For the record: I am well aware that the tornado ad for the History Channel is incredibly annoying. You may or may not have noticed the additional charming feature that it breaks links that it passes over, at least in some browsers (Opera and Safari).
The dissatisfaction with the ad has been widespread and general, and has been communicated to the Powers That Be at Seed/ ScienceBlogs. We have been assured that there will not be any more ads that extend out over the text after this one finishes its run.
Many apologies for the inconvenience, and feel free to post any additional gripes you may have in the comments of this post.
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Well, since you ask ... :-)
I'm glad to hear that. However, the other annoyance is the movement (which does not go on as long as some other ads, admittedly). If I were king, I'd ban any unrequested moving/spinning/blinking/honking web page elements ...
I don't see the problem....
...but, then, I have animated images disabled, and have Flash disabled in my browser, precisely because animated advertisements made the web all but unusable for me. Nver mind how bad they are, just a small flashing, blinking animation at the edge of my field of vision is terribly distracting, and makes it difficult for me to read the text.
Of course, there is the rare Flash thing that I'd like to see. The science outreach magazine at Vanderbilt has gone to an all-Flash format, which I think is a terrible mistake for a lot of reasons, one of which is that I just see a blank page when I go there with my browser. (There are many other reasons, including the now-inability to link to articles rather than just to the front page.)
-Rob
I have no idea what you guys are talking about. I use firefox with the Flashblock and filterset G extensions, and I only very rarely see an ad.
Oh, well, if we're doing my-browser-is-so-cool: Opera, hit F12, get a list of quick preferences that includes enabling plugins, Java, Javascript, and animated images.
So I usually surf with images, plugins, and Java off to avoid screen clutter, and didn't see the annoying ad either.
For Rob, the Firefox browser with the Flashblock extension may help some of your Flash problems. It replaces all Flash displays with a simple button, which you can click on if you want to see whatever is there. I agree this won't help linking to pages. (Add the Adblock and FiltersetG extensions and you'll never see ads at all.)
As a sidelight, it's nice to see from the mentions of Safari, etc. that Chad, PZ, Janet, and Orac, at the least are all Mac users. That seems to verify my longterm argument that intelligent users are more likely to use Macs.
Do all you Mac/Firefox users not have the incredibly annoying copy/paste bug? After a while (sometimes as long as a day or two), Firefox will cause copy and paste to stop working. Not just within Firefox, but in every application. It's driven me to Safari, which is a much inferior product.
I'm not actually a Mac user. I'm stuck with PC's, and Opera is my browser of choice for Web surfing (though I also use Firefox, because it plays nicer with some web sites).
Mac/Firefox here, and I've never seen the copy-paste bug.
I don't mind ads in general, but I installed Flashblock because of the processor-hungry ads here on scienceblogs.
Dave, yes I have had the same problem with the c&p bug. As far as I have figured out, it's a problem that occurs when too much memory is used by the browser (concurrent with the c&p bug, I also have a problem with the '-key opening the search box).