Ah, the Internet. It's become so important that Microsoft Word keeps telling me to capitalize it. It's a wonderful resource if you know how to use it, it's perfect for wasting a couple minutes or a couple hours when you've got something far better to be doing. And now, it's getting closer and closer to mainstream media with the exciting addition of advertising! Back in the good old days, the web was free, which was okay because it was also slow. The closest thing you had to advertising was a link to your roommate's webpage or a picture from your favorite TV show. Of course the latter is illegal now. Then, some genius decided that his company could get some nice publicity by buying a nice graphical link to their webpage from your average poor webmaster. At first, we let it slip. We figured they'd realize there was absolutely no money to be had from the web and they'd eventually give up.

Unfortunately, no one figured it out. Now we have all manner of advertising on the web, slowing load times down to a crawl and generally pissing off users. The kick of it all is that no one's making any money off it unless they're actually selling something directly from their website. The secret to web surfers is that they're lazy and they're cheap. If they had the motivation they'd go to the library, and if they had the money they'd go to the bookstore rather than spend 5 hours online looking for the full text of a Dickens novel.

By far, the single worst transgressor is the creator of the pop-up window. This infernal device is by far the most annoying object. Period. No one wants to have fifty windows pop up on your desktop telling you where to find the best porn on the net. And no one, and I really mean no one wants it to pop back up after they close it. Putting one on your webpage is a mortal sin and you will go straight to hell if you do.

We've considered advertising from time to time, but after an assessment of the value of our souls, we decided to keep the Journal funded only by our hard work and the $30,000 every student pays to come here.