Interesting. Perhaps run the Javascript in a sandbox, but still don't display the resulting ad?

Oh well, perhaps the liability here needs to fall on the ad networks that are serving up malware without scanning it first. Sort of like if CBS started airing advertisements from some Evil Overlord that caused brain hemorrhages in people who viewed the ads...

If the code is not executed in a browser. Just download anything from any of the ad networks to /dev/null.

I suppose that's possible. I'm definitely not an expert on the ad networks, or how they calculate ad impressions, but I fail to see how they could distinguish between an ad that's on my screen but that I don't interact with in any way (which is the vast majority of them) vs. an ad that was served, but not displayed on my screen. It's not like I'm doing a captcha on each ad to prove I'm a human and not a computer.

Here's an idea: How about someone writes an ad blocker that DOWNLOADS the ads, just like normal, but simply does not RENDER them on the screen, or execute any code? Seems like the best of both worlds: users that don't want to see the ads don't see them, and websites still get paid, since there's no way to tell if they actually got shown?

You DO realize that 'China' could have servers sitting somewhere connected via 'non-China' IPs, right?

+1, So Very True

Slow. Clap.

SuperPuTTY is a very nice tabbed window extension for PuTTY. I use it extensively.

By that logic, powerful things like The Wheel and Fire may never have spread to cause the kinds of trouble they cause today.

Seriously, though, I don't think we've really done that badly with nuclear technology. Yes, we've made weapons that could wipe out humanity if used on a global scale, but so far, we've also managed to hold off on using them. The argument that they've SAVED lives by being too horrible to use, thus indefinitely delaying WW3 can be made.

I'm not saying that you should necessarily hand over things to the Pentagon (or any other military organization, for that matter), but publishing them should be a no-brainer. People are going to mis-use knowledge, but as a whole, it also helps billions of people.

+1 Informative

Perhaps Lithium is radioactive, but with a 2 billion year half-life? Perhaps all the elements are, but with much longer half-lifes, and everything will end up as hydrogen again before the ultimate heat death of the universe.

I wish I had mod points.

Posts like this are why the moderation system needs to allow scores higher than 5.

Slashdot needs a +1 Satire mod.