I still go to File looking for File > Preferences and File > Quit.

No, ads aren't the solution for everything, and in my opinion anything.

You will reconsider this argument when you start publishing your own ads to make people aware of your software.

there are different kinds of ads, but lets be clear that even a Show HN is a form of ad. Some forms of ads are just more appreciated than others.

It appears they are returning a 403 if you don't allow any cookies.

When Apple first launched face ID, there was talk (I can't remember where) of developers being excited about the possibility of tracking where their users were looking.

And apple, being not terrible in this one specific regard (their privacy record tends to be decent for a tech giant), didn’t allow it fortunately. Not sure if the same is true on other phones.

Ironically, they'd try to get you ... or someone... anyone! on fraud. Can you imagine the same argument made in the example of getting up and going to the kitchen?

> Your honor, they agreed to our terms and conditions which stipulate you MUST stay in the recliner facing forward the whole time. By getting up to <do something important and not waste their life watching ads>, they've defrauded our advertisers! We demand to be repaid in the form of 43 lazyboy hours per year.

Whenever I’m in a situation where I can’t skip an ad (e.g. TV, radio, on foreign computer, etc), I usually turn down the volume and look away. Am I, in some sense, stealing whenever when I am not thoroughly considering each of the generous offers that Brand and Company have paid money to have delivered personally to devices of people like me? Is this inconvenient time spent while avoiding their message my penance, and is trying to skip it altogether somehow what turns my actions into sin?

Of course it’s all about everyone getting paid! I always just find it silly when my fellow plebeians try to echo some false obligation to abide by this system when people like us have been avoiding it for as long as it has existed.

No it's not. It's shining a light on where the real WWW goalposts are and always have been.

The pedantry comes not from someone using their User Agent however they want to use it. It comes from a company trying to (with receipts and lawsuits to prove it) LITERALLY redefine the World Wide Web into their own money making machine, and punish anyone who rocks their boat. They can cry "legal argument" all they want. At the end of the day, they're trying to force pedantry on their users. The only problem is most of the public has bought it Hook, Line and Sinker.

>I can view it under any terms I chose until they find a way to exclude me without excluding all the attention that being on the public Web gives them.

This is the unsung argument everyone forgets! It goes to the very start of why someone might register a domain name and set up a website on the... World Wide Web... for people to visit with their User Agent software, ask for some HTML and get some HTML back. "HOW DARE YOU NOT DO A RANDOM SOCIALLY DEFINED THING AFTER ASKING FOR OUR HTML (AND OTHERS' MP4S)?"

Does Schrodinger's cat study Fourier transforms?

I think they are called furrier transforms, you lick something that has a certain shaped that can be described frequency curves, then you throw up a furball that to any cat accurately describes the licked object.

But you already know that it does and it doesn’t at the same time.

I prefer the Feynman approach to answering Why questions... until they throw me out.