolmogorov complexity that says that there's always data that can't be compressed for any compression algorithm you devise (for a proof, simply consider the number of strings of length =n for a given n).
1. Well, I'd be surprised as long as you don't make any assumptions about the statistical distribution of bits in the text you want to compress. In other words, if you define certain properties and conjecture that all texts satisfies these properties, you may well be able to prove certain things (I'm not sure about this), but I don't think it'd really be very practical, as I'd say it's relatively likely that among those 347 PB there'll be data which does not match these properties.
I don't know.. I think a better analogy would have Wikipedia as the school's football team, and Google and Yahoo competing to become quarterback, knowing that they'll both get respect from the larger community if they do. The only difference is that in this case, there is room for more than one quarterback.
Of course, one might still argue that the topic is too limited in scope to deserve a Wikipedia article of its own - it's a specific trolling phenomenon on a specific site only, after all. I'm generally very much for inclusiveness, but with this article, I always have the feeling that it blows the whole thing out of proportion and gives unfamiliar readers the feeling that they're really more important/widely-known/relevant than they really are.
I do agree that outside of that, the article's well-written and a good example of the differences between the Ivory Tower approach and the Bazaar approach, though.
Why does Google need more than 100,000 boxes? All they do is serve (mostly) text, too, after all.
You underestimate the sheer number of hits that Wikipedia gets.
Out of curiosity, why are you switching to 1.5 yet when the last release is still listed as "not recommended for use in a production environment"?
The logical conclusion obviously is that the moon *is* bigger when it's closer to the horizon. :)
But that's not public use, not even through a very convoluted argument. What they're actually saying is that it's for the public *good* (the general public, that is, without the one whose property is stolen).
It's still a rather artificial construct, of course, but it makes sense - a new Wal-Mart means tax revenues, which arguably are "good for the public".
However, public *use* does not mean that something is useful for the public - it means that it's *used* for/by the public. For example, a new road might be public use; a new Wal-Mart is private use, or at least will be until Wal-Mart merges with the government.
Maybe if you pulled your head out of your ass, you'd understand that
a) not everyone who has a Livejournal is an angsty teenager (unless you want to include, say, Bram Cohen, Dave Jones, Dave Airlie and similar people in that group)
b) 7 million accounts *are* too much to just ignore when you want to do market research (of course, not all of these are personal accounts, and people may have more than one account, too, but I'd say it's still safe to say that the number of Livejournal users is a 7-digit figure).
I agree that you shouldn't be modded Funny, but that's about it. You're really just somewhere between troll and flamebait.
I think you missed the fact that I was talking about the long term - and the LONG long term, for that matter. How much do you want to bet that in 100 years, M$ will be long forgotten?
Well, there are other forms of ads that can't be blocked as easily. Text ads are a good example; while AdBlock allows you to block iframes and the like (which are used for Google's page ads, for example), you could also embed the advertising text/links directly in the (generated) HTML page, which would make blocking pretty much impossible.
The key question, which this guy is either missing or conveniently ignoring, is: why *do* people choose to block ads? And with a bit of common sense, the answer is easy: because they're often (literally) flashy, bright, blinking and similarly annoying - not to mention disruptive (for example, huge ads in the middle of a text, or "force the customer to view an ad and click another link instead of directly going to the page they wanted to" ads, like the ones that Yahoo is using on Yahoo Groups (and possibly elsewhere)). The key problem with all these is that they are made in a way that annoys the user; the advertisers probably subscribe to the "all attention is good for us" point of view.
Pop-ups and pop-unders, especially the more nefarious ones that open two more windows when you close one, are another example, as are flash ads, Java ads, ads abusing browser security holes to load spyware on your machine, ads with music/sound and ads that do attempt to get around popup restrictions etc. (typically flash-based ads, although I've also seen some CSS/Javascript floaters recently) are other examples.
The mantra of the advertising industry always has been "we only need to expose the user to the product, and they will unconsciously tend to favour it". In that sense, "all attention is positive" is true - but it only applies to things which the user is likely to encounter, anyway. If I see an ad on TV for a new laundry detergent, then the ad doesn't need to convince me that it's good; it's enough to make the product known so I'll recognize it when I'm at the supermarket the next time.
The same isn't true for most web ads, which often attempt to sell specific services or goods that are only available from the advertising company's website.
Of course, the advertising industry has realized this, too, which is why we have metrics like "click-through rate" etc. that attempt to measure the effectiveness of ads. What they have FAILED to do, though, is look at the bigger picture and draw the obvious conclusion that
a) you shouldn't annoy users and
b) you should attempt to display relevant ads.
The only exception to this I can think of is Google, which gets BOTH these things right - and which, in turn, is about the only kind of advertising that I myself at least do not attempt to block. Quite the opposite - I often find that Google's ads are actually helpful, or at least interesting.
Doubleclick, on the other hand, doesn't get it, and is now bemourning the fact that the world doesn't play the way they'd like it to. However, that's capitalism: it's adapt or die, and if you're too stupid to adapt, then, well, you die. And in the case of Doubleclick at least, I think noone will shed a tear.