That's with the more aerodynamic spin stabilized projectiles fired from rifled barrels(even handguns today are rifled). Unless he was stupid enough to shoot the drone with a slug or buckshot, the projectiles reach terminal velocity very rapidly compared to a rifle and *fall* at a velocity that will limit damage.

If he fired it at an angle much above 30 degrees the pellets are only dangerous on the upward part of the parabola.

Even buckshot is only dangerous a bit further, and slugs have the longest range but are still relatively short-ranged compared to a rifle round.

You should have seen the ad campaign last election season. I live in a state of less than a million people, that's nominally 'conservative', but had a democratic senator. That campaign was intense.

How intense? Think about the hassle of $200 worth of political advertising between the two of them, per registered voter.

Because of the auction system and the amount/value of those political ads, if the saw that your IP was from our state, you saw nothing else. And many of them were full video ads.

Now, this might sound 'mean', but we already do it. We have professionals at it. Actuaries. They have tables and you plug the numbers in and it spits out an estimate.

Please note that I said 'approximately'. It's impossible to determine 'exactly' how much damage coal plant X does, partially because it's dependent upon population density, the amount of power it produces, the dominant winds, rain patterns, etc...

What we can do is figure out a pretty close estimate on how much damage ALL the coal plants cause via the various pollutants, then look at Plant X, determine what it's producing via sampling, then charge for it.

If it lacks a certain control against mercury emission, for example, it's costs per kWh are going to be substantially increased because it has to pay for it.

I tend to blame slow ad servers more. With as many ad servers, tracking sites, and other crap revenue-generation webpages want to load on my computer, the odds that one of them is offline, slow, or frozen is fairly high. So I end up waiting for it to time out - until I block it and my computer doesn't even try.

Hell, one site I hit had FOUR auto-play videos on it - 2 of them the same ad that played at slightly different times, indicating that it wasn't even nice enough to pull it from the same location. Then it had the video about the article, AND a general news site feed.

The site was so horribly unusable that I could only conclude that the designers didn't view it without ad-blockers themselves.

Sequential loading, but also consider that many will delay the page showing until the ad is served or times out.

If the website is hitting 20 different ad servers & trackers, what are the odds that at least ONE of them is in a less than ideal routing location for your computer, not available, slow, or delayed?

I mean, blocking all the google, facebook, twitter, and such tracking & 'share this!' code sped up webpages quite well.

Why the hell would I want to share random posts on an internet forum, such as this, on facebook or whatever?

Normally they're looking at 'fantasy'. They're paying more than they want for the number of responses they get.

Like I was trying to point out earlier, paper, magazine, television, and radio ad responses are harder to measure than computer ad 'click-through'. Some of the examinations I've seen has the experts pointing out that there is reason to believe that the 'estimated' response for traditional media advertising has been vastly over-estimated.

Basically, they were backtracking to try to figure out why computer ads were doing so 'poorly' compared to existing media using various metrics, when they realized that computer ads aren't less effective according to traditional metrics, but are lousy by the enhanced metrics. Then they started looking into traditional advertising, and started finding the same things - advertising not as effective as believed.

This probably is part of what led to the even more advertising, but that has the problem that it's actively driving viewers away from traditional media.

Like I said - higher mis-click rate. Making the close buttons tiny only pisses users off more, but ad servers 'encourage' that because they're paid more by the click, as you say. But that just pisses users off. I think the ad people are 'okay' with it because hunting for the close button helps.

Oh, and I've seen a number on my phone lately where they put the close button on the left side, not the right where you expect it.

Completely agree. You don't have to be able to bang out an OS, but man, if everybody just knew how to grep through some files or automatically run an SQL query, dump the results into an Excel file and email it to somebody, the world would be a better place.

Pick your poison. Get robbed by your coworkers or get robbed by your boss. You're still getting robbed. But I bet your coworkers will rob you less, given that they're being robbed by the same process.

Resistance was futile!

Why don't publishers put the ads in a section of the page that can allow the rest of the page to load and render before the ad loads and renders?

Because you could stop the loading once the content you wanted was rendered, thus skipping the ad.

So the pages are set up so the ad loads and renders first.

My response to sites that ask me to disable ad-block is to point them to ad-block approved ads. I don't mind those.

I think the advertisers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The metrics show that their ads have lousy response rates, so they make them more obtrusive, which increases their click-through rates, yes. But then those buying the advertising eventually look at 'completion rates', and find that the obtrusive ads have lower completion rates - IE somebody actually buying the product/service, signing up, whatever. Most of the increase is from a higher mis-click rate where the user is hitting close or back as quickly as they can.

Thing is, earlier advertising was much more nebulous about it's benefit. It's hard to tell how much soda any given soda commercial sells, whether it's worth it, etc... What metrics they do have shows that as the number of ads increase, the response rates fall - viewers become immune. And we're very immune at this point.

Hell, at this point aliens might find that we're 'utterly' immune to their propaganda due to the barrage we face every day.

Last time I did a reinstall and browsed a bit before installing ad-block(have to experience what the proles do occasionally, right?), I can best describe it as being driven to install it.

It wasn't just the annoyance of huge ads taking up 3/4 of their front page. It was the incredible load times as well. 100ms? Try a couple seconds on some of the pages I tried.

Oh, sure, I'm just saying it would be funny. Revenge for all the epithets /.ers have hurled at him from this site. Not nearly so many since he retired, but you remember what it was like in the late 90s and early 2000s.

I never really followed politics much when I was younger, but has it always been like this?

You will occasionally find people who get very, very offended when you point out that Democrats and Republicans differ only in name. These people, sadly, really do believe that the next Obama will change things, and then grow all the more bitter when he ends up just like the rest of the worthless fucks in DC.

But yes, it has pretty much always gone like this. Every charismatic young buck looks like the next Prez Rickard, right up until he turns into the next Tricky Dick.

Townshend was wrong. It's seems like you can just keep fooling us over and over again.

Meet the new boss - Same as the old boss.