CLU, as I heard it, was deliberately -not- an exact likeness. His features are half of Bridges', mirrored to give him perfect symmetry. Seems fitting to the character, anyway.

I opted out of Domain Helper by using manually configured DNS servers, OpenDNS at the moment. It seems if you manually migrate to their DNSSEC servers, Domain Helper goes away, as according to the FAQs the two are incompatible.

If he agreed with the left leaning thought, he would not see it as bias, he would simply see it as correct.

People do not natively see their own views as biased. They are, and if pressed with logic many can be made to understand that, but only if pressed. In a typical situation, they simply see their beliefs as correct.

So, for Murdoch to be calling his competitors biased -strongly implies- that he disagrees with them.

Also, frankly, the position you are taking, that he is not right wing, but merely spouts their rhetoric for a buck, does nothing at all to improve opinion of him. If anything, if what you are saying is true, he is a -worse- human being for selling out his beliefs for the almighty dollar.

Honestly, I was fine not blocking ads until 2 trends started.

First, the obnoxiously loud ads. A little sound is one thing, but an ear splitting 'Congratulation!' bellowing out unexpectedly is quite unacceptable.

Second, malware spreading ads. I thought they were a myth at first, until I was tapped by one (spreading one of those annoying fake antivirus trojan things no less.) And these do turn up on otherwise reputable sites, so anyone trying to pull out the 'watch where you browse' or 'lay off the (porn/warez/music/movies) can sit and spin. The first infection I encountered on a system I used came from a tech support forum of all places, while running Firefox, with anti-virus and anti-malware application resident and up to date, and all applicable security patches to all involved software in place. 0-day exploits are a pain that way.

And even the best 'we will remove it if it causes trouble' policy is a failure. By that point, the damage is already done, I've had to spend time cleaning (or just plain rebuilding) a system to be certain a bit of malware is gone.

Nope, until sites start guaranteeing all their ads free of such issues (and a few others might be nice, like bugged, eta your CPU ads) the ads get blocked. My browsing safety > their ad revenue.

Indeed, I would also not mind the option of paying a small fee for such things. But that assumes that it would be 1. optional and 2. a small fee.

Fact is, most sources for Internet access also offer voice plans. VoIP is competition for them, so it is unlikely they'll offer a 'fast lane' (read: actually usable speed) for it given the opportunity to do otherwise. If they make any honest offering of priority for VoIP traffic at all, expect it to cost nearly as much, if not potentially more, than their own voice plans currently do.