It's more prevalent than you would expect. People pay for cable and magazines. People even pay to become walking ads when they buy brand name clothing.

edit: comma

When I was still reading paper magazine, the first thing I did when I received a new issue of The Economist was to shake it over a garbage bin to remove all the inserts and tear up the card board insert in the middle...

I remember that process used to be called 'deboning' the magazine.

Hahah, I did the same.

It was either the Economist or FT that did a cost/benefit analysis of removing those inserts for their already-subscribed customers copies, and found that it would cost more in lost new subscriptions to remove them.

> it would cost more in lost new subscriptions to remove them.

How does that make sense?

I guess because people are reminded weekly to resubscribe or buy subscriptions as gifts.

I dunno if it applies to me since I would habitually forget to resubscribe until they sent me the YOUR LAST ISSUE wrapping like an invasive Santa Claus.

Opportunity cost of lost subscriptions. A certain percentage of those inserts will convert to new subscriptions, even if the person receiving the insert was already a subscriber.

Some of those inserts were invitations to subscribe to the Economist.

For a while, there were people who used to drop them all in the mail.

Force the publishers and advertisers to pay the postage for them with the idea of making it less profitable to include them with the magazines in the first place.

I used to do that, back in the 90s in college. First I just put tons of trash paper in business-reply envelopes and drop them in the mail, then I started filling them up with gravel.

Years later, on the internet, I remember seeing some article about people doing this, and they had pictures of things like business-reply envelopes attached to bricks, which the USPS had received. IIRC, they said that the USPS didn't actually send these or charge the business for them, unfortunately.

So stick with just dropping them in the mail as-is, to make sure the business gets charged for it.

One time, back in the 80s, American Express had some kind of disagreement with the union that my step-father belonged to and the members of his union went out and every time they'd see the American Express credit card applications, they'd take them all and send them back in blank.

They had been told that each application cost a dollar to have mailed and processed.

I was a child so I never cared enough to ask about the details of the dispute and I don't know how long they did this, only that they did.

Wow, that really brings me back. I remember reading on Quora TE's chief editor explaining that the reason digital and print subscriptions were the same price was because digital ads were easier to avoid or block and were worth less to advertisers than print ads, which are more prominent and harder to ignore (unless you fold it over, but even then you'll certainly notice it).

those cardboard inserts made the best joint filters

With magazines, at least those for very specialized audiences, the ads can actually be quite useful. For a general interest magazine, like TIME, or Scientific American, the ads are just filler for me. I'd rather have an ad-free version of the magazine.

But for something like QST (a ham radio magazine) where almost every advertiser is offering something I have an interest in, and where there are no physical stores in my area where I can go to browse the merchandise in person, the ads do a great job of keeping me current on what is available but are easy to ignore when I'm reading an article. I'd be disappointed if QST was ad-free.

My brother cut me a login to his Comcast Xfinity. I tried watching "The Magicians" on syfy.com--- and there's 100 seconds of ads, six times over a 45 minute show! It makes the cliffhangers and pauses even more obnoxious. I'm going to go back to torrenting.

No TV/cable, but on a trip recently I tried to watch syfy on the hotel TV -- and it was more ads than show. I can't believe anyone puts up with it; I swear it was five minutes of ads and five minutes of movie. No thanks; I'll just wait until things come to Prime or Netflix.

Yeah, if you stop watching TV for a few years, trying to watch again after is really jarring. The volume-boost of ads, while not as bad as it used to be, is still pretty obnoxious, and the sheer quantity of ads makes shows much less enjoyable. I really believe that our parents are the last generation to really put up with all the ads, and our generation will just torrent / wait for Netflix / Prime or something else with minimal ads. The days of paying $100/month for 60 channels with linear programming spending a third of their time on ads are numbered.

Unfortunately the industry's response to people avoiding explicit ads seems to be including ever more product placement. At least I can skip the ads with my PVR. Better that than having immersion in a show I enjoy totally broken by some blatant product logo or, worse, a really out-of-place line delivered dutifully but still awkwardly by an actor whose character would never say that.

Possibly the only more annoying thing in TV is when some totally out of place, usually bright and animated logo pops up a couple of minutes before the end of the show I'm actually watching, usually with a boxy ad for some other show on the same channel next to it. Way to completely ruin the ending of the current show.

It won't be too long before someone figures out how to de-product-place a show. Your dvr will scan for brand names like "Dell", "HP", "Ford", etc., and blur them out. The audio can also be similarly processed. Eventually, we'll only see what we want to see, which is what "on demand" should be!

I don't know about other people, but I put up with it using a DVR and liberal use of the fast-forward button.

When cable TV first came out, way back in the previous century, one of the benefits was supposedly going to be no commercials. Because you're paying to receive it. Now I'd guess more commercials are delivered via cable (and all those channels) than broadcast.

This is precisely why my household got cable, and precisely the reason why years later we stopped having cable.

Too bad about Intel dropping support for Skylake and newer CPUs on Windows 7.

you mean Microsoft dropping support for Skylake

Can't drop something that doesn't exist.

You can drop something that doesn't exist but was announced. Thechnically Skylake support for Win7 wasn't announced, but the effect is the same since there was an implicit expectation that the feature would come.

>Thechnically Skylake support for Win7 wasn't announced, but the effect is the same since there was an implicit expectation that the feature would come.

From where did this implicit expectation come from?

Windows 7 mainstream support ended in Jan 2015 and that was known since forever.

Extended support implies:

>Microsoft no longer supplies non-security hotfixes unless you have an extended support agreement

>All warranty claims end

>Microsoft no long accepts requests for new features and design changes

But I presume dropping support just means not being able to use the latest features.

Even a very old system image of windows 7 will run on the very latest skylake. It doesn't need the very latest updates. I doubt they will create a kill switch in a windows update that refuses to boot if the system detects a too modern CPU.

They can refuse to provide a signed driver for the platform, but like you said it is unclear how far they will go.

Still better than Chrome endig support for Windows Vista this upcoming April...